00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. 00:00:15 Speaker 2: We hunt the meat-eater podcast. You can't predict anything. 00:00:20 Speaker 1: Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T.com. L-I-T-E dot com. Hal Herring, thanks for coming on the show, man. 00:00:45 Speaker 2: Great to be here, man. 00:00:46 Speaker 1: Dude, I've known you and read your stuff for so long, it's cool to have you in the room. 00:00:51 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I ran across you too, oh my God, long years ago. 00:00:56 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been a long time. It's good to be talking to you. For people that aren't familiar with Hal Herring, he's a conservation writer, he's a journalist, covers the American West. Contributing editor at Field and Stream, but he's strayed far out, and he's written for places as kind of odd and unexpected as The Atlantic and The Economist, where folks like you are generally probably a little less welcome. Hal's a lifelong defender of public lands, and we're going to pick his brain a little bit about the state of public lands and public lands management. 00:01:33 Speaker 2: In the U.S. 00:01:34 Speaker 1: You know, I'm going to start right out with the doozy, though, man, is We did this thing recently. We did this deal recently. It was kind of like a, we just fielded, did an episode sitting here and just fielded questions from people out in the audience, you know, listeners. And one guy said, he said, hey, are we winning or losing the fight over public lands? And my answer was, it's a neither. It's not like a thing that ends together. Do you know what I mean? You bet. It'll last centuries. 00:02:11 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:02:12 Speaker 1: But let me put it to you. What's your take, man? Winning or losing? Just in the most general sense. Take it wherever you want to take it. 00:02:19 Speaker 2: All right. So we have been losing slowly for about since the 1980s. 00:02:28 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:02:28 Speaker 2: And the true. 00:02:34 Speaker 2: Value of the asset, which we've been ignoring, is now front and center in people's who care minds. So I believe that the time of losing may be over. 00:02:51 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:02:52 Speaker 2: I have watched complacency and taking it for granted overwhelm public lands discourse and Um, since, you know, I mean, I came of age in the eighties, right. Okay. And, uh, since then. 00:03:07 Speaker 1: Well, what, what did losing look like in the, when it started? 00:03:11 Speaker 2: Um, so we've always been on the brink. If you read Nate Schweber's book, this America of ours about Bernard Devoto, where he blew the lid off McCarran of Nevada's plan to get rid of them all. You know, we, we started losing when, when public lands became part of the culture wars. Okay. Yeah. And you were a libtard if you liked the Forest Service. 00:03:37 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:03:38 Speaker 2: So, man, we can go a long way with this. I was sawing UBARC in Idaho in the Powell Ranger District of the Lolo, and that was for Taxol. They had a deal for a cancer drug then, and it only came from UBARC. They synthesized it now. So I was the sawyer on this UBARC crew. 00:03:56 Speaker 1: Hold on a minute, man. You got to back up a little bit. 00:03:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. 00:04:00 Speaker 1: There's a cancer drug. 00:04:02 Speaker 2: Yeah, tamoxifen. 00:04:04 Speaker 1: That came from UBARC. 00:04:05 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:04:06 Speaker 1: Okay, like a juniper type plant. 00:04:08 Speaker 2: Yeah, that you make the bows out of, right? That's like the Western bow wood. And so back then, this is 90s, they had a huge deal for GlaxoSmithKline. 00:04:20 Speaker 1: Harvesting this bark. 00:04:21 Speaker 2: Yeah. And I was the sawyer. So we'd have three or four sawyers and a bunch of like these woods hippies folks that got paid by the pound to strip the bark. 00:04:29 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:04:30 Speaker 2: And then GlaxoSmithKline would run our truck out there and load up these giant bales of U-bark. 00:04:37 Speaker 1: And you were doing this for a living? 00:04:40 Speaker 2: Yep, getting paid by the day, you know, camped out. And that was in the Lolo National Forest, but we went all over. Anywhere there was you, we were there chopping it down. Okay. All National Forest stuff. And that was during the time of, like, Ruby Ridge and Waco and all that stuff, right? But Ruby Ridge in particular. And people were like, we hate the feds. We hate the government. And literally going like, we're going to blow up the Forest Service office. And even back then I was like, you know, dude, what does the forest service have to do with this? You know, but it was an anti-federal cinema, right? And it was hot in Idaho and Western Montana. And, uh, I think that people who, who fell into that were missing the connection between their freedom to go hunting or fishing or take the kids camping or berry picking or whatever. Yeah. And this hatred of this thing that was very abstract. 00:05:41 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:05:41 Speaker 2: And that's where I think we started. It really started sliding right there. No kidding, yeah. 00:05:48 Speaker 1: Yeah. I never thought of that connection, but I remember that anti-federalism. Yeah. Like, you know, and then, you know... That was thrust front and center around Timothy McVeigh and other issues like that. Yeah, totally. And he was doing that because of Waco. Like a blanket anti-federal government thing. 00:06:05 Speaker 2: Right. And people lost sight of what the federal government, you know, good or bad, right? You're going to have a government. I mean, I was on the, you know, like I have been all over this as a young person. I didn't really like government either, you know. But you're going to have one. And then people get to decide in this country what it's going to do. And that seemed to me the better idea. And I wanted to have like public lands and a Clean Water Act and a Clean Air Act, you know, and hunting and fishing, which I keep saying hunting and fishing are the interest on the principle of properly stewarded environment. Okay. 00:06:47 Speaker 1: Right. 00:06:47 Speaker 2: They're not like the main thing. They never will be. You don't have any fishing if you don't have a Clean Water Act. I'm old enough to remember that. So anyway, I just, I remember this anti-federal sentiment. I was in the Bitterroot, lived in the Bitterroot when they were having all the militia stuff, you know. 00:07:06 Speaker 1: Sure. 00:07:07 Speaker 2: The sovereign citizens movement. And I was like, dude, this is the Bitterroot National, we were climbing and hunting elk and hunting mule deer on the Bitterroot National Forest, you know, sapphire side, big Bitterroot side. I was just loving the public lands loving everything about Bitterroot National Forest and then people will be like you know what I hate the Forest Service I hate the feds I hate this I hate that and I even back then I was like 25 I was like man maybe you ought to find something you love you. 00:07:41 Speaker 1: Know dude I know a lot of people that are not a lot I know a handful of people that that are that their passion in life is what they disapprove of yeah Yes. 00:07:54 Speaker 2: It's their, it's their motivating principle. 00:07:56 Speaker 1: Yes. 00:07:56 Speaker 2: They're motivating principle. 00:07:58 Speaker 1: Their passion in life. I've seen good people slip in that direction that their passion in life is what they don't like. 00:08:05 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:08:07 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. 00:08:09 Speaker 2: I've seen it too. I've, I've lived it actually, you know, I mean, I've been there too. Like if they don't stop that, um, But even then, I wrote about this after that Bundy occupation at Malheur. Okay. Those people were so angry. Everybody was just angry. 00:08:28 Speaker 1: Do you mind filling people in on that story? 00:08:31 Speaker 2: Yeah. That was when the Bundy... family, Ammon and Ryan and some other folks. They took over the Malheur. 00:08:39 Speaker 1: Cliven was one? 00:08:40 Speaker 2: Yeah, but Cliven wasn't at Malheur. He was, like, back tending the ranch. 00:08:44 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:08:45 Speaker 2: And to save Cliven Bundy, he actually lives in Bunkerville, own a ranch, own a little inn holding, and runs cows. He's a pretty busy guy. 00:08:53 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:08:54 Speaker 2: The rest of them seem to have plenty of time on their hands. 00:08:56 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:08:58 Speaker 2: But you can't help but, like, kind of have some respect for Cliven. He's like this old desert cowboy. 00:09:04 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:09:04 Speaker 2: Whatever his notions are. But they took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. And it was a bitter cold middle of the winter out there in eastern Oregon, outside of Burns. And they made this big show, you know, about anti-government, right? Taking the refuge and giving it back to the people as if the people didn't, the wildlife refuge is the most people, public, Ownership thing I've ever heard of it was it was very contradictory. 00:09:38 Speaker 1: You know And it was over grazing right cattle grazing rights. 00:09:42 Speaker 2: Well, it came out of an arson case against a rancher family called the Hammonds No, and that case kind of blew up. They got sentenced under this for burning some public land Whether whatever the reason that happened that case blew up up and it was in a kind of a federal sentencing guideline thing that we're gonna send them to jail for a long time that actually had been passed by these conservative legislatures who are after the environmental liberation front. 00:10:14 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:10:15 Speaker 2: The elf. Remember they were like, we got to get rid of the elf. The elf is going to destroy America. And they passed this like draconian bill. legislation about burning buildings and doing that. 00:10:26 Speaker 1: Yeah, because they were burning, like, they were trying to, like, torch, like, research laboratories. 00:10:30 Speaker 2: Well, they torched the Forest Service station, too. 00:10:33 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:10:34 Speaker 2: So the hatred was coming in from both sides, right? That's another part of this story is that the federal public agencies, BLM, Forest Service, they were under fire from the environmentalist side as well. They kind of had no friends. Okay. And that's part of our decline story. 00:10:56 Speaker 1: Yeah, because that's funny you mention that because if you go back, you remember like Ed Abbey? Of course you remember Ed Abbey. Right, just for listeners, like Ed Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire, Monkey Ranch Gang. 00:11:09 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:11:10 Speaker 1: He's one of a handful of people. So Ed Abbey, Crazy Horse, Graham Nash maybe. Don't know. People don't know where their bodies are. 00:11:22 Speaker 2: Gotcha. I don't know that one. 00:11:23 Speaker 1: When Crazy Horse was bayoneted in Nebraska, his family took him and hit him. Yep. He can't be far. Right. They took him and hit him in a crevice or crack. They never found Crazy Horse's body. Ed Abbey's body was taken. Yep. I believe Graham Nash's body was taken by his friends. Yeah, right. Anyways, Ed Abbey, his line, that was like left-wing hatred of BLM. 00:11:51 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:11:52 Speaker 1: Because Ed Abbey dubbed them the Bureau of Livestock and Mining, not the Bureau of Land Management. And so there was that hatred from both sides. 