The Wild Idea is an exploration of the intersection of wild nature and our own human nature. The hosts, Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds, through conversations with experts and thought leaders will dive into the ways that humans have both embraced and impact the function and vitality of our remaining wild places.
TWI_002_Hal
Tue, Mar 04, 2025 12:27PM • 48:21
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Conservation, public lands, environmental writing, wildlife, habitat conservation, outdoor recreation, federal lands, blister rust, whitebark pine, Clean Water Act, Civil Rights Act, privatization, outdoor advocacy, cultural wars, American exceptionalism.
SPEAKERS
Hal Herring, Speaker 1, Anders Reynolds, Bill Hodge, Voiceover
Voiceover 00:00
The following is a production of wild idea media.
Bill Hodge 00:06
Well, welcome back to the wild idea conversation, set of conversations exploring the intersection of wild nature and our own human nature, and how we see ourselves a part of separate from having dominion over, not having dominion over. We're gonna be exploring a lot of things on the wild idea. We're glad you're here to join us, and thank you for being here. Anders, good to see you again today. You too, Bill,
Anders Reynolds 00:31
I'm excited. We're starting with one of our wildest guests too.
Bill Hodge 00:35
Yeah, for sure, somebody, somebody who I think is gonna challenge us with some things that's gonna give us a lot to think about, which is the whole idea is for all of us to sort of leave these conversations with even more that we need to think about. We're honored today to have a really special guest. He's a conservationist, an environmental writer for the last 20 years, author of an upcoming book on sort of a definitive history of public lands. We'll talk about that some. He is a contributing editor of Field and Stream. He is the host of podcast and blast podcast from backcountry hunters and anglers, and I'm happy to say, a good friend of mine. He's also a federal lands contractor and subcontractor working on our Commons. Welcome to the podcast. Hal herring, thanks. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Bill and Anders, one thing that fascinates me, as I've gotten to know you and as our friendship has grown, is you both do work that gets dirt under your fingernails, and then you two would work behind the microphone and on the keyboard. And I'm curious if you could sort of contrast how you see those two things, how they inform each other. It's interesting contrast those two things you do.
Hal Herring 01:39
I never saw it as a contrast. So what happened with me was I was, I had written fiction, and kind of, I thought I had some success in my 20s, but I was, I was excruciatingly slow, and I never had any capital. I never had any money to just live on while you do X, Y or Z. So I just did what I knew to pay the bills. I had graduated from college and whatnot, but I always wanted to live out, you know, and my mind precluded me from taking any other kind of job. I was spending timber and I sold us. I started writing and writing non fiction about the game, farming industry. This was after I lived in Montana, and in 1989 this was in the mid 90s. 99 was when I started publishing this stuff, but I got like, I think, film and stream bought one of my first stories about that, and it was a huge conflict in Montana over captive trophy shooting. But I sold that story for about, I think, $1,500 and at that time, I was tree planting, mostly on public land for contracting in the spring and fall, and then thin and timber all summer. And tree planting paid about 600 a week, which was pretty good back then, like if you remember, but thin and timber was about 100 bucks a day, every day for everything you could give it so to get a check for 1500 bucks kind of made me a writer, although I tried to write full time for many, many, many years getting back into subcontracting forestry work by necessity, because writing wasn't paying enough of the bills. It was one of the best things I ever did. Like, a third of my income came from that, and it kept me outside working tree planting. And then I finally had to quit then, and it was, it was the industry kind of collapsed, which I've written about. You know, in its relation to public lands. But I just, just to make a long story short, I got a buddy of mine who's much younger than I am, got into pine cone harvest and got the early white bark pine contracts. So I'd always been a mountaineer and a climber, and I was, I was good with ropes. I went. I did that for a lot of quite a while on Ponderosa, and then we got that white bark working on 2009 and Buddy, that's the best job I ever had. And I wrote about it. I would come home completely renewed into September, go back to writing and hunting. And I just, it was, it was quite a good balance for a person who is pretty much only at home under the sky and that, that's, that's the short answer to that. It went on for, it's going on for, I'm still doing, doing I don't climb trees right now. I've aged out of that, that big work like that. How you,
Anders Reynolds 04:38
you may be retired from climbing trees. But, you know, I think most people listening to the podcast sort of know you as one of the leading voices and and talking about the role of conservation of wildlife, and therefore the role that habitat conservation plays in our world. And you know, you mentioned being a planter, a sawyer, a writer. Yeah, I'm curious like, which one of those identities, if you even think of them as identities, speaks to audiences better than another. Why is one more powerful than the other? If you found it to be that way,
