Unknown Speaker 0:00 The following is a production of wild idea media. Bill Hodge 0:06 Welcome to the wild idea podcast, where, together, we are exploring the intersection of wild nature and our own human nature. Anders, I am about to see you in person, not through a computer monitor, for the first time in like, a year. I guess, think Anders Reynolds 0:21 that's right, and honestly, I'm stoked. I cannot wait to get out there. I And that's not just because the window for a full refund is closed, because I'm I'm excited to see you, but Bill, I'm worried listeners will get the wrong idea about our relationship. You know, we work together, we travel together, we ride a tandem bike everywhere we go, but we don't always get along. You know, what steps are you going to take to ensure I don't get on your nerves while we're sharing a 50 foot boat? Bill Hodge 0:53 I'd like to say it's going to involve alcohol, but there's not enough alcohol in the world to make sure you don't get on my nerves. You know, I'm going to come with an open heart and an open mind, and my wife probably squeezing my knee under the table when I start to get frustrated, and probably Laura trying to keep me under control. And there's always the fact that there's a large ocean that I'm going to be able to throw you on, throw you in if it comes to that, right? So for the for you guys, and this is not, this is not us trying to create FOMO, we are actually going into a very wild place, Glacier Bay National Park, the vast majority of which is federally designated Wilderness. But we're going to be doing it from the water on a 50 foot sailboat with some other friends of ours in the wilderness community. And we're actually going to do some recording while we're there, and we're excited to bring that to you all. But today, we are particularly excited to bring you a conversation that we've been very interested in bringing you for a while, and it is a conversation with somebody that I hold an incredibly high regard. Christina Eisenberg is our guest today, and we're going to talk about a whole, a whole bunch of interesting things. I'm going to sort of go through the bio a little more thoroughly than I may maybe do, because I think it's going to help people understand why we've been so excited for this conversation. Christina holds her PhD in forestry and wildlife from Oregon State University. She is a first generation Native American, raw Murray and Western Apache and Latinx ecologist. She has had several long term federal projects with indigenous communities in both the States and our friends to the north that incorporate indigenous knowledge and Western science and eco Cultural Restoration of forests and grasslands. She's also the former Associate Dean and Director of tribal initiatives at Oregon State University, and the former chief scientist at Earth watch, where she oversaw a global research program and currently is doing a lot to support a lot of different organizations. And let me just be the first to say, Christina, welcome, and we're super excited to have you on the show today. Speaker 1 2:57 Oh, thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here and to join this conversation. Anders Reynolds 3:03 Christina, it's so, so nice to have you here. This episode is set to air at the beginning of the ninth forest Congress, which is a gathering of leaders in the Forestry and Conservation space that happens every once in a while and allows those folks to talk about the current health of our nation's forests as well as their future. Could you share with us and our listeners your role in this year's Congress and what you're hoping will come out of the gathering Speaker 1 3:35 yes Anders, so my role is to deliver the opening remarks and to speak right before chief Tom Schultz and to recenter the Congress on it's about a paradigm shift. So these congresses, this is only the ninth one. American forest was founded in 1875 so because there were a number of people that were really terrified about what was happening to our nation's forests, and felt that at the rate that they were being cut and how they were being managed, there weren't going to be any forest left for future generations. Since then, American forest is charged by the US Congress with helping be the North Star for forest conservation. They were responsible for the creation of the idea of we need the Forest Service, and the forest service needs to create federally protected wilderness areas and but these congresses only occur at these pivotal moments in time when we're facing huge challenges with forestry and needs to bring together people from divine. Diverse backgrounds across all sectors of folks who care about forests to advise the US Congress by creating resolutions. And these resolutions often become laws that govern how our national forests are managed and conserved. So right now, forests are in serious trouble. They're burning up at an unprecedented rate and also dealing with many, many stressors, including insect outbreaks and diseases. And again, there's that familiar concern among ecologists, those of us who know that there might not be forest that's we know them for much longer if we don't change the paradigm that we use to manage and steward and conserve them. So my opening remarks will be about the paradigm shift and the values that underlie the shift that is needed, and many of them are shared values. So what brings us together as a community? So Anders Reynolds 6:12 you mentioned that this is a pivotal moment in time because our forests are in trouble, but I'm curious to hear more about what changes to our forest management system you think are necessary for long term resilience? I've heard you call both in the past and in your answer right now, for the weaving of more indigenous knowledge into