Unknown Speaker  0:00
The following is a production of Wild Idea Media.

Bill Hodge  0:06
Welcome to The Wild Line, where land stories are the lead stories. This is our report for Halloween, October 31, 2025. Last Friday, we brought you the news that an order by U.S. District Judge Susan Elston to pause layoffs during the shutdown resulted in the revelation that the Department of the Interior had near-term plans to eliminate thousands of employees. Well, this week, Judge Elston made that pause indefinite, lasting until the suit against the government on reductions in force is closed. The move prevents the government from executing any RIFs or reorganization plans during the government shutdown.

Anders Reynolds  0:44
Bill, as we teased last week, this Monday brought the announcement of the bipartisan Senate Stewardship Caucus. The official launch took place in Washington's Union Station at an event hosted by Nature is Nonpartisan, a group founded by conservative climate advocate Benji Backer. The event was attended by a number of senators, including Republicans Steve Daines of Montana and Tom Tillis of North Carolina, as well as Democrats Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and John Hickenlooper of Colorado. The caucus is co-chaired by New Mexico Democrat Martin Heinrich and Montana Republican Tim Sheehy, who called this moment an "inflection point" for our public lands. For his part, Senator Heinrich pointed to the durable nature of bipartisan solutions in the conservation space and voiced his hope that the caucus might champion existing pieces of legislation, including the Great American Outdoors Act and the Recovering America's Wildlife Act.

Bill Hodge  1:42
Last week, we also brought you the news of Louisiana Senator John Kennedy's efforts to overturn a plan to save the threatened northern spotted owl by killing off its invasive competitor, the barred owl. His resolution, which was introduced over the objections of fellow Republican and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and the opposition of timber advocates, was absolutely destroyed on the Senate floor, garnering only 25 votes in support. Critics of Kennedy's CRA resolution said overturning the plan would have upset a delicate status quo involving resource management plans, Endangered Species Act consultations, and owl habitat. They warned that overturning the current plan would have actually resulted in fewer board feet coming off the forest rather than more. However, senators did approve a second CRA resolution from Alaska Republican Dan Sullivan that would overturn Biden's 2022 decision to protect millions of acres of western Alaska known as the National Petroleum Reserve from oil drilling. This resolution is the latest CRA action to target Biden-era rules that were crafted carefully and with extensive public input.

Anders Reynolds  2:49
On the House side, leading Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee reached out to Secretaries Burgum and Rollins to express concern over DOI and USDA's strategy of prioritizing nonessential activities during the government shutdown to the benefit of mining, drilling, and logging industries, while at the same time curtailing or suspending work that protects life, property, and public access. Noting that skeleton crews decimated by furloughs and now a shutdown are responsible for wildlife response, search and rescue, and even day-to-day needs like trash collection, the letter reminds the secretaries that the continued prioritization of extractive industries over basic agency responsibilities could potentially violate the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from incurring obligations or accepting voluntary services during a lapse in appropriations except in narrowly defined emergencies.

Bill Hodge  3:44
Speaking of DOI, several of its agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, along with the U.S. Forest Service and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, have announced, in partnership with ConocoPhillips and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, this year's round of funding for the Western Big Game Seasonal Habitat and Migration Corridors Fund. Twelve projects were awarded to twelve organizations for a total of $3.9 million in order to restore habitat and improve migration corridors across eight western states. The awards leveraged $3.4 million in matching contributions to generate a total conservation impact of $7.3 million. The twelve projects awarded through this slate will conserve critical winter range and migration corridors in tribally and state-identified focal areas within Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. Addressing the threats these species face from habitat fragmentation, including limited high-quality forage and cover and poor health conditions, these projects will remove or improve 652 miles of fencing to wildlife-friendly standards, improve management on 294,304 acres of rangelands, and restore 53,085 acres of public, private, and tribal lands. You can find a complete list of the awards in our show notes.

Anders Reynolds  5:10
Last January, in the waning days of the Biden administration, a deal was struck between The Nature Conservancy, the National Park Service, and a number of ranching and dairy farms that were allowed to run cattle on Point Reyes National Seashore. But now, a lawyer for the Interior Department has been dispatched to California to work out a new deal in the shadow of a lawsuit filed by two ranching families who have stayed at Point Reyes. It appears the person who enlisted Secretary Doug Burgum in this endeavor is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose uncle, President Kennedy, signed the law establishing Point Reyes National Seashore in 1962. Bill, this is an incredibly thorny issue, and we'll link to an article that lays out the complications better than I can. Suffice to say, the cast of characters in this story is impressive. It includes the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Jared Huffman, who happens to represent the area; a surfer known as Sea-lah, a "Make America Healthy Again" advocate who brought the Point Reyes conflict to Kennedy's attention; and two different groups of ranchers—one that has already sent a letter to Congress asking them to back off a probe of the settlement, and a smaller group that has filed a lawsuit to reverse January's settlement. That second group claims that cows are necessary to manage the seashore's grasslands, but conservation groups disagree, saying these ranchers simply want to move in on the range the other families left behind in January and that elk and fire can manage the grasslands just fine, as they did for the native tribes who lived in this landscape before European colonization.

Bill Hodge  6:50
Listeners may remember that in September, the Trump administration announced its intent to rescind the BLM Public Lands Rule. The reasoning behind this intended rollback is pretty shaky, with the administration claiming the rule is unnecessary and in violation of statutory direction. Well, the opposite is true. The Public Lands Rule was only formed after many months of public input, and it is actually necessary to ensure compliance with long-standing directives from Congress that ask the BLM to protect undeveloped landscapes, wildlife habitat, and cultural resources. When comment was gathered on the Public Lands Rule, over 92% of responses were in favor of this important step. Comments on the plan to rescind the Public Lands Rule are due by November 10, but we wanted to share a timely webinar happening at 1 Pacific, 4 Eastern, on Monday, November 3. That webinar will feature experts from New Mexico Wild, Native Land Institute, The Conservation Alliance, and The Conservation Lands Foundation, and it is designed to help the public understand what's at stake and how to take action. We'll link to the registration page for that webinar in our show notes.

Anders Reynolds  8:01
Arkansas, my account, and the Natural State was in the news for some unusual reasons this week. Firstly—and this is something I saw with my own eyes as I walked from my office to the Judiciary Square Metro on my commute home last Friday—the Trump administration has reinstalled a statue of General Albert Pike that was pulled down during D.C.'s Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Their reasoning: to "beautify the nation's capital and restore pre-existing statues." But does Pike beautify the nation's capital? Well, he served on the Arkansas Supreme Court before the Civil War and was on the losing side of the Battle of Pea Ridge in that state. Pike later misappropriated Confederate war funds and, facing arrest by the Confederate government, resigned from the rebel army. Despite being hated in both the North and the South, Pike's statue was erected in D.C. in 1901 and was the only statue in the city honoring a Confederate general. In addition to taking up arms against the United States, Pike was probably involved in the development of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. The D.C. City Council has long advocated for the statue's removal, and I'll miss the days where I didn't have to look at his stupid traitor face on my walk to work.

Secondly, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission announced this week that a final analysis has confirmed that the DNA collected from a black bear killed in Newton County on October 4 does not match the DNA of the bear responsible for the death of a 60-year-old man on October 2 in the Ozark National Forest. A bear was euthanized by Arkansas Fish and Game biologists three days after the incident, and the size, physical characteristics, and photographic evidence initially pointed to a high probability that it was the attacking animal. It was not. Biologists in Arkansas can be forgiven for not getting this exactly right, in my opinion, as no one had been killed by a bear in Arkansas since 1892—that is, if you don't count the fatal bear attack that happened less than a month before and over 100 miles away in Franklin County, where a man using a tractor to move gravel on his property was attacked by a yearling bear that stayed nearby after the attack. Arkansas Game and Fish also shot and killed that bear, which tested negative for rabies and distemper. Bill and I will be talking more about rare and deadly interactions between humans and wildlife in a couple of weeks, when we talk to author Malcolm Brooks about his personal connection to a fatal mountain lion attack in California last year.

Bill Hodge  10:43
Likewise, Montana, my account, and we have a trio of stories from Big Sky Country that we want to share with our listeners. To start, a plan to drop poison in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness from helicopters in order to kill invasive rainbow trout was rejected by a federal judge this week, handing a big win to the conservation organization Wilderness Watch, which sued the Forest Service two years ago over this plan designed to introduce Yellowstone cutthroat trout to the wilderness area streams. The judge agreed with Wilderness Watch that the plan, called the Buffalo Creek Project, conflicts with the Wilderness Act's mandate to support primeval wilderness character, as neither trout species was endemic to Buffalo Creek.

Meanwhile, a second federal judge ruled that a Forest Service timber project in the Kootenai National Forest inadequately considered how new logging roads cut through the landscape might impact grizzly bear populations. That suit was brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians, and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

Finally, last month, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte was joined by the state's two senators and representatives in signing a letter to Interior Secretary Burgum protesting conservation group American Prairie's grazing rights on a portion of the half million acres of rangeland owned by the organization. American Prairie has reintroduced bison on the land it owns and worked with cattle producers on leasing other parcels to support 7,000 head of cattle and 75 local ranchers. Yet Gianforte argues that the effort "threatens the economic vitality of our most important industry." In fact, as a percentage of the state's real Gross Domestic Product, agriculture ranks as the 12th largest industry in Montana. Still, ranchers remain concerned about the cost of operating in a landscape that could carry brucellosis, a disease that attacks the reproductive system and causes abortions in pregnant cattle, elk, and bison. This story is also a timely one for The Wild Idea, as over the next several weeks, Anders and I will be releasing two different conversations with American Prairie about these very issues. We hope you'll tune in.

That is our report for Halloween, October 31, 2025. We will be back next Friday with another Wild Line, and next Tuesday's episode of The Wild Idea features a conversation with Professor Frank Yocatur about the lessons conservation groups and advocates can draw from history—how even the best ideals can be co-opted, missions can drift, and the importance of knowing where your boundaries are before things get murky. Until then, act up and run wild.

Speaker 1  13:22
The Wild Line is a production of Wild Idea Media. Production and editing by Bren Russell at Podlad. Support by Holly Wilkeshevsky at Daypack Digital. Our theme music, "Spring Hill Jack," is from Railroad Earth and was composed by John Skehan. The executive producer is Laura Hodge. Learn more about us at wildidea.com.

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