Speaker 1 05:12
that's a great question. I think that all that outdoor work supercharged my desire to sit in a chair, which was small. It supercharged it, because I knew what was at stake, and I knew I knew the wonder of what was out there. I spent a bunch of time in this like Northern oy he now, I mean, you can't even imagine how wild and amazing that country is all BLM managed, you know, being in the top of those white bark pines all over the West at high altitude for weeks on end, you can't help but be a an advocate, and a person who wants to try to communicate the wonder. You
Bill Hodge 05:57
know, it's interesting you talk about, you know, what's at stake with this work. It's interesting to think about. And for one, for those who don't know what you talk a little bit about, why you're literally out there going and gathering whitebark pine cones like what? What's at risk with a species like whitebark pine
Speaker 1 06:13
around, I think it was 1909 or 1917 a blister rust came into the United States in a shipment of white white pines. These are all the five needle pines, right? It came because we had wiped out the white pines in the United States. And they're actually looking for sources, and that blister rust has gone through the United States and Canada. Once it got into the white bark pines, it started killing them off big time. And so there's a lot of reasons why we do this work. One is we're kind of looking for that blister rust resistant specimen, and it's out there. And the US Forest Service has a nursery and a geneticist named Mary Frances Mihailovich, I'm not sure she's still working in Coeur d'Alene. She has been doing this for so long, they are looking for that holy grail tree that will be blister rust resistant. And it's it's no doubt there, because we have these totally the dial at high altitude. It's not uniform,
Bill Hodge 07:16
right? We have plus trees, right? We have trees that kind of survives, trees that's
Speaker 1 07:20
right. And we climb the plush trees, the ones that are still surviving and producing cones and the hope. And there is this, the work, I encourage anybody to look it up on the internet. The work has been really wonderful, and I think it will be successful. It's another thing that people seem not to understand, that the US Forest Service does when people tell me about this wasted money here and this loaded money there, blue bloat, I'm just like, dude, every any, any human effort can be better, but these things are awesome, man. This is like, this is what I've written about this. This is what we do human beings, when we are at our best, the like, you know, like Lincoln said, the better angels of our nature. Well, that's what's doing this. Anybody who's interested in this, you can look it up. The white bark is the highest tree, the highest elevation tree, like in the West, right, when you lose those, the snow comes down on bare ground. It piles up. May comes along, it races off, and you take last of that fragile Alpine dirt off and yet dump it in the watersheds down below. I mean, the cascade of negative consequences of losing the white bark is is mind boggling, and that that doesn't even count, like grizzly bears who depend on these cones, these seeds that have as much fat contact tent as a piece of lard. One glimpse into this white bark deal, it opens this door into all that you've never thought of. That's what it did for me,
Bill Hodge 08:58
not to whip stall, you know, back and forth from being beat in the woods, literally being in the greens, back to back to the keyboard or back to the microphone. But when you're writing, and certainly when you're hosting podcasts and blast I think you know your journalism is first and foremost known as is sort of it within the hook and bullet world, right? And I'm curious, when you think about what's at risk with whitebark pines, we think about what's at risk with just our wild places, our public lands, these sort of places that obviously we're not It's not lost on any of us that we're in a very interesting moment, you know, sort of the the hatchet coming out on on our workforce, on public lands and that sort of thing. But what do you think the state of the marriage is between that sort of conservation focus and the hook and bullet crowd right now? Like it seems like this moment may galvanize that partnership, but there's also times when there, you know, there can be a wedge in that world too. And I'm just kind of curious in your journalism, and you're sort of living in that world of both conservation and the hunting sportsman community, what's the state of that relationship? You think these
Speaker 1 09:57
days, I think that a lot of people. In the in the hunting and fishing world have become convinced that the priorities of conservation are less than like the federal deficit or wokeism or gun control has always been the wedge issue, right? I say to people the foremost conservationists in the United States were hunters and fishermen and they that's the Pittman Robertson act of 1937 that's the John Dingell, the Dingle Johnson act that did the fisheries payments. Um, these are like, Oh, my Lord, you know that you couldn't have done it without the hunters and fishermen and Bill and Ray Scott with Bubba power in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before the Clean Water Act, suing polluters, that's the bass angler sportsman society, right? But somehow conservation and the environment and all of that got thrown into what I call the feculent bucket of culture war.
