00:00:05 Speaker 1: This thing that was so rare and therefore valuable in Europe is here in abundance, and I want to claim and tame the wilderness as the advance of using that loaded terminology civilization. That's how that's how we civilized Europe, and that's what we're going to do here. 00:00:27 Speaker 2: Who knew that American wilderness was such a contested, loaded and difficult term to define? In this second episode, I'm still in search of understanding American ideals on wilderness and if in fact America's handling of wild lands is globally unique. But really, I'm on a personal journey to understand the genesis of my own ideas on wilderness. I thought they were my own, self generated, but as I learn about America's peculiar history, I'm seeing more and more that I'm a product of a culture. I've got the same crew plus one new guy on this episode. We've got authors doctor Sarah Dant, doctor Dan Flores, and Hal Herring, also author and Thorreau critic Stephen Ranella. But new to the crew is documentary filmmaker, Native Texan and mustang wrangler Ben Masters. The Bear Greece Academy of Backwoodsmanship Philosophy and Culture is back in session. I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one. 00:01:31 Speaker 3: The idea that American's energy was capable of literally taking the last barrel of ol out of the last piece of ground, well that was evident. This movement began to say, what if we didn't do that to every place? 00:01:58 Speaker 2: My name is Clay Knukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. 00:02:32 Speaker 1: I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the Spring, For instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess, and have read that my ancestors have torn out many of the finest leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. 00:03:06 Speaker 2: That was doctor Sarah Dant reading a quote from and I hate to bring him up so early, Henry David Thereaux. We're continuing on in our pursuit of defining what wilderness is and what it means to America. 00:03:21 Speaker 4: What is wilderness? And that's a loaded question. You know, there's the capital W wilderness, and then I think there's the the wilderness experience that a person can have, which is different, you know, for everybody, but wilderness to me. I think of my ideal wilderness, and that is the headwaters of the Yellowstone River in a tributary called the Thoroughfare, in a place that's called Hawkshrest. It's thirty miles from the nearest trailhead. The only way to get there is by foot or by horseback, and it's a place where there's no dams, there's no really sign of human civilization at all except for a handful of trail signs, and it embodies everything that I think of as wilderness. And that's where I get my wilderness experience, you know, very far from humanity, as far from humanity as you can get in the lower forty eight. And I feel that whenever I go to places like the Bob Marshall or the HeLa or the Teton Wilderness and the Thoroughfare and the Wilderness of No Return in Idaho, these classic big wilderness spots in the American West. 00:04:44 Speaker 2: This has been masters He's very well traveled in America's big Western wildernesses. 00:04:51 Speaker 4: So I think that the idea of what is wilderness and I've struggled with this what is that wilderness experience? But and I think every person is going to get that feeling in a different place. And for me, I get that experience when I do a two week pack trip into a deep wilderness. For other folks it could be something as simple as going for a weekend camping trip in a three thousand acre state park. 00:05:22 Speaker 2: Defining wilderness in terms of geography and defining the wilderness experience are very different things. We'll learn it gets even harder the further we go back in American history. Here's meat Eater Zone Stephen Ranella with some opening statements on defining wilderness. 00:05:40 Speaker 5: This is just how I use it, Okay. 00:05:43 Speaker 6: The Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area in Montana, the frank Church Wilderness Area in Idaho, the north slope of the Brooks Range in Alaska, portions of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, portions of the Mississippi Delta, some of the Sky Island mountain ranges of New Mexico and Arizona, portions of the San Juans in Colorado, the boundary waters of Minnesota. I could go on our wilderness landscapes in my mind because relative to everything else, they most closely resemble, relative to everything else, what this landscape looked like upon European contact. So it's the wildest stuff relative to everything else, it's the stuff that most closely resembles what it did at the time of European contact, considering my caveat that then it was inhabited, however, sparsely by Native people. And now it's not, and it's vulnerable because once you mess with it, it ceases to be wilderness anymore, and it becomes some other thing. And I worry about running out of itness. 00:07:00 Speaker 2: And what it means to America is an important endeavor, why you may ask, partly because of a little word often used in economics, it's used in farming, it's used in life, called scarcity. In our current times, wilderness is one of the Earth's scarcest resources, and scarcity dictates value. It's ironic, but scarcity is often a more powerful force than overflowing bushel baskets of plenty. Here's doctor dant on where some of our big wildernesses are. 00:07:38 Speaker 1: The big ones are, of course up in Alaska. The biggest one in the continental United States is in Death Valley, so it's not like we're all going to go camp there. And the second biggest one is the Frank Church River of No Return in Idaho. So there are lots of big wilderness places, but there are also a lot of small wilderness places. And there are wilderness places in the East as well as in the West. And that was again something Frank Church really worked hard on because he said, we should have these rare and valuable places, rare. 00:08:09 Speaker 2: And valuable, rare and valuable, large and small in the West and in the East. The largest wilderness in the lower forty eight is in Death Valley in California, in Nevada, and it spans over three point one million acres. 00:08:26 Speaker 5: That's news to me. 00:08:28 Speaker 2: In the last episode, doctor Dan Flores told us wilderness is an idea and a reality. It's these two things, the idea part being the abstract way we talk about places where humans don't live in natural ecosystems dominate how Herring told us that wilderness was a feeling the reality of wilderness. The second part is one hundred and eleven million acres designated as federal wilderness with the capitol W. That's roughly five percent of American soil, which is governed by the strictest land designation in America, only open to human foot in equine traffic. You can't use anything with wheels. You can't even use a hang glider. True story, it's on the little signs, and you can't use anything with a motor. But to understand modern wilderness, we've got to understand the macro scale journey of mankind. For this series, I've leaned heavily into a book written in nineteen sixty seven by Roderick Nash called Wilderness in the American Mind. I nerded out hard on this book and loved it. Here's Doctor Flores with a critique on this past era of American ideals on wilderness. Remember the Wilderness Act was signed in the law in nineteen sixty four, so there was a lot of activity around this stuff in the nineteen sixties when this book was written. 00:09:51 Speaker 7: Yeah, so, I mean, that's a fantastic book. It's also fifty years old. I mean. One of the things that we began to cope with about twenty five or thirty years ago was an emerging critique of not just Nash's story of wilderness, but a critique of what misperceptions lay at the foundation of what wilderness was in the American cultural story. Because the idea of wilderness in America, which begins very early with people coming out of Europe, who of course have lived in towns and villages and have done so for a thousand years, and in a part of the world in Western Europe where all the charismatic animals have long since been wiped out. I mean, they're hunting partridges and things. And of course ordinary people are kept out of the kings and the nobleman's forests because they preserve stags and deer hunting and so forth for the wealthy. So being introduced to a continent that struck them as being a wilderness continent, Virgin America was the term that was used so often. You know, the name given to Virginia for the Virgin Queen, and was also carried on to the continent itself as a virgin place. It was a misperception of what America was, because America was actually an anciently occupied place. There had been people here for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And I mean, as one of the geographers, William Denovan, who wrote a fantastic article in nineteen ninety one, put it. He called it the Pristine Myth was his. One of the things he said in that article was that it took Europeans and their presence in America three centuries before they had imposed the kind of landscape changes on the continent that they found from native people when they arrived. But for a couple of reasons, they just sort of ignored that. One of the reasons, of course, was that as soon as Europeans arrived, they're bringing these old World diseases with them to a population of people who have never been exposed to things like smallpox and influenza and cholera and so forth and so on. And almost immediately within the first fifty or seventy five years of European arrival in North America, the native population goes from nearly five million people in what is now the United States and Canada down to about nine hundred thousand people, and so suddenly the native population has shrunk by five hundred percent. And it not only allowed for an ecological release of wildlife all over America because there wasn't the same hunting pressure that had been imposed on animals that there had been for ten thousand years, but it also the relative scarcity of native people in many parts of North America sort of confused Europeans into thinking that they actually had inherited a place that didn't have any prior human history to it, and so it made them think from the very beginning. It made us think from the very beginning that we had snagged ourselves. You know, this original garden of Eden. 00:13:23 Speaker 5: Those are some deep waters. 00:13:25 Speaker 2: And I think that perspective is very important to consider when we think about wilderness and America. I've heard doctor Taylor Keene, a member of the Cherokee and Omaha tribes, say that upon first European contact with North America, there was no wilderness, but rather a great Native American civilization. And this is where this stuff in history gets contentious. I think every side looks back and wishes it could have been handled differently, but that's beyond the scope of this conversation. However, it's useful in framing the foundational definitions of wilderness because a fundamental tenet of our definition of wilderness is that people aren't on the landscape altering it in any way. That's kind of what wilderness is. And doctor Flores is saying that you'd have to go back so far in history to find this place humanless that it's almost pointless to think about it. 00:14:20 Speaker 5: I'll also say. 00:14:22 Speaker 2: That since the release of the first podcast, a friend of mine from the Chalktaw nation named Clay from Oklahoma, he told me that they do have a traditional word similar to the English word of wilderness. We had made the statement that there were no words in the Native American languages that were similar to the English word wilderness. I stand corrected. Here is Clay saying the word in his native chalk Taw language. 00:14:54 Speaker 3: You would say these canni hiaka wilderness. 00:14:59 Speaker 5: That is interesting. 00:15:02 Speaker 2: He also said that the central stories of the Chalktaw and Chickasaft people tell about how they came into an uninhabited land and settled there. 00:15:10 Speaker 5: In the southeast. Here's more from doctor. 00:15:14 Speaker 1: Dant, this idea that when people first come from somewhere else, not so we're not talking about indigenous people, we're talking about people coming from somewhere else. When they get to America. Part of what they see is all the things that are gone from where they've been in England, in France, in Germany, and they come to America and here are trees, and here wild deer, and here are here's this wealth of nature, and they think of it in those terms that this thing that was so rare and therefore valuable in Europe is here in abundance. And I want to claim and tame the wilderness as the advance of you know, using that loaded terminology civilization. That's how that's how we civilize Europe. And that's what we're going to do here. And the way you do that is to get big on nature. You cut down the trees, you drain the swamps, she harvest the animals. And that's a way of creating value, both because those things are rare in Europe and also because then you're converting these wild, chaotic landscapes into something that's ordered and knowable. But again, it has to do with those those ideas of value, what has value as what is rare, and once those wild places become rare, then we have that shift where romantics are thinking, you know, has some demigod come before me and harvested the best of the stars. I want to know an entire heaven and an entire. 00:16:59 Speaker 2: Earth, converting wild, chaotic landscapes into something ordered and knowable. Now, that's interesting. What's hard to debate is that as a species, globally, we've worked extremely hard to get away from the instability of wild lands. You remember the etymology of wilderness right self willed or uncontrollable land of wild beasts. Here's Stephen Ranella with an interesting observation about human nature. 00:17:32 Speaker 6: People who inhabit wilderness and again acknowledging that it's a somewhat squishy definition. People who historically have inhabited wilderness have jumped at every chance they could get to chip away at that wilderness. There are some exceptions, there are some rare exceptions, but for the most part, they've jumped at any chance. Our own Western European ancestors obviously jumped at it in a big way ten thousand years ago on this continent, native Americans were very receptive to firearms, were very receptive to steal axes. We're very receptive to different building materials, to different modes of transportation, to things that just would strike us as development, strike us as having the means to make a greater, faster, more profound impact on their environment. So yes, people that have. When I say people, I just mean like us, humans outside of our outside of all these differentiations we create, like Western Europeans, Native Americans, just people across the globe have marched willfully and readily in the direction of civilization. Very few except so, if I didn't have this civilized veneer, if I didn't have this this thing that I've just was born into, raised in civilization, and came out of that respecting wilderness. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that had I just been born of wilderness, I probably would be just like everybody else, and that I would grab at any chance to make it a little. 00:19:25 Speaker 5: Less hard to be there. 00:19:27 Speaker 6: I'll tell you this, Clay, if you and me were in that situation where we were indigenous hunter gatherers who for thousands of generations had been on the same patch of ground, and all of our implements All of our building tools, building equipment were just made of natural, naturally occurring things that we could find in a landscape, stone, bone, hide. And someone showed up and gave us a palette of ready mixed concrete, we would have laid that ready mixed concrete down in some fashion or another. We would have said, this stuff is amazing. Look at that made me a big old paved area, and here's where I'm gonna start cooking. It's hard, doesn't wash away, doesn't get muddy, and we would wish we had more. We would want another palette. We would quickly want another palette of ready mixed concrete. 00:20:15 Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I guarantee it, dude. 00:20:18 Speaker 6: But knowing what we know right now, me and you, knowing what we now know, we might say, uh oh, man, you get to touch it. 00:20:27 Speaker 7: You get that ready mixed. 00:20:28 Speaker 5: Concrete out of my face. I know we're. 00:20:34 Speaker 2: That's an interesting point and it's hard to argue with. There are exceptions, but in general, mankind has been moving away from wilderness lifestyles and to go back. In the Bear Grease Academy, the Shawnee leader to Kumsa also in the Bear Grease Hall of Fame, and his brother Tinsquadawa. The prophet preached that going back to the traditional Indian ways of life and getting rid of all influence of Europeans, that would be their salvation. 00:21:06 Speaker 5: That's what he preached. 00:21:08 Speaker 2: However, they were met with stiff resistance from within their own tribe and the majority of other tribes. And in modern times us trying to imagine ourselves not leaning into modernization is kind of a stretch. It would be like in modern times someone who chooses not to have a cell phone. I mean, it's almost unimaginable. Ninety nine percent of people can't pull that off. Nor could our ancestors resist modernization. That's not a perfect analogy, but I think it's helpful. We've covered some ground already, and if you remember, doctor Flores talked about the peculiarity of American history that gave us a union perspective on wilderness, which we've covered the first part, which was the European perception of the North American continent upon arrival. However, things shifted once wild lands became scarce, and this is one of the most interesting parts of this conversation. This will be on the Bar Greece Academy Quiz at the end of the series, we've got to learn about a census in eighteen ninety that shook the nation into an identity crisis. Doctor Dant is about to tell us about a pivotal moment in America's development of our modern wilderness doctrine. 00:22:37 Speaker 1: There was a census in eighteen ninety that no longer said there was a you know, and they used the word frontier, which is the I mean, it's the census says that frontier is two or fewer people per square mile. That's the definition of frontier. And there was no obvious demarcation between those lightly settled places and the more heavily settled places by the eighteen ninety censes. And for a lot of Americans in particular, that sort of provoked this crisis of identity. If that had been what had made us uniquely Americans. That's what Frederick Jackson, Turner and some others argue. You can hear the Darwinian idea in there, that we're evolving from Europeans into this unique American species, Homo americanas I like to call it. If that's gone, then how do we retain our uniqueness and our specialness. 00:23:40 Speaker 7: So it all gets amplified then at the end of the nineteenth century when Frederi Jackson Turner writes that famous essay of his The Frontier, the significant the Frontier in American History, where he argues that it's the interaction with wild lands that turn Europeans into to Americans, right, And that of course leads to when we get to the twentieth century and it looks like, you know, the census in eighteen ninety announces that the frontier is over. I mean, it throws some Americans into a kind of a crisis of identity that historians sometimes refer to as you know, a wilderness angsed our frontier anxiety because we didn't have it, because you don't have it anymore, and so how are we going to create more Americans if you don't have it? 00:24:30 Speaker 4: Right? 00:24:30 Speaker 2: I mean, in an American had to have a frontier, had to have it. That's what I made us Americans that we had this frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner was like, the frontiers dead. 00:24:40 Speaker 7: The Frontier, well, he doesn't say necessarily it's dead, but he publishes this essay in the early eighteen nineties, and it happens to come at the same time that the US Census announces in the Census of eighteen ninety that the frontier has been so broken up by bodies of settlement that it's no longer possible to say that there is a frontier line in America. And that's what throws people into this frontier anxiety notion, and you know, I mean, out of it emerges things like the Boy Scouts, for example, where okay, we've got to go out and teach kids something about living in nature before they lose it an at. 00:25:20 Speaker 2: Well, when we've got to have this formulated organization to do this, because before Americans would have just intrinsically had these opportunities and known these things absolutely. 00:25:29 Speaker 7: Now we have to be a lot more proactive about setting up the possibility for kids in particular to be able to experience the wild. 00:25:40 Speaker 5: And it's one of the. 00:25:42 Speaker 7: Reasons that hunting the Booming Crucket Club at the time becomes most very important in conservation for example. In fact, in the lead up to the passage of the Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty four and the debate on it started in the late nineteen fifties, supposedly Frederick Jackson Turner's essay The Significance of the frontier in American history was mentioned in testimony more than two hundred times. So the people who passed the Wilderness. 00:26:09 Speaker 5: Act were reaching back that far. 00:26:11 Speaker 7: Yeah, and they were. What they were saying is that we need wilderness because this is how America and Americans are created. 00:26:25 Speaker 2: Americans were created by interaction with wild lands. Now, that's interesting. Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis is important. 00:26:34 Speaker 5: It's kind of wild. 00:26:35 Speaker 2: I'm not sure that it's true, but this is how national identity is formed. This pioneering spirit, independent self reliance are all very American things applied in modern times in a whole bunch of areas of life outside of land management. Hanging in my home for the last fifteen years is a framed quote from Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac. It says, quote, to the laborer in the sweat of his labor, the raw stuff on his anvil is an adversary to be conquered. So was wilderness and adversary to the pioneer. But to the laborer, in repose able for the moment to cast a philosophical eye on his world, that same raw stuff is something to be loved and cherished because it gives definition and meaning to his life. 00:27:29 Speaker 5: End of quote. 00:27:31 Speaker 2: Do y'all remember the infamous question I asked Steve Ranella about how much being an American impacted his way of thinking about wilderness. As I learned this deep history, It's as clear as a bell to me that I've been influenced by my culture. What the things hanging on your walls celebrate is a window into your culture. And I didn't even know about Fjt's frontier thesis when. 00:27:57 Speaker 5: I hung Aldo's quote on my wall. 00:28:03 Speaker 2: I'm sure y'all remember Alabama's son wild Land's author Hal Herring. Here's how on the wimpification of America and FJ. 00:28:13 Speaker 3: Turner, Some of the arguments made for conserving the last of the wilderness were coming from Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis or frontier theory that what defined the American spirit was the adversity and the self reliance required by the frontier or the wilderness, and people like Teddy Roosevelt particularly wrote about this. They were worried about kind of the wimplification of Americans, you know, coddled by civilization, and they wanted to make sure that there were places where people could still test themselves against nature, you know, raw and unaltered, and so there's a lot of currents here. 00:28:57 Speaker 2: I want to say wimpification one more time. Maybe the algorithm will pick it up and direct people here who are looking for a cure. I asked, how for more about American identity being wrapped around wilderness. 00:29:12 Speaker 5: Here's an interesting sequence. 00:29:15 Speaker 3: In the United States. The reason that we kind of have this designated wilderness. How we got to that came from the earliest days of the frontier, when say, the buffalo were gone eighteen seventy six seventy seven in Miles City, Montana. People were looking for the last of the commercially huntable buffalo, right and the Civil War had shown Americans the true bloodiness of our national experiment. So eighteen sixty seven, you're seeing like a lot of the plains Indian wars starting, and you're having all these people back east. And I don't want to say this in a derogatory way, but people back east are realizing that the frontier is being pushed so hard, so fast, that there may be absolutely nothing left of that if we don't make some choices. And these are people who are more insulated from it. Although they may might make expeditions. But one of the things so you're listening to I always talk about John Muir and Gifford Pinchot as these two dynamos that are working against each other and mirror. John Muir was completely immersed in the beauty of solitude and the grandeur of untrammeled spaces in wilderness, whereas Gifford Pinchot was a man who believed in managing landscapes and getting the most out of them with sustainable yield. Right, And those two dynamos are kind of like that a picture of America. We have these hugely contradictory notions at all times, and I always like to talk about it like two turbines. It's two magnets and a turbine, and they're spinning, and they're making this electricity through their contradictions. And it's part of what I love about our country the most is there's all these contradictory ideas that are spinning at the same time. In our case here, it was the kind of preservation of the wilderness versus the absolute exploitation that people were witnessing at that time. Right the eastern forests were going down like wheat in front of a combine. The white Pines were going down and cleared to Michigan at that point, I think even into Minnesota. And so the idea that American's energy was capable of literally taking the last barrel of oil out of the last piece of ground, well, that was evident. This movement began to say, what if we didn't do that to every place? 00:32:01 Speaker 2: What if we didn't do that to every place? Sometimes it's shocking to me that we slowed down enough to ask that question. I really like How's talk of America's contradictions. We wiped out the wilderness, and then right at the end, right when we were about to lose it all, we decided to save some of them. I'm going to dig in with how and I'm still trying to quantify if America's wilderness doctrine is unique. 00:32:31 Speaker 5: Here he brings up a unique point. 00:32:33 Speaker 3: What we have in America with our system of wilderness land. It's unique in the world because it was a choice that the American people, through Congress and everything made So if you go, I've been in places in Mexico that I would be wilderness. They are wilderness quality lands, as they say, but a lot of the things that are left in the world. I think of parts of the Amazon, and I've been in the Amazon, but I've been not into the farthest backcountry. Those are only there because people lacked the means to get at them. You'd think of some of the Himalayas or Kazakhstan. You know, those are places you couldn't build roads into, right. They weren't looking for anything there, Whereas in the United States after the Frontier, we found ourselves capable of getting everywhere, right, Like you look at the system of roads in the say Shoshone National Forest, or you look at how people were using the Sierras of California. We could get everywhere, and we were getting everywhere, and so the American system. And I don't know about the largeness of it, the size of it, say Vsavis what's in Russia and Siberian and the Taiga. But I think what's the difference here is in Ameria was a choice to have it. 00:34:04 Speaker 2: The fact that we chose to designate and protect wilderness, especially in the early days, was unique globally, and I think that's really important. I'd say today though, more lands globally are being protected on purpose, but in many parts of the world, the remaining wilderness was a byproduct of not being able to get to it, and I do think that intent is important. It's also only fair to bring up that wilderness preservation is a direct result of financial prosperity. We had the luxury of being able to preserve wilderness. Sometimes in other parts of life, you wonder how somebody is able to do something so good, and often it's simply an issue of the financial ability to pull it off. If seventy percent of us didn't have jobs and we couldn't feed our families, perhaps our ideas on setting aside wilderness would be much different. Front here's how with an interesting thought about prosperity and wilderness as a status symbol. 00:35:08 Speaker 3: Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico was a leader of the conservation movement in the eighty eight Congress, and during the Wilderness hearings, he said, wilderness is an anchor to windward. Knowing it is there, we can also know that we are still a rich nation, tending our resources as we should. We're not a people in despair searching every last nook and cranny of our land for a board of lumber, a barrel of all a blade of grass or a tank of water. And so what I think that Senator Anderson meant right there was exactly what they were talking about in eighteen sixty seven sixty eight. He was talking about making a choice, that we were the kind of people who could make a choice. Yes, we could destroy this, but we choose not to because we don't have to sack every last corner for every last piece of grass. 00:36:10 Speaker 5: That was good. 00:36:12 Speaker 2: Here's Ben Masters on America's uniqueness with wilderness, and hey, my first intro to Ben was through his twenty fifteen film called Unbranded, where he and someboddies rode mustangs from Mexico to Canada through the Rocky Mountains. It was a really cool film. I'm sure he's done a bunch of other stuff since then that he's way more proud of. 00:36:33 Speaker 5: But here's Ben. 00:36:35 Speaker 4: I think that our American ideals of wilderness, of preserving places that should be untouched by humankind isn't unique to the United States. But I do think that it is truly remarkable that the United States was the first country to in policy and within government, value that. I think that that should be something that should be recognized and treasured. 00:37:06 Speaker 5: I feel like there's this. 00:37:09 Speaker 4: Sense within our modern day society that you know, the United States is a country that you know, is very materialistic, that is very consumer driven, that really only cares about the economy. But in reality, the fact is that we have we kind of set the stage and set the precedent for a lot of governments to emulate around the world of the value of conserving wilderness. 00:37:37 Speaker 2: To bring us further along on this reality of wilderness actual geography. On March first, eighteen seventy two, the federal government bought two million acres in northwest Wyoming for forty thousand dollars. It was America's and the world's first large scale preservation of wilderness, and they call the Little Track of Land Yellowstone National Park. I think this was a landmark moment in human history. The trajectory of Homo sapiens up until very near this point, had been fighting to get out of the wilderness, but at this tipping point we reached back to save some of it. Alanis Morset should have added a fourth verse to her nineteen ninety six hit song Ironic about the irony of the preservation of a wilderness. 00:38:31 Speaker 5: I can't believe I'm about to do this for. 00:38:33 Speaker 2: Twenty thousand years, he fought against the wild too many variables. To keep his family safe and fed, he cut down the trees, he planted grains with his wife. Then in eighteen seventy two, we bought two million acres out right, isn't it ironic? 00:38:56 Speaker 5: Don't you think? 00:38:59 Speaker 2: I can't believe that made final cut, cut that out, fill back on track and to understand more of the general timeline. And I really hate to do it, but we've got to bring back up Henry David Thereau again. But in the eighteen fifties he was credited as one of the first voices calling for practical action to preserve wilderness in America. He believed that each town should have a primitive forest from five hundred to one thousand acres where people could just go. He also believed in this larger scale preservation of wilderness and that that would be an intellectual reservoir and nourishment for civilized man. And as far as I can find, Arkansas's Hot Springs is the oldest land set aside in America as what they had originally called a national reserve, and that was done in eighteen thirty two. Later that would become a national park. So the first preservation of land started in eighteen thirty two. Was a recipient of this message in the eighteen fifties, and then it wasn't until eighteen seventy two that the first national park, Yellowstone, was actually preserved. But in case we're getting too proud of our American wilderness efforts, here's how bringing us back down to earth. Remember these two words rock and ice. 00:40:24 Speaker 3: I mean, American wilderness is similar to wilderness in other parts of the world because it's like, it's not the rich grasslands, you know, it's it was still lands that you could not make them pay like you couldn't. You couldn't if there's I tell you, Nevada would have all kinds of wilderness, but it has gold. Right, There would be all kinds of places in America that would be kind of wilderness, but there was something there that you could make pay. And so those are not wilderness, Like there's no wilderness in Iowa because it's all black dirt. 00:40:58 Speaker 7: Right. 00:40:59 Speaker 3: Wilderness areas share something in common with the rest of the world in that they were the last places people could go and find something that would you know, that would pay early, like nineteen sixties fifties wilderness folks in the United States, they were kind of admitting that this every wilderness bill was a rock and ice bill. They were saying, well, all the wildernesses that we got are basically lands that you can't do anything with anyway, and so it was kind of like defacto wilderness because you'd have to get a climbing rope, you know, and hardware to get up there. That's not totally true, and especially not true like in the Bob Marshall, which encloses a large grassland system in the upper North Fork of the Sun River. So there is grass in there, and that was made it very controversial because people said, well, there's grass in there, I want to keep running the thousands and thousands of sheep in there. And so we have mostly set aside as wilderness the places we couldn't do anything else with. 00:42:04 Speaker 5: That's true. 00:42:07 Speaker 2: Shucks, man, that takes some of the nobility out of the story of preserving wilderness. But I guess that doesn't matter. Maybe nobility in matters like this is a myth. Anyway, here's another mic dropper pragmatism. 00:42:23 Speaker 3: So so the other thing here, I don't want to miss this because there is an enormous pragmatism in American wilderness that was not in other countries. Okay, So the Bob Marshall Wilderness, which is one I'm most familiar with, it was set aside very early because it is the headwaters of the Sun River, and the Sun River is the Gibson Dam project, which is a huge irrigation project on the Fairfield Greenfield Bench here where I live. And so the Bob Marshall Wilderness owes its exists things to the need for irrigation water down below, and if you go through the American West, the same thing applies in almost every wilderness area that I know of. Is was set aside. Originally the idea was to protect some kind of headwaters. Sixty two percent of all the available water in the American West originates on federal public land, and that is not a mistake. 00:43:34 Speaker 2: Pragmatism is a good word for taking the romance and fun right out of the story. 00:43:39 Speaker 5: Nah, I'm just kidding. 00:43:41 Speaker 2: It actually makes American wilderness a tighter story and more understandable. There are multiple reasons these lands were preserved, and multiple reasons why people celebrate their preservation today. I think all of this stuff is fascinating and it's helping me unravel and dec who we are as Americans. And oh, did I just hear the three point thirty bell ring? Sounds like the Bear Grease Academy is out for this session, but we've got one more session on wilderness and it won't be easy. It turns out there are even more problems and challenges ahead. I can't thank you enough for listening to bear Grease at First Light. We just launched our new CIRCA Big Game Western Hunting pattern CAMO. I've worn it extensively out west and it's good stuff. Brent and I will be at the Black Bear Bonanza on March ninth in Bentonville, Arkansas. We hope to see you there, and I look forward to talking with everyone on the Bear Grease Render next week

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