our programs of restoration and stewardship, particularly in response to those stressors you mentioned, to this acceleration of disturbances we're seeing on forests related to pathogen outbreaks and fire severity and climate change. Where do you think we should go from here and and how important is it for us to bring together different paradigms of knowledge? Speaker 1 6:55 Well, clearly, the approach that we're using, which is based on best western science that includes the very best silvicultural practices and amazing technologies. And I'm a very formally trained Western scientist, so I'm very familiar with what that means and how those tools are applied, but they're not working, and neither is the protection strict protection of forests as a way of saving them. And so we have to do something different, but it's not really something different. It is looking to the past, in the wisdom from the past with which these forests evolved, co evolved with humans embedded in those forests, and the knowledge that those humans developed over millennia about what it takes to create a healthy forest, so that these forests could provide everything that humans needed, and humans would provide everything the forest needed. So based on this mutual relationship of caring, the way one takes care of a family, that's very different from what when your American settlers arrived in North America, they brought with them the forestry practices that had failed in Europe, and proceeded to apply them here and then with American Forests and the for creation of the Forest Service, wilderness areas were created where trees were strictly protected from harvest, neither of those approaches worked because they involved a very different relationship between humans in these forests. So what happened is these forests co evolved for millennia with indigenous knowledge, indigenous stewardship. And what makes these forests for us is is, you know, humans tending them and and the forest shaped humans and and humans shaped the forest. And the basic premise was that we as humans, as indigenous peoples, we don't know anything, and if we listen to what the forest is telling us, then we will know what we need to do to take good care of the forest and the and so that the forest can take care of us. So the modern paradigm, which came with settlement, starting in the late 1600s is command and control. We're humans. We're rulers of the universe. We can control these forests. We can take what we need also based on limitless growth and economic. Model that was also based on limitless growth. And conversely, the conservation movement, which is we need to treat these forests with the highest level of respect, and that means no touch, and we're in control, so we can decide we're not going to do anything to these forests, and that way, they'll be healthy and strong, and we'll have all this old growth. Well, both of those paradigms failed because they're all about humans controlling nature and having control of nature, and I think as anyone listening to this podcast can agree that right now, we have very little control over nature and indigenous people believe we never did. You know, if we paid attention and listened, then maybe we would learn what we needed to learn in order to take care of nature and take care of ourselves. So that's the combination of knowledges we need the very best western science matters a lot, and braided together with indigenous knowledge and what unites us, and also local knowledge. So people who live in rural communities and have lived there for generations, very close to the land, right and what unites us, our cultures are vastly different, but what unites us is that we are all equally deeply concerned about what's happening to forests. They are being consumed by wildfires that are, you know, way beyond anything that has historically happened, the patterns, and there's a lot of science on that. And then, of course, the droughts, intensive droughts, heat domes that are killing off trees, insect outbreaks, we're losing our forests. So that's what brings us together, is our awareness of that and our awareness that one type of knowledge by itself is not going to help us take care of forests the way they need to be taken care of we need. We need all of these types of knowledge braided together in community, with respect for each other to figure this out. Bill Hodge 12:25 Well, one of the best places for people to capture where that is summarized is where you were one of four primary authors of the report, braiding indigenous and western knowledge for climate adapted forest, also referred to as the braiding sweetgrass report. It is a fascinating read and well thought out. And I want to, I want to quote from a section titled eco, cultural sustainability and concepts of reserves and wilderness. Quote as such, we are not suggesting that reserves, ie parks, wilderness areas or old growth forests, be abandoned. We do, however, suggest that such concepts and labels be reconceptualized in light of their historic meanings and implications for indigenous peoples. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we believe in the power and the imaginative capabilities of the human mind. We also believe in the necessity of the human mind to exercise that power and those capabilities in the face of our coming challenges our thinking about reserves such as parks, wilderness areas and old growth forests must evolve if we are truly to protect those places and find a way forward together in an uncertain future. End Quote, which basically just restated something that you just said, I would love for you to unpack that a little bit more for our audience, because I'd like to think as a species that we are creative enough to solve these pretty dynamic problems, but boy, you know, maybe it's a snapshot in time. It's hard to believe that we're going to use creativity. Is that me just being too scared to unseal something that is so valuable for the preservation of wildness? Is that just me being too reticent? Speaker 1 13:58 It our society is based on silos of ways of thinking. And there's the arts and the humanities, and they're very separate from, you know, science, right? And and then there's these cultures, like rural, you know, landowners, small woodland owners, for example, in are contrasted with urban folks, and so everybody's in their silo. And what the braiding seagrass report is about is that we need to come together and make a braid together as a community, to learn from each other with open minds and figure this out, and that is involves humility and openness, and that's really where creativity comes from, right? I'm a writer. I was a nature writer for two decades before I became a scientist. I'm a poet, and one of my. Brees is in painting, and as as an artist and a writer, you you know you don't have control over your creativity. You have to open yourself to it, and then you get all these wonderful surprises, like a walk in the woods, and you get, you know, inspiration for an essay or a poem, and so that's what we've lost, is our society. We're very much process oriented and transactional, and the creativity comes from really listening to each other. In the indigenous world, we have talking circles where people say what's on their mind, and everybody just listens. It's not a debate, it's not a back and forth conversation. And you sit with those words, and then whoever else wants to say something says something, and sometimes there's long moments of silence. So that's a very different way of engaging. And while we were writing the braiding sweetgrass report, our first meeting was in Washington, DC, at Forest Service headquarters in the Leopold room, because what we were doing was something Leopold had advocated for a century earlier, and in our meeting, there were that's how our meeting took place, and there were federal forest service leaders. Meryl Harrell was there, and we just opened ourselves to that creative process, and that's what that report was. Bill Hodge 16:46 I think that's great. I think my reticence is just, we live in a world of knee jerk, knee jerk responses, right? It's I, my, I had a knee jerk response when the US Department of Agriculture announced their their intent to resend the roadless rule, just like the, you know, the forest products industry has has had a pretty strong opposition to the idea of having a roadless rule in general, right? And I think that's just my I hope that we can have that humility, honestly, because I happen to be a practitioner the Wilderness Act, and I believe the strength in the Wilderness Act is the forced humility it requires of us. I just, I just, I hope that we can be humble with each other enough to find a common way forward. Just like finding the way to use Western science and traditional indigenous knowledge needs to get braided together, we have to braid this together. You and I witnessed that a little bit just a few weeks ago in Missoula, right with the listening session that we were both a part of. Yeah, it's just, I think my reticence is just like, Can I, can I trust even myself to be humble enough to find a way forward that maybe doesn't completely align with my my worldview? Speaker 1 17:56 Yeah, I recommend rereading Leopold, not just to Sand County Almanac, but some of his published journal articles, because he is the person that was responsible for creation of true wilderness, protected wilderness, and I for my master's thesis, I wanted to know why On Earth we killed all the wolves that we did in the United States? And I had a personal interest, because wolves showed up in my backyard in Montana, literally. And I had little kids, and everything changed for the for the better, actually. But you know, he in his field notes, he wrote a lot about forests and he wrote about climate change back in 1920 in his field notes, in his field notebook. So back then, the Leopold papers had not been digitized. So this was the early 2000s when I did my master's thesis, and holding his field notebook, where he he writes about what terrible condition the forest is in, how climate change is altering it to the point that it's severely at risk, and that what that forest needs this this was in the Prescott National Forest In in Arizona, and he writes, what this forest needs is cultural burning. So what a lot of people don't know is that Leopold's wife, Estella, she's actually a relative of mine, and she was indigenous, and she was in in all of his I read all of his letters between her and him and and in his field notebooks, he sometimes wrote poems to her. And she was his deepest he she was his muse, right and back then, it, it wasn't exactly safe to disclose one's indigenous background. Um. Um, so a great, great aunt of mine and she were cousins, so that's how I know about her heritage, and I was mentored by all the Leopold's daughter, Nina as well. She was on my masters, my graduate committee, but, um, he, he had it all figured out back in 1920 has taken us this long, and a key tenet to his perspectives on what it takes to restore forests and protect wilderness is humility, and that's something we've never as modern humans managing lands we have never opened ourselves fully to humility, and that's what he was advocating for back then. Bill Hodge 20:49 Well, here's hoping we can find it today. Yeah, Anders Reynolds 20:52 I just want to endorse rereading Aldo Leopold, no matter where you are in life or your career, it's a it's a really good idea. Christina, you, you brought up being a writer, being a scientist, being a poet. You also brought up wolves. I want to talk about all of those things. You wrote a book the wolf's tooth. And it is just, it's so wonderful. You could tell both the both the science the you know, the right brain science side and left brain poet side come out, and the book itself really opened me up to the idea of Keystone predation and what it means for nature, particularly in the way it challenges bottom up thinking about ecological relationships, and instead focuses on trophic cascades, which is a process where one event, in this case, the removal of an apex predator, has ripple effects all the way down. I wonder if you could share more about this idea and how you came to it with our listeners. Speaker 1 21:59 Well, I didn't come to it. It came to me, or the wolves came to us. So we lived on the California Central Coast in a very rural area, and that's where we had planned to raise our kids on a ranch. And all of a sudden, the population quadrupled in a span of three years. And my husband and I decided we did not want to raise our kids there. The values that were prevalent in Southern California were creeping into our area insidiously, and so when the minute our daughters were out of diapers, they were one and a half and two and a half, I put them in my jeep with the family dog, and kissed my husband goodbye, and went off and drove through the rural West until I found the place that was home and that, you know, I let the landscape tell me, and I wanted to find a place that wasn't going to change, where the population wasn't going to quadruple on me in five years or whatever. And I was very drawn to wilderness and big trees, and I ended up in northwest Montana, in the crown of the continent ecosystem. And we live in a place where there's more grizzly bears than people, and that's where we raised our kids. We have great neighbors, but it's a place that hasn't changed at all, and shortly after we returned, we moved here. Well, the first night, we opened our bedroom window and I heard wolves howling. I said, Huh? Wolves are not supposed to be here, right? And so, um, what ended up happening, it was those pesky Canadian wolves had recolonized. It's a narrow valley. It's a shoestring valley with two big mountain ranges on either side. And our backyard is 2.7 million acres of federal, contiguous, federally protected wilderness, lots of old growth forest. The only thing missing, really was wolves, and one day, three years later, they showed up in our backyard. They burst out of the woods. The deer burst out of the woods, running like a racehorse, and right behind it were a pair of wolves, and a black one and a gray one. They passed within about 20 feet of where my young daughters and I were weeding our perennial garden, and the deer ran back across our meadow into the woods, and the wolves, the gray wolf, turned and looked at us and we were wildlife trackers, because if you live in a place that's that wild and you have little kids, you have to know who's been in your backyard, you know, before you can let your kids out to play, right? And so we had really. Bears and cougars in our yard, but, you know, the first thing after they passed, we were in shock. And our daughters, they turned to me, and they said, Mom, let's track them. And so we waited a couple minutes, and we went and out into the meadow and tracked the wolves. And you know, I was in shock. This wasn't Yellowstone. Was it just been reintroduced to Yellowstone, and they weren't really supposed to be there. And you could we had this meadow where deer and elk used to stand there like lawn ornaments and mow the grass down and all the shrubs. And we thought that was beautiful. I was clueless, really. I mean, when we moved here, I learned everything about this place, as much as I could by practicing humility and just really paying attention with our kids. So we walked across this meadow, and you could see where the wolves had walked, had run by because the grass was starting to spring up, and I could smell their scent. And it was this scent of wildness. It was this beautiful, sweet scent. And we could even see where the female wolf, later, I discovered she was the alpha female of a new pack. Had turned her head to look at us, and the deer had run across the meadow back into the woods. And we tracked those animals, and they the deer had gone over a barbed wire fence. The wolves had gone through the barbed wire fence and left a bunch of hair. I took it to Tom Meyer, the Assistant Director of the wolf project for the United States. And he happened to be based out of Kalispell with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. And he looked at those hairs with a hand lens for a long time, and then he looks up at me. He says, wanna track them for me. So my daughters were avid naturalists. They knew every bird they wanted to know. They would say, Mom, what's that tree? What's that plant, what's that bird? And together, we would learn about it. And so everything changed on our land. Within three years, the meadow was filled in because the deer and elk could no longer stand around like lawn ornaments, or they would get preyed on by the wolves. And so it was my daughters who said, Mom, you need to study this. This place is totally different, you know, everything. And there were birds. There were, like, American Red starts showing up that are obligate to the early seral, you know, shrub layer. They nest in the shrubs and they feed in the shrubs. And we had never seen one on our lands, because everything had been munched down to nothing. So there were still lots of deer and elk, but they had to take little bites and move on, and take another bite and move on. That's the ecology of fear, right? Two years later, the wolves denned not far from our land, and they brought their pups to meet our daughters, and they were teaching their pups how to howl. These are not human habituated wolves. As an indigenous person, there's so many traditional stories about human relationships with wolves and how they taught us how to be families. They shaped our human societies around them. So I can't really explain all of this. You know why those wolves reached out, but I became a scientist because of them and because of my daughter's insistence that you really need to learn why this happened, what happened here. So trophic just means food. A cascade is like a waterfall, and just the presence alone of this apex predator changed the behavior of their prey. That changed how they were eating plants, and then that changed the habitat for an you know, at risk songbirds like the American Red Star, right? And so that's what I did my dissertation on. And in the process, I learned that these these relationships, are all over the world in every type of system. And in the process of colonization, a Euro, American settlement of places like Africa, for example, trying to tame wild systems with what we thought at the time were the best of intentions. You know, let's replace these systems with agriculture and get rid of scary things like wolves and fire, we greatly diminish the natural world. And so a trophic cascade is about relationships that are ancient, that shaped all these systems and humans were at. Center of those relationships, indigenous humans who understood that kinship relationship between an animal like a wolf or a bison and the humans that relied on the what today we call ecosystem services that that landscape provided to people. What a great description. Bill Hodge 30:23 You know, knowing that you and I live a stone's throw away from each other, that narrow valley that you live in feeds into the broader, wider valley that I live in, we both share, sort of the joys of that wildness that you just described that led to, I mean, it was a trophic cascade, including your decision to become a scientist, because your your daughters insisted that you needed to study this. We both get to call the Bob Marshall wilderness complex our backyard, and we both face the challenges, as you've just described, of living with large carnivores and the threat of catastrophic wildfires, which you talked about earlier. We certainly live in a space where forest dynamics and wildlife populations sort of play out at scale. But do we live in a place that's ecologically healthy? And if not, why not? Speaker 1 31:10 Yeah, well, the answer that I'm going to give you now is very different than the answer I would have given you 20 years ago. So I'm a very formally trained ecologist. I've studied cultural burning wildfire the and how they interact with apex predators and keystone species such as Bison, and what we're seeing today in these protected areas in all areas, but in a protected area where supposedly we were doing everything right by making it roadless, keeping it roadless and keeping it strictly protected, which means no touch nature can take care of herself, right? Well, it isn't working. So wildfires are burning in a way that they never have in historically with severe in terms of their severity and their size. One of the wildfires I studied was the Keno wildfire in Alberta. That is the most severe wildfire that has burned in history in North America. It it was in my study site. So I had where I was studying trophic cascades. So I had 700 vegetation plots in there, and I also had GPS collars on elk and on wolves. And, you know, had a clear and it was the National Park, and also on the Kainai First Nation timber limit, so I had a clear understanding of these relationships. Had published journal articles on that. And then this fire that blew up in a summer where it's been a really wet spring. This was 2017 followed by a really dry summer, and there was a lightning storm that set off many spot fires. It hit in areas that had been protected, that were in BC, that were forests that were very overgrown and densified. We closed canopies, and the wind was blowing over 100 kilometers per hour. The humidity was below 3% it was a perfect storm. This fire blew up, and it burned in ways that fires don't normally burn normally. They're very patchy, spotty, mostly low to mid severity. This fire, I quantified it as I worked with the park Parks Canada and Glacier National Park also helped. It was about 93% not just high severity, extreme severity, as in, every tree dead, about a half meter of soil removed. Just, you know, this kind of fire had not been seen before. Now we're starting to see more fires like that, not quite as bad as that, but very close. And in my backyard, in yours bill, these fires, they don't normally burn down slope, and they've been burning down slope toward us, and a couple summers ago, there were like seven fires burning that way, and what they burned through was the old growth that is in these protected wilderness areas. These forests are very different from what they were like historically when they were 10. By humans, indigenous peoples, they had very open canopies. They were today we would use the word sparse. There were a lot more sparsely forested than what we have this concept of old growth as being these thick, thick forests, those did not exist. We have lots of Western science that documents that. So we have, by trying to take care and protect, we've created these forests that are very departed from what traditionally they were like. And then when you combine that with climate change effects like the extreme, you know, weather patterns and drought, you have a catastrophe, and some people refer to it as a wildfire crisis. I don't like to use that term, but we have, you know, wildfires that are unprecedented, very different in pattern from what they were like historically. Bill Hodge 36:03 Yeah, interesting. I mean, I knew the conversation was going to challenge me. I'm not sure I completely heard that you disagree with the preservation model, but at some level, you have certain concerns that has led to certain outcomes that you just kind of outlined pretty in pretty thorough detail there. I also think about, you know, maybe in our efforts to be in humble, we now are challenging ourselves whether we can remain humble in the face of these challenges. You know, somebody you know, in my case, I've spent a fair amount of time in the Bob, not as much as a lot, but a fair amount. And it, I guess it is inside the wilderness, because they've sort of been able, because of the scale of the place, to let fire play out a little bit differently than we have historically been letting do. It does feel like it is getting back to that sort of patchy mosaic of of of burn patterns, but, but that doesn't mean that's true everywhere. As you illustrate, there are obviously places that obviously places that are densely, densely forested and are in our ripe for the these sort of stand replacement fires, these high severity fires you're talking about just, it's an interesting obviously, I knew in our in our time together today, we're going to be able to completely unpack that. But I'm just, I'm just thinking about how to, how to think about what, what our ways forward are when I want to kind of hang on to, I don't know, I guess my Western side of saying, Oh man, but we've also gotten it wrong. You know, I mean, Aldo, at one time, thought that fewer predators met Unlimited, you know, more more prey. And if we had no predators, we'd have unlimited prey. And he later admitted he got that wrong right. And we used to also think that we needed to suppress fires because fire was bad for the landscape. And then we learned that fire in its normal regime, is part of the landscape. It's part of how it functions. And that normal regime, to your point, included that humans, as part of the ecology, were controlling that. But I don't know that's a long rant for me to just try to, I mean, I knew again, this was going to challenge, sort of, my, my worldview, for the lack of a way to put it on, on that at some level, there are still places. Am I? Am I right in thinking that wilderness does give us a place as a scientific baseline to see what happens when we don't feel the you know, when we don't follow the urge to manipulate? Yeah, Speaker 1 38:26 there's a story that it might be apocryphal, but I don't think so that was shared with me when we with us, when we started writing the braiding sweetgrass report in that Leopold room by a high ranking Forest Service official, and what they shared was the story. So Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Bucha were buddies. They were both very wealthy, and they would go to each other's house for dinner. This is, you know, 1880s and after dinner, they would drink whiskey and smoke cigars, and their conversations, along with other folks that were invited over to Roosevelt's, for example, led to thick creation of most of our conservation laws that were passed in the late 1800s early 1900s so one of their conversations, they made a bet, and it led to the creation of the National Park System, and, you know, totally protected federal lands on forest Service land. And the bet was, was this what if we they were avid supporters of best science. So what if we do this grand experiment and imagine over cigars and whiskey this conversation? Okay, we're gonna take these lands and we're. Going to manage them for sustained yield, and that would be the standard Forest Service lands, and we'll use the very best science to study the effectiveness of our management practices, our silviculture. Then we're going to take these lands, and that would be the national parks, and we're going to strictly protect them, and they'll be pristine, and we're going to use the very best science to measure the effects of that protection, and then we're going to compare the two and see which, which experiment, you know, has the healthiest lands, and so this, this forest service official said to us that was, we are starting our report. Guess what? The experiment failed, right? They're both equally facing equal challenges. I um, I have my own existential crisis. I was drawn to this landscape because of its primal, wild nature. I was an advocate of wilderness, a strong advocate for wilderness in the 90s, early 2000s and then around maybe a decade ago, I started realizing, as an ecologist, and again, Leopold famous quote that I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna paraphrase badly, but the penalties of an ecological restoration Is, is the awareness that one lives in a world of wounds. And so when I finished my postdoc, I realized all of these forests are in trouble and what's missing, and tribal elders, you know, walking in the woods with me after the kina what was left of the woods after the Kino wildfire, it's like what's missing is our stewardship practices, and the fire in these strictly protected areas revealed 1000s of archeological artifacts from the Blackfeet in southwest Alberta In what is Waterton Lakes National Park, and also hundreds of 1000s of bison bones, including the bones of bison antiquis, which went extinct 10,000 years ago, and also the Dire Wolf, which went extinct at the same time. And they said, Christina, it's about relationships. We need to mend our relationships, and so humans setting fires, indigenous people carefully tending the land, stewardship of all lands. Indigenous people don't really have a word for wilderness, or even the concept of that. Rather, the natural world is like our family. We're responsible to take care of the natural world as humans, the way we take care of our children and our parents and our relatives, right? And so what I see is that these forests have had that stewardship removed. Which is cultural burning, picking berries, cutting trees to build canoes and other you know, for other uses that indigenous people had, sustaining themselves, living sustainably, even a very high population of indigenous people and throughout Buddhists today, North America and the world, really, I saw these patterns when I worked at Earthwatch Institute in places like Mongolia in Africa. They're pretty universal. You remove that stewardship, and you you say, we're going to protect this, we're going to take as much as we can from this. You know, using science to guide us. Neither of those approaches works for wilderness. I strongly support maintaining wilderness areas and working in community with indigenous people whose ancestral lands they were to figure out, what can we do and prioritizing, if you're talking about forests, stands of trees that are in deep trouble that if they have a tiny light and strike, are going to blow up, and saying, Well, maybe this needs a cultural burn over here. And so that requires different legislation that allows calls for braiding together indigenous knowledge in western science. Now the thing. About indigenous knowledge is that it's spiritual, it's about ethics, it's cultural. And if you were to, you know, create a list of the values that are the most important, economics would fall towards the bottom of the indigenous perspective, versus in the Western world, economics will fall, you know, at the top or towards the top, and so it means rethinking the concept of wilderness. I'll share something else. When I worked at Earthwatch Institute, my office was at Harvard, and I lived in Concord, Massachusetts, across the street from Ralph Waldo Emerson's house and and in a triangle of like about a quarter mile in each direction, with Louisa May alcott's house, Nathaniel Hawthorne house, and then the trail that Thoreau took from Walden Pond Over to visit his mentor, Emerson, ran through our land, and I was embedded in in the culture of the quote, the conquered quartet, as they called themselves, and we still call them that they created the concept of wilderness, protected wilderness. They were revolutionary. They were so brave and so bold, and they were outrageous, and they were fierce warriors, and they shifted our paradigm, and they created the modern conservation movement. Right? So I asked myself, what would the Concord quartet do today? And Too bad you can't interview them, because that would be a heck of a podcast. But you know, they would not say, well, we just need to protect it more. They would say, we need to figure this out together. Yeah, we need to respond, right and creativity, right? They were all artists, right. So anyway, I look at that and we are in an existential crisis. I am going to be writing a book about this and about not really a memoir, but about my journey in understanding things like wilderness that I still don't fully understand. I don't think anybody can, but what my role is as a human being to live rightly with wilderness. Bill Hodge 47:37 Wow. What an amazing place to sort of maybe put an exclamation mark on this conversation. I can't thank you enough. What a gift it has been to have you join us. And I can't wait for that book and all the other books. And we'll we'll link to the book that Andrew's referenced, the wolf's tooth, the other book, the carnivore way, which I've just thoroughly enjoyed. We'll certainly add a link to the braiding sweetgrass report, as it's referred to. Are there other ways that folks can follow your your work in this space? Speaker 1 48:05 Connect. They can connect with me on LinkedIn and social media. I tend to be pretty careful about these days, because some of my work is controversial in some circles, right? And I'm, you know, I'm a change maker in some ways, and but really, LinkedIn is the best way right now. I will be creating a website as after the Congress, after I find my way, because really, this is such a big time of change, and the landscape is shifting. It's shifting seismically right now. And so you know, part of my recentering is finding that safe, proper platform for me to communicate with the outside world. Anders Reynolds 48:54 Christina, I thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate your sharing your deep experience and your clear voice with us. And you know, having this conversation has reminded me so much of allo Leopold's approach to keep every cog and wheel as it is, the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. So thanks for talking through all this with us. Well, Speaker 1 49:16 thank you so much for inviting me to have this conversation. The two of you are creating change and bringing voices together to have conversations that are absolutely essential right now. Bill Hodge 49:31 Thank you. That's what we strive to do. So thank you for crystallizing that so well, and again, thank you for joining us that we've been talking to Christina Eisenberg, an amazing author, as you heard, also a poet and clearly a deep thinker on our way out of the crisis that our forests are in this country, we hope that you will find a way to follow her, and we will look forward to seeing all of you on down the trail. Thanks for joining us for the wild idea. Unknown Speaker 49:54 Thank you. Speaker 2 49:58 The wild line is a production. Collection of wild idea media production and editing by Bren Russell at podlad Digital, support by Holly wilkoshevsky at daypack digital. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John skeehan. The executive producer is Laura Hodge. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com you Transcribed by https://otter.ai