Bill Hodge 11:03
That's why we're having howl on right Anders that right there, that that phrase right there. Well,
Anders Reynolds 11:07
I've called bill a feculent bucket many times. I've never heard it so broadly
11:13
among other things, yes,
Speaker 1 11:16
but I just unless we pull conservation out of that bucket, we are in big trouble, and that's not because hunters and anglers are absolutely crucial to this, but they do seem to know what what is at stake, in a way that more urban, non consumptive outdoors people can easily miss the mountain bikers and the rock climbers man, the deep, immersive knowledge that hunters and fishermen had is what led to them being the United States, leading conservationists. And we got to get conservation out of the culture wars bucket once and for all. I want
Anders Reynolds 11:54
to ask you how we do that, but before I do I want to take a step back and just ask you what what makes a conservationist you grew up in Alabama. I grew up in the Mississippi Delta. We can fight about which of those places is the most southern place on Earth after this episode is over, but your background was a lot like mine, and for me, I grew up hunting ducks, paddling the Buffalo River, camping with the Boy Scouts. But if you had told me I was a conservationist, I would have said, I don't know what you're talking about. It took me some time to think of myself that way. And I'm curious if you've done anything about what values have to be present in someone to make them amenable to the preservation of the land or of wildlife or even of water or or can those values be picked up along the way? Is it something a priori, or is it something you learn? Or have you done any thinking about what makes a conservationist? Well,
Speaker 1 12:44
I can say for myself, it's, it's kind of easy, because, I mean, I was obsessed with fish when I was a little kid. How do you catch them? What are they doing down there? You know, I remember getting, getting, like, all in trouble in like, second grade, for instead of like listening, I was drawing pictures of this piece place in the creek where it was no bridge collapsed, you know. And I imagined these broom and these catfish under there. And I was drawing all these pictures. I couldn't even, I didn't know where I was in the classroom, you know, I had drawn all these pictures. And it's what these fish were doing in this place that I imagined. So, I mean, I come at it from, it's in the blood, you know. And I think that that must have come from my parents, that my daddy was pretty good fisherman. Actually, I think it comes down for your parents. And I think it comes down from that Baba Dion quote, which I always throw out, is, in the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we know, and we'll know only what we're taught. So you could pick it up as you go along, and you're gonna pick it up maybe from people, maybe like myself or you that have an early immersion in it, or bill like this is like, maybe that's our role to play here is to tap some folks on the shoulders politely and say, Whoa, man, look how cool this is. Do you think your
Anders Reynolds 14:13
connection with the South and it's less wide open spaces than than the West has? Do you think that that informs the way you approach conservation work, like you've seen the impacts that people can have, and, you know, a smaller area than, like, the bigger landscapes we're talking about out west? Does that inform the way you approach this stuff more than
Speaker 1 14:34
I can ever tell you, I was lucky that my folks moved us out in the country when I was 11 and and had some private land, and I hunted relentlessly, reading Field and Stream, reading James Fearne Moore Cooper, reading Zane gray. You know, for a long time I was obsessed with that book, The Spirit of the border, and I was Wetzel in all of my mental games. Then I was in college at the. Mercy, Alabama. And I think we had a map, me and a small group of friends of every public land that you could go on. And man, we had to really look right. There was, we were very constrained. I was, I suffered with real boredom, you know. And it was true, it was hard, man to be there where you were constrained to this human built environment or and then I started a company called Deep South reforestation, the group of hodad planters, right? Hodad being a tree planting tool. And we hit, we had been working at that job. And I will, I was, that was the chip Mills Anders. I mean, I don't know if you remember that history, Bill, you certainly do. This was the 80s. This was the chip Mills, and they were liquidating the southern hardwood forest. At at like you could, you couldn't believe it. I'd be on the buttah Hachi River, and the water was entirely filled with debris, with the I mean, it look it was, it was as catastrophic environmentally as anything in the Frontier Days. And this is in the 1980s Yeah. So I often tell people my partner too, same, who I'm going fishing with next week. He same. We just said, Man, this day, no way this could be right, like, like, and this was replacing them with what you call Second June loblolly in in kind of goose stepping rows to the to the horizon on all sides. And then we, when you'd bid the Job and said, was it rolled, sprayed, chopped and burned? And I was like, I got And so years later, I was, this is many like, I think it was not the same time they come out Lonesome Dove came out the book Larry McMurtry, you know. And when frog lip and the crew of like homicidal outlaws are going through the territory, they catch all those people, and they say, what's he gonna do to him? He go, first, I'm gonna shoot him, and then I'm gonna hang him, and now I'm gonna burn him. And they're going, they're all going, you know? And we were like, that's what they're doing to the landscape in Alabama. Yeah, it was this perfect. I can't remember who said it first, but we were like, wow. First we're gonna cut it down, and then we're gonna spray it, then we're gonna burn it, then we're gonna roll it, then we're gonna chop it. Wow. I mean, I mean, you couldn't believe this stuff. And I had a cur dog back then. We loved to hunt, you know. And we were just like, what is happening to this world, I think, you know,
Bill Hodge 17:51
going back to Andrew's question about, you know, you know, the whole conversation about taking conservation and being a conservationist out of, sort of the, you know, sort of the culture wars and that sort of thing. I think one thing that comes with sort of, sort of identifying part of yourself as being a conservationist, frankly, in today's world, comes with a level of guilt, right? Some people are conservationists, and they don't know it, right? And I say it comes with a level of guilt, because I think we all know that the volume of our species on this planet is having negative impacts on other species, on the climate. I mean, there's no way around it. And but if you go full on and try to make everybody identify as a conservationist, they get really uncomfortable. Because even in their own work, will find themselves feeling guilty, and it's just kind of interesting to think about. Do we need everybody to think of themselves as a conservationist, or do we need people to think about conservation as something that's important? And I don't know if that question makes sense to either one of you guys, but
Speaker 1 19:00
I would, I would just say you could call yourself whatever you want if you plant a 50 foot pollinator belt in your yard instead of having the true green lawn. And we can all be happy. We could, we could identify however we want. You know or for my own experience. There. I just noticed that you just had more fun. Things were better, more vibrant, more more life in places where you balance conservation and resource extraction, which you can it's not it's not convenient, and it's not always going to make you the most money in the short term, but then you get to go, like, swim in the butt of hatchi River,
Bill Hodge 19:46
right? And it's, I think it's one of the things that's interesting about about us as a species. We're smart enough to figure out how to do those things and balance, right? But we tend, we tend to march past each other as we transition from one administer. Generation to another. We just watched this pendulum do these crazy swings in and then when you think about conservation, you think about functioning ecosystems, the pendulum can't swing like that. That's not it's it's meant to evolve slowly, you know, and it has evolved and over time. And so it's just kind of interesting to think about that. Idea, Bill,
Anders Reynolds 20:21
you and I have sort of talked about this, this label of, of who's a conservationist before, because it felt like for years and years, the NGO community was focused on finding like the the people to advocate, who were having like, the most authentic outdoor experience and right, and I'm putting that in quotes, the most authentic outdoor experience was often like, a white dude wearing, like, really expensive name brand gear on like, a five day out and back and a rugged terrain. And those were the kind of people that we went out and searched for and tried to make advocates. Well, that's actually not the most authentic outdoor experience. I don't think the most authentic and normal and common experience is probably like a family on the edge of a national park having a picnic, right? No special gear, no overnight equipment, you know, no long term plan. They're just enjoying a day out, and I think, for a long time, and this is changing, the community was ignoring identifying those people as who could be great advocates without calling themselves conservationists, right? They're just moms and dads and teachers and and factory workers and just people who say, but I enjoy going to this place on Saturday, if even for a few hours, and so I want to see it protected
Speaker 1 21:42
well. You and I, dog bill, we were talking about Rue map with outdoor afro, yeah, and Ruth had one of the best things that she said, you know, if your thing is to go on a big wilderness trip, that's really wonderful. Um, if your thing is to drop the tailgate on your truck and drink a beer in the shade of a tree somewhere. That's a thing too, equally viable, right? Like No problem, man, it's, it's, it's, it's not, it's not a small tent, I promise you, especially if you, if you turn on the tap and drink water, right? If you have a house that has water in it that if it's contaminated, your property values are zero. We're all pretty much in it together. You know, I'd like to talk to you all about when you talk about identifying as a conservationist and and we, we talked about fishing and hunters. Um, one of the big problems that's happened to me, that I've seen is that a, I'm going to kind of present it in a linear way. A the 1970s produced the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act. 1964 was a Wilderness Act. 1976 with the Toxic Substances Control Act. These are all federal legislation passed that had a tremendous positive impact on the nation's air, water and outdoor recreation possibilities. So you got flip my 1976 Federal Land Policy Management Act, all these things which all y'all know as well or better than I do, um, now, from the early Reagan days until now, anybody who was somewhat right of center or Center has been taught that the federal government was this terrible Boogeyman. And suddenly we arrived, I would say, in the last 10 years, with a bunch, a huge amount of Americans who mistrust their own government, our own government, to the point where they want to defund it, divest it, all this stuff, and yet the states under the beautiful 10th Amendment, which I'm a fan of too, have not picked up the slack for these basic environmental and wildlife and lands protections. And so we are called at a what I consider a bizarre conundrum, and I'm not I do know how we got here, because there was a propaganda campaign that began during the 70s with the Heritage Foundation and all the usual suspects, Cato and countering what they considered big government overreach. And that campaign kind of triumphed. And the thing was, inside the big government overreach were all of these things that have made the quality of life and property values and human health and all, uh, the envy of the world. How do you solve that? I don't know. Yeah. I. Honestly,
Bill Hodge 25:00
when I when, you know, we came together to pull this podcast together, it became a question of, of that these are the things we want to wrestle with with this, and that's that most important question is, how do we place a value of holding things in common, which requires a centralized government, right, whether it's a state government or a federal government. And I think it is, you know, personally, this is my bias. I think federal public lands have been overwhelmingly a net positive for our society. And there's economic things that we'll get into, and a lot of other things there have been negative. Not say that there aren't negative impacts. Certainly talk to indigenous communities as we're going to, they've obviously been negatively impacted. But, but how do we, you know, how do we uncover these things in such a way that we can all truly get down to the core of the value of having these centralized ownership so that they belong to all of us? And I, I think this sort of another thing I want to talk to you about. I tend to get sort of my head down, I sort of put my blinders on, and I tend because of my, you know, my recent work history, but I've been very focused on public lands. But when we're thinking about wild places, it's not always public land, right? Like and I know in your world how, and talking to the the sportsman community, the work you do like wildlife, don't recognize boundaries of the difference between public land and private land. You know, what are we missing if we don't broaden our view out past the public land boundaries and into what I think is, in some cases, some amazing conservation work that's being done on on private land.
Speaker 1 26:38
There's no doubt about that, the private land. I mean, I mean, if you live in the West, right? So if you don't have winter range for big game herds, then you don't have big game in the West. You don't have elk, mule deer, prong horn and, of course, at low elevation, winter range is private land. I mean, I mean, one of the the things that I don't, I cannot get across to people sometime, who've never been west of Mississippi, or don't or maybe they've just been to the cities there is, like, all the land, public lands, federal public lands, BLM, Forest Service. That was the land that was unclaimed after a series of homestead acts, some of which were incredibly ill advised, the desert land act, you know, the second Homestead Act, the the was it the Grazing Act, the late, late one, where they gave away whole square miles to people, right, which destroyed like the Sandhills of Nebraska, if you look up sometime, look up the kin caters. And that was a really interesting time of giving away public land, you know. So these were the what we have left are either the high elevation snow pack watersheds or the lands like in Utah, where nobody could make $1 on the best day of your life. You know, that's why they're in their their federal public lands. And so we, we the how this is relevant, is the Pro, the good stuff is almost the valuable, what was valuable in the day was all in PRI is all in private hands. Now, where I work, in southern Idaho, in the real desert, if you got your map in your hand right, working on the on these sagebrush rehabilitation programs where they the place is all cheatgrass, and it burns and it kills all the sage off, and they're trying to re establish the sage on federally managed public land. If you go, if you see a green spot with some trees on it in the far distance, and you look at your map on your phone, that will be private. If you see a creek trickling out of a basalt cliff, and it collects down somewhere down below you, and there's some green that will have, that will be private, that will have been claimed under the 1909 Homestead Act, and it will be private because it's usable land with water on
Bill Hodge 29:17
it, I think that's the crazy thing that most, I think modern Americans wouldn't think about, but there was actually a time in our country, during the Homestead Act, that there was this belief that rain followed the plow, that all you had to do was go cultivate the land and the rain would follow. I think we all, no matter, no matter what level of education, we know that's not true. Rain is going to fall where Rain's going to fall, and there are places that are going to be wet, and in the West, overwhelmingly, there are places that are going to be dry and maybe aren't productive from a pastoral put to our use as a species, but there are productive in other ways, and for a lot of other species.
Speaker 1 29:54
Yeah, anybody who's ever been to Grand Staircase as Galant. The National Monument is you're looking at some of the most like I think every species in the southern Utah desert exists in that one place, you know, but that place is almost completely useless for humankind to make adult now, it's incredibly useful to me and to other people I know to for the replenishment of the soul and for knowing that all of this biodiversity exists in this austere and vast landscape, also all of that archeology that's there, which is, it's not as big as the Bears Ears on that, but it's pretty incredible. Speaking of
Anders Reynolds 30:41
privatization and making $1 I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on all these firings we're seeing in the Forest Service, the Park Service, BLM, wildlife refuges. I mean, it's obviously part of a plan to further degrade our public lands so that the user experience is such that people may demand that they are privatized, if you get rid of the stewards so that, you know, campgrounds are messy and trails go unmaintained and roads are closed and important, forest work doesn't happen. You know, I don't think anyone's going to be surprised when this administration says maybe we should let the private guys manage this stuff a little bit better. And that's a terrifying thought. Our our common ground being sold to the highest bidder, some of which they probably won't even hold on to. I have, I'm sure you've been following that. I'm sure you've been doing a lot of thinking about that. It must bother you as much as it bothers me.
Speaker 1 31:38
Well, it does bother me, but I have watched this all my adult life defund and decry where they strangle the budgets, or all the money goes from trails and forest management or restoration to fire increasingly, as we, as we lived through the late 90s, right, holy smokes, everything was burning, and the Forest Service budget would be completely dumped into fighting fire. And so every year, it seems to me, was the precursor to this, like overt attack. There, they used to tell kind of lies. Let's face it, they used to kind of couch it all in low well, we don't want to spend any money on that. Green Nazis have closed the gates to U of forest. It was all like a orchestrated campaign to make people dislike their own lands in the hopes that they wouldn't fight when they were taken away, and so I didn't see anything new here. I just saw it being more overt. And I honestly maybe people say I'm a Pollyanna or whatever, but I believe that they have moved their queen in front of our Rook here, because if you want to try to take these lands, you're going to have to have Congress, and then you're going to have to deal with people who are not going to put up with that. And one of the reasons that I think, for me personally, it cannot be born this is like what Randy Newberg calls a cold dead hands issue, meaning the old Charlton Heston thing with the gun. You'll have to pry these lands for my cold dead hands. The reason for that is I have come I've really spent Bill said I've been doing this for 20 years. I wish that was true, but it's been more like 30. And I have come to believe that these lands represent a kind of soul of America and and the soul of the American dream and the soul of like as important as the Declaration of Independence. And this is not something any more than I would surrender the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We cannot let this kind of descent into plutocracy, Kleptocracy, whatever we call it, divest us of this treasure, of this thing that we share in common. This is one of the last things, what we can really shake hands on and go like to everybody and say, Man, we share this asset, and we're going to argue over it, have conflict over it, all that stuff, but we are never going to let anybody take it from us or or try to tell us that it's somehow I just can't, having spent my life on these public lands, raised my children on them, my wife and I've spent, you know, years and knowing all the people who work on them, and I'm working with me and. With people and the wonderful thing and like the powerful things that we do, you just can't, you can't have them. Sorry, that's good
Anders Reynolds 35:08
history. How I, I want you to say a little bit more about where you think wildlands conservation is heading and what will happen next. I know you think a lot about history and are deeply read into it, and there's a lot of comparisons going around about what our current moment may echo with from history. I You hear a lot about the Roman Republic, or, Why am I why more Germany? But, you know, I'm personally more hopeful at something like the Lord's appellant in front of Richard the second, you know, standing up to a bully, putting him into his place, and starting something new. And I don't know if you share that kind of hope, but I'm curious where you think things are heading next.
Speaker 1 35:49
So I have a I do not have a dystopian view of this at all. I think one thing I love reading about Rome and the Azure Public us, where they took all that land from the so called barbarian tribes, you know. And it stayed public for about 200 years, right? And then it was passed out to the Legion and the politicians. And part of the reason they did that was to drive the pastoralists into the cities because they wanted some more labor, right? And then the Enclosure Acts in Europe, same thing, right? But at that time, we had the escape valve of North America. So I love the history. And as they say, history doesn't often repeat, but it tends to rhyme, right? So we have that going for us and but to accept some type of fatalistic defeat, because we had the Weimar Republic and then Berlin and ruins and all, I think that's total BS. This country, the United States of America, is so wildly unique in the world. Like, like you look at our civil war. You look at our the fights over the revolution. How many successful revolutions Can you count in this you know, in this world, right? So I believe that we are in a period of absolute flux when we are being asked what it is that we value for people in the outdoor world, and we have had it so good for so long that people simply forgot that the rivers were on fire in the 1960s they simply forgot that in 1934 they ran a newspaper story up here because somebody saw a deer track. You know, it's like we have become, we are the beneficiaries of all of these. And people talk about American exceptionalism. It's not because you're born in Des Moines that makes you exceptional. It's the America has made. They've made they've done terrible things, and then they fixed them, and then they do terrible things, right? But we have made exceptional choices in this world. And one of them, I would say, was the Wilderness Act. One of them with the Clean Water Act. One of them was the Civil Rights Act. In 1964 we've made exceptional, difficult choices, and none of them came without incredible amounts of struggle. I mean, had we done the easy thing in 1934 there wouldn't be any wildlife, it maybe there'd be, I don't know, there may be on private land somewhere. Had we done the easy thing in 1964 we wouldn't have any wilderness. I mean, minorities would still be trying to would be still faced with losing the vote, right? I mean, it took 100 years from emancipation to the passage of the Civil Rights
Bill Hodge 39:02
Act. I always want to be optimistic that, like, of course, when you have progress, there are going to be forces pulling us back, and then you keep moving forward. And you know, over time, you just keep moving forward. But how you and I had this conversation, and since you guys are pulling out all these, you know, ancient concepts, how, how you brought up the idea of a sacculum, like, where are we in? Like, an era? Are we coming to the end of an era? And I guess one risk is, are we at all approaching the end of an era where public lands and this idea of having Commons is coming to an end? Like that? It started, let's say here in North America. I mean, it obviously existed before Europeans got here, but, I mean, it existed in spades. But even then, there was obviously fight over territory and resources. But once Europeans got here, there was sort of a negative phase of, sort of just everything was being they brought that European idea of 10. Aiming everything and making a pastoral. But then we entered an age 1820s with the, you know, with the Hudson Valley painters, you know, sort of bringing back these dramatic paintings of the West and and people started to realize that was a value of what made America unique. But I, I hope that Conversations that like like this, help us think about making sure that that era of valuing that as something that makes us American, that makes us unique, isn't coming to an end because it is. It is now 205 years old or so roughly, right? So
Speaker 1 40:35
it will be as we as we allow it. That's the America still has power in the power to the people. America still has power in the demos. And this public land battle, I think, is fascinating, and we could lose. I mean, I can't imagine what that would look like, or that people would be particularly pleased with the outcome, but there may be enough people who don't care about it to where you could tilt it right. Yeah,
Bill Hodge 41:11
you said, you said to me the other day, when we were talking about it, one thing that's happening in this moment of time with this, you know, firing of the of the federal workforce, including our public lands, is we are finding out there is nobody behind the curtain. Like, if we're gonna save it, it is up to us as the public to save this. There is nobody like, Oh, it'll be okay. If they'll take care of it, it'll all be fine. It's not gonna be fine if we don't step up, right,
Speaker 1 41:35
right, don't you think that's great? Like, like, for a long time we've turned on the tap and drank water while complaining about federal overreach. And now, like, like, what we're talking about was, like, we imagine that there was this wizard that we're all living Oz, and there's this wizard behind the curtain, and he's really running the show, and things are going to be great. And we'll always be able to crawl across the Bob Marshall wilderness and in the summer and go to Utah in May and do these, these incredible trips, you know, tying together these trip desert traverses or, I mean, I know that's not a lot of people don't do that. We'll always be able to go to a park with the kids and play in the creek. And the truth is, is these, this moment we're in has ripped back the curtain, and there ain't no wizard. It was always us or nobody.
