Speaker 1: This is the Meat 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.
Speaker 2: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 2: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
Speaker 2: for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every
Speaker 2: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
Speaker 2: dot com. F I R S T L I T
Speaker 2: E dot com. All right, everybody, we're joined today by
Speaker 2: the Prairie Preacher. He's in from Tennessee. I was excited
Speaker 2: about him coming on as a guest, but I'm not
Speaker 2: anymore because he was just trying to explain to me
Speaker 2: that Pennsylvania is the South.
Speaker 1: I told him parts of Pennsylvany.
Speaker 2: I told him that's not true, because I of my
Speaker 2: own maxim if you can ice fish, it's not the South. Honestly,
Speaker 2: sitting here, he tried to lay some bullshit ecological argument
Speaker 2: on me and didn't even try to tackle the ice
Speaker 2: fishing question.
Speaker 3: Lay a bullshit sociological reason on you. It's true, man,
Speaker 3: parts of southern Pennsylvania are the South.
Speaker 1: Man. We'll get into this in a minute. I wish
Speaker 1: we were talking about Ohio because I have such a
Speaker 1: great Ohio story I want to tell, and I associate
Speaker 1: it with Pennsylvania because I had driven out of there
Speaker 1: into Ohio and then the story happened, So it doesn't
Speaker 1: really fit.
Speaker 3: You're always starting stories and never finished.
Speaker 1: But this is all on hold because there's all this stuff.
Speaker 2: Crims just got a root canal she's got, she's all
Speaker 2: novacane up in this. Say something? Does it sound slurred?
Speaker 4: Oh no, it's like in the front, I feel I
Speaker 4: feel weird. I feel like a fat I have a
Speaker 4: fat lip in the front, left side, right side.
Speaker 1: You don't look fat lipped. Okay, it's all on your head.
Speaker 1: So if Chris is normal, is normal? Quick? I gotta
Speaker 1: get into some stuff. I got a h we got
Speaker 1: we got like a bucket of just tear. Like really, people,
Speaker 1: people really fed up.
Speaker 2: About last week's episode, which I'm going to try to
Speaker 2: address for a while in a minute here why they're
Speaker 2: right and wrong to be mad. But but back to
Speaker 2: our the prayer Preacher Dwayne Askedes, doctor Dwayne Estes, Uh
Speaker 2: he's poor on geography, but strong on.
Speaker 1: Strong on ecology.
Speaker 2: Dwayne Essa serves as the executive director at the Southeastern
Speaker 2: Grasslands Institute, Full Professor of Biology, director of the A. P.
Speaker 1: S u Rbarium. Where is that? What is that apple?
Speaker 5: That's like a plant museum?
Speaker 1: But what is a P. S You?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Austin p State University just outside Nashville.
Speaker 2: Okay, the herbarian Principal investigator for the Center of Excellence
Speaker 2: for Field Biography Biology.
Speaker 1: Sorry.
Speaker 2: In January twenty seventeen, he co founded the Southeastern Grasslands
Speaker 2: Institute with colleague THEO. Whitsell. And we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about a lot of his work with grasslands. And I
Speaker 2: got a boatload of questions for you. We got to
Speaker 2: do something. But then we're going to talk about the questions.
Speaker 2: And just a key up on the questions. One of
Speaker 2: my many questions is one already brought up. I'm going
Speaker 2: to allow you to to retort about why Brody's a Southerner.
Speaker 3: No, I'm in.
Speaker 1: Northern Brody's I'd be like a Brody's a Southerner.
Speaker 3: Needs to be divided into several different states.
Speaker 1: Okay, why Brody's a Southerner?
Speaker 5: Upset?
Speaker 2: Now, how Clay Clay should all in because he's gonna
Speaker 2: be like just distraught that now, Brody's that.
Speaker 1: Southerner.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm liking this.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: I got another question about this, and I want to
Speaker 1: get into this with you. Is like.
Speaker 2: When reading about the colonial American period, so late Colonial
Speaker 2: American period, mid seventeen hundreds, that that these long hunters
Speaker 2: would go into present day Kentucky and you see similar
Speaker 2: things from southern Indiana where they're like I can't see
Speaker 2: a tree, Like, how the hell is that true? Don't
Speaker 2: answer me now, but just noodle on that. And then
Speaker 2: when they talk about going into cane breaks that are
Speaker 2: so big you can get lost in cane breaks? How
Speaker 2: the hell is that true?
Speaker 1: So noodle on that?
Speaker 5: Got it?
Speaker 1: Noodle can Yeah, how that be true? How long does
Speaker 1: he have he's got I don't know, five minutes, ten minutes. Uh?
Speaker 1: You cool very much?
Speaker 6: All right, make sure you're on that, Mike, Dwayne when
Speaker 6: you're talking.
Speaker 5: Got it?
Speaker 6: Thank you?
Speaker 1: He is just didn't hear him? He is cool with that.
Speaker 2: There's I got so many questions about this stuff, why
Speaker 2: things are different? And then like, is there any possibility
Speaker 2: of getting southeastern grasslands fixed back up again?
Speaker 5: Hmmm? Good question?
Speaker 1: Noodle on that.
Speaker 2: Uh okay, So lots of consternation about an episode we
Speaker 2: did last week where we do a State of the
Speaker 2: Union with We did a State of the Union sort
Speaker 2: of a State of the Conservation Union with Joel Peterson,
Speaker 2: who is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt
Speaker 2: Conservation Partnership, and people just upset about how that conversation went.
Speaker 2: And I feel like, I want to, like, without Joel
Speaker 2: in the room, not that I would have said anything
Speaker 2: different with him in the room, I want to context you, Liza,
Speaker 2: a couple of things and offer a few observations to
Speaker 2: people who really feel like the way that the way
Speaker 2: that we've discussed the incoming administrations actions around conservation issues
Speaker 2: has been inadequate. But first, allow me to explain a
Speaker 2: couple of things from my position one Joel Peterson. Joel
Speaker 2: Peterson is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt
Speaker 2: Conservation Partnership, And for people that weren't listening carefully, the
Speaker 2: Theatre Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is they are a d C
Speaker 2: organization that works on federal policy. All right, This is
Speaker 2: not like they're not like grassroots protests movements. They work
Speaker 2: on federal policy, meaning engaging with lawmakers about federal policy.
Speaker 2: As I tried to explain, this administration is here for
Speaker 2: four years. This administration might likely have a round two.
Speaker 2: Depending on how things go, they might have a round
Speaker 2: two where someone such as JdE Vance carries the MAGA
Speaker 2: mantle into another four years. If you worked in federal policy,
Speaker 2: ask yourself this. If you worked in federal conservation policy,
Speaker 2: and you have a high likelihood the way things look
Speaker 2: right now, I would say a high likelihood that you
Speaker 2: will need to be engaging with this administration for the
Speaker 2: next eight years. Are you telling me that it's unfair
Speaker 2: to say that you're trying to get the lay of
Speaker 2: the land, trying to look at who's coming in, trying
Speaker 2: to look at how the decision making is going, and
Speaker 2: trying to take a somewhat slow, gradual process to engaging
Speaker 2: with the administration around conservation issues. Does that really strike you?
Speaker 2: Is that irrational that you're waiting a second and watching
Speaker 2: and assessing how decisions are being made, what they care about,
Speaker 2: what they don't care about, in order to engage in
Speaker 2: a potentially eight year long dialogue about conservation now, Joel
Speaker 2: Peterson laid out when we sat down to talk with
Speaker 2: Joel Peterson. Prior to Joel Peterson coming on the episode,
Speaker 2: Joel was already concerned. He's like, anything I say is
Speaker 2: going to become outdated by the time you post the episode.
Speaker 2: And before he came on, he wanted to clarify when
Speaker 2: is it coming out? I need to choose my words
Speaker 2: carefully about when it's coming out. I talked to Krinn
Speaker 2: Krin said, will be able to put it out the
Speaker 2: following Monday. We made a joke about how anything that
Speaker 2: happens today is already going to be obsolete by the
Speaker 2: time the episode releases on Monday. We release episodes on Monday.
Speaker 2: It's always driven me kind of crazy, but that's how
Speaker 2: we do it. There's a bunch of reasons I'll explain
Speaker 2: some other day about why we keep a certain cadence
Speaker 2: and don't just drop instantly. Trust me, it makes sixty percent.
Speaker 2: That's sixty percent makes sense. So Joel Peterson comes on
Speaker 2: already concerned. Then between Joel Peters Joel Peterson's appearance on
Speaker 2: the show and the release of his episode, The The
Speaker 2: Doge Boys, the Administration, however you want to put it,
Speaker 2: axes thousands of Forest service positions and at SOMEHAE we
Speaker 2: get a lot of emails from people again not listening carefully,
Speaker 2: being like, well, how could you not bring that up? Well,
Speaker 2: that's why that didn't come up. That hadn't happened yet.
Speaker 2: In fact, this is the first time I've sat in
Speaker 2: front of a microphone since that did happen.
Speaker 1: But hold that thought for a minute.
Speaker 2: And think about this before you get like, before you
Speaker 2: start talking about who really has the back of public
Speaker 2: lands people and who don't ask yourself this like like
Speaker 2: Trump ran on the promise of having Elon Musk form
Speaker 2: a group called Doge, and that Doge was going to
Speaker 2: go in and look for federal efficiencies and reduce the
Speaker 2: federal workforce. He ran on this.
Speaker 1: And won on this.
Speaker 2: People that are run around saying it's a coup, It's like,
Speaker 2: that's an odd coup that you win in a that
Speaker 2: you win a landslide election campaigning on the fact that
Speaker 2: you're going to have a specific individual do a specific thing.
Speaker 2: If you win, then you win the specific individual does
Speaker 2: this specific thing. And somehow people are mistaking what this
Speaker 2: is really all about. This isn't me saying what I
Speaker 2: think about it, But come on, like, like, don't just
Speaker 2: start reading the news one day and not go read
Speaker 2: the news from the other days and start thinking you
Speaker 2: understand what's going on. Also, ask yourself this, and I'm
Speaker 2: going to get around to what I think about this
Speaker 2: in a minute, ask yourself this. Do you think Elon
Speaker 2: Musk gives a shit about the environment? I mean, this
Speaker 2: guy has already focused. This guy has already set sale
Speaker 2: for Mars. He's interested in Mars, which is a lifeless planet.
Speaker 2: So if you think appealing to Doge on the fact
Speaker 2: of conservation and land access and biodiversity, he's a interested
Speaker 2: in the in the least biodiverse place you can possibly
Speaker 2: think of, which is a place where life is inhospitable.
Speaker 2: That's where he'd like to go. He wears a colonized
Speaker 2: Mars shirt. So you think that coming to Doge and
Speaker 2: talking about access and biodiversity, they don't care. Like they
Speaker 2: don't care. They don't care. As Trump pointed out Trump,
Speaker 2: Don Junior is a hunter. Okay, Don Junior has at times,
Speaker 2: like Don Junior has at times in the past, I'm
Speaker 2: not sure about currently has it at times in the past,
Speaker 2: supported different conservation groups, holds lifetime memberships with conservation groups.
Speaker 2: The guy likes wildlife. Okay, he's not driving this. So
Speaker 2: for people to think that you might go that like that,
Speaker 2: For someone in federal policy to take on like a
Speaker 2: complaining tonality at this point right now might make Elon
Speaker 2: Muskin doge reconsider cutting forest service jobs. It's like, get real,
Speaker 2: that is not how you're gonna shape any kind of
Speaker 2: action with and within this administration. You're so naive to
Speaker 2: think that that that that's what you're gonna do. Here, Randall,
Speaker 2: butt in at any time.
Speaker 7: I I don't disagree with you. I mean I think, like,
Speaker 7: do you want me to butt in.
Speaker 1: Whenever you're writing. I'm just want you know you have
Speaker 1: the right to butt in and Dwayne.
Speaker 2: Dwayne's probably sitting over there and wonder what the hell
Speaker 2: we're talking about because you didn't listen to the thing
Speaker 2: we're talking about.
Speaker 1: And you can comment on it too, or you can
Speaker 1: just stick to what you want. This is something I
Speaker 1: have to do.
Speaker 2: I'm not speaking for Dwayne at all. So here here's
Speaker 2: the other part about this. Other agencies like to understand
Speaker 2: these for services. I'm gonna read a letter from a
Speaker 2: for service gun a minute, but let's back up. Other
Speaker 2: agencies are being axed Okay, us A I D. Is
Speaker 2: being dismantled, enrolled in under the State Department. Now ask
Speaker 2: yourself this question to be honest when you answer this.
Speaker 2: Just promise me you're going to be honest with yourself.
Speaker 2: Did you know did you know that USAID was not
Speaker 2: under the State Department? Like, answer that in all honesty.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: However, USAID is being dismantled to be put under the
Speaker 2: State Department. The administration ran on the idea of dismantling
Speaker 2: the Department of Education. They are closing doors, turning off
Speaker 2: email addresses, and axing the place. The Justice Department is
Speaker 2: making huge cuts, The FBI is making huge cuts. The
Speaker 2: military is probably going to be making big cuts. They're
Speaker 2: already outlining cuts they're going to make within the military.
Speaker 2: So point being, I don't applaud any of this. These
Speaker 2: are areas that I'm not even an expert in, but
Speaker 2: I see this going on. So to see that the
Speaker 2: Forest Service, so the Bureau of Land Management, is going
Speaker 2: to make a bunch of cuts. I can't look at this.
Speaker 2: I can look at that and say that really sucks.
Speaker 2: And I personally think that really sucks. They're cutting things
Speaker 2: that I care about. But I can't look at it
Speaker 2: and see that the administration is targeting land management agencies
Speaker 2: because they're dismantling non land management agencies.
Speaker 1: So in looking at the cuts to Forest Service and
Speaker 1: the cuts.
Speaker 2: To BLM, which are our big land management agencies, look
Speaker 2: at it in the context of a broader conversation about
Speaker 2: what is happening right now writ large across the federal government. Meaning,
Speaker 2: if you're going to understand these cuts and talk about
Speaker 2: these cuts, look at them in the context. This is
Speaker 2: not meant to be at this point in time. This
Speaker 2: is not meant to be an assault on the Forest Service.
Speaker 2: It's meant to be an assault on the federal workforce,
Speaker 2: of which the Forest Service is part. If I had
Speaker 2: somehow like FIAT power as some kind of dictator to
Speaker 2: come in and say, like what ones are okay and
Speaker 2: what ones are not okay, believe me, I would probably
Speaker 2: wind up saying I don't get USAID. A lot of
Speaker 2: it seems kind of ridiculous. Go ahead, Forest Service, don't
Speaker 2: touch it. In fact, take USAID's money and give it
Speaker 2: to the Forest SERVI US That would be my perspective,
Speaker 2: But that's not the position I'm in, and I don't
Speaker 2: really know that pointing out aspects that people are pointing
Speaker 2: out is going to reverse the situation. A lot of
Speaker 2: other people wrote in about this national debt question, like
Speaker 2: me having the audacity to talk about the impacts of
Speaker 2: the national debt. Now, this is a kind of a
Speaker 2: little bit situation where you can choose to play chess
Speaker 2: or you can choose to play checkers around spending the
Speaker 2: national debt. Like I'm going to keep this within a
Speaker 2: within a conversation of National of Natural Resources Management, just
Speaker 2: to give you some perspective. Every year this country, we
Speaker 2: spend eight hundred billion dollars to pay interest, to pay
Speaker 2: our interest on the national debt. Take a stab at
Speaker 2: what the BLM's annual budget is, which I bet you
Speaker 2: like I'm guessing most people don't know.
Speaker 1: I had to look it up. Take a guess, Randall.
Speaker 2: Oh, the national interest on the national debt is eight
Speaker 2: hundred billion.
Speaker 7: The BLM, I'd say thirty million. Way low, one hundred million.
Speaker 5: Billion, way low, way low.
Speaker 3: One hundred billion is low?
Speaker 1: Oh no, way, Okay.
Speaker 7: We're getting somewhere now five hundred million.
Speaker 1: Well, you know it's a problem you're creating for me
Speaker 1: right now. Exactly is you know, like if you're saying
Speaker 1: like like this bark was huge, guess how big he was,
Speaker 1: and then you guess bigger?
Speaker 6: Two hundred We've run it got problem, I mean countless
Speaker 6: times over the last six years.
Speaker 1: And then I got to go, well, no, it was
Speaker 1: one to eighty.
Speaker 6: And then.
Speaker 1: But let's back up.
Speaker 3: Eight hundred billion in interest, and then the big.
Speaker 2: This is not this is not paying down the debt.
Speaker 2: Servicing the debt is eight hundred billion dollars. The BLM's
Speaker 2: annual budget is one point seven billionllion dollars. So in
Speaker 2: any conversation about the long term, like way long term
Speaker 2: health of natural resources in this country and where we're
Speaker 2: spending our money, I'm just saying, I'm saying, and I'm
Speaker 2: asking you to consider this. If we didn't have to
Speaker 2: factor in in our budget, in our federal budget, if
Speaker 2: we weren't factoring in eight hundred billion dollars in interest
Speaker 2: payments that don't pay down the debt, I have to
Speaker 2: think I have to think that there would be more
Speaker 2: room than one point seven billion for the BLM. I
Speaker 2: can't sit here and guarantee you that that's where it
Speaker 2: would go, but I think that the health of the country,
Speaker 2: and by meaning the health of the country, the parts
Speaker 2: I like about this country, the natural resources, the public lands,
Speaker 2: the wildlife, those things are going to continue to sacrifice
Speaker 2: if we have to continue to do this. So if
Speaker 2: I bring up, like even friends of mine get mad
Speaker 2: if I bring up the idea of the national debt,
Speaker 2: meaning like, oh, you would sell our prime, our our
Speaker 2: main global our national treasures in order to pay down
Speaker 2: the debt.
Speaker 1: I never said that. Ever.
Speaker 2: I'm pointing out that if you're gonna like a lot
Speaker 2: of times we keep conservation conversations like very.
Speaker 3: In a bubble.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
Speaker 2: I have over the years and talking about conservation, I
Speaker 2: have oftentimes looked at it in a bubble, certain things
Speaker 2: in a bubble, and these in this conversation. As the
Speaker 2: administration goes along, we will wind up, I promise you,
Speaker 2: we will wind up with plenty of bubbles. So when
Speaker 2: I said, when I sat there and said waiting for
Speaker 2: the people, are like, oh, I can't believe you would
Speaker 2: say you're gonna wait for the dust to settle or
Speaker 2: whatever the hell I said. Let me rephrase what I said,
Speaker 2: because you're right, I would be disappointed to hear someone
Speaker 2: say that too. What I'm waiting for is parts of
Speaker 2: this to bubble wise. But right now it's hard to
Speaker 2: bubble it because I can't take like the Force Service cuts.
Speaker 2: Those can't be bubbilized because they're rolled into like a
Speaker 2: wholesale reorganization of all of these federal agencies. So you're
Speaker 2: not gonna be able to call your politician right now,
Speaker 2: Like I'm telling you that, like it doesn't work. You're
Speaker 2: not going to call your politician right now and say, hey, hey,
Speaker 2: I understand like the thousands that the tens of thousands
Speaker 2: of federal employees are getting caught across all of these
Speaker 2: administrations or organizations. That's all fine. What I would like
Speaker 2: you to do is put the Force Service people back.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can't.
Speaker 1: It ain't gonna happen.
Speaker 3: Like, what's like top of mind and most concerning for
Speaker 3: us is not it doesn't translate to the entirety of
Speaker 3: the federal government or like the people who voted for
Speaker 3: the people who are running the federal government right like
Speaker 3: they're not necessarily They're top concern is not conservation and
Speaker 3: land access and things like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because they're not looking at they're not looking at
Speaker 1: any bubbles. Yep, they're not looking at at this point,
Speaker 1: no one is talking about any particulars. It will come.
Speaker 2: Like like starting already, it'll start to take some clarity,
Speaker 2: but like right now, there's a little bit of like
Speaker 2: waiting to see what happened. And with the Forest Service cuts, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think it's I think it's like a catastrophic I'm
Speaker 2: gonna read a letter where someone puts it really well,
Speaker 2: But I'm inviting people to stop and like expand outside
Speaker 2: of the way that we've historically framed conservation questions and
Speaker 2: try to get a look at like where the national
Speaker 2: mood is at right now with people in power, there
Speaker 2: is this thing called the national debt, and know, like
Speaker 2: the debt's not going anywhere, but they're going to make
Speaker 2: a budget, and within this budget they're going to try
Speaker 2: to find a way of how do you find the
Speaker 2: money to facilitate the interest payments on the debt? And
Speaker 2: how do you fund some tax cuts which they ran
Speaker 2: on okay, and still balance the budget in some way
Speaker 2: or another. All of these questions about what we're gonna
Speaker 2: do on real specific conservation issues outside of like like
Speaker 2: how we're gonna fight to keep mining interests out of
Speaker 2: the headwaters of the Boundy waters, okay or sorry, on
Speaker 2: the borders of the Boundy waters. How are you gonna
Speaker 2: work on that? Where you gonna do about ambler Road,
Speaker 2: What you're gonna do about anwar, What you're gonna do
Speaker 2: about pebble mind, Like, all of these things are gonna
Speaker 2: get specific with specific players doing specific things, and they're
Speaker 2: like these little battles are gonna play out NonStop for
Speaker 2: a bunch of years. But right now, on the employee thing,
Speaker 2: it's part of such it's part of such a broader
Speaker 2: conversation that gets really hard to explain how to be
Speaker 2: like tactful at this moment. It's dizzying. It's dizzying. I
Speaker 2: try to follow politics very closely. It's dizzying right now.
Speaker 2: And it's like it's intentionally dizzy. That's a point people
Speaker 2: keep bringing up. It's like it's it's it's meant to
Speaker 2: be almost it almost appears without any kind of broader
Speaker 2: goal in mind.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think that's I mean, I don't know
Speaker 7: that people who want to shrink the federal government want
Speaker 7: to shrink it in the way that it's being done right, correct.
Speaker 7: I think lost in all this is that these are
Speaker 7: just completely arbitrary decisions and that they've had to you know,
Speaker 7: I saw it the other day that they'd cut security
Speaker 7: people at nuclear facilities and then they realized they didn't
Speaker 7: have anymore, and so they're trying to get in touch
Speaker 7: with those people to bring them back. And the same
Speaker 7: for bird flu. I saw just the other day of
Speaker 7: the USDA cut all the people working on the bird
Speaker 7: flu outbreak that's driving up the price of eggs, and
Speaker 7: now they need to figure out how to get in
Speaker 7: touch with those people to bring them back. So I think,
Speaker 7: regardless of like where you stand, I think like we
Speaker 7: can acknowledge that this is a very arbitrary and destructive
Speaker 7: way of doing it.
Speaker 1: It is, yeah, it is.
Speaker 2: It's emerging that, and it's like, and parts of this
Speaker 2: are hitting at things I care about deeply, But I'm
Speaker 2: not succumbing to the temptation to look at it as
Speaker 2: being an assault on the things I care about deeply
Speaker 2: rather than an assault on like a kind of hamhanded
Speaker 2: assault on the idea of the federal role in American lives.
Speaker 3: When I'm scrolling through the news and it cuts here,
Speaker 3: cuts there, cuts there, cuts in the Forest Service or wherever.
Speaker 3: I've had to force myself not to like focus just
Speaker 3: on that one thing, right because it's kind of unfair.
Speaker 3: It's like unfair to think about it that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's thousands and thousands and thousands of people and
Speaker 2: any person. I have a neighbor who is a school teacher.
Speaker 5: He's like, he could.
Speaker 2: Go on for a long time about what the Department
Speaker 2: of Education dismantling means for him. Meanwhile, I look at
Speaker 2: the Department of Education thing and I'm like, Eh, wells
Speaker 2: it all mess with the four Service? BLM, I'm cool.
Speaker 2: Do you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: It's it's like.
Speaker 2: It's a very hard like for the conservation space right now,
Speaker 2: for the conservation movement right now, for the environmental movement
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 1: It's like a.
Speaker 2: This is going to require a radical reorientation of how
Speaker 2: we talk about things. They're using a playbook on the
Speaker 2: federal workforce that was used on that was used on Twitter,
Speaker 2: like breaking Twitter.
Speaker 3: Move fast and break things.
Speaker 2: Yes, breaking Twitter is like okay, I mean broken, and
Speaker 2: they already broken.
Speaker 1: It will always be broken. But they did break it.
Speaker 7: It became a wildly less, wildly less effective company and
Speaker 7: lost a bunch of advertising and kind of sure took
Speaker 7: a dump.
Speaker 2: Yes, so I'm saying, like breaking the government, taking the
Speaker 2: same approach to break the government, Like, I hope it
Speaker 2: goes better than it did when he broke Twitter. Yeah,
Speaker 2: to return to my main point, to somehow pin it
Speaker 2: on a person, to somehow suggests that an individual that
Speaker 2: works in federal policy and is needing to figure out
Speaker 2: who am I talking to, what are we talking about,
Speaker 2: where are some areas we can succeed in the next
Speaker 2: four years or eight years, rather than saying, you know what,
Speaker 2: I don't like the way this is looking, I'm going home.
Speaker 3: They have to work with who they have to work with, right,
Speaker 3: they don't have a choice. Yes, they've got to do
Speaker 3: what they can do.
Speaker 2: Imagine if he says, you know what, Okay, I'm not
Speaker 2: going to talk to anybody about federal conservation policy for
Speaker 2: the next four years. That'll stick them, That'll show them.
Speaker 7: And I think too, there's like a when you think
Speaker 7: about how a group like TIERCP works, there are other
Speaker 7: groups out there that are going to be throwing bombs
Speaker 7: at the administration. There are other groups out there that
Speaker 7: are going to be like rallying the troops and and
Speaker 7: taking shots. Right, But like, if you're in d C
Speaker 7: and you're serious about trying to make change or trying
Speaker 7: to protect what we like, you know, you got to
Speaker 7: go to work every day.
Speaker 1: There's different groups with different.
Speaker 7: Roles and the and you're not gonna the biggest the
Speaker 7: biggest advantage that you can have in d C is
Speaker 7: that someone takes your calls or that someone has a
Speaker 7: meeting with you.
Speaker 3: Correctly if I'm wrong, But t RCP has like a
Speaker 3: very good working relationship with politicians on both sides of
Speaker 3: the aisle, right, like right.
Speaker 1: That's their program, y, yeah, that is what that is
Speaker 1: what they are.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's how they get shipped done.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and and and I mean that's that's how the how,
Speaker 7: that's how it works, you know, whether you like it
Speaker 7: or not, Like it's I mean, I think it's incredible
Speaker 7: that we have a group like that who's using the power,
Speaker 7: you know, like they're using the system in place, because
Speaker 7: that's where the rubber hits the road in DC, and
Speaker 7: it's it's somebody going to take your so you can't.
Speaker 7: You have to be the adult in the room sometimes
Speaker 7: and and not throw bombs.
Speaker 2: And not name call so yeah, And I like I've
Speaker 2: even like as a board member at TRCP, you know
Speaker 2: I have, I don't like, I have a voice in
Speaker 2: the room. And the part about having a board is
Speaker 2: you try to assemble a board with a bunch of
Speaker 2: disparate voices. So sure I have, you know, I have
Speaker 2: perspective on things where I talk to someone privately about
Speaker 2: what I think. When when Utah was trying to figure
Speaker 2: out a way to declare that public lands were effectively unconstitutional,
Speaker 2: I'm on the phone with TRCP, knowing the other people
Speaker 2: around the phone with TRSP, and I'm giving my take
Speaker 2: on it. Then they're in the role of taking these
Speaker 2: different takes, shaping them, asking who they can speak with,
Speaker 2: and then make it some progress. But if you're just
Speaker 2: gonna throw Molotov cocktails for them, I'm not talking about me, Yeah,
Speaker 2: for them, if they're gonna throw Molotov cocktails and then
Speaker 2: one day call up and be like, but seriously, uh
Speaker 2: the farm bill? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, how
Speaker 2: are we gonna keep the CRP programs alive?
Speaker 1: Like that still has to happen.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, And and you need a seat at the table,
Speaker 7: you're like, and it's very easy to lose your seat
Speaker 7: at the table if you if you come out and
Speaker 7: start throwing punches.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you want to be like like, ask yourself,
Speaker 2: like someone else said, oh pretty rich that Steve said,
Speaker 2: get involved in the conservation movement after saying blah blah
Speaker 2: blah whatever he said, uh to everyone else, I'll say this,
Speaker 2: if you want to get involved in the conservation movement
Speaker 2: and you want to do it in a way where you.
Speaker 1: Have a voice.
Speaker 2: At the you have a voice in a seat at
Speaker 2: the highest level of table, right the top table. You
Speaker 2: want to voice there, get on board with an organization
Speaker 2: like TRCP. That doesn't mean that people going out and
Speaker 2: protesting that their state capital isn't effective. It's a way
Speaker 2: to show forces. If that's where you're at. TRCP is
Speaker 2: not your group. If you like, if you are willing
Speaker 2: to be like patient and somewhat intellectual and strategic and
Speaker 2: play in Washington.
Speaker 1: D C. That's different.
Speaker 7: It's just different, and there's room for both and you
Speaker 7: can support both at the same time, right, Like, I mean,
Speaker 7: there's certainly it's effective to go and let your elected
Speaker 7: officials know where you stand and strongly worded calls to
Speaker 7: your reflected officials do work, but that there's also another
Speaker 7: model that's having like high stakes meetings with people who
Speaker 7: have the power, and you're not going to get very
Speaker 7: far with them by calling them up and leaving a
Speaker 7: strongly worded voicemail.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna try to give a little bit to explain
Speaker 2: myself a little bit with with the with the parallel
Speaker 2: thing that occurred to me one time, Like picture that
Speaker 2: you picture. You're a kid growing up in America and
Speaker 2: movies come out, and you just in the movies come out,
Speaker 2: and you become aware of movies. You see movies, and
Speaker 2: then there's books that are in the bookstore, there's books
Speaker 2: in the library, and they just are there because they're there.
Speaker 2: And the movies that get made get made because they
Speaker 2: get made. That that's how I grew up. I don't know,
Speaker 2: just like movies came out and you went so me
Speaker 2: never gave any thought to what happened. Right then, as
Speaker 2: my career went along and I got into my thirties,
Speaker 2: and I started going and having meetings with people that
Speaker 2: make TV shows and people that make books and people
Speaker 2: that make movies, and I understood, like why they do
Speaker 2: what they do, how they do what they do, how
Speaker 2: it's finance how the whole bigger project works. All of
Speaker 2: a sudden, you go, all of a sudden, it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, I never use like the whole like stupid
Speaker 2: red pill thing.
Speaker 1: You get red pilled. You're like, oh shit, that's how
Speaker 1: all this works. Do you know what I mean? And
Speaker 1: then you're like, oh, I get it now.
Speaker 2: That's why the books that are out are out, and
Speaker 2: that's why this that that's how this whole thing functions,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden you understand the world in
Speaker 2: a different way. I over time, being someone involved in
Speaker 2: wildlife conservation have had I've.
Speaker 1: Like undergone a sort of evolution. What's the opposite evolution?
Speaker 5: The evolution?
Speaker 2: Do you know where opposite evolution? Okay, some might say, oh,
Speaker 2: he went through a de evolution.
Speaker 1: I don't know. To me, it feels yeah, devolved.
Speaker 2: No, No, because I don't want to seem my I
Speaker 2: my picture of how things happen.
Speaker 5: Mmmm, there we go, rand.
Speaker 1: Point. I'm trying to make point. I'm trying to make here.
Speaker 2: My understanding of how things happen and why the world
Speaker 2: looks like it does in wildlife conservation has changed as
Speaker 2: much as my understanding of why what shows get made
Speaker 2: and what books come out in print. It's like it's
Speaker 2: changed with education. It has changed. I have come to
Speaker 2: see more of the value of like back room high
Speaker 2: level conversations. There are other people who've come up with
Speaker 2: a very different opinion. If you really want to get
Speaker 2: into this, you could go read about what happened with
Speaker 2: Why did the Sixties fizzle? You could dig into Joan Didion.
Speaker 2: You can start watching things about the efficacy and evolution
Speaker 2: of Vietnam protesters. I don't know, there's different ways to
Speaker 2: engage in policy discussions.
Speaker 1: The civil rights movement was disruptive and very effective. Other
Speaker 1: movements have been disruptive and they faltered and haven't worked.
Speaker 1: What else? Oh my for service?
Speaker 2: Let I personally personally, Yeah, I'm gonna say a couple
Speaker 2: more personal things here. I've always had a thing where
Speaker 2: I have a I've tried to keep a brand promise
Speaker 2: where we stay out of issues that we stay out
Speaker 2: of issues that aren't directly relevant to hunters and anglers. Okay,
Speaker 2: so at times this is where I'm in a little
Speaker 2: bit of a bind. At times I have expressed appreciation
Speaker 2: for some things half some number of things that the
Speaker 2: current administration ran on and is doing I have expressed
Speaker 2: appreciation for because it's just true.
Speaker 1: It's just true. I appreciate a bunch of the things.
Speaker 2: I would have to violate my pact with the audience
Speaker 2: to start talking about the things I appreciate.
Speaker 1: There's a thing called a nypothesis. Randall knows what it is.
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 2: An apothesis is when you bring something up by saying
Speaker 2: you're not going to bring it up. So my example
Speaker 2: will be your fighting with your wife. Your wife says, well,
Speaker 2: I'm not even going to bring up what you did
Speaker 2: on Friday. That's an apothesis. She's bringing it up by
Speaker 2: not bringing it up. So I'm gonna do an apothesis
Speaker 2: when I'm talking about this administration. I'm not going to
Speaker 2: bring up that I think that the country should have borders. Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to bring that up. I'm not going
Speaker 2: to bring up that I don't think people should have
Speaker 2: their livelihoods and careers destroyed because they fail to get
Speaker 2: on board with whatever.
Speaker 1: New sloganism emerges in a given day. Like, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to bring that up.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm not going to bring up things I think
Speaker 2: about with human biology and distinctions between males and females.
Speaker 1: Not going to bring it up.
Speaker 2: But when I've talked about things the administration is done,
Speaker 2: I'm talking about some things I'm not going to bring
Speaker 2: up that I think are pretty good. Do I then
Speaker 2: think that what they're they're threatening to do, what it
Speaker 2: seems like they're going to do to American wildlife and
Speaker 2: American wild places and public lands? Do I think that
Speaker 2: that's accessible? No, I don't. But I can hold two
Speaker 2: things in my hands at the same time that, like,
Speaker 2: there's things I like about the administration, there's also seems
Speaker 2: to be like some things that they're going to be
Speaker 2: doing and are doing that are going to be catastrophic
Speaker 2: for public.
Speaker 1: Lands and wildlife.
Speaker 2: And it's part of my personal thing to sort out
Speaker 2: these two issues and find out where I'm going to
Speaker 2: land on it. But I can't sit here and tell
Speaker 2: you that every single thing Donald Trump does pisses me off,
Speaker 2: because that's not true. Like it doesn't. Some of the
Speaker 2: stuff is absolutely going to But I'm not gonna look
Speaker 2: at it like that. I'm gonna look at it like
Speaker 2: I'm going to find the areas and weigh in on
Speaker 2: the areas that I think they're screwing up, and it's
Speaker 2: starting to look like there's going to be quite a
Speaker 2: pile of them.
Speaker 1: Any else? Uh? No, letter? Where do I begin the letter?
Speaker 1: Put my spectacles on.
Speaker 2: My name is blank, and I am a Forest Service
Speaker 2: mule packer. As I write to you February fourteenth, I
Speaker 2: am still an employee of the US Forest Service. Today
Speaker 2: I lost many co workers that I call friends to
Speaker 2: the new administration's recent cutbacks on federal employees.
Speaker 1: For valid and invalid reasons. The new administration has decided
Speaker 1: to pick on the US Forest Service. I'm going to
Speaker 1: step in and editorialize here. I'm outside of the letter
Speaker 1: for a minute. People don't want to hear this, But
Speaker 1: I don't think the word choice is right. I don't
Speaker 1: think they've decided to pick on a lot of people.
Speaker 2: It'd be like if I went into a class. If
Speaker 2: I was a bully and went into a class and
Speaker 2: beat up all the kids in the class, they would.
Speaker 1: Say he was picking on Bobby. Right? Is that a
Speaker 1: good announce Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 2: Throughout my career, I'm back to the letter. Throughout my
Speaker 2: career and the Recreation and Range departments, I have witnessed
Speaker 2: decrease in budgets every year, forcing us to do more
Speaker 2: with less. Last year, all seasonal non fire field workers
Speaker 2: were fired. That was last year under Biden. They left
Speaker 2: US field going permanence. They left US field going permanent
Speaker 2: employees feeling overwhelmed, to say the least, for the upcoming
Speaker 2: field season. But today the new administration fired over thirty
Speaker 2: employees on the Beaverhead Deer Lodge National Forest. All but
Speaker 2: one of the wilderness rangers were let go on the
Speaker 2: Crassle Ranger District of the frank Church River of No
Speaker 2: Return Wilderness, and all the trail crews of the Spotted
Speaker 2: Bear Ranger District and the Bob Marshall Wilderness were let go.
Speaker 2: This is the Ranger district no longer has any trail
Speaker 2: crew to maintain the anacon of Pintler Willderness either a
Speaker 2: dear friend was days away from graduating from probationary status.
Speaker 2: He was fired from the NRCS in Alaska along with
Speaker 2: her entire tribal relations team. Out of all the wasteful
Speaker 2: spending and government, for this administration to pick on the
Speaker 2: hardest working, lowest paid, and most dedicated workers makes me ill.
Speaker 2: This may be an honest, uneducated attempt to cut wasteful
Speaker 2: spending in government. Now this is this is like why
Speaker 2: this particular letter resonated with me because of this line.
Speaker 2: This may be an honest, uneducated attempt to cut wasteful
Speaker 2: spending in government. He says, in my off season, I
Speaker 2: work for different outfitters guiding elk hunts in multiple states.
Speaker 2: We rely on these trail systems, do our job and
Speaker 2: earn a modest living doing what we love. These layoffs
Speaker 2: are taking away access to our public lands. Over one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty years of blood and sweat by the
Speaker 2: American working class maintaining these trail systems will be lost.
Speaker 2: Those that making that make a living in these areas
Speaker 2: will suffer, but most importantly, the American people will lose
Speaker 2: their access to the last place they can escape the
Speaker 2: modernities we call progress in this world. And he ends
Speaker 2: with a plea, use your voice to let the American
Speaker 2: public know what these government cutbacks are costing us.
Speaker 1: A lot all across the board.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think, like.
Speaker 7: Just on the subject of people who are working in
Speaker 7: these jobs, like beyond the end and and there's lots
Speaker 7: of people wondering how they're going to pay their mortgage
Speaker 7: this month, or how they're going to pay their rent,
Speaker 7: and beyond that, like immediate in individual tragedy, like there's
Speaker 7: a larger I think tragedy, and like there's probably some
Speaker 7: talented young kids right now in college who are studying.
Speaker 7: They're trying to figure out what they're going to study
Speaker 7: and what career they're going to pursue. And if I
Speaker 7: was graduating from college right now, I probably wouldn't be
Speaker 7: thinking about trying to go work for the Forest Service,
Speaker 7: you know, or try and try to go work for
Speaker 7: the National Park Service. And those jobs require a ton
Speaker 7: of sacrifice year after year after year to get your
Speaker 7: foot in the door, and then the pay is not
Speaker 7: great and then you're probably transferring around to you know,
Speaker 7: if you're in the Park Service, bouncing from park to park.
Speaker 1: Or wherever you are.
Speaker 7: Like I think we're going to see generational consequences from
Speaker 7: the past few weeks just on the types of people
Speaker 7: we can attract to those jobs. And that, for me,
Speaker 7: I think is like a pretty profound Like even if
Speaker 7: they hired all these people back next week, Like there's
Speaker 7: a chink in the armor that it is hard to
Speaker 7: polish out at this point, and it's just like, yeah,
Speaker 7: I don't know. I mean when I was when I
Speaker 7: was finishing college, I tried really hard to get my
Speaker 7: foot in the door at a public land management agency
Speaker 7: and couldn't do it. I did, you know, And I'm
Speaker 7: lucky that. I'm lucky that things went the way they did.
Speaker 7: But yeah, it's just like, these people love the resource,
Speaker 7: and I never go out on our public lands and
Speaker 7: think I wish there were fewer I wish there are
Speaker 7: fewer guys working on roads, you know, I wish there
Speaker 7: were fewer interpretive rangers telling people what's great about this
Speaker 7: landscape or telling people about these animals we're looking at.
Speaker 1: Like I just yeah that.
Speaker 7: Obviously I'm having a hard time like putting my finger
Speaker 7: on it. But it's really hard to not sort of
Speaker 7: have your thoughts spiral when you think about the compounding
Speaker 7: consequences of this stuff that's being done by twenty year
Speaker 7: old kids that don't know anything about the government.
Speaker 3: And the impact like the like the real world impact
Speaker 3: to hunters and anglers and all kinds of outdoor recreation people.
Speaker 3: Like it's gonna take a while to see what actually happens,
Speaker 3: you know, with like trail access and boat ramps and
Speaker 3: like who knows, Like, we don't know necessarily what we're
Speaker 3: gonna be facing when the fall rolls around for hunting season.
Speaker 1: No, you don't. And to return to my analogy about
Speaker 1: the bully coming in and beating.
Speaker 2: Up everybody in the class, like the like it's kind
Speaker 2: of great analogy, but not trying to quit the same thing.
Speaker 2: But you might look and be like, well, yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean a lot of those kids had it coming, but
Speaker 2: little Billy, well, he's the nicest kid in the world.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, like, I don't think you're gonna find like,
Speaker 2: you're not gonna look at the Forest Service and the
Speaker 2: Rocky Mountain West and and and and Musk aren't gonna
Speaker 2: be like and look at all the embarrassing look at
Speaker 2: all the embarrassing, crazy expenditures they were making.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but here's where here's where a thing I do
Speaker 2: predict happening as this goes on.
Speaker 1: And again, this is all new news, but I could
Speaker 1: picture this.
Speaker 2: Do you remember when Dwayne I'm sorry, where I'm almost done?
Speaker 2: He could cause that a bad moment. Do you want
Speaker 2: to come back? Do you remember when when Trump floated
Speaker 2: the idea, and I talked about this the other day,
Speaker 2: Like I was the ere day. I was explaining, if
Speaker 2: I get really mad at my kids about iPads and phones,
Speaker 2: I'll say something like I'm about ready to take all
Speaker 2: those iPads.
Speaker 1: Out and run them over with my truck. I use
Speaker 1: that one.
Speaker 2: Now they know I'm not gonna run the iPads over
Speaker 2: the truck, but they also know he's gonna do something.
Speaker 1: He's fed up.
Speaker 2: I was saying, how I was just joking around, saying
Speaker 2: how when Trump said I got half of mine to
Speaker 2: the out gaza and make a big resort, he was
Speaker 2: kind of saying, I'm gonna put all the iPads in
Speaker 2: the driveway and run them over my truck. Meaning people
Speaker 2: are like, he's not gonna do that, but he's pissed.
Speaker 2: He's gonna do something. Well, who's the guy who's the
Speaker 2: libertarian from Kentucky?
Speaker 1: Oh, Paul right away?
Speaker 2: He uh now that Twitter's not Twitter, it's called the
Speaker 2: X When you tweet, what are you doing xing?
Speaker 3: He They still say, tweeted just a horrible businesses. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he tweets this thing.
Speaker 2: He's running the government, ran Paul tweets. I thought we
Speaker 2: voted for America first. Right, Yeah, Now, just to capture
Speaker 2: that sentiment, here's a thing that I do picture happening.
Speaker 2: Much of this conversation about the right and the left
Speaker 2: in this country has been framed over the previous years
Speaker 2: as a as a rural people, interior people battling for
Speaker 2: the soul of the country against the coastal elites.
Speaker 1: Remember this, mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Okay, as doge, if they do take a wrecking ball
Speaker 2: to the interests of rural people, to the people that
Speaker 2: were supporting Trump, he won overwhelmingly in this state. When
Speaker 2: you run for office in this state, you have to
Speaker 2: I'm talking about Montana. If you're running for office in Montana,
Speaker 2: I don't care what you're doing, you have to pay
Speaker 2: lip service at least to being pro public lands. You
Speaker 2: have to say public lands in public hands. You have
Speaker 2: to do it else you can't win. You have to
Speaker 2: do it, just like you can't say at the federal level,
Speaker 2: I'm going to cut social Security.
Speaker 1: You lose. If here you say I want to sell
Speaker 1: off public lands, you lose.
Speaker 2: Now, So that's true of Montana, Montana. I've met Trump
Speaker 2: the first time, won Montana by fourteen points. Right, they
Speaker 2: don't even need a campaign here gonna win. But what
Speaker 2: happens when what happens when you start seeing in the
Speaker 2: erosion of these things that the people and not in
Speaker 2: this state care a lot about, which is their public
Speaker 2: lands of public land access. You risk alienating your own
Speaker 2: support network.
Speaker 3: You risk the pendulum swinging the other way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and people in a couple.
Speaker 3: Of years when the midterms come.
Speaker 2: Up, and just like rand Paul, was it, Rand Paul,
Speaker 2: Yeah said I thought we were voting for America. First,
Speaker 2: someone might say I thought I was voting for guys
Speaker 2: like me. This isn't serving my interest.
Speaker 1: No, excuse yourself, Randall, I'm really sorry.
Speaker 6: Keeping that in that was incredible.
Speaker 3: I was wondering where you can't tell where it's coming from.
Speaker 1: Excuse me?
Speaker 7: That was only supposed to be fin was elsewhere at
Speaker 7: the moment.
Speaker 1: Can I start interviewing Dwayne? But what's up?
Speaker 3: We should re enter do him because everyone probably forgot
Speaker 3: who he is.
Speaker 1: It's terrible joining us today.
Speaker 2: Doctor Dwayne asked us who I have heard about from
Speaker 2: a ton of people and has been uh and Krim
Speaker 2: was very eager to have him on The Prairie Preacher,
Speaker 2: co founder and executive dress director of Southeastern Grasslands Institute.
Speaker 2: I first have to say everything I just said is
Speaker 2: me talking, not Dwayne talking.
Speaker 1: But I would like to invite if Dwayne, if you have.
Speaker 2: Any comments about anything about what we just said, because
Speaker 2: you're sort of now like like you're sort of affiliated
Speaker 2: with the conversation.
Speaker 1: You could either sit it out or you could give
Speaker 1: you some of your thoughts. You'd say whatever hell you want.
Speaker 1: I don't care.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, let's talk about it. Well, number just wade
Speaker 5: in number one, there's a there's a double meaning to apothesis.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, it's the it's the broad portion of
Speaker 5: a pine cone scale. Just just f wi from a
Speaker 5: little bit botanical. Yeah, like you had a pine cone, right,
Speaker 5: You've got the little the prickle there. It's that broad
Speaker 5: triangular face that you see. That's the apopthesis.
Speaker 1: Ship. Yeah, I love that, you.
Speaker 5: Know, drop knowledge next week show. No, uh, you know,
Speaker 5: I find it fascinating, man, because we're all in this
Speaker 5: limbo right now, and as a founder and executive director
Speaker 5: of a conservation organization, we're like everybody else, you know.
Speaker 5: I talked to a good friend of mine who is
Speaker 5: a former senator, and he said he reminded me he said,
Speaker 5: you know this, Uh, I hear you. He says, not
Speaker 5: about you, it's you know, there's worldwide ramifications of what's happening.
Speaker 5: And I think that helped to frame it in a
Speaker 5: context that made me kind of just sit back and
Speaker 5: try to chill and get through it and just say,
Speaker 5: you know, it's going to take a little while for
Speaker 5: us to kind of figure out what the road ahead
Speaker 5: looks like. You know, we're trying to go through planning
Speaker 5: right now and to think about what are our options.
Speaker 5: You know, it could be that we get by unscathed.
Speaker 5: It could be that our organization fails in four weeks
Speaker 5: because of what we're currently faced with. So yeah, it's scary, man.
Speaker 5: People's livelihoods at stake. Good people, good hardworking people doing
Speaker 5: habitat restoration work, you know, planting seeds, plant and prairies,
Speaker 5: doing prescribed fire, people with babies and kids and elderly parents,
Speaker 5: farmers that we work with, seed producers, they're all they're
Speaker 5: all uncertain right now, and they're you know, a little
Speaker 5: bit scared about what's coming. So to me, I found
Speaker 5: the fascination conversation be very fascinating.
Speaker 1: I just was enjoying it, really. I wouldn't call it
Speaker 1: a conversation.
Speaker 5: Is more like a monologue.
Speaker 3: But it's okay, monologue version verging on rant, But that's okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, wasn't rant because a rant you're pushing a thing.
Speaker 2: I was pushing a question mark.
Speaker 3: Your face wasn't red and there wasn't like a blood
Speaker 3: vessel sticking out of your forehead.
Speaker 1: Thank you? Yeah. Uh, let's let's set the stage for Grasslands. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can we can we tackle this first? Explain how Brody's
Speaker 1: a song again?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 5: Okay, So Brody and anybody, well, anybody in southern Ohio,
Speaker 5: southern Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey. Imagine that you're in the
Speaker 5: South man, Yeah, you're in the South. I'll draw you
Speaker 5: the South. I'm gonna tell you that.
Speaker 1: I'm familiar with two ways of drawing this line. I'm
Speaker 1: familiar with the Mason Dixon line.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I'm familiar with my thing about where it's a
Speaker 1: line of where you ice fish or not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and the Mason Dixon line and got nothing to
Speaker 5: do with what I'm about to show you. So I
Speaker 5: do like I do like geography. By the way, By
Speaker 5: the way, you gotta put the Chesapeake Bay in there,
Speaker 5: you know, you got to put the New Jersey in.
Speaker 5: There's your Long Island right there, that's the that's the
Speaker 5: northern extent of the South right there. Yeah, no ship man, absolutely,
Speaker 5: need they talk. No seriously, man, we could even make
Speaker 5: a case for southern Nova Scotia and Cape Cod I'm
Speaker 5: telling you, all right, So then what we do is
Speaker 5: we draw that line coming across the southern two thirds
Speaker 5: of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: Okay, not no, no, no, he's a Yankee.
Speaker 5: Yeah, ere, he's out. You're in those glaciated plains, yes,
Speaker 5: very close.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 5: Now, now what you're going to just bring it down
Speaker 5: the trader. Yeah, you're gonna pull in the edge of Appalachia,
Speaker 5: country of Ohio. You do, bring in Cincinnati, Yeah, southern
Speaker 5: third of Indiana, southern Illinois, cut right across south of
Speaker 5: the Columbia a US map a shirt now.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so you're drawing a map of basically what right there,
Speaker 7: what wasn't covered by.
Speaker 3: The middle of Texas.
Speaker 6: You want to hold that up for the camera.
Speaker 1: I can't believe you just did that without having a reference.
Speaker 5: Man, I've been studying since I was wearing a diaper. Bro. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's the South right there, The SGI focal region.
Speaker 1: I'm still Yankee, twenty four states.
Speaker 5: It all gets down to biogeography, Steve.
Speaker 1: So you're you're you're a Johnny reb now there around yep, Yeah,
Speaker 1: just south of the south of the Hills there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Look weat explain that to me. What's going on within
Speaker 1: that map?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so pretty much when you look at this region
Speaker 5: and you know, again this is not the cultural South, right,
Speaker 5: this is that kind.
Speaker 1: Of stuff we're talking to, Collegy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if you're talking about plants and animals, you know,
Speaker 5: there is a high level of endemism here. So lots
Speaker 5: of species that occur within this region that that don't
Speaker 5: occur anywhere else on earth. And so there's lots of
Speaker 5: these clusters of endemic species, and they all are really clustered,
Speaker 5: like in the southern Appalachians or in the what we
Speaker 5: call the Interior Plateau or parts of Florida East Texas,
Speaker 5: and many of those species are really narrowly distributed, you know.
Speaker 5: But then you also have wide ranging species. That's the
Speaker 5: ones we look at, like look at post oak trees
Speaker 5: for example. Post oaks grow all the way out to
Speaker 5: the cross timbers of Texas. They grow up into southern Illinois,
Speaker 5: they go all the way up to Long Island or
Speaker 5: so they don't go any farther north. So what you
Speaker 5: have then is this perpetual pattern of species that reach
Speaker 5: their northern range limits and their western range limits because
Speaker 5: of climatic barriers. So here you get into the boreal northeast,
Speaker 5: you get into the true you know, the tall grass
Speaker 5: prairie of the Midwest and the Great Plains, and then
Speaker 5: the arid basically Chiwalla desert margin right here in South Texas.
Speaker 5: So that means then everything in this region is kind
Speaker 5: of temperate. It's got seasonality, with exception of South Florida,
Speaker 5: which is subtropical, it's mostly you know, people think of
Speaker 5: it as a deciduous forest region. That drives me bonkers.
Speaker 5: You don't like that term, No, I don't. Actually, it's
Speaker 5: a huge misnomber and it's not based in science or his.
Speaker 1: Can you tell what it means and why you don't
Speaker 1: like it?
Speaker 5: Yeah, because what it does is it extrapolates you know,
Speaker 5: all parts of the East as being you know, people think, well,
Speaker 5: it all used to be forest, right. There's this what
Speaker 5: we call the myth of the.
Speaker 1: Squirrel that tell you the squirrel.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was raised on this good Okay, what the squirrel
Speaker 1: could go from blank to blank and never touch the ground.
Speaker 1: Squirrel could go from Kentucky to Michigan, from Florida to
Speaker 1: New Jersey, that's right, whatever and never touched the ground.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I heard it as my sixth grade teacher, Tommy John's,
Speaker 5: who also paddled me thirteen times for talking too much.
Speaker 7: Does he invent the surgery?
Speaker 5: He told me?
Speaker 1: No, I don't know Tommy john surgery.
Speaker 6: No, this is.
Speaker 5: I call it. I call it Tommy John's in the
Speaker 5: fabled squirrel.
Speaker 1: You know, we still got whooped when I was a kid.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm forty six. Huh yeah, I got I got
Speaker 5: thirteen of them in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: Yeah, mister Bricken, Yeah, man, he called me down, whooped
Speaker 1: me one time.
Speaker 5: But he told me, he said, look, a squirrel could
Speaker 5: travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without
Speaker 5: ever touching the ground.
Speaker 2: That's what I heard it. I was screwing the whole
Speaker 2: thing up. That's my dad would like to tell me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know it really no, I don't buy
Speaker 5: it at all. And it has its origins. The origin
Speaker 5: is kind of complex. I wrote to the pretty well
Speaker 5: known author Stephen J. Pine and said, you know, do
Speaker 5: you know where that originated? And we both have been
Speaker 5: sort of scratching our heads over the true origins. That
Speaker 5: myth are a little bit hard to put to nail down.
Speaker 5: But what's easily provable is that it's not true. All
Speaker 5: you got to do is go back into the annals
Speaker 5: of American history the days of Boone and in his contemporaries,
Speaker 5: or you can look at multiple lines of scientific evidence
Speaker 5: at many different places across that and say, oh, there
Speaker 5: were vast prairies there, there were cane breaks there, non
Speaker 5: forested eco systems. So for us to take this mantra
Speaker 5: that it was all forested has had a deleterious effect
Speaker 5: for biodiversity and conservation. Think about it. We've invested billions
Speaker 5: of dollars in the eastern United States into forests. When
Speaker 5: we go by land for protection we create public new
Speaker 5: state parks or new national parks. It's all the mountainous
Speaker 5: forested or big swampy bottom lands that get all the attention. Yep.
Speaker 5: Nobody thinks about the open spaces when you do prioritization
Speaker 5: for you know, conservation action, all the places that get
Speaker 5: the conservation focus. And I'm talking about terrestrial week systems,
Speaker 5: not streams and rivers at this point. But you know,
Speaker 5: it's big river floodplains, it's big swampy intact forests, it's
Speaker 5: big mountain systems that are still forested. Nobody gives a
Speaker 5: shit about pasture lands and crop fields, but those are
Speaker 5: the areas that used to be grassland, and they no
Speaker 5: longer are in most places.
Speaker 2: Is it safe to say that those went first because
Speaker 2: you could grill a corn, a crop of corn on
Speaker 2: them without needing to girdle all.
Speaker 1: The trees, and so it just everything got gobbled up.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Absolutely, And we were beginning to sort of lay
Speaker 5: a fact trail of evidentiary information that proves that exact point.
Speaker 5: You know, you got people in the eighteen seventies who
Speaker 5: are writing back about conditions and say the eighteen forties
Speaker 5: in Tennessee and say, you know, the earliest waves of settlers,
Speaker 5: for example, who went from Middle Tennessee into West Tennessee
Speaker 5: when that land was purchased by Andrew Jackson from the
Speaker 5: Chickasaw Nation. They settled in the already open lands first,
Speaker 5: because quote it opened, you know, a crop of corn
Speaker 5: and cotton very quickly, and so you can look again
Speaker 5: and again in places throughout the East, and what we
Speaker 5: have begun to advance is what we call this push
Speaker 5: pull hypothesis. You know, it's the same thing that was
Speaker 5: driving Boon to Daniel Boone to want to kind of
Speaker 5: move around, and he didn't like the pressure of a
Speaker 5: neighbor being ten miles away from it, So he was
Speaker 5: being sort of pushed by this ever increasing population density factor.
Speaker 5: What we like to say, though, is look at the
Speaker 5: pool sure, right, why was Boone being attracted to the
Speaker 5: Kentucky Bluegrass or the Nashville base in the Cumberland River Valley.
Speaker 5: He certainly wouldn't going to hunt in a big, vast,
Speaker 5: extensive forest. He was going to hunt the meadow lands,
Speaker 5: the cane break margins, the savannahs. That's what people were
Speaker 5: attracted by. Like these early land surveyors and land speculators,
Speaker 5: they wanted good land that was going to open up
Speaker 5: settlement opportunities for incoming westward migrating settlers and colonists. So
Speaker 5: that's what was pulling America's migration patterns in the sixteen
Speaker 5: hundreds and seventeen hundreds. It was the availability of open space.
Speaker 5: That story has never been told in American history, but we're.
Speaker 2: Telling speaking of history, you know the I don't know
Speaker 2: if you know Randall's specialty.
Speaker 5: M tell me about it, Randal.
Speaker 1: Well he doesn't.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I was waiting to hear you.
Speaker 1: Randall has been formally trained to your thing about where
Speaker 1: did that squirrel thing come from? He's been formally trained
Speaker 1: to find that kind of stuff. Wow, he's a pH
Speaker 1: d in history.
Speaker 5: That's what we need, man, we need we need to
Speaker 5: figure it out.
Speaker 7: The first time I ever heard that.
Speaker 1: He's busy right now.
Speaker 5: We need more PhDs.
Speaker 2: But if you put Randall on that, he'd probably coming
Speaker 2: after a couple of weeks. He'd come tell you where
Speaker 2: that first appeared.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't know about that.
Speaker 7: I mean that stuffs so hard to pin down.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like never mind, Well, well it's a great compliment.
Speaker 7: I really I feel like I'm sitting up straighter in
Speaker 7: my chair now. But uh yeah, I think you're probably
Speaker 7: doing the Stephen Pine as well, the as much as
Speaker 7: can be done on that.
Speaker 1: What Uh I wish I had.
Speaker 2: I wish I had compiled more specific examples, but places
Speaker 2: random This will jogging memory, places where I don't. I
Speaker 2: don't necessarily from Boonez descriptions, but places where guys seven
Speaker 2: around seventeen seventy whatever are describing could be north of
Speaker 2: the Ohio and some places, mostly south of the Ohio River,
Speaker 2: are saying that like not.
Speaker 1: A tree in sight. Yeah, I mean, where in the
Speaker 1: world is that happening?
Speaker 7: I thought that was when you're reading all those accounts.
Speaker 7: I mean they're describing savannahs and.
Speaker 1: The barons.
Speaker 7: The Barons is this region that they talk about all
Speaker 7: the time. And in my mind, having grown up in
Speaker 7: Ohio and driven interstates, you know, up and down to
Speaker 7: the you know, to the south and throughout sort of Tennessee, Kentucky,
Speaker 7: how this I picture? It's trees on the hills and
Speaker 7: farms in the bottom. And you read these descriptions from
Speaker 7: that time period of all this open country, and for me,
Speaker 7: it was just like I didn't have a visual reference
Speaker 7: in my imagination for what that looks like.
Speaker 5: I kind of think about the land as I told
Speaker 5: a friend this recently, and she kind of looked at
Speaker 5: me like she didn't believe me. I said, imagine if
Speaker 5: you were to go into like the eighty one Corridor,
Speaker 5: which takes you from Pennsylvania down, you know, into Tennessee.
Speaker 5: The Great Valley as it's called, you know, it's the
Speaker 5: bottom of the valley is relatively open today. I think
Speaker 5: the vast majority of Americans would look at that valley
Speaker 5: and say, oh, at some point in our past, it's
Speaker 5: been cleared, you know, it's been deforested.
Speaker 1: I would think it was open anthroporogenically.
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly, you know. And I would maintain that many
Speaker 5: sections of eastern United States are relatively about the same
Speaker 5: in terms of the approximate closure of the landscape versus
Speaker 5: openness as it was to pre settlement times. So that
Speaker 5: you know, those open cattle pastures you see down in
Speaker 5: there in western Virginia today, or cornfields or valley bottom
Speaker 5: hay meadows, those were probably mostly always open. Sure, there
Speaker 5: are blocks that were deforested, yes, but the relative balance
Speaker 5: of land open to closed, I think is relatively the same.
Speaker 5: It's just what happened to the land. The forests went
Speaker 5: through the mountain sides, some of them were cleared and
Speaker 5: logged and grew back up into secondary and tertiary forests.
Speaker 5: Those valley lands, though, those were part of that pull
Speaker 5: factor that attracted for people moving out of Chesapeake Bay
Speaker 5: and stuff and Tidewater, Virginia. And when they moved into that,
Speaker 5: they moved in state forever. Right. They converted those meadow
Speaker 5: lands and those savannahs into the first cornfields and crop
Speaker 5: lands and plantations. And when those got exhaust then sometimes
Speaker 5: they let them go back and go follow into pasture lands,
Speaker 5: or they went into pasture lands from the beginning. And
Speaker 5: many of our grasslands too, especially the savannah types, they've
Speaker 5: always had trees. And that's one of the big hallmarks
Speaker 5: of what we call southern grasslands is not all of
Speaker 5: them had trees. There are certainly many examples that were
Speaker 5: essentially treeless that we can point to, and we can
Speaker 5: talk about where they were and why. But eighty percent
Speaker 5: at least of southern grasslands had somewhere between probably ten
Speaker 5: and fifty percent tree cover. And so many of our
Speaker 5: friends said, well, hell, why don't you just call that
Speaker 5: a forest and be done with it. Well, because you
Speaker 5: could call it an open forest, you can call it
Speaker 5: a woodland. We don't really give a shit what you
Speaker 5: call it. The fact of the matter is we need
Speaker 5: to understand what its structure needs to be, right, what
Speaker 5: does it need to be to be healthy and flourishing
Speaker 5: for both native plants and native wildlife. It needs to
Speaker 5: be something other than what it is today. We have
Speaker 5: deviated from the natural condition so profoundly that people in
Speaker 5: the East are just unaware of that deviation.
Speaker 7: Good, well, this is a non sequitur.
Speaker 5: I don't even know what that means.
Speaker 7: It's not going to fall what you just said. I
Speaker 7: wasn't sure what we were walking into today. And I
Speaker 7: love profanity, but you've said the word shit a few times,
Speaker 7: which is not something that I expected from the prairie preacher.
Speaker 7: Now I'm understanding that they heard.
Speaker 5: It from you guys the gospel.
Speaker 1: Oh please, I mean I thought he was a preacher, yeah,
Speaker 1: from the prairie. No, I mean I read that.
Speaker 7: I was like, I wonder sort of where the preacher
Speaker 7: comes from. And now I'm getting you know, you've got
Speaker 7: your own gospel here of of what the East used
Speaker 7: to look like. But yeah, I don't know, that's just
Speaker 7: my thought. I don't really have a question.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Back to you, how much of your work
Speaker 1: is about.
Speaker 2: Where do you split your work and your worldview from
Speaker 2: trying to capture what things looked like? I'll add a
Speaker 2: little bit on that because random I have experiences as
Speaker 2: well as in some of our research about market hunting
Speaker 2: that we've been doing lately, where we're sort of taking
Speaker 2: the first far west meaning Appalachia, Kentucky, Tennessee south the
Speaker 2: Ohio River and looking at the source material that explains
Speaker 2: what that looked like, who was there, what it looked like,
Speaker 2: what are the first experiences that Euro Americans had there.
Speaker 2: The source material for that versus the source material for
Speaker 2: the Rocky Mountains. The source material for the Rocky Mountains
Speaker 2: is just relatively vast. I mean, you can't in a lifetime,
Speaker 2: you can't get through all the first hand accounts of
Speaker 2: what a quote unquote untouched West looked like, like the
Speaker 2: what it looked like in the Native America state. You
Speaker 2: can't read it all. If you're trying to find accounts
Speaker 2: of what this what we're talking about looked like in
Speaker 2: an untouched state, it's like it's.
Speaker 1: Like a paucity of material.
Speaker 2: The people that weren't talking and describing weren't describing that.
Speaker 2: So like, how much of your focus is understanding what
Speaker 2: that was because it's so mysterious what it looked like,
Speaker 2: how it functioned, what it did and how much of
Speaker 2: your work is about, well, what do we do now?
Speaker 2: Like knowing that, what do we do now?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Yeah, I would say we're equally split, cause it
Speaker 5: took us, you know, for our first eight years. We've
Speaker 5: we've been around since twenty seventeen. You know, we really
Speaker 5: kind of grew first out of this desire to know
Speaker 5: what it was and document and substantiate how we know
Speaker 5: what it was, right getting back to that original source material,
Speaker 5: educate the public and the masses to the extent we
Speaker 5: could about you know, what it looked like, giving someone
Speaker 5: a visual reference for you know, ecosystems that are nearly extinct.
Speaker 5: So we really were heavily research based and sort of
Speaker 5: into the documentation up until now, and we still are.
Speaker 5: That's one big branch of what we do as an organization.
Speaker 5: And then the other thing that we've grown into really
Speaker 5: in the past three to four years is the restoration.
Speaker 5: It's like, what do we do about it? You know?
Speaker 5: So we have these remnant grasslands where we have these
Speaker 5: areas that a private landowner wants to restore or the
Speaker 5: National Park Service wants to restore. We've been rapidly building
Speaker 5: our team up until the big freeze I have to say,
Speaker 5: we've been rapidly building our team up and we were
Speaker 5: just poised to really begin to do some real impactful
Speaker 5: on the ground habitat restoration work. Those are the two
Speaker 5: equal halves of our organization, and yeah, I'm excited by
Speaker 5: you know. One is I listened to the audible version
Speaker 5: of the Long Hunter.
Speaker 1: Book that you use there is.
Speaker 5: I love it, man, you know, I love the complementary.
Speaker 5: Is that a word between You're in Clay's southern accent? Yeah?
Speaker 5: I thought that played off real well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but like one of these guys is obviously, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, a man of the people.
Speaker 5: But I love the book. And you know what I
Speaker 5: found is that you found You talk about the paucity
Speaker 5: of those records, You found some of them. You found
Speaker 5: some of the few. You know, like you mentioned the
Speaker 5: Casper Mansker and the Bloods. I always forget if it's
Speaker 5: Isaac or Anthony, you know, the brother two?
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, and I can't remember which one was with
Speaker 8: Mansker when they encounter the lick and what is modern
Speaker 8: day Summer County s and you know the first time
Speaker 8: they came, as you alluded to in your book, they
Speaker 8: were on horseback and they shot a deer.
Speaker 5: It was in the middle of this giant herd of bison, right,
Speaker 5: and they couldn't get off their horses for fear of
Speaker 5: being trampled to death. But as long as they stayed
Speaker 5: on their horses, they were good. You know. There were hundreds,
Speaker 5: possibly you know, a few thousand buffalo into that particular
Speaker 5: lick that they were in, and you found that reference
Speaker 5: to that. There's a couple more to that exact same
Speaker 5: same place though. That has always stuck with me, For example,
Speaker 5: when they came back the following year, and I think
Speaker 5: you may have references too. All those bison had been
Speaker 5: exterminated French. Yeah, the French hunters like Timothy de Munbrin
Speaker 5: and his his you know, cronies were all kind of
Speaker 5: hunting around in that area. So you know, you've stumbled
Speaker 5: upon like one of the very few references to what
Speaker 5: I would say is a reference that alludes to the
Speaker 5: savannahs around the Nashville area. Some regions have really well
Speaker 5: documented grasslands, like the black Belt Prairie region of Mississippi
Speaker 5: and Alabama. It goes all the way back to like
Speaker 5: seventeen oh one, you know, when that was French territory.
Speaker 5: You had French generals and stuff like, they were based
Speaker 5: in New Orleans, they and their armies were crisscrossing northern Mississippi.
Speaker 5: Those are all recorded in the French archives, and I've
Speaker 5: got a colleague, doctor John Barone, who's published and pulled
Speaker 5: that stuff out. But part of the challenge of the
Speaker 5: South and the East in general is that many of
Speaker 5: these areas were settled so rapidly and hectically chaotically that
Speaker 5: the original landscape. We always say they were gone before
Speaker 5: the camera was invented. They were gone before people who
Speaker 5: could write about them visited. In some cases they were
Speaker 5: transformed before they could be recorded, and oftentimes they were
Speaker 5: gone before the first artist came through. So the record
Speaker 5: has to be sort of pieced back together, like Humpty Dumpty.
Speaker 5: And that's one of the things that we're actively doing,
Speaker 5: is piecing back where they were, what they looked like.
Speaker 5: One of our great friends, and you gotta have them
Speaker 5: on your show. He's amazing. He's the best oil painter
Speaker 5: you'll ever meet.
Speaker 1: And careful knockcuse, my wife's taken over now, man.
Speaker 5: But he goes back and he tours like when William
Speaker 5: Bartram was an explorer in the South in the seventeen seventies.
Speaker 5: He goes back to where William Bartram was in Montgomery, Alabama,
Speaker 5: and he uses Bartram's words and his ability to look
Speaker 5: at the modern landscape to put back the scene that
Speaker 5: Bartram would have seen. And it's a vast prairie that
Speaker 5: looks like the Flynn Hills of East Kansas.
Speaker 3: You were talking about bison, Do you guys suspect that
Speaker 3: they played a role in maintaining these these grasslands?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Now, bison in the East, as
Speaker 5: you guys, I'm sure no, is very complicated. You know,
Speaker 5: I've read Ted Bulow's book. I love It's one of
Speaker 5: my favorite of all times.
Speaker 1: This whole thing is a great story.
Speaker 5: I got them a backpack. But you know, there's some
Speaker 5: new evidence emerging on bison in the East. There's some
Speaker 5: archaeology and paleontology work that's been done. You know, we
Speaker 5: thought that bison had kind of re emerged in the
Speaker 5: South in like the middle fifteen hundreds early fifteen hundreds,
Speaker 5: after the depopulation of Native Americans from some of the
Speaker 5: different pandemic diseases that they came back in from the
Speaker 5: Great Plains I think that the supporting evidence suggests that
Speaker 5: is true. Right, But if you had asked, most people, Okay,
Speaker 5: so bison came back into the South, because you know,
Speaker 5: they were definitely here in the South in ice age
Speaker 5: times we had multiple species of bison. But most people
Speaker 5: kind of considered that in states like North Carolina, Georgia,
Speaker 5: you know, Tennessee, that bison had essentially been gone for
Speaker 5: you know, since fifteen thousand years ago, up until about
Speaker 5: the year fifteen fifty or so. And so then you
Speaker 5: get into saying, well, well, wait a minute, does that
Speaker 5: mean there were no big animals grazing southern grasslands three
Speaker 5: thousand years ago, five thousand, nine thousand years ago. That
Speaker 5: was kind of the I think the consensus.
Speaker 2: But this this wedgend, if you have wedging, well, I
Speaker 2: just want some of the things people have looked at
Speaker 2: and describing that That that I've read about is like
Speaker 2: that the the Spanish and the French would come through
Speaker 2: places in the early sixteen hundreds and they'd describe everything
Speaker 2: right down to possums, no mention of buffalo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you go to the.
Speaker 2: Effigy mounds, like the mound builders, the Mississippian cultures on
Speaker 2: the Ohio Mississippi River. They carve and have things every snake, turtle, deer, bear.
Speaker 1: They don't have buffalo effigies.
Speaker 2: And I think that that like that kind when we're
Speaker 2: talking about evidence, like that kind of evidence, it's almost
Speaker 2: like a omission. I'm try like omission equals absence. I'm
Speaker 2: familiar with that kind of evidence, like, well, if they
Speaker 2: were there, they would have talked about them, so they
Speaker 2: must not have been there.
Speaker 5: I've encountered a lot of that logic, right, Yeah, And
Speaker 5: I think that's that's generally it seems like there's wide
Speaker 5: agreement that there generally were few to know bison in
Speaker 5: the East and Southeast before the early fifteen hundreds. You know,
Speaker 5: when you get to the French explorers of the sixteen
Speaker 5: eighties through you know, the seventeen twenties, ample, ample discussion
Speaker 5: of bison just just it's it's everywhere, you know, when
Speaker 5: you get to the seventeen sixties and seventies seventies, everybody
Speaker 5: who goes out is talking about bison in every valley
Speaker 5: in West Virginia and every big you know whatever. Isn't
Speaker 5: that crazy, It's crazy, you know? But and so many
Speaker 5: place names too. But here's the challenge. Uh we we
Speaker 5: thought they essentially had disappeared at the end of the
Speaker 5: ice Age. But I think his name is doctor Gary Moore.
Speaker 5: He's an archaeologist from East Carolina State University. Was doing
Speaker 5: some work at a archaeological site in the Piedmont of
Speaker 5: South Carolina and using a technique where they looked at
Speaker 5: these spear points, these stone projectile tools. Right, they were
Speaker 5: able to go into you know, you guys have seen
Speaker 5: those flint nappers, right and you're sitting there making it,
Speaker 5: making a projectile. Yeah, there you go. Well, those those
Speaker 5: stone tools have little microfractures in them that through capitalar
Speaker 5: re action, you know, draws in blood and other types
Speaker 5: of material when you when you kill an animal. And
Speaker 5: what doctor Moore's work has shown is that they can
Speaker 5: actually extract not the DNA, but they can extract the
Speaker 5: protein residues of animals that were killed with these stone tools.
Speaker 5: Is well, I know I've heard mixed opinions on it too,
Speaker 5: but but if it's true, let's just say if it is,
Speaker 5: and you know, it's gone through peer review, publication and
Speaker 5: that kind of stuff. But what his work shows is
Speaker 5: that there's a continuous record of bison in South Carolina
Speaker 5: from the Late Ice Age, so probably fifteen thousand years ago,
Speaker 5: all the way up until seven thousand years ago. So
Speaker 5: that's a totally different story. If you got bison in
Speaker 5: South Carolina at seven thousand years ago, you probably had
Speaker 5: them in Tennessee, Kentucky. You may have had them even farther,
Speaker 5: you know, to the west and south. So then that
Speaker 5: means that the window without bison is actually much narrower
Speaker 5: than we suspected gotch So it's that kind of that
Speaker 5: kind of emerging evidence which adds to and somewhat you know,
Speaker 5: clouds the whole picture of southeastern grassland ecosystems.
Speaker 2: Can you speak to the impact of Native American burning
Speaker 2: like this? This was I can't remember what year it was,
Speaker 2: but this became a very fashionable.
Speaker 1: Idea that.
Speaker 2: Open country, that all this open lands was a result
Speaker 2: of slash and burn agriculture, or there are accounts, I
Speaker 2: believe there's French accounts where they were using fire and
Speaker 2: game drives. Yeah, I mean they would encircle big areas,
Speaker 2: get some hunters staked up, and just burn the place
Speaker 2: to push out deer. And so for a while it
Speaker 2: seemed like everybody was really hip on this idea that
Speaker 2: all that open country was that was anthropogenic and not natural,
Speaker 2: you know, like not whatever the hell the opposite anthropogenic is.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think I'm reading the book Forgotten Fires right now,
Speaker 5: right and they talk about you know, it's written by
Speaker 5: an anthropologists, so it relies heavily on that perspective and
Speaker 5: sort of the science of anthropology. There's no question when
Speaker 5: you go back into the earliest seventeen hundreds and sixteen
Speaker 5: hundreds and maybe slightly beyond that, there are just ample
Speaker 5: documentary evidences and observations of Native Americans burning the landscape
Speaker 5: for you know, setting large, you know, circular fires on
Speaker 5: the land, and that's really well documented. I think, though,
Speaker 5: there's a slippery slope and it's just too far to go.
Speaker 5: It's too big of an extrapolation to say with surety
Speaker 5: that Native Americans created open ecosystems of the South. And
Speaker 5: I think what that does is it makes a bunch
Speaker 5: of assumptions. One of the ways I think in my
Speaker 5: colleague who's our chief science advisor, doctor Reid Nass, he
Speaker 5: wrote a book in twenty thirteen called Forgotten Grasslands of
Speaker 5: the South, and it really was a game changer and
Speaker 5: turned the messaging around southern ecosystems. There's one very clear
Speaker 5: line of evidence as to why it doesn't make sense
Speaker 5: that Native Americans created these landscapes. They probably moved into
Speaker 5: them and found them already largely open. They may have
Speaker 5: expanded some of the smaller ones to make them larger,
Speaker 5: But the clear line of evidence that they did not
Speaker 5: create most of them is in the presence of endemic species.
Speaker 5: When you have plants and animals that have, you know,
Speaker 5: through the process of evolution, it just takes time. Most
Speaker 5: of the species that evolve on this planet, they require
Speaker 5: tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Some of them
Speaker 5: require millions of years to evolve. If we have conclusively
Speaker 5: had people in the South for say thirteen fourteen thousand years,
Speaker 5: most of these modern species likely originated prior to the
Speaker 5: arrival of man into the southeastern United States. Grassland species,
Speaker 5: they're grassland obligate species. That's the biggest testament to that
Speaker 5: longevity factor. Now here's the other one. Very rich fossil
Speaker 5: evidence for grasslands and grassland endemic species in the South.
Speaker 5: And so if you know you say, okay, well, you
Speaker 5: know what if it's true that Native Americans uh came
Speaker 5: into and created these. Again, I am not in any
Speaker 5: way trying to take away the importance of indigenous management.
Speaker 5: I think that is a exceptionally important, you know, component
Speaker 5: to this. But you can go back to the fossil
Speaker 5: record in Florida and East Tennessee and various places, uh
Speaker 5: and find a rich wealth of some of the biggest
Speaker 5: grassland dependent you know, megafauna and carnivores. You can imagine.
Speaker 5: You know, there's a recent discovery of the American cheetah
Speaker 5: in the in the the Appalachians of southwest Virginia. Seriously, yeah,
Speaker 5: no joke, found out.
Speaker 3: I was reading there was caribou in Alabama, Georgia.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yes, that you know, uh, big longhorn bison. And
Speaker 5: by the way, that that cheetah was found within the
Speaker 5: county adjacent to Cumberland Gap.
Speaker 1: Mmm.
Speaker 5: No, kid, yeah, I know, you know, I know you
Speaker 5: love Cumberland Gain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, huh.
Speaker 5: So there's a there's a wealth, I mean, the endemic
Speaker 5: species alone. Man, that that that is the biggest piece
Speaker 5: of evidence.
Speaker 2: I remember when I was a little kid, man, do
Speaker 2: you remember what did do you guys remember what the
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's still around the Epcot Center.
Speaker 3: It's very much still, isn't it.
Speaker 5: It's a big glass.
Speaker 3: It's like a big glass, like a giant.
Speaker 1: I went there when I was just a youngster.
Speaker 2: I went down I remember we went down there to
Speaker 2: we fished, We watched them shoot a space shuttle off,
Speaker 2: and we went to the Epcot Center and they did
Speaker 2: this thing where you were like cruising at very low altitude,
Speaker 2: Like it's like a planetarium experience where it's like you're
Speaker 2: cruising very fast at very low altitude over the country.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: I know, there's like some budget problems.
Speaker 2: Has have you guys tried like any kind of wide
Speaker 2: scale visual representation.
Speaker 1: Of what a flyover like, you know, I mean, like
Speaker 1: what a flyover of the area you mapped out looked
Speaker 1: like in fourteen ninety two.
Speaker 5: That sounds like a good collaboration with meat Eator if
Speaker 5: you want me to tell you about it. But no,
Speaker 5: what we have, what we have embarked on is the
Speaker 5: creation of a web platform we call Grasslandia.
Speaker 9: You know it sounds kind of fanciful, right, Come with
Speaker 9: me to the grassland the world of Grasslandia.
Speaker 5: And No, I think that needs to happen. We need
Speaker 5: to have that sort of visual you know, flyover reenactment
Speaker 5: so people can see it, because nobody can can see
Speaker 5: it and understand it today and if you can't see it,
Speaker 5: you can't visualize it. Or the largest remnants you have
Speaker 5: left is the footprint of this building, you know, or
Speaker 5: a quarter of an acre. How are you going to
Speaker 5: inspire people to go back in and care about those
Speaker 5: landscapes and rebuild them and reconstruct them so we can
Speaker 5: prevent the continued collapse of our wildlife and bio diversity
Speaker 5: which is all around us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, tell us about some of those patches you found, Yeah, well,
Speaker 2: like native patches of like yeah, historic.
Speaker 1: Grass and how small they are.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Well, the probably the best patch that we have
Speaker 5: left in Tennessee where I'm from, it's called May Prairie.
Speaker 5: And you know, the story is back in the sixties,
Speaker 5: a couple of professors from the University of Tennessee. We're
Speaker 5: sitting at a cafe across the street on Highway forty one,
Speaker 5: you know, which like goes from Chicago to Florida. And
Speaker 5: they're sitting at this restaurant it's called the Prairie Cafe,
Speaker 5: and they look over to the lady and said, miss ma'am,
Speaker 5: why is this called the prairie Cafe? She said, you
Speaker 5: see a line of trees over there across the highway.
Speaker 5: Well look through there. You see how it kind of
Speaker 5: looks open and sunny. There's a prairie in there. And
Speaker 5: these were two botanists, right like I am. So they
Speaker 5: get they finish up their meal and they go out
Speaker 5: across road to walk in and they find May Prairie,
Speaker 5: which is eleven acres and it's still to this day
Speaker 5: is eleven acres. May Prairie is the most biodiverse single
Speaker 5: eleven acres in the eastern interior United States. Kid, you know,
Speaker 5: oh crazy, totally separate side story. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 5: I was part of the Natural Areas conference that came
Speaker 5: to Tennessee. It was in Nashville, and they asked me,
Speaker 5: I said, will you lead a grass identification hike down
Speaker 5: to May Prairie for the for the conference? I said,
Speaker 5: for sure, will I go down there? And I'm walking
Speaker 5: through this prairie It's October of two thousand and eight,
Speaker 5: and I see this plant. I look down and I said, man,
Speaker 5: this is weird. This is the type of little member
Speaker 5: of the sunflyer family. I said, this is not anything
Speaker 5: currently known from Tennessee. And Buddy Mine says, how you know?
Speaker 5: I said, just trust me. I know, I know the
Speaker 5: floor of Tennessee. There's nothing else like it. I don't
Speaker 5: know what it is. So I get back and later
Speaker 5: that email, I sent an email to the national uh,
Speaker 5: the international expert on that particular group of plants, who
Speaker 5: happened to be in Waterloo, Canada, and he wrote back
Speaker 5: and he said, congratulations, you have discovered a completely new species.
Speaker 5: And not only did it prove to be new, but
Speaker 5: it's endemic to that single prairie and nowhere else on earth.
Speaker 1: You're kidding me?
Speaker 7: Did you get to name it?
Speaker 5: He actually named it for me, so.
Speaker 1: I thought you couldn't do that anymore.
Speaker 5: No, I can't. I can't name it for myself.
Speaker 3: So by new it was actually old, like is that
Speaker 3: what you're saying?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 9: It was endemic to probably all over damn place once
Speaker 9: upon a time, endemic in the sense that it Yeah,
Speaker 9: it probably was more widely distributed because that area had
Speaker 9: had about a million acres.
Speaker 5: Of grass historically. That's one of the last fragments left.
Speaker 5: But yeah, and old in the sense it probably took
Speaker 5: tens of thousands of years to evolve as a species. Yeah,
Speaker 5: the name is sympiatricum estesia. Well not the sexiest name around.
Speaker 3: Like, we've got prairie out here, and it's you know,
Speaker 3: obviously it's diverse and there's different kind of plants and
Speaker 3: animals and stuff. But like, what would like a patch
Speaker 3: of that prairie that size of this table look like
Speaker 3: that year talking like, is it a bunch of different
Speaker 3: flowers and plants and grass and.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's gonna look like your tall grass
Speaker 5: prairie and like parts of Missouri or Iowa very similar.
Speaker 5: It's just oftentimes it is gonna have a bit more
Speaker 5: tree cover, you know, it's gonna.
Speaker 3: Have what would those be, conifers or hardwoods or both,
Speaker 3: mostly hardwoods.
Speaker 5: So like in lots of the Upper South you'll have
Speaker 5: post oak, black jack oak those those or burroak those
Speaker 5: in my you know, my way of thinking, especially for
Speaker 5: our region, are essentially grassland trees, which is kind of
Speaker 5: a weird concept for people. Like black jack oak won't
Speaker 5: even reproduce anymore, Like it's acorns just never germinate because
Speaker 5: most black jack oaks today are shrouded in forest that
Speaker 5: is unnaturally forested, where the forest has overtaken grassland. So
Speaker 5: you've got an oak that essentially can no longer germinate
Speaker 5: and reproduce itself.
Speaker 2: Like he's dropping his acorn in a place that yeah,
Speaker 2: or excuse me's acorn, that's.
Speaker 5: Right, and it doesn't do any good, and he's on
Speaker 5: his way out, you know, and another generation or two,
Speaker 5: those oaks will die and they will never replace themselves
Speaker 5: without things like fire and buffalo and those kind of things.
Speaker 5: But you know, yeah, visually very similar to what you'd
Speaker 5: see with the eastern tallgrass prairie. That's essentially what ours were.
Speaker 5: They were sort of eastern outliers of but they were
Speaker 5: very different in terms of the plants. They had their
Speaker 5: own species, their own composition, They were unique, and now
Speaker 5: they're mostly gone.
Speaker 1: What's it look like subsurface in that may prairie.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that particular prairie does have you know, it's it's
Speaker 5: an intact system. So it's the underground is intact too,
Speaker 5: and it's prairie soils and stuff. But that's that's a
Speaker 5: big misnumber, big misconception a lot of people have is
Speaker 5: that prairie is always associated with a given soil type.
Speaker 5: You know, in the Midwest, a lot of your prairies
Speaker 5: are these black prairie soils they call mollosaws. But in
Speaker 5: the South we get prairies on every soul type imaginable,
Speaker 5: So that really doesn't hold much water for us with
Speaker 5: the actual sul type.
Speaker 1: Got it? Yeah, yeah, What is the history of how
Speaker 1: that made prairie? How did it stay intact just because
Speaker 1: something didn't happen.
Speaker 5: Well, that's the sort of the case that we see
Speaker 5: with a lot of our eastern grasslands. Is the thing
Speaker 5: that caused them to survive four hundred years of you know,
Speaker 5: Euro American settlement was Oftentimes they're too wet or too rocky,
Speaker 5: or maybe they're on the natural edge. So in this case,
Speaker 5: it has it's we'll call hard pan prairie. So if
Speaker 5: you dig down them by a foot, it actually has
Speaker 5: a clay hardpan that restricts tree growth and actually favors
Speaker 5: grasses and wildflowers and those kind of things. So it's
Speaker 5: naturally predisposed to being being grassy. But it's also really
Speaker 5: really wet in the wintertime. You can't really develop there.
Speaker 5: It's not a good good for cropping soils are highly acidic,
Speaker 5: so that's one of the reasons why it's kind of
Speaker 5: you know, persistent to the modern day. But a lot
Speaker 5: of these other sites, you know, if they're rocky that
Speaker 5: will preclude development, or if they're in a like a
Speaker 5: power line corridor. We see a lot of our best
Speaker 5: grasslands in power lines and on roadsides. Really yeah, but strangely,
Speaker 5: you know, or not strangely, I guess, but especially in
Speaker 5: the past twenty five years, those are the hardest hit,
Speaker 5: you know, from the usage of herbicides to kind of
Speaker 5: manage those environments. So they were the last to remain
Speaker 5: and now they're the sort of those little last scraps
Speaker 5: are being devastated, and those remnants are key to rebuilding efforts.
Speaker 5: You know, if you want to rebuild prairie, if you
Speaker 5: want to rebuild savannahs, it's important to know where those
Speaker 5: remnants are.
Speaker 2: Can can those remnants if you rate the right conditions.
Speaker 2: Do those remnants want to grow or do they want
Speaker 2: to shrink based on what's on the edge of them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they do not grow. They that's they're not They
Speaker 5: don't have a natural predispicient predisposition to being able to
Speaker 5: move easily as a as a vegetation type.
Speaker 1: So it's not like a BlackBerry patch.
Speaker 5: No. Now, in fact, that that's one of the things
Speaker 5: that's really hard for a lot of people to understand.
Speaker 5: You know, in the wildlife biology arena, the term early
Speaker 5: successional habitat is like rampant, right. That's actually one of
Speaker 5: the terms that's least helpful to us, because I think
Speaker 5: people have always looked at grasslands as early successional habitat.
Speaker 5: That's true of some types, but what we're talking about
Speaker 5: are grasslands in some cases that have survived hundreds or
Speaker 5: thousands of years. They are old growth ecosystems. So you know,
Speaker 5: a lot of effort to recognize old growth forests almost
Speaker 5: no effort to recognize old growth grasslands. That's what may
Speaker 5: prairie is. And if people could visualize them like that,
Speaker 5: I think that would maybe add to the appreciation that
Speaker 5: people have for them. But it's really hard for people
Speaker 5: to get by. You know, see is just a grassy
Speaker 5: patch or just an old field. It's hard to It's
Speaker 5: not like an old growth forest where's immediately clear to
Speaker 5: all why it's old.
Speaker 1: Growth yep, yep, oh.
Speaker 3: What is I mean? You're probably gonna get to this,
Speaker 3: But what would restoration look like? Is it cutting down
Speaker 3: trees and replanting stuff or is it because you said
Speaker 3: it won't grow on its own, right, So you've got
Speaker 3: to step in at some point.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think it's first important to kind
Speaker 5: of understand what type of grassland you're dealing with, right, So,
Speaker 5: like in our work for this entire southeastern geography, we've
Speaker 5: identified one and eighteen major types of grasslands. Those can
Speaker 5: be further subdivided into probably six hundred types, so you're
Speaker 5: you're dealing with a vast number. First of all, you know,
Speaker 5: coastal dune grasslands versus lonely pine savannah grasslands versus tall grass,
Speaker 5: prairie type grasslands versus the meadow in West Virginia. They
Speaker 5: all are going to require different starting points for healing
Speaker 5: and restoring and rebuilding those landscapes. That's kind of the
Speaker 5: first thing. So you know, if we go into let's say,
Speaker 5: an area that used to be prairie in central Kentucky,
Speaker 5: we first want to know is there any remnant potential left?
Speaker 5: Most times it's no. We have a landowner says, yeah,
Speaker 5: I want to build prairie out here. Tell me if
Speaker 5: it's a good site. You know, we don't want to
Speaker 5: necessarily rebuild a prairie that naturally should be in a
Speaker 5: forested landscape. You're fighting a losing battle there. So we
Speaker 5: try to use our knowledge of the local history. We
Speaker 5: try to use our knowledge of biodiversity too, you know,
Speaker 5: constructively and very thoughtfully suggest what should be there to
Speaker 5: begin with. That's all based in science.
Speaker 1: Real quick, let's say you had this hypothetical landowner, yeah,
Speaker 1: in central Kentucky on what you Let's say we're in
Speaker 1: a spot where you know, categorically like you know that
Speaker 1: this was prairie. Is it possible that the guy comes
Speaker 1: forward and he's got a thousand acres and you go
Speaker 1: look and there's none?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, it's just gone. Yeah. We're working
Speaker 5: on a five thousand acre farm right now, just south
Speaker 5: of the Kentucky line. It was founded by George Washington's cousin,
Speaker 5: and it was the second largest tobacco plantation on earth
Speaker 5: in the decades before the Civil War. There's nothing left.
Speaker 5: There's no prairie there are.
Speaker 1: You know that it was prairie and now there's none, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And there's there's none left. And so you know,
Speaker 5: the three states. Essentially you can think of is that
Speaker 5: those areas with really fertile, agriculturally productive soils in all
Speaker 5: cases in the East, all of them have been decimated
Speaker 5: by ninety nine point ninety nine percent. That's not hyperbole,
Speaker 5: that's demonstrated loss. The second group is what we're formerly like,
Speaker 5: less fertile, but they were meadowlands. Shennonto a valley of
Speaker 5: northern Virginia comes to mind, the new river settlements that
Speaker 5: I know you and I have read a lot about
Speaker 5: the River Valley on these areas. They were really fertile,
Speaker 5: but not like good for plant and crops. They were
Speaker 5: fertile for grazing lands. Well, those got overgrazed in the
Speaker 5: early periods of American history. Then they got improved by
Speaker 5: planting tall fescue and you know, Scottish grass and all
Speaker 5: these other kinds of invasive species. And today they're like
Speaker 5: ninety nine point nine to nine percent pasture lands dominated
Speaker 5: by Eurasian grasses. And in the third category, like you're
Speaker 5: more rolling, sandy, sort of rocky grasslands with trees, those
Speaker 5: were savannahs. Those really dependent on fire, you know, places
Speaker 5: like tall timbers in South Georgia, for example, you take
Speaker 5: fire out of the equation, you take big animals out
Speaker 5: of the equation, those grow up and become forests.
Speaker 1: God.
Speaker 5: So the you know, vast swaths of our public lands
Speaker 5: today in the south Piney Woods of East Texas, big
Speaker 5: game lands in central Virginia, into Piedmont big lands in
Speaker 5: the Florida Panhandle that are today densely, densely forested and dry,
Speaker 5: used to be open savannahs. God, and we've lost it.
Speaker 5: But that's actually the greatest potential for recovery. And so
Speaker 5: you know, back to your question, Brodie, is how do
Speaker 5: you how do you rebuild these? Well, again starting with
Speaker 5: knowing what they were, But you know, what you do
Speaker 5: to recover a savannah is very different what you do
Speaker 5: to plant a prairie. So savannahs are probably the trickiest.
Speaker 5: They're the easiest to restore, the most potential right now
Speaker 5: as a nation, to restore millions of acres of savannah
Speaker 5: that are just suppressed under artificially forested conditions. It's not
Speaker 5: gonna be popular because you're gonna have to cut trees.
Speaker 3: That's what I was kind of getting that people don't
Speaker 3: like that, And unfortunately the biggest.
Speaker 1: It comes from a good place though, Yeah it does.
Speaker 2: It comes from reading low Rex and all that, like
Speaker 2: it comes from a good day.
Speaker 7: Well, to circle back to the earlier point, I mean
Speaker 7: when I growing up, when if someone said they're going
Speaker 7: to restore something, I thought, oh, you're going to plant
Speaker 7: trees there, Just more trees is restoration.
Speaker 2: I found myself trying to explain to someone the other
Speaker 2: day that we're talking about conservation, and I was talking
Speaker 2: about it's so regions specific, like what that means. And
Speaker 2: I'm saying that there's a perception among the general populace
Speaker 2: of well meaning people the conservation means not doing anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I was trying to explain the concept of
Speaker 2: active land management that if not doing anything doesn't give
Speaker 2: you what in some places, not doing anything doesn't deliver
Speaker 2: what you want.
Speaker 5: Oh absolutely. And in the case of grasslands, which they
Speaker 5: either require most grasslands not all, but most require either
Speaker 5: some combination of big animals bison, elk especially fire. Again,
Speaker 5: not all types. The blue grasses of animals, the blue
Speaker 5: grass of Kentucky, for example, was probably a bison elk
Speaker 5: dependent ecosystem, not a fire dependent ecosystems. Right, yeah, But
Speaker 5: you take those two combinations of factors out and you
Speaker 5: then you know, interject you know, conversion to crop land
Speaker 5: or overgrazing. That's how you lose what we had. But
Speaker 5: if they're done well, they almost always require people to
Speaker 5: be involved in the process. I think that's part of
Speaker 5: the success story is the people who love land and
Speaker 5: conservation and hunting. There's a great opportunity and it's enjoyable.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think about the farms that we work with.
Speaker 5: One of the best is this eleven thousand acre farm
Speaker 5: in Alabama. This farm's nine miles wide and this family
Speaker 5: it's been in their farm since nineteen eighteen. They've never
Speaker 5: needed the federal government or the state government or anybody
Speaker 5: to tell them what to do with it. And they
Speaker 5: just they've made managed it perfectly in one hundred years.
Speaker 5: And it's like stepping back into a time capsule to
Speaker 5: about the eighteen teens in west central Alabama. It's amazing.
Speaker 3: You mentioned her. Besides having a big impact on you know,
Speaker 3: killing all this stuff, do you in order to combat
Speaker 3: all those Eurasian evasive grass species, do you have to
Speaker 3: whatever hold hands with the devil and use that stuff? Also?
Speaker 5: Absolutely? Yeah, And boy, that's a big hot button issue
Speaker 5: for us because you know, right now the technology and
Speaker 5: then know how to take something from a field of johnsngrass,
Speaker 5: which is this nasty invasive from Africa. For us to
Speaker 5: do something better than Johnson grass, we have to nuke
Speaker 5: it like six times, you know, and we don't want
Speaker 5: to do that. But guess what once we take care
Speaker 5: of the Johnson grass problem. Like we're doing a project
Speaker 5: right now with Google, and you know, we are treating
Speaker 5: a site and preparing it, but once we get it
Speaker 5: planted with the most diverse species mix it's ever been
Speaker 5: planted in Central Tennessee, you know, except for coming back
Speaker 5: in and just with our volunteers and spot treating a
Speaker 5: couple of problem areas, we'll never again have to use
Speaker 5: that stuff there. And you know, we've got American bumblebees
Speaker 5: coming back, We've got grasshopper sparrows, got Northern harriers, We've
Speaker 5: got otters coming in from the Creek Bank. So hopefully, Yeah,
Speaker 5: that's a big problem here. I mean, I have some
Speaker 5: really high profile clients that say, no, this is a
Speaker 5: certified organic farm, and we don't want to give up
Speaker 5: on doing it organically. It's just really right now, very
Speaker 5: challenging to do it at scale. You could do it
Speaker 5: at one to two acres, but the how you're going
Speaker 5: to do it at one hundred acres you know, or
Speaker 5: even ten acres is very challenging right now.
Speaker 4: That's to take a lot because you're throwing off the
Speaker 4: balance in the soil as well, so you probably need
Speaker 4: a yeah, a lot of layers deep.
Speaker 5: It's it's very complicated. I mean we've had to turn
Speaker 5: away some you know, high profile clients that said, hey,
Speaker 5: this is this is a certified organic farm. You won't
Speaker 5: be using that stuff on my place, and there's just
Speaker 5: nothing you can do. Then no, And then they actually
Speaker 5: did plant before we came in. They tried to plant,
Speaker 5: and it fails because if you don't take care of
Speaker 5: the invasives all, it takes about three years to get
Speaker 5: on top of it. I know that's a lot, but
Speaker 5: if you can, if you can manage the invas as
Speaker 5: well for three years to make sure that you are
Speaker 5: planting into something that is very you know, receptible to
Speaker 5: all these you know species of grasses and wafflars that
Speaker 5: you need for healthy wildlife habitat. It's just a three
Speaker 5: year quick sacrifice.
Speaker 3: And once it's established, it can kind of hold that
Speaker 3: stuff at bay.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it can. Now, it may depending on the severity infestation.
Speaker 5: You know. Again, what we're trying to do is build
Speaker 5: a team of young men and women who come in
Speaker 5: and we stay on top of it. Right And that's
Speaker 5: the thing is that you can't just build a prairie
Speaker 5: and walk away. That's one of the reasons why it's
Speaker 5: exceptionally hard to get a lot of people on board
Speaker 5: with this idea of eastern grasslands is because it does
Speaker 5: require perpetual management.
Speaker 1: How many years of management or do you mean perpetual perpetual?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think perpetual, you know, and you know it's
Speaker 5: going to need most of them are going to need fire.
Speaker 5: You know, some of them would benefit from grazing, you know.
Speaker 5: So where we have the greatest success is working on
Speaker 5: you know, nothing's guaranteed, but we're right now we're having
Speaker 5: the greatest success. There's probably some of the private lands
Speaker 5: where people are still young and active and they're like,
Speaker 5: my kids are into this, and it's all hands on deck. Otherwise,
Speaker 5: it takes a fairly steep monetary investment to get into
Speaker 5: some of this and right now, we're trying to. What
Speaker 5: we're trying to basically inform the American public on is
Speaker 5: that we can't afford not to because so much of
Speaker 5: our Eastern bid diversity, northern bob white countless songbirds, pollinators,
Speaker 5: you know, they're in free fall collapse in the eastern
Speaker 5: part of the United States. We would argue largely in
Speaker 5: part because we're not doing what we need for our habitat.
Speaker 1: Do you think that's what that's what is ultimately has
Speaker 1: happened to the bob Wait Quail.
Speaker 5: One thousand percent? Yeah, And I you know, I enjoyed
Speaker 5: the episode that you guys had on Quail recently. Not
Speaker 5: everyone did well, you know, I enjoyed it, but uh
Speaker 5: and I learned a lot about eye parasites, you know.
Speaker 5: But I was thinking the time the whole time I
Speaker 5: watched it. Well, when you take an ecosystem or a
Speaker 5: collection of open, brushy, grassy ecosystems that offered Quail everything
Speaker 5: they needed, and then you take away ninety five percent
Speaker 5: of that, what the hell do you expect? What do
Speaker 5: you expect? And even even I'm not even just talking
Speaker 5: about pre settlement landscapes. Uh, As a boy growing up
Speaker 5: in southern middle Tennessee. In the eighties and nineties, every
Speaker 5: hillside for miles around was just broomsedge fields, you know,
Speaker 5: golden broomsedge Athropogon virginicas standing through the winter.
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 5: It's a it's a type of blue stem native blue
Speaker 5: stem grass. It's it's it's shipped for forage. So farmers
Speaker 5: don't really like it, and it's often a sign of
Speaker 5: beat up pastures and stuff. But you know what, Quail,
Speaker 5: Quail loved it. And we had BlackBerry patches everywhere. I mean,
Speaker 5: this is this is not your ideal, pristine, high quality habitat.
Speaker 5: It was very much an agricultural beat up, brushy pasture
Speaker 5: land on somewhat poor farms that I grew up on.
Speaker 5: But the thing is it was everywhere. But then by
Speaker 5: the latest nineties, everybody, everybody in their mama started mowing religiously,
Speaker 5: and oat side started getting sprayed and fence rows started
Speaker 5: getting taken out. And I think what we hear a
Speaker 5: lot of times is I've heard some colleagues push back
Speaker 5: and say, well, yeah, but you know, Quail, they really
Speaker 5: made a big spike in this sort of era of
Speaker 5: land disturbance and clearance, and this agricultural revolution. I think
Speaker 5: that most people saying that don't really have a grasp
Speaker 5: on what we just lost. They're working from this nineteen
Speaker 5: fifties mindset that it was all easternsiduous forest. They got
Speaker 5: opened up into brushy, scrubby great quail habitat. They're not
Speaker 5: even stopping to consider the three point seven million acres
Speaker 5: of prairie lost from central Kentucky, the barons, the Big
Speaker 5: Barons as it was called, that today less than one
Speaker 5: hundredth of a percent remains.
Speaker 1: And that was quail country.
Speaker 5: That's quail country.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know what's kind of funny is my buddy
Speaker 1: Kevin Murphy. I was down hunt with him in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: Where is He's not? Is he Paduca?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I thinks Anyways, he gets permission on an Amish farm,
Speaker 2: gets real exciting because that's where the game's at. And uh,
Speaker 2: he was right, only quail I've ever seen walking around, Kevin.
Speaker 1: They grew up on quail.
Speaker 2: The only quail I've ever seen walking around with Kevin
Speaker 2: Murphy's One day he got permission on an Amish farm,
Speaker 2: And I'm like, why is that just different?
Speaker 1: He's like different practices. The fence rose right, but.
Speaker 2: Again highly disturbed, highly disturbed landscape. But he had he
Speaker 2: had said a couple things, hell on predators not cutting
Speaker 2: fence rows, dirtier areas meaning like you know, like big
Speaker 2: areas full old equipment that kind.
Speaker 1: Of grew up and cover.
Speaker 2: So you start to associate quail today, You associate quail
Speaker 2: with man made ecosystems that somehow give them what they need.
Speaker 1: But then you got to try to remember that that's
Speaker 1: not what they came from.
Speaker 2: They use it as refugeia, but it wasn't like the
Speaker 2: main thing. Yeah, the main thing was like grasslands. Otherwise
Speaker 2: whitetail deer.
Speaker 7: You just think they came from tracktomes in suburbia, right.
Speaker 1: Exactly right, yeah, exactly right, Like you drive around exactly
Speaker 1: what they need. Yeah, you see a big bucket?
Speaker 5: What did they do before all this?
Speaker 1: What they do before that neighborhood? Well, you know that
Speaker 1: big buck lip.
Speaker 5: And in the archaeological record, we've got you know, we've
Speaker 5: got records of quail going back you know, ten thousand
Speaker 5: years ago. In North Alabama. There's a cave called Dust
Speaker 5: Cave near Florence, Alabama, And uh, dust Cave is one
Speaker 5: of these sites where these academics that study these sites
Speaker 5: basically detailed all that the Native Americans were utilizing from
Speaker 5: the landscape that they could that they could find in
Speaker 5: the remains of those cave settlements. Right, They put together
Speaker 5: like a list of one hundred animal species. It's crazy,
Speaker 5: at least dozens. Every kind of duck and waterfowl and
Speaker 5: thing you could imagine being in the backwaters of the
Speaker 5: Tennessee River. They were utilizing it. Every kind of turtle,
Speaker 5: every kind of major fish species. They had fragments of it, rattlesnakes, boom,
Speaker 5: they got it. But they all said quail and greater
Speaker 5: praid chickens, you know, and we see greater prayer chickens,
Speaker 5: which has often thought of as this classic sort of
Speaker 5: Midwestern species. But you know John James Audubon when he
Speaker 5: painted in his original paintings of the species hardin County, Kentucky,
Speaker 5: you know, just south of Louisville, greater prairie chickens, greater
Speaker 5: prayer chickens. And before we end today, I hope it's
Speaker 5: not right now, but when it is, I need to
Speaker 5: tell you one of my favorite quotes. I'll tell you
Speaker 5: right now.
Speaker 1: Tell me.
Speaker 5: I need you guys close your eyes. Okay, we're gonna
Speaker 5: do a little prairie preaching right here.
Speaker 1: Okay is the lap? Okay, I'm ready.
Speaker 5: We're gonna ask Wanda to come up and play on
Speaker 5: the Oregon. We're gonna have an ultra call.
Speaker 4: Well, where's the music job?
Speaker 5: It would be difficult to imagine anything more beautiful, For
Speaker 5: as far as the eye could reach, they seemed one vast,
Speaker 5: deep green meadow, adorned with countless numbers of bright flowers
Speaker 5: springing up in all directions. Only a solitary tree now
Speaker 5: and then a scattered post oak were to be seen.
Speaker 5: It was here where the wild strawberries grew in such
Speaker 5: profusion as sustained the horses hoofs a deep red color.
Speaker 5: It was here that I afterwards met with the prairie bird,
Speaker 5: or the barren hen, as we called it, which I
Speaker 5: afterwards met with in such vast numbers on the great
Speaker 5: prairies of Illinois. Ruben Ross eighteen twelve.
Speaker 1: Hallelujah, Where was he?
Speaker 5: This is right on the Kentucky Tennessee line, just about
Speaker 5: an hour southwest of Bowling Grain, near well my town, Clarksville, Tennessee,
Speaker 5: where we're based.
Speaker 1: It'd be a sweet deer hunting permission.
Speaker 3: Strawberries got me strawberries, and I butchered that quote a
Speaker 3: little bit.
Speaker 5: The strawberries actually coming to the end.
Speaker 2: But you know, if you you use the term earlier tertiary,
Speaker 2: what's that mean tertiary forest.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like the third you know, it's you know,
Speaker 5: secondary tertiary, quaternary.
Speaker 2: I've been so much more familiar with the West and
Speaker 2: my adult life. But like, let's say you have a
Speaker 2: let's see you go twenty miles from here in the mountains, okay,
Speaker 2: and something burns. I mean it burns down to the rocks.
Speaker 2: Let's say, like that kind of fire. Right, It's like
Speaker 2: dirt and rocks are done. It's hard to picture, but
Speaker 2: I would say to my kids, like it'll go through
Speaker 2: a bunch of steps, and if nothing happens from people
Speaker 2: or whatever.
Speaker 1: It'll it's hard to picture, it'll.
Speaker 2: Wind up just like it was when it burnt. It'll,
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of these forests, it will wind
Speaker 2: up being that. It winds up being like it'll be
Speaker 2: big lodge poles and it'll bet those little knitic knick
Speaker 2: berries growing on the ground or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
Speaker 2: It'll like find its way back to that is that
Speaker 2: does that wind up not being true in the east
Speaker 2: because of non native plants?
Speaker 1: Meaning if you'd gone in fourteen hundred and you would
Speaker 1: put round up on a patch of this prairie, you
Speaker 1: put round up on it till it, put round up
Speaker 1: on it till it, put round up on it till it,
Speaker 1: and just till it's good and dead and left by
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred whatever the hell, it probably would have been
Speaker 1: back to being right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, what you're described back to be in prairie. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean, well, there's a couple of things there. One
Speaker 5: is you're describing that pioneer process, right, that's primary succession.
Speaker 5: So when you take something back to you know, just
Speaker 5: bear subsoil, right, the things that are first going to
Speaker 5: colonize that are the weeds, you know. So broom sedge,
Speaker 5: which I mentioned earlier, is a type of native grass,
Speaker 5: but it's a weedy native grass. It has a very
Speaker 5: low what we call conservatism value. It's like a one
Speaker 5: or a two on a scale of one to ten.
Speaker 5: Something that's a one, two three can just move right
Speaker 5: on in. It tends to persist for a little while
Speaker 5: as other things then invade and stabilize that ecosystem over time,
Speaker 5: and some natural communities are really adapted to long term stability,
Speaker 5: you know, like meaning like not just complete disruption. You know,
Speaker 5: prairies are pretty stable, you know. But then but most
Speaker 5: of your native prairie grasses are not pining your species.
Speaker 5: That's why don't call them early successional. You know, you
Speaker 5: go open up a new cornfield, you let it go
Speaker 5: follow and let's say you got a prairie next to it.
Speaker 5: You can hope and wish all damn day, but those
Speaker 5: prairie species are not going to move into your cornfield. Yeah,
Speaker 5: they don't do that. They don't behave that way. It
Speaker 5: takes a long time for these natural communities to assemble,
Speaker 5: what's called assembly time. And in the case of doctor
Speaker 5: Joseph Weldman at Texas A and M has published a
Speaker 5: paper a few years ago, twenty fifteen or so that
Speaker 5: talked about old growth grasslands, they require thousands of years
Speaker 5: to assemble. That's god man, nobody's thinking about that stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the term you're using, is helpful assemble, Yeah,
Speaker 2: because it's not like how you're going to have fire
Speaker 2: weed but then all of a sudden, immediately you're going
Speaker 2: to have all these little lodge pole pine things and
Speaker 2: then pretty soon lodge pole pine is.
Speaker 1: Gonna win out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you're talking about two things coming together, right,
Speaker 2: which which would be like dwarf wortleberry, lodge pole pine, whatever,
Speaker 2: two things you're talking about.
Speaker 1: How do you get these perhaps dozens?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Well, and you also were asking about invasive species,
Speaker 5: So yeah, now that's the factory that gets in a way. Right,
Speaker 5: You've got a site that it's going through this early
Speaker 5: phase of disturbance. Invases are going to move in and
Speaker 5: sort of suspend that natural successional pathway, and that complicates
Speaker 5: things for us out there in the habitat restoration world
Speaker 5: a big time. You know. But you're always gonna have weeds.
Speaker 5: You know. Where you would have had this weedy flora
Speaker 5: in the east, let's say three thousand years ago, would
Speaker 5: have been around a Mississippian probably a thousand years ago
Speaker 5: Mississippian Native American village. You know, a lot of cornfields
Speaker 5: and stuff where they were disturbing. You would have expected
Speaker 5: native weeds to be all in and around their settlements. God,
Speaker 5: where you had a bison wallow, you know, three hundred
Speaker 5: years ago, the weeds would have been around that bison wallow,
Speaker 5: But you're more ecosystems that are not, especially when it
Speaker 5: comes to soil disturbance. That's the big thing that they like,
Speaker 5: the weeds like. But your other forms of disturbance, like
Speaker 5: you know, grazing, pressure or fire, they don't have the
Speaker 5: same kind of detrimental resetting effect that like plowing till
Speaker 5: and wallowing half.
Speaker 3: Is there, like in your eyes, is there an acceptable
Speaker 3: like approximation of the original as far as restoration where
Speaker 3: it's like it's not perfect, but it's close enough that
Speaker 3: like it's pretty damn good.
Speaker 5: Yeah. What we do is we look to remnants where
Speaker 5: they exist. You know, I mentioned Long Island earlier, right,
Speaker 5: there was sixty thousand acres of prairie up until about
Speaker 5: nineteen oh five, nineteen ten. That prairie lasted longer than
Speaker 5: the prairies near my home at for Campbell Army Base
Speaker 5: or in Middle Tennessee, Kentucky.
Speaker 1: Did they have that moor hen out there.
Speaker 5: Where they had the what they called the heath hen. Yeah,
Speaker 5: you're right, and it went extinct a decade or two later.
Speaker 5: But today, out of that former sixty thousand acre landscape,
Speaker 5: there's only twenty four acres left adjacent to Nassau Community College.
Speaker 5: What Yeah, So if you want to rebuild a grassland
Speaker 5: on Long Island, one, you got to where you're gonna
Speaker 5: do it right. But then you could go look at that,
Speaker 5: at that last surviving remnant, harvest the seeds from it,
Speaker 5: learn how to then structurally attempt to rebuild it across
Speaker 5: the road. That's the approach we're using all across our region.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 5: We go look at the last surviving remnants on army
Speaker 5: bases or someone's private ranch or farm, and then those
Speaker 5: we collect seeds from and we work with seed farmers
Speaker 5: like Roundstone Native Seed out of Kentucky or Earned Native
Speaker 5: Seed out of Pennsylvania. We buy the seed from them
Speaker 5: and then we rebuild those ecosystems to the very best
Speaker 5: that we can.
Speaker 1: And what's like to Brody's point, to put a finer
Speaker 1: answer on it, like, what.
Speaker 2: Is what's as close as we could get to good enough?
Speaker 2: I think sixty of the species biodiversity? Like like when
Speaker 2: do you go, like, sweet, let's go find a new spot.
Speaker 5: That's a great question. I think I'll give you just
Speaker 5: I'll just give you a real scattershot of what people
Speaker 5: have been doing. Right. So you know in the nineties
Speaker 5: and two thousands, Uh, we have a saying back where
Speaker 5: I'm from, where native warm season grasses, everybody planning the
Speaker 5: native warm season grasses like twenty years ago, and they
Speaker 5: would use three species big blue stem indian grass and
Speaker 5: little blue stem sometimes ate out of fourth switch grass.
Speaker 5: That's not cutting. You're not adding sore three in enough.
Speaker 5: You're not adding what we call groceries on the ground.
Speaker 5: You don't have the seeds, the nectar, the cover, the
Speaker 5: structural diversity needed to support a diverse array of wildlife,
Speaker 5: including polleners and songbirds. You need to hold package. So
Speaker 5: then about ten years ago people were stepping up because
Speaker 5: a big limitation is where you're going to get the seeds.
Speaker 5: If you don't have farmers producing seed, your shit out
Speaker 5: of luck.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So you know, was that little eleven acre patch
Speaker 1: isn't going.
Speaker 5: To right and you off the Yeah, and you would
Speaker 5: exhaust those patches too, right. They need their seeds to
Speaker 5: rain back down on that site to some extent. So
Speaker 5: you do need these native seed producers, these private companies
Speaker 5: mostly to go and buy the seed from. And so
Speaker 5: ten years ago most people were just barely able to
Speaker 5: get like a mix of like ten fifteen twenty species,
Speaker 5: and it wasn't really that cost effective to be able
Speaker 5: to You couldn't really afford to do a lot more
Speaker 5: even if they did exist. But in the last ten years,
Speaker 5: that's five years, those same companies now are offering to
Speaker 5: three hundred species. So what our project with Google when
Speaker 5: we planted it in twenty twenty, we used seventy seven
Speaker 5: species in our mix. That was the most at that time.
Speaker 5: We just planted an eighty nine species mix on a
Speaker 5: private farm in Tennessee. So you know, we're trying to
Speaker 5: get our mixes up eighty nine. Yeah. Now that's not
Speaker 5: for everybody, you know, but I would say you need
Speaker 5: to be somewhere, but you need to be somewhere in
Speaker 5: a twenty to forty range is a sweet spot.
Speaker 3: Let's say someone has a whatever, one hundred acre farm
Speaker 3: and they've got a twenty acre pasture. It's like ideal
Speaker 3: for a storing. They restore it. Can they then use
Speaker 3: that as a pasture or is it like hands off
Speaker 3: now because the animals might graze somewhere else and then
Speaker 3: bring in in base or it just can't handle the.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can. It depends on the kind of grassland, right,
Speaker 5: Some are really conducive to being great for grazing. You
Speaker 5: do need to pay attention to like what you put
Speaker 5: in your forage mix. You know, for example, horses. Horses
Speaker 5: can't tolerate certain types of grasses that maybe cattle can.
Speaker 1: For example, Oh, like you might have a toxic plant.
Speaker 5: You could have a toxic plant, or you could have
Speaker 5: a plant with bristles on the spikelets of the grass
Speaker 5: that get into the mouth parts. So those are all
Speaker 5: considerations and we try to be real mindful of those
Speaker 5: kind of things. But now this same farm is called
Speaker 5: the Wessington Plantation north of Nashville. Uh, you know, we're
Speaker 5: putting eighty nine species in that mix, but we're absolutely
Speaker 5: going to be lightly grazing that. That site's really cool.
Speaker 5: It's got a two documented buffalo fords just down in
Speaker 5: the valley and you can still go and see the
Speaker 5: impressions where the bison would across the screen ship. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: Hey, I got a tactics question for you. Uh you
Speaker 1: were talking earlier. You use the expression nuke in the ground. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to get it ready. I appreciate the term we hate
Speaker 1: to do it. I'm assuming you're talking about glefil Sate.
Speaker 5: Glyfe Sate, and a few others. Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh.
Speaker 2: That winds up you know earlier we're talking about political complexities.
Speaker 1: To return to the beginning of the return to political.
Speaker 2: Back in there, yeah nah, going back in there, springing
Speaker 2: up like we had a Feller sitting in that seat
Speaker 2: one time.
Speaker 1: That is.
Speaker 2: Very adversarial to round up. Right, how do you like,
Speaker 2: is there another.
Speaker 1: Emerging technology that gives you what you need if the
Speaker 1: tide against roundup turns with like the class action lawsuits
Speaker 1: and stuff. If round it becomes like can't get it,
Speaker 1: can't put it under ground, do you then have to
Speaker 1: be like, oh shit, this whole thing's over or is
Speaker 1: there is there a plan B.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, that that's a great thing to consider, and
Speaker 5: it is something we worry about, you know, because right
Speaker 5: now it's just the knowledge and the the technology and
Speaker 5: the cost right of doing other options. And people could say, well,
Speaker 5: it's about the cost. No, it's not about the cost.
Speaker 5: It's about some of the top experts that I've been
Speaker 5: able to talk to on this issue have not found
Speaker 5: a way to do it. Above one to two acres
Speaker 5: at a time, and if we're tackling one or two
Speaker 5: acres at a time, damn it, we're not doing enough. We
Speaker 5: have to think about scaling this. And you know right
Speaker 5: now we've got six big anchor grasslands that were just
Speaker 5: been funded to begin restoring, and some of these are
Speaker 5: in very bad shape. They're going to require two full
Speaker 5: years of getting on top of the weeds so that
Speaker 5: we can have something better. If we were presented with
Speaker 5: an option where you can't use it, it would completely derail
Speaker 5: conservation efforts for grasslands.
Speaker 2: Now, Randall, do you remember how many acres of dan
Speaker 2: floories do by hand?
Speaker 1: Oh? I think that was.
Speaker 7: I think that was twenty or forty acres.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 2: It was like a arid grass landing. But he had
Speaker 2: I think he did spot a nap weed and leafy
Speaker 2: spurge years years any spare moment.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Now, so what is the what is the current
Speaker 7: footprint of your organization look like in terms of on
Speaker 7: the ground being here, done that, or under underway.
Speaker 5: Let me just answer one last thing that Steve brought up,
Speaker 5: which is, uh, we are about to experiment with using
Speaker 5: a flame scorcher to do probably somewhere between five. It's
Speaker 5: a propane fuel flame scuorture, so you know, hot hot,
Speaker 5: and it even for those you know, then that gets
Speaker 5: into like fuel consumption and carbon emissions kind of territory.
Speaker 5: Either either way you go. You don't have a good approach,
Speaker 5: like you could get.
Speaker 1: That ship so hot that you wind up with an equal.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you'd have to do it several times. I mean,
Speaker 5: otherwise you're looking at solarization. You'd have to put black
Speaker 5: plastic down. Can you imagine trying to cover black plastic
Speaker 5: on one hundred acres? It's just not feasible.
Speaker 1: And everybody's all mad at plastic.
Speaker 5: Now right, you know, and that's what's going to break down.
Speaker 7: I just can't win these days.
Speaker 5: You could, You could disc the hell out of it,
Speaker 5: but that don't work on a slope where you're subjected,
Speaker 5: subjected people after you. And then the last one that
Speaker 5: comes to mind is, uh, you could graze the hell
Speaker 5: out of it for a long long time with.
Speaker 3: A bunch of goats.
Speaker 6: Yeah and all that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but then you there's all these come with complexity. Sure,
Speaker 5: the quickest and most efficient is the approach we use,
Speaker 5: but it does have its you know, it comes with
Speaker 5: its drawbacks for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a complicated world. Complicated, Yeah, the world. It's
Speaker 2: annoying this world.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's uh. And now, Randal, you asked me what's
Speaker 5: our footprint?
Speaker 7: Yeah, like, how how many acres are you working on? Now?
Speaker 7: How many acres have you worked on? What's how's the
Speaker 7: scaling been?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So the region is twenty four states. We're actively
Speaker 5: working in or contracted before the freeze to work in
Speaker 5: seventeen states. We just this year, with the funding that
Speaker 5: the pro we've already started and what we've been funded
Speaker 5: to do, we would be able to begin our first
Speaker 5: ten thousand acres of restoration. So that's that's a big
Speaker 5: accomplishment for us because just a year and a half
Speaker 5: ago we had sort of reached our first thousand acres.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, as an organization where you're starting
Speaker 5: from scratch to build what is now a fifty person team,
Speaker 5: you know eight years ago, first no one really knew
Speaker 5: about southeastern grasslands as a thing, so we had to
Speaker 5: educate why they're here. Then you know, we had to
Speaker 5: just build the team organically, you know, administrative assistance, communications,
Speaker 5: team on the ground, representation, fundraising, all that stuff, and
Speaker 5: it took us a good eight years to reach our
Speaker 5: first thousand acres.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you're using as inspiration ten acre.
Speaker 2: Patches, that's right, Yeah, which is when you put it
Speaker 2: in that like, when you consider that, that makes it
Speaker 2: more all the more extraordinary.
Speaker 5: And it's so it's so difficult, so to go from
Speaker 5: one thousand acres in twenty twenty three to now ten
Speaker 5: thousand acres. But our ability to do that, you know,
Speaker 5: is currently in limbo with the freeze that we're currently facing.
Speaker 5: We were super excited at the beginning of this year.
Speaker 5: We had just received major funding from a few major
Speaker 5: federal agencies to begin working on forty US National parks
Speaker 5: from Mississippi Vermont to do a few thousand acres of
Speaker 5: much needed eastern grasslands focused representation. And I'm talking about
Speaker 5: some of the most iconic landscapes that we have, like
Speaker 5: Gettysburg Battlefield. People don't realize that southeast Pennsylvania was home
Speaker 5: to grasslands before seventeen twenty. Great Smoking Mountains National Park,
Speaker 5: CAD's Cove. You know, these are places that are really
Speaker 5: well stated. It's Tennessee.
Speaker 1: These are all Republican states. They might still get it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they might get it.
Speaker 5: You know, they might get it so.
Speaker 2: Battlegrounds now they need to keep them happy. They might
Speaker 2: send some of that money over there, hopefully and assuming
Speaker 2: they're going to use that money and strategically into.
Speaker 5: Like I'm gonna be positive, I'm gonna hope it's gonna
Speaker 5: clear up and go through. But I think if if
Speaker 5: things don't clear up into three to four week five
Speaker 5: six week process, we risk losing ninety percent of our team.
Speaker 3: Is there, seriously, Yeah, And there's no hope to like
Speaker 3: working directly with state agencies, They're just not the mould.
Speaker 5: And we've we've been cultivating what we've built for eight years,
Speaker 5: you know. And I had a farmer I don't want
Speaker 5: to say his name or getting in his business, but
Speaker 5: you know, when we got the agreements in place to
Speaker 5: work with the US National Park Service, you know, and
Speaker 5: these are mostly funded through the Inflation Reduction Act in
Speaker 5: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, you know, those those two two
Speaker 5: and a half to three years of discussions to get
Speaker 5: in place. We signed them all well ahead of the
Speaker 5: past several months, and those have been all obligated.
Speaker 1: Those are obligated, congressionally approved, all.
Speaker 5: Congressionally approved, and so then We spent all of last
Speaker 5: year staffing up to get ready for that. So we
Speaker 5: hired almost twenty five employees in the rounds of going
Speaker 5: through searches and interviews, et cetera. We had then build
Speaker 5: up our partnership base on the East coast, and so
Speaker 5: we reached out to a couple of private companies and said,
Speaker 5: do you guys have the capacity to join us with
Speaker 5: this effort. One major seed producer said, you know, I
Speaker 5: need about two or three weeks to deliberate, as this
Speaker 5: is a big, big opportunity for our small business. You know,
Speaker 5: they employed about forty people. They said, need some time
Speaker 5: to think about it. They came back two or three
Speaker 5: weeks later they said, we're in. We're going to work
Speaker 5: with you to help make sure you got all the
Speaker 5: seeds that you need to be to restore these lands,
Speaker 5: restore this wildlife habitat. And when the freeze took effect,
Speaker 5: it now puts that farmer, that small business, those forty
Speaker 5: people employed in that business at risk. My friend had
Speaker 5: to go out and take a one million dollar business
Speaker 5: loan to be able to have the to staff up
Speaker 5: and have the capacity needed to meet this federally obligated project.
Speaker 5: And I'm not trying to bitch about our situation because again,
Speaker 5: everybody's in the same boat. But you said it when
Speaker 5: it starts coming back and biting people in the ass
Speaker 5: who are just everyday Americans trying to have kids and
Speaker 5: babies and care for their elder aging parents and go
Speaker 5: out and hunt on some good lands. I don't know,
Speaker 5: you know, And so as the leader of our organization
Speaker 5: and the co founder, and I'm deeply worried about with
Speaker 5: the next three weeks. I just talked to a good
Speaker 5: friend of mine and a philanthropist and an advisor. I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm looking at the reality of needing to go raise
Speaker 5: thirty million dollars in six months. I got friends that
Speaker 5: tell me it's physically impossible. I got this mighty man
Speaker 5: attitude that says I can do it. I really don't
Speaker 5: know where to go, but I know I don't want
Speaker 5: to face the reality of letting my ONTUR team go.
Speaker 5: And we were we were standing at the world's highest
Speaker 5: point three and a half weeks ago. It just feels
Speaker 5: like we got our damn teeth kicked in. And so
Speaker 5: many of my friends are going through the same situation.
Speaker 5: M both sides of they this is a bipartisan, you
Speaker 5: know effort.
Speaker 1: Ye. That feels pretty America first to me. It does
Speaker 1: get in the grasslands.
Speaker 5: It does. Yeah, and we're telling them about brother Yeah, man,
Speaker 5: this is America.
Speaker 1: Yeah, put that first. Mega make America grassy again.
Speaker 5: Man, I've heard that somebody's mentioned that before.
Speaker 3: Is there any way for like someone on land and
Speaker 3: they wanted to like try to do some of this
Speaker 3: on their own, Like, could they contact you and get advice?
Speaker 3: Or is there like a handbook for so to speak,
Speaker 3: for doing this or is it something that needs to
Speaker 3: be done on such a larger scale that it's not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean there's definitely a lot of people doing it,
Speaker 5: you know, on their own properties and stuff. I think
Speaker 5: you guys are going to talk to my good friend
Speaker 5: Kyle Iibarger coming up in a while, you know, with
Speaker 5: a Native habitat project. You know, Kyle does this kind
Speaker 5: of work. You know, he came up about five or
Speaker 5: six years ago, started this kind of work. You know,
Speaker 5: increasingly we're beginning to see a lot more attention. All
Speaker 5: we ever wanted was to give eastern grasslands an equal
Speaker 5: seat at the conservation table. I went to a conference
Speaker 5: recently and I got right with these people. You have
Speaker 5: been right with somebody, Steve, I don't know what means.
Speaker 5: That's when you start throwing out a couple of by gods,
Speaker 5: you know, yeah, yeah. So I went into I went
Speaker 5: into this gathering of about one hundred people, and I said,
Speaker 5: by god, it is pastime for y'all to start having
Speaker 5: a damn conservation conference in the southeastern United States. There
Speaker 5: better not ever be another conservation conference where grasslands don't
Speaker 5: get an equal seat at the damn table. I said,
Speaker 5: you can have forest and you talk about wetlands, and
Speaker 5: you talk about coastal ecosystems, and you talk about climate change.
Speaker 5: Grassland's harbor half the biodiversity of temperate eastern North America,
Speaker 5: and their biodiversity's collapsing. You got to do something about it.
Speaker 5: So I had a by god moment. I do apologize
Speaker 5: forgetting to the here you well, I don't know. I
Speaker 5: think they're hearing. I think we're witnessing the explosion of
Speaker 5: interest in this topic. But we ain't got it far
Speaker 5: enough yet.
Speaker 1: Steve, Well, I'll tell you this is.
Speaker 2: I'm new to the whole conversation, you know, the whole
Speaker 2: thing that I even started thinking about it. I would
Speaker 2: never even become aware of it had I not had
Speaker 2: such an interest in this particular era, in these early
Speaker 2: accounts of people rolling into these spots and describing them
Speaker 2: for the first time. If I had an encounter that
Speaker 2: I would never even have thought of it. I would
Speaker 2: have still tell them everybody about the squirrel running from.
Speaker 1: You know wherever. That's one am I going to the
Speaker 1: Mississippi never hitting the ground.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the long Hunters are one of my gateways into this.
Speaker 5: But I do need apologize. I just committed blasphemy.
Speaker 1: Oh we can beat it out.
Speaker 7: No, No, I appreciate that people know what was said.
Speaker 4: Yeah, God, well not even that.
Speaker 2: I think you should bleep it out, Phil sleeping out, Yeah,
Speaker 2: bleeping out. Get that I had earlier that loud that
Speaker 2: could be the new bleep we use.
Speaker 7: And my terrible, my terrible guess at the BLM's annual budget.
Speaker 7: I'd like that one stricken from the record as.
Speaker 2: Well anytime randalled Yeah he has something, Regrettably, he says,
Speaker 2: just put his belch in there.
Speaker 1: Hey, I keep meaning asked, what's up with that wedding
Speaker 1: ring you got on there?
Speaker 5: Uh, dude, I'll tell you what probably been married almost
Speaker 5: twenty five years? What yeah, man, Yeah, you got married
Speaker 5: at five.
Speaker 7: Or you're just a age gracefully.
Speaker 5: It's probably twenty two, twenty three. Yeah. My wife and
Speaker 5: I've been together since like two thousand and two. That's
Speaker 5: when we got married. Been together since ninety seven. Yeah,
Speaker 5: long time first girlfriend ever.
Speaker 1: Good for you.
Speaker 5: My first girlfriend turned into my wife. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You guys got kids?
Speaker 5: We do, got three kids. What's your wife's name, Shauna?
Speaker 5: I got an eighteen year old, sixteen year old, and
Speaker 5: a ten year old named Boom.
Speaker 1: You guys got right to it.
Speaker 5: I'm right, bro.
Speaker 1: See that was a good move. My buddy Clayed the
Speaker 1: same thing, got right to it young.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like I keep thinking about, you know, like the kind
Speaker 1: of being the kind of old dude where you go
Speaker 1: get your grandkids because your kids don't want to hang
Speaker 1: out anymore. But I'm so far away from that happening, man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like picking up your grandkids, taking them turt young your back.
Speaker 1: You're right on the cost.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: You'll still be all walk around. I'll be rolling up
Speaker 1: in a wheelchair if at all. Huh, give me a
Speaker 1: piece of marriage advice.
Speaker 5: Oh gosh, man, my wife's always right. That's for one. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and uh.
Speaker 1: You're not telling me that she is. You're just saying
Speaker 1: you pretending.
Speaker 5: Yeah, pretending. I tell you I got lucky, Man, I
Speaker 5: got lucky. I'll tell you this. I will say this.
Speaker 5: All credit to you there. You know, there's a reasons
Speaker 5: why the Southeastern Grasslands Institute exists.
Speaker 1: Are we off marriage?
Speaker 5: No? No, no, I was.
Speaker 1: Gonna shout this is this is gonna bring this, gonna bring.
Speaker 5: It coming full circle.
Speaker 1: I'm with you, strong one.
Speaker 5: It wouldn't exist if a philanthropist from New York City
Speaker 5: hadn't discovered us and said, I want you guys to
Speaker 5: dream big, think programmatically, and create something special. But it
Speaker 5: also wouldn't exist without the relentless support of my wife
Speaker 5: because man, this to grow a new organization from nothing
Speaker 5: to a team of fifty soon to be sixty five, man,
Speaker 5: I had to have a strong woman in my life,
Speaker 5: and all credit to her.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 5: When I had to work sometimes thirty hours straight, got
Speaker 5: no sleep day in, day out, she made sure I
Speaker 5: had what I needed to keep running. And I'm deeply
Speaker 5: appreciative to her for that.
Speaker 1: It's great.
Speaker 2: You know, to quote, my friend told me, what's that
Speaker 2: behind every successful man is a woman who thinks he's
Speaker 2: an idiot, right, right, because.
Speaker 1: It pushes you, keeps you, it keeps you awakening and
Speaker 1: gets you up in the morning.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 1: I'm not that bad. Come on, I'm going to get to.
Speaker 3: It, Dwayne. Are you guys? Are you guys like a
Speaker 3: nonprofit that people can donate money to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so you know, we are housed out of a
Speaker 5: university because I've been a professor for eighteen years, right,
Speaker 5: we currently function in sort of two capacities. We function
Speaker 5: as a nonprofit. Part of the university is our fiscal sponsors,
Speaker 5: what we call it. And then we function very much
Speaker 5: like an acidic department out of our our university, and
Speaker 5: that that really gives us a lot of amplitude and flexibility. Uh.
Speaker 5: This year, we are going to be creating our own
Speaker 5: you know, nonprofit still affiliated with the university.
Speaker 1: We'll run like a foundation.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, right, so well you know, we'll have our
Speaker 5: own board of directors. We're going to be assembling that
Speaker 5: this year. And uh, I think that's gonna help us,
Speaker 5: you know, get to a point where we need to be.
Speaker 5: It's part of our business plan already.
Speaker 1: Anyway, what tell me the university you're out of.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's called Austin P P E A Y. And
Speaker 5: our motto is let's go pee and uh.
Speaker 3: You guys that you guys are occasionally do well in
Speaker 3: the uh in the march madness.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, you know, I know that. Yeah, And a
Speaker 5: lot of people say Pa or Paya or whatever, but
Speaker 5: it's just Austin P named for one of our former
Speaker 5: former governors. Yeah, it's good school.
Speaker 3: So at some point people will be able to jump
Speaker 3: on a website and donate some cash.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if they do check it out at you know,
Speaker 5: our website, Southeastern Grasslands Institute Segrasslands dot org. And of
Speaker 5: course we're on you know, Facebook and substack and you
Speaker 5: know all that stuff.
Speaker 2: And if you're sitting there and you got a big
Speaker 2: property within yourself, the Dwayne South, Yeah, and you're just
Speaker 2: wading through piles of money and you're thinking about it's
Speaker 2: how you want to do something good for your land
Speaker 2: because as Doug Duran says, it's not ours, it's just
Speaker 2: our turn that's right, And you want to do something
Speaker 2: right by your land, Maybe go check these guys out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I would like to. There's there's three things
Speaker 5: in particular, I'd love for your listeners to kind of
Speaker 5: help us think through Okay, and you guess too. One
Speaker 5: is we got so much existing public land and private land,
Speaker 5: it just needs to be managed in a better different direction. Right.
Speaker 5: Our organization, through this web portal that's been funded by
Speaker 5: the USDA called Grasslandia, is designed once we roll that
Speaker 5: out next year in partnership with EZRA, is designed to
Speaker 5: be that decision support tool that both public land managers
Speaker 5: and private landowners can come to Grasslandia and you'll better
Speaker 5: go into that world and see maps of where the
Speaker 5: grasses used to be, see the quotes from the early
Speaker 5: historians who follow the Long Hunter's work or Native Americans,
Speaker 5: and have that at your fingertips, along with information the
Speaker 5: photos what they look like, and the information of how
Speaker 5: to restore the seed mixes the fire regime that you need.
Speaker 5: So we need to do a lot better with the
Speaker 5: land we already have. But the second key points one
Speaker 5: is that we have remnants left on the landscape that
Speaker 5: are clinging to existence. They need us to recognize them
Speaker 5: for what they are. They need our help, and that's
Speaker 5: a hard thing to do. But we can't forget those
Speaker 5: remnants of places like May Prairie. They're critical is the
Speaker 5: building blocks to build back from seeds or to protect
Speaker 5: them because they are oftentimes they need to be protected
Speaker 5: to manage because they're the last of their kinds. That's
Speaker 5: the Model's the model. And then the third is I
Speaker 5: fear that people in the East especially have given up
Speaker 5: on this idea of big scale conservation. And we're not
Speaker 5: giving up. So our vision is in my lifetime, is
Speaker 5: to create two dozen large scale grasslands again in the East. Now,
Speaker 5: large scale is relative, you know, that's the eastern version
Speaker 5: of large, right, So there's no reason why we can't
Speaker 5: build an eleven thousand acre prairie in parts of Alabama
Speaker 5: Mississippi that connects to and integrates farms and you know,
Speaker 5: just all the different kinds of efforts grazing, et cetera
Speaker 5: that needs to happen at a large scale. Now, imagine
Speaker 5: if we did big scale grassland here in central North
Speaker 5: Carolina and western Kentucky. I think people have given up
Speaker 5: on that as a possibility. S g I, the Southeastern
Speaker 5: Grasslands Institute. That's that's where we're heading. That's our future,
Speaker 5: that's our next big thing, and what we want is
Speaker 5: to attract people to come join us on that bold,
Speaker 5: big vision. That's the future of Eastern conservation right there.
Speaker 1: Amen, I'm a convert.
Speaker 5: Come on down, and I have been sold to extend
Speaker 5: a hunting invitation to have you guys come on down
Speaker 5: some turkeys. I tell y'all, Yeah, I want you guys
Speaker 5: to come on down and see that bison trail at
Speaker 5: the at the Wessington.
Speaker 1: Farm, and I would love to see that.
Speaker 5: Come down, see the bison traces you can hunt in
Speaker 5: our newly restored grasslands down there. Really got some amazing
Speaker 5: turkey deer. Come on down.
Speaker 1: I love to have you like sounds of that. You
Speaker 1: know what book you might like to read?
Speaker 5: Man, tell me I'm looking for some good ones.
Speaker 1: Have you read The Land Breakers? No, it's from the sixties.
Speaker 2: So the other day I had dinner with my editor
Speaker 2: and my publisher at random House, and I was talking
Speaker 2: about They were asked me if I'd seen something that's
Speaker 2: out right now that everybody's watching, and I was saying,
Speaker 2: I have a hard time with stuff like that because
Speaker 2: I'll see something that wasn't accurate, historically accurate, and I'll
Speaker 2: forget all about what I'm watching and I'll just be
Speaker 2: real annoyed about that, so I can't watch it, yeah,
Speaker 2: which led us to a conversation of who gets it right?
Speaker 1: And I was making the case that I was making.
Speaker 2: The case that Corn McCarthy gets his stuff right like
Speaker 2: other writers, Alan Eckert gets his stuff right. They're just good,
Speaker 2: which led someone to say, have you read The Land
Speaker 2: Breakers from the six nineteen six? I think it was
Speaker 2: from sixty four and I hadn't. But the land Breakers,
Speaker 2: as you can imagine, it's like seventeen eighty right, and
Speaker 2: it's new people moving in to break the land.
Speaker 1: It's so well done.
Speaker 5: It's just kind of like the Liul Lamore is the
Speaker 5: Sacket series. It's sort of similar.
Speaker 1: Dude, I don't want to hack on Louis the Moore.
Speaker 1: How do I put this? I've read Louis, the more
Speaker 1: Dirt is a big Louis. Dirt is always reading Louis.
Speaker 1: The more I know how to say this in general way,
Speaker 1: just go for it.
Speaker 6: No, I mean I think I think.
Speaker 1: No, it is unbelievable. Uh. It is like like how
Speaker 1: that dude knows what he knows?
Speaker 2: And I've gone and checked a little bit to be
Speaker 2: like what, yeah, including this, but I mean, the stuff
Speaker 2: about trees and plants is unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Like he's done a lot of work. He later got
Speaker 1: involved in politics as an advisor.
Speaker 5: I can't wait to read it.
Speaker 1: Man, The land Breakers, I'll read it. Unbelievable. Anyhow, I
Speaker 1: learned in there, and I went and looked, and this
Speaker 1: is true when you're making leather wang for like leather
Speaker 1: stitching groundhog. Whow strongest ship out there? Wow?
Speaker 2: But no, I think it's like, I think you'd really
Speaker 2: appreciate that novel, The land Breakers.
Speaker 5: I'll check it out. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I got nothing to gain from this. Well, in fact,
Speaker 1: I take that back. You should go check out Meterre's
Speaker 1: American history. Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 5: Hey, it's a tremendous honor to be here. Thank you
Speaker 5: for having me.
Speaker 1: Is how best to come find you? If people want
Speaker 1: to find you, go to where.
Speaker 5: Yeah, check us out on social media and come to
Speaker 5: our website and there's an email.
Speaker 1: Link there, say the website.
Speaker 5: Yeah, se grasslands dot org.
Speaker 1: S grasslands dot org. And on social what are you?
Speaker 5: On Facebook? And Instagram? At Instagram it's se grass land without.
Speaker 1: The yes all right, Yeah, I like grassland.
Speaker 5: Grass landy is gonna be cool man. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 5: gonna be cool for any research that you need for
Speaker 5: your book projects. So man, it's up excellent.
Speaker 2: We're kind of moving westward on our book projects, but
Speaker 2: we'll come back, come back, We'll double back.
Speaker 1: Come back, man, So far west will wind up back east. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: just this South yea, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 5: Appreciate, appreciate you guys,