00:12:02 Speaker 2: Yeah, and what happened there is Congress recognized that. And so you give the money to people that people like. And they saw, I think our congressional, all the Congress, they saw that these people were not particularly, the agencies were not particularly well-liked by either side. And then a huge amount of Americans didn't even have any idea what they did. And so they kind of became disenfranchised, right? 00:12:35 Speaker 1: You know what's funny, man? Years ago, I was interviewing Tucker Carlson, and he's a big fisherman. But I mentioned the director of the BLM. And he says, I hate the BLM because I realize he's talking about black lives. 00:12:53 Speaker 2: Yeah, right. 00:12:54 Speaker 1: Yeah. So when you get into people's awareness of BLM. 00:13:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, right. I love talking about Abby because he did his master's thesis on the anarchism and violence. And so he was kind of an anarchist in his life. And I love his work. 00:13:18 Speaker 1: Right. 00:13:19 Speaker 2: Um, but he never reconciled the existence of the public lands that he loves so much with the, the necessity of a government of the people, by the people, for the people that maintain that institution. Because if he, if he had what he wanted as an anarchist and I don't want to get into Crow Potkin and Murray Rothbard and all that anarchist theory. 00:13:43 Speaker 1: Right. 00:13:44 Speaker 2: But if he had what he wanted. some very wealthy entity would have bought the public lands and kicked him off or go like we don't we don't need any more hippies out here or you know whatever he was you. 00:13:57 Speaker 1: Can't really have a serious this is gonna piss people off but you can't have a serious conversation about anarchism no because it's a theory it's just it's like a it's a mind game right it's a mind game yep Because you'd be like, well, I'm assuming, if you're talking to an anarchist, you'd be like, man, I'm assuming you drove over here on some kind of highway. Yep. And you fly on airplanes and you have an expectation that an Islamist isn't going to blow that plane out of the sky. 00:14:29 Speaker 2: Yep. Or that somebody's not going to stop you on the road. 00:14:32 Speaker 1: Yeah. So it'd be like just, that's why it's always, it's just a fun game. 00:14:37 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:14:37 Speaker 1: It's a fun game. 00:14:39 Speaker 2: Totally agree. Yeah. 00:14:41 Speaker 1: But it is funny. I mean, Ed Abbey, like, you think about Ed Abbey and Monkey Ranch Gang, okay? It's a novel, but Monkey Ranch Gang, Hey Duke, I think, makes a point of when he's driving down the road, he always throws his beer cans out the window. 00:14:57 Speaker 2: Right. 00:14:58 Speaker 1: As some sort of convoluted fuck you to something, right? He's like a desert. He's like a, he's willing to protect the desert To use violence to protect the desert. But he takes such... He's so offended by don't litter. Yeah. Because it obscures the broader issues. Yep. And so he's like... He's shitting up the side of the... You know what I'm saying? 00:15:27 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:15:28 Speaker 1: You tie yourself in knots with all the, like, hypocrisies and stuff. Yeah, you do. 00:15:32 Speaker 2: And that reminds me of John Valant's book, The Golden Spruce. 00:15:36 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good book. 00:15:36 Speaker 2: Yeah. Remember, he cut down the golden spruce in protesting of the logging. 00:15:43 Speaker 1: But that's where you land, man, when you get crazy enough. 00:15:46 Speaker 2: In knots. Yeah. In knots. And I've been thinking a lot about that anarchism, communism, traditional conservatism, libertarianism. They don't work. They're all abstract theories. And some blend of them all is what people come up with. And to take it back to public lands, I mean, there are no public lands in authoritarian governments. I've found this to be true. Like when Pinochet took over Chile, he sold those water rights. Like right away. Like there are no environmental laws. There's never been like an eco-authoritarian. Isn't that fascinating? 00:16:32 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:16:33 Speaker 2: And so. 00:16:34 Speaker 1: That is interesting. 00:16:35 Speaker 2: Yeah. And I've spent a huge amount of time as I was, I'm just finishing this public lands book after multiple years overdue. And it's deeply intersected the idea of public lands and public lands management with a representative government. of the people by the people for the people. 00:16:55 Speaker 1: Right. 00:16:56 Speaker 2: And, and, uh, it's really interesting because it coincided. How did we get to the environmental decade of the seventies, right? Clean air act, clean water act, toxic substances, control act, all that. It was a middle-class deal, super powerful middle-class. And in my, in the book, in the book research I was doing, people were driving out They had enough money to get a car after World War II, and they're driving out to Yellowstone with the kids. And they're going, wow, if this ain't nice, I don't know what is. You know, look at this. And then they come back to Ohio or Alabama, and they go like, well, how come we can't have some nice things around here? Why do I have to live on a super polluted river when we know that there's a way that you don't have to have that? And that was a middle class, man. And that seems to be the driving force behind active public lands management, people being engaged, for better or worse, right? People get engaged and the environmentalists want this and the loggers want that. Well, that's cool. You don't want everybody singing kumbaya over the public lands management. That wouldn't work at all. You want an engaged citizenry. And for a long time, we had that. And that's why I date the decline back to somewhere in the 80s where we started culture warring and separating out. And the middle class was struggling harder all the way. And you just don't have time to debate over like spotted owl policy if you're really worried about paying for that tank of gas. Yeah. And that's true, you know, in Mexico and El Salvador. I started out as a young reporter, right? I was in El Salvador in the 80s. And I didn't know how to be a reporter, but I was trying. And it was a place you could take a, you know, it was a war that you could take a bus to, you know. And I saw things there where, I was only there a couple months, but I saw things there where I never was under the illusion that things couldn't go bad for you after that. 00:19:10 Speaker 1: I got it. You know. You mean that changed your worldview? 00:19:15 Speaker 2: It changed my worldview. 00:19:17 Speaker 1: It made you feel like we're more on an edge of something. 00:19:20 Speaker 2: Always on the edge. And it's just like in your personal life, like national policies and stuff, they're intentional. If you just let the wind blow them around. In El Salvador, it was the Los Catorce, the 14 families. They owned 92% of the arable land or something like that. the population density hit 550 people per square mile and it kind of blew up right they just there wasn't enough to go around and the and the 14 families had it all and that's what happened that's like the default setting for for a society that's not engaging in their own politics got it or they're disenfranchised in a way. 00:20:04 Speaker 1: Yeah talk me through we're going a long way, man. Oh no, no, no, this is great. But talk me through that, that transition you think might be happening now. Do you mean like if, if you say there's a decline in the eighties and it was, it was linked to a, it was linked to in the West, particularly like this vilification of land management agencies, the feds, big government, jamming it down your throat. 00:20:36 Speaker 2: Yep. Right. 00:20:38 Speaker 1: How do you, how do you feel that that's kind of over? Because I feel that if you look at, if you look at Doge, if you look at part of like part of Maga, there's kind of a, there's a bit of that hiding in there. Oh yeah, totally. There's a bit of that hiding in there that anything the government could do, a private person could do better. Right. Or you got big, real wealthy land, wealthy individuals that make a fortune in And something besides running cattle. 00:21:10 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:21:11 Speaker 1: They make a fortune in tech. Oftentimes, it's people that make a fortune that would never have made a fortune outside of the U.S. 00:21:21 Speaker 2: Correct. 00:21:21 Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Let me hit a side deal here because this is important. I shouldn't say important. This is important to the story. America is an unbelievable country. like land of opportunity. 00:21:38 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:21:40 Speaker 1: America creates phenomenal success stories. America creates wealth. America gives you the protections that you need to create jobs, wealth, employment, right. Investment. Like we have this phenomenal machine. 00:22:04 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:22:06 Speaker 1: Um, Like, I've been part of building a company that relies hugely on free speech elements in media. We have those protections here. If you find success, I find oftentimes people that really, really find success in America will, in their rhetoric, they'll turn against it. 00:22:31 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:22:34 Speaker 1: And oftentimes you find people coming out of other industries where they've built big successful businesses that they would have never built in another country. They would not have built that business in Iran. Right. 00:22:47 Speaker 2: Or Somalia. 00:22:48 Speaker 1: They wouldn't have built it there. Right. And then they buy a bunch of land and then they're like, and then they take on this like anti-agency standpoint. 00:22:58 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:22:59 Speaker 1: They don't want environmental regulations. They don't want, government involvement or whatever. And it's kind of like, well, you see, you did really good in America. 00:23:07 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:23:08 Speaker 1: Like America's been great for you, dude. 00:23:10 Speaker 2: Well, that was what Bill Burr said. Remember he said, you made a trillion dollars. What's wrong with it? Um, no, I, I, you're nailing something there that, uh, I, I, I'm, I think we, we have to ponder. Um, and I, I think of it first as private property rights and D and patents, um, They had this thing, and I don't want to get the history wrong, but in the Ukraine war, where they were listening to the Russians on their radios, and they were like, what kind of a nut doesn't have encrypted military radios? Well, they don't have protection for patents in Russia. This is what I understand. If you invent something that's really good and marketable, an oligarch takes it from you. Yeah. And Thomas Jefferson and all the people in America, like there were three thousand post offices in Montana, like before the Dust Bowl. 00:24:09 Speaker 1: Three thousand. 00:24:10 Speaker 2: And one of the reasons that from the founding of our country was that you could send if you patented something, you didn't have to have a stamp. You could send it to the patent office. Is that right? That's how important they thought innovation was, right? 00:24:25 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:24:26 Speaker 2: And then you would be protected. So, like, Bill Gates wouldn't exist in Russia, right? The patents to all of that would just have been taken from him. Yeah. And it doesn't matter if you're– I mean, if somebody's willing to hit you in the kneecaps with a ball-peen hammer, right, all the laws and justice. 00:24:47 Speaker 1: And– I invented this. 00:24:49 Speaker 2: It's mine. And they go, yeah, it was yours, you know, until the thug showed up. It wouldn't happen in Guatemala even. 00:24:57 Speaker 1: It's interesting if you become that, let's just say, for instance, you become the richest man in the world and you're incensed about the ways the government got in your way and you'd be like, hold on a minute. So if they hadn't gotten your way, what would have happened? 00:25:15 Speaker 2: Right. 00:25:16 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:25:16 Speaker 2: Right. Right. Somebody else surely. 00:25:20 Speaker 1: You'd be what? 00:25:21 Speaker 2: I always, uh, have you ever seen the Anthony Bourdain episode where he goes to Lagos? 00:25:27 Speaker 1: No, but I got friends that worked it. Yeah, yeah. My buddies filmed it. 00:25:32 Speaker 2: Yes, and he's really enamored with the libertarian nature of Lagos, like really, really interested in it. And because it's an Anthony Bourdain episode with those guys who are really geniuses, they let it evolve. And then Bourdain meets the area boys, right? And there are these little militias of 12 to 18-year-old guys who just go shake down all the store owners. And if you don't want to have your store torched, then you pay up. Yeah. And it's a great episode because then he falls into this. He goes, well, how free is it? You can set up a stand and sell rat meat and call it chicken. That's cool. But you can't really operate that business without paying the area boys who work for a feudal semi-warlord. 00:26:30 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:26:30 Speaker 2: And I've been told that Lagos is getting a lot better. People got fed up with that, right? Yeah. But that's what it was. And that's power abhors a vacuum. Yeah. Right? So you're going to have a government of some sort. Yeah. 00:26:44 Speaker 1: Somebody- It's going to be governing. We keep getting off a little bit. Yeah. So tell me where, if the 80s brought about this animosity to land management agencies and it brought about where you had a sort of cultural animosity from the left, from the environmental movement who viewed federal land managers as the enemy because they were permitting mining, they were permitting logging, right? 00:27:11 Speaker 2: Right. 00:27:12 Speaker 1: Then all of a sudden you have the right political cultural right criticizing land management agencies because they're not permissive enough right they're not permitting enough logging they're not permitting enough right grazing and that led it where they just didn't have they were friendless they were friendless right and so when did when did we climb out of that or if you if you're feeling optimistic now how did we start climbing out of that oh well we recognize the value of the asset It reminds me, too, to go back a little bit. I remember people when the Waters of the U.S. rule came up, right? 00:27:51 Speaker 2: And it was an extension of the Clean Water Act into the hands of unelected bureaucrats, which is actually true, but it worked good to get clean water. And people drink clean water out of their tap, which you can't do in Mexico City or Guat City. I'm referring to places I don't know. You know, and they go federal overreach. It's a terrible problem. You know, like like you got clean water because of the federal law. Like like the states don't have those laws. Yeah. And so to look at this decline, it became so I would go one further on the right is they actually the right. said that there are no, the federal government can't have public lands. We don't want public lands. And they did that up and down. I mean, I had to listen to that forever. And I would go like, well, what's the alternative, you know? And it's just this economic free-for-all where you descend, I consider it a descent, into a feudalist society. Like, oligarchy is the default setting for all societies that don't, that don't try to keep it at bay without an empowered citizenry. And the ownership of vast expanses of land is the hallmark of an oligarchy in few hands. 00:29:21 Speaker 1: But I mean, I know people say this. I think that public lands defenders will kind of do what I feel is a little bit of a red herring and talk about a very fringe perspective. And I think to be fair, the idea that when people make this legal argument, hearkening back to things that the founding fathers said or things that are in the U.S. Constitution, and they make this legal argument where they say, aha, it's illegal for the federal government to own land. 00:29:57 Speaker 2: I mean. 00:29:58 Speaker 1: I'm not saying that there aren't people that say that, but that's not a really serious... No. That's not a serious thing. 00:30:05 Speaker 2: No, it's been... That's not like. 00:30:07 Speaker 1: A serious threat. I feel like it's a red herring meant to show... It's a red herring from guys who might be more like you and me, who are public lands advocates, and when we're playing a rhetorical game, we will point to these extremes. Right. But... Just to be totally fair, no one's taken that seriously. 00:30:31 Speaker 2: I'm not sure. 00:30:32 Speaker 1: Or do you deny that? 00:30:33 Speaker 2: No, I think they took it seriously. I mean, when I was at the Malheur Refuge, they said that over and over. And they had the little Cleon Skousen version of the American Constitution, U.S. Constitution, that it was all that was edited out. The what section? whatever the constitutional article that allowed the federal government. 