00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything coming at you. Um, congested with a sore throat. So it's not sounding pretty sick. You sound off, Yeah, that time of year. Um, we're just talking. I want to pick up on a conversation with just having a quick cal Can you can you revisit what you're talking about? John? We can we talk about where you live? Or do you like to keep that secret? No, it's fine, right about it. I don't write about it. But it's not like I live in an undisclosed location. Okay, I just lived there. We're with the writer John Muellum, and you don't go by nature writer, you're just having to write about I think that's kind of silly. You don't like that? Uh what do you? What do you do? You can describe yourself as a generalist. Yeah, yeah, I think that's accurate. But that is a thing these days, right to be a generalist? No, No, to like people take like nature writing these days? Dude? Yeah? Way yeah. Yeah, we're science writer natural history writers. Do you what do you say that? No? No, because I feel like it has a softer connotation, right, like you're gazing at a I'll say that. I'll oftentimes, if I'm trying to deflect a conversation, i will say that I'm an outdoor writer because no one knows what that. Yeah. It's like, yeah, I just I'm trying to get in and out of the subject real quick. We all often times throw that out there to see if that allows me to just move on, right, And sometimes it's people like, Okay, it's over. Yeah, But the writer the generalist, John Welm, lives on Bainbridge Island, which is an island in Puget Sound, and hearing this our other guests, frequent contributor and guests Ryan Callahan shared with us his memories of right fishing for chum salmon on Bainbridge. Uh. I want to say it was two thousand and ten, and I could be screwing this up, but we Uh. It was actually back in the days of working with Warren Miller Entertainment, and I was in charge of shipping all of our stuff all across the country, and I also slipped in a container load of our fishing gear so we could fish wherever we were in the country. And we went out and fished the chum round on Bainbridge, and um everything in this area was pretty economically depressed, UM on Bainbridge and the peninsula in general. And and I was very confused as to the fishing regulations because there seemed to be an awful lot of people gut we we we referred to basically snagging salmon and just dragging them on shore. And we were, you know, out there with their flying rod uh fly fishing gear, just trying to catch something in the mouth. And on the way out of uh, the creek that we'd walked down into, ran into some uh fishing game officers and fish cops fish cops, and I had I had. I didn't ask directly, but you know you kind of like, hey, so supposed uh and these officers had basically said like, yeah, we're aware of that. We're not really concerned about it because these folks are taking everything home and smoking them. So they were they were willing to like look, turn turn a blind eye that yeah to the chum thing. The reason I wanted to tell that because some reason it's stuck to putting my mind two things. One my brother man, it winds up being so circular. Can I tell about the book you're working on, John, John's working on the book by Alaska. And as part of that, we got talking about anchored, So I had sort of anchored floating around in my head. Then Cal got talking about salmon, so I have an anchorage and salmon floating around my head. I got to thinking about something. My brother was telling me that it's a derogatory term. I think like the Moonies. John, you know about the Moonies, right? Ye? Are you asking me if that's a derogatory too reading? But can you, because you understand them better, can you explain to me real quick, even though it's not your true right, I'd say I have a D minus great understanding of the Moonies the Unification Church. But you knew that, like you knew some of it. I know that. I think it's in like we didn't start the fire that you know. He's the mass Shaye Stadium. The Reverend moon converted ten thousands, some number of thousands of people a church all at once. The Beatles kind of got into it. They had their heyday. And if you see dudes in the airport who are wearing yellow gowns and have a hairstyle, similar to the Iroquoi Five Nations groups, right, but this is is that still going? And I'm telling you what the reason I'm thinking about this right now is my brother was saying that the Mooney's in Anchorage will rent busses to go fish salmon. I'm telling you the only the guy we're thinking about. And I feel like I already brought it up once, which was just like I talked about this every day now is because the type of salmon you're talking about, a chum, is also known as a dog salmon. And it gets this name because um some people will find that it's that it's best us is to be fed to dogs. So people will catch chums and just freeze the hole to freeze to sled dogs. It's not a popular food fish chump salmon and dog salmon. And I was recently taught about this is someone they're saying that the folks was it was it that is sam as the folks on um Nevakish. Yeah, they liked it though they love it. And I'll touch on that too because uh, chump salmon or coastal spawners, so they spawned close to the ocean. They'll generally enter rivers in pretty shitty shape already. But there's an exception to this that our brother was point now is there's a big run of chums in the Yukon where these chums are traveling a thousand miles and they'll enter the river very nice and clean and very fatty, and so they're they're pretty popular and people will net them out in the open ocean. But people know that chum salmon slash dog salmon is a real ship salmon, so they've tried to rebrand them, and for while they're trying to sell them as calico salmon, because when they're up in the rivers, you ever know, to get that calico color to them. Kind of the other day we were I think we might have talked about this. They uh dirt myth went into a Whole Foods and came out with a little envelope of smoked salmon and on it it says keita salmon. And I know my salmon inside now or thought I did, and I was like, that's not a kind of salmon. But it turns out that the Linnaean name for the chum is on corinthis Keita, it sounds like a Bible verse on corinthis keita, and uh, yeah, the whole food was just trying to sell chums as key to salmon, which is just a play on their Lineian name because people like get stuff in their head and they won't eat it because because of its name. Yeah, but it's still tastes good enough to sell, all right, good enough for people to come back. And the chupic Eskimo they don't. They don't like to catch him. They let the chums run in the river and spawn out, and they don't like to catch him until that sun bitch is washing back out to the ocean mostly dead, at which point they like to catch him. Because their climate is so wet it's very hard to dry fish. And a chum is after he's spawned out and mostly dead, he's very lean, his fat reserve is gone. At that point you can dry him down successfully in a climate that is not appropriate for fish drying. Wow. I talked with that uh, this guy, Dave, Alaska resident who looked at me like I had three eyes because I told him how much I liked the silver salmon. Then we caught up at the fish shack and he was like, you eat. Oh, there's so much bullshit around fish. My brother. My brother has been doing mass been doing blind taste tests where he's like doing where he's cooking pink salmon for people and co ho for people, and he's final about of people prefer the pinks, and then everybod says, oh, yeah, but the real problem with pinks they don't freeze well, they turn mushy when you freeze them. So he starts then freezing it all and doing a blind taste test with it, and I think thought, I think six of people preferred the pink, but it just doesn't mark it well. No, So John, back back to John, Uh, you're general How long have you been a generalist writer? Since I've been a writer, really, I've been writing for the New York Times magazine for twelve years and I think, you know, that was not long after I started writing for magazines. And I think just as a freelancer, you know, you why would I say no to a good idea? So did you study journalism? I did, Actually I went to the Berkeley Journalism School. That was how I met Michael Pollen. Uh, But at that point I kind of I didn't scope out journalism schools to go to. It was more a function of we were moving to San Francisco, my wife and I. She was gonna go to grad school. And I tried to get a bunch of jobs in journalism in San Francisco and got turned down. And then I had applied to the journalism school, had to my dad had died recently. I had some money that could pay for the graduate degree, and uh, I couldn't get any work. So that I showed up at Berkeley. I went to go visit when I got admitted, and I was just like, why would I not do this? This is a you know, it's almost like I've been freelancing for a while. So I thought I could show up at this place and just keep freelancing. And now I've got the support of all these people around me, and uh, it was too good to pass up. And that was grad school. That was grad school. Yeah. Yeah, how sick? How sick of talking about? How how sick are you've talked about your your book? Uh, I haven't done it in a while. So I got some questions I want to ask. Yeah, yeah, we'll see, but my I'm not gonna be as up on my own book as I was. Yeah, we'll just give me the like give me the give people to run down of your book. So the books called wild Ones. The subtitle is a sometimes this maying, wearily reassuring story about looking at people looking at animals in America. And uh it uh it's a book about Uh. Basically, it's a book about conservation and dangered species, although I didn't always want to describe it that way. Uh. And it's so why did you not want? Because it's not a too dismal I think it shuts some a lot of people down right. I think the thing I was interested in doing was writing about those issues from the perspective of someone who had no direct contact with them. Um. You know, I was living in San Francisco at the time, and as I write in the book, you know, most of my exposure to animals was you know, watching Planet Earth or uh, you know, Wild America when I was when I was a kid. And then I had my first child and realized how much of a child's life gets flooded with animals, you know, be they on your pajamas or stuffed animals and things like this. And I just started to realize that these animals, which are real animals out there in the ecosystem, are sort of these also these imaginative constructs that people like me are trafficking in every day. And so the book was really about trying to reconcile those two worlds, trying to take what I thought and felt about animals and go out into the ecosystem of some of these endangered species and really think hard about you know, why is it that someone who's never going to see a mountain lion might want to get behind the cause of mountain lion conservation? What are these animals doing for us? Uh? Not maybe not in the physical plane, but you know, just emotionally. When you were when you were thinking about that about you mentioned that your kid's pajamas and the way that childhood is so animal rich, at least in the imagery of it. It's rich in the imagery of animals and sort of the the metaphysical realm. Have you ever thought about like, how is it that the how is it decided? Do you feel? Um, what species sort of make the cut? Yeah, African megafauna is big with it is big with kids. It's big, and it's like big with pajamas. It's big with stuffed animals. Um. And then there are like our many of our own animals are kind of neglected in that world. Yeah, well I think that's that. Yeah, that's a great question, and I think some of it it just speaks to the fact that when we're putting a giraffe on our daughters, you know, Onesie, it's not because of anything having to do with the giraffe itself, right, It has to do with what the giraffe represents, you know. Maybe uh, it's it's colorful, right, Maybe it's something that we think of as gentle um. And I think that there's also the exotic nous of it alone is doing a lot of the work because we want to surround our kids with things that are precious, you know, and give them, uh, kind of take them to another world. Right. So maybe it's a giraffe, or maybe it's a ferry, right, or a princess imaginary right, And sometimes it is, but it doesn't often maybe won't work, right. I mean owls, I feel like owls have a good pr right now, like we we think of owls, Owls do take it into the stuffy realm. Yeah, exactly exactly. Squirrels though not so much. I was just trying to think of a squirrel and only character and can come up with this uh rocking, rocking bowl winkle. Yeah, but kids aren't into that anymore. No, definitely not anymore. The hedgehog has gone. His brand is rising. Do you think I think the hedgehog is coming into his own a a child's thing, my kids awareness of animals really, like how it was eye opening for me anyway, like the your story of the Teddy Bear. Oh, that's that's the next thing. I want to have you address that. I thought that was fantastic. Yeah, why the hell? Yeah? Can you because we're on the thing with like what sort of like the fantastic sort of representation of animals and kids stuff that you got interested in. Can you talk about um? And I trust me I will move on to like more recent things with you. But keep talking about keep talking about Teddy Roosevelt in the bear. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't know this. You didn't know. I feel like I knew something. No, I didn't. I knew that had something to do with I knew that the Teddy Bear was Teddy Roosevelt, but I didn't know like I didn't know how. Yeah, I'll do a little pitch for the book right now. I think it's worth buying just to read your explanation of that story, because I've heard that story numerous times and I could, you know, vaguely, probably tell it t and someone say, oh, yeah, you know what's nuts the nuts and bolts of it. But you added in just a few details that I didn't know. I was like, now that's fascinating thing in a way I don't agree with with Horniday, Like I know the Horniday story very well. Yeah, I would not tell it the way you told it. How would you tell it? Just different? Are we gonna Can we skip right to that one? Can we skip to that one? And it will come back to the Teddy? Now even now I'm scintillated. No, I have to sit with that discomfort. Tell us about tell us about so the Roosevelt story, Yeah I had. I don't know if I knew that story or not. I mean, I think, like you at least knew that Teddy bears Teddy Roosevelt. There's a relationship, and the story goes. I believe it's I could have the year wrong at this point. Was the year that uh scotfy A published the Culinary Guide. Well, there's a lot happening that year. Clearly a big year. Um, Roosevelt goes down to Mississippi and it's gonna go bear hunting, and this is a it's a you know, the press is following him there, and longest story short, they're not finding any bears. One of the last days of his hunt his uh they go out cut stop me from it. Um, what year? When was uh? You know, who's the Mississippi bear hunting writer Faulkner? When was Falkoner? Like active later, I believe I don't know, not my not my Arab expertise. I barely am expert on my own book anymore. Yeah, well, uh, we're forcing you to revisit. Yes, I should have I should have brushed up a little bit more. In any case, Uh, all of a sudden, Roosevelt is uh, you know, he he gives up. He goes to have lunch, and they're hunting with hounds. They're hunting with hounds and a guide. You know. So his guide was this sort of famous black Mississippi former slave bear hunter guy who you know, was a very storied figure. Yeah, Roosevelt wouldn't cross the street without a guy, I would assume. So yeah, so this guy suddenly he starts blowing on his bugle. Uh. Colin Roosevelt back out into the field because he's found a bear and it's this kind of mangy looking, scrawny animal that he's tied to a tree, and he's the hounds have cornered it. He's tied it to a tree so that the President can come shoot it, have the honor of shooting it. Now, this is where the story and the truth kind of get diverge a little bit, get a little muddy. The story goes that Roosevelt found this all very unsportsmanlike and spared the bear's life. And there's a famous cartoon done at this moment in a Washington newspaper where they show Roosevelt declining to shoot this very cuddly looking bear, and the bear becomes the Teddy Bear that that bear in the cartoon looks, you know, fluffy and cute and cuddly, a little vulnerable. That becomes the Teddy's Bear. Uh. And toy companies start making these stuffed animals name them after the President to sort of celebrate that moment of mercy. The truth is, as far as I could tell, that he did not He did refuse to shoot the bear. Instead, he asked his buddy to knife it with put it out of its misery. That part did not get carried over into the myth um right because it was supposedly like a worn down, scrawny it was out. It just like wasn't doing very good. It was a bad looking bear. It was a bad looking bear. So he did feel that it was unsportsmanlike, but it was more to protect his own sense of sportsmanship than the bear's life that he declared to shoot it um. So that in and of itself, I thought was interesting the way that the story, you know, the parts of the story that we wanted to repeat and the parts that we wanted to ignore. But yeah, in any case, that was the sort of birth of the table. And there's there's other competing stories. I actually got a lot of emails from various people, you know, marshaling historic evidence that but what happened that day, Well what happened that day or about the you know, or linking the origin of the Teddy Bear two different things. And then it was it was this moment with Teddy rizz with that kind of gave it's popularity so that it wasn't necessarily invented because of Teddy Roosevelt. But that was what made it a sensation. Um, Like the Teddy bear is already a thing, but it became more of a thing. There's there's camps as far as I remember, there's there's some some argument about that as well. Um but yeah, but but in the book, I link that to the condition of sort of actual bears in America at that time, where we were sort of shifting from a perspective where they were these menacing threats to something that we had pretty much brought to its knees and now needed to show Mercy's Roosevelt to read that told it, Yeah, sort of resonates, you know, as of course, now is the time to spare the bears life, and we can make them into this adorable thing that we give to our babies. Whereas you know, an eighteen thirty nobody out on the frontier is going to think of a bear as a cuddly thing that their child should should play with, right, it would be like giving your child a monster. Yeah, and you'd you'd said on the manufacturing kind of backstory, Um, and that's the thing that just like light bulb went off for me, was the one manufacturer had had a stuffed bear on the market, that it was kind of fierce looking with the hump on its back and more of an actual depiction of a representation of a bear complete with a hook through its nose or a ring through its nose and a chain did not sell very well. Oh yes, yeah, Well that was the thing is that when you look pretty teddy bear, there are no you know, I haven't done the historians have you. You just didn't see bear toys and when you did, this was one of the few examples where it was clearly a scary toy. It was meant to frighten children, It wasn't meant to comfort them. And even when the teddy bear starts taken off, as often happens, the kind of old guard at the toy industry is late to catch up. They can't get their heads around why suddenly people think bears are adorable and they're because they're just placing baby dolls. You know, this is scandalous. So there's a lot of there's a lot of backlash, you know, is what is the world coming to? That these chips were giving these children bears? And there were actually poems, epic poems about the fights between Teddy Bears and dolls at Christmas time, you know, and that the bears were slaying the dolls and things like this. So that the more I think that there was one called the Passing of the Dolls, which you know it was, it was just slow to catch up to the zeitgeist. Man, do you uh, can you explain shifting baseline syndrome? Yeah? But can we talk about possums first, because that's the take the footnote on the Teddy Bears story, because you were saying that you don't often see possums and the possums are not widely represented in children ship right, and so meaning mobiles, pajamas, teddy Bears, not at all. We do have a book, a children's book um that was sent that that my brother and sister in law sent us for our kids. It's the favorite of theirs and it's a children's book that was written in the sixties or seventies called Possum now to show kind of like changing our changing attitudes towards what's appropriate for children. Possum is largely about the whittling down of a large family unit of possums where there's the mother has It starts out the mother's in her den has a litter of twelve or thirteen, and throughout her summer's travels, they are uh whittled away throwing snakes, other things, snapping turtles, cars to where there's just a couple of them. And then one female survives and she gets bred up by a male and goes back into the den to have more. And it's just like the decimation of a possum family. But it's like presented as a children's book. Doc, what's the moral? What do you take away from it? Life is fleeting, the just make more. Life is fleeting in the natural world is at least as harrowing as ours. That's a good book. So I volunteered to go last year with my kids. In first grade, you had to volunteer to go read a book, and my wife signed me up to go read a story to the kids in class. And I went and read Possum, and Yeah, I didn't feel like I felt like the kids like it. I felt like that it made the teacher uncomfortable. Well, that's interesting because that's the point you bring up in the book and how you're saying how there's some research done with how kids react to like the brutality of nature and right, and the young kids are kind of like, yeah, like whatever, like protect me, and it's fine. I don't really care if all those things die, if if I can live on. And it's only as we get older that we sort of don't like that stuff anymore, like like how nature really. Yeah, there's there's a good research. I mean, there's this whole field of you know, human of human dimensions of wildlife they started calling it. But this Stephen Colored at Yale, I don't know if you ever come across this stuff. I think he passed away now, but yeah, in the seventies, he he kind of lad this whole body of research to just look at how do people think about animals? You know, what do we actually think? And the findings are are really counterintuitive and kind of crazy. I mean also to some of the questions they asked. I mean, he asked them to rate animals. You know, do you like ladybugs more than cougars? And we know what's smarter, you know, like a lobster or a dolphin. You know, just things like they just gut instincts. But one of the things that he he did was he got very interested in how children think about animals, and they don't think about animals the way adults think about children thinking about animals. So he showed, for example, that we we want to think of children as these innocent, peaceful things, and you know that's probably why we give them animals, which we also want to think of as innocent, peaceful things. Um. But it turns out, you know, you ask a three year old or I don't know the exact ages, but there's an age at which you ask a small child do you want to camp around other people? Or do you want to camp among animals? And they're gonna say other people because they're afraid of animals obviously, right, I mean, here's the evolutionary and some in some sense, but we forget all that, right, we we put these presumptions on them. So yeah, they want to you know, if a if a wolf I maybe getting the species, it could have been a coyote. But you know, if if a wolf of kyote comes and kills the farmer's chickens, what should the farmer do? Kill all the kill all the wolves? Right, that's the answer that the kids give you, um, and and a slight few adults will give you well, absolutely absolutely, But I think that we think that, you know, I think for a lot of conservation minded people, there's there's this presumption that, you know, the rancher wants to kill the wolf, he just has to get back in touch with his childlike love of of all living creatures. Right. Yeah. What I like about what I like about kids. An interesting thing about kids, and you see it, I see it my own all the time, is the the hard wired things about animals that come from just our species history, like just the innate distrust of serpents. Right, there's a lot of things that kid will want to go up and grab, but there's something they just I'm sure there's plenty of exceptions, but I find that kids are generally, without having someone discussed snakes with them, are generally like repulsed by a snake. Well, I know that there's research about that. I don't necessarily remember what it shows, but I do remember reading studies where they showed a kind of laddering of fears of animals, so that you know, younger kids are afraid of snakes. Thinking when you're on the ground, when you're crawling, you know you have a fear of snakes and maybe spiders and things like that, and then you're but you're not afraid of predator. You know, you're not afraid of a bear because you're probably not gonna have the opportunity to be put face to face with the bear. And how are fears are? The sort of innate fears that you're talking about seemed to be triggered as you as you age, which is kind of like a good operation, like crawling around on the ground before you can walk. You're running into a rack and it's snakes, potentially poisonous. You'll find the kids are kind of like they know, don't put that, that's right, and they're not and they're not afraid of guns, you know. All right? Oh you know what, because because you were feeling uneasy about it? Um, I want to get into William T. Hornaday. But do you want to do that first or do you want to explain this is nothing I've never heard by love it shifting baseline syndrome. I want you to talk to me about horn today. First, tell the story of horn today. The story Okay, so um, first off, we share and we share, uh a tendency to still use the word buffalo. Okay, it's like a type of dude to mean you say buffalo. There's the type of dude who wants to sort of he feels like he's engaging and who knows most about wildlife contest where he'll like to point out that there's that it's called the bison, as though you could know as much as you know about it, like as though I could have, for instance, written a whole book about the subject, but not picked up. I'm the fact that the name now is bison, Like that eluded me, and so someone needs to make sure to get ahold of me, because having written several hundred pages about this animal's history from the place to scene into the future, I had missed that fact. So there's like a there's