Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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Speaker 1: first light dot com. F I R S T L
Speaker 1: I T E dot com. All Right, everybody, it's an
Speaker 1: Aldo Leopold blowout. I'm looking around the room.
Speaker 2: I don't know about that branding.
Speaker 1: When we had babies, we'd say they had a blowout,
Speaker 1: if you know, yeah, it would kind of I'll tell them.
Speaker 1: We were celebrating my boys for birthday the other night
Speaker 1: and I was saying, everybody's kind of sharing a memory,
Speaker 1: and I said, the thing I remember about you is
Speaker 1: when you're a little baby, looking and seeing how you
Speaker 1: had a kind of a brownish yellow streak on your
Speaker 1: onesie above your diaper line. Oh yeah, going up the back,
Speaker 1: and we called a blowout. And I'd be like, and
Speaker 1: I would see that and I'd be like, man, I
Speaker 1: was like, that's my memory. Uh two huge, So there's
Speaker 1: like a there's like a what's your problem, Doug.
Speaker 3: It's just an interesting way of starting.
Speaker 1: Bubby bubbly Doug. Durn's here expressing disapproval already, and we're joining.
Speaker 1: We're joined by uh doctor Carl Malcolm. Uh. These are
Speaker 1: both longtime veterans of the show, joined by Randall is here,
Speaker 1: Brody's here, Giannis is here, and we're gonna we're celebrating,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna we're gonna explain why it warrants celebration.
Speaker 1: We're celebrating two sort of Elder Leopold anniversaries. One is
Speaker 1: like a real one. One's a big one because the
Speaker 1: centennial one hundred year anniversary of the Heat the Wilderness Area,
Speaker 1: which is our first wilderness area.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: And just to throw it in there, the seventy fifth anniversary,
Speaker 1: I don't know, is that legit?
Speaker 3: That's legit?
Speaker 1: I don't like fifty ten, fifty one hundred is seventy five?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, there celebrates seventy fifth anniversary.
Speaker 3: All the time, Diamond, I was gonna say, man, if
Speaker 3: you were married seventy five years, you sure as he'll
Speaker 3: be celebrating.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, well I'd be celebrating how long I've been alive.
Speaker 5: The seventy fifth year is known as the Diamond.
Speaker 6: And Diamond July.
Speaker 1: All right, so it's legit. I questioned it all along.
Speaker 1: I never had any hesitation that we were going to
Speaker 1: do a thing because and I'm gonna tell you why.
Speaker 1: If you're gonna do a mount rush more of American
Speaker 1: conservation leaders, you'd put Roosevelt, You'd put Roosevelt on it.
Speaker 1: But Roosevelt was you know, he was he was a
Speaker 1: political figure, right, he did things outside of politics. He
Speaker 1: was a political figure. He would go on it. And
Speaker 1: the second one, you'd have to stop and think about
Speaker 1: three and four. The second one would absolutely be Eldo Leopold.
Speaker 1: Like like Roosevelt shape so much policy from the buldy pulpit, right,
Speaker 1: But Eldo Leopold is sort of the philosophical He's the
Speaker 1: philosophical father, the philosophical founder of American conservation in that
Speaker 1: he was like he talked about things that are still
Speaker 1: relevant now. Roosevelt talked a lot about a lot of
Speaker 1: things that became He like this helped solve a lot
Speaker 1: of problems that got solved.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: One of his first battles was against market like, you know,
Speaker 1: market hunting of waterfowl, market hunting of uh feathered birds,
Speaker 1: shore birds, right, like, real things that were real issues,
Speaker 1: and they solved them. And then Aldo Leopold came along
Speaker 1: and talked about He framed up all the discussions we're
Speaker 1: still having today.
Speaker 3: I would argue, I would agree with you completely.
Speaker 1: Here's some Eldo Leopold. We're gonna then we're gonna do
Speaker 1: our normal thing and talk about a couple of extra things.
Speaker 1: But here's some Eldo Leopold quotes. Unfortunately, these are ranked
Speaker 1: by likes. I'm on Goodreads, which I like that. I
Speaker 1: like the good Reads that will compile quotes from authors.
Speaker 1: You'll find that all of these I believe all of
Speaker 1: these quotes are from Oh we never explained anniversary of
Speaker 1: the publication of what I would regard to be the
Speaker 1: most influential piece of conservation writing ever in that it
Speaker 1: still maintains relevance today. Yeah, when you read, Just to
Speaker 1: keep this Roosevelt Leopold thing set up. Now, No, Leopold
Speaker 1: was a private person. Leopold was a forester, he was
Speaker 1: a land manager, he was an agency person.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt was a governor in a president. So we're comparing
Speaker 1: apples and oranges. But if you said to people, name
Speaker 1: a great conservations, they're going to go Roosevelt. Be like,
Speaker 1: name a second one, They're going to go Elo, Leopold,
Speaker 1: And then three they're gonna be like, I don't know, uh,
Speaker 1: Desert Solitaire. You know, I don't know where they go
Speaker 1: with number three. The general public. But his book A
Speaker 1: Sand County Almanac, which is a collection of his writing,
Speaker 1: maintains relevant today. When you go read Roosevelt today, you're
Speaker 1: reading Roosevelt kind of like like a hobby historian. You know,
Speaker 1: you're sort of reading it to find out about a
Speaker 1: long time ago. When you read a San Connie Almanac,
Speaker 1: you're you're reading it and finding out. You're reading it
Speaker 1: and being like, holy, this could have been written yesterday
Speaker 1: and it would still be relevant.
Speaker 3: Wow, Steve, I am really happy to hear you read
Speaker 3: all this. So you guys, I'm not reading this. I
Speaker 3: mean say all this.
Speaker 1: That well, you know, I was before we started recording.
Speaker 1: I was pointing out that he was fathered by first cousins,
Speaker 1: and I was pointing out that he would take insanely
Speaker 1: long shots with the trad bow at deer just to
Speaker 1: kind of see what would happen. So Doug thought I
Speaker 1: was going to sit here and hack.
Speaker 3: On different.
Speaker 4: You're not confusing that with some with like Art Young
Speaker 4: in Saxon.
Speaker 1: Poell, Leopold would take some hail Mary's. I think he
Speaker 1: had basically to see what would happen.
Speaker 4: You think what?
Speaker 3: I think he admitted to it. I think he talked
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 1: He'd take his recurve and cockback and you know, hold
Speaker 1: like eight deer bodies high and take a seventy five
Speaker 1: yard winger.
Speaker 4: Oh well, everybody in the room, raise your hand. I
Speaker 4: have not done that. Yeah, you've never launched one at
Speaker 4: a deer with a recurve.
Speaker 1: What would have happened?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: Never?
Speaker 1: And Phil has it either.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't bow hunt, so I never really had
Speaker 3: that opportunity.
Speaker 1: Here's some quotes, and again these are ranked accurse. These
Speaker 1: are These are listed according to rankings one and seventy three.
Speaker 1: People who frequent goodreads dot Com like this one. I
Speaker 1: am glad I will not be young in a future
Speaker 1: without wilderness. I'm picking here. Here's another one that's that's so,
Speaker 1: then that's his number one. Then the next one down
Speaker 1: the line has a thousand less likes. That's too complicated
Speaker 1: for people. Here's a famous one. There are two spiritual
Speaker 1: dangers and not owning a farm. One is the day
Speaker 1: of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the
Speaker 1: other that heat comes from the furnace. There's another one.
Speaker 1: Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our
Speaker 1: Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we we
Speaker 1: abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging
Speaker 1: to us. When we see land as a community to
Speaker 1: which we belong, we may begin to use it with
Speaker 1: love and respect. Here's another one. I would apply this
Speaker 1: to someone taking a Hail Mary with his beau. He says,
Speaker 1: ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one
Speaker 1: else is watching, even when doing the wrong thing is
Speaker 1: legal to those of void of imagination. A blank place
Speaker 1: on the map is a useless waste to others the
Speaker 1: most valuable part.
Speaker 4: I feel like the first quote that you read had
Speaker 4: more to it, Like isn't there a follow up to
Speaker 4: that that has something about like what good is it
Speaker 4: without like places on a map to explore.
Speaker 1: Weak you have to take it up with good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, you have to take it up with good.
Speaker 4: Reads, right, But that's a part of that same quote,
Speaker 4: isn't it.
Speaker 7: There's none that he refers to the value of wilderness
Speaker 7: and wildness in a number of these quotes.
Speaker 1: But that's what makes I mean, we're all clear that
Speaker 1: what makes a quote is you've pulled it, like Twain
Speaker 1: didn't publish published one sentences, but he published bugs. Then
Speaker 1: a feller goes in there and pulls out the quotes
Speaker 1: like it's all contextual. It's surrounded by a whole damn book.
Speaker 7: But Yanni's mentioning there are some quotes that are in
Speaker 7: a similar vein, and what he's referencing is a slight
Speaker 7: tweak on the quote that you shared. That's also from Leopold,
Speaker 7: and in a similar kind of line of thought. He
Speaker 7: talks about the idea of what avails our forty freedoms
Speaker 7: without a young place, without a wild place to be
Speaker 7: young in.
Speaker 1: That's right, Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken
Speaker 1: for granted until progress began to do away with them.
Speaker 1: Now we face the question whether a still higher standard
Speaker 1: of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild
Speaker 1: and free for us of the minority, the opportunity to
Speaker 1: see geese is more important than television. Here's one on
Speaker 1: land management cease being intimidated by the argument that a
Speaker 1: right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits,
Speaker 1: or that a wrong action is to be condoned because
Speaker 1: it pays.
Speaker 3: Here's one that I like farmer as a conservationist. When
Speaker 3: land does well for its owner and the owner does
Speaker 3: well by his land, when both end up better by
Speaker 3: reason of their partnership, we have conservation.
Speaker 1: We hit to hit me with that one again.
Speaker 3: When land does well for its owner and the owner
Speaker 3: does well by his land, when both end up better
Speaker 3: by reason of their partnership, we have conservation.
Speaker 1: There you go. That's that's that's very close to it.
Speaker 1: Doug during quote Well, indeed, well, no, that's a Doug
Speaker 1: during great You will say, I see what the farmer
Speaker 1: gets out of it. I see what the hunter gets
Speaker 1: out of it, But what does the land get out
Speaker 1: of it?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Your memory never ceases to amaze me.
Speaker 1: Doug Durn Also another favorite quote of mind. Doug Durn said,
Speaker 1: when when he was conjuring other people, if the kids
Speaker 1: are gonna hunt, I'm gonna hunt.
Speaker 4: In reference to youth season.
Speaker 1: In reference to when when they put it to the concert,
Speaker 1: when they put it to the Wisconsin when they put
Speaker 1: it to Wisconsin voters, do you support expanding youth turkey
Speaker 1: from two days to four days? And simultaneously, do you
Speaker 1: support expanding youth deer season from two days to four days?
Speaker 1: They voted like a slim majority in favor of expanding
Speaker 1: youth Turkey, which I'm going to hire lobbyists to work on,
Speaker 1: and they had a minority in support of expanding youth deer.
Speaker 1: And Doug and if this process plays out of a
Speaker 1: gold with these meetings, and Doug was imagining going to
Speaker 1: the meeting and was imagining the man who would stand
Speaker 1: up and beat the table and say, if the kids.
Speaker 3: Are going on? She did not have to imagine that guy.
Speaker 1: Many of those guys exist that. Let me tell you
Speaker 1: who likes youth season. Let's tell you who likes it
Speaker 1: people with.
Speaker 4: Kids, well, and kids like under sixteen years of age?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And who doesn't like youth season?
Speaker 5: People without kids.
Speaker 1: Sure, there's there's an area of that. There's like an
Speaker 1: area of wildlife law. And I was trying to explain this.
Speaker 1: We're working on our next Close Calls edition, which has
Speaker 1: these sort of like transformative stories in it. But anyways,
Speaker 1: there's there's an area of wildlife law. I'm a juxtaposed
Speaker 1: two types of wildlife law. There's an area there's an
Speaker 1: area of wildlife law where there's sort of a moral
Speaker 1: basis right where you'll look at certain questions and it'll
Speaker 1: be like, well, clearly that's the right thing, like shooting
Speaker 1: a sow with cubs or something like that. Sure like
Speaker 1: it's like that. There's there's things that almost have like
Speaker 1: biblical reference about like like like waste okay, like and
Speaker 1: and uh like to take the most classic example. You know,
Speaker 1: it's generally been understood for a long time, like murdering
Speaker 1: your brethren is bad right in the Ten Commandments. It's
Speaker 1: generally you find this prohibition around the world. We now
Speaker 1: have very specific laws about it. But you look and
Speaker 1: be like, oh, yeah, of course wildlife law I think
Speaker 1: has some of that. You know, the people would look
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, yeah, that's got to be illegal.
Speaker 1: You just went shot a whole herd of elk and
Speaker 1: has left them laying out the rot in the sun.
Speaker 1: That ought to be illegal. Seems like that be illegal.
Speaker 1: But then you have areas of wildlife law that are Uh,
Speaker 1: wind up, there's no moral background, and it winds up
Speaker 1: being argued by who stands to gain the most. I'll
Speaker 1: point out that I think I feel like the corner
Speaker 1: crossing debate sits outside of morality. People that want to
Speaker 1: be able to cross corners are people that want to
Speaker 1: go into those areas. People that don't want you to
Speaker 1: be able to cross corners are people that don't want
Speaker 1: you going into those areas. There's no like, there's no
Speaker 1: one coming and saying like I have the moral high ground.
Speaker 1: And uh was talking about oh the youth season thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no like more, you know what I mean. It's
Speaker 1: like everybody's just jockeying for their own interests. Man on
Speaker 1: a bashing damn kids an opportunity away from me. Well,
Speaker 1: we had a guy right in. Were you here for
Speaker 1: that guy that wrote in why He's like sure? Pat
Speaker 1: Dirkin writes an article about it's the same old story
Speaker 1: you see all the time, Like during COVID is all
Speaker 1: the articles like oh these people hunting fishing. Now there's
Speaker 1: all these articles. No one's going hunting and fishing. Wisconsin's
Speaker 1: losing all their deer hunters. It's like and you're looking
Speaker 1: and be like, okay, like a demonstrable decline, but you
Speaker 1: know it's the same up down that has always existed. Anyways.
Speaker 1: The guy writes in well, I'll tell you and he
Speaker 1: writes it a piss He signs it a pissed off
Speaker 1: Michigan hunter. He wrote in being like, I'll tell you
Speaker 1: why no one's hunting deer anymore because kids seasons, kids
Speaker 1: kill all the big bucks. And he calls it what
Speaker 1: was his term for, like the the big hunt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: before the big hunt, the big hunt, like the big
Speaker 1: hunt in his mind, his general firearm. And he says,
Speaker 1: by the time the big hunt happens, they're all dead.
Speaker 1: Everything's dead.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: You got this season and you got that season.
Speaker 5: And then the kid say it's not the kids shooting them,
Speaker 5: it's the kid's dad shooting.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because there's a kid there in diapers with his picture,
Speaker 3: you know, six or five creed more or something in
Speaker 3: a big giant buck.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and like in say anthing with Doug, like
Speaker 1: if the kids are gonna hunt, I'm gonna hunt, and
Speaker 1: you season, here's my take. I'm gonna hunt. So you
Speaker 1: kids start un well, this is nothing new to your ass.
Speaker 1: Speaking the cup of extra days.
Speaker 3: And it is fun going out with kids.
Speaker 1: Man, I love it. But yeah, I'm like, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: I'm not like, Well, let me know when you want
Speaker 1: to wake up. I'm up. Everybody else, Get up, get up,
Speaker 1: get up, away back. Okay, so oh, a quick warning.
Speaker 1: But guy wrote in two things. If don't go to
Speaker 1: audible dot com and buy a Sand County Almanac, here's
Speaker 1: a problem you guys at the Elder Leopold Foundation need
Speaker 1: to figure out. Hmm, I just downloaded. This is a
Speaker 1: guy writing it. I just downloaded the only copy of
Speaker 1: a Sand County Almanac available on audible. He'd already read
Speaker 1: his hard copy several times. Okay, he says, imagine my
Speaker 1: discuss when I realized someone has added what amounts to
Speaker 1: a politically charged high school essay as an introduction, as
Speaker 1: well as removing the whole second portion of the book.
Speaker 1: Nowhere in the description does it say that it's an
Speaker 1: abridged version, with a I haven't listened to it and
Speaker 1: apparently questionable the introduction.
Speaker 2: The introduction is part of the book that's currently published.
Speaker 2: It's written by a Pulitzer Prize winning essay asked Barbara Kingsoliver. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's what's Yeah, there's a couple of people that are
Speaker 2: upset about the politics of the intro, which I think
Speaker 2: is actually.
Speaker 1: I thought that was highly I thought that that choice
Speaker 1: of an intro was highly questionable.
Speaker 2: It's not a bad intro.
Speaker 1: I've read her work. Yeah, I just really felt that
Speaker 1: that was a bad move. Yeah, I mean I could.
Speaker 2: See what it's one of those things and not to interrupt,
Speaker 2: but it's one of those things where like she mentions
Speaker 2: the fact that people disagree about climate change and this
Speaker 2: and that, but she takes a pretty even handed approach
Speaker 2: to it.
Speaker 3: I don't know what.
Speaker 2: That's not how I would have had right the intro.
Speaker 2: Oh No, I mean it's an interesting choice for sure. Nonetheless,
Speaker 2: I've seen several people. I looked at the comments on
Speaker 2: Audible after reading this email, and there's a lot of
Speaker 2: people that claim it's a high school book report.
Speaker 1: It's just like, eh, but as a part of the
Speaker 1: book missing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems to be. There's like ten or so
Speaker 2: people that make the same claim.
Speaker 3: So the sketches here and there part they say.
Speaker 2: It's like a chunk out of the middle.
Speaker 3: Well, that would be the middle it's really three parts. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Carl and I of course have old copyright, don't have
Speaker 3: the intro. Yeah, his is signed by one of the
Speaker 3: Leopold kids.
Speaker 1: Okay, so anyways, you guys got to figure that out.
Speaker 1: Yeah at theold Yeah, once you get someone to read
Speaker 1: the sum bitch, do like a proper version. Put it
Speaker 1: on audible.
Speaker 3: I'll work on that, please. I have an idea. You know,
Speaker 3: there are no recordings of Leopold's voice.
Speaker 1: Hmm, there aren't. So you can't do an ai him.
Speaker 3: No, you can't him. But I listened to both Kurt
Speaker 3: Mighty and Stan Temple, who held Leopold's position at the
Speaker 3: University of Wisconsin, talk about Leopold, and if you close
Speaker 3: your eyes when Stan Temple's talking, you kind of feel
Speaker 3: like you're in the presence.
Speaker 1: He'd be a good guy to read it.
Speaker 3: I think he would be.
Speaker 4: I would agree with that. The current We also bought
Speaker 4: it on audible and the narration was not great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I also picked that up from the comments.
Speaker 2: I didn't go so far as to buy it, so.
Speaker 1: I can't really speak to that, but understood you put
Speaker 1: on your company card, Randall.
Speaker 2: I don't have a company card.
Speaker 1: Maybe Chili can put it on his company card for you. Okay,
Speaker 1: we have Okay. A long time ago, we did a
Speaker 1: special drop episode. I think it was called we had
Speaker 1: when Renee Cross came out.
Speaker 8: The title of that was, come on, Phil, good Lord,
Speaker 8: where did you come from?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Karin's sitting in here, Karen's on the floor.
Speaker 2: Title for this episode.
Speaker 1: Back in the old days, that would have been the
Speaker 1: title on the floor. Back in the old days, when
Speaker 1: we had titles that told you nothing, what was it called?
Speaker 4: Are you bitter about them?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I'm bitter about it. When we had to switch when
Speaker 1: you switch titlings so people could tell by the title
Speaker 1: what it might be about. Yeah, I remember we had
Speaker 1: an episode of call it an Object in Its Shadows.
Speaker 1: You look at it like, what the hell's that supposed
Speaker 1: to be about?
Speaker 3: Listen to that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like an easter egg.
Speaker 9: Hut.
Speaker 1: You got to figure out where they got the title from. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I explained it at the very end. I explained with the
Speaker 1: concept of an object in its shadow. Now that I
Speaker 1: brought it up, I'll just point out it means like
Speaker 1: I'll splay a smart time it takes too long from
Speaker 1: bass to blue Water yeah, Okay. A while back, me
Speaker 1: and Janni had in we did a appis. We did
Speaker 1: an extra drop, so a Friday drop? Did it? A
Speaker 1: Friday drop?
Speaker 3: Krinn?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Thursday?
Speaker 1: Whatever the hell? An extra drop called from bassa Blue Water.
Speaker 1: We had in a guest Renee Cross. As we explained
Speaker 1: back then, I became friends. Renee Cross owned Cypress Cove
Speaker 1: Marina in Venice, Louisiana. There's kind of like two marinas.
Speaker 1: There's a big, huge marina. I don't mean to knock it,
Speaker 1: but it's like very like a very touristy marina of
Speaker 1: the Venice Marina, and then there's Cypress Cove Marine, which
Speaker 1: is a smaller kind of I don't know, more intimate marina.
Speaker 1: We would I've been down there. I've been going down
Speaker 1: there to spearfish last few years, and we hunted ducks
Speaker 1: down there and did some filming down there. The owner
Speaker 1: of the marina came up one day and introduced himself
Speaker 1: to me while we're cleaning fish, and that was Renee Cross.
Speaker 1: And as we explained the special drop, I just became
Speaker 1: friendly with Renee Cross and we started coming up with
Speaker 1: this idea of doing a sort of a like a
Speaker 1: takeover of Cypress Coved Marina in October, and we have
Speaker 1: a thing called Meat Eater Experiences, and so we lined up.
Speaker 1: So we're starting out with we lined up two mediatter experiences.
Speaker 1: One is a waterfowl hunting Kansas in cooperation with foul Planes.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna have like Yanni's gonna for the times
Speaker 1: we're there, Yani's gonna be there. I'm gonna hunt there
Speaker 1: for a while. A couple of turns, Brent Reeves, Clay
Speaker 1: cal I don't know who all the hell is gonna
Speaker 1: be down there.
Speaker 2: There's one more.
Speaker 4: You got five out of six. I can't think who
Speaker 4: the six is.
Speaker 1: But bunch of people going there at foul planes. Now
Speaker 1: foul planes, they're already a waterfowl guide. We're taking time
Speaker 1: there to kind of make our own curriculum at foul planes. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you'll still go. And how many days of hunting?
Speaker 1: Is it? Three days of hunting?
Speaker 9: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, three days of hunting because you can only transport
Speaker 1: three day limited birds. So they kind of do waterfowl
Speaker 1: hunts three days because you can have You could kill
Speaker 1: limits all three days and still go home. So what
Speaker 1: we're gonna do is the way it normally works is
Speaker 1: like you know, you go there, people clean your birds whatever,
Speaker 1: out of sight, you go have a cocktail. We're gonna
Speaker 1: kind of change the format up. We're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: hunt together, but we're also gonna do a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff around cleaning, food prep, nighttime entertainment, do trivia stuff,
Speaker 1: do some different lessons on waterfowl and lectures on waterfowl
Speaker 1: and make it a more educational experience and just more
Speaker 1: hanging out and really fill it out. So we have
Speaker 1: that with foul planes, and those are all happening in
Speaker 1: December and January. Okay, there's still some spots left there,
Speaker 1: and that's hunting waterfowl at Kansas. Hunting waterfowl in Kansas
Speaker 1: with foul planes with the Meat Eater Crew. Cypress Coved
Speaker 1: Marina trip is in October. Now. The reason we went
Speaker 1: with October is because October is kind of like an
Speaker 1: unsung time down there where the fishing is absolutely spectacular,
Speaker 1: but the sort of summer rush is laying off, and
Speaker 1: we're taking over the whole Cypress Cove Marina.
Speaker 4: From October fourth to the sixteen.
Speaker 1: October four to sixteen, So we're gonna come down and fish.
Speaker 1: We got a lot of guys from the crew coming
Speaker 1: down to fish. We got a lot of friends coming
Speaker 1: down to fish. We're gonna go down and fish, and
Speaker 1: you can go in and book trips, so it's all
Speaker 1: like when you book the trips, it's all your lodging.
Speaker 1: We have a ton of guides lined up because there's
Speaker 1: a lot of guides that fish out of Cypress Cove Marina,
Speaker 1: that run their own businesses out of Cypress Clost Marina.
Speaker 1: We took those guides and booked those guides for the
Speaker 1: time that we're there. And the cool thing about Cypress
Speaker 1: Cove Marina is you're sitting in Venice, Louisiana, so you
Speaker 1: have an amazing inshore fishery and then right there the
Speaker 1: continental shelf is twenty miles away. So when you're sitting
Speaker 1: there at Cypress Cove Marina, this is no joke. You've
Speaker 1: got guys launching bass boats to go fish largemouth bass.
Speaker 1: They're going upriver and like literally right next to them
Speaker 1: are people gearing up to go out for bluefin, tuna
Speaker 1: and mahi. It's like that crunch together. You got guys
Speaker 1: fishing bluefish, calffish. You got guys doing tons of redfish,
Speaker 1: speckled sea trout. We go down there for red snapper,
Speaker 1: we go down there for what they down there called
Speaker 1: lemon fish or kobia. It's just like it is the
Speaker 1: greatest fishing I would say globally of everywhere I've been,
Speaker 1: it is the greatest fishing spot I've ever been to.
Speaker 1: It's what I mean, like I love Alaska, it's just better.
Speaker 1: I mean, like the fishing is just better than Alaska.
Speaker 1: There's so much more to do. So we have when
Speaker 1: Renee Cross came on. When Renee Cross came on and
Speaker 1: talked about it, we weren't like the seats weren't We
Speaker 1: hadn't opened availability to book yet. It was just kind
Speaker 1: of a precursor to the whole thing. But it's open
Speaker 1: to booking to go and get trips to come to
Speaker 1: Cypress Cove. Fish with us, clean fish with us, eat
Speaker 1: cage and food at night. It's gonna be a great time.
Speaker 1: And like you're doing like guided fishing, so you're gonna do.
Speaker 1: You got three fish days you're gonna do in short
Speaker 1: and off shore. We'll be swapping out and jumping on
Speaker 1: the different boats. We'll be hanging out at night we'll
Speaker 1: be cleaning fish together. We'll get all your fish packaged
Speaker 1: up so you bring your fish home recipe ready. They'll
Speaker 1: be educational, be a ton of fun. Booking is available.
Speaker 4: Now, are you going to tell a couple of good
Speaker 4: stories while we're hanging out after cleaning fish.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell some great stories, and I'll be able
Speaker 1: to tell the stories I would never tell on air.
Speaker 1: Bumped Doug. Doug teld me a really good story I
Speaker 1: can't tell on Oh. I got a number of stories
Speaker 1: I've heard from Doug that I can't tell on air.
Speaker 1: I came home and he told me a funny one.
Speaker 1: I came home and shared it widely. I would get done, people,
Speaker 1: that's not funny.
Speaker 3: That's my favorite kind of story.
Speaker 1: It has to do with your little health scare. Oh,
Speaker 1: I thought I like that story. I thought it was
Speaker 1: a delightful. Dude, I heard I heard a turkey hunting
Speaker 1: story the other day that I vowed I like, I
Speaker 1: can't like, I really can't tell it on air. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I heard a turkey story the other day. That's just
Speaker 1: my new, absolute favorite story. You know, when you go
Speaker 1: to some comedy clubs where they tell like racy humor.
Speaker 1: And now they got that thing where you got to
Speaker 1: put your phone in that bag. When we do this
Speaker 1: Cypress Cove deal, I'm gonna get some of those bags
Speaker 1: and put your phone in one of these bags. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you a turkey hunting story.
Speaker 3: If you're going to tell me those other stories about yeah,
Speaker 3: well that one. You know, there were a couple of
Speaker 3: others that you that you know that I'd rather you
Speaker 3: didn't share, or that someone might hit record.
Speaker 6: Here.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you a quick version. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: just don't even chime in. Okay, dog Doug had to
Speaker 1: have a battery of tests done and he came back
Speaker 1: with a and like the doctor calls him okay, And
Speaker 1: Doug wound up having a false positive, which is not
Speaker 1: a false positive you want. And they called and go, hey,
Speaker 1: we have your results, and Doug's like, oh, I'm sitting
Speaker 1: here with my wife. I'll put her on a speakerphone
Speaker 1: because she's real concerned about my health, you know, like
Speaker 1: the follow on as one would.
Speaker 9: Phone.
Speaker 1: And he's like, well, Doug, you're blank came back positive,
Speaker 1: to which Trish is like, what.
Speaker 3: Made for a really interesting weekend While waiting for how
Speaker 3: long did I sorted out? Well, the interesting thing about
Speaker 3: it was that we both then kind of had well,
Speaker 3: you know, before we were married, kind of talks. It
Speaker 3: was uh, yeah, no, it was. It was a Monday,
Speaker 3: and in the meantime I had to I was doing
Speaker 3: a talk at an environmental education center. We were selling
Speaker 3: a house, and all these things are bombarding me. And
Speaker 3: you know, when you go and do one of those talks,
Speaker 3: you try to gather your thoughts before you go out there.
Speaker 3: But I'm getting phone calls and checking messages and to
Speaker 3: see if the test results had come back. And I
Speaker 3: walked out there and I started doing my talk, and
Speaker 3: interestingly enough, I was talking about Leopold and the Riley
Speaker 3: Game Cooperative, which maybe we'll get to, and then I'm
Speaker 3: transitioning to the next part of the talk, which was
Speaker 3: about sharing the land, this initiative that I've started that
Speaker 3: was inspired by Leopold. And in the middle of the talk,
Speaker 3: I stopped and all of these things were going through
Speaker 3: my mind at that particular moment, and it just stopped me,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, well, we're going to sell that house,
Speaker 3: and I wonder what's gonna happen with those test results.
Speaker 3: And oh, this is in my head and I'm standing
Speaker 3: in front of two hundred people.
Speaker 1: He started crying, and.
Speaker 3: Then I and then I went and then went into
Speaker 3: the next part of it. And my wife said later,
Speaker 3: I said, did you notice that I kind of freaked
Speaker 3: out there for a minute. She goes, no, I thought
Speaker 3: it was a dramatic pause. It was, yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: Oh another thing about cypress calls. We're gonna record We're
Speaker 1: gonna record podcasts down there, and we'll, uh, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have a way for for people that that We're gonna
Speaker 1: have a way for people that come down and fish
Speaker 1: with us and book trips to We're gonna work on
Speaker 1: a way for people to join in the podcast recordings.
Speaker 1: Trivia board game, bag and stock How did it? When
Speaker 1: was it ever out of stock?
Speaker 10: Uh?
Speaker 4: Not long after we ran.
Speaker 1: Ran ran of them. If you wanted a trivia board game,
Speaker 1: they're back in stock, you know, go camping with your family,
Speaker 1: be able to play some trivia. And also Spencer's plugging
Speaker 1: away on Spencer's plugging away on the the packs expansion
Speaker 1: which I totally disagree with the avenue he took. What
Speaker 1: are the expansion packs he's doing?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 5: He's talked about white tails, talked about I don't know.
Speaker 1: What what ones is he doing?
Speaker 4: I want to say, is uh is Mountain Man one
Speaker 4: of them?
Speaker 3: Not?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's doing expansion packs. I'm sure everybody will like it.
Speaker 1: I would have made him a little weirder m hmm.
Speaker 1: I would have done the I was like more trivial,
Speaker 1: like the weird I would have called it. I've done
Speaker 1: an expansion pack called the Weird Ship mm hmm, and
Speaker 1: then and then Frontiersmen the mountain Man. But he's doing
Speaker 1: like white tails that people like those deer.
Speaker 4: Here we go.
Speaker 1: Before I'm joking. Before we started recording, all you Leopold fans,
Speaker 1: hang tight, we're getting to it. Before we started recording,
Speaker 1: We're gonna Before we started recording today, we were hitting
Speaker 1: on some reminiscing about about spring turkey hunts. I got
Speaker 1: some turkey hunts in the highlight of my turkey season
Speaker 1: was as always going to the Lovely during family farm
Speaker 1: for youth turkey season. Uh, we've had phenomenal hunts. We've
Speaker 1: had some bad weather now and then this year was phenomenal.
Speaker 1: We had four kids hunting, two got birds. Everybody had
Speaker 1: an opportunity. My little boy, it was his first year,
Speaker 1: my younger boy, it was his first year on the shotgun,
Speaker 1: had a miss, kept stoic with Doug. He was hunting
Speaker 1: with Doug. So my daughter was hunting with Doug when
Speaker 1: she got a turkey. My little boy was hunting with
Speaker 1: Doug when he had a miss. He kept stoic, got home,
Speaker 1: went upstairs at the farmhouse and cried. And then the
Speaker 1: other night my wife said, what's up with Matthew because
Speaker 1: he was crying about that turkey quite a number of
Speaker 1: weeks later.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I thought that he was. He was so
Speaker 3: good about it after it happened. And I'm still playing
Speaker 3: it through my mind. So he's not alone in his disappointment.
Speaker 3: Haunted the lung, Yeah, I am. You're always haunted, haunted
Speaker 3: by the ones that got away, right, But we outside
Speaker 3: of the outside of the blind, and I was just
Speaker 3: I was crushed by it. And I said, Matthew, I'm
Speaker 3: so sorry that that happened, and talked about it a
Speaker 3: little bit, and he just kind of shrugged his shoulders
Speaker 3: and said, well, that's okay.
Speaker 1: No, he like he's he's private about Yeah, he kind
Speaker 1: of he kind of spills his guts at night. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but he spilled his guts upstairs at the farmhouse.
Speaker 3: Do you know. My favorite story that he told me
Speaker 3: when we were in the blind was about how the
Speaker 3: kids at school, because he's kind of bulky. Not my
Speaker 3: mom would have called it husky. He goes the kids
Speaker 3: at school thought I was a bully.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they call it. He says, I have a bully body.
Speaker 1: He's got a bully. He's got the build of a bully,
Speaker 1: but not the temperament.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, he's such a sweet kid man, which makes
Speaker 3: me feel even worse about him. About that.
Speaker 1: He'll be fine. Yeah aa next year. It's like game on,
Speaker 1: full pressure on him.
Speaker 4: Oh, in the end, it's better this way.
Speaker 10: No.
Speaker 1: I like getting them.
Speaker 6: I'll like get it even Moore though.
Speaker 1: I like getting the turkeys. Brody Haten had a good year.
Speaker 4: You don't think that's some failure for your kids, and
Speaker 4: these hunts is a good thing.
Speaker 1: Really. I like getting them turkeys. I like cutting spurs off.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 11: I understand all that tell me that you think that
Speaker 11: the dry, but I never sit there.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me ask you this.
Speaker 3: Do you hope you're.
Speaker 1: When you're sitting there in are you saying yourself, I
Speaker 1: hope she misses, or it'll be more meaningful if she missed.
Speaker 2: Afterwards that you got and taking photos. Are you like, man,
Speaker 2: it would have been nice if she just do.
Speaker 1: You spookle out of the turkeys?
Speaker 2: Are valuable experience if she just missed this, do you.
Speaker 1: Spookle out of turkey so your daughter doesn't get the
Speaker 1: chance it'll be more meaningful to her, Or take her
Speaker 1: to really bad spots because it'll be more meaningful to her.
Speaker 4: No, but.
Speaker 12: Builds characters, what don't We don't take them to spots
Speaker 12: where there's a corn pile and just try to guarantee
Speaker 12: a turkey fe feeding there that they can shoot their
Speaker 12: head off of.
Speaker 1: In hindsight, yes, in the moment, that's how I put it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the yeah you did. And in the moment, I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, of course.
Speaker 5: And it's wazier for you to say that than to
Speaker 5: convince the kid of that at the time.
Speaker 1: His daughters will take out.
Speaker 4: You ain't never gonna convince the kid of right at
Speaker 4: the time.
Speaker 1: But I think you're right, honest, bro, your boy got
Speaker 1: a double Yeah, he hadn't.
Speaker 5: It was actually his first spring turkey, first two he
Speaker 5: had killed a gobbler in the fall or.
Speaker 3: A year or two ago.
Speaker 5: But yeah, we had a We had a gob a
Speaker 5: gobbler dragon, five jakes and he got two of them.
Speaker 1: So he shot the big boy and then got the jake.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that that that they were coming in. There's a
Speaker 5: log on the ground, and that I had ranged at
Speaker 5: fifty yards. I was like, they got to come closer
Speaker 5: than that log, and that gobbler when he got to
Speaker 5: that log hopped up on a branch on that log
Speaker 5: and sat there for like three minutes, didn't move, and
Speaker 5: all those jakes were bunched up behind him, and Hayden's like,
Speaker 5: can I shoot him?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 9: Shoot him?
Speaker 5: Finally hopped down, got one and I was like another
Speaker 5: one got him. By the time he handed me they
Speaker 5: I had left. We had repositioned, so I had left
Speaker 5: my gun away from us, so I didn't have a chance.
Speaker 3: He handed me the gun.
Speaker 1: They were all finally all scattered. But yeah, it was cool.
Speaker 3: You got a triple.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe a quadruple quad I've never been present for
Speaker 1: I don't think I have either, but yeah, that's a mess.
Speaker 3: Yeah, John, he got a triple. You know, it was funny. Yes,
Speaker 3: I got in yesterday and I walked down to the
Speaker 3: from the hotel and walked down to the Mediator store,
Speaker 3: which I have to say is beautiful. I liked it
Speaker 3: a lot. Which buy a little thing for my wife? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 3: and what I thought I had got some kind of discount.
Speaker 3: But those guys and they held me right up for
Speaker 3: the Yeah, not that guy. You know, if they don't recognize.
Speaker 2: Do you have any idea who I am?
Speaker 1: So when you went into the media store, they didn't
Speaker 1: know who you were.
Speaker 3: They immediately recognized me. Anyway, was interesting because the the
Speaker 3: you've got that YouTube videos running on loop and here
Speaker 3: was the Turkey hunt that you did with Miller And
Speaker 3: I'm talking to the guy and I'm kind of looking around,
Speaker 3: and I was like, this doesn't get interesting until they
Speaker 3: leave Yanni's property and come over to my farm. And
Speaker 3: the guy goes I've seen this so many times already.
Speaker 5: How did how did I not see you guys get
Speaker 5: a triple? You know how Turkey populations are declining in
Speaker 5: this country because of guys like you.
Speaker 1: It's better when you don't get one.
Speaker 10: Yeah, not getting one?
Speaker 3: Yann. He's walking away. He's got a big gobbler in
Speaker 3: the middle of two, Jake's.
Speaker 1: It's always better to go.
Speaker 3: But you guys, you guys have had hunted quite a
Speaker 3: bit before you all of a sudden got into him.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we put our time the Durn Farm, didn't
Speaker 4: We had it.
Speaker 1: It didn't save one of our episodes, but it really
Speaker 1: helped it. Oh yeah, when we had to come over
Speaker 1: with Melroy, all over from Melroy.
Speaker 3: With your cheese curds on the dashboard.
Speaker 1: Uh, Carl, you got you hunters your kids this year?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, how'd that go?
Speaker 7: Had an awesome hunt And back to the connections to
Speaker 7: farms and and sort of the meat Eater crew after
Speaker 7: meeting Chester. He grew up about forty five minutes north
Speaker 7: of where I'm living in southeast Wisconsin, on a beautiful
Speaker 7: chunk of land, and his family has welcomed me there
Speaker 7: the last three springs on the farm where Chester grew up,
Speaker 7: and it's beautiful and actually the work that they're doing
Speaker 7: on that farm as stewards of the land ties nicely.
Speaker 7: They're doing a beautiful job. It is a beautiful piece
Speaker 7: of property. And so I've gotten to know both of
Speaker 7: Chester's parents and also his brother Ike. Ike's a cool dude.
Speaker 7: Trad bow guy, total entrepreneur and had a chance to
Speaker 7: take my four year old son along this year and
Speaker 7: we had just a phenomenal, phenomenal hunt with perfect conditions.
Speaker 7: First morning, got in there in the dark as things
Speaker 7: are getting light. We've got deer close to the blind,
Speaker 7: so my son's checking out the deer. He's got his
Speaker 7: farm and fleet plastic practice shotgun along and have a
Speaker 7: bird goblin on the roost. Had a possum come out
Speaker 7: in front of us, real close and walk by. I
Speaker 7: got to watch this possum, sand hill cranes, Canada geese,
Speaker 7: the just amazing diversity of dawn bird's song, everything just
Speaker 7: like ten out of ten in this incredible farm, just
Speaker 7: a beautiful spot. And as the morning wore on, we
Speaker 7: had a hen kind of calling back and forth with me,
Speaker 7: and my son was totally on edge listening to this hen.
Speaker 7: Hen comes out into the field into the decoy spread,
Speaker 7: and my son immediately is like, you're gonna shoot that
Speaker 7: You're you're gonna shoot that turkey, and I'm telling him no,
Speaker 7: waiting for a gobbler. You know, this is the spring hunt.
Speaker 7: Of course, it's got to be a male turkey. And
Speaker 7: every once in a while, you'd hear this gobbler gobble
Speaker 7: at the sound of us call him back and forth
Speaker 7: with the hen and every gobble. My son's getting more
Speaker 7: and more amped up. And I don't know, I think
Speaker 7: many of us here have been in the blind with kids.
Speaker 7: My son is the loudest whisperer ever. He whispers like
Speaker 7: borderline yelling. Right, It's like, did you hear that gobble?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 7: I heard the gobble man, and we got to keep
Speaker 7: it down. So I'm trying to keep him quiet, and
Speaker 7: the hen comes in. I've got a strutting tom and
Speaker 7: a hen decoy out in front of us. The hen
Speaker 7: comes in. She's purring and making all kinds of very
Speaker 7: very subtle vocalizations, and she gets right in there with
Speaker 7: the two decoys, the gobbler and the hen. And I
Speaker 7: know this Tom is somewhere nearby, right, and he's he's
Speaker 7: been coming to the sound of the hen. And so
Speaker 7: I'm telling my boy, I'm like, just two things, do
Speaker 7: not move and don't speak. Don't move, don't speak. And
Speaker 7: it's that that moment where you know the gobbler is
Speaker 7: somewhere nearby, but we haven't seen him yet, and you
Speaker 7: could you could cut the silence with a knife, right,
Speaker 7: It's just like perfectly, there's not a breath of wind, nothing,
Speaker 7: And I'm just waiting for this gobbler to appear at
Speaker 7: any moment. And that's when my son farts, like loudly.
Speaker 7: Did he shot with a super add that to the list?
Speaker 7: And he's got just like a totally innocent look on
Speaker 7: his face. And I look at him, I'm like, dude,
Speaker 7: what the heck man? And he looks at me like
Speaker 7: what I'm like. When I said don't speak, I meant like,
Speaker 7: don't make any noise. And we're whispering back and forth.
Speaker 7: So you know, he's dude's four, right. So so then
Speaker 7: I'm wondering did the tom hear this? Because I'm serious.
Speaker 7: It's like that moment where any if you're thinking that the
Speaker 7: gobbler is going to show up any second, and ten
Speaker 7: seconds go by twenty seconds, we probably get close to
Speaker 7: a minute.
Speaker 6: And then at the edge of.
Speaker 7: The field, this gobbler comes strutting out and as soon
Speaker 7: as my son peeking out, you know, we got we
Speaker 7: got a ground blind step. As soon as as soon
Speaker 7: as the gobbler starts coming out, my boy starts reaching
Speaker 7: for the other side of the blind to get his
Speaker 7: farm and flight shot on the little little toy gun.
Speaker 7: I'm like, don't move, don't move like you can shoot
Speaker 7: the turkey in a second, you know, after after we
Speaker 7: take care of business. So the gobbler struts out right
Speaker 7: into the the spread and he's all fanned out, get
Speaker 7: starting to nudge right up on the on the streading
Speaker 7: gobbler decoy. So shot the gobbler went out there. My
Speaker 7: son was over the moon, you know, turkey's flopping around
Speaker 7: and he's asking questions about you know, is the turkey
Speaker 7: still alive?
Speaker 2: And we're talking is it.
Speaker 1: True that you can't stop the flop Daddy.
Speaker 7: I've got I've gotten to the point where, you know,
Speaker 7: I used to stand on the stand on the neck
Speaker 7: and all that anymore. If you I know you've made
Speaker 7: a good shot, just kind of wait for the flopping
Speaker 7: to stop. So took some pictures and then went back
Speaker 7: back up to the farmhouse and Chester's mom, dad, brother
Speaker 7: all there. I bump into Chester's dad Greg first, and he's.
Speaker 6: Over the moon.
Speaker 7: He didn't know I was going to have my boy
Speaker 7: along with me, right, So he sees my son and
Speaker 7: my son walks up to him without hesitation. He says, Hi,
Speaker 7: I'm Alexander, thanks for letting us hunt on your farm
Speaker 7: this morning, and Greg Greg Flood, Chester's dad says, hold on,
Speaker 7: I need to get my wife and brings her out.
Speaker 7: And that was the first time i'd met her. You
Speaker 7: can you know Chester is a super solid dude, and
Speaker 7: you can see when you meet his mom and dead brother,
Speaker 7: like why he turned out the way he did. They're
Speaker 7: just a really awesome family. And so his mom took
Speaker 7: a few more pictures of us up there at the
Speaker 7: farmhouse and we shot the shot the breeze a little
Speaker 7: bit more. And then his brother has a cookie business
Speaker 7: going right now, and he sent us home with a
Speaker 7: few of the cookies. So like we show up on
Speaker 7: at the farm, were treated like royalty by these folks.
Speaker 6: They send us home with they give you present.
Speaker 2: I know, man, I know.
Speaker 7: So we went we went right home, and my boy
Speaker 7: and I wrote a bit. He's getting the point where
Speaker 7: he can write a L e X pretty well. So
Speaker 7: he and I collaborated on a thank you card and
Speaker 7: send him a send them a little token of our appreciation.
Speaker 7: But super cool and seeing the way I mean that
Speaker 7: that farm, not unlike the little bit of property that
Speaker 7: my family and I live on has been heavily impacted
Speaker 7: by the Emerald ash boarer. So they've got dead ash
Speaker 7: trees everywhere, and they're also at the headwaters of a
Speaker 7: really important trout stream tributary. They're doing so much work
Speaker 7: to remove the dead ash trees to plant new trees.
Speaker 7: They're obviously they're they're big. They're big deer hunters. They've
Speaker 7: got deer blinds all over the place. They're thinking a
Speaker 7: lot about deer. But they're also they're approaching the stewardship
Speaker 7: of that property with a focus on back to what
Speaker 7: Doug was saying, like what does the land need from us?
Speaker 6: And they're providing it.
Speaker 7: And then you pull out of the driveway and I
Speaker 7: think at the end of the driveway they've got a
Speaker 7: bunch of big rounds of dead ash stacked up with
Speaker 7: a sign free firewood donations accepted. Oh so anybody wants
Speaker 7: to roll up and grab firewood and if they want
Speaker 7: to throw a few bucks in, like that's the kind
Speaker 7: of people that they are. So it just felt felt
Speaker 7: really privileged and that experience with my boy, like the
Speaker 7: the getting a turkey is always cool, but having that
Speaker 7: morning and seeing all the wildlife and the woods waking
Speaker 7: up and his excitement and just all those details. It
Speaker 7: was one of the most fun turkey hunts that I've
Speaker 7: I've experienced in my life for sure. So good, a
Speaker 7: good start to the spring. And up next week, man,
Speaker 7: I'm taking the week off to float some rivers up
Speaker 7: and up in the up and catch trout and uh
Speaker 7: and hunt some gobblers in the north country.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about Yanni's Arizona. We're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna move on. I want to digging on Leopold, Okay,
Speaker 1: because it happened. First, we're here to we're here to
Speaker 1: celebrate the hundred one hundred years of the HeLa Wilderness
Speaker 1: heal Wildern yep. And then we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: more about San Countie Almanac. Yeah, but you want to
Speaker 1: take the Helo, Carl.
Speaker 6: You want to dive into the HeLa.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, tell me like like how it happened, why
Speaker 1: it happened, what the repercussions were.
Speaker 7: Well, A good place, A good place to start the
Speaker 7: conversation as it relates to Leopold is just a reminder
Speaker 7: of the fact that that Aldough was a Midwestern boy
Speaker 7: by birth, grew up in Burlington, Iowa, spent a lot
Speaker 7: of time actually growing up, summer vacations in the Upper Peninsula,
Speaker 7: Michigan over in the Lasiano Islands, a lot of formative
Speaker 7: experiences in the Midwest that definitely shaped his philosophy ultimately
Speaker 7: around around private land management. But at a very formative
Speaker 7: period in his career, after just graduating from the Yale
Speaker 7: School of Forestry, he did what basically was really the
Speaker 7: only option for an aspiring young conservation professional at that
Speaker 7: point in time, which was to get a job with
Speaker 7: the also young United States Forest Service, the agency I
Speaker 7: work for now.
Speaker 1: I want to hear you with a quick question. Yeah,
Speaker 1: on biography. Yeah, we've joked before about how he's one
Speaker 1: of these people that has multiple places that claim him totally.
Speaker 1: You know, like the writer Jim Harrison is like Montana
Speaker 1: claims him, Patagonia, Arizona, crailing Michigan baby, Right, So so
Speaker 1: you get these people like they're claimed by Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: a bunch of spots.
Speaker 7: Harrison gets claimed by Michigan though. We'll just put that
Speaker 7: to rest right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like the big claim, does Iowa take any like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Wisconsin loves Leopold, Yeah for sure. New Mexico loves Leopold
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Iowa was a little bit like, yeah, that community, this.
Speaker 7: Is where his his the house that he grew up
Speaker 7: in is still maintained as a very important historical site
Speaker 7: right on the banks the Mississippi River and Burlington, Iowa
Speaker 7: is you know. Inarguably that's where he got got to
Speaker 7: start watching watching the birds in the yard with opera
Speaker 7: glasses that his mother okay him.
Speaker 6: So that's that's.
Speaker 7: Where it began, absolutely influential experiences throughout the Midwest. Yale
Speaker 7: School of Forestry graduates and does the one thing that
Speaker 7: a young forester can do at that point in time professionally,
Speaker 7: which is get a job with the United States Forest Service.
Speaker 7: They promptly ship him out to the Arizona Territory. Like
Speaker 7: bear in mind this this predates Arizona in New Mexico
Speaker 7: statehood and is what you're this would be early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: Like I'd have to I'd have to get.
Speaker 7: A time nineteen oh ninety gets shipped out. Yep, okay, good,
Speaker 7: we can tag team this. So and and by the way, anybody,
Speaker 7: anybody who wants to get into Leopold's biography in a
Speaker 7: very detailed way. A friend, a friend of ours, Kurtmine,
Speaker 7: wrote a phenomenal biography of all the Leopold, All the Leopold,
Speaker 7: his life and work. Grab a copy of that if
Speaker 7: you really want to get into the details. It's fantastic.
Speaker 7: So young Leopold, straight out of college, shipped out to
Speaker 7: essentially cruise timber on the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest what
Speaker 7: is today the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest, which is right
Speaker 7: on the sort of southern end of the border between
Speaker 7: what is now the state of Arizona in the state
Speaker 7: of New Mexico. And so his job is to quantify
Speaker 7: essentially how much timber is out there. And bear in mind,
Speaker 7: at this point the history of the Forest Service, the
Speaker 7: genesis was rooted in a recognition that these landscapes were
Speaker 7: important for producing timber and also important for protecting the
Speaker 7: headwaters of critical drinking water sources, particularly in the Western
Speaker 7: United States. So early on in the Forest Service, the
Speaker 7: focus was really on watersheds and timber, and it wasn't
Speaker 7: until nineteen sixty there was a piece of legislation called
Speaker 7: the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, which broadened the set
Speaker 7: of responsibilities that the agency has to go beyond timber
Speaker 7: and water and include fish and wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation,
Speaker 7: and also brought in rangeland management as one of the
Speaker 7: five pillars of the multiple use mission that the agency
Speaker 7: has today. But at that point in time, timber was
Speaker 7: essentially king. So Leopold's out cruising around filing reports with
Speaker 7: the headquarters office, letting folks know how much timber out there,
Speaker 7: of what different varieties and potential merchant ability and logistics
Speaker 7: of accessing that timber, et cetera, which is what he
Speaker 7: was trained to do in school, and spending a lot
Speaker 7: of time. You got to bear in mind like that
Speaker 7: field work was on horseback, extended periods of time out
Speaker 7: in the back country, exploring a landscape that would have
Speaker 7: been totally unfamiliar to Leopold and quite like.
Speaker 6: And quite remote, quite remote back then.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I mean part of that landscape is one
Speaker 7: of the prominent features there right on the New Mexico
Speaker 7: Arizona state line is escadea Mountain, and there's an essay
Speaker 7: in a Sand County almanac called Escadia, which was the
Speaker 7: home of one of the last grizzly bears to live
Speaker 7: in the southwestern United States. So Leopold is seeing and
Speaker 7: experiencing all these things, including those those stories he's hearing
Speaker 7: about the grizzly bears, and coming to have a real
Speaker 7: appreciation for what that landscape has to offer, in addition
Speaker 7: to the timber that he's out there cruising and over
Speaker 7: the course of his time in the southwestern United States
Speaker 7: and ascending into different positions and thinking a lot about
Speaker 7: the change that he's watching occur on the landscape, he
Speaker 7: starts posing some questions that at the time were extremely radical.
Speaker 7: And this was a period of time where there was
Speaker 7: a huge expansion of the road network basically every corner
Speaker 7: of the western US, it felt like to Leopold and
Speaker 7: others had new roads being built into wild country in
Speaker 7: part to extract resources, but also to support people's tourism
Speaker 7: to these places and economic development. And this is when
Speaker 7: the automobile is becoming more commonly owned by middle class
Speaker 7: families throughout the country. And so Leopold started asking some
Speaker 7: questions about whether or not certain places, including the Hila,
Speaker 7: if we want to talk about highest and best use
Speaker 7: of these landscapes, does it not make sense to refrain
Speaker 7: from having that development incur into at least some of
Speaker 7: these remnants of wildness that exist. And he was able
Speaker 7: to do that because he was a well respected sort
Speaker 7: of insider within the agency. He wasn't you know, he
Speaker 7: wasn't seen as some radical from the outside with these
Speaker 7: crazy ideas. He was trained at the Yale School of Forestry.
Speaker 7: He was very much indoctrinated in agency culture.
Speaker 6: But he was also.
Speaker 7: Asking questions that nobody else at the time was really
Speaker 7: was really posing. And so with the Hila coming up
Speaker 7: here in just about two weeks time, right at the
Speaker 7: beginning of June will hit the one hundredth anniversary of
Speaker 7: the administrative designation of the Hila as the first wilderness
Speaker 7: area anywhere on the planet. And it was really at
Speaker 7: Leopold's urging that he convinced the regional forester or the
Speaker 7: big boss of the Southwestern region to make that administrative
Speaker 7: designation that then carried forward another forty years. So that
Speaker 7: was nineteen twenty four that the HeLa was administratively designated.
Speaker 7: It took forty more years before, in nineteen sixty four
Speaker 7: the passage of the Wilderness Act, and then the HeLa
Speaker 7: and a number of other wild landscapes around the United
Speaker 7: States were included in that first batch of congressionally designated
Speaker 7: wilderness areas a full forty years later. So Leopold is
Speaker 7: widely seen as one of the one of the critical
Speaker 7: players in helping set the stage for now. We have
Speaker 7: about one hundred and ten million acres of wilderness that's
Speaker 7: managed under the National Wilderness Preservation System, about two percent
Speaker 7: of the country.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, how big was the HeLa the area that he identified.
Speaker 7: It's in the ballpark of five hundred and fifty thousand
Speaker 7: acres And what's cool now, and there's actually some really
Speaker 7: interesting history here. But for anybody who's familiar with that landscape,
Speaker 7: you have the HeLa Wilderness and then just to the
Speaker 7: east of it, you have another wilderness area called the
Speaker 7: Aldo Leopold Wildern And there's a road that divides the
Speaker 7: two wilderness areas. I think it's Forest Road one point fifty,
Speaker 7: also referred to as the North Star Road, and that road.
Speaker 7: One of the reasons that that road was put in
Speaker 7: was actually to provide easier access to the burgeoning deer herds.
Speaker 7: And this relates to some of the other things that
Speaker 7: Doug and I were talking about earlier. Today about Leopold's
Speaker 7: questioning of predator control, his work on trying to argue
Speaker 7: in favor of more aggressive deer harvests, including antler list
Speaker 7: deer harvest, at times when that was wildly unpopular. But
Speaker 7: one of the concerns that he had back in the
Speaker 7: twenties was the idea that predator control had been so
Speaker 7: effective at promoting these burgeoning deer numbers that then the
Speaker 7: need to access and manage those deer numbers was one
Speaker 7: of the reasons that management agencies like the Forest Service
Speaker 7: and state game and fish agencies were using to build
Speaker 7: new roads into wild country to get more hunter to
Speaker 7: kill the deer that the predators no longer could control.
Speaker 7: And he published some research papers. There's a paper that
Speaker 7: he published in nineteen forty three titled Deer Eruptions where
Speaker 7: he evaluates a couple of different case studies where for
Speaker 7: various reasons. In the case of the Kibab Plateau this
Speaker 7: is post predator control, the deer herds, inflated by orders
Speaker 7: of magnitude, over browsed the range and then had massive
Speaker 7: die offs in the winter, and that impacted the ability
Speaker 7: of the forage in the near term. After those years
Speaker 7: to actually sustain the deer population rebounding. And then another
Speaker 7: case study where I've got a really personal connection is
Speaker 7: a research reserve in southeast Michigan called the Edwin S.
Speaker 7: George Research Preserve. It's a twelve hundred acre property near Hell, Michigan.
Speaker 7: If anybody's familiar with that, which is fenced. And the
Speaker 7: man who owned that property at the time in nineteen
Speaker 7: twenty eight, he brought in four doh and two bucks
Speaker 7: from the up of Michigan released him on the property
Speaker 7: at a time when there were virtually no deer in
Speaker 7: southeast Michigan, and over the span of just a few years,
Speaker 7: the population demonstrated essentially exponential growth in the absence of predation.
Speaker 7: Went from the four dos and two bucks to one
Speaker 7: hundred and sixty deer in the span of I think
Speaker 7: it was four years, six years somewhere in there. I'd
Speaker 7: have to go back and revisit the digits, but exponential growth.
Speaker 7: Leopold uses these two case studies to make the argument for.
Speaker 1: Did he have some real studs on that place?
Speaker 7: Well, so, I said a personal connection to that property
Speaker 7: because when I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan,
Speaker 7: they had no management planned for that deer herd, and
Speaker 7: so one of my first forays into wildlife management was
Speaker 7: incorporating a little consulting business and bidding on a contract
Speaker 7: to manage the deer herd at the Edwin S. George Reserve,
Speaker 7: where also some of the most important white tailed deer
Speaker 7: population ecology work was published by another scientist named Dale McCullough.
Speaker 7: So this is a really well studied herd that had
Speaker 7: a history of really good management and then they basically
Speaker 7: did nothing for a number of years. And so I
Speaker 7: was out there doing winter kill surveys and seeing we
Speaker 7: would find thirty to fifty winter killed deer per year
Speaker 7: inside this reason of that because there's no predation.
Speaker 3: How many how many acres was it again? Twelve vendre yep.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So there's another book for folks who really want to
Speaker 7: If you're in the wildlife management realm and really want
Speaker 7: to get into it, look for Dale McCullough's book The
Speaker 7: George Reserve Deer Herd, which is one of the foundational
Speaker 7: sort of wildlife management books on the reproductive capacity and
Speaker 7: population dynamics of white tail deer and Dale McCullough also
Speaker 7: did a lot of research in Australia with kangaroos, and
Speaker 7: he's a big population dynamics guy. Coincidentally also a student
Speaker 7: of one of Leopold's sons as a graduate student as well.
Speaker 7: So Leopold just tying this back to the HILA, he
Speaker 7: was the driving force for pumping the brakes on the
Speaker 7: idea that all of these National Forest System landscapes should
Speaker 7: be looked at through the lens of how much timber
Speaker 7: can they produce? Stepping back and saying like, wait a minute,
Speaker 7: in some of these places, these vestiges of wildness might
Speaker 7: actually serve us a much higher value over the long run.
Speaker 1: And this is what I wanted you to jump into next. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: And just to tee it up a little bit differently,
Speaker 1: at a point, Leopold has like make a non emotional case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like he needs to go to and he needs to
Speaker 1: go to administrators like bureaucrats, Yeah, who are serving a
Speaker 1: mandate well delivering value. Yep, all right, And he needs
Speaker 1: to say maybe he feels something spiritual. Yeah, probably he's
Speaker 1: like feeling a spiritual need to preserve wild places in America.
Speaker 1: But that's not going to f.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: He's got to put it into he's got to make
Speaker 1: it pragmatic. Yeah, in some way. Yeah, like talk about
Speaker 1: that that process, because so you still wind up with it,
Speaker 1: you still is you know, you still have people critical
Speaker 1: of wilderness.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well so thinking back, I like where you started our
Speaker 7: conversation today, Steve and sharing some of those quotes, and no,
Speaker 7: no that doesn't seem relevant particularly, but where you did
Speaker 7: some of the language used in those quotes where Leopold
Speaker 7: is using language like beauty and love.
Speaker 6: There's there's.
Speaker 7: A number of points both in a Sand County Almanac
Speaker 7: and in many of his essays where he's using language
Speaker 7: that departs from the objective voice of a scientist. Right
Speaker 7: he he he wears it on his sleeve that these
Speaker 7: are these are places, are these are issues that are
Speaker 7: of deep importance to him, Right he clearly cares, which
Speaker 7: in the science realm, if you're working on a peer
Speaker 7: reviewed research paper, the culture of our western science approach
Speaker 7: is to purge virtually all of that from the conversation.
Speaker 2: And he and he was like very conscious of that,
Speaker 2: Like he wrote specifically about the need to balance the two. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like there's some quote he has about like you don't
Speaker 2: need something like you don't need a PhD to see
Speaker 2: the land for what it is. But if you have
Speaker 2: a PhD, you run the risk of being like a
Speaker 2: mortician looking at a dead buy and you're not appreciating
Speaker 2: the actual what's you know, the magic of it, all
Speaker 2: the mystery.
Speaker 6: I'm going to hit you with it. It's damn it.
Speaker 7: I'll buy you just a minute, because the part that
Speaker 7: you're the part that you're getting into is it sort
Speaker 7: of represents an evolution of Leopold's thinking about the significance
Speaker 7: of these places in providing opportunities for people to participate
Speaker 7: in a form of outdoor recreation that he holds in
Speaker 7: very high regard, which is essentially observing and learning about
Speaker 7: the natural world.
Speaker 2: I think the other I mean, I'm not a leopoled expert,
Speaker 2: so I'm just sort of chiming in with what I've
Speaker 2: taken away. But yeah, one of his sort of utilitarian
Speaker 2: purposes that he identifies as specifically hunting pack trips. Yeah,
Speaker 2: in the HeLa, Yeah, He's like, we need places that
Speaker 2: can sustain a pack trip, And that's sort of his
Speaker 2: measurement of, like, what's a big enough chunk of wild country.
Speaker 6: Large enough to contain a two week trip.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he's like, and I believe he proposed calling
Speaker 2: it like the the HeLa Hunting primitive hunting ground, Yeah,
Speaker 2: something like that. Really, Yeah, like it was baked into
Speaker 2: the idea. Yeah, so he had it.
Speaker 7: There was there was an article not included in a
Speaker 7: San County Almanac. I believe it was published an Outdoor Life,
Speaker 7: but it was entitled a Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds,
Speaker 7: where he lays this whole case out. So Steve, just
Speaker 7: going back to the question that you posed about what
Speaker 7: was the pragmatic argument that Leopold had to make, Because
Speaker 7: you're right, you can't necessarily go in with a bunch
Speaker 7: of flowery language about beauty and love and these emotive
Speaker 7: arguments that are that are such a compelling aspect of
Speaker 7: a San County Almanac and have that work in the
Speaker 7: bureaucratic space of a federal agency. So Leopold did bring
Speaker 7: a number of arguments and talking points to bear in
Speaker 7: support of this vision that were very pragmatic in nature,
Speaker 7: and one of the points was related to different forms
Speaker 7: of outdoor recreation. And he makes this argument essentially, if
Speaker 7: you have a whole universe of people who want to
Speaker 7: engage in different types of outdoor recreation. And you've got
Speaker 7: folks who want to go out in their ford and
Speaker 7: park and camp on the road side, and they've got
Speaker 7: ninety percent of the opportunity already locked up. And you've
Speaker 7: got other folks who want to be able to get
Speaker 7: off the beaten path and escape and get into the
Speaker 7: back country and get away from all that and experience
Speaker 7: some solitude. Doesn't it make sense to maybe hold on
Speaker 7: to the remaining five percent or ten percent and try
Speaker 7: to provide a diversity of opportunity types for the different
Speaker 7: ways that people want to engage. So that was one
Speaker 7: aspect of the argument. And then in the case of
Speaker 7: the HeLa, one of the points that he makes that
Speaker 7: maybe helped carry the day.
Speaker 6: And you've a.
Speaker 7: Number of us in the room have been down in
Speaker 7: that chunk of ground. It is rugged, it is gnarly,
Speaker 7: and it is not a place where getting at that
Speaker 7: timber would be particularly easy to do. And so he
Speaker 7: also makes an economic argument that in the case of
Speaker 7: the HeLa, at least that landscape, you'd have to put
Speaker 7: so much investment in the infrastructure to access the resources
Speaker 7: that you want to extract that the net gain wouldn't
Speaker 7: really be all that big anyway, So maybe just don't
Speaker 7: mess with it and keep it wild and spare yourself
Speaker 7: the hassle of all of that additional road building and infrastructure.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I feel like in a fact at a
Speaker 1: time he had said basically giving into the giving into
Speaker 1: the value thing, saying okay, let's talk about.
Speaker 6: Value, right, like you're saying economic values.
Speaker 1: Yeah, He's like, like, arguably the greatest value of this
Speaker 1: in time will just be itself. Yeah, And a criticism
Speaker 1: you hear a wilderness areas as you hear people say
Speaker 1: like it's a lot of rock. I mean, like like
Speaker 1: you go you look at a mountain range out here,
Speaker 1: you know, and be like, well, let me guess where
Speaker 1: the wilderness area is. It's up there at the back.
Speaker 1: It's like at the back end. And in time, know
Speaker 1: what we now know there's probably enormous mineral there's probably
Speaker 1: enormous mineral wealth in a lot of these places.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: Right, Like in hindsight, a gelgist might now be like
Speaker 1: being like, boys, you set the wrong stuff aside, because
Speaker 1: like gold whatever the hell in those hills. At the time,
Speaker 1: though you could kind of go, well, look at it, yeah,
Speaker 1: like what really what are we really leaving on the table.
Speaker 2: It's a pragmatic decision.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not like there's not a ton of mature timber,
Speaker 1: you know, in some not all, but in a lot
Speaker 1: of the wilderness areas. It's like, it's like, be hard,
Speaker 1: it's not a lot of it. It's hard to get
Speaker 1: at a lot of rock, a lot of ice.
Speaker 6: Yep, yeah, rock and ice is set.
Speaker 1: It's like, we're just not leaving a ton of money
Speaker 1: on the table, and in time it might be that
Speaker 1: people are just glad to have that stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a good chance Leopold wouldn't have won that
Speaker 5: argument today.
Speaker 1: Oh if you if Leopold, no today for sure. And
Speaker 1: if Leopold would have said, like I got an idea,
Speaker 1: all these big, huge valleys in the West, let's make
Speaker 1: these all giant riparian wilderness areas.
Speaker 3: Noah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he had to point to the stuff that was
Speaker 1: like no one had touched and been like, listen, no
Speaker 1: one's gonna no one's gonna mess with that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I just said it.
Speaker 3: Aside.
Speaker 7: Well, and a lot of the stuff that you're talking about,
Speaker 7: like the Ryperian Valley wilderness model, a lot of that
Speaker 7: was already wrote it up. You know, like if you
Speaker 7: think about that point in history, so nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 7: and you look at the remaining chunks of big wild country,
Speaker 7: And in a couple of these essays, Leopold highlights specific places.
Speaker 7: Another spot in New Mexico, he specifically specifically highlights as
Speaker 7: the Pecos up on the border between the Santa Fe
Speaker 7: and Carson National Forest northeast to Santa Fe, as another
Speaker 7: sort of opportunity. And coincidentally, the Pecost Wilderness was also
Speaker 7: included in that original batch of congressionally designated areas in
Speaker 7: nineteen sixty four. But there were not that many of
Speaker 7: them left, is the point. There had already been so
Speaker 7: much expansion.
Speaker 2: Of the of the road network in congressation, just throwing
Speaker 2: money at building roads. Yeah, both on the agency side
Speaker 2: and you know in the state side.
Speaker 1: Brody talk about or touch on what you were saying
Speaker 1: that you wouldn't be able to pull it off now.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean it's it's an argument that's been going
Speaker 5: on since for one hundred years, right, Like there are
Speaker 5: those people who will want to extract resources from it.
Speaker 5: So what good is it if it doesn't pay pay
Speaker 5: off in some way, some tangible way. But there's also
Speaker 5: I mean, you still hear this argument. You know, as
Speaker 5: far as the wilderness hunting area goes, there are people
Speaker 5: who are like, I can't get in there, you know
Speaker 5: what I mean? Like, yeah, like you young fellas that
Speaker 5: can hike all day long can get in there, but
Speaker 5: it doesn't do me any good. I've heard you say like,
Speaker 5: well you had your time.
Speaker 1: But well, Jim, I was gonna say, you remember how
Speaker 1: Jim Poswitz the conservationists, Yeah, Jim Poswitz put it. He's like,
Speaker 1: I used to get back in there. I'm too old now,
Speaker 1: I've been too old for a long time. But man,
Speaker 1: am I excited for you guys that can Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, but I think these days it's more of a
Speaker 5: resource extraction thing that would not allow it to go
Speaker 5: down the way it did.
Speaker 1: This is a frustration I have about memory and politics
Speaker 1: in America would be and I say this every time
Speaker 1: the subject of Roosevelt comes up. I'm like, any politician
Speaker 1: would welcome a favorable comparison to Roosevelt on conservation.
Speaker 3: Record, right, yep.
Speaker 1: They would hang that guy from a tree nowadays.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and the amazing thing about the wilderness.
Speaker 1: And they wanted to then he would be a he
Speaker 1: would be regarded today as an insane lib tard tree hugger,
Speaker 1: but because he wanted to create a national force and
Speaker 1: people were pissed back then, but they were living, and
Speaker 1: now we're like, oh, let's carve him on a big mountain.
Speaker 1: Sure they felt that God he gave us the national
Speaker 1: force system. The same people that would be pissed now
Speaker 1: were pissed then, the same thing with with with with
Speaker 1: Leopold Leopold, I bring up all the time, the fact
Speaker 1: that the Wilderness Act passed the way it did. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't never pass the point.
Speaker 5: That I'm trying to make, like there was a time
Speaker 5: when both sides were like, this is a really good idea.
Speaker 5: It makes sense, like for a lot of reasons, Like
Speaker 5: one dissenter wasn't there in Congress, and only because.
Speaker 3: It wasn't big enough.
Speaker 1: Yeah it was. It was something like the senator, one
Speaker 1: of them. They both were like overwhelmingly and I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is something I talked about all the time. I
Speaker 1: gonna talk about it.
Speaker 2: What's interesting about Leopold, I think, is that he's got
Speaker 2: these two sides, Like he speaks the language of utility,
Speaker 2: and he also he's a talented enough writer and a
Speaker 2: deep enough thinker that he also has like this element
Speaker 2: of the row and sure mirror and you can sort
Speaker 2: of see what you want in him when you read it.
Speaker 2: You know, like you could you could have someone on
Speaker 2: the far left read this and think, oh, like he's
Speaker 2: in touch with the spiritual aspects of nature. And you
Speaker 2: could also, you know, people on the right side of
Speaker 2: the spectrum look at him and be like, here's a
Speaker 2: very like agency man. You know, forester works on the land,
Speaker 2: like has this sort of rural authenticity about him, which
Speaker 2: I find like there's just I don't know, I find
Speaker 2: like it's really he's he's hard to sort of wrap.
Speaker 1: Your mind or you can't box him up.
Speaker 2: He's a poet, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: He's a poet, he's a farmer, he's a forester. He's
Speaker 1: a big game hunter. You can't box him up. And
Speaker 1: that gave him room to do what he did, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because people had to take him seriously. And there's also
Speaker 1: a little bit of a he's going to be the
Speaker 1: smartest guy in the room, oh yeah, you know, which
Speaker 1: is hard for people to fight against sometimes darkness speaking
Speaker 1: of the smartest guy in the room, the smartest guybaby Doug.
Speaker 1: Let's move. Let's let's move into our set. What do
Speaker 1: you call the diamond anniversary? What's a one hundred?
Speaker 3: You believe?
Speaker 1: What's the hundred? Platinum? Airlines had to think of a
Speaker 1: new thing? Silver diamond?
Speaker 4: Does come after the diamond?
Speaker 1: No? Diamond?
Speaker 3: I think one.
Speaker 1: Hundred, centennial, centennial, obsidian, obsidian. If you said to me
Speaker 1: you want to.
Speaker 5: Hunker, natural, other other terms that are like natural.
Speaker 1: The obsidian anniversary. Who are these people, the centennial people who.
Speaker 3: Have the interest in obsidian?
Speaker 1: Apparently so big obsidian one hundred to your anniversary? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I got Well, I got one last question before we
Speaker 1: move into San Countie Almanac, which I want you both,
Speaker 1: you guys to talk about. But if you had to
Speaker 1: crystal ball it, okay, if he hadn't did, if he
Speaker 1: hadn't set this concept into motion when he did with
Speaker 1: the Heila, do you feel that we would have landed
Speaker 1: where we did anyway with wilderness areas?
Speaker 6: No, you don't, I think he I think.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 7: There's there's a lot of other rich history we could
Speaker 7: get into. Another very cool example from up in Colorado,
Speaker 7: like in the in the White River National Forest, flat
Speaker 7: tops wilderness area. There's a place called Trappers Lake.
Speaker 1: There's Jianni's old stop ground.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so you know Trappers Lake, right the story there.
Speaker 7: There was a another Forest Service colleague, Arthur Carhart, who
Speaker 7: helped inform some conversations about it.
Speaker 1: Had one pair of stiff bibs on and some stiff.
Speaker 7: Bibs that they got supple when they were broken in.
Speaker 7: It became real trendy about the pros and cons of
Speaker 7: developing more infrastructure on that Trapper's Lake property for recreation
Speaker 7: and debating whether or not it would be better left
Speaker 7: with an undeveloped lake shore. He had folks up in
Speaker 7: what's today the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness advocating for
Speaker 7: the importance of that wild landscape. But I think for
Speaker 7: a concrete administrative step to be taken in nineteen twenty
Speaker 7: four and to be able to hold that up as
Speaker 7: an example and an extension of that. One of the
Speaker 7: things that's really challenging about Leopold is there's so many
Speaker 7: different little anecdotes and alleyways that you can go down.
Speaker 7: But we didn't even mention the fact that he's one
Speaker 7: of the founders of the Wilderness Society as well. So
Speaker 7: not only was he advocating for that specific piece of
Speaker 7: ground to be administratively designated, but he was also instrumental
Speaker 7: in convening a community of other thought leaders to help
Speaker 7: push that vision more broadly, and that organization is still
Speaker 7: alive and robust today. But I don't think we would
Speaker 7: be in remotely the same situation with Howard Zohneiser's success
Speaker 7: in shepherding the Wilderness Act through to signature in September
Speaker 7: of sixty four without not just the HeLa, but all
Speaker 7: of that hustling that Leopold was a part of leading
Speaker 7: up to the HeLa and after the hela's administrative designation,
Speaker 7: and right through the end to the end of his life.
Speaker 7: I mean, these were concepts that he was helping try
Speaker 7: to advance and build community around into the late forties
Speaker 7: when he passed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's a good point about the He was
Speaker 1: doing the conceptualization right.
Speaker 7: It wasn't just like the HeLa came into being and
Speaker 7: then he moved on to other things, right, that was
Speaker 7: a very important milestone on that timeline, But he was
Speaker 7: helping foster a ground swell of movement around those concepts
Speaker 7: much more broadly as well.
Speaker 1: He came at this interesting moment in American history, a
Speaker 1: really pivotal moment in American history where if you look
Speaker 1: at pre Leopold, like pre Roosevelt, pre Leopold, you have
Speaker 1: we had wilderness in spite of our best efforts to
Speaker 1: get rid of it, you know.
Speaker 3: What I mean.
Speaker 1: It was like it was there because we hadn't gotten
Speaker 1: to it yet. Yeah, and then there was this this
Speaker 1: this minute, this moment where it also became not a
Speaker 1: thing that we were we we we like fought foughtought, fought,
Speaker 1: fought to rid ourselves of it. Yeah, then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden it immediately had to become we fought, fought, fought, fought,
Speaker 1: fought to keep it. Right, Like a lot of countries
Speaker 1: never got never a lot of countries never had the
Speaker 1: luxury to hit that inflection point. Right, they barred, you know,
Speaker 1: they like go to great survivalent yea, like go to
Speaker 1: like England's history. Yeah, you know, I mean they deforced
Speaker 1: the entire island. Right, There was no like inflection point
Speaker 1: where someone had the sort of like power and public
Speaker 1: backing and wan not to go like, hey, at what
Speaker 1: point should we just not do this to some parts?
Speaker 2: And the quote that you read earlier about the trading
Speaker 2: off the geese for the television. I mean, I think
Speaker 2: what's really interesting when you read Leopold is he recognizes
Speaker 2: that conflict. He doesn't have like this utopian you know,
Speaker 2: if you look at like previous resource managers, there's this
Speaker 2: very like progressive idea of we can just manage it
Speaker 2: better and manage it better and squeeze everything out of it.
Speaker 2: And he recognizes these trade offs. And it strikes me
Speaker 2: as like a very fundamental concept to our modern sensibility
Speaker 2: about wildlife and environmental issues is like someone's good. You know,
Speaker 2: someone is going to pay somewhere for any little decision
Speaker 2: that's made. You know, like every bit of you know,
Speaker 2: sure you could, is the juice worth to squeeze? Is
Speaker 2: kind of Leopold's big question and a lot of these things,
Speaker 2: and that's where it's sort of the ethic.
Speaker 1: He might be the father of fathers arguing with their
Speaker 1: kids about television. He might have been the first person
Speaker 1: that God bless him. He might have been like I
Speaker 1: picture a future conflict, yeah, between nature and TV.
Speaker 7: So that point you made Steve about sort of the
Speaker 7: tipping point between wilderness being this thing that we're stacked
Speaker 7: up against versus wilderness being this thing that we're trying
Speaker 7: to steward. One of the things Leopold had to say
Speaker 7: in that space, I'll try to I'll try to quote
Speaker 7: it here, but it gets at that idea that you
Speaker 7: were hitting earlier, on the blank place on the map.
Speaker 7: He talks about man always killing the things we love,
Speaker 7: and so we the pioneers, have killed our wilderness.
Speaker 6: You be that as it may. I am glad.
Speaker 7: I will never be young without wild country, to be
Speaker 7: young in of what avails our forty freedoms without a
Speaker 7: blank spot on the map.
Speaker 1: He did what his eyes closed.
Speaker 7: I think, I think that's the quote I was trying
Speaker 7: to get at earlier, and then Steve before we move off,
Speaker 7: got written back there.
Speaker 6: I want to, I want to.
Speaker 7: I want to touch on just like two very quickly,
Speaker 7: two principles that I think, in and of themselves could
Speaker 7: be a whole other conversation.
Speaker 1: But hit him then we're gonna get into the book.
Speaker 7: Well, hit him quick, so there is ample room to
Speaker 7: have a discussion about what the future for wilderness management
Speaker 7: holds and all of that complexity and what we know
Speaker 7: now that we didn't know at the time of Leopold's
Speaker 7: effort with the Hila or the Wilderness Act, and even
Speaker 7: the language in the Wilderness Act and the deeper history
Speaker 7: of these places. So a lot of that conceptualization of
Speaker 7: these wild lands is rooted on an idea that these
Speaker 7: places were uninhabited, the idea of terra nullius, that this
Speaker 7: was just wild land waiting to be So that's a
Speaker 7: whole that's a whole thing that needs to be acknowledged
Speaker 7: right it is. And in the Wilderness Act there's language
Speaker 7: of places where man is a visitor who does not remain.
Speaker 7: But in the case of the Hila, in the case
Speaker 7: of the Boundary Waters, in the case of every one
Speaker 7: of these places, there's a much deeper history that you know,
Speaker 7: a whole heck of a lot about, and we would
Speaker 7: be doing a disservice, I think, by just clossing over
Speaker 7: that reality. And then another aspect that I think is
Speaker 7: a nice segue to a Sand County Almanac, and I
Speaker 7: think the lifestyle that Doug lives, the lifestyle of Chester
Speaker 7: and the whole Floyd family with their property. This idea,
Speaker 7: and you've touched on it already on this podcast, Doug,
Speaker 7: but the idea of the reciprocal dynamic between providing what
Speaker 7: land needs from us and us getting what we need
Speaker 7: from the land. That active involvement, where human activity in
Speaker 7: a landscape can both make the land better and people better.
Speaker 7: A lot of the conservation and ecology discussions we have
Speaker 7: at this point in history are rooted in the notion
Speaker 7: that all people do is screw stuff up. You've got
Speaker 7: too many people, we're burning too much fossil fuels, We're
Speaker 7: having this many impacts with overpopulation and all this development, etc.
Speaker 6: Etc.
Speaker 7: But we are also capable of providing so much value
Speaker 7: to these places, just as these places provide so much
Speaker 7: value to us as human beings. And in the case
Speaker 7: of wilderness, one of the foundational tenets there is this
Speaker 7: idea of an untrammeled landscape, a place where we're not
Speaker 7: meddling in the system, and that made a lot of
Speaker 7: sense in nineteen sixty four. And as we're moving forward
Speaker 7: and trying to wrestle with some of these big conservation
Speaker 7: challenges of non native invasive species and climate change and
Speaker 7: the disruption of historic disturbance regimes like fire, we are
Speaker 7: quickly awakening to the fact that the land needs a
Speaker 7: lot from us. In terms of active management and taking
Speaker 7: a totally hands off approach in a lot of situations
Speaker 7: does not necessarily serve ecological outcomes. So that's a good
Speaker 7: pivot to thinking about a Sand County Almanac and this
Speaker 7: reciprocal relationship between land and people. What does the land
Speaker 7: need from us?
Speaker 1: It's a good pivot to talk about Doug because Doug
Speaker 1: started Doug has started an organization. When I talked about
Speaker 1: Doug's quote earlier, I'm going to talk about the contextualized
Speaker 1: contextualized Doug's quote. Doug has started an organization, a nonprofit
Speaker 1: group called Sharing the Land, and looking at the increasing
Speaker 1: trend we see all around the country of leasing agreements,
Speaker 1: like it's birthplace was in Texas, but it's it's spread everywhere.
Speaker 1: It's everywhere. It's in the it's in the Northern Rockies,
Speaker 1: it's everywhere now, which is landowners who might have traditionally
Speaker 1: generations passed their fathers, their mothers, might have just had
Speaker 1: granted permissions to neighbors, granted permissions to relatives, granted permissions
Speaker 1: to whoever it was. When I grew up, it was
Speaker 1: like loosey goosey. We hunted this the zerlots farm. We
Speaker 1: hunted the zeld Rose farm shiitloads of people hunted the Zerlots.
Speaker 1: Very much of their church hunted the Zerlots farm and
Speaker 1: the zeld Rose farm. And then it kind of came
Speaker 1: this awareness of like, oh, man, we have like as
Speaker 1: much as we're raising they raised apples, alfalfa, dairy, right,
Speaker 1: They're like, man, there's another like cash crop here in
Speaker 1: the cash crop, here is wildlife, right and people want
Speaker 1: it and they're willing to pay for it. So leasing
Speaker 1: as come in, You're not going to change it to
Speaker 1: just come in. And when when Doug looked at sharing
Speaker 1: the land and started to set up this organization, he's
Speaker 1: taking the same perspective like there's a landowner and the
Speaker 1: landowner holds a thing of value and there's people that
Speaker 1: want access to the thing of value it Well, rather
Speaker 1: than maybe taking that interest and leveraging it into cash payment,
Speaker 1: maybe we can solve that question of what does the
Speaker 1: land get out of it? So landowners through Shane Land,
Speaker 1: a landowner can have conservation work they wish they could
Speaker 1: do on their place. I wish I could do tree
Speaker 1: planning on my place. I wish I could take up
Speaker 1: old fences on my place. I wish I could fight
Speaker 1: non native invasive plants on my place. I wish I
Speaker 1: could restore my stream bakes on my place. Well, those
Speaker 1: hunters that are lined up waiting to hunt your place,
Speaker 1: put them to work, right, like through an organized fashion.
Speaker 1: Be like, here's your choor list, buddy, you know, and
Speaker 1: then let's talk about hunting. Let's get some chores done
Speaker 1: on the ground, right And that's kind of it's a
Speaker 1: very Leopold concept, right.
Speaker 3: Well, the concept was inspired, borrowed, possibly even stolen, but
Speaker 3: from Leopold and the idea of the Riley Game Cooperative.
Speaker 3: When Leopold, when he was living in Madison in the
Speaker 3: early thirties, looking for a place to hunt, he pulls
Speaker 3: up on the side of the road and here's a
Speaker 3: farmer working, and he starts chatting with him, this fellow
Speaker 3: named Ruben Paulson, And he gets around to that where
Speaker 3: one would about asking permission, and Paulson says, well, yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess you could hunt my place, but you know,
Speaker 3: I have to tell you there really isn't much game
Speaker 3: around here. And he thought it was because of trespassers
Speaker 3: more than anything else. Or poachers is actually what he
Speaker 3: called him. And Leopold one. I have this vision of
Speaker 3: these two guys meeting, you know, because people do stop,
Speaker 3: and I just have this vision of this meeting. And
Speaker 3: Leopold in that moment said to him, well, you know,
Speaker 3: you could have more a game if you had better habitat.
Speaker 3: And they came up with this idea, as as Leopold
Speaker 3: called it, and there Riley was born the Riley Game Cooperative,
Speaker 3: where his his buddies from town came out and Leopold
Speaker 3: put a plan together and then helped his buddies helped
Speaker 3: put implement that plan, and then they all they all
Speaker 3: benefited from that that work, and the land benefited, the
Speaker 3: members of the biotic community benefited, and the hunters and
Speaker 3: the farmers benefited. And from that a community also developed.
Speaker 3: That it became a community, a gathering of people who
Speaker 3: shared those ideas, and some of them kind of came
Speaker 3: to it because of that, and some of them were
Speaker 3: farmers and some of them were students of Leopold. Is
Speaker 3: a fascinating thing to me. You know. I learned about
Speaker 3: Riley about the same time I met you, and it
Speaker 3: was about fifteen years ago, and I was riding a
Speaker 3: bicycle through Riley and here's this they're putting up this kiosk,
Speaker 3: and it's I had no idea. I thought I knew
Speaker 3: a lot about Leopold, you know. And then they talk
Speaker 3: about there's this whole thing about the Riley Game Cooperative,
Speaker 3: and Uh, it's something that was in my head for
Speaker 3: a long time. And so that's where sharing the land
Speaker 3: was was born from.
Speaker 1: Uh And can you can you explain you got to
Speaker 1: him coming to Madison, Okay and his and we talked
Speaker 1: earlier about all the states that claim them. Can you,
Speaker 1: being from Wisconsin, can you set up what what Sand County?
Speaker 1: If you're looking for that on the map, what that is?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you won't. You won't find a Sand county that
Speaker 3: I'm aware of. But he was in uh near Barriboom
Speaker 3: in sauc County, right on the Wisconsin River. In the
Speaker 3: Wisconsin River is very sandy. That whole area is is
Speaker 3: Wisconsin Rivers, ever changing river. There's lots of sand, a
Speaker 3: lot of sand dunes, sandbars and a little side note,
Speaker 3: he ended up buying this piece of land sounds like
Speaker 3: pretty much for the back taxes that it was an
Speaker 3: abandoned farm. So if you're in Wisconsin and southwest Wisconsin,
Speaker 3: it's right on the banks of the Wisconsin River. So
Speaker 3: from our place, I guess you wouldn't necessarily know, but
Speaker 3: to the east of us on the Wisconsin River and
Speaker 3: very thirty miles away, and it's very very different terrain
Speaker 3: than what we have over in our driftless area, very sandy,
Speaker 3: lots of bogginess and water, lots of mosquitoes if you
Speaker 3: go over there. So a very different place, but about
Speaker 3: a half an hour forty five minute drive from Madison,
Speaker 3: and it was, you know, it was within reach and
Speaker 3: sounds like for the most part, it was exactly the
Speaker 3: property that he was looking for, the kind of property
Speaker 3: he was looking for, one that had been degraded that
Speaker 3: he could then practice these conservation ideas that he had
Speaker 3: been talking about, the whole idea of wildlife ecology and
Speaker 3: what kind of habitat that the wildlife that he was
Speaker 3: interested in, and that we tend to be interested in
Speaker 3: it as hunters, what kind of habitat they needed. And
Speaker 3: so he bought this and began working.
Speaker 1: On which you guys, best equipped you can decide among yourselves,
Speaker 1: is best equipped to explain what a Sand County Almanac
Speaker 1: is meaning like structurally meaning And I don't even know
Speaker 1: the details on it. He was dead when it came out, right,
Speaker 1: he did, and he didn't sit down and write it
Speaker 1: like beginning, middle end, like you write a book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you know that? That's about the extent of what
Speaker 1: I understood. That what I've come to understand.
Speaker 3: He had been putting these essays together in a logical manner,
Speaker 3: or what he thought was a logical manner, and his daughter, I.
Speaker 7: Think it was his sons who took I think the
Speaker 7: kids had a critical role in working with the publisher
Speaker 7: after he had gotten a letter of acceptance for.
Speaker 3: The Yeah, the book had been accepted, but it wasn't completely.
Speaker 5: It was a more those individual essays were not like
Speaker 5: previously published another place.
Speaker 7: Well, so if you look right at the right at
Speaker 7: the beginning, I've got my copy here in front of me.
Speaker 7: And one of the first things that you see as
Speaker 7: a grateful acknowledgment made to the editors of the following
Speaker 7: magazines and journals who have kindly allowed to be reprinted
Speaker 7: in book form from portions or all of individual articles.
Speaker 7: And here's a list of the periodicals. American Forests, Audubon Magazine,
Speaker 7: The Condor Journal of Forestry, Journal, of Wildlife Management.
Speaker 1: Meter dot com.
Speaker 7: Uh, perhaps if you'd been in existence at that point.
Speaker 7: Outdoor America, Silent Wings, Wisconsin Agriculturist and Farmer, Wisconsin Conservation Bulletin.
Speaker 10: So on.
Speaker 1: Parts of a Sand County almanac appeared in the Wisconsin
Speaker 1: Conservation is Bulletin's.
Speaker 7: I can give you the specifics so and actually one
Speaker 7: of my favorite essays Skydance, Burrow and Skydance. I believe
Speaker 7: that's right, if I've got the order here. There's a
Speaker 7: lot of semi colons to make sense of. But the
Speaker 7: short answer is it's a collection of a life's worth
Speaker 7: of work that he brought some structure to.
Speaker 1: But when you're reading it, it isn't like that. No, I
Speaker 1: read it without knowing that. I read it like a
Speaker 1: dude sat down and wrote this book. Do you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. It's not like you know when you
Speaker 1: when you get a writer you like and you read
Speaker 1: all their work and then you're stuck reading like the
Speaker 1: book of their like letters and correspondence, and this is
Speaker 1: how it's terrible. This is not that no, right, No.
Speaker 3: It's really it's really a lifetime of work. And I
Speaker 3: think that's one of the beauties of it. To me,
Speaker 3: the most beautiful thing is the first sentence in the
Speaker 3: or the first two sentences in the forward. There are
Speaker 3: those there are some who can live without wild things,
Speaker 3: and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and
Speaker 3: dilemmas of one who cannot. The delights and the dilemmas yep,
Speaker 3: And and then the rest of the book just goes
Speaker 3: from there, so divided in three parts. As A as
Speaker 3: a young man, a sixteen year old walked into the
Speaker 3: high school library and our librarian, I'm sure I was
Speaker 3: going into study or something and not talk to girls
Speaker 3: in the corner or anything. But miss Hendrix handed me
Speaker 3: the book and said, I think you'd be interested in that.
Speaker 1: Really, how old were you?
Speaker 3: Then?
Speaker 2: I'm sorry?
Speaker 1: What was this?
Speaker 3: When was that a long time ago? It was nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy five.
Speaker 1: Of the book had just come out. He was still
Speaker 1: writing as a as a new release.
Speaker 2: Well it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't immediately like this iconic,
Speaker 2: Oh not at all. Yeah, Yeah, that's why I was. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I didn't think you were a teenager in nineteen
Speaker 2: forty nine. I was kind of curious because it was
Speaker 2: a slow burn up until the early seventies.
Speaker 3: Late so it was like, yeah, late sixties, like sixty
Speaker 3: nine I think was when it was published. In sixty
Speaker 3: eight or sixty nine is when it was published in paperback,
Speaker 3: and of course that coincided with the new environmental movement
Speaker 3: that was happening, and so it became, you know, incredibly
Speaker 3: important and really spoke to a lot.
Speaker 1: Of people, and it has sold millions, yeah, millions of.
Speaker 3: Copies in a bunch of different languages. So yeah, so
Speaker 3: I wasn't reading I was whatever in nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 3: or sixty nine. I was nine years old, but nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy five to have miss Hendrix, who was our librarian,
Speaker 3: hand this to me and say this, might you seem
Speaker 3: like kind a guy would be interested in this?
Speaker 1: And what a compliment?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that is a great compliment. I think she
Speaker 3: was really searching for some way to get me moving
Speaker 3: along a little more. And at that time in my life,
Speaker 3: the first part of the book, which is the Phenology
Speaker 3: of our Area, really where he goes through the seasons
Speaker 3: and he talks about these different things. I was just
Speaker 3: fascinated by that because he was putting giving voice to
Speaker 3: things that I was I don't know if that I
Speaker 3: was thinking about him, but I was certainly experiencing them.
Speaker 3: You know, I was sixteen years old. We were going
Speaker 3: hunting and you're hearing this different stuff and what's this
Speaker 3: and what's that? And I had kind of Karl and
Speaker 3: I were talking about this earlier when we're having breakfast
Speaker 3: that I walked along with my grandfather when I was eight, nine,
Speaker 3: ten years old and with a bucket of paint and
Speaker 3: a paint rush and I was marketing. He was telling me,
Speaker 3: paint that one and I put these. So I was
Speaker 3: having the marking trees, marking trees, and I was having
Speaker 3: this experience that I didn't think about for another you know,
Speaker 3: fifty years that my grandpa was teaching me that, whether
Speaker 3: he knew he or not, but I remember as every
Speaker 3: eight or nine year old kid would ask why why
Speaker 3: do I paint this one? He said, well, we're going
Speaker 3: to cut that one, and then why are we cutting
Speaker 3: that one? I mean, that's that was one of my
Speaker 3: earliest experiences with that sort of thing. And then spending
Speaker 3: time on the farm with my dad.
Speaker 1: So by the time just button on neck, because it's
Speaker 1: interesting that you had that because you came from an
Speaker 1: agricultural family, and that you had an introduction to conservation
Speaker 1: thinking like that, like landscape care, landscape manipulation. I would
Speaker 1: say that I that I was completely unaware of anything
Speaker 1: surrounding conservation, the conservation movement until I read the San
Speaker 1: County Almanac. I was raised with the get it while
Speaker 1: the gitting's good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I get it again.
Speaker 1: Like my dad was like brought up in a house
Speaker 1: where they spoke Italian. He was raised by Italian immigrants
Speaker 1: born in the Great Depression, right, the like these people
Speaker 1: aren't coming from Italy to be in the America in
Speaker 1: the Great Depression in.
Speaker 3: You know these.
Speaker 1: Trees, right, It's just like it was. It was good.
Speaker 1: All the getting's good was the attitude. And I didn't
Speaker 1: know about I didn't know about any of these even
Speaker 1: thoughts until I read a San County almac. So it's
Speaker 1: like to have an upbringing where he was at least
Speaker 1: talking about something you've been exposed to. That you picked
Speaker 1: this tree and not that tree.
Speaker 3: It's cool, right, oh yeah, And you know that because
Speaker 3: of the number of times visited my family. The reason
Speaker 3: they came from Germany in the eighteen fifties is they
Speaker 3: were looking for a place to set up sawmills, and
Speaker 3: they did over there en Durham Road, and then our
Speaker 3: and who knows whether the name was already named Durham
Speaker 3: Road or not. But the property that we own they
Speaker 3: bought because it had timber on it. My people weren't
Speaker 3: really farmers, they were sawyers. So my great great grandfather,
Speaker 3: my great grandfather, my grandfather all had sawmills. And they,
Speaker 3: you know, it's not like today where you're going through
Speaker 3: and you're just ripping. You can go through a lot
Speaker 3: of trees in a hurry. They were being selective about it.
Speaker 1: And Leopold speaks to those people at one point in
Speaker 1: Santa County Almanac. He's like talking about axe biting into
Speaker 1: a tree. Yeah, And he goes and he does a
Speaker 1: history lesson flap right out flies a chunk of the tree,
Speaker 1: and you think about the growth rings. And he walks
Speaker 1: you through where you're at, and you take a cup
Speaker 1: more wax, and where you're.
Speaker 6: At cross.
Speaker 1: Strokes.
Speaker 6: You're right, you're right there.
Speaker 1: That as that saw bites into that tree, he walks
Speaker 1: you back into time as you go into those growth rings.
Speaker 3: Right, it's.
Speaker 6: With his with his partner on the other.
Speaker 3: End that kind of exposure is not something that you
Speaker 3: think about at the time. It's just happening to you.
Speaker 3: Right Even now, identifying trees, I can't explain. It's difficult
Speaker 3: for me to explain to people that that's a a
Speaker 3: red oak, that's a white oak, and here's why, because
Speaker 3: the way it is, yeah, it's just right, you.
Speaker 2: Know when you see it.
Speaker 1: I mean pretty much everything in the woods just like
Speaker 1: you know, that's just the way.
Speaker 3: Well right, well, actually, my dad always used to say
Speaker 3: that's what they call and then insert whatever there, that's
Speaker 3: what they call. But had those experiences and I guess
Speaker 3: didn't appreciate him. It was more or didn't understand that
Speaker 3: there was a lesson being taught. And I don't think
Speaker 3: it was an intentional lesson at all. It was just
Speaker 3: this is what we do, and a farm was carved
Speaker 3: out of that land. And you know, to this day
Speaker 3: the farmland is one hundred acres or sixty acres of
Speaker 3: pasture and there's two hundred and forty acres of woods.
Speaker 3: And so I remember my father telling me fifteen years ago,
Speaker 3: you remember when we did the cutting of those big
Speaker 3: trees that I mean, this was one of these ethic
Speaker 3: things right. We were sitting there as I had gone
Speaker 3: through the management plan the shelter would harvest, and I
Speaker 3: was talking with him about it, and he looked at
Speaker 3: me and said, well, Douglas, this, I know this needs
Speaker 3: to be done. I just didn't want to be the
Speaker 3: one to do it, which was meaning he didn't want
Speaker 3: to be the one to kill those big trees because
Speaker 3: he's ninety years old at the time and he grew
Speaker 3: up with them.
Speaker 1: I've left. I've had that conversation with Yannie.
Speaker 3: Oh, killing killing trees.
Speaker 4: He doesn't want me to kill the trees, just.
Speaker 1: Cutting into them big old Yeah.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 3: Here's the thing about that. The one of the my
Speaker 3: favorite lessons from Forrester was that kills the trees kill
Speaker 3: each other. That over time, the bigger they get, the
Speaker 3: fewer of them there are, and that what we're doing
Speaker 3: in our timber stand improvement process is we're selecting for
Speaker 3: the better trees so I can support you and your
Speaker 3: timber stand improvement. There's some things that maybe not so much,
Speaker 3: but I like what you're doing with your place. You know.
Speaker 3: It's Oh, I would never expect to speak for Leo Pulled,
Speaker 3: but I think much what Yanni's doing is Leopoldion. I
Speaker 3: don't think 'apoldion like that.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean I think I would certainly fall in
Speaker 4: like the greater than than rather than the lesser than category,
Speaker 4: you know, as most of what I'm doing he'd be into.
Speaker 3: I think you're right and the part in all of us. Right.
Speaker 3: So here I am sixty five years old, sitting here
Speaker 3: talking with all you young bucks.
Speaker 1: One second for folks at home. Yanni has taken a
Speaker 1: property that's he's spent his life around, and his family
Speaker 1: has deep history, and he's he's improving. He's taking steps
Speaker 1: to improve it as wildlife habitat. Particularly he's trying to
Speaker 1: attract big giant bucks and squirrels and squirrels. No, not anymore.
Speaker 4: It started, I'll be honest. Two years ago, when it started,
Speaker 4: I would have I would have said that's correct to say,
Speaker 4: particularly big giant books. But two years into it, it's
Speaker 4: just improving wildlife habitat.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And when I dog on Yianni, I'm joking. I
Speaker 1: know what he's doing. He's learned more about I don't.
Speaker 1: I've never done that project. He's studied up on it, right,
Speaker 1: I'm just teasing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, it's fantastic what he's doing. And I think
Speaker 3: what Leopold would like is that you're you're thinking, you're adapting,
Speaker 3: you're managing, and you're looking at uh, that bigger biotic community.
Speaker 3: And I think that's the part of the thought process
Speaker 3: that I was learning and didn't really understand it. So
Speaker 3: then I'm sixteen years old and I read this book,
Speaker 3: and by that first part the phenology was just fascinating
Speaker 3: to me. Then I got a little older and I
Speaker 3: traveled a little bit, and so the central part, which
Speaker 3: sketches here and there, where he's talking about these different
Speaker 3: parts of the country where he visited and the different
Speaker 3: experiences that he had in there and how they were
Speaker 3: beginning to shape it all through it, you can see,
Speaker 3: you can hear that these essays are the delights and
Speaker 3: dilemmas of one who cannot about wild places. So he's
Speaker 3: you can see what he's going towards. And then at
Speaker 3: the end it's the upshot the land ethic, and he
Speaker 3: says somewhere in there about I don't pretend to say
Speaker 3: that this is something that I've known all along, that
Speaker 3: this has been the evolution of life, is something that's
Speaker 3: learned over a lifetime and when.
Speaker 1: You I want to button out of things, you brought
Speaker 1: a thing up that reminds me of something I'd like
Speaker 1: to touch on with him. Is you mentioned the biotic community?
Speaker 1: That was a like somebody will say Eldo Leopold is
Speaker 1: the father of a cology because Eldo Leopold was looking
Speaker 1: at community like the wild, like nature as a community
Speaker 1: of parts. And he has this metaphor where he has
Speaker 1: this metaphor where you have a clock, right, and you
Speaker 1: have a person who doesn't know a lot about clocks,
Speaker 1: and they start going, what the hell could this wheel
Speaker 1: be for? That doesn't do any good?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: And you start pitching parts. And he looked at nature
Speaker 1: that you have to have an appreciation that there's components
Speaker 1: of this that you don't understand. This is a collection
Speaker 1: of cogs and wheels that function together to do a thing.
Speaker 1: You cannot throw out little parts because you don't see
Speaker 1: what it's doing. That can't be helping this clock, right.
Speaker 2: He I think like as a game manager prior to Leopold,
Speaker 2: very generally speaking, it's like, if you want more game animals,
Speaker 2: you either stop people from hunting, you kill predators, or
Speaker 2: you you know, transplant animals or propagate animals and breathe them,
Speaker 2: and his his sort of generation. And it's not that
Speaker 2: he was just part of it, but I mean he
Speaker 2: was a leading figure in this recognition that all of
Speaker 2: these parts matter and that one way to get game
Speaker 2: animals is to improve habitat right. And like previously, there
Speaker 2: was a much more sort of narrow focus on like
Speaker 2: the number of deer in the woods and not necessarily
Speaker 2: like how the brows is doing and all that.
Speaker 3: And you've probably all heard the part about when he
Speaker 3: shot a wolf and saw the green fire go out
Speaker 3: of her eyes. I don't think that he was saying
Speaker 3: we should never control predators.
Speaker 1: He was, I feecially after that research just came out
Speaker 1: of British Columbia recently.
Speaker 6: That was interesting, but.
Speaker 3: The idea that they are members of the biotic community.
Speaker 3: And then later he wrote in the I think I
Speaker 3: sent it to you summary and I don't have it
Speaker 3: in front of me, but essentially where he said where
Speaker 3: rifles can control the antler the game populations, but they
Speaker 3: rarely do. As you once said to me as we
Speaker 3: were talking about white tail deer, you said, well, what
Speaker 3: do you mean too many deer. You were playing Devil's
Speaker 3: advocates to.
Speaker 1: Make that point all the time, and I don't make it.
Speaker 1: I make the point all the time when something the
Speaker 1: minute someone tells you something's overpopulated, I always point out,
Speaker 1: ask yourself, according to who right?
Speaker 3: From whose perspective?
Speaker 1: And I think my perspective is it overpopulated?
Speaker 3: And my response that day was.
Speaker 1: It's not like there's just not like an objective truth.
Speaker 7: Oh there is, please, there is one dog Leopold. Leopold
Speaker 7: told us what it was too right versus wrong. Okay,
Speaker 7: what a thing is right when it tends to preserve
Speaker 7: the beauty and integrity of the biotic community, it's wrong
Speaker 7: when it when it tends otherwise. And so if you
Speaker 7: have the land telling you there are too many deer,
Speaker 7: if you have the ecosystem telling you that there are
Speaker 7: too many deer, objectively, there are too many deer.
Speaker 1: As opposed to somebody who's like car insurance, car insurance company.
Speaker 2: It's not a number like fifty thousand and two and
Speaker 2: eighty two deer.
Speaker 7: Go on, Doug, Right, Yeah, you take a stance there
Speaker 7: too many.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, you're absolutely right, And that's uh, that is what
Speaker 3: he was getting at and all of that. When you
Speaker 3: when we had that discussion, I said, well, how about
Speaker 3: from the perspective of the land or something to that effect,
Speaker 3: And you're like, and I understood the position you were taking,
Speaker 3: but that that also goes to the biotic community. When
Speaker 3: we see ourselves as a member of the community, will
Speaker 3: treat it more lovingly as opposed to that that the
Speaker 3: first quote you read about one of the first quotes
Speaker 3: was that we are the masters the abrahamick that it's
Speaker 3: here for us to deploit. Essentially, that when we see
Speaker 3: ourselves as a member of it, we'll treat it more lovingly.
Speaker 3: And that's the kind of stuff that I've really taken
Speaker 3: the heart. I mean, I want a healthy biotic community.
Speaker 3: I want a healthy ecosystem, healthy forest, I want a
Speaker 3: healthy deer herd. I want big giant bucks when when
Speaker 3: you start boiling it down to my place in my
Speaker 3: area and I want turkeys a guy.
Speaker 5: But when it comes to hunting, like, what was Leopold's like,
Speaker 5: what was it about hunting for him? Was it that
Speaker 5: that game was a resource like timber or soil or water,
Speaker 5: or was it that that game was an indicator of
Speaker 5: a healthy landscape or did he just love hunting or
Speaker 5: was it everything?
Speaker 3: It was all of that, And again, I think that's
Speaker 3: an evolution and thought that that as my dad used
Speaker 3: to like to say, well, it's all part of it.
Speaker 3: And I think that's very My father was very Leopoldian
Speaker 3: when it came to things like that. Right now, it's
Speaker 3: all a part of it. And when we're in a
Speaker 3: situation very different than the HeLa and those wilderness areas,
Speaker 3: where I'm in a situation in southwest Wisconsin where ninety
Speaker 3: five percent of the land is privately owned and almost
Speaker 3: one hundred percent of that land has had this heavy
Speaker 3: impact of humankind and farming and and things that seemed
Speaker 3: like the right thing at the time, like the planning
Speaker 3: of multiflora rose or autumn olive or uh that kind
Speaker 3: of thing. And Yanny knows about this autumn alive, buckthorn,
Speaker 3: Japanese barbery, all of these different plants that we're really
Speaker 3: spending our time and we're out there managing invasive species
Speaker 3: now that we're introduced by us. Because it seemed like
Speaker 3: the right thing at the time, the same agencies that
Speaker 3: maybe encourage some of that planting are now also encouraging
Speaker 3: well will never eradicate it with the management of it.
Speaker 3: So that heavy hand of man and you know, in
Speaker 3: agriculture and and all of that is a real interesting
Speaker 3: part of this discussion to me. And I think one
Speaker 3: of the beautiful things of Leopold is that he was
Speaker 3: both this advocate for these wilderness areas and this this wildness,
Speaker 3: but then he was also heavily involved with private land conservation.
Speaker 1: That's a great that's a great point man that he like,
Speaker 1: when I look at my social circle, right, I got
Speaker 1: the friends right that are the you know, the last
Speaker 1: vestiges of wilderness and just like leave it be, leave
Speaker 1: it be, leave it be. And I got friends that
Speaker 1: are very steeped in like proper land management. We recently
Speaker 1: had Becky humphries On. Becky Humphreyes is like the ships
Speaker 1: sailed man. For most of the stuff, the lee even
Speaker 1: in alone ain't working. Yeah, it needs we need effort, money,
Speaker 1: time put into active land management. Leaving it be is
Speaker 1: not helping I, right, And it's like that here's this
Speaker 1: guy that at that time saw that these things are
Speaker 1: like was able to sort of see the world and
Speaker 1: these things that were like these two different conversations that
Speaker 1: needed to happen depending on location.
Speaker 3: Right, that's exactly right. So here in Uh, it was
Speaker 3: in nineteen twenty four that he moved to to Madison.
Speaker 3: You know, he was transferred to the Forest Products Lab
Speaker 3: in in Madison, Wisconsin, and he you know, he did
Speaker 3: that for about four years and ultimately quit and was
Speaker 3: hired by the Shooting and Shooting Arms Sammy. Sammy, tell
Speaker 3: me what it is, the Shooting Arms and.
Speaker 2: Orditions, Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there you go to do. Uh, that is really well.
Speaker 3: On tribune, it was just yeah, bro, are you kind
Speaker 3: of yeah? I know, I wonder if you're both going
Speaker 3: to play later tape their minds shut.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm looking forward to.
Speaker 3: Is he talking about if I ever have a podcast?
Speaker 2: The guy for Sammy? After quitting the Forest Products.
Speaker 3: Right, he quit and so this is in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3: You know, things are going pretty well and he quit
Speaker 3: and then he convinced that group to hire him to
Speaker 3: do a game survey of multiple ones of the Upper Midwest.
Speaker 3: So the folks who are selling guns and ammunition, we're
Speaker 3: beginning to recognize that if we're going to sell guns
Speaker 3: and ammunition for people to hunt. Boy, they better have
Speaker 3: something to hunt, and what can we do about it?
Speaker 3: So he spent a lot of time in the Upper Midwest,
Speaker 3: uh doing these game surveys, and what he came back
Speaker 3: from with that from was it's not just regulation and
Speaker 3: in fact regulation of well it, you know, just don't
Speaker 3: shoot any deer for a while and you'll come back,
Speaker 3: or don't shoot any of this. That they have to
Speaker 3: have the habitat too, whatever that species happens to be,
Speaker 3: that they have to have that habitat. So let's start
Speaker 3: to work in that work on that. And then of
Speaker 3: course in the nineteen thirties when the depression came and
Speaker 3: the things like the Civilian Conservation Course started and the
Speaker 3: Soil Conservation Service that we all know as the Natural
Speaker 3: Resource Conservation Service now and the programs that Becky Humphries
Speaker 3: was talking about, the farm Bill, stuff like the Conservation
Speaker 3: Reserve Program, Stewardship program, equip all of those things. The
Speaker 3: precursor to that, Leopold was involved with that on private
Speaker 3: land between Madison Lacrosse is this place called Coon Valley,
Speaker 3: and they wanted to do something they being the Soil
Speaker 3: Conservation Service, to conserve the land, you know, those were
Speaker 3: the dust bowl years been in that area. It was
Speaker 3: erosion from just over use, over pasturing, over planting, you know,
Speaker 3: just plowing right across the side hills, all of that.
Speaker 3: And so the Soil Conservation Service, using the CCC, started
Speaker 3: to help farmers to to slow that down, stop it,
Speaker 3: you know, improve soil conditions. And Leopold stuck his nose
Speaker 3: in and said, you know, we can probably improved some
Speaker 3: wildlife habitat at the same time. So rather than planting this,
Speaker 3: that or the other thing, let's look at that. What
Speaker 3: what improvements are going to be made and how we
Speaker 3: can improve things for wildlife. And they did that. They
Speaker 3: accomplished that in Kune Valley. But he and at that
Speaker 3: time when he was talking about he wrote an essay
Speaker 3: called conservation Economics, which is a really interesting you know,
Speaker 3: and it speaks to all of what I just mentioned.
Speaker 3: Conservation economics, and he said that conservation will ultimately come
Speaker 3: down to rewarding the private landowner for conserving the public's interests,
Speaker 3: and a lot of that was born of it. What
Speaker 3: bothered him ultimately, again these are things that you have
Speaker 3: to learn over a period of time, right, is that
Speaker 3: farmers were getting paid for this stuff and for doing
Speaker 3: that kind of work, or the work was being done
Speaker 3: for them in areas they were improving their pastures, they're
Speaker 3: stopping the erosion doing all these things. And what ended
Speaker 3: up happening then once the program was over and maybe
Speaker 3: the payment stopped, they began to revert to their old
Speaker 3: practices because we got to get as much as we
Speaker 3: got to extract as much as we can out of there.
Speaker 3: And that was definitely a part of his evolution in
Speaker 3: talking about the land ethic, about having that ethic modern day,
Speaker 3: we have seen that. I've seen it in my lifetime
Speaker 3: where if you would have done some of the farming
Speaker 3: practices that I've seen in our area on those side
Speaker 3: hills and people do in fall plunging, people would have
Speaker 3: called you out on that. When I was a kid,
Speaker 3: we don't do that, you know, big buffer strips and
Speaker 3: you always rotate hay into it. But now it's corn
Speaker 3: beans and corn beans and a lot of those areas
Speaker 3: and they've improved some of the soil conservation practices. But
Speaker 3: land that came out of CRP marginal highly a rodable
Speaker 3: land that's come out of CRP and went back into
Speaker 3: corner beans because there's more money in it in plant
Speaker 3: and corn and beans than there is in having it
Speaker 3: in a conservation program like CRP. So that's where he
Speaker 3: begins to in the last part of the book, the
Speaker 3: third part of the book that speaks to me more
Speaker 3: now at this later part of my life about conservation
Speaker 3: philosophy and having a land ethic and seeing myself as
Speaker 3: a member of the biotic community. And you know, I've
Speaker 3: had all this advantage in my life where I'm the
Speaker 3: steward of a property that's been in my family for
Speaker 3: one hundred and twenty years. It's easy for me to
Speaker 3: stand there and think about my dad, my grandfather, my parents,
Speaker 3: my grandparents, my great grandparents, and them being on that land.
Speaker 3: And you know, I plane goes down on the way
Speaker 3: home and that land is still there, the land of bides.
Speaker 3: How do we influence how that because it's been so
Speaker 3: I was going to say negatively influenced, but that's not
Speaker 3: necessarily fair. It's been so influenced by the presence of man.
Speaker 3: How do we going forward? How do we going forward
Speaker 3: do the best thing that we can for the land?
Speaker 3: How can we honor the past while we plan and
Speaker 3: implement in the present. To do the best we can
Speaker 3: for the future. Summed up in It's not ours, It's
Speaker 3: just our turn. I just can't tell you how important this,
Speaker 3: the essays of this book have been to me. I've
Speaker 3: been reading through it again knowing that I was coming
Speaker 3: on and I kind of forgot about that or how
Speaker 3: he makes these points a lot of quotes, you know,
Speaker 3: one sentence quotes, but it's the whole paragraph. Yeah, that's important.
Speaker 1: When you look at like just this revolutionary figure and
Speaker 1: understood all this stuff so well, it does make you
Speaker 1: question current prohibitions on cousins, you know, like you know,
Speaker 1: he right, Yeah, it's a real, real check on the
Speaker 1: scorecard of the.
Speaker 3: Yeah, real it worked once.
Speaker 2: Obviously.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll be like, well, you're saying it's almost unfair.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: He's like such a brilliant thinker, this incredibly accomplished professional
Speaker 2: and made it. He's also like a prophet in some
Speaker 2: respects and a philosopher and a writer.
Speaker 1: It's just like, yeah, you tell me, isn't it that
Speaker 1: you tell me? That's no good? Huh.
Speaker 3: Well, and he was sixty two years old when he died,
Speaker 3: helping a neighbor he.
Speaker 1: Had Doug Hayes's joke, the cousin thing. Yeah, I'm he's
Speaker 1: changing the subject.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I am going to change the subject.
Speaker 1: So Leo wrapped the whole show up. I want you
Speaker 1: to have the last word, Doug.
Speaker 3: Uh Leopold died when he was night, when he was
Speaker 3: sixty two years old. Did he really died?
Speaker 1: I think I knew that and forgot it. He died
Speaker 1: that young.
Speaker 3: He was sixty two years old. He died helping a
Speaker 3: neighbor fight a grass fire.
Speaker 2: He had a heart attack.
Speaker 3: Yet when you look at pictures of Elder Leopold, just
Speaker 3: I defy you, folks.
Speaker 1: He died at six sixty two years old.
Speaker 3: Google Elder Leopold and then clicked on images and it
Speaker 3: will be a whole raft of images of him doing
Speaker 3: nothing but sitting on his butt. It just amazes me
Speaker 3: how much this guy did in a lifetime, and seemingly
Speaker 3: there aren't any pictures of him doing much other than
Speaker 3: looking off in the distance and maybe writing in a
Speaker 3: journal and whatnot.
Speaker 5: But sixty two, sixty two, I don't think that was
Speaker 5: that unusual back then.
Speaker 3: Well, you had to be sitting still to get a
Speaker 3: good photograph.
Speaker 5: No, no, that you would die had uncle died, burning leaves,
Speaker 5: smoke in ealation, no fire, it out of control.
Speaker 7: There's a good action shot on the Rio Grande of
Speaker 7: Leopold as a young man with a boat like a
Speaker 7: flat bottom boat that he fashioned for duck hunting, named
Speaker 7: the Binnacle Bat he called his boat. And he's out
Speaker 7: there dragging this this duck skiff. He's not sitting that one.
Speaker 7: But there are a lot of thoughtful he was action.
Speaker 3: Action in motion. Remarkable and I would ask you all
Speaker 3: to go and check out the Ela Leopold Foundation. It
Speaker 3: is the source for information about Leopold and it will
Speaker 3: take you in a lot of different directions. They are
Speaker 3: also the Leopold Foundation is located on the Leopold farm.
Speaker 3: The shack is there. It's open to tours.
Speaker 1: You should put that in the sports from Atlas Brody.
Speaker 1: Totally Leopold's farm.
Speaker 2: We got the HeLa.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're gonna get to Leopold. Can landowners enroll? Can
Speaker 5: they say eyeing up to join your sharing the land program?
Speaker 3: Please? It's interesting. We have thirty landowners in eight different
Speaker 3: states and we have about thirteen hundred conservation resumes from
Speaker 3: access seekers who want to be cooperators. So we as
Speaker 3: you probably are not surprised. The demand is outstripping the
Speaker 3: supply and landowners, one of the things that I would
Speaker 3: tell you is that it's it's very much your What
Speaker 3: you're able to do is offer access for the things
Speaker 3: that that you are will. You don't have to offer
Speaker 3: access for everything.
Speaker 5: It's like conservation related. It's not like shovel and shit
Speaker 5: and taking out the trash.
Speaker 3: You know, it can be. What I've noticed about most
Speaker 3: of our landowners is that they're really interested. The ones
Speaker 3: who are interested in sharing the land and are part
Speaker 3: of sharing the land are very engaged with their property,
Speaker 3: very engaged landowners who are in interested in spreading conservation education.
Speaker 3: And you know, the need. The truth is that there
Speaker 3: is a big need to get things done on on projects.
Speaker 3: I got a list of stuff at home that that
Speaker 3: we're going to be getting busy on. I got to
Speaker 3: tell you what, Steve Ranella works his butt off in
Speaker 3: the very short period of time usually, but he gets,
Speaker 3: he gets, He gets more than most people do. We
Speaker 3: had an elm tree right by the house break off
Speaker 3: and it was just a mess in the yard, and
Speaker 3: uh yeah, he got after it to.
Speaker 1: The Tasmanian devil.
Speaker 5: That's just because all the windows were there's no more
Speaker 5: windows break.
Speaker 3: And the kids helped out, Jimmy mostly the other two.
Speaker 3: You know. They they come along.
Speaker 1: And they feel that helping is being in the vicinity.
Speaker 2: Well they can run, they can run for help if
Speaker 2: you need it.
Speaker 1: So so doing a chore they be like, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna kind of play like buy the chore area.
Speaker 3: Right accept or the auxiliary. Steve had Matthew out because
Speaker 3: I had clearly failed as a guide, and uh, Steve
Speaker 3: took him out. But Rosie and and uh uh the
Speaker 3: other one, Jimmy had already gotten their birds, and I said, well,
Speaker 3: I've got some stuff for him to do. And I
Speaker 3: had a burroke tree, a couple of fruit trees to plant,
Speaker 3: a little a little more picking up to do. And
Speaker 3: they stepped right into its bring your kids. Yeah, they
Speaker 3: weren't afraid. They got right in there and they did
Speaker 3: a great job of it.
Speaker 1: We're gonna wrap it up. Oh no, you were The
Speaker 1: one that you're gonna say is for landowners that want
Speaker 1: to participate with sharing the land, you don't need to
Speaker 1: be like, hey, here's the keys of the farm.
Speaker 3: Oh not at all.
Speaker 1: You can be like, hey, turkey's cool. Hey, late season
Speaker 1: white tailed doz cool, squirrels cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: Don't shoot my big giant bucks.
Speaker 3: Okay, well sure, I mean that that can be a
Speaker 3: part of it too, and and and to be perfectly
Speaker 3: on honest, I as I think everybody at the table
Speaker 3: knows here, I don't bow hunt because bow hunts for
Speaker 3: people don't have enough to do. But I lease my
Speaker 3: farm to some bow hunters and who do a great
Speaker 3: job of it, and I'm very happy to have them there.
Speaker 3: And that revenue I mean they simply pay is a
Speaker 3: part of it too, right, because that's a part of
Speaker 3: the a la carte menu that well, you can't bowhunt in.
Speaker 3: But some of my cooperators literally the day they're like,
Speaker 3: when are those guys leaving? And there's some good days
Speaker 3: of the rut left and they're in there right after that.
Speaker 3: And think about that on both sides, right, So those
Speaker 3: guys are, well, we've been doing this work, we should
Speaker 3: get that opportunity. But they know and then the guy
Speaker 3: who spends serious money to come and hunt, he's like,
Speaker 3: so will you explain this to me again that we're
Speaker 3: paying And then tomorrow after we leave. You got these
Speaker 3: other guys coming. They're not paying nothing. Yeah, that's the deal.
Speaker 3: Well you sum it up. I've been working with those
Speaker 3: those guys have been least in my place for eight
Speaker 3: years now, and that has been and and and then
Speaker 3: when we come in and then the gun hunting.
Speaker 1: You know, I'll help you hold up you're end of
Speaker 1: the deal though, man, Like you have a window of
Speaker 1: time that they want to hunt, carved out, hunted.
Speaker 3: And nobody else hunted before them, and they get that
Speaker 3: period of time and then I.
Speaker 1: Mean, you're you're you're you're being kind, but like you're
Speaker 1: taking like peak white tail rut on a beautiful white
Speaker 1: tail property and that's.
Speaker 3: Theirs, and that's theirs. And uh and then then they
Speaker 3: shot fortier last year, and then we came in with
Speaker 3: rifles and shot forty three more.
Speaker 1: Well you know, and you wouldn't know what from looking
Speaker 1: at it this spring. Well, it's like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: Well that's a whole there's a million deer in that place.
Speaker 3: That's a whole other thing. I uh, at our seat,
Speaker 3: I just want to put this in at our sea
Speaker 3: deck meeting the County Deer Advisory Council which I'm a
Speaker 3: member of. We actually had someone come in from the
Speaker 3: public and we had public comments but online. But somebody
Speaker 3: came in from the public and he was nice guy.
Speaker 3: I've had other conversations with me. I don't understand why
Speaker 3: you want to kill all the deer. Why are you
Speaker 3: killing all Why do you want to kill all the deer?
Speaker 3: And it's not what we're trying to do. We're trying
Speaker 3: to give opportunity as much opportunity as we can because
Speaker 3: we have a lot of deer and ninety percent of
Speaker 3: land as privately owned. And if you don't think that
Speaker 3: you have enough deer on your property, then don't kill many.
Speaker 3: It's a pretty simple premise.
Speaker 1: All right, man, We're gonna wrap up. Thank you boys,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. Carol Malcolm from the US for Service,
Speaker 1: glad to be here. And Doug Durn from Casanova, Wisconsin.
Speaker 3: Casanova, that's what you like.
Speaker 1: To call it, Casanova Wisconsin.
Speaker 3: And please go and check out the Alder Leopold Foundation.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much.
Speaker 9: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 10: I used to be the one skin datiesy close enough
Speaker 10: for me and he say up more steps before you
Speaker 10: click the safety.
Speaker 9: Off of that O two forty three and do my
Speaker 9: best to sit there.
Speaker 10: Quiety say, so you gotta learn to be step. And
Speaker 10: now it's me telling his grandson all the things he
Speaker 10: used to whisper in my just a little more patient, son,
Speaker 10: I ain't gonna hurt no one. He ain't got a
Speaker 10: picking good shot before he pulled the trigger.
Speaker 9: Night on, gone on, the study untrue.
Speaker 10: Man. When you take came, the rest is up to you. Man,
Speaker 10: you're gonna do great. Just shoot in the street. Now,
Speaker 10: my daddy's up in heaven. One day I'll.
Speaker 9: Be up there with them looking down.
Speaker 10: Oh when watching now the Jemeration show, the next wom
Speaker 10: a ride.
Speaker 9: And they through these olds.
Speaker 10: Awkwards and they teach me everythings they need to know
Speaker 10: because they ain't learned from their daddy, learned from their daddy.
Speaker 9: And the story goes, just a little more patience.
Speaker 10: I ain't gonna hurt no wale. You ain't gotta picking
Speaker 10: good shot before we pulled the trigger, na on, gone order.
Speaker 9: Steady in true. And when you two came, the rest
Speaker 9: is up to you. Man.
Speaker 10: You're gonna do great. Just shoot street. Just a little
Speaker 10: more patience. So I ain't gonna hurt no one. You
Speaker 10: ain't gotta picking good shot before you pull the trigger
Speaker 10: from that old.
Speaker 9: Gone hold in steady R. And when you take the
Speaker 9: rest is up to you. Man, you're gonna do the great.
Speaker 9: Just shoot up the street.
Speaker 7: H