00:30:56 Speaker 1: To own land. Let me clarify my point. 00:30:58 Speaker 2: Sure. 00:30:58 Speaker 1: I didn't do a good job saying that. When I say no one's taking it seriously, what I mean is certainly there are individuals who take it seriously. But what I mean is I don't view it as a threat that all of a sudden there's going to be a series of lawsuits and they make it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says, you're right. All land must be sold now. 00:31:21 Speaker 2: Right. 00:31:22 Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden, all of our national forests, all of our national parks are, blam, privatized because of some constitutional argument. 00:31:30 Speaker 2: Like, come on. I don't think so. No. 00:31:32 Speaker 1: I mean, there's a hundred things that would prevent that. 00:31:35 Speaker 2: Right. 00:31:36 Speaker 1: But I think that it's good to explore it intellectually as a viewpoint that's held, but I just don't want to sort of obfuscate actual threats with, like, extreme conversations. Right. 00:31:49 Speaker 2: No, I agree with that. I would say, though, that it would be taken too much for granted to say that that couldn't happen. 00:31:59 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:32:00 Speaker 2: Because, I mean, what would happen was people would buy the good parts. 00:32:07 Speaker 1: Like what happened in the first place. 00:32:08 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:32:09 Speaker 1: There's a reason all the valleys are private. 00:32:11 Speaker 2: Exactly. Or, or when you go to Nevada, I've been working in Nevada and my son's working there and you take your Onyx, you know, every green spot that you can see on the horizon is private. Yeah. And every piece of the Owyhee that's just a piece of cheatgrass is BLM, and it's public. So we have already done that. 00:32:33 Speaker 1: There's the old joke that wilderness areas, it was basically the rock and the ice. 00:32:38 Speaker 2: The rock and ice. 00:32:39 Speaker 1: I mean, the wilderness areas were, like, I'm not explaining this to you. I'm just kind of like, for listeners, land that was deemed of value. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, that it was arable at the time. 00:32:58 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:32:58 Speaker 1: Good grazing land, whatever. Land that was deemed of value. There were many pathways to ownership. And at a point, it was just that public lands in the West, to some degree in the East as well, public lands were the things that people hadn't gobbled up. 00:33:15 Speaker 2: No, the lands that nobody wanted. 00:33:17 Speaker 1: That's the title of the book. Didn't want to pay taxes on it. Didn't want to go through the hassle of proving it up. And our most protected lands, the wilderness areas are the areas that are sort of least likely. Yeah. To get gobbled up. 00:33:31 Speaker 2: Totally. Cause, uh, and, and like the, uh, why he, for instance, you can't put enough pounds on cows to pay a property tax on that. 00:33:39 Speaker 1: Right. 00:33:40 Speaker 2: And that's why it stayed in the public. Uh, I just did a piece on, uh, Lewis and Clark national forest and Bob Marshall wilderness, you know? 00:33:47 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:33:48 Speaker 2: And they tried to give that away under the Forest Homestead Act, like after 1909. Okay. But in order to prove up on your homestead claim inside the National Forest, you had to stay there five years. So nobody could winter over in what's now the Bob Marshall Wilderness for five years. So they cut it back to three. 00:34:14 Speaker 1: No kidding. 00:34:14 Speaker 2: Yeah. Danaher Meadows. Have you ever been there? 00:34:17 Speaker 1: No, I haven't. 00:34:17 Speaker 2: So that's like the old cutting, you know, Mecca back on the, on that side. 00:34:21 Speaker 1: Dude, I hate to say it. I've been all around the edges. I've never, man, I might be wrong. I don't think I've ever stepped on that one. Yeah. I don't think I've ever been on the Bob Marshall. 00:34:29 Speaker 2: Well, it's not a rock and ice. It has a bunch of grass and, uh, and Gates park, which is a beautiful forest service headquarters. That was Kate's park. That was a homestead. And the guy just couldn't, I mean, it snowed seven foot deep, you know? And they just couldn't prove up. And so those reverted to federal ownership over time. Danaher met us as well. And Tom Danaher was the guy. I mean, it's pretty late. Like, there's people alive today that remember pre-wilderness act. And the wilderness act only kicked in there after 64. And they had tried to give even that away. And one of the things that happened in there was the, uh, they had tie hacked that they had cut it for railroad ties. Cause there are a lot of lodge bowl, right? And their uniform may make a, and they, they cut like 425,000 railroad ties out of that country. 00:35:27 Speaker 1: Are you serious? 00:35:28 Speaker 2: Yeah. And they were jamming them, uh, jamming them into the rivers, like sun river, Dearborn river, Teton river, but those rivers don't have enough water to carry them. That's what kind of brought the, brought it to an end. Yeah. And people at 1907, they started making this irrigation project, Sun River Project, out to make the desert bloom, right? Yeah. East of the Rockies. 00:35:52 Speaker 1: Like the Sun River, now that big game reserve. 