like a who knows most e sort of thing about bison buffalo. But I still have a great affinity for the word buffalo. I noticed that you use it well. Horny himself encouraged people. Am I doing it? Who knows more? Thing? Right now? You know Hornaday and one of his books he starts out by saying, you know, the technical name is bison, but I'm gonna call it buffalo. And I believe Americans should call it buffalo because that's the popular term, right now and it shows sort of art. It gives us a greater investment in the animal to go with the populace. It's I have never in my life registered any confusion where I had said to someone, hey, man, did you notice all those buffalo like out that way? And they registered confusion when they didn't know what I was talking about, Like, no, I saw a bunch of bison, Yeah, you mean the bison nickel, do you like? I've never had someone registered confusion. So Hornaday now the last big at. I never know where to begin this story, I said, it's it begins in the begins in the place the scene. But at the end of the Civil War, there's two big herds of buffalo. We're gonna go buffalo here, there's two big herds buffalo left or people sort of perceived the remaining animals as being in these two large hurts um there's about fifteen million of them. There was what they called the Southern herd, which was sort of you can kind of imagine it being centered around Dodge City, Kansas and uh down in the Texas panhandle, the southern plains or south of the railroad. And then you have the Northern herd, which you could kind of imagine that being centered around UM, say, centered around Miles City, Montana, being up into up into Canada, south into Wyoming, and that was like the Northern herd. There was two big groups. They kind of shot. They killed the North the Southern herd off in eighteen They kind of reached a packs of slaughter around eighteen eighteen seventy two, and it was about a decade later that the Northern Pacific Railroad made it to Miles City and then they tapped out the last of the Northern herd and in that you know, they killed a million or two million or some number the hide hunters did, and I think it was eighteen seventy three, right pretty quick where they thought the last one. Hornaday, like William T. Horned a collected specimens for the Smithsonian, was actually very influential in the Smithsonian, proved wanted being very influential in the Bronx Zoo. Was a specimen collector. Hornaday knew that UM the animals around the way out. He was even sending letters to people trying to find places where it might be feasible to go get some specimens and determines it the best chance would be to take the Northern Pacific Railroad into Miles City. Now this is months months after the hide hunters were still shooting him for commercial markets. He's out just trying to find some and he goes up into the big Sandy area north in the tad east of Miles City, I believe, and when going up around the muscle shell, I think and uh, I was just trying to shoot museum specimens. Um. The parts of the story that I think are most interesting to me was uh when I said that we would have told the story differently, is I did don't really see one. I didn't see a ton of irony there, which I feel that you did. Irony in the sense that he was killing animals to preserve that. Yeah, I feel like you were being a little judgmental of him, as though he had sort of, um, who's the guy in the Bible that sound his way to go kill a bunch of people and get struck by Yeah, he has sort of you kind of tell it as though he had some sort of epiphany. You don't think he did well And then maybe not in that moment. I think the irony is that he himself went on to move from taxidermy to conservation. I mean, I think in some ways he invented, but he was already very he when he went out to collect his specimens. It wasn't like, um, he was like he was glad about this. No, he was tortured by it. Yeah, But but I just got the sense like um, that he kind of felt like, oh my god, and then he's so shortsighted. Oh, I see the distinction. Yes, I appreciate that's a that's a I get that critique. I guess he's like, there's I feel that he was thinking, there's nothing anyone's gonna do. There are guys out there right now, including Teddy Roosevelt, trying to shoot him. At least we would have some specimens for future generations to even understand this thing. Right, So my question to you would be, and that's not the part. There's two parts I thought were interesting. Was that, um that he was wading through during this time, waiting, almost literally wading through the carcasses and remains of the hide hunters. And two, did he had this observation that the people in Miles City when he later wrote about this experience, that the people in Miles City the hide hunters. We're waiting in Miles City, having no idea what they had done, and that they were just waiting there for the next big herd to show up. And over time, just while waiting for the next big herd that they thought would come out of Canada, some magical thing would happen where a million more would would flow through town. They would get back to their business just kind of gradually got into being saloon keepers or ranchers, and only gradually over the years realized that like, oh my god, we killed them all, that there was no comprehension of the finiteness of that resource. Like that's important to me because I feel that people oftentimes go and look at the hide hunters and find a sort of like there was maliciousness and greed, for sure, but there was also just a general like not understanding what you were doing going on. And I feel that relative to the people who were at actually out doing this, Hornaday was went into it a very enlightened individual, not just like yet another asshole laying on yet another layer of pathology onto this whole problem. Yeah, I agree, and I'm I regret that you felt that I was lumping him in. I mean, if that is if that's what you took away from it. Then I can see that that might be I might have been reading in heavy but now go ahead like maybe, yeah, well, I agree with you. I think he was incredibly enlightened relative to the to the thinking of his day. And I think that is what I wanted to call attention to, is what did enlightenment look like in that context? Right? I think that a big takeaway I I had from from looking at a lot of the issues in the book was the arbitrary nous with which people often decide what is possible and what is impossible? Bowl Right, he decided that all that was possible was to shoot a dozen buffalo and stuff them, and that was going to be how he preserved the species. He later proved himself wrong very quickly, you know, within a fifteen years, by actually setting up captive breeding programs, reintroduced producing you know what is maybe one of the first you know, reintroduction programs from a captive breeding program that he was doing at the Bronx Zoo. And that's an interesting story that people don't know. Yeah, it got so bad that day later to repopulate the West, we're bringing animals from the Bronx Zoo back west by Rail. Yes, and he was probably the major force in that project. So I think it's interesting that the William Temple Hornaday of could probably could look back on the William Hornaday of eighteen nineties something and say, and that guy didn't really even understand what was possible the same way that And that's how I'm looking at him, you know, because you kind of get into a similar thing about polar bears, not similar, but another thing of like of people sort of feeling there at the end of something and trying to prevent the end. Yeah, for a species. I think that we're quick to I think the polar bears is get example. I think that we're quick to when we don't know the future, fill it in with ah negative assumptions, right, and that that was what Hornday is doing. I think that. I guess I don't necessarily see the parallel of polar bears. Do you want to do you want to frame that a little bit better? Well, yeah, that right now it's not a perfect parallel. But the effort that you're talking about, like the effort that people go through on the Hudson's Bay to move polar bears out of the troubled path. Well, does mean like, um, like extraordinary things we do for beleaguered species. Yeah, that was the That was what got me going on the book, just realizing the degree to which these animals are being managed. You know, I talked about uh sort of stage managing a lot of the species. You know that that were you know, a lot of endangered species are being captively bred, reintroduced into ecosystems that were also engineering for, you know, so that they can thrive in them. So all this work is being done on their behalf. Every part of the equation is being micromanaged. Um. The example with the sea turtles, Yeah, yeah, I mean that was a story I did for the Times magazine when during the Gulf oil spill. You know, I went down and and they were digging up I don't know if you guys remember there is a big news story at the time, but the government is digging up sea turtle nests on the Gulf coast, shipping the egg driving the eggs in a FedEx truck to the East coast of Florida to Atlantic coast of Florida, and reburying the I don't know if they were reburying them or just letting them hatch and putting the hatchlings out in the water because they didn't want the turtle hatchlings in the Gulf Coast to be swimming directly into the spill. And I went down to Alabama and hung out with this UH, a group of mostly retired folks who had been for years had just been walking around the beach barricading the nests so that people wouldn't trample them or you know, accidentally dig them up to protect them. And then what they would do is when they were getting close to hatching, they would just camp out on the beach around the nests. And when the turtle hatchlings started to boil out of the sand, since they wouldn't want them going away from the water toward the artificial light, because their their instinct is to go toward the light UH, and they often get stranded in parking lots and things they go on the wrong direction. They wanted him go into the ocean, so they would sit around the nest. When the hatchling start coming up, they would dig a trench to funnel them towards the ocean. So they had no other options but to go right into the ocean and then they would stand with tarps around the trench to block the light, so that basically they're just escorting them. I mean they could have just dug them up and carried them out, and sometimes they had to do that too, but they would stay up all night waiting for these hatchlings. I mean that is people's lives. An ordinate amount of their time is being spent to get this these nests. And during the spill, it turns out they were the experts that the the government had to call on. They were the people with the relevant experience who could go dig up these It was sort of like this Armageddon situation, you know, like the movie army Ageddon and that's the phone call of your lifetime. Oh they were so psycked, you know. And they were and they were also I don't want to say this with a tone of uh, you know, I want to judge them harshly for it. I thought it was amazing. They were let's just say they were. They were feeling good about themselves, you know, they were telling people what to do. They knew they were the experts. This was their moment and they weren't gonna let anyone funk with their turtles and it was great to see, you know, it was great to see someone who just had this sort of any hobby who's you know, kids and nephews and nieces probably tease them about. You know, you get up every morning and you walk on the beach looking for turtle tracks, you know, and uh, you know these people they had turtles painted on their their cars and turtles hanging from their rear view mirrors, and their whole life had been about sea turtles and now they were stepping in to save this uh, this generation of turtles. It was amazing. Yeah, we like in the hunting world, you're surrounded by that um all the time. With the way that people like people who kind of pulled off the turkey reintroduction and recovery and even then, so I know people who have like devoted their lives, who have devoted their their life to elk, or people who devote their life to quail. For people dev over their life to turkey. And there I'm always like, I just understand it right because I see like what it was born of. But it is I look at the turtle thing and I'm like, man, and those people will do it without even the promise of having turtle soup. It's not even part of the equation. M R. Yeah, And so what is that value? I mean, that's that's exactly what I'm interested in, is when the value of the animals gets unmoored from any practical anything. Um, it's because a guy would be like, man, I've always just dreamed of hunting turkeys, so I got real involved and bringing turkeys back to my state. But for a turtle guy, it's just that turtle hits the water and you will never lay eyes on it again. And I agree with you. The turkey guy on an intuitive level makes a lot more sense to me. And I think that's why I'm drawn to figure out the other side of it, the other part of it. Okay, I was gonna have you. I can't decide now that's the only talking about shifting baseline syndrome. And oh the term that you've been talking about and also want to talk about. I want you to touch on conservation reliance of species, but I also want to talk about pedals. The bear from your perspective is do you see a good order to do that? Uh? Well, conservation reliance, I think we can get through pretty quickly. I mean, that's basically just what I was talking about. That's the technical term for the idea that it's going to take intensive management on the part of humans to keep in endangered species alive. So there was a study that came out that introduced this term, I believe in early two thousand's by a guy named Mike scot who at the time I was maybe with Fish and Wildlife some federal agency, and uh, he came up with this term conservation reliance because they looked at every species on the dangered species list, and they looked at what, you know, tried to forecast what outcomes you know are possible, and basically realized that some huge percentage something in the eighties, I believe just eighty something percent of these species are going to be reliant on human intervention for the foreseeqable future. And that doesn't mean that, you know, it could just be getting weeds out of their ecosystem so that the whatever you know, plant they need is there um or it could be a much more intensive captive breeding type of thing, but that the equilibrium in which these species evolved has been disrupted to such an extent that we're always going to be like I'm saying, stage managing. Yeah, like it would be fair to say you could. You can probably name a bunch because your research. But the California condor lives in a state of conservation reliance absolutely, and that that goes from everything from you know, I believe they're still captively breeding them, but they're definitely, I mean, they teach them not to perch on power lines. You know, they have to train them to live in the world where they have to live. Now, Um, exactly do you think of other ones? Sure? I mean the one I write about in the book is this butterfly species and Lang's metal more arc where it's uh, you know, been winnowed down to such an extent where they go out they collect butterfly eggs off leaves of its host plant. They take it to a lab in southern California, is outside San Francisco. They take it to a lab in southern California. They breathed them there, they let the eggs hatch, they and then they put the larva back on the plant. Then they go back collect some of the live butterflies, bring them back to the lab, have them uh breed, and do the whole process all over again. Meanwhile, they've got a full time fish and Wildlife service employer, at least did it as a couple of years ago. I know whose job was to groom the ecosystem. He was basically like a caretaker for the butterfly's property, and he was doing all sorts of invasive controls to make sure that that host plant could get a footing on the sand dunes where it lives. So that's a pretty extreme case I think, where every part of what used to be a natural process has to be done by hand, by human hand. Yeah, there's a certain type of person who looks at that and they feel like an anger towards the species. Yeah. I think there's part of that in me, honestly. I mean I think that's why I was so wrapped up in this, because I couldn't see my way through to any you know, discernible, clear, defensible position. Yeah. I I've always lived, or I just live with this sense that it's deeply immoral two um, to allow species to go extinct because of our because of our influence, our influences on the environment. To be like to be like there there's parts of creation, whether you take that in a religious way or in just like an ecological way, that there's parts of creation that we've decided are um that we can just throw away or allowed to be thrown away because we don't want to be inconvenience by it. I feel like if we've a I that if we're there, if we've arrived at that point, we really don't have any claimed any kind of moral legitimacy anymore. Do you think we're not at that point? I don't think a lot of people at that point. The person I run into on this, I mean, yeah, plenty of people are at that point, and I think they don't have any kind of claimed moral legitimacy either. Is uh we started talking about well like a migration corrid or you know, you have to be great if you didn't graze that down to nothing. It would be better if you uh had you know, a clean single top strand with no barbs on it, on your barbed wire fans be better if there was no barbed wire fans um. And you always hit this point where well where does it end? You know? And that's the person on these when we get into these arguments and talks on this subject, that's the person always shows up like, yeah, but how far are you gonna take on well, like I can't I put you know demmit or I had the no light ordinance on my beach front house. So okay, I did that. But you know you're now you're asking me to you know, not you know, use my back porch at all, or you know where does it end? Yeah, that's the thing that people like, let's run this out to the point where everyone will see the absurdity of yes and yeah. And there's another thing about it, Like in the case of the Condor, there's a there's an interesting argents we made that the Condor could be considered to be one of the Pleistocene extinctions. It just took a long time to arrive there. So at the Pleistocene Holla scene transition, when we lost mastodons, Woolleye mams, giant ground slaw short faced bears, we lost all these animals, um and a sort of sis in on what what did it? Because it wasn't human caused. It's mysterious some combination of some combination of climate change at the at the end of the last Ice Age, some combination of climate change influence from uh successional waves of humans coming from Asia, you know, Ice Age hunters um. Possibly disease issues no one really understand. Possibly there's this the idea that never really dies, whatever really gets going of um some like cosmic disturbances that caused the extinctions. But you have this big gass bird that's a feeds on carrion, and whether you know lead ammo or not, or power lines are not, you'd have just seen that bird fizzle out the way that many, many dozens of other species fizzled out at the end of the places scene because they just took a long time to happen. They were all over the I believe, all over the continent, right and they just the last remaining ones just happened to be the ones at the very western edge. Because if they found a way to begin that, they found a way to kind of exploit marine map dead marine mammals, and then people will be like, there's nothing you were gonna do, or it was just gonna happen, the same way if we had caught the tail end of some other the end of the mammoths and we grappled and be like, wow, why what do we do when maybe it was just gonna happen. Yeah, But how do you guys answer that because it's like, okay, well who gets to choose? Are you Steve, Rinella or John. I am not going to be the guy that signs the paper that says let it go for all humanity we just stopped right now. I will not I will not be the guy that says it all right, So I s want to touch on pebbles. I want to touch on giant sequoias in the Karl Marx Tree. Want to talk about uh pedal. I already said pedals shifting baseline syndrome, right, because it's like an important part of your book. Yeah, I think at this point it's important part of my life. I think it really has colored the way I think about a lot of things. Uh shifting baseline syndrome. I wanted her up Tuesday. This is all in. Everything we've covered mostly so far is in. It's in wild Ones. Yeah, we're going we're going through the book, John wu Allams wild Ones still available, still available, uh shifting baseline syndrome. So yeah, this is the idea I stumbled on when I was actually writing about that that butterfly, and I find that it's something that gives a name to a lot of phenomenon that we come across all the time. Shifting baseline syndrome was the phrase was coined by a marine fisheries scientist named Daniel Pauly Ah in the nineties, and what he was what he realized was that people in his field, we're coming in and and spending their careers documenting the crash of different fish species. So they were looking at everything happening in the ocean from the time they started their career to the time they retired more. I mean, obviously they knew more than that, but this was their focus. And then the next generation of academics would come along or scientists would come along, and they would start basically with a clean slate intellectually, so they would start documenting the decline of fish species further. But because we're always looking at the world through this window of the present, we never really see that I should start that all over again. I'm not doing this idea very I'm tracking. I'm tracking, but I already understand it again. Shifting baseline syndrome was a phrase coined by Daniel Polly, who's a fisheries scientist. Don't get discouraged, man, discourage it's a discouraging idea. I guess the idea basically that Uh, he was noticing that people were documenting the crash of marine species, but no one was really putting together that the crashes that they were or the declines that they were documented within their own careers, were actually just slivers on a much longer graph of time, so that each time a new generation would come along, they would accept the condition in which they were looking at the ocean as normal, and they would document the decline relative to that normal. But if you zoom out and you look at you know, instead of a fifty years span or or thirty year span, you look at a hundred years span or tuner year span, you see a much steeper decline, So that these little line graphs that we're drawing and and freaking out about are actually just slivers of this much much bigger graph. UM. And I think that that there's another term for pretty much the same phenomenon. UH. Peter Khan is a psychologist at the University of Washington. Around the same time, he coined the term environmental generational amnesia, which actually think is a cooler term, didn't catch on quite as much, but UH and that was more widely applicable, so He would go to kids in Houston and he would say, you know who live among oil refiners And he would say, do you think your neighborhoods polluted? They say no, right, because that's the you know, we just kind of assume it's normal and whatever we inherit, it's normal. Uh. And so we watch all this stuff happen, and you know, people get old and grumpy and talk about how it used to be. But of course when they were kids, they were grump people you know who are old at that time talking about how it used to be a generation before that. And I think this is like a really important thing to recognize. And then having recognized it, I don't know what the funk to do about it because it just screws me up. I still cannot what do you do with this information? What do you do with the information that your perspective is sort of inherently flawed. I struggle with it all the time, and reading that term like I've been. My mom still lives in the house where I was brought up in, you know, born and on, and it's on a lake. So I've been a very careful observer of that lake for forty three years. And yes, the Eden, Eden for that lake is when I was five, and first I was able to take it in. But I do oftentimes wonder about like the time machine thing. It wouldn't be my first pick, but if I had ten picks with a time machine, one stop would be that lake in pre human times, to go like, so what is the actual baseline? But you're right, I in my mind it was like that lake's history began when I first gazed upon it, and everything since then. And now my child, my boy, who fishes that lake a few days every year, will someday have it be that that moment when I first took him there to fish blue Girls was Eden, and everything will just be whatever has slipped from that point, And my story is about what it was like. He won't. He'll be able to understand that, but it won't factor into his own monitoring of its decline, right, and which it will be that lake was born on that day? And which baseline? Do you attach the legitimacy too? Because you could dial up your time machine and go back to whatever year. I tend to think of things as being for me, just because it allows me to like begin to sort of put my arms around things I tend to when thinking about wild life in America, the arrival of human beings tends to be where I where this For me, that's where the story begins. And I agree with you, I think instincially that makes a lot of sense. But because some people will be in Wyoming and they'll be thinking about when it was the Great Inland Sea whose shorelines were populated by dinosaurs, But I don't care about that. I automatically go to what was it like fourteen thousand years ago for whatever reason, just because in our effort to understand and make sense of and begin having a conversation, that's just where I jump. But that basically invalidates our presence here. That says that our goal as responsible citizens of these ecosystems is to have zero is to be as if we were not here, that they would be repopulated with mammoth. Yes, and yeah, I think you're setting yourself up for failure. But yeah, it's it's and it's just where. And it's a problem thinking ahead too, right, it's a problem thinking you know. Use the example in the book is the bald eagle recovery. Right, you know that when when the bald eagles were delisted as in danger species. There was a lot of triumphant talk about how many you know bald eagles were. Of course it was just a minor fraction of the number of bald eagles that there were, you know, at well, for example, at your baseline, right, um, And so when do you know how many? Benjamin Franklin was criticizing that as being scummy exactly, So, how many are there supposed to be? Right? How do we know if we've succeeded, and how do we know if we failed? If we can't agree on what the legitimate you know, what the should be of the equation is. I don't know, but you can find out because we're having this conversation all the time right now. We're engaged in it around the idea of wolves and grizzlies in the lower forty eight how many like what could like the what is the most reasonable picture of recovery based on the fact that there's this thing we have to deal with called reality? Well, how many do we want? That's the question I like to ask, you know, and I think that's a much more complicated question. I mean, a lot of the conservation, I mean, there's a lot of cases of species that have rebounded only to be greeted by distaste or take take the case, go ahead, No I can say, like, yeah, man, it quickly swings that pendulum to where like oh Canada geese, Candida GeSe, is you know, saving them? And now like you can't find a person probably like walking in our country that can even remember when people were trying to save that bird. Yeah, that's a good point. Things that we've recovered, like there are states who are doing active reintroductions of deer, white tailed deer. So now the new villain is the aggressive turkey. Yeah I read that keeping people from getting out of their cars, right, these are And meanwhile we had to go through extraordinary measures to recover the species. And now it's like these dumb, violent birds preventing me from getting in and out of my car. And now you've got the de extinction people you know that. Oh yeah, they want to bring back passenger pigeons. Well I don't think American civilization is ready for swarms of passenger pigeons. They're gonna block out the sun. Yeah, can you refer our listeners back to our episode. You look at what episode we did with the ancient DNA expert Dr beast Shapiro about de extinction can just be good both the goose and and the turkey. I mean how they're significant portion portions of our population that if you were to mention that species to them, they'd be like, Oh, the goddamn things that ship all over my lawn scratch up my car. They have no reference of those anim roles anywhere other than that. It's like I live on a golf course and I have to step in their poop every day. I hate those things very shortsighted. Or yeah, looking at it from the perspective of your own lifetime, do you find the number? Episode seventy five, we explore date the extinction with a professor and we cover just that topic about what it would really be like to have, you know, billions of passenger pisness back again, and why she thinks you don't really need to worry about it too much. Um, here's another version of the here's another version of how much's too many? And what does recovery look like? So we've got it now, we're up to over a half million buffalo and so people say, like, what does recovery look like? And they say, there's two types of recovery. There's dealing with its genetic extinction, which we've dealt with. It's no longer at risk of genetic extinction, but it's there's still a risk of ecological extinction because of the half million that we have are privately owned, are managed as livestock, so there's no risk of losing the animal. But what we've lost is the species interaction, the species native interaction with the landscape. So we haven't like that won't maybe won't be recovered or will recover it, and just small little spots where we can kind of replicate what the animal was beyond just it's it's genetic makeup, how it influenced and was influenced and was influenced by the landscape on which it lived. Um, but yeah, it's going on all the time. Um, what should the world look like? I don't know. I mean I think that that gets back to your what you're saying before about you know, when do we give up on something because it's inconvenient. Well, the reason why it's often perceived as any convenient is because the context in which it existed is gone, you know, I mean I think it the questions start to parallel, like palliative care questions, you know, and the kind of questions you know, when what is the it's not necessarily quality of life. I'm not gonna get into the emotional well being of the animals, but you know, in some sense, these these critters become invasive species in their own ecosystem. You know, they're just not locked in in the way that they used to be. And I don't have an answer for that. I don't know when it's not worth preserving them. Yeah, it's like preserve it's like keeping a person alive in a vegetative state. Yeah. What what is your prime example of a native species becoming an invasive species in their own ecosystem. Well, I think that that butterfly goes goes a long way to explain. I mean, this was a sand dune ecosystem about an hour used of San Francisco called the Antioch Dunes that very quickly became ah leveled after the I think the big burst was after the nine earthquake in San Francisco when they were mining the dunes for bricks. But just wave after wave of exploitation of that resource until literally, you know, you could see talking about shifting. Basically you could actually see you know, the baseline of the dune, you know, lowering um when you look at when you look at photographs um and it it stopped being a dune ecosystem. The sand stopped shifting, Uh, you know, trees took root. It became a you know, a savanna, and it became like a you know, there's oak trees growing there now. So to come back and say we want to preserve this butterfly that is used to living on a you know, a particular kind of plant that grows in the sand dune ecosystem, you've got to do a lot of work to the ground before you start putting the butterfly back. And I mean, I think the condor in some sense too, as you're talking about like the you know, the entire matrix of circumstances that allowed it to evolve, it's just not really there. It's just hanging onto this because it learned to probably eat you know, marine mammal carcasses and things like that, so it adapted a little bit. But it's not behaving the same way that a condor would have in the past. And you know, I'm not judging it, but it's something about its condor nest is gone. Yeah, yeah, And I don't know. I mean, I just think that the point I got to, you know, basically, and I'm surprised that some people find this discouraging because I find it really encouraging. Is the point I got to is just a kind of deep acceptance of the fact that these questions are not going to be resolved. That being as powerful as species as we are and trying to exist in a world that's as complicated as it is is gonna mean that we're creating all this friction around us all the time, and it's kind of amazing. We feel somewhat compelled to even be responsible to the rest of the planet and to try to minimize that that friction or at least you know, put back together whatever we're breaking as we kind of trundle around. So I don't have any fantasy, you know, this whole idea that there's some hope that if we just all start, you know, stop drinking bottle water or whatever it is, or you know, driving prius, is that suddenly the Earth is going to be restored to this beautiful equilibrium and we won't have to think about these things anymore. I think is is sort of ludicrous. And I think that what we need to be doing is figuring out how to exist in this tussle of um priorities and clumsiness and uh, just kind of hashing it out. It's just like a it's like a brawl, you know. We just gotta be in there swinging away trying to fix all this stuff because we're going to be constantly destroying it all the time. Two, there's a quote you have for another piece you wrote that I wrote down the future is always somebody else's problem. It will very likely feel as authentic and only as horrific as our moment does to us. Yeah, I think I said, I think I a a should said the future is always somebody else's present, which is the shifting baselines thing? Is that what I say, problem probably right here in the future is always somebody else's present. Yeah, well very likely, I'm sorry, it will very likely feeling as authentic and only as horrific as our moment does us. They won't have a new people won't recalibrate to experience all other level of horrific. I hope not. I mean, that's I think even if Corman McCarthy's the road right, there's only so much anxiety to go around. I don't think you find a new way to achieve a new level of anxiety. It's normal, it's your normal. It's no. And I think the perfect example of it is going back to Hornaday is you're saying, now, he was lamenting that all the kids were playing indoors, none of the kids were getting outside enough. And what is our generation of with young kids lament about right now? You know, a hundred years later, it's the same thing, right, Yeah, I think we're, if anything, maybe we're less concerned than he was. You know, he was drive and nuts by that. Yeah. I'm just living my life. I wish my kids played outside more, but I'm not writing writing screens about it. Have you read his book of going up into BC No, hunting mountain goats, grizzlies and big horns. That's Horny, right, You sent me that book? Yeah, camp fires in the Rocky No, I've never read that one. You haven't read it. No, he's a big game hunter. Yeah he liked it. Oh yeah, Okay, Now, how how big explained to me? How big a sequoia is. It's fucking big. I just read your piece about tekoia Is and you're as funny because in the beginning our guests John Wullen is saying, like, I suppose I need to talk about how big they are. Yeah, that's just everyone talks about how big they're, but no, let's focus on how big they are. I figured, I'm gonna sit down and write a piece about sequoia Is. I can't really try to be cute about it. We're gonna deal with this head on and just get it out of the way, because you really need to. Even if you're not going to understand the feeling of being next to something big that I'm telling you, you at least need to remember that. It's all it's the preoccupation. We can't gloss over it, but you you first off, um, before we talk about how big there, how did it come to be there that you did a piece about visiting the so the because it wasn't like a doom and gloom piece. No, So The Times magazine does a travel issue a couple of times a year, Yeah, a couple of times a year, and this one, this was about a year ago. Their idea was to just ask writers to go somewhere you've always wanted to go in the US. Um, you've never been before. And I mean there was a lot of places I wanted to go, And partially it was dictated by the timing. I didn't have a lot of times I need to go somewhere relatively close. Um, But I'd always I always wanted to go. I spend some time him in the Redwoods. But something about the Sequoias, And I think, honestly, it might just be the name. It might have just been the exotic nous of the name. You know, Redwood. You know it's all right there in Sequoia. There's a little more mystery to it. Um. It leaves something something to the imagination, it sure does. It feels a little more magical. Um. Yeah, that's just always been fascinated by him. So I just wanted to see what would happen if I went and stood around some really big trees. Yeah. It's a cool piece. And in it you're trying to you're struggling with how big they are. And one of the ways you express it would be that if you filled the biggest one is what's his name? I know that they used to call it the Carl Marks Generals General Sherman Tree. That it went from the Carl Marks Tree to the General sherw Is that the General Sherman Tree? I think, yeah, serm, they call it Sherman for short. Yeah, that if you filled that thing with water, you're saying, so it's the largest tree on earth by volume, and if you filled it with water, a person could draw a bath from that reservoir of water every single day for twenty seven years for exhausting the water. Or that a limb fell off it, So a branch off a coniferous tree seven ft thick on fifty ft long, and you point out that that would be one of the biggest that limb would be one of the biggest trees east of the Mississippi, west of the Mississippi, east of the Mississippi. Sorry, big damn trees. Yeah, that was the kind of thing that drove it home for me. Yeah, I've never heard that one. A branch that's seven ft across. Yeah, Yeah, that one gets repeated a lot around the park. Yeah. What's funny is you talking the piece about how you wanted to take a photo. How frustrating is like you cannot take a photo of the tree because people looking at it will just they'll shrink the other trees. So the trees that it's towering above, they'll be like, oh, those are shrubs, and your head will always make the tree makes sense. And John though about how he finally gets a picture that he really likes and sends to a friend and she mistakes it for a tree in his backyard. Yeah, it was amazing. Not everything I did to try to get a good picture of these trees backfire, like I had. At one point, I had someone take a picture of me on a on a ridge overlooking five or six sequoias, right, and so that all that's in the picture is me and these sequoias. And when you look at it, you think that I'm standing in front of a few regular sized trees that are right behind me instead of like two feet behind me, because your eye just brings them right up. It just finds a way to make them seem normal. Like it doesn't want to deal with it. It just can't deal with it. It just can't deal with it. But when you get up to it, do you feel it? Then? Yes, yeah, I really did. I'm not a as we discussed, I'm not a nature writer in the in the sense of someone who wants to go stand next to tree and feel things. Uh, but yeah, I mean it's hard to say. I was there to go see what it's like, to see what it feels like to be next to a tree. So I was, you know, turned on a little bit more than if I was just walking around. But I cannot see how that those trees can disappoint you if you go to see them. Um, I mean, if you do, I think there's something dead inside in you. Can you touch real quick on as well as you remember it? Can you touch real quick on? Uh? The sort of history with this utopian colony, yeah, yeah, and how they wanted to finance their colony, so there was a Kawak colony. So the history of the park was really interesting in the sense that, ah, you know, we think about these um well, there's a couple of things. First is that people have always been trying to cut down the sequoias from the time that you know, white people discovered them. They thought it's a bonanza, right, these huge trees. And the problem with sequoias is you can't really cut them down very well because they splinter, so they would there were a lot of trees that were cut down and then just basically you could starts to Yeah, well when when it hits the ground, just it's not good lumber. So a lot of people wasted a lot of trees trying to figure out how to use them as resources and just couldn't figure it out. Um, but they kept trying. So in any case, this, uh, there was a federal act that was encouraging people timber and stone actively was called that was encouraging people to go out west and and uh, you know log trees. And this group of people in San Francisco who are socialists, utopian socialist decided that they were gonna team up and buy a lot of land inside what is now Sequoia National Park. Um. And this was gonna be how they were going to fund their utopia was by cutting down trees. And I don't know how you do remember how long they were the first they had to build a road. Well, interesting thing about it was because they all lived together other yeah they were, they were, They all had the same address. And they found that corporations would do bogus stuff with to do land claims. So their land came claim got messed up because they thought it was just a corporation using fictitious names. Right, Yeah, Well that's the end of the story. That's the whole beginning of the story, is that they actually got the land and started building road, started building a w They spent a year or something cutting this road, you know, straight uphill for miles to get to the biggest stand of sequoias, to chop them down, to chop them down. And this whole time there's a there's a kind of a clerical error, you know, there's a bureaucratic wrangling over their claims because, as you say, there was that sort of raised the red flag that they all had the same address at this time corporation. They would just go into saloons and they'd you know, buy someone a beer to go down to the to the office and and make a claim on a piece of land so that they could buy it back from them. So the fact that all these utopians where you you all lived, or using the same address, um made them seem like a corporation. So in any case, this is all play out. They just they're building their roads on good faith that eventually the government's going to see that this is an honest mistake and validate their claim. But in the meantime, it was actually partially due to the railroad interests who wanted to build the railroad along a certain route. Uh, they built, they founded sequ federal government found in sequa National Park and stripped them of their claim, which they never officially had in the first place. So they had improved all this land. So the big government coming in and screwing the social screw and the socialists at the behest of large corporations in order to create a national park and preserve this kind of national natural treasure. How far we've come, it's all scrambled up. How far. It's really hard to see the you know, the typical good guys and bad guys in that in that story. And they but they recognized the tree is they knew like the biggest one Sherman. They recognized it as like, man, though there's a tree. Yeah, they did. The Coral Mark Street they did. They used to have picnics under it, and they were they would have cut it down anything. I don't know. I mean, they had a lot of tree used to go through. I mean I also wonder if they would have maybe figured out pretty quickly that these trees were not going to really you know, no one had figured out a way to basically monetize these trees. Um, and they were just optimistic enough to figure that they could do it. I guess how lucky for the sequoia is they're not good for longer. That's right. It's a touching article. Then I liked it, thanks, Um, And then I still want to come background and talk about your piece about Petals the Bear. Yeah, Petals the Bear. A little synopsis there, Yeah, because you were asked to write about influential people, right, so the influential people of what year this was? Last year? This is so the magazine also does a lot the lives they lived. It's an issue. It's like obituaries. It's a bituaries. It's every year between Christmas and New Year's where there's you know, remarkable people that have died. Each get a short essay about them. And the idea I think is, you know you've got your big you know, your David Bowie's people like that. You know they'll be definitely some of those, But I think the bulk of the issue is always devoted to people who you may not have heard of, but you know they've had this profound impact in one way or another, and so it's a it's a good time to kind of look back on the people who maybe didn't get their due, either in life or in the year in which they died. Is I'm doing one right now by a sociologist that no one's ever heard of. Um, but last year I did one about a bear, which I think was maybe the only the second time there had been an animal. I can't say it was the first thing. They had also done one about the Remember when the chimp tore off the woman's face. Yeah, so the chimp got one? Yeah, um, but yeah, pedals the bear was earlier. Speaking of chimps earlier, I was trying to think of ways to explain horn today, and I was thinking, what if Jane Goodall had gone out to shoot chimps as the way of having a couple of stuffed ones laying around, this would be a very different story. Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about I think that's exactly what it must have been like. Instead, she's like, you know what, I'm no, hold off on that and try to do um but no, but she was just studying them anyways. I didn't mention because I didn't think it was a good analogy, but it did cross my mind. But yeah, pebbles, pedals, Pedals show some respect for the dead. Yeah. Pedals was a black black bear in New Jersey, Northern New Jersey, which is also where I grew up. And he had some kind of injury or deformity on his paws and uh so he had learned to walk upright. So he spent a lot of time just cruising around through suburban neighborhoods on his hind legs. Had an affinity for bird feeders. Yeah, I'm sure in garbage cans and so people would you know, there are a lot of videos of Pedals on the internet because it was crazy looking, you know, I mean it looked at People would always describe it as looking like a man in a bear suit. Yeah. He would go quite a few steps. He was good. Yeah, he can move, He can move, and so they called him Pedals. Uh. And then he was shot by bow hunter I believe um or as one. I can't remember what publication in New York he was assassinated. Yeah, there had been a big there had been a big effort to I mean, what I was basically writing about was the big argument that unfolded the summer before he died, about what to do about him, whether there was a big camp of uh, you know, pro pedals partisans who believed that he needed to be brought in from the wild and sent to a rehab facility to live out his days. And deeper background is that when we talked about how many is enough, uh, New Jersey had very successfully this is me talking about New Jersey had very successfully recovered the black bear to the point where the state Fish and Game Agency felt that, in execution of their mandate about allowing democratic access to renewable resources, felt that the species had been recovered enough that it was warranted to allow hunting for couple of reasons, One because there was a a harvestable surplus of the animals and two that they had hit a point where they felt that they could not have anymore or somewhere needed the lower populations to limit their spread into higher conflict areas. So this is a determination they made, and they allowed, and they came up with a quota system and started a bear season. And I think petals people, I knew what this might mean for pedals, and I think pedals people all along. I mean that that decision to reinstate the bear hunt did not go down well, along a huge share of the population New Jersey. So I think a lot of the the feeling for pedals was already triggering, you know, triggered by a lot of upset over the fact that bears are being hunted. Petals became a proxy. Yeah, it's always a proxy, isn't it? Because people can't because not people. A lot of people can't think species level. Yes, they can only think individual level. I think that's exactly right. And even when comprehending their own species, I find that a lot of people do not think species level. When I hear that a plane went down, and then I see that that plane went down in Belarus, I'm like, oh, glad it wasn't America, right, Or if a plane went down in America, I quickly like run in my head, would that be a flight that people I know would be on? I wouldn't know anyone on that plane. So we do. We have a difficult time with species level thinking about we focus on the known and finite. Well, especially when you give the animal name and it becomes a Internet celebrity and yeah, so go on, so follow us through on pebbles. Well, so in the you know, as petals rises to fail. Can call them pebbles. I don't know. Pedal lung was the Yeah, that's because stepping on the joke here, pebbles is the flintstone girl is not pedals because he like with pedal lungs. Yeah, he had wheel he's moving. Uh so. Yeah. So there was a there's a lot of talk about what to do about pedals and a lot of anger that among you know, this one side of the debate that the state was not helping pedals, that the compassionate thing to do would be to bring pedals out of the wild, you know, and let him live in captivity. And when we want to say captivity, I mean, you know, at some sort of sanctuary, not in And what was the state's attitude towards the state's attitude was this bear has adapted to its condition, seems to be doing well. It's doing all the things the bear needs to do to survive. The compassionate thing to do is to let the bear be wild. And that's what intrigued me, is that fundamental predicament where both sides at the same exact facts and both wanted to do the compassionate thing and had completely different ideas about how to how to do it, and then he was then he was killed, so the debate was over. You didn't have any chance to talk to the guy that got it, did you know? So that no, one, that's not public information because there were some rumors about various people who you were the hunter who took Pedals down, and those people received death threats, and so I think one actually sued some people for defamation after that, for outing his name or suggesting that he was the Yeah. I don't know what what ended up with that, but yeah, so it was very tense, and I do wonder about the guy that got it. I'd like to imagine that he was not I hope that he was just not aware. Yeah, well that's the question I asked in the pieces. We don't know if so Pedals did not own stand on too. I mean, he he did walk around on all fours like a regular bear at times. So it's possible, you know that whoever killed Pedals caught him on all four, caught him on all fours, had no way of knowing those different bear on the other On the other hand, if the bear was upright, then the very thing that made Pedals such a survivor ultimately probably drew attention to him caused his death, which I think it's a sad irony. Yeah. And I imagine New Jersey's a state where you have to report your harvest immediately upon kill jeckstation, and they knew the minute it pulled up. I read the Once pedals showed up, They're like, oh god, yeah, well, pals nature of the deformity. Well, I believe I could have this wrong. I believe he was missing one paw and the other was either it was sort of bent inward, so it was kind of useless. Um. Yeah. And and I should stipulate here that the state to this day does not um confirmed at pedals was the bear that was brought to the check station. They will just say that it fit pedals description because they've never tagged pedals and so they don't like to identify the bear. Um So, I don't know if that's significant. Anyway, I thought it was sort of interesting that there's a sort of shrouding or bear aspect to it. You know that even even that is uncertain, you know, technically, That's where it always makes me cringe. We have a running joke about like New Jersey cat ladies, but it always makes me cringe when people who I feel like aren't equipped to begin talking about wildlife when they enter wildlife conversations, like they haven't really earned their place at the table in my in my opinion and my estimation, they haven't earned their place at the table. And I don't think that a position at the table is reliant on the fact that your pro extraction of wildlife resources are pro use. I feel like you can have a place at the table and be ardently anti hunting or anti use of renewable resources. It's like, sure, I welcome those conversations, but oftentimes there's little things will happen that all of a sudden just invite people who are ill prepared, not up to speed, to like get in on it. And that was one of those cases where all of a sudden, just everyone kind of became a bear expert for a minute, and you saw a similar thing happened. There was no poster child for it. But like, did you write about or follow and and like you know you, I want to ask you about hunting the deer in your yard, but um, did did you follow the Florida bear hunt? When Florida went through a similar thing and initiated a yeah. They said they had a population estimate of bears in Florida. Um that it's just based on modeling, so it's a soft number. They set a quota for their bear season. They opened the season up I think it was in two days. They were getting close to this. In two days, they got close enough to their quota, their mortality quota, that they shut the season down because were they to run it a whole other day. They felt that they might go over the quota, so they shut it off before they hit their mortality cap. Some of the world looks, some of the country looks at this and says, wow, Florida did a great job with bears. It almost seems like their model was low and they have more bears than they thought they had. They planned out this hunt and had all the measures put in place to make sure that they didn't surpass their mortality quota, had the restraint and conservative management strategy to shut down before reaching their quota. What a successful launch of a bear hunt. Hooray for Florida, or as some um as one I can't Another New York online news magazine I can't remember the name of put it at Florida executes two bears like or there's that version, you know, and the fact that these two versions can just exist together out there, it's just like it befuddles me. But I think it's this kind of conversation we're having in general now about the polarized nature of America. Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say, this kind of partisan deadlock that everything is about now the wildlife people, this is like the most familiar thing in the world, right that, like I was saying before, two sides can have the exact same information, see the situation completely differently and not want to budge. That's the story of wildlife, but also in the case that in this case kind of sort of want the same thing. If you went to said do you want to have a stable, well managed population of bears in Florida, I feel that most people will be like, yep. But then the next question would reveal all those differences, you know, well, because it comes down to killing. Yeah, I mean, if you are against hunting an animal, I don't see how you can argue your way into feeling good about it. You know, if it's morally reprehensible to you. Now want to get personal with you if you don't mind, sure, you like we I've been at your home and we looked at the deer and talked about the deer out in your home, Like how is it? Uh? What is this sort of your thing? Like if you imagine, just like as a writer or whatever, if you imagine like like you eat some meat, not a ton of it, but eat some or would you yeah, and you'll eat dear meat? What do you think about? And I'm honestly curious about this because I like, like I said, you you in my mind, you very much earned your seat at the table. Like I'm like, what do you think when you imagine that when you imagine yourself, like like shooting a deer to eat, Like, what are sort of the pros and cons that run through your head or the like the emotional wrestling or whatever it is that happens in your head. I have many times imagine myself shooting a deer that walked through my property, maybe not with a gun, maybe with more with a bow, for for aesthetic reasons or uh for or earthquake preparedness in an earthquake is sort of a posts just because it wouldn't be pictured with the bo Yeah, I guess I just pictured suffering I have some discomfort around guns. Yeah, that it would suffer a little longer before it died. Uh, yeah, but I would suffer less. I don't know. I guess I haven't thought of that. I haven't thought that's a good case. Maybe I should start thinking about it. Well, I guess because I don't have a gun, but my daughter has a boat, so I can shoo. Gives you a way to start picturing it. Yeah, okay, I'm also pictured. I mean this is way crueler. But like so, I'm writing a book about an earthquake right now, so I constantly I'm looking at the world around me thinking about if there were an earthquake a second. Yeah, it's just sort of running in the background all the time. And I have so that has made me. And also on Bainbridge Island, you're told to be prepared for I think two weeks because the idea is that there's a bridge that connects to the island to the peninsula that may or may not by an earthquake, and that the ferry service man are run and so you know, supplies and whatnot. We'll have it difficult because when when it hits, they imagine a mass tsunami, well, I don't. That's something I need to research because I've been I haven't looked in that myself, but I don't know that Bambridge is necessarily risk of a tsunami, but the faerry boats, oh yes, well yeah, uh so I have actually thought and this was a while ago, but I do remember thinking, like looking around and being like, it happens right now? What do I do? How do how does my family eat? You know? I mean, we have an earthquake kit, but it's probably not good for two weeks. And I thought, we have a garden right with a fence around it, And I thought, this is how far I was going. I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I thought, is there a way to lure a deer into the garden? Locked the gate and then it's just hand to hand? Right? Well? Then, well I didn't have any you don't have any? I have an ax, right, but like that that would be the first step maybe, right. So this is my experience with hunting so far, is that this level that sort of fantasy, fantasy makes it sound goods It took no pleasure in it, but you realize that that's not The axe is not a legal method. Of take well, you're not apocalyptic now un plus earthquake, it's apocalypic But yeah, so that's I've just emptied all of my thoughts regarding killing deer. That's all I've thought about. That's the extent of it. It's gonna make me think about it more now. Yeah, well just because I'm a little bit curious, just only because I sat there and talked and looked at the deer trails cutting through the yard with you, and like I said, I just want to like find where you are so you would never like you you you, And I'm definitely not trying to I'm not not trying to like like unveil or reveal some sort of inherent hypocrisy or whatever. But you will buy flesh. Yeah, So what is it that, like, what is it that you don't go like, oh, I'll just shoot these deer and eat them. I don't think I I've I don't think I'm squeamish about that. I don't think I would have a problem hunting. It's just something I don't do. This is just like a lack of interest. I've never been Yeah, I've never been driven to go try I did go once, you know, I went with a friend of mine went elk hunting. I couldn't fire the gun or we didn't even see any elk that day, but you know, I was curious to see what it was like. Um, I'm not actually anti hunting, you know, I don't have I don't. I don't know how any aversion to it. Uh. I my entire life have gone to supermarket. I used to be a butcher, right, so I've been on that side of it too. Um, I'm someone who goes to the store and buys me. I'm not someone who kills it myself. And I and I don't have I don't have to. I mean, that's what it comes down to a lot of things. I could make my own clothing, right, but it's for the same reason I've never been drawn to do that. I've tried. I've made that point. It's whnny you bring that up about making your own clothing, because I've made and when I've been interviewed, I've been asked by people often times like they're like, so you think that everybody should go out and shoot it, you know that's what you think the only legitimate and I always point out, no, Um, there are a lot of things that people used to have to do that I don't do myself, like process my own raw sewage, stitch my own clothes. Right, I've bowed out of all kinds of stuff and allowed people to step in and handle it for me. It just happens to me that that handful growing vegetables is very important to me. I guess like I've really centered around food ideas. Like somehow food remains like like being in the driver's seat as much as possible on food remains very important to me. I feel the same way. I think I just haven't gone as far as you have gone, you know it. I think we have the same philosophy. It's just I I have not executed it to the degree that you have to the extent. Yeah, So you don't imagine anytime soon you're gonna take up deer hunting, I don't. I mean, I don't know. I want you to so bad. Why because I want you to write about it? Huh, I mean I might that might be the most likely context in which I would go hunting. To be honest, well maybe maybe they will, all right. I want to strongly steer you away from the acts situation. Yeah, I was to kind of put mine, not even te on the table, just as a baseline for the rest of the conversation. But you don't do cheesy, Yeah, you don't do cheesy cold open though. Yeah, like I sharp the sharpened axe was raised over my head. No. If I was driven to kill an ax in my garden, inside my garden fence, kill a deer inside my garden fence with an ax after an earthquake, I would probably write about it. That seems like a remarkable experience that should be documented somewhere. But I hope it doesn't come to that. If it came that, you would later when when tapping into the old well, you would you would just stumble upon that story eventually. Yeah, all right, the last thing, do you guys got I want the last thing. I want to talk about the new book. But but um, we'll talk about that. Then you can ask your final questions. Are you guys good to move on to the new book? Yes? To what degree are you comfortable talking about your new book? Oh? I'm comfortable with it. Because here's the thing. A lot of the people listen to the show have an intense interest in Alaska because they come at it from a hunting and fishing perspective, and that's like, you know, well known for that kind of stuff. I don't know if you're aware a lot of people kill them deers with access out there, That's what I've heard. So, yeah, talk about talk about the book. Well, in my book has everything to do with Alaska and almost nothing to do with hunting and fishing. But um, this was actually grew out of a project I did for a podcast Visible, which, UM, you know, anyone listening to this who wants to go check that out would would get a lot better understanding of it. Um. Can you also do talk about the the show as you do with the Yeah. So this was a project I did with a bunch of musicians who are um in the band called the Decembers. So it was, you know, everyone but one member of the Decembers used to be in this uh other band and who I've done some collaborations with over the years. Um, it's sort of tricking out because they don't evenet they have a name anymore, but they used to be called Black Prairie. So we uh, we basically do these projects where um, I tell a story and they write a score to the story. UM, and often songs, uh, sort of based on characters. They did a soundtrack for wild Ones where they wrote songs about in the book. They wrote a song about horn today. Yeah. Um, it sounds a little weird, but it works out all right. And so in this last project uh we did for Visible, it's called This is Chance, which is probably gonna be the name of the book as well. And it was about the nineteen sixty four earthquake uh in Alaska. Uh. Mostly mostly I'm dealing with anchorage. Uh and I'm just basically telling the story of the first three or four days after the earthquake. UM. And thankfully I found just a tremendous amount of archival material that's letting me do that in a really intimate, um detail oriented way. Can you talking about just how big and bad that earthquake was. It was a nine point two earthquake. Uh, it was. It was so big that uh it's hard. It's hard. It's like, it's yeah, it's hard. It's it really is like the sequoise in the sense that it's your mind cannot accept, you know, sort of it has no way to endo it the size. But well, like the Richter Scare scale end at ten, well, the Richter scales exponential A nine is ten times worse than the eight. Yeah, it does it end of ten. I don't know, how can there be an end? Right? Well, that's yeah, I don't know, because you just know how bad the earth can get bump bound up. Yeah, I mean this is a you know some of what I what I find really interesting about um this it may be true of all earthquakes, but the degree to which the damage was sort of freakishly random, you know, I mean it wasn't random, and not everything to do with the underlying geology and whatnot, but just looking at pictures of the damage. You know, you have on Fourth Avenue, which is sort of the main drag of Anchorage, you had one side of the street which for two and a half three blocks sank about just in place where you know, all the buildings were still mostly intact, had cars parked next to the parking meters just twenty below. You had guys coming out of bars, you know, just looking up trying to figure out how they're gonna get out the other side of the street. Totally fine, you know. And uh, I was telling John today that my brother hunts ducks in a marsh that used to be farm land, but it just instantly shot downward and became underwater. Yeah, there was an entire little town called Portage. We were saying earlier that is the same same scenario. Um. Yeah, So so this the the magnitude and the destruction from this quake for pretty catastrophic, and yet the death toll was was miraculously small. I think there was a hundred and eleven people um around Alaska, and that included that may or may not include a handful of people that died from Tsunami's down in the lower forty eight as well, um partially because there just wasn't the population density in in Alaska or even an Anchorage at that time. But happened on Good Friday. So what I'm writing about is the story is mostly focused around a radio station in Anchorage called k E and I, which was sort of like the community radio station. You know, they were the people around town. Everyone knew the broadcasters. And there was a woman who were at part time at the station named Genie Chance, who for variety of reason wound up um sort of being recognized as a voice that carried UM a lot of Alaska through that quake. And it was her voice that UM just solely by coincidence, wound up being played all over the world. UM, both her giving reports to stations all over the world, but also just recordings of her that people are picked up outside of Anchorage on the station, just doing local announcements about you know people, you know so and so, your brother is at this place, he's fine. I'm just kind of reconnecting the community. So I'm following her story and she just turned out to be a totally fascinating character both before and after the quake, and then a couple of other people around Anchorage at that time, taking them through these these first few days. Uh, just of that good Friday Easter weekend. When did she die? She died in the nineties. She actually went on to be um a state legislature legislator in Alaska for a few years and had a pretty distinguished career and UM it was really remembered as uh, you know, really fondly by people there for you know, she was real big on kind of feminist issues at a time when that was not necessarily that was real popular, UM and did a lot of work with she had, uh, you know, been abused by her husband at the time around the time of the earthquake, she was in this kind of you know, tough marriage that way, and uh came out of it and did a lot of work for um, you know, other women suffering from that as a legislator and uh so, yeah, so I'm not necessarily dealing with her later life all that much, although I am, I am looking into it, but uh yeah, I think there's just something that really captivated me about the unpredictability, you know, the way that that lay a situation like that lays bare just how chaotic the earth is, and you know, just I want to say metaphorically but not really even metaphorically, just literally just the uncertainty that we all kind of have to live with. And then what do you do when when that cleaves your world right open and all these things that you thought, you you know, you took for granted just the way things were just aren't true anymore, which, you know, more and more seems like a condition where male of us are living with two So uh yeah, what was her name again, Genie Chance? What jumped in my mind when you're talking about that as the woman who won fulsome New Mexico was destroyed by flash flood there was a woman working the switchboard trying to alert everyone and stayed at the post and was killed. Huh. I mean that sacrificed herself to the That's an interesting thing, you know, when I as it didn't take long after I started doing just the basic research for this book that I realized that as remarkable as her story was and what she did was, there were lots of other people, even just around Anchorage, you know, Ham radio operators who stayed up for thirty six hours just relaying messages to the South forty eight. All sorts of people were doing miraculous things. This is what I was telling you before, is that just so happened that this sociology research institute had been set up at Ohio State a few months before the earthquake, and their whole thing was they were going to study the way people behaved in natural disasters after in the aftermath, and they were bankrolled by the military. The military he thought this was a like a natural laboratory in which to study nuclear war. What was gonna happen, what was pandemonium was gonna unfold after a nuclear strike? And how are we gonna, uh, you know, control it or minimize it? And it turned out that these saci'oll just who came to Alaska. This was their first big chance to study a real disaster, and they did hundreds of interviews around town, documented everything, and I you know, have access to their materials. There's a big way I'm telling this story. You know, they started to look around. They realize it's not at all what you know, the military thinks it's gonna be. It's is a lot of people acting very heroically, commonly, rationally, collaboratively. Um. And that's the way these aftermaths tend to play out. You know, sometimes there's mismanagement by authorities. You know, looting turns out to be mostly just a myth. Um although as soon as anything looks like looting, it gets widely reported because you know, the fear of looting is is very high. Um. So yeah, they just kind of that was the beg. That Alaska study was really the beginning of like a half century of social science just debunking a lot of these very pessimistic myths about human nature. That stuff for siss because I think there's still this thing when people who are into disaster preparedness, like when I imagine my own because I live in a seismically active area. When I imagine my own disaster preparedness, I like to think that there's some room in my mind for, um ways in which I would assist my neighbors. But a lot of guys start thinking about disaster preparedness and they're out shopping for a gun with which they will use to kill their neighbors. I feel like there's like two mentalities at Yeah. And even though we see it again again, you know, it's like, it's funny because I'm just writing about about this a little bit. And and uh, even like this year and all that disasters we've had this year, and there have been so many great stories about you know, just ordinary local people helping each other, but it's always framed as this very surprising thing. You know, this it's just as who we are in Houston, you know, like we help one another, but actually, you know everyone, it's who everyone is, right, um, And so there's this weird mix of it we just can't quite accept. Uh, you know that maybe the goodness is not so special all you know that it's this it should be very reassuring, but it just feels deflating something. I think it takes a few it takes a few days of feeling a band and to start bringing out Yeah, and maybe I don't know. Kind of if you just look at like natural disasters is oftentimes it's not people are immediately like, well, let's run out and cause mayhem. It's sort of like, man, we've been completely let down, and then tensions. Well, what they say is I guess my understanding of the research, and I don't know it in and out, but I definitely don't know what what I guess. There's there's a shift that happens when you know, in a in a natural disaster, everyone's suffering together, so everyone has the same we're all, you know, all everyone's afflicted by the same thing. And then when you can stop feeling collectively, you know, joined by your suffering from that disaster, and start pointing fingers at you know, whoever is has botched the recovery to the disaster, that's when the when the trouble starts to you know, at least they will will things starts to rise up. I don't you know, that's my sense from reading what I've read so far. No, I fear for people finding out about my giant rain barrel and just how much mountain house I have stashed around and they're gonna come for it. Meshing to just let it out, Just let the cat out of the bag right there. So cal do you have any concluders? Any final um thanks questions for our our guest, John Wellen oh Man. His work can be found at any number of places online and in his book. I guess once you should say thanks, um wild ones that admit I am not not through it, but it's been great and yeah, a couple of little twists and additions to some of the stories in there, just in a way that I wasn't thinking and and I've really enjoyed it. Um yeah, man, I I what is what is your response to those people who's like, well, how much is too much? Like? When when do you John say, yeah, you gotta pull the plug on that sea turtle. I wish I was that organized to have a group to make these decisions. Yeah. I mean, I'm just you know, going clumsily on my way like everyone else. I think. Or is it better to go to Steve's fourteen thousand years ago? You're you're the first man to that lake. What if what if you you're on your pristine lake and there is not a pan fish to be found. It's full of you know, northern pike. I wonder if that's why i'd like to go visit that's I'd like to go. It's an unrealistic it's an unrealistic goal. But if I it's just where I've decided to fall, and how tempted would you be. But it's it's like academic too, you know. It's like just not like I'm like thinking will arrive there, but just the way that it's it's how I begin to understand things. It's a way I like strive to understand things. There was that was like that was day one. That was day one, and then this is as good as it as best as I can understand what happened on day one through day well, I don't know what day we'd be on now in the hundreds of thousands, as the best as how we'd get there. It's actually pronounced by some bison bison, bison, that's how it's pronounced, trying it's trinomial. Norman Clayture would be bison bites and bison yehney um. Yeah. It's a good book, I think if you if you like listening to this show, you feel probably like reading the book, I feel like a lot of the things that I was surprised by because I really didn't know what to expect that, you know, I just kind of got it, you know, thinking a better readings. We're gonna talk to John and uh, it's like a lot of the thought of the concepts that you've brought up to me just over the last few years. John sort of brings up in that book and then talks about him in just a different way then you and I talked about him. So it's it's been an eye opening for me. I i'ven't I really enjoyed it. I mean, I can ask all kinds of questions you need to get deeper about what I learned in that book so far. But I don't know if I really have any follow up. But I think if you're if your whole understanding like mine, like my understanding of wildlife is inspired, it has been inspired by and is kind of based around right like a hunting efficient perspective. So it's useful. Um, it's useful to go to to go read people read about wildlife from from a different perspective now and then because they just notice things completely different. It's good. That's why I mean, that's not that's kind of why I would sell it to our That's kind why I would sell it to the type of guy that's listening to this type of lady that's listening to this. Yeah, expand outward a little bit. Yeah, totally, and know all about turkeys, how good turkeys are doing right now? Anything else you have? I think that's all I got, John, Do you have any final concluding thoughts? If it's anything you wanted this wedge in. You couldn't find a way to wedge it in. But you're like, man, the one thing I gotta make sure to talk about is blank. And you never got a chance. That's your chance. And I don't think I mean, I would just say, like you're asking me, how do you make those decisions? I'm not really interested in making those decisions, you know, But I think that there's value in trying to acknowledge how complex a lot of these questions are and how complex your own. Like you're saying, well, this is my baseline, but what how can I really defend that? I think the more people do that, the easier it is to deal with this kind of you know, partisan gridlock we find ourselves in and a lot of stuff, because you won't feel so violated by whatever decision is made. You know, if you can understand that it's happening in this kind of climate of great complexity, you know, it gives you some sympathy. Uh. You know, if you think that your thing is absolutely right and there's easy ways to think about all this, then when the decision doesn't meet your criteria, it's gonna feel a lot worse. That's funny you bring it up, because I really there's a handful of things that I remind myself about every day, and one of the things I remind myself about every day is not becoming one of those people who has this sort of attitude like, oh my god, what do they think of next? Yesterday it was this, and no it's that. Like, to be like that type of guy scares me. I think it gets harder to write. It's so easy to become a guy like that. Did I like? I like him? I was like, hey, don't get worced. Don't get divorced today, and don't become a guy who's like, oh my god, what next. They're probably related. I think those are related goals. Yeah, they working. Yeah, your efforts on each of those working tandem. All right, John, Well, thanks for joining us. Tell us again because wild Ones, but give us the great subtitles. I'll mess it up. Wild Ones, A sometimes dismaying, weirdly reassuring story about looking at people, looking at animals in America and all kinds of writings. Um, you're write primarily for New York Times magazine, not the newspaper, but the magazine, which are which our brothers walking hand in hand. And then um in your forthcoming book, like you're not done with it, and then it takes him a year to do it. And that's the ways out. I mean, I just started writing it. So this is a long range teaser. Yeah, I'm deep in the dark tunnel. But in the future, in future, uh, Christmas times, a Christmas time or two from now, when you're like, what do I get my brother or my sister or whatever. UM, give him this as yet unnamed book. Put it on your calendar now, your calendar shoppers from now? All right, John, Thanksgan, Thank you guys.