Speaker 1  0:00  
Zach,

I'm Zach Angstead from Great Falls, Montana, and you're listening to the wild idea.

Bill  0:10  
Welcome to our exploration of the intersection of human nature and wild nature, a place we call The wild idea. Podcast. Today, we're going to make some of you maybe a bit uncomfortable, by discussing, among other things, the folly of ballot biology, the sentiment based preferential treatment of charismatic species independent of whole ecology dynamics. With the author of one of my favorite fiction works, painted horses, Malcolm Brooks, but first Andrew's greetings from the banks of the Klamath River.

Anders Reynolds  0:38  
Oh, hi, Bill, the Klamath River. Bill, I'm I've never seen the Klamath. I did go for a long walk along the Anacostia last weekend, but I haven't experienced the Klamath. How is it? I heard there's a lot of conifer diversity, lack of dams, things of that nature. Can you rate the river on a scale of maybe like one to 10 salmon

Bill  1:02  
Well, it's way more that than than that. Number wise, salmon wise. That's some of the exciting news about being here on the Klamath is with the dams, the lower dams all finally removed. The the salmon numbers, I think, have even surprised folks who knew that there would be a return. It's a beautiful river, and it's really great to be literally right here on the banks of the Klamath and spending some time with the river and on the river, and just a beautiful, beautiful place to be.

Anders Reynolds  1:28  
Bill, what's your favorite River? Do I know the answer to this? I don't think I do. I don't

Bill  1:32  
think you probably do. My favorite river would have to be the south tow River, which drains the Eastern flanks of Mount Mitchell and the black mountain range in North Carolina. It's a place where I fell in love with public lands and did a lot of bathing in very cool water when I was a kid. So pretty cool spot. But so that's my favorite. How about your what's your

Anders Reynolds  1:53  
favorite River? Oh, Bill, I think you know the answer to this. Take a wild guess.

Bill  1:57  
I'm gonna guess it's the Arkansas No, it's the Buffalo River. Oh, well, that makes sense, too.

Anders Reynolds  2:03  
America's first National River, the Arkansas River, is the Arkansas River. Anybody's favorite. It's like the, it's like the Ron Howard of rivers, the best river that's nobody's favorite, the Arkansas.

Bill  2:16  
That's not fair to Ron...Yeah, I should have known it was the buffalo. Silly me. But of course, I just had to put Arkansas on there because there, because everything else is Arkansas for you. So let's end our shenanigans and Malcolm, it is such a privilege to have you on the podcast. So first of all, just just welcome and thanks for being here.

Malcolm  2:32  
Thank you for having me. It's it's a pleasure and an honor. 

Bill  2:36  
We are going to explore some I guess I'll use the term heavy material a little later, but I would like to start where I was first introduced to your work, which is the novel painted horses, which, as a work of fiction, plumbs some of the same ground we like to cover here on the podcast. The book tracks human connections to the land, cultural connections and the tensions that live within individual perspectives on the relationship with the land, and in a book that I think many have pointed out, where the land itself is one of the most colorful characters in the book, would you mind share a bit about the story and how that art came to you? It's such a well written story. 

Malcolm  3:15  
Thank you. Yeah, you know, I mean, it was published over 10 years ago now, so I'm gonna It's been a while since I've really talked about it. But, I mean, I'll, you know, kind of rewind and do my best the I guess the basic framework and context for the story involves the archeology, archeological surveys that were done in the 1950s and 60s, ahead of like the major, major water reclamation projects in the American West. And from there, I just sort of started to throw a whole lot of different things that I was really interested in into the same blender to see if I could kind of find my own links and connections between these seemingly disparate subjects. And some of it is, you know, things like ice age art and the archeology, you know, after the London Blitz and, yeah, the the US horse cavalry in World War Two. I mean, a lot of sort of arcane, seemingly not, you know, very connected things, all wound up in this one book. And somehow it seems to have worked, though

Bill  4:29  
it worked really well. I mean, and your your ability to capture the land as a character in and of itself surely comes from not just your time behind the keyboard, but from your time in the outdoors, starting with in your natiSpeaker ve California. And I'm sure you brought that to our shared home of Montana.