Anders Reynolds 42:35
I like that. You frame it as an opportunity and not a challenge. I appreciate that. Al, before we run out of time, I want to hear a little bit more about what's coming up on your own podcast, podcast and blast, and maybe you could tell us a little bit more about your book that's coming out soon.
Speaker 1 42:51
So I'm working with an editor now to cut a huge amount of words from a book that I've been working on. This is the fifth year, although for four and a half years, a lot of us a history of public lands, and then they there's a lot of trips home public lands, journeys and profiles of different places. I over, I wrote a lot, and so that that is coming to fruition, I hope I'm going to the piston National Forest right now to do a long trip there and then to learn what I can about the history of the forest and and what's happening there now with the job cuts as part of the latter part of this book. Now on the podcast, which I hope people will check out. I have a really interesting episode coming up with a woman named Cornelia motel from Iowa, and she is, she doesn't hunt or fish. She is a she's written or edited seven books on the natural history of Iowa, and when, when they had the tremendous floods in 2008 the the state hired her to compile the reasons why we're flooding. And the reasons, of course, are that 97% of Iowa has been altered to try to produce things that people think it would be better than than the original tall grass prairie, and that has come with an incredibly and not just biodiversity and ecology costs, but economic, pretty much disaster, and we need to she's now put together a book called tending Iowa's land, and it's 28 essays about how to get out of this trap that we we put ourselves in. And so the podcast kind of balances out. I've got another guy, Trey Curtis, who's killed a bull elk owned public land every year for 10 years in a rook.
Anders Reynolds 44:57
Oh, who hasn't? Oh, oh yeah.
Speaker 1 45:00
Own foot without a horse. Well, so the the podcast kind of balances, one of the things that I've I never had, I never really questioned this, but, you know, without hunting and fishing, outdoor recreation or really just interest on the principle of well managed and thoughtfully managed landscapes and waters. They don't, they're not like ends in themselves. They never have been. They never will be, um, and you just, it's, that's, that was so obvious to me from childhood. Um, but it also you need to make that case, because it's, it's, it may be true, but other people, I here's the thing is, being a journalist, other people are busy. They're roofing houses, they're doing tax accounts, they're they're busy, right? So they, they might be interested in this, but who has time to know know some of the even the most basic things. So the role of somebody like us, I think, is to simply go, Hey, we spent some time looking into this. This might be important to you. Check this out, and they can either take it or leave it right, but, but as William Wilberforce said of slavery in front of the parliament, he produced this huge report, whether the whether Britain was going to fund an anti slavery Navy, right? And Wilberforce gave them the report. And he said, you may say you don't care, you may say that this is not important. But after today, you will never be able to say that you did not know.
Bill Hodge 46:47
Wow, what a great place to end. That is absolutely amazing. And I think probably those of you who are listening now know why we wanted to get how on here. I mean, and one of those ways that you can know is follow how and podcast and blast. Be looking for the forthcoming book that he mentioned that he's working on now. Just such a become such a dear friend of mine. He's living proof that you can take the boy out out of Alabama, but 30 years later, you can't take the accent out of the boy. But how thank you for for being here in Anders. Just great to continue on this journey. And yeah,
Anders Reynolds 47:21
how if you bring the tailgate to the Pisgah, I'll bring the beer. All
47:26
right, I'm on my way.
Bill Hodge 47:29
That sounds great. Thanks Hal for joining us, and we'll, we'll see you guys in a week. And thank you for enjoying the wild idea, exploring that intersection of human nature and wild nature.
Voiceover 47:41
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 wilkuszewski at Digital day pack. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John skiham, our executive producer and ringleader as Laura Hodge, you can find the wild idea wherever you listen or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, 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.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai