Bill  0:01  
Hi. I'm Leah Lindsay from Carbondale, Colorado, and you're listening to the wild idea. Welcome to our exploration of the intersection of wild nature and our own human nature, what we call the wild idea Podcast. Today, on this bonus episode, we dive into a massive scale project of rewilding the prairie with the founder of American prairie, Sean Garrity, but before we bring Sean into the conversation, let me welcome my dear friend and co host Andrews Reynolds.

Anders Reynolds  0:30  
Oh, hi, Bill. Really, really glad to be with you for a bonus episode. I don't I don't get enough face time with you. Once a week is not nearly enough.

Bill  0:39  
We do get to see each other virtually plenty, and lately we've gotten to see each other in person a little bit. That's

Anders Reynolds  0:46  
true. How have you been you're on a you're on a road trip. I The people clamor to know more about what you're seeing, what you're doing, how you're feeling. Tell us,

Bill  0:55  
Well, right now, what I'm seeing and what I'm feeling is the vibration of a giant industrial mower that is taking this perfect moment to decide to mow the campsite that we're on here on the beautiful banks of the Klamath River. But Laura and I have been on the on the road for a few weeks. We'll say a highlight that we just had was in the last 48 hours, we got to take a hike in the Rockefeller grove of the Redwoods at Humboldt Redwood State Park, the largest contiguous intact grove of old growth redwoods. And it was just a magical experience and a reminder that, like people for a long time, have been making significant investments in, you know, large scale restoration, large scale with a quotation around it. But it was, it was just an amazing moment to be among just gigantic trees that we know we're standing before our constitution was drafted. Such a special place and really been been great to visit with folks on the road for as part of this trip. Well,

Anders Reynolds  1:59  
I'm glad it's been rejuvenating, refreshing, nice and quiet, industrial strength lawn mowers aside. Yeah,

Bill  2:05  
here he comes for another pass, just right in time for for me to unmute myself so

Anders Reynolds  2:11  
and now your moment of Zen. I think he's

Bill  2:13  
gonna drive right up into the rig here in just a second. But let's, let's not worry about my lawn mower problems that I haven't I'm having today here on the Klamath and let's bring Sean into the conversation. Sean Garrity is founder of American prairie. If you're not from Montana, you maybe you're not familiar with it, but you'll know a lot more after we have this conversation. Sean, you bet you may not remember this, but the first time we met, I was sitting at my campfire there at Antelope Creek on the prairie, and you came over to my campfire, and we had probably a two hour conversation about the vision and start of American prairie. It was such a great experience from my side, this unknown person to me, sharing in great detail the story of the place I was experiencing from wild on purpose your new book, you quickly share that your childhood was was on the move that you said, I think 19 new places by the time you turned 18. Did that youthful experience of always having to start relationships anew help connect you to to a total stranger like me that evening on the prairie bill.

Speaker 1  3:25  
I remember it very well, because we had just pulled in, I think we just got our camper set up, and I saw you guys getting ready to cook, and I wish I wasn't having to set up. I wanted to sit down with a with a beer and start cooking on the grill as well. So I thought I'd go over to see what you guys had on on the fire there. And that was a lot of fun meeting you and hearing about other parts of your life and what drew you here. Since you knew Corey, one of our employees, I believe, from American prairie, and talked about the Bob Marshall. And I said, I have quite a tie to the Bob Marshall, because I grew up mostly in Great Falls, so going up to the eastern front all the time. We had a cabin, you know, up to sun River Canyon since the early 1960s so we quickly found common ground there. That was really nice. And that, which doesn't always happen, because I'll walk into somebody else's camp. I do this frequently, just to see where people come from when I'm out there, and it's Ohio and Florida and upstate New York and all kinds of things. And that was funny, we're pretty soon we're talking about the Bob Marshall says, great, but yeah, so your question was, did moving around a lot? You know, I thought about that. I put that in the book because it did have obviously an impact on me. It was 18 different households houses before I graduated from high school, but a lot of that was within areas we've lived. So I think I'd have to ask my older sister who still lives there. But I think in Great Falls, I probably live nine different places. My parents just moved quite a lot as they had found different places they wanted to be, and my dad was just kind of. Rolling Stone. Didn't like anything too long, but we did bounce around. But, you know, I moved down to Cheyenne, wilney for three months, then we'd get transferred to Minot, North Dakota. I think we were there like two and a half months. Then we're back. I was in sixth grade, and I'm better. Pretty soon, I'm back in Lewis and Clark Elementary, back in Great Falls in a new house, because somebody was renting our house. Of course, it's just like non stop, but it was almost always in Montana, almost always in Great Falls, where we go and default back quite a bit. But I think to your question, I learned changing schools a lot, having to leave friends behind, because sometimes we just move across town, but that feels like 500 miles when you're in second grade, right? Because you leave your school and you leave your friends, and I learned how to let go of what I had, and I may not be here too long, so I better go meet people quickly. Yeah, I think I did.

Anders Reynolds  5:54  
Let's talk about that, meeting people. I wanted to base my first question, Sean, off the very first line in your book, which introduces readers to a central conflict, at least as I understand it, and American prairie's origin story. And that's convincing ranchers that they add nothing to fear from the largest privately funded restoration of fully functional and wild prairie ecosystem ever attempted in North America, and one that would include reintroduction of bison, which had been missing from Montana for over 100 years. So the question is simple, how did you do it?

Speaker 1  6:32  
Well, Anders, I think as people go looking for that line after they buy the book, which I hope they will, I don't think I started off with, you have nothing to fear. I usually try to start off with and people cite their fears or use sometimes that comes from a place of frustration, but fear is often underneath as you know is that you don't have anything to fear from us. We are very cognizant of what is out here. I've been around Montana for a very long time. I know what you have here and what you have cherish, and we're in no way trying to abolish it or take it away or change it out for our dream. We should be able to do this together, where there are no losers in this story, but everybody comes out a winner. So that's how I would frame it in the beginning is, and it's very important to us that that is the outcome, whether it's the tribes, whether it's ranchers in the six, seven counties we're working in, townspeople, I firmly believe we can have a collection of winners When this thing comes to fruition?

Anders Reynolds  7:41  
Yeah, in the book, you describe yourself as a possibilist rather than an optimist. I think that's kind of what you're describing here. That seems like a fitting place for someone who is a fan of rewilding to be I'm thinking here of English activist George Monbiot and his belief that damaged ecosystems can recover if given the chance, even when the odds or data look bleak. It's a belief that insists that nature retains a possibility of self renewal. Is that part of what you mean by possibilist like faith in nature's capacity to heal if humans make space for that. Well,

Speaker 1  8:23  
I think a reason I say possible is because I, I do believe in possibilities. And sometimes when people label you as an optimist, they think of Don Quixote. You believe anything's impossible, anything's possible, even stuff that doesn't make any sense, and you're tilting your windmill shown kind of thing, and I don't want to be thought of as a blind optimist, but has no basis to those feelings or those thoughts I've looked long and hard before I decided to take on this endeavor back in 2000 2001

Speaker 1  8:56  
I didn't need to do it. My other job was fine. My life was pretty darn comfortable enjoying my two young kids in Montana there and being outdoors a lot, and nothing was broken, but this possibility came along, meaning the habitat was still there. There was a wildlife history that's absolutely phenomenal. It was there for 1000s of years. 

Speaker 1  9:19  
Oh, there the the wildlife you don't have to conjure up, or bring back mammoths or anything like that. You could every all the conditions that needed to be in place were in place for the possibility of putting something together that would be brand new. This is not going back to something this is putting something together that had the abundance of wildlife that we know was there historically on a landscape that we know it sat upon nearly 5000 square miles, you know,

Speaker 1  9:50  
but this time, with the people that were there, we could also do it in so that it doesn't swap people out. A lot of changes that have happened on the plains is some people had to go. Way so for others to move in and set up what they wanted to set up in this one, this our vision doesn't mean anybody has to go away where people are out there, they can remain. And this thing can fit too. In the book I talk about the northern Great Plains are 180 million acres. Most of that 100 and 80 million acres that covers parts of five states of the US and two provinces of Canada. Most of that, the vast majority, is in agriculture. 180 million acres. We're wanting to affect only 3 million acres of that 180 that's it, to save one place, just one place, where wildlife comes first and people can enjoy hundreds of years from now, but the vast majority of the land of the northern Great Plains will stay just like it is. So nobody has to go, nobody has to be shut down, nobody has to lose for this to happen. That's what I see as but that's all just possibility. That's if we can everything fits in the execution of the thing. Of

Bill  10:58  
course, Sean, that's great. I was thinking about your sort of 2060 20 rule. And again, we're talking with Sean Garrity, the author of the just released wild on purpose, the American prairie story and the art of thinking bigger. In the book, this 2060 20 question that I think somebody or sort of framework that somebody put forward, that you sort of adopted, which is, there's 20% of the people that are with you, no matter what you do, there is 20% of the people who are going to be so fearful that very rarely are they going to move to support but in the middle is that 60% that they just want to know more. And I think that's incredibly important, because you just outlined that the idea is not to replace something with something else, like what had happened before, when we replaced an indigenous culture and in came this agriculture based movement. You were talking about not having to replace something and yet, I mean, let's be honest, you and I both live in Montana. There are billboards, you know, save a cowboy stop American prairie, all of those sort of things that, that messaging that's out there, which I would put in that sort of 20% category of like, it's going to be hard to ever win that over. But like, how do you keep focused on that 60% like, how did, how did the and how important was that to the early years of American prairie?

Speaker 1  12:14  
Well, my background before this taught me that that formula, in general, works. I I worked as an organization development consultant for nearly 20 years prior to this life, working with American prairie and went in countless human systems where I was hired to help with the transition from something to something. Sometimes it's organizational structure, sometimes it was technology. People were moving from the old technology the new technology, whatever it was, human beings generally fall into those categories you talked about. And the idea is, don't spend too much time with that 20% who's thrilled that you finally someone's coming along and suggesting this change, because they'll give you a false sense of security that you don't have much work to do. On the other hand, the 20% that are already against it. Before you finish explaining the vision, spending a lot of time there doesn't make a lot of sense, too, not to ignore people. People need to be heard, etc. But in order to get a change going, that 60% of open minded, thoughtful folks who will consider the possibility, but they're going to be reserved. They're going to wait and see. Do you really know what you're talking about? Do you actually show up and do what you say you're going to do? Or you can provide the resources to help me with the change? All that kind of thing I saw that happen over and over and over again, no matter where I worked around the world, in Asia and Europe and Central America and in the US. And so I came to believe that people do shake out into those categories for sure. And so the place to spend your time isn't that 60% because they're the open minded. I may come along not everything you're saying is all that scary, necessarily, but I'm just not quite sure. And I need some months. I need some years, maybe a couple of decades. And so we've set up for the long haul, believing, making a bet that a big proportion of the middle 60% that you can read about in the book I'm talking about, it's a model designed by a guy named Michael Hammer. He deserves the credit for that, that over the decades, a lot of those 60% would come along because they'd incrementally see the benefits. So we made a very long term, pricey bet to sign up and see if we could pull that off. Sean,

Bill  14:30  
I'm going to sort of continue to harp on this, this 2060, 20 question, and obviously this incredible success of American prairie, is that staying focused on that 60% the people who just want to know more are curious enough to learn more as they inform an opinion about such an important and large endeavor. But there is always noise from the 20% some of it like you just have to sort of stay focused, but some of it is important enough noise that you can. It sort of, you can't ignore it completely. And just a few weeks ago, you know, it came out that there was a letter sent from Governor gianforte and the entire Montana federal delegation to the Secretary of the Interior that said, among other things, that American prairie was, quote, threatening the state's economy. Like, maybe, you know, we'll leave it to Ali and Danny to answer this in next week's episode with with Ali and Danny. But like, in your case, at moments like this, because I don't think this is the first time something like this has happened. How did you deal with that noise while still staying focused on that 60% Well, it's

Speaker 1  15:36  
a good nuance you bring up. I don't want to overstate the fact that you just ignore 100% of the time the kind of things you may encounter, like this particular letter, and this is one of a long string of things like this we've been dealing with for nearly 25 years now. So I think the thing to do is be as gracious as possible and respond. Give a response without cheating back and getting a fight about it or telling the other people wrong or dumb or anything like that, is just give the best response you can and then default back to that attention on the 60% you have to show up if I had to answer these questions a lot myself, because the calls came to me, and now, thank goodness they come to Pete Geddes. And I think Pete Geddes did a very good job in that article. I hope you'll put in the show notes where people can go find this article we're talking about and see what it was about and see Pete's response. You do what he did. He said, point by point, here's our response to this. This is what we're trying to do. If I could, I'd like to correct some assumptions, some faulty assumptions, some errors and assumptions. And then he quietly, graciously exited the conversation. But he did respond to the people who wrote the article, and I think he did a good job. That's how you do it. So you talked about the economy, for instance, I'm paraphrasing, because you should talk to Pete. Maybe you're gonna, guys are gonna talk to him soon. But he said, you know, as far as the state's economy, there's 96 million acres in Montana. About 64 million acres of Montana is in agriculture, and we're up there dealing with about two and a half million in northeastern Montana. Even in northeastern Montana, there's a small northeast Montana is 22 million acres. So it's a very, very small piece. That's, that's, that's one thing. And as far as the economy, they're absolutely correct. Montana produces a lot of ag product that everybody, including all of us on this show, ought to be proud of. It's a great industry, but, you know, it is not going to be natively affected by what we're doing. It's not even a drop in the buckets, hundreds of one drop in a bucket, possibly. And you know, tour, it's about about 4.6 $4.8 billion a year in ag, tourism is also right about $5 billion a year now in Montana. So it's a diversified economy. In fact, we are bringing tourists this year in 2024 actually we're in 2025 and we're talking right now. But in 2024 we had 6600 people come to that region just to see the American prairie reserve. That's a draw of people who spend money in hotels, they buy gas, they buy beer, they buy ice, they hire guides to take them out, birding, all kinds of things. It does. You know the idea of wrecking the entire Montana economy. You have to break it down a little bit so and but then go back to the 60%

Anders Reynolds  18:47  
Sean, I want to ask you about this 2.5 million, 3 million acre number you've been mentioning a lot. You know, I'm, I'm on that wilderness grind here in Washington, DC, and with the exception of the emery county bill in Utah, the designated bills I am used to engaging with are, you know, 100,000 acres maximum. Sometimes they're as small as 2000 acres. You're dealing with something much, much bigger. And I want to ask you if you think we're reaching a tipping point where maybe conservation is finally catching up with ecological scale. Or do you think there's still a big gap between the rhetoric and the resources? Do you see American prairies focus on building out a single, large, intact ecosystem as a driver of new conservation strategies, or is it more a reflection of where conservation thinking has already been heading?

Speaker 1  19:48  
Andrews, I really like this question. There is a three or 1000 or so people gathered in Dubai two weeks ago to discuss this and the reports that came out about the. Be rewilding all over the world that they came to check in on. How's everybody doing from all the world is really cool, and I'll send that to you in the show notes as well. I think people ought to download this PDF. Anybody from Montana, whether they are interested in American prairie or not, would be fascinated by this particular report that was put together. So I'll give this to you, and it talks about exactly what are the trends. And when we started in 2000 the word rewilding was not even the same, and there's very few people doing we couldn't find very many people to talk to, Anders that were doing what we're trying to do now. There are hundreds. So that's really exciting. The world has changed dramatically in a quarter century, because I've seen it from start to where we are sitting here this afternoon, and it's really exciting. There are people well ahead of us. We have friends in Kazakhstan that are doing something six times the size of American prairie on the grasslands. It's unbelievable. There's so many cool things getting going. I advise some people in Namibia on the orange river crew Conservation Area. They're putting together a million acre reserve. I also work up and with a group in in Tanzania, it's hard to keep up with the rewilding phenomena that's going now. What is changing? Let me go back to the number just for a second. You'll hear all of us. Anybody from American prairie, it doesn't take much to ask them one question and they'll come out with three and a quarter million acres. That's the numbers are really important to understand. three and a quarter million acres, just hang on for a second. You can someone can get out. They can get out a map on their phone while they're listening. Or later, 1.1 million acres already exists. It's the Charles and Russell Wildlife Reserve, all right, so that's interesting. That makes us even smaller. We're only trying to affect about two and a half million acres. That's it. Out of 96 million acres in Montana, we're doing two and a half million acres. We're trying to create more wildlife, richer wildlife habitat, glue it back together, and increase wildlife abundance on just that small area. So it's it gets when you really go up and look at the map and break down what we're what we're doing. It's even smaller than that, three and a quarter now, though, on the other hand, what is happening all around the world? I spent a good bit of five weeks in Thailand this year, and Thailand is the only place in Southeast Asia where Tiger populations are growing, and they're doing it through a new rewilding approach, and that is, you have small conservation areas where wildlife comes first surrounded by forestry, logging, or whatever it might be, and then you hook those to you make a lot of those, and you hook those together to wildlife corridors, sometimes in remote areas, you don't have to do much except maybe take down some fence with areas of lots of lots of people. You need highway overpasses and underpasses, etc, but those corridors are absolutely critical. So as some people say, well, listen to this and say, Sean's trying to make it sound small. Actually, here's the other side of the coin is it's even bigger than you think. Because as we take this new coring area that like a glacier or like a Yellowstone or Bob Marsh or whatever. This is definitely a new core area that is new, that is change for this landscape, for sure. But there's something that's been there for a very long time, and that is the ecosystem around this core area that is probably four or 5 million acres, and spills over in into Canada, above us, by way of example, in this ecosystem, which is where wildlife is connected by the land in some way, the longest pronghorn migration in North America exists. In the fall, they start up in Canada, and they go, depending on the year, 250 to 300 miles down into Montana, cross the Missouri River, and they go below the Missouri River in the spring, they go back up to Canada. They've been doing this exact same route for 1000s of years. That's a definition of an ecosystem that a species uses it like that. Lions were all shot out of the area by around before World War One gone for 50 years. But in the 1950s and 1960s they started coming back on their own. Scientists say they came from the Rocky Mountain Front, but they've actually repopulated the area. So they come back into this ecosystem, because it's really good for them. It's great for their their ability to operate there. Grizzly bears in the last four years have begun to repopulate. And I was just on a phone call with wildlife biologist yesterday for fish life and parks to make sure I was accurate on this. Bears have come from both the Greater Yellowstone coalition. One bear they have here samples from their nut ancestors, their relatives, are from the bear tooth. That's a GYC bear, another bear they just did analysis on. And they actually found that bear that and that bear is on the confluence of the Judas River near Missouri River up in our area, right there, in this ecosystem describing, or call it the greater Northern Great Plains, the greater North plain plains ecosystem, that bear came from the front. So they're coming from both areas to repopulate the Great Plains. Now you have genetics from both those big protected areas, right? There's an ecosystem there. So if you begin to take a look at a map of Montana in your mind's eye, you know, 1520, years down the road, which we're going to see, is a core that American Prairie has been working on diligently for decades and decades, right? And hopefully in really good quality, a terrific wildlife abundance, etc. But around that is an ecosystem similar to the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a greater Yellowstone ecosystem right the GYE and over in the continental northern Continental Divide, you have a combination of the ones Glacier Park and the Bob Marshall and the Great Bear, etc, that has its own world. But those also are connected by corridors. If you think of it in your mind's eye, that is a triangle, a Montana triangle. And I think by the time my little grandkids are old enough to be biologists, wildlife biologists, maybe they're four and five years old right now, by the time they're in their 30s, people recognize the Montana triangle of oh, that's all how it's always been, right? That's the new baseline. So the northern Great Plains ecosystem with a small, much, much smaller American prairie core area down there in the breaks, and it's connected by high quality corridors out to the continent, northern Continental Divide, and high quality corridors down, corridor down to the G, y, E. And the one that's ahead of us all the time is Yellowstone to Yukon. They've laid the groundwork, done amazing stuff since 1993 for the spine of the continent, all the way to the top the Yukon, of course. So this, this triangle is forming. Whether the bears are already ahead of us, the lions are ahead of us, they already know this thing exists, right? And they want to go between all these different protected, these, these, these ecosystems that make sense. That's a long answer to a short question, but

Anders Reynolds  27:07  
it's a great answer. And it turns out, you're an optimist after all, because that, that answer made me feel really good. I do want to ask like, a really quick follow up. And we will, we will link to this Dubai PDF in our show notes, the phrase Dubai PDF, when I say it out loud, sounds like a MacGuffin and like a Mission Impossible movie. We'll put it on the website. What lessons emerge from that meeting, or what lessons have just emerged from your work that that might change how other conservation efforts, public or private, are designed in the next decade.

Speaker 1  27:43  
Oh boy. We learned a lot of lessons, and that usually comes from making, you can't count all the mistakes we made. So if you learn from failing and falling down and picking yourself up, we've had a lot of learning opportunities over 25 years. That's for sure. I've applied a lot of new ground. People that are there now running American prairie so brilliantly, are a lot more sophisticated, using less muscle and more finesse than we use in the beginning. That's for sure. They're super impressive. And they've learned. They're continuing to learn very, very fast. It's a learning organization. We learned a lot of things. You know? It's you think, well, I want to stay busy enough just working on this core area, this three and a quarter million acres. How do you buy all the land? How do you put it back together once you get the land, how do you start to bring it incrementally back to the point where it has high wildlife carrying capacity? How do you make sure people can come out and access all this and enjoy it while we're building it? That takes up a lot of time. And how do you raise all the money for this thing? That's a big one, but you have to, in the beginning. You also have to think about what's going to be outside this core area and the surrounding area is extremely important, because you have to raise social carrying capacity for wildlife outside the core area. You're talking about, well, you're trying to work on biological carrying capacity. You have to think about, from the get go, social caring capacity, and that's just how rewilding is looked at these days. It wasn't like it wasn't that wasn't a big, important front burner issue 25 years ago, but it is now, and it's very smart. And you also have to think, how are we connected to other ecosystems? We can't be an island at all. We have to figure out how we were connected, like the thing I just described, that Montana triangle, which is in the book. By the way, I try to describe it better than I articulated it there. So what I think we learned is, unfortunately, you have to be thinking about this all the time at the micro level, this little three and a quarter million acre thing. But then the medium, then the macro level too. You have to take into consideration who do our colleagues and collaborators have to be if we're thinking eight years ahead or so? Who do we need to be talking to now so we're doing quality work eight years from now? You may ask me, or are going to ask me this later on, but we have this thing called our wild sky program that is helping us to increase social care and capacity. By doing a collaborative, mutually beneficial thing with cattle ranchers surrounding the core area, you have to get those kinds of things started. And getting them started is easy, keeping them going and running a continuous improvement process to make the quality better and better and better of that mutuality happen. And there's people at American prairie who live in Lewistown and run this. They do a phenomenal job, but it is a lot of work to keep that continuous improvement process going. So anyway,

Bill  30:27  
yeah, we we look forward to talking to Ali and Danny next week and getting into some of the programming that continues to this day. But while we have you and your presence at the origin story and picking up the torch that had been created by the sort of the collaborative that came before American prairie, and then, and then you taking this on, I want to ask you about in the early days, and then the evolution in the subsequent years of your relationship with the tribes at Fort Belknap and Fort Peck and And what the relationship is like with the indigenous populations there in north central and northeastern Montana.

Speaker 1  31:06  
Yeah. So I read about this in the book that I was nervous about this in the beginning because I didn't want to blow it. I knew I wanted it to go well, and I did not know how to make it go well, there's all kinds of stories of people coming in with great intentions, trying to help, trying to do wonderful things with tribes. And in three years they ran out, they run out of money, or in five years, they run out of enthusiasm, and they leave. And there's a long history of abandonment, of well meaning people who ended up letting the tribes down, and I did not want to be in that contingent, but I didn't know how not to be I didn't know how to approach it. So I had to learn from other people. I didn't know how to take the first step with confidence. So I talk about that people like Dakota Meeks and now Corey Williamson, who works in American prairie, folks who can help people like me, who this is not my expertise, do a good job of it. But I grew up in public schools in Great Falls, so I had a lot of friends who were Blackfoot. They're from the different reservation, for sure, but I realized, because I grew up with them, we played kickball together. They're my good friends there on the east side of Great Falls, near miles rivers base. I thought, How do I do a good job on this? So the most important thing is to form the intent that has to be a success criteria for us that this is beneficial to the tribes and they end up liking what we're doing somehow, some way. So we started with that intent, I think number one is try to be a good neighbor, trusted neighbor. Show up. Don't try to avoid them. Get on the reservation. Don't try to do things by email or text. I don't really like email and text anyway, so that was easy. Showing up in person to their ceremonies, inviting them, like large groups of them, to whenever we had something big going on, like a bison release, we brought trucks with bison down from from Canada, and released them. Make sure they're there, and we can have an event out of it, something that they will enjoy. So they can help us. They can they can get a chance to envision the future as well. These little cat bison calves pour out of the trucks, you know, and go out onto the landscape. So first was just increase interaction, make sure we had a lot of interaction with no big plans of making elaborate projects happen and things like that, just getting to know each other and showing up and invite and and being friendly and being trustable people. Later on, we started coming up with all different kinds of bulk projects that had to do with working on bison, projects together, on swift fox on prey dogs, black footed chariots. So at the conservation or biology level, even noxious weeds, things like that. There are things you can collaborate on where they're in our place or we're on their place. That is very helpful. Doing something positive that benefits both entities is always a good way to go. No magic about that, right? That makes sense as I think longer term guys for me, and as I get to you know, people who are at first acquaintances and then turn into friends. And there's a nice passage that my friend George Horse Capture Jr put in the book, which was Terrica about him to do this about his thoughts on American prairie is what we can do over a long period of time, and that's decades, not just year years, but we can make our property, which has not have been so common for them in the past, our our acquisitions, and that is both private and public lease. Land leases makes them feel exceedingly 100% welcome anytime to be on our private property, to camp. To cross our property to get the public public lands so we don't have a locked gate blocking them from getting the BLM lands, which is our chart of their public lands, because they're citizens, of course, so access and making them feel welcome on the landscape where they have not necessarily felt so welcome in the past. That's number one, and number two is basically work our butts off to try to bring back something they feel a great sense of loss about, and something they once cherished, and that's the wildlife abundance that is no longer there, and that's working decade after decade to bring back the animals they used once used to used to revere, those mountain lions, the elk, the pronghorn, the bighorn sheep that used to be on all the cliffs and the breaks, right, even wolves and everything else is bring that back in abundance so they can those two things, the welcoming nature of us as a very large land manager, if you will. And that abundance being there once again, we have a shot at, in some small way, making this area for them once again, feel like home.

Bill  36:10  
One other thing I want to ask about from the early days on, the wildlife component was you brought in this, this business acumen. You You know, you've been a founder of, of catalyst consulting, and you sort of had this sort of, I'll just call it a business way of looking at things. But on the on the wildlife side, you had the benefit of, of inheriting this incredible relationship with individuals and collectively, the World Wildlife Fund and and their northern great team, specifically Kurt fries. But could you talk a little bit about their importance in the early stages of the development of American

Speaker 1  36:50  
prairie? In the book, I described a story where I started off a naysayer about this project. The more I heard about it, more I thought there's no way it's going to work. And so there's a truck. There's story about riding in a truck from the Canadian border, arguing with a guy who's a very good friend of mine now Steve for us about whether or not this is going to work, because I've been around a lot of business startup before, and this just had a lot of holes in it. But eventually I talked with Steve, but more importantly, I also got a chance to meet Kurt Frazee, who's now also a really good friend. Steve said he ought to talk to talk to Kurt. He can explain it better than I do. And Kurt, not only is he good explaining things, he's got an incredible background working all over the world and tigers and the Triarch Nepal, and, you know, on mink whales and the Bering Sea. And this guy has knowledge of how to bring species back for sure. He's really interesting. He's living in Bozeman. He's writer, quiet, incredibly friendly, super gracious guy, integrity through the roof. I met him, and I thought one, you know, as I move towards something from my past experiences working with Catalyst, one thing I want to make sure it stays intact is I want to be people, working with people, be around people I would like to work with that I feel it was a privilege to work with Kurt frasy and Steve Forrest came across like that. That started to draw me in was the quality of the people who are thinking about this idea. They had not started acting on it yet. Then, as they began, I said, you know, I've been going out, you know, with my parents, hunting in northeastern Montana, and in since the mid 1960s my parents would have a pronghorn tag or something, and my view of that is fences and cows. How are you going to make this all happen you're talking about? And the more they explained it, it made sense, and I saw that the conditions were in place for it to be possible. And that's where the possible things started coming up with it welling up in me, and the more they began to describe it. There are some small details, like how you get to raise all the money, but I thought, We'll take care of that later. It just got to be very exciting that, you know, this is not as hard as it sounded in the beginning, and they did have good answers for that. Started to fill many of those holes. You didn't have to have miracles like, like, how cars on hydrogen. You know, there's needs to be a few more miracles where we can do that, right? It all seems doable. And once, once I grasped that every single problem, if I didn't have the answer, it did appear solvable, we can figure that one out, whatever that one was, and there's plenty of them. As far as I feel like this is just about tenacity and persistence and patience and sticking with it and signing up for the long haul, the reward being leaving something for future generations, it just got to be too exciting not to go for that's how

Bill  39:47  
that happened. Well, Sean, not as we start to wrap this up, I'm going to go back to the to the really beginnings and actually, literally, the prelude and section of your book, but you tell the heroines to. Story of the journey of the first 16 bison coming to American prairie from Wind Cave National Park. It was a long day followed by a long night, driving in the rain, and of course, the subsequent gumbo that happens out on the prairie, a night where getting stuck was was not an option, as you outlined in the book. Could you imagine then where we are 20 years later, and the size and scope of endeavor and the size and scope of the herd.

Speaker 1  40:28  
Oh, yeah. And I think I don't know who you're talking to from from American prairie, but if it's Allie and Peter Garrett, whoever's going to be there, and they'll say they can answer that question for you, they'll say Sean that is, be we'd be way further by now. He thought we'd be almost done. That's where his optimism comes out. I thought, What do you mean for four decades? No way we'll have this thing in the bag in 28 years. So sometimes I am an optimist, not quite like Don Quixote, but yeah, I really thought it would be faster, and I knew the gating factor was going to be, how much money? Could we raise money fast enough? And that I made a mistake. I misjudged how hard fundraising is. I blew that, but we got good at it. It's going well thanks to the incredible people running the project now. I mean, it started getting going, 2008 2009 even during that stock market crash, which was pretty ugly, and we started to figure out how it's done. But I just thought that would happen faster, as used to the speed of other kinds of industry. And I just can't tell you how much I admire fundraisers who are good at it, it is so excruciatingly difficult, and it's non stop, but you have to get good at it, and you have to do it forever to drive a project like this. I have enormous respect for people who can do it, like the folks who are running American prairie now, but yeah, they would say, Oh yeah, Sean thought it was. And when I stand there with a vice looking a little 16 in the middle of the rain, you know, drinking Jameson's with my buddies at 330 in the morning. Yeah, I thought this is gonna work, man, this is great. Yeah, we just need to make it bigger.

Anders Reynolds  42:14  
I have one last question before we wrap, and it's actually for both of you, Sean, you overcame so much in those first few years as an executive director. In the book, you describe just how stressful being the founder of a conservation group can be, and to be totally honest, what came to mind as I read about your ups and downs was Bill Hodge. I was there when Bill started the southern Appalachian wilderness stewards. I watched him navigate successfully fiscal cliffs and develop his fundraising muscle as you were just talking about, and grow as a leader. And sure, Bill had the support of maybe the most talented Board Chair any organization has ever seen, absolutely, but, but seriously, the parallels were, were eerie, so I guess my question is, and and again, it's for both of you. How do you sustain yourself and your sense of purpose through the strain of building something so ambitious and potentially game changing.

Bill  43:23  
Well, I think it was two things for me. Yeah, I when I was reading that section, Sean, specifically, when you were talking about taking out a personal loan to survive a few months, I quite literally was having PTSD, reading that section, been there and experienced that. I think, Andrew, to answer your question, I think question, I think for me, getting through the emotions, and I think you saw me get emotional at times, and not anger, but actual just, like, like, just fear, I guess was one of two things, was the people, whether that, that was the amazing people on the board, including yourself and grounding myself and them and their commitment, but and also, obviously the people being the staff at that time at saws, or it was the landscapes we were working in, I could go, go back out to places, in that case, whether it was the upper bald, now the upper bald wilderness, and ground myself in The place to sort of reset the brain chemistry from that, from that, I guess that over over, dopamine dump of of like, how are we going to make payroll next week? Always had to stay focused on the realities of the moment, but I would always ground myself back in the people and the places.

Anders Reynolds  44:36  
Sean, I

Speaker 1  44:38  
think I agree with that. There is plenty of and I'd need to have a James Mitchener size book, eight or 900 pages to be able to talk about all the down times. Edit those out, you know, to make it fit in a sellable book. But the thing that would happen, um. Walking into the building and with the team the next day and the people I got to work with at this time, we started off with three, and then it was seven, then it was 12, and whatever. Now it's 50, but I still miss that walking in in the type of people that are there, and they are there for the right reasons, and the privilege of being able to be around them, and the thought of quitting and letting them down and say, wow, it got to be too hard. We're not going to do this. It just, you know, I put these things away and say, There's got to be a way forward. You know, you guys, you guys have been stuck plenty of times and trucks and the dirt touching your axles and your phone cell, your cell service doesn't work. You're thinking, you can't just sit down cry. You got to figure this out. And and you got to do it quickly, because it's getting cold and so, you know, I think I've been around enough problem solving things that I can't figure this one out, it almost always had to do with money and fundraising. Can't find enough to pay people facing layoffs and stuff. I didn't want to let the people down around me. I cared about them too much, and there's too much reward for me walking in every day and having the privilege to be around them. And then I talked to my wife, she's good at calming me down and freaking out about things. And, you know, she would say, I ran into somebody downtown the other day, and they gave me a hug, and they talked about how cool the American prairie idea is and how far you guys have come. We might have one property, you know, not 48 like we have now, and the cheering on from people and how much they wanted to see this thing happen that we were describing, I feel like I was letting those people down too. I didn't owe them anything. But what a fun thing to have a shot at that once in your life to be a part of that, you know, so to walk away from it just because we're having, we're on the skids, the privilege of being able to, yeah, just be involved for a short little blip of time, for me to 17 years, that's pretty short in these things is that's what would bring me back to it over and over again, is where are you going to find something this cool that aligns with my own personal values and my own sense of purpose? So well, I'm not sure I could find that again. So let's figure this small problem out. Great

Anders Reynolds  47:38  
answer, that's some really good wisdom. I appreciate that answer and and I appreciate all the wisdom you've shared with us today. Sean, thank you so much for spending some time with us.

Speaker 1  47:48  
Yeah, great to talk to. You. Have good time with my colleagues when you talk to them in a couple of weeks. I love I love them all. We're pretty cool.

Bill  47:54  
Well, thank you very much, John, for being on such a great conversation. For those of you been listening, the book is wild. On purpose, the American prairie story and the art of thinking bigger. We've been talking with Sean Garrity coming up on the wild idea. We continue the conversation about American prairie as a large scale restoration effort by talking with Allison Fox, the CEO and Danny Kinka, the director of rewilding. That episode is out next Tuesday. We hope, if you haven't already subscribed on your preferred player, that you will do so, and hope you like us enough to give us a good rating and recommend us to a friend. And if you want to dig in a little bit deeper, register for our newsletter at the wild idea.com it is totally free until we see you down the trail. Here's to enjoying all the wild that is out there.

Speaker 2  48:39  
The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds, production and editing by Bren Russell at podlad Digital, support by Holly wilkeshevsky At day pack digital. Our theme music Spring Hill Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John skihan. Our executive producer and ring leader is Laura Hodge. You can find the wild idea wherever you listen to or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, please take a minute to give us a rating, and if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai