Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything coming at you. Um, congested with a
Speaker 1: sore throat. So it's not sounding pretty sick. You sound off, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that time of year. Um, we're just talking. I want
Speaker 1: to pick up on a conversation with just having a
Speaker 1: quick cal Can you can you revisit what you're talking about? John?
Speaker 1: We can we talk about where you live? Or do
Speaker 1: you like to keep that secret? No, it's fine, right
Speaker 1: about it. I don't write about it. But it's not
Speaker 1: like I live in an undisclosed location. Okay, I just
Speaker 1: lived there. We're with the writer John Muellum, and you
Speaker 1: don't go by nature writer, you're just having to write
Speaker 1: about I think that's kind of silly. You don't like that?
Speaker 1: Uh what do you? What do you do? You can
Speaker 1: describe yourself as a generalist. Yeah, yeah, I think that's accurate.
Speaker 1: But that is a thing these days, right to be
Speaker 1: a generalist? No, No, to like people take like nature
Speaker 1: writing these days? Dude? Yeah? Way yeah. Yeah, we're science
Speaker 1: writer natural history writers. Do you what do you say that? No? No,
Speaker 1: because I feel like it has a softer connotation, right,
Speaker 1: like you're gazing at a I'll say that. I'll oftentimes,
Speaker 1: if I'm trying to deflect a conversation, i will say
Speaker 1: that I'm an outdoor writer because no one knows what that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, I just I'm trying to get in
Speaker 1: and out of the subject real quick. We all often
Speaker 1: times throw that out there to see if that allows
Speaker 1: me to just move on, right, And sometimes it's people like, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's over. Yeah, But the writer the generalist, John Welm,
Speaker 1: lives on Bainbridge Island, which is an island in Puget Sound,
Speaker 1: and hearing this our other guests, frequent contributor and guests
Speaker 1: Ryan Callahan shared with us his memories of right fishing
Speaker 1: for chum salmon on Bainbridge. Uh. I want to say
Speaker 1: it was two thousand and ten, and I could be
Speaker 1: screwing this up, but we Uh. It was actually back
Speaker 1: in the days of working with Warren Miller Entertainment, and
Speaker 1: I was in charge of shipping all of our stuff
Speaker 1: all across the country, and I also slipped in a
Speaker 1: container load of our fishing gear so we could fish
Speaker 1: wherever we were in the country. And we went out
Speaker 1: and fished the chum round on Bainbridge, and um everything
Speaker 1: in this area was pretty economically depressed, UM on Bainbridge
Speaker 1: and the peninsula in general. And and I was very
Speaker 1: confused as to the fishing regulations because there seemed to
Speaker 1: be an awful lot of people gut we we we
Speaker 1: referred to basically snagging salmon and just dragging them on shore.
Speaker 1: And we were, you know, out there with their flying
Speaker 1: rod uh fly fishing gear, just trying to catch something
Speaker 1: in the mouth. And on the way out of uh,
Speaker 1: the creek that we'd walked down into, ran into some
Speaker 1: uh fishing game officers and fish cops fish cops, and
Speaker 1: I had I had. I didn't ask directly, but you
Speaker 1: know you kind of like, hey, so supposed uh and
Speaker 1: these officers had basically said like, yeah, we're aware of that.
Speaker 1: We're not really concerned about it because these folks are
Speaker 1: taking everything home and smoking them. So they were they
Speaker 1: were willing to like look, turn turn a blind eye
Speaker 1: that yeah to the chum thing. The reason I wanted
Speaker 1: to tell that because some reason it's stuck to putting
Speaker 1: my mind two things. One my brother man, it winds
Speaker 1: up being so circular. Can I tell about the book
Speaker 1: you're working on, John, John's working on the book by Alaska.
Speaker 1: And as part of that, we got talking about anchored,
Speaker 1: So I had sort of anchored floating around in my head.
Speaker 1: Then Cal got talking about salmon, so I have an
Speaker 1: anchorage and salmon floating around my head. I got to
Speaker 1: thinking about something. My brother was telling me that it's
Speaker 1: a derogatory term. I think like the Moonies. John, you
Speaker 1: know about the Moonies, right? Ye? Are you asking me
Speaker 1: if that's a derogatory too reading? But can you, because
Speaker 1: you understand them better, can you explain to me real quick,
Speaker 1: even though it's not your true right, I'd say I
Speaker 1: have a D minus great understanding of the Moonies the
Speaker 1: Unification Church. But you knew that, like you knew some
Speaker 1: of it. I know that. I think it's in like
Speaker 1: we didn't start the fire that you know. He's the
Speaker 1: mass Shaye Stadium. The Reverend moon converted ten thousands, some
Speaker 1: number of thousands of people a church all at once.
Speaker 1: The Beatles kind of got into it. They had their heyday.
Speaker 1: And if you see dudes in the airport who are
Speaker 1: wearing yellow gowns and have a hairstyle, similar to the
Speaker 1: Iroquoi Five Nations groups, right, but this is is that
Speaker 1: still going? And I'm telling you what the reason I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about this right now is my brother was saying
Speaker 1: that the Mooney's in Anchorage will rent busses to go
Speaker 1: fish salmon. I'm telling you the only the guy we're
Speaker 1: thinking about. And I feel like I already brought it
Speaker 1: up once, which was just like I talked about this
Speaker 1: every day now is because the type of salmon you're
Speaker 1: talking about, a chum, is also known as a dog salmon.
Speaker 1: And it gets this name because um some people will
Speaker 1: find that it's that it's best us is to be
Speaker 1: fed to dogs. So people will catch chums and just
Speaker 1: freeze the hole to freeze to sled dogs. It's not
Speaker 1: a popular food fish chump salmon and dog salmon. And
Speaker 1: I was recently taught about this is someone they're saying
Speaker 1: that the folks was it was it that is sam
Speaker 1: as the folks on um Nevakish. Yeah, they liked it
Speaker 1: though they love it. And I'll touch on that too
Speaker 1: because uh, chump salmon or coastal spawners, so they spawned
Speaker 1: close to the ocean. They'll generally enter rivers in pretty
Speaker 1: shitty shape already. But there's an exception to this that
Speaker 1: our brother was point now is there's a big run
Speaker 1: of chums in the Yukon where these chums are traveling
Speaker 1: a thousand miles and they'll enter the river very nice
Speaker 1: and clean and very fatty, and so they're they're pretty
Speaker 1: popular and people will net them out in the open ocean.
Speaker 1: But people know that chum salmon slash dog salmon is
Speaker 1: a real ship salmon, so they've tried to rebrand them,
Speaker 1: and for while they're trying to sell them as calico salmon,
Speaker 1: because when they're up in the rivers, you ever know,
Speaker 1: to get that calico color to them. Kind of the
Speaker 1: other day we were I think we might have talked
Speaker 1: about this. They uh dirt myth went into a Whole
Speaker 1: Foods and came out with a little envelope of smoked
Speaker 1: salmon and on it it says keita salmon. And I
Speaker 1: know my salmon inside now or thought I did, and
Speaker 1: I was like, that's not a kind of salmon. But
Speaker 1: it turns out that the Linnaean name for the chum
Speaker 1: is on corinthis Keita, it sounds like a Bible verse
Speaker 1: on corinthis keita, and uh, yeah, the whole food was
Speaker 1: just trying to sell chums as key to salmon, which
Speaker 1: is just a play on their Lineian name because people
Speaker 1: like get stuff in their head and they won't eat
Speaker 1: it because because of its name. Yeah, but it's still
Speaker 1: tastes good enough to sell, all right, good enough for
Speaker 1: people to come back. And the chupic Eskimo they don't.
Speaker 1: They don't like to catch him. They let the chums
Speaker 1: run in the river and spawn out, and they don't
Speaker 1: like to catch him until that sun bitch is washing
Speaker 1: back out to the ocean mostly dead, at which point
Speaker 1: they like to catch him. Because their climate is so
Speaker 1: wet it's very hard to dry fish. And a chum
Speaker 1: is after he's spawned out and mostly dead, he's very lean,
Speaker 1: his fat reserve is gone. At that point you can
Speaker 1: dry him down successfully in a climate that is not
Speaker 1: appropriate for fish drying. Wow. I talked with that uh,
Speaker 1: this guy, Dave, Alaska resident who looked at me like
Speaker 1: I had three eyes because I told him how much
Speaker 1: I liked the silver salmon. Then we caught up at
Speaker 1: the fish shack and he was like, you eat. Oh,
Speaker 1: there's so much bullshit around fish. My brother. My brother
Speaker 1: has been doing mass been doing blind taste tests where
Speaker 1: he's like doing where he's cooking pink salmon for people
Speaker 1: and co ho for people, and he's final about of
Speaker 1: people prefer the pinks, and then everybod says, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: but the real problem with pinks they don't freeze well,
Speaker 1: they turn mushy when you freeze them. So he starts
Speaker 1: then freezing it all and doing a blind taste test
Speaker 1: with it, and I think thought, I think six of
Speaker 1: people preferred the pink, but it just doesn't mark it well. No,
Speaker 1: So John, back back to John, Uh, you're general How
Speaker 1: long have you been a generalist writer? Since I've been
Speaker 1: a writer, really, I've been writing for the New York
Speaker 1: Times magazine for twelve years and I think, you know,
Speaker 1: that was not long after I started writing for magazines.
Speaker 1: And I think just as a freelancer, you know, you
Speaker 1: why would I say no to a good idea? So
Speaker 1: did you study journalism? I did, Actually I went to
Speaker 1: the Berkeley Journalism School. That was how I met Michael Pollen. Uh,
Speaker 1: But at that point I kind of I didn't scope
Speaker 1: out journalism schools to go to. It was more a
Speaker 1: function of we were moving to San Francisco, my wife
Speaker 1: and I. She was gonna go to grad school. And
Speaker 1: I tried to get a bunch of jobs in journalism
Speaker 1: in San Francisco and got turned down. And then I
Speaker 1: had applied to the journalism school, had to my dad
Speaker 1: had died recently. I had some money that could pay
Speaker 1: for the graduate degree, and uh, I couldn't get any work.
Speaker 1: So that I showed up at Berkeley. I went to
Speaker 1: go visit when I got admitted, and I was just like,
Speaker 1: why would I not do this? This is a you know,
Speaker 1: it's almost like I've been freelancing for a while. So
Speaker 1: I thought I could show up at this place and
Speaker 1: just keep freelancing. And now I've got the support of
Speaker 1: all these people around me, and uh, it was too
Speaker 1: good to pass up. And that was grad school. That
Speaker 1: was grad school. Yeah. Yeah, how sick? How sick of
Speaker 1: talking about? How how sick are you've talked about your
Speaker 1: your book? Uh, I haven't done it in a while.
Speaker 1: So I got some questions I want to ask. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll see, but my I'm not gonna be as up
Speaker 1: on my own book as I was. Yeah, we'll just
Speaker 1: give me the like give me the give people to
Speaker 1: run down of your book. So the books called wild Ones.
Speaker 1: The subtitle is a sometimes this maying, wearily reassuring story
Speaker 1: about looking at people looking at animals in America. And
Speaker 1: uh it uh it's a book about Uh. Basically, it's
Speaker 1: a book about conservation and dangered species, although I didn't
Speaker 1: always want to describe it that way. Uh. And it's
Speaker 1: so why did you not want? Because it's not a
Speaker 1: too dismal I think it shuts some a lot of
Speaker 1: people down right. I think the thing I was interested
Speaker 1: in doing was writing about those issues from the perspective
Speaker 1: of someone who had no direct contact with them. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I was living in San Francisco at the time,
Speaker 1: and as I write in the book, you know, most
Speaker 1: of my exposure to animals was you know, watching Planet
Speaker 1: Earth or uh, you know, Wild America when I was
Speaker 1: when I was a kid. And then I had my
Speaker 1: first child and realized how much of a child's life
Speaker 1: gets flooded with animals, you know, be they on your
Speaker 1: pajamas or stuffed animals and things like this. And I
Speaker 1: just started to realize that these animals, which are real
Speaker 1: animals out there in the ecosystem, are sort of these
Speaker 1: also these imaginative constructs that people like me are trafficking
Speaker 1: in every day. And so the book was really about
Speaker 1: trying to reconcile those two worlds, trying to take what
Speaker 1: I thought and felt about animals and go out into
Speaker 1: the ecosystem of some of these endangered species and really
Speaker 1: think hard about you know, why is it that someone
Speaker 1: who's never going to see a mountain lion might want
Speaker 1: to get behind the cause of mountain lion conservation? What
Speaker 1: are these animals doing for us? Uh? Not maybe not
Speaker 1: in the physical plane, but you know, just emotionally. When
Speaker 1: you were when you were thinking about that about you
Speaker 1: mentioned that your kid's pajamas and the way that childhood
Speaker 1: is so animal rich, at least in the imagery of it.
Speaker 1: It's rich in the imagery of animals and sort of
Speaker 1: the the metaphysical realm. Have you ever thought about like,
Speaker 1: how is it that the how is it decided? Do
Speaker 1: you feel? Um, what species sort of make the cut? Yeah,
Speaker 1: African megafauna is big with it is big with kids.
Speaker 1: It's big, and it's like big with pajamas. It's big
Speaker 1: with stuffed animals. Um. And then there are like our
Speaker 1: many of our own animals are kind of neglected in
Speaker 1: that world. Yeah, well I think that's that. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a great question, and I think some of it it
Speaker 1: just speaks to the fact that when we're putting a
Speaker 1: giraffe on our daughters, you know, Onesie, it's not because
Speaker 1: of anything having to do with the giraffe itself, right,
Speaker 1: It has to do with what the giraffe represents, you know.
Speaker 1: Maybe uh, it's it's colorful, right, Maybe it's something that
Speaker 1: we think of as gentle um. And I think that
Speaker 1: there's also the exotic nous of it alone is doing
Speaker 1: a lot of the work because we want to surround
Speaker 1: our kids with things that are precious, you know, and
Speaker 1: give them, uh, kind of take them to another world. Right.
Speaker 1: So maybe it's a giraffe, or maybe it's a ferry, right,
Speaker 1: or a princess imaginary right, And sometimes it is, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't often maybe won't work, right. I mean owls,
Speaker 1: I feel like owls have a good pr right now,
Speaker 1: like we we think of owls, Owls do take it
Speaker 1: into the stuffy realm. Yeah, exactly exactly. Squirrels though not
Speaker 1: so much. I was just trying to think of a
Speaker 1: squirrel and only character and can come up with this
Speaker 1: uh rocking, rocking bowl winkle. Yeah, but kids aren't into
Speaker 1: that anymore. No, definitely not anymore. The hedgehog has gone.
Speaker 1: His brand is rising. Do you think I think the
Speaker 1: hedgehog is coming into his own a a child's thing,
Speaker 1: my kids awareness of animals really, like how it was
Speaker 1: eye opening for me anyway, like the your story of
Speaker 1: the Teddy Bear. Oh, that's that's the next thing. I
Speaker 1: want to have you address that. I thought that was fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: why the hell? Yeah? Can you because we're on the
Speaker 1: thing with like what sort of like the fantastic sort
Speaker 1: of representation of animals and kids stuff that you got
Speaker 1: interested in. Can you talk about um? And I trust
Speaker 1: me I will move on to like more recent things
Speaker 1: with you. But keep talking about keep talking about Teddy
Speaker 1: Roosevelt in the bear. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't know this.
Speaker 1: You didn't know. I feel like I knew something. No,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I knew that had something to do with
Speaker 1: I knew that the Teddy Bear was Teddy Roosevelt, but
Speaker 1: I didn't know like I didn't know how. Yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: do a little pitch for the book right now. I
Speaker 1: think it's worth buying just to read your explanation of
Speaker 1: that story, because I've heard that story numerous times and
Speaker 1: I could, you know, vaguely, probably tell it t and
Speaker 1: someone say, oh, yeah, you know what's nuts the nuts
Speaker 1: and bolts of it. But you added in just a
Speaker 1: few details that I didn't know. I was like, now
Speaker 1: that's fascinating thing in a way I don't agree with
Speaker 1: with Horniday, Like I know the Horniday story very well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would not tell it the way you told it.
Speaker 1: How would you tell it? Just different? Are we gonna
Speaker 1: Can we skip right to that one? Can we skip
Speaker 1: to that one? And it will come back to the Teddy?
Speaker 1: Now even now I'm scintillated. No, I have to sit
Speaker 1: with that discomfort. Tell us about tell us about so
Speaker 1: the Roosevelt story, Yeah I had. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I knew that story or not. I mean, I think,
Speaker 1: like you at least knew that Teddy bears Teddy Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: There's a relationship, and the story goes. I believe it's
Speaker 1: I could have the year wrong at this point. Was
Speaker 1: the year that uh scotfy A published the Culinary Guide. Well,
Speaker 1: there's a lot happening that year. Clearly a big year. Um,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt goes down to Mississippi and it's gonna go bear hunting,
Speaker 1: and this is a it's a you know, the press
Speaker 1: is following him there, and longest story short, they're not
Speaker 1: finding any bears. One of the last days of his
Speaker 1: hunt his uh they go out cut stop me from it. Um,
Speaker 1: what year? When was uh? You know, who's the Mississippi
Speaker 1: bear hunting writer Faulkner? When was Falkoner? Like active later,
Speaker 1: I believe I don't know, not my not my Arab expertise.
Speaker 1: I barely am expert on my own book anymore. Yeah, well, uh,
Speaker 1: we're forcing you to revisit. Yes, I should have I
Speaker 1: should have brushed up a little bit more. In any case, Uh,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, Roosevelt is uh, you know, he
Speaker 1: he gives up. He goes to have lunch, and they're
Speaker 1: hunting with hounds. They're hunting with hounds and a guide.
Speaker 1: You know. So his guide was this sort of famous
Speaker 1: black Mississippi former slave bear hunter guy who you know,
Speaker 1: was a very storied figure. Yeah, Roosevelt wouldn't cross the
Speaker 1: street without a guy, I would assume. So yeah, so
Speaker 1: this guy suddenly he starts blowing on his bugle. Uh.
Speaker 1: Colin Roosevelt back out into the field because he's found
Speaker 1: a bear and it's this kind of mangy looking, scrawny
Speaker 1: animal that he's tied to a tree, and he's the
Speaker 1: hounds have cornered it. He's tied it to a tree
Speaker 1: so that the President can come shoot it, have the
Speaker 1: honor of shooting it. Now, this is where the story
Speaker 1: and the truth kind of get diverge a little bit,
Speaker 1: get a little muddy. The story goes that Roosevelt found
Speaker 1: this all very unsportsmanlike and spared the bear's life. And
Speaker 1: there's a famous cartoon done at this moment in a
Speaker 1: Washington newspaper where they show Roosevelt declining to shoot this
Speaker 1: very cuddly looking bear, and the bear becomes the Teddy
Speaker 1: Bear that that bear in the cartoon looks, you know,
Speaker 1: fluffy and cute and cuddly, a little vulnerable. That becomes
Speaker 1: the Teddy's Bear. Uh. And toy companies start making these
Speaker 1: stuffed animals name them after the President to sort of
Speaker 1: celebrate that moment of mercy. The truth is, as far
Speaker 1: as I could tell, that he did not He did
Speaker 1: refuse to shoot the bear. Instead, he asked his buddy
Speaker 1: to knife it with put it out of its misery.
Speaker 1: That part did not get carried over into the myth
Speaker 1: um right because it was supposedly like a worn down,
Speaker 1: scrawny it was out. It just like wasn't doing very good.
Speaker 1: It was a bad looking bear. It was a bad
Speaker 1: looking bear. So he did feel that it was unsportsmanlike,
Speaker 1: but it was more to protect his own sense of
Speaker 1: sportsmanship than the bear's life that he declared to shoot
Speaker 1: it um. So that in and of itself, I thought
Speaker 1: was interesting the way that the story, you know, the
Speaker 1: parts of the story that we wanted to repeat and
Speaker 1: the parts that we wanted to ignore. But yeah, in
Speaker 1: any case, that was the sort of birth of the table.
Speaker 1: And there's there's other competing stories. I actually got a
Speaker 1: lot of emails from various people, you know, marshaling historic
Speaker 1: evidence that but what happened that day, Well what happened
Speaker 1: that day or about the you know, or linking the
Speaker 1: origin of the Teddy Bear two different things. And then
Speaker 1: it was it was this moment with Teddy rizz with
Speaker 1: that kind of gave it's popularity so that it wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily invented because of Teddy Roosevelt. But that was what
Speaker 1: made it a sensation. Um, Like the Teddy bear is
Speaker 1: already a thing, but it became more of a thing.
Speaker 1: There's there's camps as far as I remember, there's there's
Speaker 1: some some argument about that as well. Um but yeah,
Speaker 1: but but in the book, I link that to the
Speaker 1: condition of sort of actual bears in America at that time,
Speaker 1: where we were sort of shifting from a perspective where
Speaker 1: they were these menacing threats to something that we had
Speaker 1: pretty much brought to its knees and now needed to
Speaker 1: show Mercy's Roosevelt to read that told it, Yeah, sort
Speaker 1: of resonates, you know, as of course, now is the
Speaker 1: time to spare the bears life, and we can make
Speaker 1: them into this adorable thing that we give to our babies.
Speaker 1: Whereas you know, an eighteen thirty nobody out on the
Speaker 1: frontier is going to think of a bear as a
Speaker 1: cuddly thing that their child should should play with, right,
Speaker 1: it would be like giving your child a monster. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you'd you'd said on the manufacturing kind of backstory, Um,
Speaker 1: and that's the thing that just like light bulb went
Speaker 1: off for me, was the one manufacturer had had a
Speaker 1: stuffed bear on the market, that it was kind of
Speaker 1: fierce looking with the hump on its back and more
Speaker 1: of an actual depiction of a representation of a bear
Speaker 1: complete with a hook through its nose or a ring
Speaker 1: through its nose and a chain did not sell very well.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, yeah, Well that was the thing is that
Speaker 1: when you look pretty teddy bear, there are no you know,
Speaker 1: I haven't done the historians have you. You just didn't
Speaker 1: see bear toys and when you did, this was one
Speaker 1: of the few examples where it was clearly a scary toy.
Speaker 1: It was meant to frighten children, It wasn't meant to
Speaker 1: comfort them. And even when the teddy bear starts taken off,
Speaker 1: as often happens, the kind of old guard at the
Speaker 1: toy industry is late to catch up. They can't get
Speaker 1: their heads around why suddenly people think bears are adorable
Speaker 1: and they're because they're just placing baby dolls. You know,
Speaker 1: this is scandalous. So there's a lot of there's a
Speaker 1: lot of backlash, you know, is what is the world
Speaker 1: coming to? That these chips were giving these children bears?
Speaker 1: And there were actually poems, epic poems about the fights
Speaker 1: between Teddy Bears and dolls at Christmas time, you know,
Speaker 1: and that the bears were slaying the dolls and things
Speaker 1: like this. So that the more I think that there
Speaker 1: was one called the Passing of the Dolls, which you
Speaker 1: know it was, it was just slow to catch up
Speaker 1: to the zeitgeist. Man, do you uh, can you explain
Speaker 1: shifting baseline syndrome? Yeah? But can we talk about possums first,
Speaker 1: because that's the take the footnote on the Teddy Bears story,
Speaker 1: because you were saying that you don't often see possums
Speaker 1: and the possums are not widely represented in children ship right,
Speaker 1: and so meaning mobiles, pajamas, teddy Bears, not at all.
Speaker 1: We do have a book, a children's book um that
Speaker 1: was sent that that my brother and sister in law
Speaker 1: sent us for our kids. It's the favorite of theirs
Speaker 1: and it's a children's book that was written in the
Speaker 1: sixties or seventies called Possum now to show kind of
Speaker 1: like changing our changing attitudes towards what's appropriate for children.
Speaker 1: Possum is largely about the whittling down of a large
Speaker 1: family unit of possums where there's the mother has It
Speaker 1: starts out the mother's in her den has a litter
Speaker 1: of twelve or thirteen, and throughout her summer's travels, they
Speaker 1: are uh whittled away throwing snakes, other things, snapping turtles,
Speaker 1: cars to where there's just a couple of them. And
Speaker 1: then one female survives and she gets bred up by
Speaker 1: a male and goes back into the den to have more.
Speaker 1: And it's just like the decimation of a possum family.
Speaker 1: But it's like presented as a children's book. Doc, what's
Speaker 1: the moral? What do you take away from it? Life
Speaker 1: is fleeting, the just make more. Life is fleeting in
Speaker 1: the natural world is at least as harrowing as ours.
Speaker 1: That's a good book. So I volunteered to go last
Speaker 1: year with my kids. In first grade, you had to
Speaker 1: volunteer to go read a book, and my wife signed
Speaker 1: me up to go read a story to the kids
Speaker 1: in class. And I went and read Possum, and Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't feel like I felt like the kids like it.
Speaker 1: I felt like that it made the teacher uncomfortable. Well,
Speaker 1: that's interesting because that's the point you bring up in
Speaker 1: the book and how you're saying how there's some research
Speaker 1: done with how kids react to like the brutality of
Speaker 1: nature and right, and the young kids are kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like whatever, like protect me, and it's fine. I don't
Speaker 1: really care if all those things die, if if I
Speaker 1: can live on. And it's only as we get older
Speaker 1: that we sort of don't like that stuff anymore, like
Speaker 1: like how nature really. Yeah, there's there's a good research.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's this whole field of you know, human
Speaker 1: of human dimensions of wildlife they started calling it. But
Speaker 1: this Stephen Colored at Yale, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: ever come across this stuff. I think he passed away now,
Speaker 1: but yeah, in the seventies, he he kind of lad
Speaker 1: this whole body of research to just look at how
Speaker 1: do people think about animals? You know, what do we
Speaker 1: actually think? And the findings are are really counterintuitive and
Speaker 1: kind of crazy. I mean also to some of the
Speaker 1: questions they asked. I mean, he asked them to rate animals.
Speaker 1: You know, do you like ladybugs more than cougars? And
Speaker 1: we know what's smarter, you know, like a lobster or
Speaker 1: a dolphin. You know, just things like they just gut instincts.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that he he did was
Speaker 1: he got very interested in how children think about animals,
Speaker 1: and they don't think about animals the way adults think
Speaker 1: about children thinking about animals. So he showed, for example,
Speaker 1: that we we want to think of children as these innocent,
Speaker 1: peaceful things, and you know that's probably why we give
Speaker 1: them animals, which we also want to think of as innocent,
Speaker 1: peaceful things. Um. But it turns out, you know, you
Speaker 1: ask a three year old or I don't know the
Speaker 1: exact ages, but there's an age at which you ask
Speaker 1: a small child do you want to camp around other people?
Speaker 1: Or do you want to camp among animals? And they're
Speaker 1: gonna say other people because they're afraid of animals obviously, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, here's the evolutionary and some in some sense,
Speaker 1: but we forget all that, right, we we put these
Speaker 1: presumptions on them. So yeah, they want to you know,
Speaker 1: if a if a wolf I maybe getting the species,
Speaker 1: it could have been a coyote. But you know, if
Speaker 1: if a wolf of kyote comes and kills the farmer's chickens,
Speaker 1: what should the farmer do? Kill all the kill all
Speaker 1: the wolves? Right, that's the answer that the kids give you, um,
Speaker 1: and and a slight few adults will give you well,
Speaker 1: absolutely absolutely, But I think that we think that, you know,
Speaker 1: I think for a lot of conservation minded people, there's
Speaker 1: there's this presumption that, you know, the rancher wants to
Speaker 1: kill the wolf, he just has to get back in
Speaker 1: touch with his childlike love of of all living creatures. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What I like about what I like about kids. An
Speaker 1: interesting thing about kids, and you see it, I see
Speaker 1: it my own all the time, is the the hard
Speaker 1: wired things about animals that come from just our species history,
Speaker 1: like just the innate distrust of serpents. Right, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of things that kid will want to go up
Speaker 1: and grab, but there's something they just I'm sure there's
Speaker 1: plenty of exceptions, but I find that kids are generally,
Speaker 1: without having someone discussed snakes with them, are generally like
Speaker 1: repulsed by a snake. Well, I know that there's research
Speaker 1: about that. I don't necessarily remember what it shows, but
Speaker 1: I do remember reading studies where they showed a kind
Speaker 1: of laddering of fears of animals, so that you know,
Speaker 1: younger kids are afraid of snakes. Thinking when you're on
Speaker 1: the ground, when you're crawling, you know you have a
Speaker 1: fear of snakes and maybe spiders and things like that,
Speaker 1: and then you're but you're not afraid of predator. You know,
Speaker 1: you're not afraid of a bear because you're probably not
Speaker 1: gonna have the opportunity to be put face to face
Speaker 1: with the bear. And how are fears are? The sort
Speaker 1: of innate fears that you're talking about seemed to be
Speaker 1: triggered as you as you age, which is kind of
Speaker 1: like a good operation, like crawling around on the ground
Speaker 1: before you can walk. You're running into a rack and
Speaker 1: it's snakes, potentially poisonous. You'll find the kids are kind
Speaker 1: of like they know, don't put that, that's right, and
Speaker 1: they're not and they're not afraid of guns, you know.
Speaker 1: All right? Oh you know what, because because you were
Speaker 1: feeling uneasy about it? Um, I want to get into
Speaker 1: William T. Hornaday. But do you want to do that
Speaker 1: first or do you want to explain this is nothing
Speaker 1: I've never heard by love it shifting baseline syndrome. I
Speaker 1: want you to talk to me about horn today. First,
Speaker 1: tell the story of horn today. The story Okay, so um,
Speaker 1: first off, we share and we share, uh a tendency
Speaker 1: to still use the word buffalo. Okay, it's like a
Speaker 1: type of dude to mean you say buffalo. There's the
Speaker 1: type of dude who wants to sort of he feels
Speaker 1: like he's engaging and who knows most about wildlife contest
Speaker 1: where he'll like to point out that there's that it's
Speaker 1: called the bison, as though you could know as much
Speaker 1: as you know about it, like as though I could have,
Speaker 1: for instance, written a whole book about the subject, but
Speaker 1: not picked up. I'm the fact that the name now
Speaker 1: is bison, Like that eluded me, and so someone needs
Speaker 1: to make sure to get ahold of me, because having
Speaker 1: written several hundred pages about this animal's history from the
Speaker 1: place to scene into the future, I had missed that fact.
Speaker 1: So there's like a there's like a who knows most
Speaker 1: e sort of thing about bison buffalo. But I still
Speaker 1: have a great affinity for the word buffalo. I noticed
Speaker 1: that you use it well. Horny himself encouraged people. Am
Speaker 1: I doing it? Who knows more? Thing? Right now? You
Speaker 1: know Hornaday and one of his books he starts out
Speaker 1: by saying, you know, the technical name is bison, but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call it buffalo. And I believe Americans should
Speaker 1: call it buffalo because that's the popular term, right now
Speaker 1: and it shows sort of art. It gives us a
Speaker 1: greater investment in the animal to go with the populace.
Speaker 1: It's I have never in my life registered any confusion
Speaker 1: where I had said to someone, hey, man, did you
Speaker 1: notice all those buffalo like out that way? And they
Speaker 1: registered confusion when they didn't know what I was talking about, Like, no,
Speaker 1: I saw a bunch of bison, Yeah, you mean the
Speaker 1: bison nickel, do you like? I've never had someone registered confusion.
Speaker 1: So Hornaday now the last big at. I never know
Speaker 1: where to begin this story, I said, it's it begins
Speaker 1: in the begins in the place the scene. But at
Speaker 1: the end of the Civil War, there's two big herds
Speaker 1: of buffalo. We're gonna go buffalo here, there's two big
Speaker 1: herds buffalo left or people sort of perceived the remaining
Speaker 1: animals as being in these two large hurts um there's
Speaker 1: about fifteen million of them. There was what they called
Speaker 1: the Southern herd, which was sort of you can kind
Speaker 1: of imagine it being centered around Dodge City, Kansas and
Speaker 1: uh down in the Texas panhandle, the southern plains or
Speaker 1: south of the railroad. And then you have the Northern herd,
Speaker 1: which you could kind of imagine that being centered around UM, say,
Speaker 1: centered around Miles City, Montana, being up into up into Canada,
Speaker 1: south into Wyoming, and that was like the Northern herd.
Speaker 1: There was two big groups. They kind of shot. They
Speaker 1: killed the North the Southern herd off in eighteen They
Speaker 1: kind of reached a packs of slaughter around eighteen eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy two, and it was about a decade later that
Speaker 1: the Northern Pacific Railroad made it to Miles City and
Speaker 1: then they tapped out the last of the Northern herd
Speaker 1: and in that you know, they killed a million or
Speaker 1: two million or some number the hide hunters did, and
Speaker 1: I think it was eighteen seventy three, right pretty quick
Speaker 1: where they thought the last one. Hornaday, like William T.
Speaker 1: Horned a collected specimens for the Smithsonian, was actually very
Speaker 1: influential in the Smithsonian, proved wanted being very influential in
Speaker 1: the Bronx Zoo. Was a specimen collector. Hornaday knew that
Speaker 1: UM the animals around the way out. He was even
Speaker 1: sending letters to people trying to find places where it
Speaker 1: might be feasible to go get some specimens and determines
Speaker 1: it the best chance would be to take the Northern
Speaker 1: Pacific Railroad into Miles City. Now this is months months
Speaker 1: after the hide hunters were still shooting him for commercial markets.
Speaker 1: He's out just trying to find some and he goes
Speaker 1: up into the big Sandy area north in the tad
Speaker 1: east of Miles City, I believe, and when going up
Speaker 1: around the muscle shell, I think and uh, I was
Speaker 1: just trying to shoot museum specimens. Um. The parts of
Speaker 1: the story that I think are most interesting to me
Speaker 1: was uh when I said that we would have told
Speaker 1: the story differently, is I did don't really see one.
Speaker 1: I didn't see a ton of irony there, which I
Speaker 1: feel that you did. Irony in the sense that he
Speaker 1: was killing animals to preserve that. Yeah, I feel like
Speaker 1: you were being a little judgmental of him, as though
Speaker 1: he had sort of, um, who's the guy in the
Speaker 1: Bible that sound his way to go kill a bunch
Speaker 1: of people and get struck by Yeah, he has sort
Speaker 1: of you kind of tell it as though he had
Speaker 1: some sort of epiphany. You don't think he did well
Speaker 1: And then maybe not in that moment. I think the
Speaker 1: irony is that he himself went on to move from
Speaker 1: taxidermy to conservation. I mean, I think in some ways
Speaker 1: he invented, but he was already very he when he
Speaker 1: went out to collect his specimens. It wasn't like, um,
Speaker 1: he was like he was glad about this. No, he
Speaker 1: was tortured by it. Yeah, But but I just got
Speaker 1: the sense like um, that he kind of felt like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, and then he's so shortsighted. Oh, I
Speaker 1: see the distinction. Yes, I appreciate that's a that's a
Speaker 1: I get that critique. I guess he's like, there's I
Speaker 1: feel that he was thinking, there's nothing anyone's gonna do.
Speaker 1: There are guys out there right now, including Teddy Roosevelt,
Speaker 1: trying to shoot him. At least we would have some
Speaker 1: specimens for future generations to even understand this thing. Right,
Speaker 1: So my question to you would be, and that's not
Speaker 1: the part. There's two parts I thought were interesting. Was that,
Speaker 1: um that he was wading through during this time, waiting,
Speaker 1: almost literally wading through the carcasses and remains of the
Speaker 1: hide hunters. And two, did he had this observation that
Speaker 1: the people in Miles City when he later wrote about
Speaker 1: this experience, that the people in Miles City the hide hunters.
Speaker 1: We're waiting in Miles City, having no idea what they
Speaker 1: had done, and that they were just waiting there for
Speaker 1: the next big herd to show up. And over time,
Speaker 1: just while waiting for the next big herd that they
Speaker 1: thought would come out of Canada, some magical thing would
Speaker 1: happen where a million more would would flow through town.
Speaker 1: They would get back to their business just kind of
Speaker 1: gradually got into being saloon keepers or ranchers, and only
Speaker 1: gradually over the years realized that like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: we killed them all, that there was no comprehension of
Speaker 1: the finiteness of that resource. Like that's important to me
Speaker 1: because I feel that people oftentimes go and look at
Speaker 1: the hide hunters and find a sort of like there
Speaker 1: was maliciousness and greed, for sure, but there was also
Speaker 1: just a general like not understanding what you were doing
Speaker 1: going on. And I feel that relative to the people
Speaker 1: who were at actually out doing this, Hornaday was went
Speaker 1: into it a very enlightened individual, not just like yet
Speaker 1: another asshole laying on yet another layer of pathology onto
Speaker 1: this whole problem. Yeah, I agree, and I'm I regret
Speaker 1: that you felt that I was lumping him in. I mean,
Speaker 1: if that is if that's what you took away from it.
Speaker 1: Then I can see that that might be I might
Speaker 1: have been reading in heavy but now go ahead like maybe, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I agree with you. I think he was incredibly enlightened
Speaker 1: relative to the to the thinking of his day. And
Speaker 1: I think that is what I wanted to call attention to,
Speaker 1: is what did enlightenment look like in that context? Right?
Speaker 1: I think that a big takeaway I I had from
Speaker 1: from looking at a lot of the issues in the
Speaker 1: book was the arbitrary nous with which people often decide
Speaker 1: what is possible and what is impossible? Bowl Right, he
Speaker 1: decided that all that was possible was to shoot a
Speaker 1: dozen buffalo and stuff them, and that was going to
Speaker 1: be how he preserved the species. He later proved himself
Speaker 1: wrong very quickly, you know, within a fifteen years, by
Speaker 1: actually setting up captive breeding programs, reintroduced producing you know
Speaker 1: what is maybe one of the first you know, reintroduction
Speaker 1: programs from a captive breeding program that he was doing
Speaker 1: at the Bronx Zoo. And that's an interesting story that
Speaker 1: people don't know. Yeah, it got so bad that day
Speaker 1: later to repopulate the West, we're bringing animals from the
Speaker 1: Bronx Zoo back west by Rail. Yes, and he was
Speaker 1: probably the major force in that project. So I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting that the William Temple Hornaday of could probably
Speaker 1: could look back on the William Hornaday of eighteen nineties
Speaker 1: something and say, and that guy didn't really even understand
Speaker 1: what was possible the same way that And that's how
Speaker 1: I'm looking at him, you know, because you kind of
Speaker 1: get into a similar thing about polar bears, not similar,
Speaker 1: but another thing of like of people sort of feeling
Speaker 1: there at the end of something and trying to prevent
Speaker 1: the end. Yeah, for a species. I think that we're
Speaker 1: quick to I think the polar bears is get example.
Speaker 1: I think that we're quick to when we don't know
Speaker 1: the future, fill it in with ah negative assumptions, right,
Speaker 1: and that that was what Hornday is doing. I think that.
Speaker 1: I guess I don't necessarily see the parallel of polar bears.
Speaker 1: Do you want to do you want to frame that
Speaker 1: a little bit better? Well, yeah, that right now it's
Speaker 1: not a perfect parallel. But the effort that you're talking about,
Speaker 1: like the effort that people go through on the Hudson's
Speaker 1: Bay to move polar bears out of the troubled path. Well,
Speaker 1: does mean like, um, like extraordinary things we do for
Speaker 1: beleaguered species. Yeah, that was the That was what got
Speaker 1: me going on the book, just realizing the degree to
Speaker 1: which these animals are being managed. You know, I talked
Speaker 1: about uh sort of stage managing a lot of the species.
Speaker 1: You know that that were you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: endangered species are being captively bred, reintroduced into ecosystems that
Speaker 1: were also engineering for, you know, so that they can
Speaker 1: thrive in them. So all this work is being done
Speaker 1: on their behalf. Every part of the equation is being micromanaged. Um.
Speaker 1: The example with the sea turtles, Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that was a story I did for the Times magazine
Speaker 1: when during the Gulf oil spill. You know, I went
Speaker 1: down and and they were digging up I don't know
Speaker 1: if you guys remember there is a big news story
Speaker 1: at the time, but the government is digging up sea
Speaker 1: turtle nests on the Gulf coast, shipping the egg driving
Speaker 1: the eggs in a FedEx truck to the East coast
Speaker 1: of Florida to Atlantic coast of Florida, and reburying the
Speaker 1: I don't know if they were reburying them or just
Speaker 1: letting them hatch and putting the hatchlings out in the
Speaker 1: water because they didn't want the turtle hatchlings in the
Speaker 1: Gulf Coast to be swimming directly into the spill. And
Speaker 1: I went down to Alabama and hung out with this UH,
Speaker 1: a group of mostly retired folks who had been for
Speaker 1: years had just been walking around the beach barricading the
Speaker 1: nests so that people wouldn't trample them or you know,
Speaker 1: accidentally dig them up to protect them. And then what
Speaker 1: they would do is when they were getting close to hatching,
Speaker 1: they would just camp out on the beach around the nests.
Speaker 1: And when the turtle hatchlings started to boil out of
Speaker 1: the sand, since they wouldn't want them going away from
Speaker 1: the water toward the artificial light, because their their instinct
Speaker 1: is to go toward the light UH, and they often
Speaker 1: get stranded in parking lots and things they go on
Speaker 1: the wrong direction. They wanted him go into the ocean,
Speaker 1: so they would sit around the nest. When the hatchling
Speaker 1: start coming up, they would dig a trench to funnel
Speaker 1: them towards the ocean. So they had no other options
Speaker 1: but to go right into the ocean and then they
Speaker 1: would stand with tarps around the trench to block the light,
Speaker 1: so that basically they're just escorting them. I mean they
Speaker 1: could have just dug them up and carried them out,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they had to do that too, but they
Speaker 1: would stay up all night waiting for these hatchlings. I
Speaker 1: mean that is people's lives. An ordinate amount of their
Speaker 1: time is being spent to get this these nests. And
Speaker 1: during the spill, it turns out they were the experts
Speaker 1: that the the government had to call on. They were
Speaker 1: the people with the relevant experience who could go dig
Speaker 1: up these It was sort of like this Armageddon situation,
Speaker 1: you know, like the movie army Ageddon and that's the
Speaker 1: phone call of your lifetime. Oh they were so psycked,
Speaker 1: you know. And they were and they were also I
Speaker 1: don't want to say this with a tone of uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I want to judge them harshly for it.
Speaker 1: I thought it was amazing. They were let's just say
Speaker 1: they were. They were feeling good about themselves, you know,
Speaker 1: they were telling people what to do. They knew they
Speaker 1: were the experts. This was their moment and they weren't
Speaker 1: gonna let anyone funk with their turtles and it was
Speaker 1: great to see, you know, it was great to see
Speaker 1: someone who just had this sort of any hobby who's
Speaker 1: you know, kids and nephews and nieces probably tease them about.
Speaker 1: You know, you get up every morning and you walk
Speaker 1: on the beach looking for turtle tracks, you know, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know these people they had turtles painted on their
Speaker 1: their cars and turtles hanging from their rear view mirrors,
Speaker 1: and their whole life had been about sea turtles and
Speaker 1: now they were stepping in to save this uh, this
Speaker 1: generation of turtles. It was amazing. Yeah, we like in
Speaker 1: the hunting world, you're surrounded by that um all the time.
Speaker 1: With the way that people like people who kind of
Speaker 1: pulled off the turkey reintroduction and recovery and even then,
Speaker 1: so I know people who have like devoted their lives,
Speaker 1: who have devoted their their life to elk, or people
Speaker 1: who devote their life to quail. For people dev over
Speaker 1: their life to turkey. And there I'm always like, I
Speaker 1: just understand it right because I see like what it
Speaker 1: was born of. But it is I look at the
Speaker 1: turtle thing and I'm like, man, and those people will
Speaker 1: do it without even the promise of having turtle soup.
Speaker 1: It's not even part of the equation. M R. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so what is that value? I mean, that's that's
Speaker 1: exactly what I'm interested in, is when the value of
Speaker 1: the animals gets unmoored from any practical anything. Um, it's
Speaker 1: because a guy would be like, man, I've always just
Speaker 1: dreamed of hunting turkeys, so I got real involved and
Speaker 1: bringing turkeys back to my state. But for a turtle guy,
Speaker 1: it's just that turtle hits the water and you will
Speaker 1: never lay eyes on it again. And I agree with you.
Speaker 1: The turkey guy on an intuitive level makes a lot
Speaker 1: more sense to me. And I think that's why I'm
Speaker 1: drawn to figure out the other side of it, the
Speaker 1: other part of it. Okay, I was gonna have you.
Speaker 1: I can't decide now that's the only talking about shifting
Speaker 1: baseline syndrome. And oh the term that you've been talking
Speaker 1: about and also want to talk about. I want you
Speaker 1: to touch on conservation reliance of species, but I also
Speaker 1: want to talk about pedals. The bear from your perspective
Speaker 1: is do you see a good order to do that? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: conservation reliance, I think we can get through pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's basically just what I was talking about.
Speaker 1: That's the technical term for the idea that it's going
Speaker 1: to take intensive management on the part of humans to
Speaker 1: keep in endangered species alive. So there was a study
Speaker 1: that came out that introduced this term, I believe in
Speaker 1: early two thousand's by a guy named Mike scot who
Speaker 1: at the time I was maybe with Fish and Wildlife
Speaker 1: some federal agency, and uh, he came up with this
Speaker 1: term conservation reliance because they looked at every species on
Speaker 1: the dangered species list, and they looked at what, you know,
Speaker 1: tried to forecast what outcomes you know are possible, and
Speaker 1: basically realized that some huge percentage something in the eighties,
Speaker 1: I believe just eighty something percent of these species are
Speaker 1: going to be reliant on human intervention for the foreseeqable future.
Speaker 1: And that doesn't mean that, you know, it could just
Speaker 1: be getting weeds out of their ecosystem so that the
Speaker 1: whatever you know, plant they need is there um or
Speaker 1: it could be a much more intensive captive breeding type
Speaker 1: of thing, but that the equilibrium in which these species
Speaker 1: evolved has been disrupted to such an extent that we're
Speaker 1: always going to be like I'm saying, stage managing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like it would be fair to say you could. You
Speaker 1: can probably name a bunch because your research. But the
Speaker 1: California condor lives in a state of conservation reliance absolutely,
Speaker 1: and that that goes from everything from you know, I
Speaker 1: believe they're still captively breeding them, but they're definitely, I mean,
Speaker 1: they teach them not to perch on power lines. You know,
Speaker 1: they have to train them to live in the world
Speaker 1: where they have to live. Now, Um, exactly do you
Speaker 1: think of other ones? Sure? I mean the one I
Speaker 1: write about in the book is this butterfly species and
Speaker 1: Lang's metal more arc where it's uh, you know, been
Speaker 1: winnowed down to such an extent where they go out
Speaker 1: they collect butterfly eggs off leaves of its host plant.
Speaker 1: They take it to a lab in southern California, is
Speaker 1: outside San Francisco. They take it to a lab in
Speaker 1: southern California. They breathed them there, they let the eggs hatch,
Speaker 1: they and then they put the larva back on the plant.
Speaker 1: Then they go back collect some of the live butterflies,
Speaker 1: bring them back to the lab, have them uh breed,
Speaker 1: and do the whole process all over again. Meanwhile, they've
Speaker 1: got a full time fish and Wildlife service employer, at
Speaker 1: least did it as a couple of years ago. I
Speaker 1: know whose job was to groom the ecosystem. He was
Speaker 1: basically like a caretaker for the butterfly's property, and he
Speaker 1: was doing all sorts of invasive controls to make sure
Speaker 1: that that host plant could get a footing on the
Speaker 1: sand dunes where it lives. So that's a pretty extreme
Speaker 1: case I think, where every part of what used to
Speaker 1: be a natural process has to be done by hand,
Speaker 1: by human hand. Yeah, there's a certain type of person
Speaker 1: who looks at that and they feel like an anger
Speaker 1: towards the species. Yeah. I think there's part of that
Speaker 1: in me, honestly. I mean I think that's why I
Speaker 1: was so wrapped up in this, because I couldn't see
Speaker 1: my way through to any you know, discernible, clear, defensible position. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I I've always lived, or I just live with this
Speaker 1: sense that it's deeply immoral two um, to allow species
Speaker 1: to go extinct because of our because of our influence,
Speaker 1: our influences on the environment. To be like to be
Speaker 1: like there there's parts of creation, whether you take that
Speaker 1: in a religious way or in just like an ecological way,
Speaker 1: that there's parts of creation that we've decided are um
Speaker 1: that we can just throw away or allowed to be
Speaker 1: thrown away because we don't want to be inconvenience by it.
Speaker 1: I feel like if we've a I that if we're there,
Speaker 1: if we've arrived at that point, we really don't have
Speaker 1: any claimed any kind of moral legitimacy anymore. Do you
Speaker 1: think we're not at that point? I don't think a
Speaker 1: lot of people at that point. The person I run
Speaker 1: into on this, I mean, yeah, plenty of people are
Speaker 1: at that point, and I think they don't have any
Speaker 1: kind of claimed moral legitimacy either. Is uh we started
Speaker 1: talking about well like a migration corrid or you know,
Speaker 1: you have to be great if you didn't graze that
Speaker 1: down to nothing. It would be better if you uh
Speaker 1: had you know, a clean single top strand with no
Speaker 1: barbs on it, on your barbed wire fans be better
Speaker 1: if there was no barbed wire fans um. And you
Speaker 1: always hit this point where well where does it end?
Speaker 1: You know? And that's the person on these when we
Speaker 1: get into these arguments and talks on this subject, that's
Speaker 1: the person always shows up like, yeah, but how far
Speaker 1: are you gonna take on well, like I can't I
Speaker 1: put you know demmit or I had the no light
Speaker 1: ordinance on my beach front house. So okay, I did that.
Speaker 1: But you know you're now you're asking me to you know,
Speaker 1: not you know, use my back porch at all, or
Speaker 1: you know where does it end? Yeah, that's the thing
Speaker 1: that people like, let's run this out to the point
Speaker 1: where everyone will see the absurdity of yes and yeah.
Speaker 1: And there's another thing about it, Like in the case
Speaker 1: of the Condor, there's a there's an interesting argents we
Speaker 1: made that the Condor could be considered to be one
Speaker 1: of the Pleistocene extinctions. It just took a long time
Speaker 1: to arrive there. So at the Pleistocene Holla scene transition,
Speaker 1: when we lost mastodons, Woolleye mams, giant ground slaw short
Speaker 1: faced bears, we lost all these animals, um and a
Speaker 1: sort of sis in on what what did it? Because
Speaker 1: it wasn't human caused. It's mysterious some combination of some
Speaker 1: combination of climate change at the at the end of
Speaker 1: the last Ice Age, some combination of climate change influence
Speaker 1: from uh successional waves of humans coming from Asia, you know,
Speaker 1: Ice Age hunters um. Possibly disease issues no one really understand.
Speaker 1: Possibly there's this the idea that never really dies, whatever
Speaker 1: really gets going of um some like cosmic disturbances that
Speaker 1: caused the extinctions. But you have this big gass bird
Speaker 1: that's a feeds on carrion, and whether you know lead
Speaker 1: ammo or not, or power lines are not, you'd have
Speaker 1: just seen that bird fizzle out the way that many,
Speaker 1: many dozens of other species fizzled out at the end
Speaker 1: of the places scene because they just took a long
Speaker 1: time to happen. They were all over the I believe,
Speaker 1: all over the continent, right and they just the last
Speaker 1: remaining ones just happened to be the ones at the
Speaker 1: very western edge. Because if they found a way to
Speaker 1: begin that, they found a way to kind of exploit
Speaker 1: marine map dead marine mammals, and then people will be like,
Speaker 1: there's nothing you were gonna do, or it was just
Speaker 1: gonna happen, the same way if we had caught the
Speaker 1: tail end of some other the end of the mammoths
Speaker 1: and we grappled and be like, wow, why what do
Speaker 1: we do when maybe it was just gonna happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But how do you guys answer that because it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: well who gets to choose? Are you Steve, Rinella or John.
Speaker 1: I am not going to be the guy that signs
Speaker 1: the paper that says let it go for all humanity
Speaker 1: we just stopped right now. I will not I will
Speaker 1: not be the guy that says it all right, So
Speaker 1: I s want to touch on pebbles. I want to
Speaker 1: touch on giant sequoias in the Karl Marx Tree. Want
Speaker 1: to talk about uh pedal. I already said pedals shifting
Speaker 1: baseline syndrome, right, because it's like an important part of
Speaker 1: your book. Yeah, I think at this point it's important
Speaker 1: part of my life. I think it really has colored
Speaker 1: the way I think about a lot of things. Uh
Speaker 1: shifting baseline syndrome. I wanted her up Tuesday. This is
Speaker 1: all in. Everything we've covered mostly so far is in.
Speaker 1: It's in wild Ones. Yeah, we're going we're going through
Speaker 1: the book, John wu Allams wild Ones still available, still available,
Speaker 1: uh shifting baseline syndrome. So yeah, this is the idea
Speaker 1: I stumbled on when I was actually writing about that
Speaker 1: that butterfly, and I find that it's something that gives
Speaker 1: a name to a lot of phenomenon that we come
Speaker 1: across all the time. Shifting baseline syndrome was the phrase
Speaker 1: was coined by a marine fisheries scientist named Daniel Pauly
Speaker 1: Ah in the nineties, and what he was what he
Speaker 1: realized was that people in his field, we're coming in
Speaker 1: and and spending their careers documenting the crash of different
Speaker 1: fish species. So they were looking at everything happening in
Speaker 1: the ocean from the time they started their career to
Speaker 1: the time they retired more. I mean, obviously they knew
Speaker 1: more than that, but this was their focus. And then
Speaker 1: the next generation of academics would come along or scientists
Speaker 1: would come along, and they would start basically with a
Speaker 1: clean slate intellectually, so they would start documenting the decline
Speaker 1: of fish species further. But because we're always looking at
Speaker 1: the world through this window of the present, we never
Speaker 1: really see that I should start that all over again.
Speaker 1: I'm not doing this idea very I'm tracking. I'm tracking,
Speaker 1: but I already understand it again. Shifting baseline syndrome was
Speaker 1: a phrase coined by Daniel Polly, who's a fisheries scientist.
Speaker 1: Don't get discouraged, man, discourage it's a discouraging idea. I
Speaker 1: guess the idea basically that Uh, he was noticing that
Speaker 1: people were documenting the crash of marine species, but no
Speaker 1: one was really putting together that the crashes that they
Speaker 1: were or the declines that they were documented within their
Speaker 1: own careers, were actually just slivers on a much longer
Speaker 1: graph of time, so that each time a new generation
Speaker 1: would come along, they would accept the condition in which
Speaker 1: they were looking at the ocean as normal, and they
Speaker 1: would document the decline relative to that normal. But if
Speaker 1: you zoom out and you look at you know, instead
Speaker 1: of a fifty years span or or thirty year span,
Speaker 1: you look at a hundred years span or tuner year span,
Speaker 1: you see a much steeper decline, So that these little
Speaker 1: line graphs that we're drawing and and freaking out about
Speaker 1: are actually just slivers of this much much bigger graph. UM.
Speaker 1: And I think that that there's another term for pretty
Speaker 1: much the same phenomenon. UH. Peter Khan is a psychologist
Speaker 1: at the University of Washington. Around the same time, he
Speaker 1: coined the term environmental generational amnesia, which actually think is
Speaker 1: a cooler term, didn't catch on quite as much, but
Speaker 1: UH and that was more widely applicable, so He would
Speaker 1: go to kids in Houston and he would say, you
Speaker 1: know who live among oil refiners And he would say,
Speaker 1: do you think your neighborhoods polluted? They say no, right,
Speaker 1: because that's the you know, we just kind of assume
Speaker 1: it's normal and whatever we inherit, it's normal. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so we watch all this stuff happen, and you know,
Speaker 1: people get old and grumpy and talk about how it
Speaker 1: used to be. But of course when they were kids,
Speaker 1: they were grump people you know who are old at
Speaker 1: that time talking about how it used to be a
Speaker 1: generation before that. And I think this is like a
Speaker 1: really important thing to recognize. And then having recognized it,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the funk to do about it
Speaker 1: because it just screws me up. I still cannot what
Speaker 1: do you do with this information? What do you do
Speaker 1: with the information that your perspective is sort of inherently flawed.
Speaker 1: I struggle with it all the time, and reading that
Speaker 1: term like I've been. My mom still lives in the
Speaker 1: house where I was brought up in, you know, born
Speaker 1: and on, and it's on a lake. So I've been
Speaker 1: a very careful observer of that lake for forty three years.
Speaker 1: And yes, the Eden, Eden for that lake is when
Speaker 1: I was five, and first I was able to take
Speaker 1: it in. But I do oftentimes wonder about like the
Speaker 1: time machine thing. It wouldn't be my first pick, but
Speaker 1: if I had ten picks with a time machine, one
Speaker 1: stop would be that lake in pre human times, to
Speaker 1: go like, so what is the actual baseline? But you're right,
Speaker 1: I in my mind it was like that lake's history
Speaker 1: began when I first gazed upon it, and everything since then.
Speaker 1: And now my child, my boy, who fishes that lake
Speaker 1: a few days every year, will someday have it be
Speaker 1: that that moment when I first took him there to
Speaker 1: fish blue Girls was Eden, and everything will just be
Speaker 1: whatever has slipped from that point, And my story is
Speaker 1: about what it was like. He won't. He'll be able
Speaker 1: to understand that, but it won't factor into his own
Speaker 1: monitoring of its decline, right, and which it will be
Speaker 1: that lake was born on that day? And which baseline?
Speaker 1: Do you attach the legitimacy too? Because you could dial
Speaker 1: up your time machine and go back to whatever year.
Speaker 1: I tend to think of things as being for me,
Speaker 1: just because it allows me to like begin to sort
Speaker 1: of put my arms around things I tend to when
Speaker 1: thinking about wild life in America, the arrival of human
Speaker 1: beings tends to be where I where this For me,
Speaker 1: that's where the story begins. And I agree with you,
Speaker 1: I think instincially that makes a lot of sense. But
Speaker 1: because some people will be in Wyoming and they'll be
Speaker 1: thinking about when it was the Great Inland Sea whose
Speaker 1: shorelines were populated by dinosaurs, But I don't care about that.
Speaker 1: I automatically go to what was it like fourteen thousand
Speaker 1: years ago for whatever reason, just because in our effort
Speaker 1: to understand and make sense of and begin having a conversation,
Speaker 1: that's just where I jump. But that basically invalidates our
Speaker 1: presence here. That says that our goal as responsible citizens
Speaker 1: of these ecosystems is to have zero is to be
Speaker 1: as if we were not here, that they would be
Speaker 1: repopulated with mammoth. Yes, and yeah, I think you're setting
Speaker 1: yourself up for failure. But yeah, it's it's and it's
Speaker 1: just where. And it's a problem thinking ahead too, right,
Speaker 1: it's a problem thinking you know. Use the example in
Speaker 1: the book is the bald eagle recovery. Right, you know
Speaker 1: that when when the bald eagles were delisted as in
Speaker 1: danger species. There was a lot of triumphant talk about
Speaker 1: how many you know bald eagles were. Of course it
Speaker 1: was just a minor fraction of the number of bald
Speaker 1: eagles that there were, you know, at well, for example,
Speaker 1: at your baseline, right, um, And so when do you
Speaker 1: know how many? Benjamin Franklin was criticizing that as being
Speaker 1: scummy exactly, So, how many are there supposed to be? Right?
Speaker 1: How do we know if we've succeeded, and how do
Speaker 1: we know if we failed? If we can't agree on
Speaker 1: what the legitimate you know, what the should be of
Speaker 1: the equation is. I don't know, but you can find
Speaker 1: out because we're having this conversation all the time right now.
Speaker 1: We're engaged in it around the idea of wolves and
Speaker 1: grizzlies in the lower forty eight how many like what
Speaker 1: could like the what is the most reasonable picture of
Speaker 1: recovery based on the fact that there's this thing we
Speaker 1: have to deal with called reality? Well, how many do
Speaker 1: we want? That's the question I like to ask, you know,
Speaker 1: and I think that's a much more complicated question. I mean,
Speaker 1: a lot of the conservation, I mean, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of cases of species that have rebounded only to be
Speaker 1: greeted by distaste or take take the case, go ahead,
Speaker 1: No I can say, like, yeah, man, it quickly swings
Speaker 1: that pendulum to where like oh Canada geese, Candida GeSe,
Speaker 1: is you know, saving them? And now like you can't
Speaker 1: find a person probably like walking in our country that
Speaker 1: can even remember when people were trying to save that bird. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. Things that we've recovered, like there
Speaker 1: are states who are doing active reintroductions of deer, white
Speaker 1: tailed deer. So now the new villain is the aggressive turkey.
Speaker 1: Yeah I read that keeping people from getting out of
Speaker 1: their cars, right, these are And meanwhile we had to
Speaker 1: go through extraordinary measures to recover the species. And now
Speaker 1: it's like these dumb, violent birds preventing me from getting
Speaker 1: in and out of my car. And now you've got
Speaker 1: the de extinction people you know that. Oh yeah, they
Speaker 1: want to bring back passenger pigeons. Well I don't think
Speaker 1: American civilization is ready for swarms of passenger pigeons. They're
Speaker 1: gonna block out the sun. Yeah, can you refer our
Speaker 1: listeners back to our episode. You look at what episode
Speaker 1: we did with the ancient DNA expert Dr beast Shapiro
Speaker 1: about de extinction can just be good both the goose
Speaker 1: and and the turkey. I mean how they're significant portion
Speaker 1: portions of our population that if you were to mention
Speaker 1: that species to them, they'd be like, Oh, the goddamn
Speaker 1: things that ship all over my lawn scratch up my car.
Speaker 1: They have no reference of those anim roles anywhere other
Speaker 1: than that. It's like I live on a golf course
Speaker 1: and I have to step in their poop every day.
Speaker 1: I hate those things very shortsighted. Or yeah, looking at
Speaker 1: it from the perspective of your own lifetime, do you
Speaker 1: find the number? Episode seventy five, we explore date the
Speaker 1: extinction with a professor and we cover just that topic
Speaker 1: about what it would really be like to have, you know,
Speaker 1: billions of passenger pisness back again, and why she thinks
Speaker 1: you don't really need to worry about it too much. Um,
Speaker 1: here's another version of the here's another version of how
Speaker 1: much's too many? And what does recovery look like? So
Speaker 1: we've got it now, we're up to over a half
Speaker 1: million buffalo and so people say, like, what does recovery
Speaker 1: look like? And they say, there's two types of recovery.
Speaker 1: There's dealing with its genetic extinction, which we've dealt with.
Speaker 1: It's no longer at risk of genetic extinction, but it's
Speaker 1: there's still a risk of ecological extinction because of the
Speaker 1: half million that we have are privately owned, are managed
Speaker 1: as livestock, so there's no risk of losing the animal.
Speaker 1: But what we've lost is the species interaction, the species
Speaker 1: native interaction with the landscape. So we haven't like that
Speaker 1: won't maybe won't be recovered or will recover it, and
Speaker 1: just small little spots where we can kind of replicate
Speaker 1: what the animal was beyond just it's it's genetic makeup,
Speaker 1: how it influenced and was influenced and was influenced by
Speaker 1: the landscape on which it lived. Um, but yeah, it's
Speaker 1: going on all the time. Um, what should the world
Speaker 1: look like? I don't know. I mean I think that
Speaker 1: that gets back to your what you're saying before about
Speaker 1: you know, when do we give up on something because
Speaker 1: it's inconvenient. Well, the reason why it's often perceived as
Speaker 1: any convenient is because the context in which it existed
Speaker 1: is gone, you know, I mean I think it the
Speaker 1: questions start to parallel, like palliative care questions, you know,
Speaker 1: and the kind of questions you know, when what is
Speaker 1: the it's not necessarily quality of life. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: get into the emotional well being of the animals, but
Speaker 1: you know, in some sense, these these critters become invasive
Speaker 1: species in their own ecosystem. You know, they're just not
Speaker 1: locked in in the way that they used to be.
Speaker 1: And I don't have an answer for that. I don't
Speaker 1: know when it's not worth preserving them. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: preserve it's like keeping a person alive in a vegetative state. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What what is your prime example of a native species
Speaker 1: becoming an invasive species in their own ecosystem. Well, I
Speaker 1: think that that butterfly goes goes a long way to explain.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was a sand dune ecosystem about an
Speaker 1: hour used of San Francisco called the Antioch Dunes that
Speaker 1: very quickly became ah leveled after the I think the
Speaker 1: big burst was after the nine earthquake in San Francisco
Speaker 1: when they were mining the dunes for bricks. But just
Speaker 1: wave after wave of exploitation of that resource until literally,
Speaker 1: you know, you could see talking about shifting. Basically you
Speaker 1: could actually see you know, the baseline of the dune,
Speaker 1: you know, lowering um when you look at when you
Speaker 1: look at photographs um and it it stopped being a
Speaker 1: dune ecosystem. The sand stopped shifting, Uh, you know, trees
Speaker 1: took root. It became a you know, a savanna, and
Speaker 1: it became like a you know, there's oak trees growing
Speaker 1: there now. So to come back and say we want
Speaker 1: to preserve this butterfly that is used to living on
Speaker 1: a you know, a particular kind of plant that grows
Speaker 1: in the sand dune ecosystem, you've got to do a
Speaker 1: lot of work to the ground before you start putting
Speaker 1: the butterfly back. And I mean, I think the condor
Speaker 1: in some sense too, as you're talking about like the
Speaker 1: you know, the entire matrix of circumstances that allowed it
Speaker 1: to evolve, it's just not really there. It's just hanging
Speaker 1: onto this because it learned to probably eat you know,
Speaker 1: marine mammal carcasses and things like that, so it adapted
Speaker 1: a little bit. But it's not behaving the same way
Speaker 1: that a condor would have in the past. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not judging it, but it's something about its condor
Speaker 1: nest is gone. Yeah, yeah, And I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: I just think that the point I got to, you know, basically,
Speaker 1: and I'm surprised that some people find this discouraging because
Speaker 1: I find it really encouraging. Is the point I got
Speaker 1: to is just a kind of deep acceptance of the
Speaker 1: fact that these questions are not going to be resolved.
Speaker 1: That being as powerful as species as we are and
Speaker 1: trying to exist in a world that's as complicated as
Speaker 1: it is is gonna mean that we're creating all this
Speaker 1: friction around us all the time, and it's kind of amazing.
Speaker 1: We feel somewhat compelled to even be responsible to the
Speaker 1: rest of the planet and to try to minimize that
Speaker 1: that friction or at least you know, put back together
Speaker 1: whatever we're breaking as we kind of trundle around. So
Speaker 1: I don't have any fantasy, you know, this whole idea
Speaker 1: that there's some hope that if we just all start,
Speaker 1: you know, stop drinking bottle water or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: or you know, driving prius, is that suddenly the Earth
Speaker 1: is going to be restored to this beautiful equilibrium and
Speaker 1: we won't have to think about these things anymore. I
Speaker 1: think is is sort of ludicrous. And I think that
Speaker 1: what we need to be doing is figuring out how
Speaker 1: to exist in this tussle of um priorities and clumsiness
Speaker 1: and uh, just kind of hashing it out. It's just
Speaker 1: like a it's like a brawl, you know. We just
Speaker 1: gotta be in there swinging away trying to fix all
Speaker 1: this stuff because we're going to be constantly destroying it
Speaker 1: all the time. Two, there's a quote you have for
Speaker 1: another piece you wrote that I wrote down the future
Speaker 1: is always somebody else's problem. It will very likely feel
Speaker 1: as authentic and only as horrific as our moment does
Speaker 1: to us. Yeah, I think I said, I think I a
Speaker 1: a should said the future is always somebody else's present,
Speaker 1: which is the shifting baselines thing? Is that what I say,
Speaker 1: problem probably right here in the future is always somebody
Speaker 1: else's present. Yeah, well very likely, I'm sorry, it will
Speaker 1: very likely feeling as authentic and only as horrific as
Speaker 1: our moment does us. They won't have a new people
Speaker 1: won't recalibrate to experience all other level of horrific. I
Speaker 1: hope not. I mean, that's I think even if Corman
Speaker 1: McCarthy's the road right, there's only so much anxiety to
Speaker 1: go around. I don't think you find a new way
Speaker 1: to achieve a new level of anxiety. It's normal, it's
Speaker 1: your normal. It's no. And I think the perfect example
Speaker 1: of it is going back to Hornaday is you're saying, now,
Speaker 1: he was lamenting that all the kids were playing indoors,
Speaker 1: none of the kids were getting outside enough. And what
Speaker 1: is our generation of with young kids lament about right now?
Speaker 1: You know, a hundred years later, it's the same thing, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we're, if anything, maybe we're less concerned than
Speaker 1: he was. You know, he was drive and nuts by that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm just living my life. I wish my kids played
Speaker 1: outside more, but I'm not writing writing screens about it.
Speaker 1: Have you read his book of going up into BC No,
Speaker 1: hunting mountain goats, grizzlies and big horns. That's Horny, right,
Speaker 1: You sent me that book? Yeah, camp fires in the
Speaker 1: Rocky No, I've never read that one. You haven't read it. No,
Speaker 1: he's a big game hunter. Yeah he liked it. Oh yeah, Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: how how big explained to me? How big a sequoia is.
Speaker 1: It's fucking big. I just read your piece about tekoia
Speaker 1: Is and you're as funny because in the beginning our
Speaker 1: guests John Wullen is saying, like, I suppose I need
Speaker 1: to talk about how big they are. Yeah, that's just
Speaker 1: everyone talks about how big they're, but no, let's focus
Speaker 1: on how big they are. I figured, I'm gonna sit
Speaker 1: down and write a piece about sequoia Is. I can't
Speaker 1: really try to be cute about it. We're gonna deal
Speaker 1: with this head on and just get it out of
Speaker 1: the way, because you really need to. Even if you're
Speaker 1: not going to understand the feeling of being next to
Speaker 1: something big that I'm telling you, you at least need
Speaker 1: to remember that. It's all it's the preoccupation. We can't
Speaker 1: gloss over it, but you you first off, um, before
Speaker 1: we talk about how big there, how did it come
Speaker 1: to be there that you did a piece about visiting
Speaker 1: the so the because it wasn't like a doom and
Speaker 1: gloom piece. No, So The Times magazine does a travel
Speaker 1: issue a couple of times a year, Yeah, a couple
Speaker 1: of times a year, and this one, this was about
Speaker 1: a year ago. Their idea was to just ask writers
Speaker 1: to go somewhere you've always wanted to go in the US. Um,
Speaker 1: you've never been before. And I mean there was a
Speaker 1: lot of places I wanted to go, And partially it
Speaker 1: was dictated by the timing. I didn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of times I need to go somewhere relatively close. Um,
Speaker 1: But I'd always I always wanted to go. I spend
Speaker 1: some time him in the Redwoods. But something about the Sequoias,
Speaker 1: And I think, honestly, it might just be the name.
Speaker 1: It might have just been the exotic nous of the name.
Speaker 1: You know, Redwood. You know it's all right there in Sequoia.
Speaker 1: There's a little more mystery to it. Um. It leaves
Speaker 1: something something to the imagination, it sure does. It feels
Speaker 1: a little more magical. Um. Yeah, that's just always been
Speaker 1: fascinated by him. So I just wanted to see what
Speaker 1: would happen if I went and stood around some really
Speaker 1: big trees. Yeah. It's a cool piece. And in it
Speaker 1: you're trying to you're struggling with how big they are.
Speaker 1: And one of the ways you express it would be
Speaker 1: that if you filled the biggest one is what's his name?
Speaker 1: I know that they used to call it the Carl
Speaker 1: Marks Generals General Sherman Tree. That it went from the
Speaker 1: Carl Marks Tree to the General sherw Is that the
Speaker 1: General Sherman Tree? I think, yeah, serm, they call it
Speaker 1: Sherman for short. Yeah, that if you filled that thing
Speaker 1: with water, you're saying, so it's the largest tree on
Speaker 1: earth by volume, and if you filled it with water,
Speaker 1: a person could draw a bath from that reservoir of
Speaker 1: water every single day for twenty seven years for exhausting
Speaker 1: the water. Or that a limb fell off it, So
Speaker 1: a branch off a coniferous tree seven ft thick on
Speaker 1: fifty ft long, and you point out that that would
Speaker 1: be one of the biggest that limb would be one
Speaker 1: of the biggest trees east of the Mississippi, west of
Speaker 1: the Mississippi, east of the Mississippi. Sorry, big damn trees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the kind of thing that drove it home
Speaker 1: for me. Yeah, I've never heard that one. A branch
Speaker 1: that's seven ft across. Yeah, Yeah, that one gets repeated
Speaker 1: a lot around the park. Yeah. What's funny is you
Speaker 1: talking the piece about how you wanted to take a photo.
Speaker 1: How frustrating is like you cannot take a photo of
Speaker 1: the tree because people looking at it will just they'll
Speaker 1: shrink the other trees. So the trees that it's towering above,
Speaker 1: they'll be like, oh, those are shrubs, and your head
Speaker 1: will always make the tree makes sense. And John though
Speaker 1: about how he finally gets a picture that he really
Speaker 1: likes and sends to a friend and she mistakes it
Speaker 1: for a tree in his backyard. Yeah, it was amazing.
Speaker 1: Not everything I did to try to get a good
Speaker 1: picture of these trees backfire, like I had. At one point,
Speaker 1: I had someone take a picture of me on a
Speaker 1: on a ridge overlooking five or six sequoias, right, and
Speaker 1: so that all that's in the picture is me and
Speaker 1: these sequoias. And when you look at it, you think
Speaker 1: that I'm standing in front of a few regular sized
Speaker 1: trees that are right behind me instead of like two
Speaker 1: feet behind me, because your eye just brings them right up.
Speaker 1: It just finds a way to make them seem normal.
Speaker 1: Like it doesn't want to deal with it. It just
Speaker 1: can't deal with it. It just can't deal with it.
Speaker 1: But when you get up to it, do you feel it? Then? Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I really did. I'm not a as we discussed, I'm
Speaker 1: not a nature writer in the in the sense of
Speaker 1: someone who wants to go stand next to tree and
Speaker 1: feel things. Uh, but yeah, I mean it's hard to say.
Speaker 1: I was there to go see what it's like, to
Speaker 1: see what it feels like to be next to a tree.
Speaker 1: So I was, you know, turned on a little bit
Speaker 1: more than if I was just walking around. But I
Speaker 1: cannot see how that those trees can disappoint you if
Speaker 1: you go to see them. Um, I mean, if you do,
Speaker 1: I think there's something dead inside in you. Can you
Speaker 1: touch real quick on as well as you remember it?
Speaker 1: Can you touch real quick on? Uh? The sort of
Speaker 1: history with this utopian colony, yeah, yeah, and how they
Speaker 1: wanted to finance their colony, so there was a Kawak colony.
Speaker 1: So the history of the park was really interesting in
Speaker 1: the sense that, ah, you know, we think about these
Speaker 1: um well, there's a couple of things. First is that
Speaker 1: people have always been trying to cut down the sequoias
Speaker 1: from the time that you know, white people discovered them.
Speaker 1: They thought it's a bonanza, right, these huge trees. And
Speaker 1: the problem with sequoias is you can't really cut them
Speaker 1: down very well because they splinter, so they would there
Speaker 1: were a lot of trees that were cut down and
Speaker 1: then just basically you could starts to Yeah, well when
Speaker 1: when it hits the ground, just it's not good lumber.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people wasted a lot of trees
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to use them as resources
Speaker 1: and just couldn't figure it out. Um, but they kept trying.
Speaker 1: So in any case, this, uh, there was a federal
Speaker 1: act that was encouraging people timber and stone actively was
Speaker 1: called that was encouraging people to go out west and
Speaker 1: and uh, you know log trees. And this group of
Speaker 1: people in San Francisco who are socialists, utopian socialist decided
Speaker 1: that they were gonna team up and buy a lot
Speaker 1: of land inside what is now Sequoia National Park. Um.
Speaker 1: And this was gonna be how they were going to
Speaker 1: fund their utopia was by cutting down trees. And I
Speaker 1: don't know how you do remember how long they were
Speaker 1: the first they had to build a road. Well, interesting
Speaker 1: thing about it was because they all lived together other
Speaker 1: yeah they were, they were, They all had the same address.
Speaker 1: And they found that corporations would do bogus stuff with
Speaker 1: to do land claims. So their land came claim got
Speaker 1: messed up because they thought it was just a corporation
Speaker 1: using fictitious names. Right, Yeah, Well that's the end of
Speaker 1: the story. That's the whole beginning of the story, is
Speaker 1: that they actually got the land and started building road,
Speaker 1: started building a w They spent a year or something
Speaker 1: cutting this road, you know, straight uphill for miles to
Speaker 1: get to the biggest stand of sequoias, to chop them down,
Speaker 1: to chop them down. And this whole time there's a
Speaker 1: there's a kind of a clerical error, you know, there's
Speaker 1: a bureaucratic wrangling over their claims because, as you say,
Speaker 1: there was that sort of raised the red flag that
Speaker 1: they all had the same address at this time corporation.
Speaker 1: They would just go into saloons and they'd you know,
Speaker 1: buy someone a beer to go down to the to
Speaker 1: the office and and make a claim on a piece
Speaker 1: of land so that they could buy it back from them.
Speaker 1: So the fact that all these utopians where you you
Speaker 1: all lived, or using the same address, um made them
Speaker 1: seem like a corporation. So in any case, this is
Speaker 1: all play out. They just they're building their roads on
Speaker 1: good faith that eventually the government's going to see that
Speaker 1: this is an honest mistake and validate their claim. But
Speaker 1: in the meantime, it was actually partially due to the
Speaker 1: railroad interests who wanted to build the railroad along a
Speaker 1: certain route. Uh, they built, they founded sequ federal government
Speaker 1: found in sequa National Park and stripped them of their claim,
Speaker 1: which they never officially had in the first place. So
Speaker 1: they had improved all this land. So the big government
Speaker 1: coming in and screwing the social screw and the socialists
Speaker 1: at the behest of large corporations in order to create
Speaker 1: a national park and preserve this kind of national natural treasure.
Speaker 1: How far we've come, it's all scrambled up. How far.
Speaker 1: It's really hard to see the you know, the typical
Speaker 1: good guys and bad guys in that in that story.
Speaker 1: And they but they recognized the tree is they knew
Speaker 1: like the biggest one Sherman. They recognized it as like, man,
Speaker 1: though there's a tree. Yeah, they did. The Coral Mark
Speaker 1: Street they did. They used to have picnics under it,
Speaker 1: and they were they would have cut it down anything.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, they had a lot of
Speaker 1: tree used to go through. I mean I also wonder
Speaker 1: if they would have maybe figured out pretty quickly that
Speaker 1: these trees were not going to really you know, no
Speaker 1: one had figured out a way to basically monetize these trees. Um,
Speaker 1: and they were just optimistic enough to figure that they
Speaker 1: could do it. I guess how lucky for the sequoia
Speaker 1: is they're not good for longer. That's right. It's a
Speaker 1: touching article. Then I liked it, thanks, Um, And then
Speaker 1: I still want to come background and talk about your
Speaker 1: piece about Petals the Bear. Yeah, Petals the Bear. A
Speaker 1: little synopsis there, Yeah, because you were asked to write
Speaker 1: about influential people, right, so the influential people of what
Speaker 1: year this was? Last year? This is so the magazine
Speaker 1: also does a lot the lives they lived. It's an issue.
Speaker 1: It's like obituaries. It's a bituaries. It's every year between
Speaker 1: Christmas and New Year's where there's you know, remarkable people
Speaker 1: that have died. Each get a short essay about them.
Speaker 1: And the idea I think is, you know you've got
Speaker 1: your big you know, your David Bowie's people like that.
Speaker 1: You know they'll be definitely some of those, But I
Speaker 1: think the bulk of the issue is always devoted to
Speaker 1: people who you may not have heard of, but you
Speaker 1: know they've had this profound impact in one way or another,
Speaker 1: and so it's a it's a good time to kind
Speaker 1: of look back on the people who maybe didn't get
Speaker 1: their due, either in life or in the year in
Speaker 1: which they died. Is I'm doing one right now by
Speaker 1: a sociologist that no one's ever heard of. Um, but
Speaker 1: last year I did one about a bear, which I
Speaker 1: think was maybe the only the second time there had
Speaker 1: been an animal. I can't say it was the first thing.
Speaker 1: They had also done one about the Remember when the
Speaker 1: chimp tore off the woman's face. Yeah, so the chimp
Speaker 1: got one? Yeah, um, but yeah, pedals the bear was earlier.
Speaker 1: Speaking of chimps earlier, I was trying to think of
Speaker 1: ways to explain horn today, and I was thinking, what
Speaker 1: if Jane Goodall had gone out to shoot chimps as
Speaker 1: the way of having a couple of stuffed ones laying around,
Speaker 1: this would be a very different story. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: that's a good way to think about I think that's
Speaker 1: exactly what it must have been like. Instead, she's like,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm no, hold off on that and
Speaker 1: try to do um but no, but she was just
Speaker 1: studying them anyways. I didn't mention because I didn't think
Speaker 1: it was a good analogy, but it did cross my mind.
Speaker 1: But yeah, pebbles, pedals, Pedals show some respect for the dead. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Pedals was a black black bear in New Jersey, Northern
Speaker 1: New Jersey, which is also where I grew up. And
Speaker 1: he had some kind of injury or deformity on his
Speaker 1: paws and uh so he had learned to walk upright.
Speaker 1: So he spent a lot of time just cruising around
Speaker 1: through suburban neighborhoods on his hind legs. Had an affinity
Speaker 1: for bird feeders. Yeah, I'm sure in garbage cans and
Speaker 1: so people would you know, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: videos of Pedals on the internet because it was crazy looking,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean it looked at People would always
Speaker 1: describe it as looking like a man in a bear suit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He would go quite a few steps. He was good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he can move, He can move, and so they called
Speaker 1: him Pedals. Uh. And then he was shot by bow
Speaker 1: hunter I believe um or as one. I can't remember
Speaker 1: what publication in New York he was assassinated. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: had been a big there had been a big effort
Speaker 1: to I mean, what I was basically writing about was
Speaker 1: the big argument that unfolded the summer before he died,
Speaker 1: about what to do about him, whether there was a
Speaker 1: big camp of uh, you know, pro pedals partisans who
Speaker 1: believed that he needed to be brought in from the
Speaker 1: wild and sent to a rehab facility to live out
Speaker 1: his days. And deeper background is that when we talked
Speaker 1: about how many is enough, uh, New Jersey had very
Speaker 1: successfully this is me talking about New Jersey had very
Speaker 1: successfully recovered the black bear to the point where the
Speaker 1: state Fish and Game Agency felt that, in execution of
Speaker 1: their mandate about allowing democratic access to renewable resources, felt
Speaker 1: that the species had been recovered enough that it was
Speaker 1: warranted to allow hunting for couple of reasons, One because
Speaker 1: there was a a harvestable surplus of the animals and
Speaker 1: two that they had hit a point where they felt
Speaker 1: that they could not have anymore or somewhere needed the
Speaker 1: lower populations to limit their spread into higher conflict areas.
Speaker 1: So this is a determination they made, and they allowed,
Speaker 1: and they came up with a quota system and started
Speaker 1: a bear season. And I think petals people, I knew
Speaker 1: what this might mean for pedals, and I think pedals
Speaker 1: people all along. I mean that that decision to reinstate
Speaker 1: the bear hunt did not go down well, along a
Speaker 1: huge share of the population New Jersey. So I think
Speaker 1: a lot of the the feeling for pedals was already triggering,
Speaker 1: you know, triggered by a lot of upset over the
Speaker 1: fact that bears are being hunted. Petals became a proxy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's always a proxy, isn't it? Because people can't because
Speaker 1: not people. A lot of people can't think species level. Yes,
Speaker 1: they can only think individual level. I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And even when comprehending their own species, I find that
Speaker 1: a lot of people do not think species level. When
Speaker 1: I hear that a plane went down, and then I
Speaker 1: see that that plane went down in Belarus, I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: glad it wasn't America, right, Or if a plane went
Speaker 1: down in America, I quickly like run in my head,
Speaker 1: would that be a flight that people I know would
Speaker 1: be on? I wouldn't know anyone on that plane. So
Speaker 1: we do. We have a difficult time with species level
Speaker 1: thinking about we focus on the known and finite. Well,
Speaker 1: especially when you give the animal name and it becomes
Speaker 1: a Internet celebrity and yeah, so go on, so follow
Speaker 1: us through on pebbles. Well, so in the you know,
Speaker 1: as petals rises to fail. Can call them pebbles. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Pedal lung was the Yeah, that's because stepping
Speaker 1: on the joke here, pebbles is the flintstone girl is
Speaker 1: not pedals because he like with pedal lungs. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: had wheel he's moving. Uh so. Yeah. So there was
Speaker 1: a there's a lot of talk about what to do
Speaker 1: about pedals and a lot of anger that among you know,
Speaker 1: this one side of the debate that the state was
Speaker 1: not helping pedals, that the compassionate thing to do would
Speaker 1: be to bring pedals out of the wild, you know,
Speaker 1: and let him live in captivity. And when we want
Speaker 1: to say captivity, I mean, you know, at some sort
Speaker 1: of sanctuary, not in And what was the state's attitude
Speaker 1: towards the state's attitude was this bear has adapted to
Speaker 1: its condition, seems to be doing well. It's doing all
Speaker 1: the things the bear needs to do to survive. The
Speaker 1: compassionate thing to do is to let the bear be wild.
Speaker 1: And that's what intrigued me, is that fundamental predicament where
Speaker 1: both sides at the same exact facts and both wanted
Speaker 1: to do the compassionate thing and had completely different ideas
Speaker 1: about how to how to do it, and then he
Speaker 1: was then he was killed, so the debate was over.
Speaker 1: You didn't have any chance to talk to the guy
Speaker 1: that got it, did you know? So that no, one,
Speaker 1: that's not public information because there were some rumors about
Speaker 1: various people who you were the hunter who took Pedals down,
Speaker 1: and those people received death threats, and so I think
Speaker 1: one actually sued some people for defamation after that, for
Speaker 1: outing his name or suggesting that he was the Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know what what ended up with that, but yeah,
Speaker 1: so it was very tense, and I do wonder about
Speaker 1: the guy that got it. I'd like to imagine that
Speaker 1: he was not I hope that he was just not aware. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's the question I asked in the pieces. We
Speaker 1: don't know if so Pedals did not own stand on too.
Speaker 1: I mean, he he did walk around on all fours
Speaker 1: like a regular bear at times. So it's possible, you
Speaker 1: know that whoever killed Pedals caught him on all four,
Speaker 1: caught him on all fours, had no way of knowing
Speaker 1: those different bear on the other On the other hand,
Speaker 1: if the bear was upright, then the very thing that
Speaker 1: made Pedals such a survivor ultimately probably drew attention to
Speaker 1: him caused his death, which I think it's a sad irony. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I imagine New Jersey's a state where you have
Speaker 1: to report your harvest immediately upon kill jeckstation, and they
Speaker 1: knew the minute it pulled up. I read the Once
Speaker 1: pedals showed up, They're like, oh god, yeah, well, pals
Speaker 1: nature of the deformity. Well, I believe I could have
Speaker 1: this wrong. I believe he was missing one paw and
Speaker 1: the other was either it was sort of bent inward,
Speaker 1: so it was kind of useless. Um. Yeah. And and
Speaker 1: I should stipulate here that the state to this day
Speaker 1: does not um confirmed at pedals was the bear that
Speaker 1: was brought to the check station. They will just say
Speaker 1: that it fit pedals description because they've never tagged pedals
Speaker 1: and so they don't like to identify the bear. Um So,
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's significant. Anyway, I thought it
Speaker 1: was sort of interesting that there's a sort of shrouding
Speaker 1: or bear aspect to it. You know that even even
Speaker 1: that is uncertain, you know, technically, That's where it always
Speaker 1: makes me cringe. We have a running joke about like
Speaker 1: New Jersey cat ladies, but it always makes me cringe
Speaker 1: when people who I feel like aren't equipped to begin
Speaker 1: talking about wildlife when they enter wildlife conversations, like they
Speaker 1: haven't really earned their place at the table in my
Speaker 1: in my opinion and my estimation, they haven't earned their
Speaker 1: place at the table. And I don't think that a
Speaker 1: position at the table is reliant on the fact that
Speaker 1: your pro extraction of wildlife resources are pro use. I
Speaker 1: feel like you can have a place at the table
Speaker 1: and be ardently anti hunting or anti use of renewable resources.
Speaker 1: It's like, sure, I welcome those conversations, but oftentimes there's
Speaker 1: little things will happen that all of a sudden just
Speaker 1: invite people who are ill prepared, not up to speed,
Speaker 1: to like get in on it. And that was one
Speaker 1: of those cases where all of a sudden, just everyone
Speaker 1: kind of became a bear expert for a minute, and
Speaker 1: you saw a similar thing happened. There was no poster
Speaker 1: child for it. But like, did you write about or
Speaker 1: follow and and like you know you, I want to
Speaker 1: ask you about hunting the deer in your yard, but um,
Speaker 1: did did you follow the Florida bear hunt? When Florida
Speaker 1: went through a similar thing and initiated a yeah. They
Speaker 1: said they had a population estimate of bears in Florida.
Speaker 1: Um that it's just based on modeling, so it's a
Speaker 1: soft number. They set a quota for their bear season.
Speaker 1: They opened the season up I think it was in
Speaker 1: two days. They were getting close to this. In two days,
Speaker 1: they got close enough to their quota, their mortality quota,
Speaker 1: that they shut the season down because were they to
Speaker 1: run it a whole other day. They felt that they
Speaker 1: might go over the quota, so they shut it off
Speaker 1: before they hit their mortality cap. Some of the world looks,
Speaker 1: some of the country looks at this and says, wow,
Speaker 1: Florida did a great job with bears. It almost seems
Speaker 1: like their model was low and they have more bears
Speaker 1: than they thought they had. They planned out this hunt
Speaker 1: and had all the measures put in place to make
Speaker 1: sure that they didn't surpass their mortality quota, had the
Speaker 1: restraint and conservative management strategy to shut down before reaching
Speaker 1: their quota. What a successful launch of a bear hunt.
Speaker 1: Hooray for Florida, or as some um as one I
Speaker 1: can't Another New York online news magazine I can't remember
Speaker 1: the name of put it at Florida executes two bears
Speaker 1: like or there's that version, you know, and the fact
Speaker 1: that these two versions can just exist together out there,
Speaker 1: it's just like it befuddles me. But I think it's
Speaker 1: this kind of conversation we're having in general now about
Speaker 1: the polarized nature of America. Yeah, I mean, I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, this kind of partisan deadlock that everything is
Speaker 1: about now the wildlife people, this is like the most
Speaker 1: familiar thing in the world, right that, like I was
Speaker 1: saying before, two sides can have the exact same information,
Speaker 1: see the situation completely differently and not want to budge.
Speaker 1: That's the story of wildlife, but also in the case
Speaker 1: that in this case kind of sort of want the
Speaker 1: same thing. If you went to said do you want
Speaker 1: to have a stable, well managed population of bears in Florida,
Speaker 1: I feel that most people will be like, yep. But
Speaker 1: then the next question would reveal all those differences, you know, well,
Speaker 1: because it comes down to killing. Yeah, I mean, if
Speaker 1: you are against hunting an animal, I don't see how
Speaker 1: you can argue your way into feeling good about it.
Speaker 1: You know, if it's morally reprehensible to you. Now want
Speaker 1: to get personal with you if you don't mind, sure,
Speaker 1: you like we I've been at your home and we
Speaker 1: looked at the deer and talked about the deer out
Speaker 1: in your home, Like how is it? Uh? What is
Speaker 1: this sort of your thing? Like if you imagine, just
Speaker 1: like as a writer or whatever, if you imagine like
Speaker 1: like you eat some meat, not a ton of it,
Speaker 1: but eat some or would you yeah, and you'll eat
Speaker 1: dear meat? What do you think about? And I'm honestly
Speaker 1: curious about this because I like, like I said, you
Speaker 1: you in my mind, you very much earned your seat
Speaker 1: at the table. Like I'm like, what do you think
Speaker 1: when you imagine that when you imagine yourself, like like
Speaker 1: shooting a deer to eat, Like, what are sort of
Speaker 1: the pros and cons that run through your head or
Speaker 1: the like the emotional wrestling or whatever it is that
Speaker 1: happens in your head. I have many times imagine myself
Speaker 1: shooting a deer that walked through my property, maybe not
Speaker 1: with a gun, maybe with more with a bow, for
Speaker 1: for aesthetic reasons or uh for or earthquake preparedness in
Speaker 1: an earthquake is sort of a posts just because it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be pictured with the bo Yeah, I guess I
Speaker 1: just pictured suffering I have some discomfort around guns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that it would suffer a little longer before it died. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I would suffer less. I don't know. I guess
Speaker 1: I haven't thought of that. I haven't thought that's a
Speaker 1: good case. Maybe I should start thinking about it. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess because I don't have a gun, but my
Speaker 1: daughter has a boat, so I can shoo. Gives you
Speaker 1: a way to start picturing it. Yeah, okay, I'm also pictured.
Speaker 1: I mean this is way crueler. But like so, I'm
Speaker 1: writing a book about an earthquake right now, so I
Speaker 1: constantly I'm looking at the world around me thinking about
Speaker 1: if there were an earthquake a second. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: sort of running in the background all the time. And
Speaker 1: I have so that has made me. And also on
Speaker 1: Bainbridge Island, you're told to be prepared for I think
Speaker 1: two weeks because the idea is that there's a bridge
Speaker 1: that connects to the island to the peninsula that may
Speaker 1: or may not by an earthquake, and that the ferry
Speaker 1: service man are run and so you know, supplies and whatnot.
Speaker 1: We'll have it difficult because when when it hits, they
Speaker 1: imagine a mass tsunami, well, I don't. That's something I
Speaker 1: need to research because I've been I haven't looked in
Speaker 1: that myself, but I don't know that Bambridge is necessarily
Speaker 1: risk of a tsunami, but the faerry boats, oh yes,
Speaker 1: well yeah, uh so I have actually thought and this
Speaker 1: was a while ago, but I do remember thinking, like
Speaker 1: looking around and being like, it happens right now? What
Speaker 1: do I do? How do how does my family eat?
Speaker 1: You know? I mean, we have an earthquake kit, but
Speaker 1: it's probably not good for two weeks. And I thought,
Speaker 1: we have a garden right with a fence around it,
Speaker 1: And I thought, this is how far I was going.
Speaker 1: I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I thought, is
Speaker 1: there a way to lure a deer into the garden?
Speaker 1: Locked the gate and then it's just hand to hand? Right? Well? Then,
Speaker 1: well I didn't have any you don't have any? I
Speaker 1: have an ax, right, but like that that would be
Speaker 1: the first step maybe, right. So this is my experience
Speaker 1: with hunting so far, is that this level that sort
Speaker 1: of fantasy, fantasy makes it sound goods It took no
Speaker 1: pleasure in it, but you realize that that's not The
Speaker 1: axe is not a legal method. Of take well, you're
Speaker 1: not apocalyptic now un plus earthquake, it's apocalypic But yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's I've just emptied all of my thoughts regarding
Speaker 1: killing deer. That's all I've thought about. That's the extent
Speaker 1: of it. It's gonna make me think about it more now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well just because I'm a little bit curious, just only
Speaker 1: because I sat there and talked and looked at the
Speaker 1: deer trails cutting through the yard with you, and like
Speaker 1: I said, I just want to like find where you
Speaker 1: are so you would never like you you you, And
Speaker 1: I'm definitely not trying to I'm not not trying to
Speaker 1: like like unveil or reveal some sort of inherent hypocrisy
Speaker 1: or whatever. But you will buy flesh. Yeah, So what
Speaker 1: is it that, like, what is it that you don't
Speaker 1: go like, oh, I'll just shoot these deer and eat them.
Speaker 1: I don't think I I've I don't think I'm squeamish
Speaker 1: about that. I don't think I would have a problem hunting.
Speaker 1: It's just something I don't do. This is just like
Speaker 1: a lack of interest. I've never been Yeah, I've never
Speaker 1: been driven to go try I did go once, you know,
Speaker 1: I went with a friend of mine went elk hunting.
Speaker 1: I couldn't fire the gun or we didn't even see
Speaker 1: any elk that day, but you know, I was curious
Speaker 1: to see what it was like. Um, I'm not actually
Speaker 1: anti hunting, you know, I don't have I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't know how any aversion to it. Uh. I my
Speaker 1: entire life have gone to supermarket. I used to be
Speaker 1: a butcher, right, so I've been on that side of
Speaker 1: it too. Um, I'm someone who goes to the store
Speaker 1: and buys me. I'm not someone who kills it myself.
Speaker 1: And I and I don't have I don't have to.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what it comes down to a lot
Speaker 1: of things. I could make my own clothing, right, but
Speaker 1: it's for the same reason I've never been drawn to
Speaker 1: do that. I've tried. I've made that point. It's whnny
Speaker 1: you bring that up about making your own clothing, because
Speaker 1: I've made and when I've been interviewed, I've been asked
Speaker 1: by people often times like they're like, so you think
Speaker 1: that everybody should go out and shoot it, you know
Speaker 1: that's what you think the only legitimate and I always
Speaker 1: point out, no, Um, there are a lot of things
Speaker 1: that people used to have to do that I don't
Speaker 1: do myself, like process my own raw sewage, stitch my
Speaker 1: own clothes. Right, I've bowed out of all kinds of
Speaker 1: stuff and allowed people to step in and handle it
Speaker 1: for me. It just happens to me that that handful
Speaker 1: growing vegetables is very important to me. I guess like
Speaker 1: I've really centered around food ideas. Like somehow food remains
Speaker 1: like like being in the driver's seat as much as
Speaker 1: possible on food remains very important to me. I feel
Speaker 1: the same way. I think I just haven't gone as
Speaker 1: far as you have gone, you know it. I think
Speaker 1: we have the same philosophy. It's just I I have
Speaker 1: not executed it to the degree that you have to
Speaker 1: the extent. Yeah, So you don't imagine anytime soon you're
Speaker 1: gonna take up deer hunting, I don't. I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I want you to so bad. Why because
Speaker 1: I want you to write about it? Huh, I mean
Speaker 1: I might that might be the most likely context in
Speaker 1: which I would go hunting. To be honest, well maybe
Speaker 1: maybe they will, all right. I want to strongly steer
Speaker 1: you away from the acts situation. Yeah, I was to
Speaker 1: kind of put mine, not even te on the table,
Speaker 1: just as a baseline for the rest of the conversation.
Speaker 1: But you don't do cheesy, Yeah, you don't do cheesy
Speaker 1: cold open though. Yeah, like I sharp the sharpened axe
Speaker 1: was raised over my head. No. If I was driven
Speaker 1: to kill an ax in my garden, inside my garden fence,
Speaker 1: kill a deer inside my garden fence with an ax
Speaker 1: after an earthquake, I would probably write about it. That
Speaker 1: seems like a remarkable experience that should be documented somewhere.
Speaker 1: But I hope it doesn't come to that. If it
Speaker 1: came that, you would later when when tapping into the
Speaker 1: old well, you would you would just stumble upon that
Speaker 1: story eventually. Yeah, all right, the last thing, do you
Speaker 1: guys got I want the last thing. I want to
Speaker 1: talk about the new book. But but um, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about that. Then you can ask your final questions. Are
Speaker 1: you guys good to move on to the new book? Yes?
Speaker 1: To what degree are you comfortable talking about your new book? Oh?
Speaker 1: I'm comfortable with it. Because here's the thing. A lot
Speaker 1: of the people listen to the show have an intense
Speaker 1: interest in Alaska because they come at it from a
Speaker 1: hunting and fishing perspective, and that's like, you know, well
Speaker 1: known for that kind of stuff. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you're aware a lot of people kill them deers with
Speaker 1: access out there, That's what I've heard. So, yeah, talk
Speaker 1: about talk about the book. Well, in my book has
Speaker 1: everything to do with Alaska and almost nothing to do
Speaker 1: with hunting and fishing. But um, this was actually grew
Speaker 1: out of a project I did for a podcast Visible, which, UM,
Speaker 1: you know, anyone listening to this who wants to go
Speaker 1: check that out would would get a lot better understanding
Speaker 1: of it. Um. Can you also do talk about the
Speaker 1: the show as you do with the Yeah. So this
Speaker 1: was a project I did with a bunch of musicians
Speaker 1: who are um in the band called the Decembers. So
Speaker 1: it was, you know, everyone but one member of the
Speaker 1: Decembers used to be in this uh other band and
Speaker 1: who I've done some collaborations with over the years. Um,
Speaker 1: it's sort of tricking out because they don't evenet they
Speaker 1: have a name anymore, but they used to be called
Speaker 1: Black Prairie. So we uh, we basically do these projects
Speaker 1: where um, I tell a story and they write a
Speaker 1: score to the story. UM, and often songs, uh, sort
Speaker 1: of based on characters. They did a soundtrack for wild
Speaker 1: Ones where they wrote songs about in the book. They
Speaker 1: wrote a song about horn today. Yeah. Um, it sounds
Speaker 1: a little weird, but it works out all right. And
Speaker 1: so in this last project uh we did for Visible,
Speaker 1: it's called This is Chance, which is probably gonna be
Speaker 1: the name of the book as well. And it was
Speaker 1: about the nineteen sixty four earthquake uh in Alaska. Uh.
Speaker 1: Mostly mostly I'm dealing with anchorage. Uh and I'm just
Speaker 1: basically telling the story of the first three or four
Speaker 1: days after the earthquake. UM. And thankfully I found just
Speaker 1: a tremendous amount of archival material that's letting me do
Speaker 1: that in a really intimate, um detail oriented way. Can
Speaker 1: you talking about just how big and bad that earthquake was.
Speaker 1: It was a nine point two earthquake. Uh, it was.
Speaker 1: It was so big that uh it's hard. It's hard.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's yeah, it's hard. It's it really is
Speaker 1: like the sequoise in the sense that it's your mind
Speaker 1: cannot accept, you know, sort of it has no way
Speaker 1: to endo it the size. But well, like the Richter
Speaker 1: Scare scale end at ten, well, the Richter scales exponential
Speaker 1: A nine is ten times worse than the eight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it does it end of ten. I don't know, how
Speaker 1: can there be an end? Right? Well, that's yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know, because you just know how bad the earth
Speaker 1: can get bump bound up. Yeah, I mean this is
Speaker 1: a you know some of what I what I find
Speaker 1: really interesting about um this it may be true of
Speaker 1: all earthquakes, but the degree to which the damage was
Speaker 1: sort of freakishly random, you know, I mean it wasn't random,
Speaker 1: and not everything to do with the underlying geology and whatnot,
Speaker 1: but just looking at pictures of the damage. You know,
Speaker 1: you have on Fourth Avenue, which is sort of the
Speaker 1: main drag of Anchorage, you had one side of the
Speaker 1: street which for two and a half three blocks sank
Speaker 1: about just in place where you know, all the buildings
Speaker 1: were still mostly intact, had cars parked next to the
Speaker 1: parking meters just twenty below. You had guys coming out
Speaker 1: of bars, you know, just looking up trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how they're gonna get out the other side of
Speaker 1: the street. Totally fine, you know. And uh, I was
Speaker 1: telling John today that my brother hunts ducks in a
Speaker 1: marsh that used to be farm land, but it just
Speaker 1: instantly shot downward and became underwater. Yeah, there was an
Speaker 1: entire little town called Portage. We were saying earlier that
Speaker 1: is the same same scenario. Um. Yeah, So so this
Speaker 1: the the magnitude and the destruction from this quake for
Speaker 1: pretty catastrophic, and yet the death toll was was miraculously small.
Speaker 1: I think there was a hundred and eleven people um
Speaker 1: around Alaska, and that included that may or may not
Speaker 1: include a handful of people that died from Tsunami's down
Speaker 1: in the lower forty eight as well, um partially because
Speaker 1: there just wasn't the population density in in Alaska or
Speaker 1: even an Anchorage at that time. But happened on Good Friday.
Speaker 1: So what I'm writing about is the story is mostly
Speaker 1: focused around a radio station in Anchorage called k E
Speaker 1: and I, which was sort of like the community radio station.
Speaker 1: You know, they were the people around town. Everyone knew
Speaker 1: the broadcasters. And there was a woman who were at
Speaker 1: part time at the station named Genie Chance, who for
Speaker 1: variety of reason wound up um sort of being recognized
Speaker 1: as a voice that carried UM a lot of Alaska
Speaker 1: through that quake. And it was her voice that UM
Speaker 1: just solely by coincidence, wound up being played all over
Speaker 1: the world. UM, both her giving reports to stations all
Speaker 1: over the world, but also just recordings of her that
Speaker 1: people are picked up outside of Anchorage on the station,
Speaker 1: just doing local announcements about you know people, you know
Speaker 1: so and so, your brother is at this place, he's fine.
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of reconnecting the community. So I'm following
Speaker 1: her story and she just turned out to be a
Speaker 1: totally fascinating character both before and after the quake, and
Speaker 1: then a couple of other people around Anchorage at that time,
Speaker 1: taking them through these these first few days. Uh, just
Speaker 1: of that good Friday Easter weekend. When did she die?
Speaker 1: She died in the nineties. She actually went on to
Speaker 1: be um a state legislature legislator in Alaska for a
Speaker 1: few years and had a pretty distinguished career and UM
Speaker 1: it was really remembered as uh, you know, really fondly
Speaker 1: by people there for you know, she was real big
Speaker 1: on kind of feminist issues at a time when that
Speaker 1: was not necessarily that was real popular, UM and did
Speaker 1: a lot of work with she had, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: been abused by her husband at the time around the
Speaker 1: time of the earthquake, she was in this kind of
Speaker 1: you know, tough marriage that way, and uh came out
Speaker 1: of it and did a lot of work for um,
Speaker 1: you know, other women suffering from that as a legislator
Speaker 1: and uh so, yeah, so I'm not necessarily dealing with
Speaker 1: her later life all that much, although I am, I
Speaker 1: am looking into it, but uh yeah, I think there's
Speaker 1: just something that really captivated me about the unpredictability, you know,
Speaker 1: the way that that lay a situation like that lays
Speaker 1: bare just how chaotic the earth is, and you know,
Speaker 1: just I want to say metaphorically but not really even metaphorically,
Speaker 1: just literally just the uncertainty that we all kind of
Speaker 1: have to live with. And then what do you do
Speaker 1: when when that cleaves your world right open and all
Speaker 1: these things that you thought, you you know, you took
Speaker 1: for granted just the way things were just aren't true anymore, which,
Speaker 1: you know, more and more seems like a condition where
Speaker 1: male of us are living with two So uh yeah,
Speaker 1: what was her name again, Genie Chance? What jumped in
Speaker 1: my mind when you're talking about that as the woman
Speaker 1: who won fulsome New Mexico was destroyed by flash flood
Speaker 1: there was a woman working the switchboard trying to alert
Speaker 1: everyone and stayed at the post and was killed. Huh.
Speaker 1: I mean that sacrificed herself to the That's an interesting thing,
Speaker 1: you know, when I as it didn't take long after
Speaker 1: I started doing just the basic research for this book
Speaker 1: that I realized that as remarkable as her story was
Speaker 1: and what she did was, there were lots of other people,
Speaker 1: even just around Anchorage, you know, Ham radio operators who
Speaker 1: stayed up for thirty six hours just relaying messages to
Speaker 1: the South forty eight. All sorts of people were doing
Speaker 1: miraculous things. This is what I was telling you before,
Speaker 1: is that just so happened that this sociology research institute
Speaker 1: had been set up at Ohio State a few months
Speaker 1: before the earthquake, and their whole thing was they were
Speaker 1: going to study the way people behaved in natural disasters
Speaker 1: after in the aftermath, and they were bankrolled by the military.
Speaker 1: The military he thought this was a like a natural
Speaker 1: laboratory in which to study nuclear war. What was gonna happen,
Speaker 1: what was pandemonium was gonna unfold after a nuclear strike?
Speaker 1: And how are we gonna, uh, you know, control it
Speaker 1: or minimize it? And it turned out that these saci'oll
Speaker 1: just who came to Alaska. This was their first big
Speaker 1: chance to study a real disaster, and they did hundreds
Speaker 1: of interviews around town, documented everything, and I you know,
Speaker 1: have access to their materials. There's a big way I'm
Speaker 1: telling this story. You know, they started to look around.
Speaker 1: They realize it's not at all what you know, the
Speaker 1: military thinks it's gonna be. It's is a lot of
Speaker 1: people acting very heroically, commonly, rationally, collaboratively. Um. And that's
Speaker 1: the way these aftermaths tend to play out. You know,
Speaker 1: sometimes there's mismanagement by authorities. You know, looting turns out
Speaker 1: to be mostly just a myth. Um although as soon
Speaker 1: as anything looks like looting, it gets widely reported because
Speaker 1: you know, the fear of looting is is very high. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, they just kind of that was the beg.
Speaker 1: That Alaska study was really the beginning of like a
Speaker 1: half century of social science just debunking a lot of
Speaker 1: these very pessimistic myths about human nature. That stuff for
Speaker 1: siss because I think there's still this thing when people
Speaker 1: who are into disaster preparedness, like when I imagine my
Speaker 1: own because I live in a seismically active area. When
Speaker 1: I imagine my own disaster preparedness, I like to think
Speaker 1: that there's some room in my mind for, um ways
Speaker 1: in which I would assist my neighbors. But a lot
Speaker 1: of guys start thinking about disaster preparedness and they're out
Speaker 1: shopping for a gun with which they will use to
Speaker 1: kill their neighbors. I feel like there's like two mentalities
Speaker 1: at Yeah. And even though we see it again again,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, it's funny because I'm just writing
Speaker 1: about about this a little bit. And and uh, even
Speaker 1: like this year and all that disasters we've had this year,
Speaker 1: and there have been so many great stories about you know,
Speaker 1: just ordinary local people helping each other, but it's always
Speaker 1: framed as this very surprising thing. You know, this it's
Speaker 1: just as who we are in Houston, you know, like
Speaker 1: we help one another, but actually, you know everyone, it's
Speaker 1: who everyone is, right, um, And so there's this weird
Speaker 1: mix of it we just can't quite accept. Uh, you
Speaker 1: know that maybe the goodness is not so special all
Speaker 1: you know that it's this it should be very reassuring,
Speaker 1: but it just feels deflating something. I think it takes
Speaker 1: a few it takes a few days of feeling a
Speaker 1: band and to start bringing out Yeah, and maybe I
Speaker 1: don't know. Kind of if you just look at like
Speaker 1: natural disasters is oftentimes it's not people are immediately like, well,
Speaker 1: let's run out and cause mayhem. It's sort of like, man,
Speaker 1: we've been completely let down, and then tensions. Well, what
Speaker 1: they say is I guess my understanding of the research,
Speaker 1: and I don't know it in and out, but I
Speaker 1: definitely don't know what what I guess. There's there's a
Speaker 1: shift that happens when you know, in a in a
Speaker 1: natural disaster, everyone's suffering together, so everyone has the same
Speaker 1: we're all, you know, all everyone's afflicted by the same thing.
Speaker 1: And then when you can stop feeling collectively, you know,
Speaker 1: joined by your suffering from that disaster, and start pointing
Speaker 1: fingers at you know, whoever is has botched the recovery
Speaker 1: to the disaster, that's when the when the trouble starts
Speaker 1: to you know, at least they will will things starts
Speaker 1: to rise up. I don't you know, that's my sense
Speaker 1: from reading what I've read so far. No, I fear
Speaker 1: for people finding out about my giant rain barrel and
Speaker 1: just how much mountain house I have stashed around and
Speaker 1: they're gonna come for it. Meshing to just let it out,
Speaker 1: Just let the cat out of the bag right there.
Speaker 1: So cal do you have any concluders? Any final um
Speaker 1: thanks questions for our our guest, John Wellen oh Man.
Speaker 1: His work can be found at any number of places
Speaker 1: online and in his book. I guess once you should
Speaker 1: say thanks, um wild ones that admit I am not
Speaker 1: not through it, but it's been great and yeah, a
Speaker 1: couple of little twists and additions to some of the
Speaker 1: stories in there, just in a way that I wasn't
Speaker 1: thinking and and I've really enjoyed it. Um yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I I what is what is your response to those
Speaker 1: people who's like, well, how much is too much? Like?
Speaker 1: When when do you John say, yeah, you gotta pull
Speaker 1: the plug on that sea turtle. I wish I was
Speaker 1: that organized to have a group to make these decisions. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm just you know, going clumsily on my
Speaker 1: way like everyone else. I think. Or is it better
Speaker 1: to go to Steve's fourteen thousand years ago? You're you're
Speaker 1: the first man to that lake. What if what if
Speaker 1: you you're on your pristine lake and there is not
Speaker 1: a pan fish to be found. It's full of you know,
Speaker 1: northern pike. I wonder if that's why i'd like to
Speaker 1: go visit that's I'd like to go. It's an unrealistic
Speaker 1: it's an unrealistic goal. But if I it's just where
Speaker 1: I've decided to fall, and how tempted would you be.
Speaker 1: But it's it's like academic too, you know. It's like
Speaker 1: just not like I'm like thinking will arrive there, but
Speaker 1: just the way that it's it's how I begin to
Speaker 1: understand things. It's a way I like strive to understand things.
Speaker 1: There was that was like that was day one. That
Speaker 1: was day one, and then this is as good as
Speaker 1: it as best as I can understand what happened on
Speaker 1: day one through day well, I don't know what day
Speaker 1: we'd be on now in the hundreds of thousands, as
Speaker 1: the best as how we'd get there. It's actually pronounced
Speaker 1: by some bison bison, bison, that's how it's pronounced, trying
Speaker 1: it's trinomial. Norman Clayture would be bison bites and bison
Speaker 1: yehney um. Yeah. It's a good book, I think if
Speaker 1: you if you like listening to this show, you feel
Speaker 1: probably like reading the book, I feel like a lot
Speaker 1: of the things that I was surprised by because I
Speaker 1: really didn't know what to expect that, you know, I
Speaker 1: just kind of got it, you know, thinking a better readings.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk to John and uh, it's like a
Speaker 1: lot of the thought of the concepts that you've brought
Speaker 1: up to me just over the last few years. John
Speaker 1: sort of brings up in that book and then talks
Speaker 1: about him in just a different way then you and
Speaker 1: I talked about him. So it's it's been an eye
Speaker 1: opening for me. I i'ven't I really enjoyed it. I mean,
Speaker 1: I can ask all kinds of questions you need to
Speaker 1: get deeper about what I learned in that book so far.
Speaker 1: But I don't know if I really have any follow up.
Speaker 1: But I think if you're if your whole understanding like mine,
Speaker 1: like my understanding of wildlife is inspired, it has been
Speaker 1: inspired by and is kind of based around right like
Speaker 1: a hunting efficient perspective. So it's useful. Um, it's useful
Speaker 1: to go to to go read people read about wildlife
Speaker 1: from from a different perspective now and then because they
Speaker 1: just notice things completely different. It's good. That's why I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not that's kind of why I would sell it
Speaker 1: to our That's kind why I would sell it to
Speaker 1: the type of guy that's listening to this type of
Speaker 1: lady that's listening to this. Yeah, expand outward a little bit. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: and know all about turkeys, how good turkeys are doing
Speaker 1: right now? Anything else you have? I think that's all
Speaker 1: I got, John, Do you have any final concluding thoughts?
Speaker 1: If it's anything you wanted this wedge in. You couldn't
Speaker 1: find a way to wedge it in. But you're like, man,
Speaker 1: the one thing I gotta make sure to talk about
Speaker 1: is blank. And you never got a chance. That's your chance.
Speaker 1: And I don't think I mean, I would just say,
Speaker 1: like you're asking me, how do you make those decisions?
Speaker 1: I'm not really interested in making those decisions, you know,
Speaker 1: But I think that there's value in trying to acknowledge
Speaker 1: how complex a lot of these questions are and how
Speaker 1: complex your own. Like you're saying, well, this is my baseline,
Speaker 1: but what how can I really defend that? I think
Speaker 1: the more people do that, the easier it is to
Speaker 1: deal with this kind of you know, partisan gridlock we
Speaker 1: find ourselves in and a lot of stuff, because you
Speaker 1: won't feel so violated by whatever decision is made. You know,
Speaker 1: if you can understand that it's happening in this kind
Speaker 1: of climate of great complexity, you know, it gives you
Speaker 1: some sympathy. Uh. You know, if you think that your
Speaker 1: thing is absolutely right and there's easy ways to think
Speaker 1: about all this, then when the decision doesn't meet your criteria,
Speaker 1: it's gonna feel a lot worse. That's funny you bring
Speaker 1: it up, because I really there's a handful of things
Speaker 1: that I remind myself about every day, and one of
Speaker 1: the things I remind myself about every day is not
Speaker 1: becoming one of those people who has this sort of
Speaker 1: attitude like, oh my god, what do they think of next?
Speaker 1: Yesterday it was this, and no it's that. Like, to
Speaker 1: be like that type of guy scares me. I think
Speaker 1: it gets harder to write. It's so easy to become
Speaker 1: a guy like that. Did I like? I like him?
Speaker 1: I was like, hey, don't get worced. Don't get divorced today,
Speaker 1: and don't become a guy who's like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: what next. They're probably related. I think those are related goals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they working. Yeah, your efforts on each of those working tandem.
Speaker 1: All right, John, Well, thanks for joining us. Tell us
Speaker 1: again because wild Ones, but give us the great subtitles.
Speaker 1: I'll mess it up. Wild Ones, A sometimes dismaying, weirdly
Speaker 1: reassuring story about looking at people, looking at animals in
Speaker 1: America and all kinds of writings. Um, you're write primarily
Speaker 1: for New York Times magazine, not the newspaper, but the magazine,
Speaker 1: which are which our brothers walking hand in hand. And
Speaker 1: then um in your forthcoming book, like you're not done
Speaker 1: with it, and then it takes him a year to
Speaker 1: do it. And that's the ways out. I mean, I
Speaker 1: just started writing it. So this is a long range teaser. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm deep in the dark tunnel. But in the future,
Speaker 1: in future, uh, Christmas times, a Christmas time or two
Speaker 1: from now, when you're like, what do I get my
Speaker 1: brother or my sister or whatever. UM, give him this
Speaker 1: as yet unnamed book. Put it on your calendar now,
Speaker 1: your calendar shoppers from now? All right, John, Thanksgan, Thank
Speaker 1: you guys.