Malcolm  4:44  
Yeah, definitely grew up in an outdoor family. Was always really fascinated by the idea of the frontier, and as a kid, I was just obsessed with, you know. 18th century fur trapper stuff and, you know, Plains Indian stuff and all of that kind of it's sort of bridged the gap between my reading life and my outdoor life. I, you know, the two things were informing each other all the time.

Anders Reynolds  5:16  
I'm really enjoying reading painted horses. I'm not all the way through it yet. Malcolm, being friends with Bill means basically maintaining a library where he's calling you every day with a new book to read. I'm really enjoying it, and one of the things I'm really enjoying is something he touched on, and that's you know, that the landscape and painted horses isn't just a setting. It breathes, it judges, it sometimes even resists, you know, how do you approach that work? How do you think about landscape as a kind of character in your work?

Malcolm  5:49  
Well, I think part of it comes from, you know, my own reading as a kid, and I don't know that I necessarily consciously landed on this, as opposed to just sort of intuiting it. But the that's the thing about a lot of Western writing, or a lot of Frontier writing, the the landscape is its own character, whether that's, you know, really obvious in the forefront of the reader's mind, or whether it's just impressionistic, but you can't really write about, you know, these big, epic frontier narratives without factoring in the stage that it's set upon, which is the landscape. I'm also, like a huge fan of a lot of like Western painters, whether it's like a more contemporary painter like Russell Chatham or probably my all time favorite, Maynard Dixon, these massive scale landscape paintings that they were doing that just has this incredible pulse to it, almost, and this visual hit that you get, I mean, it's, I think, All of that kind of, and that's another part of painted horses, I guess, that I should mention, there's a lot of like, I don't want to say art theory, but there's definitely a theme of art and the human connection to the land that I mean, again, I don't even know if I contrived or conceived of that consciously, but I think it's present for sure.

Anders Reynolds  7:28  
You mentioned connecting all these disparate pieces as you write about these places, the high plains, the Badlands, the river valleys, what comes first for you, the terrain or the people who move through it.

Malcolm  7:40  
Oh, that's a tough one. I think it varies. And I think it can be either or, but there, particularly with that book, I think I did get to a point while I was writing it where I knew that I always had to balance exactly those two things on the page at the same time. Because, I mean, part of the theme of the book is we've gotten to a point as a civilization, and, you know, the human species is so startlingly successful that now we have to factor, you know, our ability to alter the ground that we live On and depend on into our decisions about how to continue living as people.

Bill  8:24  
Yeah, that's so beautifully put. And again, folks, if you get the chance, pick up painted horses, but I think that answer leads into this. And to cut to the challenge I mentioned right off the top in the podcast, the challenge of illuminating the folly of ballot box biology, I would ask that you share how and why you've taken on this endeavor of illuminating the challenge the problems that exist with that and for our audience, this is not a journey that starts with anything short of the shocking, and for some probably the disturbing. But Malcolm, would you? Would you maybe sort of give us an introduction to what brought you to your writing, beautiful works of fiction, to now taking on this sort of covering, if you will, this important challenge. 

Malcolm  9:09  
Yeah, you know, I almost have to backtrack prior to the last couple of years, to the time when I was still living in California in the late 80s and early 1990s there was an effort to declare the mountain lion as a specially protected mammal. And I had been out on, on, you can't really call them hunts, because, you know, lethal take hunting for mountain lions was already not legal at that point, but I would go out with these guys who had how tracking hounds, and you know, both on on actual bear hunts and also in pursuit of lions, which was still legal, you can non lethally pursue them if. You had a permit to do so, and a trained pack of hounds, and they would tree the lion, take pictures of it, and then pull the dogs and just go on their their way. Okay, so that was the legal standing of lion pursuit in California from the early 1970s all the way up to 1990 in the mid 80s, they started to have an escalating increase in both lion depredations on livestock and also the first couple of attacks on humans in almost a century. So at that point, the state decided that they were going to remove this kind of temporary protection on lions and return management to California Department of Fish and Wildlife to start to manage them as a game animal again, meaning they would be able to do like limited take quota based hunts on them lethally well, that kind of put the issue back onto the radar of animal welfare and animal protectionist organizations, and they initiated a ballot process to have a ballot measure put up in front of the voters of California to permanently protect mountain lions, not only from lethal take hunting, but at that point, from anything even resembling harassment, which took, you know, it removed the ability of houndsmen To pursue this species, even on a non lethal basis. So this happened in 1990 and the ballot measure passed. Within a couple of years, the lion behavior began to kind of palpably change down there in the area that I grew up, which is in Northern California foothills. And suddenly people are we never saw mountain lions when we were, you know, growing up as kids, they were, we knew they were there. If someone physically saw one, it would actually make the local newspaper. The only time people saw them is if a hound guy put one up a tree, and that was it. Well within a couple of years after the past passage of Proposition 117 in 1990 people started to see him pretty regularly in broad daylight, crossing the road or, you know, out on a horse pasture or whatever. Then in 1994 there was the first human fatality in nearly a century in the county where I grew up, it was a lady, and she was out on her evening run and was ambushed by a lion and killed. And that kind of was the first moment where a lot of us were sort of like, okay, wait a minute. I mean, something has shifted here with the way these cats are responding to humans at this point. So if we fast forward until you know another what is it? I mean? 30 years lo and behold, my nephews are confronted and attacked by a mountain lion in broad daylight, about 10 miles from where the lady jogger had been killed 30 years ago. One of my nephews fought it off and continued to try to fight it. My other nephew wound up getting clamped in the throat and died from it. So this all happened in March, I guess, march 23 of 2024, so it's about a year and a half ago now. But because, you know, I had, like, kind of a pre existing knowledge of this situation and the politics behind it. I mean, it was never my, you know, wasn't my passion or my cause to speak of, until it landed in my family's lap, and at that point, you know, I kind of was morally compelled to go ahead and pursue some kind of reform, if possible, to get The species back into, you know, a more reasonable management state. 

Anders Reynolds  14:24  
So let's talk about that Malcolm. That's a harrowing experience. And you know, I know from reading some of your work that this incident, as you're even saying here, became a real catalyst for you, leading you to examine assumptions and policies around protected predators and the human wildlife interface and just how management practices may be lagging behind ecological realities. But I guess I just want to ask you very bluntly, how has your personal connection to this event changed how you view wildlife management policies?

Malcolm 14:59  
To be honest with you, I'm not sure that it did change the way I view it as much as it reinforced it. I mean, I initially myself and many other people who were living in more rural areas in Northern California who were actually directly sort of affected by the shift in policy in 1990 tended to be more skeptical of this new, you know, management approach, or, I mean, if you it's really a non management approach, it's a strictly preservationist gesture, and it was not based on any kind of science or data or population trends at all with the species. It was strictly a grassroots effort out of generally urban population, you know, funded by, you know, organizations like the Mountain Lion Foundation and, you know, just preservationist, protectionist animal welfare organizations that were able to play to the sympathies of an otherwise uninformed voting population, and that opened up Pandora's box. And you know, the state of California would is a perfect kind of testing ground for that kind of thing, because you've got this very large preponderance of, you know, of residents who live in urban areas. They're not, they're simply not engaged on a day by day basis in the areas that actually are affected by that kind of policy?

Anders Reynolds  16:42  
Yeah, your article points to the disconnect you're talking about between urban policy makers and or urban voters and rural realities. How do you think conservation advocates and wildlife agencies could better bridge that divide so that policies reflect, you know, actual on the ground conditions.

Malcolm 17:07  
Well, some of it gets difficult just based on what the state wildlife, you know, agents are able to even speak to, particularly when it comes to, you know, a ballot, you know, election year situation. I know there was a similar ballot measure in Colorado last year that wound up being pretty resoundingly defeated, thankfully, however. I mean, I bring this up only because it has to be pointed out that the state biologists were not allowed to publicly weigh in on what their opinion of, you know, of this ballot measure language was. So some of this stuff is just kind of unavoidable because of strictures, you know, muzzles that are really put on the experts in the first place. As insane as that sounds,

Anders Reynolds  18:08  
that does sound wild. And I guess I also want to just ask you, in addition to, like, the ballot problems, just because we haven't touched on this, I want to underscore that part of the problem too, as I understand it, is that California, long ago, decades ago, sort of eliminated all the mountain lions, natural predators, right? And grizzly bears and wolves, and that played a role in in where we are today, too, correct?

Malcolm  18:38  
Yeah, it would, yeah. I mean, it would have to, you know, historically or traditionally, the only two sort of top end Apex competitors, other than humans, for mountain lions, would be wolf packs and the grizzly bear. There's a little bit of an like ancillary competition from black bears. Black Bears will push mountain lions off of their their kill and take it from them at a fairly high rate, which causes, you know, the lions to have to kill more of their prey base in order to, you know, to make a living, if you will. But in terms of, you know, the the sort of deadly competitive pressure from another species to a lion, it would be limited to wolves, grizzly bears, and then obviously humans.

Anders Reynolds  19:38  
So you mentioned these groups of guys going out with their hounds, getting the mountain lions up a tree. You know the concept of tree and free hazing and using dogs as management is is probably going to sound controversial to some of our listeners, so I guess I want to ask you. Or give you the opportunity to sort of address what you think are the biggest misconceptions about that approach and how do you respond to, you know, ethical concerns that it might raise for folks, and just ask you if you think there are other non lethal hazing practices that the public might find less jarring but just as effective, that could either be used instead of that, or in addition to those practices,

Malcolm  20:24  
well, it's the just as effective clause that you have to trip over right away. There's nothing else that's as effective at habituating lions away from human populations. The only thing that works is to halliday's them, and as far as the if we're going to look at this through a lens of Natural History, this is a conditioned response that Lions have developed in reaction to wild canines, they'll go up a tree because of competition with wolf packs, and probably Grizzlies as well, because Grizzlies also, as a rule, can't climb a tree. So this is an evolved conditioned reaction that this particular species has in its fight or flight mode. So it's not something that they're doing or learning from human pressure. They've, they've had this, you know, evolved biological response system long before humans were ever pursuing them with dogs in North America. For sure,

Bill  21:33  
I think I want to, I don't think I have to, but I want, I feel compelled to, want to reset for our audience what we're talking about here. Some people are going to have sort of turned out, tuned out the nuance that we're talking about here, and immediately think, well, we're talking about going back to an era of wiping a species out. And I want to make sure people have clearly heard that the idea here is, is that we have to recondition the species for that fear of those canines, which will be attached to humans, if you will, as a way of managing, not eliminating. I just want to flag that, because I do think the emotions I'm just going to say, I'm curious, as someone that loves that certain species are regaining some footing, and I almost revel in living in grizzly country, for example, how do we cross over the divide between an unreasonable obsession on one side and what could be an equally unreasonable obsession on the other? And is the dividing line between love and hate. But where is that? Where the battle really rages like people either love them so much that they can't imagine even this non lethal hazing. And then those who you know there, obviously, there was a point in our history where people just wanted to eliminate them, obviously, mostly from a livestock predation problem perspective. But is it that simple? It's this dividing line between we've made these, these charismatic species, I think about P 22 in LA, you know, the sort of famous mountain lion that people just I have friends who just love that mountain lion, right? But, like, I can't imagine they've even made it to this point in this conversation, maybe because of the uncomfortable nature of the idea that we actually have to return them to their wildness, if you will.

Malcolm  23:19  
No, I think that's a really good point. And as a dovetail to that, it's really important to stress that once proposition 117 was passed, and there was no longer any sort of human canine pressure on the species, the livestock depredation situation got so out of hand that the state would still which had a loophole to be able to in fact, they were not. They're not. It wasn't even a loophole that allowed them. It was a loophole that required the state to remove livestock, depredating Lions. And when I say remove, I don't mean relocate. I mean lethal removal. So ironically, once they stopped allowing non lethal tree and free lion pursuit in California, the state began to take and kill more lions than had ever been taken between 1972 and 1990 bill.

Anders Reynolds  24:17  
That was such a good reminder, because I agree with you, there's, there's probably someone listening out there who might be interpreting this as as us giving justification for human superiority over another animal. But something I also want to underscore is that is not what the article that Malcolm wrote suggests. In fact, it's the opposite. I think, I think the article suggests that large predators remind us of our limits rather than our dominion. And I guess, to maybe move us away from the acute problem and just sort of ask Malcolm about that in the abstract, I'm curious how that insight about our our limits rather than. Art of minion. How does that influence your broader thinking about conservation and perhaps by extension, your work as a writer?

Malcolm  25:08  
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess you know again. I mean, if we can return for a moment to what we were thematically talking about with the novel, a lot of the the theme there has to do with the ability of modern humans to alter a landscape and alter the natural world in a way that ultimately is deleterious to the human experience. So I mean, I am very much a massive preservationist and public land advocate, and I want roadless areas. I want more roadless areas. I want more wildlife species, better habitat with the, you know, with the caveat or the knowledge that we do actually have to apply some management criteria and management pressure to these places in order to keep them as vibrant and ecologically healthy and as sound as possible. For instance, removing a dam is a management decision, in my opinion, okay, choosing you know to you know to plow up the entry to a Forest Service road is a management decision. It goes it's more complicated and it's more comprehensive than people generally tend to consider on just a front end knee jerk basis. There's a lot going on there, but the idea that we somehow just grant special protection privileges based on its charisma to a specific species that also plays a role in the overall dynamic wild lands or ecological picture that will lead to a cascading series of deleterious consequences. We already know that,

Bill  27:16  
yeah, I think it's I think it's so challenging today that on so many issues, we talk past each other, right, that that it's hard to step people back from their, you know, center brain response to whether they're in the camp that sees, you know, sees the fuzzy, warm, charismatic creature versus something that that we have to live with in a way in which both can thrive. And I think it's to me, it's honestly quite astounding that a personal family tragedy that your family, you know, went through has led to you actually having these nuanced conversations. And for those of you listening. We're not going to get into all of it probably here. So I strongly recommend you go to our show notes. You will find a link to both the New York Times Magazine article that Malcolm wrote and a link to his longer form. You know, obviously some things fell on the cutting room floor, as as happens in the editing process, but his full, you know, exploration of this, but I just think it's so interesting, like we have, we now have, normally wild species that have names, or at least they have numbers, and people can track that can even track their collars. And it just feels fraught with like, how are we ever going to back away from this moment to a more reasonable moment where we all can agree that we do like the idea of having apex predators like Grizzlies on the landscape or mountain lions on the landscape, but we're also doing things to make sure that we keep both this, that species, safe and our species.

Malcolm  28:50  
Yeah, there's that, like, human or public safety component to it, for sure, but I mean, something that you, you know, just said a moment ago, really made me Cognizant in the, you know, in the moment of the need to address another aspect of this, which is that none of you know these species, even you know the big, charismatic apex predators, exist outside of the overall, you know, holographic ecological reality so and I can something I can point to in California that's a problem right now is there's this exploding black bear population, which it's within the last couple of years, becoming more and more obvious, even to managers and biologists, that this incredibly dense black bear population is creating a decline in the deer population. Well, the deer are, you know, the prey base for the Lions. So some of what we're seeing probably relative to Boulder and Boulder lion behavior. And encroachment into more like, literally, downright suburban residential areas by, you know, this predatory animal that previously was incredibly evasive and really never allowed itself to be seen in, you know, in a human population zone, that's where they're going now, because the deer population has declined relative to mismanagement of the bear population. So you've got this again, unless you're managing in a holographic fashion. One thing leads to another with these sort of law of unintended consequences, results.

Anders Reynolds  30:37  
Malcolm. Let's look forward, given your warning that some wildlife laws may rest more on charisma or myth or sentiment than on ecology. Sure of the problem. What specific changes would you like to see legislatively or even culturally in say, the next five years that would improve predator management. In your mind, 

Malcolm  31:04  
I would like to see the North American model of wildlife management comprehensively restored everywhere. And I, you know, I would like to see the general public and the, you know, the political pressures from the general public taken out of the equation. Basically, I would like wildlife management to not be a political hot button. To not be a politicized situation. It needs to remain in the hands of people who are invested in whole ecological health, invested in all of the species and the health of all the species, and allow them give them all of the tools, restore all of the tools that they need to do their jobs for the benefit of all of the species that are in the equation. Wow,

Bill  31:57  
that would be an ideal scenario, for sure, like I think about, you know, I trust somebody else to have gone to school to give me good health advice and good guidance. I trust somebody else who might be leading the country to have experts that understand economic theory. And yet, in this case, in California, we chose to let the general public out completely trump the the vote of of those who understand the predator, prey dynamics of a species like the mountain lion. So from from your lips, from your lips to either California's voters, ears or

Malcolm  32:34  
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, if I can just interject one more thing, to be completely fair to the other side. Back in that era, not much was known about mountain lion populations. Not much was known about mountain lion behavior. I mean, what we're seeing right now is somewhat of a grand experiment in protecting a species that we don't know very much about, and in the interim, we've learned a lot more about them. Partially, that's the result of, you know, just the technology of being able to research an animal like the mountain lion, it's still largely reliant on putting a lion into a tree with a hound dog, tranquilizing it, and then you can take data from it, or you can put a radio collar on it. But even the radio collars have come so far, just in the last few years, and a lot of that technology actually has come from waterfowl counts and, you know, waterfowl biology, but you can apply it to other species at this point. I mean, they've got, you know, these, these radio transmitters now that react with us with satellites, and they can report on the location of whatever you know, animal is collared with this or or outfitted with it, whether it's a duck or whether it's a lion, they can get a report on, like, a 32nd you know, basis. Every 30 seconds, they can get a report on exactly what coordinates this creature is at, and it's, it's things like that. You know, enhanced technology for researchers that have sort of also brought us to the present conversation where we just know a lot more about some of these species than we used to, you know, in 1990 you know, interesting.

Bill  34:33  
You bring that up the technology. We covered in depth with Tim manly, a grizzly bear manager from Montana who pioneered some of the early game cameras, and now he talks about these GIS fences that increase the frequency in which they ping grizzly bear collars, so that they can actually maybe change human behavior, get human to put the garbage up and yeah, so I would hope the technology will allow us to evolve. A point where we can get past the histrionics that come from, yeah, people falling in love with charismatic species when, when we have things happen, like, what has happened to your family? I'm gonna, I'm gonna sort of move us on something maybe a little less heavy. Maybe can be equally, yeah, I know that you're working on something coming up, and that's a book about Butte America and the complex history of that place. And for people that don't know Butte Malcolm, maybe tell them a little bit about the place, and also how you came to this pursuit of telling a bit of the history of that place.

Malcolm  35:38  
Yeah, I mean, again, I mean, there's some layers of irony to, you know, to the subject Butte is both the home to the largest super fund, you know, environmental cleanup site in North America, and also home to the largest National Historic District in America. And it's a critical, a critical chapter in modernity itself. At the exact same time that electrical technology was coming into play with, you know, Edison's light bulb and the you know, the telephone, the telegraph. You know, electric trains, electric street cars. At exactly that moment, the basically Vegas trove of copper was discovered in Butte, Montana. So Butte wound up providing a lot of the copper wiring for the first half of the 20th century to bring us into this incredible modern state that we now, you know, both occupy and also have to ethically grapple with what part

Bill  36:51  
about the history, I know it kind of grabbed you when you were doing some work in Butte, like, what? What set its hooks in you about Butte?

Malcolm  36:58  
Okay, I am a carpenter by trade. And I was actually doing a whole house remodel on a 1910 vintage row house over there in 2019 it was just prior to all the covid stuff. And I had lived in Montana at that point for, you know, almost 30 years and I moved to Montana, you know, for many of the same reasons a lot of people do, I mean the outdoor grandeur and the ability to hunt and fish and have wild places and whatnot. Well, Butte is not that. Butte has this massive, abandoned, open pit mine, and a lot of Victorian and Art Deco buildings that look like a mothballed movie set, almost. And I, and I realized that this was a and I was also like a massive Western history and Montana history fan for since I was a kid, really. But somehow, Butte never totally got on my radar. And once I was there and sort of on the ground for an extended period of time, I just got so fascinated by what I didn't know about it, and I started to read as much as I could get my hands on about the history of it, and realize that nothing about the actual origination story of it had been written in like at least 50 years, and that in that span of time, there was a lot more that was Available to modern researchers in terms of being able to, you know, go through newspaper archives digitally and whatnot. And it just occurred to me at some point that that was a, you know, a missing gap in the ability to tell Butte story or preserve Butte story was just to, you know, write a more modern version of a narrative history that would appeal to contemporary readers who didn't know about, you know, the this fascinating history of the plays,

Anders Reynolds  39:13  
moving to Butte sounds a lot like doing this podcast bill it. It might sound glamorous, but it involves looking at you more than I care to and to say nothing filling up with all your weird habits all the time.

Bill  39:23  
I do have a few, but I thank you for indulging them when you do so. Malcolm, this has just been such a great conversation. I want to thank thank you for coming on. I want to thank you for your incredible work. Painted horses. I just loved it. I read it when I first got to Montana and and obviously taking what is obviously a personal tragedy, tragedy within your family and and turning it into a spotlight on a very important issue that we need to think harder about, more about. And I appreciate you coming on the wild idea podcast to have part of that conversation.

Anders Reynolds  39:56  
Yeah, Malcolm, this has been really great. I appreciate you. Spending time talking with us, not just about, you know, your personal story, but about your your writing experience. It's been really illuminating for me. So thank you so much. I've enjoyed this. 

Malcolm 40:11  
Thankyou. I have too. And just appreciate the opportunity to come on and hopefully, you know, give people maybe a side to some controversial, you know, issues that they haven't otherwise, you know, considered before. Well,

Bill  40:26  
I think you've done a great job of that. And thank you for just boiling it down in such a succinct way. And again, folks, you need to read the full article. We'll have a link to it in our show notes, which you can find at the wild idea.com coming up on the wild idea podcast, we dive into the American prairie, first with a bonus episode this Thursday with the early architect of this drive to create a multi million acre wildlife infused refuge, Sean Garrity, and then the next week, we talk about the current state of American prairie with CEO Ali Fox and Danny Kinka, the director of rewilding, in an Episode that'll be out a week from today. If you like the podcast, we hope you'll do two things besides subscribing, give us a review in your favorite podcast app, and we hope you'll take a minute to recommend this to a friend or a colleague. And if you don't get our newsletter, you should, because it's full of lots of great additional information that you don't hear in the podcast itself. And you can sign up for that again at the wild idea.com and we look forward to seeing all of you on down the trail.

Speaker 3  41:25  
The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds. Production and editing by Bren Russell at podlad Digital, support by Holly wilkeshevsky At day pack digital. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth, and was composed by John skihan. Our executive producer and ringleader is Laura Hodge. You can find the wild idea wherever you listen to or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, please take a minute to give us a rating, and if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com you Bren.

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