00:35:54 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:35:54 Speaker 1: Yes. 00:35:55 Speaker 2: And they said, wow, if we keep tyhacking and keep putting all these sheep and cattle in there, it's going to mess up the watershed for this huge federal investment in this irrigation project. And so they started saying, well, maybe it's better as a primitive area. And they started, they started the mech, the, the mechanics of what became the Bob Marshall wilderness was based on, they had tried everything to make it, you know, produce and give it away. And then they realized that it was most valuable as a watershed. Yeah. 00:36:30 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:36:31 Speaker 2: And, and to supply the water to, to make the desert bloom out East. Hmm. Um, And so then that actually happened. Like, if you look at the Monongahela Forest out east, that was a result of the Pittsburgh flood, 1909, 1913. And they said, somebody's got to do something about the deforested headlands here because they're dumping. All the sediment came down, filled up the river. The river flooded out, and it stopped the steel mills, right? It flooded Pittsburgh. And they said, we've got to do something. Well, that was the Weeks Act of 1911 was what they bought Eastern Forests under, right? 00:37:09 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:37:09 Speaker 2: So they said, well, we got to do something. And nobody had the money to replant it. Nobody had the money to fix it after it had been deforested. Yeah. And the federal government did, though, because they could draw on taxpayers from all over the country, right, and make this treasure chest where they could put trees back on there and stop the flooding in Pittsburgh. Mm-hmm. 00:37:29 Speaker 1: You mean they weren't thinking they were trying to create great hunting and fishing spots? 00:37:32 Speaker 2: They were not. Hunting and fishing were the interest on the principle. 00:37:36 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:37:37 Speaker 2: And all over. And the Weeks Act specifically said it's watershed based. I would recommend that people listen to this. Read the Weeks Act like at Wikipedia. 00:37:48 Speaker 1: Oh, it's fascinating. It's fascinating. And maybe you can talk more about like where I grew up, those big national forests in Michigan. Yeah. 00:37:57 Speaker 2: Man. 00:38:00 Speaker 1: If you remember i was talking about the west where you had these places that didn't get like there's kind of came a mark and you probably know the date better than me but there kind of became a mark where if someone hadn't gotten it by that point yep it wasn't going to get got yep right and those became these public lands areas the the national forest that i grew up on and i've been down like you know, other places too, Tuskegee National Forest. I mean, if you're out in Tuskegee National Forest in Alabama, you'll come in and you'll see, you'll be looking at the trees in the woods, man. 00:38:34 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:38:36 Speaker 1: And you're like, this used to be a driveway. Yeah, used to be a driveway. You can see two rows of trees. You're like, this ran, these rows of trees ran down either side of a mile-long driveway. 00:38:47 Speaker 2: You bet. 00:38:48 Speaker 1: In the forest. And you're like, this, it's like when you go to those Mayan, when you go to those Mayan ruins and they always have a picture of what it would have looked like. Yeah. Cause you're sitting out there in the jungle and there's this crazy stone pyramid, you know, and it's all just jungle. And then there always be some artists rendering of what you would have been looking at. And then you, what you would have been looking at is ag, like agriculture, as far as the eye can see. 00:39:15 Speaker 2: As far as you can see to support the people that built that pyramid. 00:39:18 Speaker 1: But you think that they snuck out in the jungle and built that pyramid on the jungle. But it's like, it's like, The stuff that was going to happen there isn't happening there now. Yep. You know, it'd be like when you read, you know, there's stuff where you read areas like up in north central montana you read accounts of there being a thousand black feet camped in some valley yep and if you added up all the people that passed to that valley in a year it ain't a thousand right now yep and like Some of those big national forests in Michigan, that was all people trying to farm that shitty, sandy soil that abandoned it because they couldn't pay the taxes. Right. And it reverted to. Yeah. 00:40:01 Speaker 2: The feds. 00:40:02 Speaker 1: It reverted to national forests. 00:40:04 Speaker 2: Yeah, it was. 00:40:05 Speaker 1: It's just funny when these stories that you're telling, it points to this thing that I think people lose sight of why these things became what they are. They did. But then values change. When they made the wilderness areas, there was no conversation about rare earth minerals. 00:40:26 Speaker 2: Right. 00:40:27 Speaker 1: So now there's this sense of people looking around and they're being like, we did what? 00:40:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, right. 00:40:33 Speaker 1: We did what? 00:40:34 Speaker 2: Right, right. 00:40:36 Speaker 1: Are you kidding me? 00:40:37 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:40:37 Speaker 1: We protected that? 00:40:39 Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll have to fight over that one. You know, as a people, right? As the American people. And who knows how that'll come out? I don't know. I can't predict. The 64 Wilderness Act would have been, like, people would have laughed uproariously in 1867. 00:40:59 Speaker 1: They'd laugh uproariously now. 00:41:01 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:41:01 Speaker 1: You would never in a million years, dude. You would never in a million years pass that now. 00:41:05 Speaker 2: Why is that? 00:41:06 Speaker 1: Because it became partisan. 00:41:08 Speaker 2: Yeah. Got you. 00:41:10 Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by that. 00:41:10 Speaker 2: Why do you think? 00:41:11 Speaker 1: I mean, the Wilderness Act didn't just pass. I'm interested in somebody else's. The Wilderness Act didn't just pass. It passed overwhelmingly. But people lose sight of, like, the Clean Water Act. This was a Republican president. Right. The Endangered Species Act. Yep. 00:41:27 Speaker 2: 72. 00:41:29 Speaker 1: 1972. Dick Nixon. 00:41:31 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:41:33 Speaker 1: It's just different now, man. 00:41:35 Speaker 2: Right. 00:41:35 Speaker 1: And if you go back in time, man, like, What Republicans meant and Democrats meant switches all the time. 00:41:41 Speaker 2: Right. 00:41:42 Speaker 1: That's right. You know. 00:41:44 Speaker 2: Well, I grew up in Alabama, right? Southern Democrats. 00:41:47 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:41:47 Speaker 2: It's a totally different thing. Yeah. 00:41:49 Speaker 1: Like the guy that emancipated the slaves, you know, like Abraham Lincoln was Republican. Right. People like people resisting reconstruction in the American South. We're Democrats, then you go a few decades forward and the civil rights movement totally switches. Democrats. Totally switches what side is pushing most aggressively for civil rights. You go back a little while ago, and I mean a little while ago, meaning like during my 11-year-old's lifetime, Republicans were free trade. 00:42:20 Speaker 2: Right. 00:42:21 Speaker 1: Republicans gave up on free trade. Republicans were interventionist. 00:42:29 Speaker 2: Right. 00:42:31 Speaker 1: Willing to be like a global police officer. Republicans liked allegiances. 00:42:35 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:42:35 Speaker 1: They like NATO. Yep. 00:42:37 Speaker 2: Right. And to share the burden. Yeah. 00:42:41 Speaker 1: And all of a sudden it's like, Oh, hold on. I must've missed something because we're not like, we're not free trade anymore. 00:42:47 Speaker 2: Right. 00:42:48 Speaker 1: So where people sat on these public lands issues switches, but it would be like purely, purely partisan now. Right. 00:42:57 Speaker 2: So I think, I think that it's kind of like, uh, we don't want to descend into factional violence or factional, like, anger on public lands. What we want to do is agree on goals and disagree on the methods used, like you can free market or you can do all this kind of stuff. But you want to agree on the goals of trying to keep the public estate. 00:43:24 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:43:25 Speaker 2: Because the partisanship ends up being the dog, the tail wagging the dog against the wall, right? It ends up killing the dog. It doesn't work. And it becomes so stupid, right? Like where you just have these opinions based on your ideological perspective, which is very abstract, right? And one of the things I was talking the other day was hunters and fishermen do share one thing. They own one thing. And it's kind of a reality-based decision-making thing. Like if it's 23 degrees below zero and you're going to go trapping or whatever, you got to put all the different gear on and make sure you don't fall in the water head first. It's reality based. Modern society insulates people from reality and allows them to entertain these like consequence free kind of BS notions of wouldn't it be nice if. 00:44:25 Speaker 1: Give me an example. 00:44:27 Speaker 2: Well, the public public lands privatization movement. Like when Mike Lee's attempt to sell off all that land in Utah, right? They don't have the water for that. It was an ideological goad. It was an attack on the idea that we share something in common and that this is beautiful. And what I consider a cornerstone of American democratic republic. I really do. I see the public lands as equal. It's the Constitution, the American public lands. I'm a diehard. I believe those two things. Our freedom as Americans to experience our own dirt, our own water, our own mountains, our own Bankhead National Forest, I think that is absolutely crucial to any future that we want for our kids or grandkids. 00:45:28 Speaker 1: You know, a minute ago we were talking about what it means to be a Republican switches a lot. And it switched a lot under Trump. 00:45:35 Speaker 2: Right. 00:45:35 Speaker 1: Like Trump took. Right. You know, it's funny because he will frequently say someone's a Republican in name only. 00:45:44 Speaker 2: Right. 00:45:45 Speaker 1: But that person could be someone that would have been diehard Republican. 00:45:50 Speaker 2: Right. 00:45:51 Speaker 1: Pre-Trump era. 00:45:51 Speaker 2: Sure. 00:45:52 Speaker 1: Because he just by fiat said we're no longer free trade. 00:45:57 Speaker 2: Right. 00:45:58 Speaker 1: And they followed. 00:45:59 Speaker 2: Sure. 00:45:59 Speaker 1: You know, it was just bizarre to see it happen. 00:46:02 Speaker 2: Agreed. 00:46:02 Speaker 1: But they followed. I have very, like, as a hunter and angler, I have very deep frustrations with Democrats because from them, we get so many anti-hunting, anti-wildlife management stuff, method of take, prohibitions, cultural attacks on hunters. It comes from them. And you just don't see it come from Republicans. And part of this, part of for me, part of my mind is I like to put positive attention on Democrats who come from a hunting and angling background because I'm like, We're going to have them around. I want these voices in that room. 00:47:01 Speaker 2: Right. 00:47:02 Speaker 1: And so when I find those, I like them. Likewise, when I find a Republican who has the audacity to be outspokenly pro-public lands, I want to shine a light on them. You bet. Because I want that voice in the room. But why is it that... If you look at it just totally ideologically, why is it that in. 00:47:27 Speaker 2: I don't know. 00:47:28 Speaker 1: Why is it that in the last 20 years that animosity to public lands has become a right thing, has become a Republican thing? Like, why is that? