Speaker 1: I don't picture running out of roads. I don't picture
Speaker 1: running out of towns. I don't picture running out of
Speaker 1: places to go shopping. I picture running out of wilderness.
Speaker 2: The term American wilderness is evocative to me, pulling forth
Speaker 2: a collage of emotions, imagery, and ideals. Oddly, I'd draw
Speaker 2: from it a sense of personal identity, even though I
Speaker 2: live most of my life inside the confines of modern civilization.
Speaker 2: I'd like to think I came up with all of
Speaker 2: this on my own, or I would have got to
Speaker 2: the same place if I was the first and only
Speaker 2: human to ever set foot in North America. But I
Speaker 2: don't think I would have. I'm in search of the
Speaker 2: unique journey that built American ideals on wild lands or wilderness,
Speaker 2: and even more foundational than that, to defy what wilderness is.
Speaker 3: It's ironic.
Speaker 2: This is a big and complex story, and I think
Speaker 2: it should be in the survival kit of basic knowledge
Speaker 2: of every American, because every one of us has a
Speaker 2: doctrine on it. For this challenging pilgrimage, I've recruited the
Speaker 2: health of a worthy group of authors. Good authors doctor
Speaker 2: Dan Flores, doctor Sarah Dant, Stephen Ranella, and Hal Herring.
Speaker 2: This story is about why wilderness is still here in
Speaker 2: modern times, how we interact with it, and how the
Speaker 2: land formed American identity. Let me warn you that this
Speaker 2: is going to be a lot of workfolks, and let
Speaker 2: it be known that the Bear Grease Academy of Backwoodsmanship,
Speaker 2: Philosophy and Culture is now in session. You may be
Speaker 2: able to find a buckscrape, or use your phone to
Speaker 2: find hunting land, or even catch a catfish on a trotline.
Speaker 3: But if you don't know the deep history.
Speaker 2: Of your own passion, you ain't no backwoodsman. This is
Speaker 2: gonna be good, and I really doubt that you're going
Speaker 2: to want to miss this one.
Speaker 4: Romantics and environmentalists in particular have elevated it to almost
Speaker 4: a sacred word. It has a kind of a meaning
Speaker 4: as an idea that I'm not sure other parts of
Speaker 4: the world other cultures completely share.
Speaker 2: My name is Klay Nukem, and this is the Bear
Speaker 2: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 2: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 2: story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Speaker 2: Presented by FHF Gear American Made Purpose built and fishing
Speaker 2: gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place.
Speaker 3: As we explore. What range of mountains is this over here?
Speaker 4: That's the Hamus Range. This is the Orties Mountains. Okay,
Speaker 4: of course, the range behind Santa Fe is the song grays,
Speaker 4: the sungread of Cristo, which means blood of Christ. The
Speaker 4: Spanish colonizers named it that because at sunset, the alp
Speaker 4: and glow made the mountains look like they were bloody,
Speaker 4: covering blood on the snowfields.
Speaker 2: You may recognize this man's voice. This is author and
Speaker 2: historian doctor Dan Flores. I'm in New Mexico on his
Speaker 2: back porch. The song grade di Cristo start in Poncha
Speaker 2: Pass in central Colorado, with ten peaks over fourteenth thousand feet.
Speaker 2: They pushed two hundred and forty two miles south, ending
Speaker 2: at Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The landscape
Speaker 2: closer to us between here and these blood colored mountains
Speaker 2: is a less intimidating stretch of arid high desert.
Speaker 3: I want to describe to you what it looks like.
Speaker 2: Imagine the rosette pattern of the jaguar spots, but it's
Speaker 2: set on the brilliant tan of an American mountain lion.
Speaker 2: The rolling hills are tinted beige by the dead winter
Speaker 2: grasses and bleached soil, but littered with dark juniper clumps.
Speaker 2: Doctor Flores wants to read me a quote.
Speaker 4: You understand, this isn't the third place I've had wonderful
Speaker 4: I have done this, so I'll read you this. J.
Speaker 4: Frank Dobe was a very famous folklorist and author of
Speaker 4: the wild but I thought i'd bring you up. He
Speaker 4: just stand in this spot and read what he says.
Speaker 4: The greatest happiness possible to a man is to become civilized,
Speaker 4: to know the pageant of the past, to love the beautiful,
Speaker 4: and then retaining his animal instincts and appetites to live
Speaker 4: in a wilderness.
Speaker 3: That's that's powerful, isn't it. Yeah, that's what we want
Speaker 3: to do.
Speaker 2: We want to be able to have We want to
Speaker 2: live in civilization.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you want to be civilized. You want to have
Speaker 4: access to the world, right, But it's it's so it's
Speaker 4: the thorough thing. Threau had this comment once about you know,
Speaker 4: I like to live with one foot in civilization and
Speaker 4: one foot in wilderness. And the question is always which
Speaker 4: one do you rest on? Which foot do you rest on?
Speaker 4: What I've always liked to do is to rest on
Speaker 4: the the wilderness foot, and then town's only twenty minutes away.
Speaker 2: J Frank, Dobie, Henry, David Threaux, and doctor Flores had
Speaker 2: and have a refined doctrine on dealing with wilderness. Doctrine
Speaker 2: just means the way that you live, and truthfully, we
Speaker 2: all have a doctrine on wild places. If you live
Speaker 2: near one or have never been to one, you have
Speaker 2: a doctrine. You can't be doctrine less. I'm in search
Speaker 2: of America's wilderness doctrine and how I got mine. I
Speaker 2: think a good starting place in this conversation is to
Speaker 2: define wilderness, which will learn is tricky. I asked Stephen
Speaker 2: Ranella about his definition.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you I think when I hear the word
Speaker 1: American wilderness, my working present day twenty twenty four definition
Speaker 1: of American wilderness. My usage is relative. There are landscapes
Speaker 1: where I would go, as an example, the north slope
Speaker 1: of the Brooks in Alaska. I would say that's wilderness
Speaker 1: because relative to everything else that is wild.
Speaker 3: If we put.
Speaker 1: Wildness on a one to ten, a one being Manhattan,
Speaker 1: and then we had to find a ten. When I
Speaker 1: say wildness natural ecosystem, I'm gonna use another controversial term,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna say absence of man Okay, absence of man.
Speaker 1: If Manhattan is a one, we need a ten. The
Speaker 1: north sorp of the Brooks Range is the ten. It's wilderness.
Speaker 1: And then let me say that if we imagine that
Speaker 1: framework that scale one to ten, I would say, I
Speaker 1: suppose wilderness starts at around eight. Here's another I'm gonna
Speaker 1: add another thing that's gonna trip some people out. That's
Speaker 1: gonna trip some philosophers and academics out. They're most they
Speaker 1: most closely resemble relative to everything else. This landscape looked
Speaker 1: like upon European contact with one important caveat Those places
Speaker 1: were sparsely inhabited by individuals at that time, potentially with
Speaker 1: great absences that any given spot might oh ten years,
Speaker 1: twenty years, thirty years without seeing it person, and there
Speaker 1: were people on the landscape. That's my sort of working
Speaker 1: definition that it like I can't ever look at it
Speaker 1: in isolation.
Speaker 3: I have to look at it.
Speaker 1: Like compared to what so I'm like, it's wilderness compared
Speaker 1: to everything that's not. You're not going to find two
Speaker 1: people that are going to give you the same definition
Speaker 1: of this.
Speaker 2: On the Ranella scale of wildness, the wild O meter,
Speaker 2: wilderness starts at eight out of ten. The spectrum swings
Speaker 2: from Manhattan to the Alaskan Brooks Range. That's a helpful analogy,
Speaker 2: but shows the subjective nature of the term. Will learn
Speaker 2: that there are more concrete ways to define it. The
Speaker 2: word wilderness was first used in the thirteenth century the
Speaker 2: twelve hundreds, but gain steam in the thirteen hundreds when
Speaker 2: John Wycliffe's English translation of the Bible use the new
Speaker 2: word to describe the uninhabited land that's spoken of all
Speaker 2: throughout the Old book. The deep etymology of the word
Speaker 2: stems from the Norse languages, and its root is the
Speaker 2: word will, as in self willed or wilful. From willed
Speaker 2: comes the word wild, which is also connected to the
Speaker 2: Old Swedish word for boiling water, meaning unruly, chaotic, or confused.
Speaker 2: The second part of the word wilderness, the dur will durness,
Speaker 2: is the Old English word for animal diordeo r. Put
Speaker 2: this together with this new word wild and you get
Speaker 2: wild dore. And then you add a ness and you
Speaker 2: can see the word wild door ness, which essentially means
Speaker 2: self willed or uncontrollable land of wild beasts. Holy smokes,
Speaker 2: I like the sound of that. It kind of makes
Speaker 2: me quiver a little bit. But this word needs more definition.
Speaker 2: Doctor Sarah Dant is a professor and author and she
Speaker 2: works at Weber College in Utah. She just published a
Speaker 2: book called Losing Eden. I asked her to define wilderness.
Speaker 5: So wilderness, I think can be many things. It kind
Speaker 5: of depends on who you ask. If we went into
Speaker 5: a bar and asked fifteen different people what's wilderness, we'd
Speaker 5: get fifteen different ideas and probably a small bar fight
Speaker 5: in the process. So you know, if we think about
Speaker 5: it just as a kind of an emotional reaction to it,
Speaker 5: it is this place that we go where there aren't
Speaker 5: other people, right, It's the place that we go and
Speaker 5: get to be much more one on one with nature.
Speaker 5: I think fundamentally, for a lot of people, that's wilderness.
Speaker 5: But that's not what the political definition is that creates
Speaker 5: boundaries and puts up signs and creates management plans. That's
Speaker 5: a very different idea about wilderness. In that case, it's
Speaker 5: the law says basically it's an area that has been
Speaker 5: untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does
Speaker 5: not remain. And so it's this idea that it's it's
Speaker 5: a place that a lot of people would probably use
Speaker 5: the word christine. But I think those kinds of ideas,
Speaker 5: how do we talk about places that are not developed?
Speaker 5: How do we talk about places that don't have roads
Speaker 5: and motor vehicles and houses? Those places have real value
Speaker 5: in part now because they're so scarce.
Speaker 2: Doctor Dant brought up two important components of our conversation.
Speaker 2: Number one, there is a legal definition of wilderness, as
Speaker 2: in federally regulated wilderness with a capital W.
Speaker 3: Will get to it.
Speaker 2: Secondly, and most importantly, wilderness, the self willed land of
Speaker 2: wild beasts, has value because of its scarcity.
Speaker 3: Will come back to this.
Speaker 2: I want to introduce you to another fella, but don't
Speaker 2: let the Alabama gravel in his voice fool you. Hal
Speaker 2: Harring is a lifelong writer and spokesperson for wild Lands
Speaker 2: who's lived most of his adult life in Montana, but
Speaker 2: he was born and raised in Alabama. I asked him
Speaker 2: to define wilderness.
Speaker 6: Well when I was younger and living in Alabama, when
Speaker 6: I was a kid, I didn't really have a definition
Speaker 6: of it. And then when I was older and started traveling,
Speaker 6: like in Montana at Wyoming, it was beyond the legal
Speaker 6: definition or the federal you know, regulation type definition, the designation.
Speaker 6: I think think it was a feeling that there were
Speaker 6: these places left on this earth that you could enter.
Speaker 6: I mean, I mean the language in the Wilderness Act
Speaker 6: is that where it will remain untrammeled, where man is
Speaker 6: a visitory, does it remain all that? And that's true,
Speaker 6: that was required maybe to hold on to this feeling.
Speaker 6: But it's the feeling of you're now entered a place
Speaker 6: that's ruled by something other than the endeavors of human beings,
Speaker 6: and it's a place that's ruled still by older laws.
Speaker 6: Nature's time, the world's time, not yours. But to me
Speaker 6: it was freedom. Freedom was the first thing.
Speaker 2: Wilderness is a feeling a place not governed by man's laws. Now,
Speaker 2: that's interesting, and the legal definition of wilderness was designed
Speaker 2: to preserve a feeling. That's even more interesting. How Aldo Leopold,
Speaker 2: who's considered the father of modern American wildern Us will
Speaker 2: get more to him later to find wilderness as quote
Speaker 2: a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state,
Speaker 2: open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb
Speaker 2: a two week's pack trip, and kept devoid of roads,
Speaker 2: artificial trails, cottages, and other works of man.
Speaker 3: End of quote.
Speaker 2: That's really functional, But his description of absorbing a two
Speaker 2: week pack trip probably delivers the most understandable definition to
Speaker 2: this day. And I did think it was cute that
Speaker 2: he used the word cottages. I have a question for
Speaker 2: Steve Ranella, what does the word wilderness do for you
Speaker 2: at an emotional level?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 2: What does does it make you feel warm and fuzzy inside?
Speaker 2: Does it make you fearful? Does it make you want
Speaker 2: to go there? Does it make you not want to
Speaker 2: go there? What does what does that term do for you?
Speaker 1: Makes me want to go there, but I don't need
Speaker 1: to go there to love it being there. I have
Speaker 1: that I have a fear of running out of it.
Speaker 1: I don't picture running out of roads. I don't picture
Speaker 1: running out of towns. I don't picture running out of
Speaker 1: places to go shopping. I don't picture running out of airports.
Speaker 1: I don't picture running out of subdivisions. I don't picture
Speaker 1: running out of golf courses. I picture running out of wilderness.
Speaker 3: Because you don't.
Speaker 1: Get it back. We've never gotten. You don't get any
Speaker 1: of it back. Once it's gone, it's gone. Man, It's
Speaker 1: like when you lay some concrete over it.
Speaker 3: It's gone. Gone.
Speaker 2: Everybody we've heard from so far values wilderness. They like it,
Speaker 2: which is a very new idea to mankind, well sort of.
Speaker 2: In his book Wilderness in the American Mind, Roderick Nash
Speaker 2: states that all ancient culture had an idea of paradise
Speaker 2: as a garden, which is actually the antithesis of wilderness.
Speaker 2: A garden is ordered and protected, delivering resources and security.
Speaker 2: It's controllable, it's manipulated by man. Considering that primitive man's
Speaker 2: number one concern was simply survival, and lack of control
Speaker 2: was a dangerous variable. Man's greatest good was to live
Speaker 2: a life that rose out of this self willed land.
Speaker 2: This has been a roadmap to man's journey over the
Speaker 2: last ten thousand years. Rising out of wilderness and the
Speaker 2: rudimentary mechanism of man's control over nature were number one.
Speaker 2: Fire initially used to beat back the vegetation and make
Speaker 2: clearings that offered visibility and safety. Yeah, it's like super
Speaker 2: primitive number two, the domestication of wild animals to secure
Speaker 2: meat so horses, and number three domesticating wild plants and
Speaker 2: cultivating land to create predictable food sources through crops. These
Speaker 2: things congregated people, increased birth rates, and probably most importantly,
Speaker 2: joined human minds in greater numbers into collaboration on what
Speaker 2: it meant to be human, of which a primary definition
Speaker 2: became humans overcome wilderness and bring it into control. I
Speaker 2: am very aware that this is a very general summation
Speaker 2: of human history that does not include modern hunter gatherer
Speaker 2: tribes that are still functioning at some level even today.
Speaker 2: The word wilderness is used two hundred and forty five
Speaker 2: times in the Old Testament of the Bible and thirty
Speaker 2: five times in the New Testament. The garden of Eden
Speaker 2: was the antithesis of wilderness. In God's first punishment of
Speaker 2: man was to cast him out of.
Speaker 3: The garden into it.
Speaker 2: Later, the Israelites would wander in the wilderness for forty
Speaker 2: years as a judgment and a time of testing and tribulation.
Speaker 2: In the New Testament, Jesus met Satan himself in the
Speaker 2: wilderness in the Temptation of Christ. The wilderness was a
Speaker 2: dangerous place. The wilderness is where you went to die.
Speaker 2: A first century Roman poet named Cheris criticized the earth
Speaker 2: as greedily possessed by mountains in the forests of wild beasts.
Speaker 2: In Greek mythology, a half goat half man creature named
Speaker 2: pan was the lord of the woods, and the English
Speaker 2: word panic stems from the striking fear one feels when
Speaker 2: in the woods and you hear strange, unexplainable sounds. It's
Speaker 2: clear that wilderness cuts deep into our culture. It's also
Speaker 2: important not to confuse the Old World's a preciation of
Speaker 2: rural pastoral settings with wilderness. Art, folk tales, and music
Speaker 2: celebrating livestock and farming were very real and popular, but
Speaker 2: that's not wilderness. To this day, Western culture often views
Speaker 2: disassembling wilderness and making it productive as a moral obligation.
Speaker 2: Roderick Nash wrote this intellectual legacy of the Old World
Speaker 2: to the New not only helped determine initial responses, but
Speaker 2: left a lasting imprint on American thought. When Europeans got here,
Speaker 2: we thought it was our moral obligation to tame what
Speaker 2: we perceived as wilderness.
Speaker 3: The word wilderness.
Speaker 2: Has forces behind it that may not be evident and
Speaker 2: on these ideas form the basis of understanding of modern wilderness,
Speaker 2: and it's evident that our current situation on Earth, comparing
Speaker 2: it to early man, has massively shifted. Once civilized areas
Speaker 2: were scarce and the greedy wild lands filled with awful
Speaker 2: beasts dominated this place. But this last epic of man's
Speaker 2: journey has turned the tables, and now from the dominating
Speaker 2: platform of civilization, we're trying to save an artifact of
Speaker 2: wild lands. The contrast between the old world's ideas about
Speaker 2: wilderness and many ideas today are vastly different. Here's doctor
Speaker 2: Flores breaking down what wilderness is, which will lead us
Speaker 2: into a broader picture of America's wild ometer.
Speaker 4: I think I would have to say that wilderness is
Speaker 4: both a reality and an idea, and there's certainly overlap
Speaker 4: between the two. But one of the fascinating parts of
Speaker 4: the whole wilderness concept, and especially the role that wilderness
Speaker 4: has played in America, where environmentalists, romantics and environmentalists in
Speaker 4: particular have elevated it to almost a sacred word. It
Speaker 4: has a kind of a meaning as an idea that
Speaker 4: I'm not sure other parts of the world, other cultures
Speaker 4: completely share. It's probably more important to us as a people,
Speaker 4: to Americans, to Americans than it has been to anyone
Speaker 4: else around the globe. And that has to do with
Speaker 4: the peculiarities of American history.
Speaker 2: The peculiarities of American history. I'm very interested in this,
Speaker 2: doctor Flores, But like a load of unfolded laundry sitting
Speaker 2: on the table before the company shows up, we've got
Speaker 2: some work to do before we can talk about that.
Speaker 2: He said, it's an overlapping reality and an idea. We've
Speaker 2: been talking about the idea of wilderness, but the reality
Speaker 2: is the actual federal designation of public land called wilderness areas.
Speaker 2: The Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty four instituted this, but
Speaker 2: the idea of wilderness can be experienced outside of these areas.
Speaker 2: This is going to be the most boring part of
Speaker 2: this podcast, but we've got to do it because you're
Speaker 2: enrolled in the Bear Grease Academy. Here is an excerpt
Speaker 2: from the Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty four. It's ridiculously boring,
Speaker 2: but this is modern man's attempt to preserve wildness. I'm kidding,
Speaker 2: it's really not that bad.
Speaker 3: Here goes.
Speaker 2: In order to assure that an increasing population accompanied by
Speaker 2: expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify
Speaker 2: all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving
Speaker 2: no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition.
Speaker 2: It is hereby to be the policy of the Congress
Speaker 2: to secure for the American people, the present and future generations,
Speaker 2: the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness. For this purpose,
Speaker 2: there is hereby established a National Wilderness Preservation System to
Speaker 2: be composed of federally owned areas designated by Congress as
Speaker 2: wilderness areas, and these shall be administered for the use
Speaker 2: and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as
Speaker 2: will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness.
Speaker 2: A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and
Speaker 2: his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an
Speaker 2: area where the earth and its community of life are
Speaker 2: untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who
Speaker 2: does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined
Speaker 2: to mean in this act an area of undeveloped federal
Speaker 2: land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements
Speaker 2: or human habitation which is protected and managed so as
Speaker 2: to preserve its natural conditions, and which generally appears to
Speaker 2: have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with
Speaker 2: the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable. It has outstanding
Speaker 2: opportunities for solitude, or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation,
Speaker 2: has at least five thousand acres of land, or is
Speaker 2: of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and
Speaker 2: use in an unimpaired condition, and may also contain ecological, geological,
Speaker 2: or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historic value.
Speaker 3: We're done.
Speaker 2: Steve Vernella probably could have jazzed that writen up a
Speaker 2: little bit, but that's pretty descriptive, but whole smokes. As
Speaker 2: There been some controversy around the definition of wilderness in
Speaker 2: the last one hundred years.
Speaker 3: We'll get to it.
Speaker 2: But wilderness with the capitol W is the strictest, most
Speaker 2: conservative land USIC designation in America. Today, there are eight
Speaker 2: hundred and six federal wilderness areas that encompass over one
Speaker 2: hundred and eleven million acres of land. That's larger than
Speaker 2: the state of California. Wilderness encompasses about seventeen percent of
Speaker 2: all public land, and about five percent of all American land.
Speaker 3: Is federal wilderness. That's a lot of land.
Speaker 2: I now want to redirect the conversation back to the
Speaker 2: deep human history with wild lands.
Speaker 3: This is a transition.
Speaker 2: So here's doctor Flores talking about the time time before
Speaker 2: these Greek poets, before agriculture and civilization, and when humans
Speaker 2: were hunter gatherers.
Speaker 4: I think that wilderness is a very recent idea in history.
Speaker 3: Frankly, wait a minute, what we just said.
Speaker 2: Wild lands are ancient, But what we now call wilderness,
Speaker 2: raw land uninfluenced by man, is the oldest natural thing
Speaker 2: there is. Yes, but the idea of designating it out
Speaker 2: as something different, in calling it wilderness, is new.
Speaker 4: Carry on, doc, I mean, I've spent a good deal
Speaker 4: of time writing about why people migrated around the world
Speaker 4: twenty five thirty thousand years ago, ultimately finding the Americas,
Speaker 4: the last of the great continents on Earth that we
Speaker 4: found and the reason we left Africa, went to Europe,
Speaker 4: then went to Asia, and finally found our way into
Speaker 4: North America and South America was essentially a search for
Speaker 4: what the modern idea of wilderness implies we were looking
Speaker 4: for places without prior human presence. And the reason we
Speaker 4: were looking for places without prior human presence is because
Speaker 4: of the ability of those places to harbor big animals
Speaker 4: with no prior experience with humans as predators, and that
Speaker 4: made them easy to hunt and to take down. And
Speaker 4: so that search for a place out there in the
Speaker 4: world where you were not finding human footprints, you weren't
Speaker 4: finding campfires, you didn't see smoke from an encampment on
Speaker 4: the horizon, but the world appeared to be pristine. That
Speaker 4: was a very compelling thing that drew people around the world.
Speaker 4: And so this whole idea of this without humans present,
Speaker 4: it's probably a really ancient thing that goes back to
Speaker 4: that sort of search for places with animals.
Speaker 2: And I think it's even our experience inside of our
Speaker 2: DNA somewhere to search something like that out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, is that a romantic stretch.
Speaker 4: Well, it could be a romantic stretch to say it's
Speaker 4: part of our genetic makeup, but I'm enough of romantic
Speaker 4: to actually say that. I think if this is probably
Speaker 4: intrinsic to who we are, that we instinctively find a
Speaker 4: kind of a satisfaction and sometimes even a euphoria in
Speaker 4: places that seem to harbor no signs of other people.
Speaker 4: And it's a very ancient thing.
Speaker 2: Well, when you think about humans today, not in wilderness
Speaker 2: business people are looking for unexploited parts of society. Sure
Speaker 2: there's something that you feel. You know, My good buddy
Speaker 2: James Lawrence always says found a bird nest on the ground,
Speaker 2: meaning like, wow, this is an incredible opportunity. I mean, really,
Speaker 2: that's what humans have been looking for forever.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a wonderful study somebody did in Io Wilson's
Speaker 4: book The Biophilia Hypothesis about landscape art around the world,
Speaker 4: and landscape art around the world tends to portray and
Speaker 4: we tend to the observers of landscape art tend to
Speaker 4: react most positively to representations of places that show trees
Speaker 4: that don't appear to have been stripped of fruit, or
Speaker 4: branches of undisturbed herds of animals that don't seem to
Speaker 4: be reacting in alarm. And the argument in that particular
Speaker 4: essay was that this is a replication of what we
Speaker 4: were looking for as we were migrating around the planet.
Speaker 4: We were looking for places that had evidence of us
Speaker 4: being the first there, and it's that kind of sense.
Speaker 4: I think that that powers this instinctive reaction about wilderness.
Speaker 2: Designating wilderness is a new idea on planet Earth, but
Speaker 2: it's an artifact from deep human history and doctor Fluores's
Speaker 2: book Wild New World. He argues that a major factor
Speaker 2: in early human migration was to find blank spots on
Speaker 2: the map with unmolested animals easier to hunt. We were
Speaker 2: biologically rewarded for finding the most humanless landscapes possible, and
Speaker 2: that's been translated into our epigenetics. I had to google
Speaker 2: what that term meant, but it's a change in the
Speaker 2: way our genes work as influenced by our behaviors and environments.
Speaker 2: So interaction with wild places didn't change our genes, but
Speaker 2: it changes the way our body reads DNA sequences. We
Speaker 2: developed a taste for places without humans, and we're biologically
Speaker 2: rewarded for it. I cannot say if it's nature or nurture,
Speaker 2: but I have felt that reward for most of my life.
Speaker 2: I want to go to the wildest places. Did Gary
Speaker 2: believernucom teach me that? And I adopted the doctrine that
Speaker 2: was part of it? But then who taught him? It's
Speaker 2: like looking in a mirror with a mirror behind you.
Speaker 2: Here's doctor Flores on some info on Indigenous ideas on wilderness.
Speaker 4: To be sure indigenous people occupying landscapes. So, for example,
Speaker 4: in North America, after the pleacescene extinctions, after that first
Speaker 4: fifteen thousand years of the human presence, once all the
Speaker 4: many of the big charismatic animals are gone, there's this
Speaker 4: ten thousand year period which I refer to in well
Speaker 4: in the world as Native America, when people go for
Speaker 4: ten thousand years in North America and managed to preserve
Speaker 4: most of the biological diversity of the continent. By the
Speaker 4: time Europeans arrived, that diversity is still present, still exists.
Speaker 3: But I don't think, at least.
Speaker 4: There's not any evidence from any of their cultures, their traditions,
Speaker 4: or their stories that they looked on parts of North
Speaker 4: America as wilderness places. I mean, they certainly would, for example,
Speaker 4: go and seek out a particular butte or a mesa
Speaker 4: in order to do a vision quest experience to look
Speaker 4: for something that was that would direct their future actions,
Speaker 4: or some ally in the world a wolf and elk
Speaker 4: or something like that. But they didn't seek out what
Speaker 4: many Europeans in the last five hundred years sought out
Speaker 4: when they were trying to find wilderness. So that means
Speaker 4: to me that wilderness is a relatively recent and unique phenomenon,
Speaker 4: and it probably does come about as a result of
Speaker 4: a reaction to emerging civilization. As civilization begans to particularly
Speaker 4: spread across the Middle East and Western Europe and Asia,
Speaker 4: there comes to be as so often as the case
Speaker 4: in human affairs and appreciation for what's being lost, and
Speaker 4: what's being lost are those lands where the human imprint
Speaker 4: is not nearly as impressive.
Speaker 2: Native Americans didn't have a word equivalent to the English
Speaker 2: word wilderness. However, it's hard not to imagine that they
Speaker 2: knew when they were in places far away from home,
Speaker 2: a place they wouldn't stay, a place that was more
Speaker 2: absent of human existence. Their worldview was vastly different from
Speaker 2: the Europeans, but I still think they probably had that
Speaker 2: fee that how Herring spoke about earlier. Doctor Flores also
Speaker 2: said scarcity produces value. That's very important to the modern
Speaker 2: conversation about wilderness. Here's doctor Sarah Dant.
Speaker 5: So let me see if I can kind of put
Speaker 5: this together in a way that makes sense. So one
Speaker 5: of the things that we as almost as a species,
Speaker 5: we're almost hardwired to find value in things that are rare.
Speaker 5: And when we look first at the colonial experience, there's
Speaker 5: a lot of wilderness and not much, you know, controlled land. Certainly,
Speaker 5: you know, I don't want to use that word civilized
Speaker 5: is pretty loaded, but you know, farming land, raising land,
Speaker 5: managed lands, and so wilderness isn't valued, it's feared. But
Speaker 5: as we transition from the nineteenth into the twentieth century,
Speaker 5: there becomes this growing awareness that wait a minute, we're
Speaker 5: about to cut all the trees down on build houses
Speaker 5: in the last places.
Speaker 2: Thank you, doctor Dant, and I'd like to officially transition
Speaker 2: and call this next section the introduction to early American
Speaker 2: doctrine on wilderness that produced our modern ideas about wilderness
Speaker 2: that flows right off the tongue. Will now embark on
Speaker 2: understanding on a more specific level, the flow that produced
Speaker 2: the American worldview on wilderness. The seventeen and eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: were a romantic era in America in regards to wilderness.
Speaker 2: Society had begun to move beyond the long standing fear
Speaker 2: of desolate places, and it started to become trendy to
Speaker 2: like them and guess where it all started in the
Speaker 2: cities where literature and art were being digested. In seventeen
Speaker 2: fifty seven, Edmun Burke wrote a peace Call, the Philosophical
Speaker 2: Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
Speaker 2: and Beautiful. Roderick Nash would write that Burke expressed the
Speaker 2: idea that terror and horror in regard to nature stemmed
Speaker 2: from the exaltation all in delight, rather from dread and loathing.
Speaker 3: This was a shift.
Speaker 2: In the seventeen seventies, botanist and writer William Bartram would
Speaker 2: take Burke's words sublime and use it extensively to describe
Speaker 2: wild places. He'd write that God's wisdom and power were
Speaker 2: manifested in wilderness. And Bartram was also the founding father
Speaker 2: of Romantic primitivism, stating that man was content and at
Speaker 2: his best in his primitive state inside of wilderness.
Speaker 3: This was really trendy.
Speaker 2: Man had fought to separate himself from wilderness for thousands
Speaker 2: of years, and now that civilization had begun to conquer
Speaker 2: it on a massive scale, we were going back to it,
Speaker 2: but in smaller.
Speaker 3: Doses, because we could still live in civilization.
Speaker 2: Daniel Boone's first hand account of hunting in Kentucky in
Speaker 2: seventeen eighty four, written by John Filson, was wildly philosophical
Speaker 2: about the pleasures of wilderness and man's harmony in nature.
Speaker 3: This was a new idea.
Speaker 2: In eighteen eighteen, Estwick Evans wrote, how great are the
Speaker 2: advantages of solitude? How sublime is the silence of nature's
Speaker 2: ever acting energies. There is something in the very name
Speaker 2: of wilderness which charms the ear and soothes the spirit
Speaker 2: of man.
Speaker 3: There is religion in it. End of quote.
Speaker 2: We're beginning to hear strong spiritual vibes in the narrative.
Speaker 3: And I know this is kind of boring. It's really
Speaker 3: not as fascinating.
Speaker 2: But we're in the bear grease academy, folks, so sucking
Speaker 2: up buttercup.
Speaker 3: So we move on.
Speaker 2: But I haven't told you the whole story of how
Speaker 2: the Bible viewed wilderness. It was a howling, dangerous place,
Speaker 2: a place you went to die, but it was also
Speaker 2: the place that you might find God. Moses encountered the
Speaker 2: burning bush and God's direct speaking in the wilderness. Elijah
Speaker 2: heard the still small voice of God in the wilderness
Speaker 2: and was fed by Ravens Jesus retreated to the wilderness
Speaker 2: to pray, it's dangerous there but has potential of great reward.
Speaker 2: American writers and thinkers began to focus on this. By
Speaker 2: the eighteen forties, wilderness was very popular in literature, and
Speaker 2: Roderick Nash would write the capacity to appreciate wilderness was,
Speaker 2: in fact deemed one of the qualities of a gentleman.
Speaker 2: Enjoyment of wilderness for them was a function of gentility.
Speaker 2: I now want to go back to doctor Flores.
Speaker 4: I would argue that one of the reasons, you know, so,
Speaker 4: we start with the idea of wilderness very early. Then
Speaker 4: the Romantic aid, which is when Thoreau is writing Walden
Speaker 4: and writing in his journals and writing about, you know,
Speaker 4: in wildness lies the preservation of the world, as he
Speaker 4: writes it. I think early misapprehension of what North America was,
Speaker 4: which downplayed the Indian presence. And then the Romantic movement
Speaker 4: of the nineteenth century, which lasts from the eighteen twenties
Speaker 4: to the eighteen eighties or so, which doesn't just produce
Speaker 4: people like Threroaw, I mean, it produces many of our
Speaker 4: great early American painters of wild lance Albert Berstett, Thomas Moran,
Speaker 4: the Hudson Bay painters of State New York. Their conception
Speaker 4: of what they were portraying in wild country was you
Speaker 4: were getting to see the face of God. They were
Speaker 4: all influenced by Christianity still, and their notion was wild
Speaker 4: country was the last best expression of God's handiwork. And
Speaker 4: so when you stood before a wh old landscape with
Speaker 4: soaring mountain peaks or a waterfall, you were standing in
Speaker 4: the presence.
Speaker 3: Of the divine.
Speaker 4: And that's one of the things that began to give
Speaker 4: wilderness a kind of a sacred feeling, and almost began
Speaker 4: to turn it into a kind of a religious pilgrimage
Speaker 4: to particular places that preserve this idea of that God's
Speaker 4: last great handiwork. And we're looking at this mountain range,
Speaker 4: we're looking at the face of God. I mean, it's
Speaker 4: the idea of what the Romantic is called the sublime,
Speaker 4: and the sublime is a landscape that as you're standing
Speaker 4: in front of it and looking at it, you're so
Speaker 4: moved emotionally that you feel a kind of a religious almost.
Speaker 2: A flight for the natural and the spiritual kind of overlap.
Speaker 4: I over absolutely overlap and so the painters like Beerstott
Speaker 4: and Moran and the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole and
Speaker 4: people like that. That's why they were trying to portray.
Speaker 4: They were trying to portray God's hand in nature. And
Speaker 4: the people who sought out those places, like Threau climbing
Speaker 4: Mount Todden in Maine and getting to the top and
Speaker 4: saying contact, contact, I've finally come face to face with it.
Speaker 4: That's what they're doing with this whole kind of pilgrimage
Speaker 4: to wild places.
Speaker 2: In the early eighteen hundreds, American artists began to paint wilderness,
Speaker 2: which became a symbol of national identity. We didn't have
Speaker 2: beautiful architecture in thousands of years of history like Europe,
Speaker 2: but we had wild places. Wild Lands were becoming our
Speaker 2: calling card, our Instagram bio. Hi, my name is America,
Speaker 2: and we have wild places. Henry David Threau was born
Speaker 2: in eighteen seventeen and inherited the momentum of Romantic primitivism.
Speaker 2: By the age teen fifties, he was rocking and rolling
Speaker 2: as one of America's leading voices for wilderness. But his
Speaker 2: message cut deeper into the heart of humanity than did
Speaker 2: this nationalism and primitivism. At a public speech in New
Speaker 2: England in eighteen fifty one, he said, I wish to
Speaker 2: speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,
Speaker 2: and he ended the speech by saying in wildness is
Speaker 2: the preservation of the world. He was a transcendentalist and
Speaker 2: believe man's connection to nature to essentially be the salvation
Speaker 2: of his soul.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 2: That was a lot of work, a lot of talking.
Speaker 2: This is the Bear Grease Academy. We don't take weeks
Speaker 2: off for pleasure and leisure. I'm the David Goggins of
Speaker 2: the backwoods discipline of learning.
Speaker 3: Who we are.
Speaker 2: I'm interested in why I think what I think. I
Speaker 2: just popped out of the womb in Montgomery County, Arkansas
Speaker 2: and found myself immersed in a culture. And as Americans,
Speaker 2: we value independence, but I think that's often deceptive for
Speaker 2: how original our ideas actually are.
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask.
Speaker 2: Steve Ranella a question and it quickly turned into a
Speaker 2: total train wreck. Here goes So throw was the original
Speaker 2: guy in America that started talking about this stuff? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: so okay, you may have answered my question with your
Speaker 2: cynicism right there. He really was. He was he was
Speaker 2: the architect in America. Oh, he had this deep do
Speaker 2: wilderness effect on thought. You just said the same thing
Speaker 2: as him.
Speaker 3: But what I'm asking going my question is as Steve.
Speaker 1: His pond by his Miles house was not what I
Speaker 1: would call wilderness.
Speaker 3: Okay, how much? How much would would he have affected you?
Speaker 3: And you not even know it? None? I find that
Speaker 3: really hard.
Speaker 1: I could have fell from I could have fell from
Speaker 1: outer space with my brain the way it came out
Speaker 1: of my mother's womb. I could have fallen from outer space,
Speaker 1: and I would have walked around the planet and mosied
Speaker 1: around the planet, and I would have wound up saying
Speaker 1: I like the north slope of the Brooks Range better
Speaker 1: than that.
Speaker 3: Town over Yonder. I just would have ye, yes, I listen.
Speaker 1: Had I never ever heard of throw and I'd be
Speaker 1: just I almost wish that that was the case. Would
Speaker 1: not change my view of whether or not I appreciate
Speaker 1: wild animals in wild places.
Speaker 3: I don't. At the most simple level, his thank.
Speaker 2: You like crotchety old, I don't care, No, no, no,
Speaker 2: I'm not.
Speaker 3: It's that you would come and tell.
Speaker 1: Me that I feel the way I do about wilderness
Speaker 1: because I had to read throw and like freshman.
Speaker 2: Year, I think, is you feel the way you do
Speaker 2: about wilderness in part because you're an American man?
Speaker 3: That escalated quickly. Two things.
Speaker 2: Number One, it was a very ill worded question. I
Speaker 2: shouldn't have even brought up the row. The roau arose
Speaker 2: as an influential prophet for wilderness, but really what I
Speaker 2: was trying to ask Stevie boy was how much has
Speaker 2: been an American influenced your ideas on wilderness. Secondly, I
Speaker 2: didn't know that the roau was such an emotional trigger
Speaker 2: word for.
Speaker 3: My distinguished guests. But let's carry on.
Speaker 2: We're gonna start back with my ending statement from the
Speaker 2: last clip.
Speaker 3: This is embarrassing for both of us.
Speaker 2: Is you feel the way you do about wilderness in
Speaker 2: part because you're an American?
Speaker 1: Because if you were, it is, oh yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I know those Canadians sure hate the stuff. Come on, well,
Speaker 1: I feel the way I do about wilderness because I'm
Speaker 1: like a hunter and trapper and fisher, and I'm a
Speaker 1: student of wildlife.
Speaker 2: What I'm saying is other countries in the East, other
Speaker 2: countries all over the globe, in different hemispheres and on
Speaker 2: different continents, do not have a deep core foundational appreciation
Speaker 2: of wild places like Americans do.
Speaker 3: They don't.
Speaker 1: They might not, they might not have access to them.
Speaker 1: Well they perhaps there's a little bit of a different
Speaker 1: perhaps there's a different cultural history, and that that's it.
Speaker 1: You could you could find a lot of literary figures.
Speaker 1: You can find a lot of literary figures and historical
Speaker 1: figures that greatly predate your body. Throw who I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm not even who appreciated wildlife of wild places.
Speaker 3: No doubt, huge mistake to have brought up th Row.
Speaker 2: Clearly he was not the architect I thought I was
Speaker 2: being interviewed.
Speaker 3: Go ahead.
Speaker 2: Where I was going with the question was are the
Speaker 2: fundamental truths of wilderness so strong that you would have
Speaker 2: come to these conclusions on your own, which you've emphatically
Speaker 2: said yes you have, And I agree with that.
Speaker 3: Like you you pop out of the womb and you
Speaker 3: know EO.
Speaker 2: Wilson's biophelia, like we have this innate love of life,
Speaker 2: love of things that are alive, and this curiosity, and
Speaker 2: that's part of what makes us so unique in our humanness,
Speaker 2: is that we're interested in other stuff. But I think
Speaker 2: there's a big component of the way that we think
Speaker 2: about wild places that's deeply American. That's that is not
Speaker 2: replicated in other places. I mean, we were the first
Speaker 2: place on planet Earth that demarketed wilderness Federal Wilderness Area.
Speaker 1: Sure, I'm a very very American person, even though I
Speaker 1: was just saying if I fell from outer space, that
Speaker 1: I came from my mother's womb and then fell from
Speaker 1: outer space. Of course I can't go in and unravel
Speaker 1: what parts of me are American. But I think that
Speaker 1: you're getting a little narrow to say that appreciation for
Speaker 1: wilderness is an American phenomenon.
Speaker 2: To Sha, doctor Ranella, to sha great point, and I
Speaker 2: agree with you. Americans do not have the market on
Speaker 2: appreciation of or living in wild lands. That's the birthright
Speaker 2: of mankind. However, that peculiarity of American history that doctor
Speaker 2: Flores talked about produced something that was unique in the
Speaker 2: world for how we manage and think about wild places.
Speaker 3: And I'm probably.
Speaker 2: Gonna name my next pack of squirrel dogs Henry, David
Speaker 2: and Thoreau just to aggravate Steve Ranella.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, but there's more.
Speaker 1: I think that you will find among many cultures an
Speaker 1: insistence on wilderness. How can you say it's American? How
Speaker 1: can you look at people who live in the headwaters
Speaker 1: of the Amazon and tell me that an appreciation for
Speaker 1: wilderness is American. Now they would say, they would say
Speaker 1: they have an appreciation for their home. But I don't
Speaker 1: want to get overly cute about these definitions.
Speaker 2: Well, all I'm saying is that it appears that we
Speaker 2: have a unique perspective on wilderness.
Speaker 3: Right or wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean again, you are saying that because I don't
Speaker 1: know if you like watching nature documentaries, but you'll find
Speaker 1: that when when you're watching those, you're not hearing a
Speaker 1: lot of American accents.
Speaker 3: You're hearing a.
Speaker 1: Lot of Brits. Why do they so much? They love
Speaker 1: it because they killed all of theirs, so they.
Speaker 3: Look at it. It's very exactly, it's very other to them.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean that that's just you've proved what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: No, I disprove what you're saying. You said it's American
Speaker 1: to like wilderness. I think that that's not true.
Speaker 2: What I what Clay said in the question was Americans
Speaker 2: have a unique perspective on wilderness that has produced something.
Speaker 2: And so you saying the English killed off all their animals.
Speaker 2: Is exactly my point. Are our ideas and philosophy on
Speaker 2: wilderness have allowed it to be preserved at a high
Speaker 2: level as compared to much of planet Earth. I agree
Speaker 2: with that, and I mean that's something that's something to
Speaker 2: be proud of. As Steve always says, cynicism is the
Speaker 2: chastity of the intellect, and his contribution to this conversation
Speaker 2: is noted, No, Americans aren't the only people who love wilderness,
Speaker 2: but America has forged a pragmatic approach to wilderness that
Speaker 2: came from our peculiar history. I want to end by
Speaker 2: asking how Herring why we love wilderness, why I love wilderness,
Speaker 2: and how much we've been influenced by our history.
Speaker 3: Here's what he said.
Speaker 6: First, I would say that you probably value wilderness harshly
Speaker 6: by cultural for cultural reasons, but also you value wilderness
Speaker 6: because you're an autonomous hunter and a person who values
Speaker 6: individual sovereignty and freedom, and so the feeling that you
Speaker 6: get there is probably independent of any kind of cultural
Speaker 6: preparation you have. I think certain people, just like in
Speaker 6: the old days, it would have been like somebody like
Speaker 6: Jim Bridge, or you know, like Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone.
Speaker 6: Certain people simply respond to the freedom of wilderness. They
Speaker 6: always have and they probably always will.
Speaker 3: I like it.
Speaker 2: How that's an answer we can all understand. What we'll
Speaker 2: hear next time is how the last fifty years of
Speaker 2: the eighteen hundreds set us up for the conservation movement
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century. Don't worry, The Bear Grease Academy
Speaker 2: of Backwoodsmanship, philosopher feet, and culture will start right where
Speaker 2: we've left off. I'm grateful for our heritage, and I'm
Speaker 2: interested in how when I arose to consciousness in this
Speaker 2: mortal realm in nineteen seventy nine, that wild beasts and
Speaker 2: wild places still existed and were still accessible to the
Speaker 2: common man like meat. I'm grateful for a father and
Speaker 2: a culture who took me to them and taught me
Speaker 2: to value them. I can't thank you enough for listening
Speaker 2: to Bear Grease. Come on down to the Black Bear
Speaker 2: Bonanza in Bentonville, Arkansas, on March ninth, twenty twenty four, and.
Speaker 3: See Brent and I.
Speaker 2: Thanks for sharing Bear Grease with your pals, leaving us
Speaker 2: a review on iTunes, and I look forward to talking
Speaker 2: with the folks on the Render next week,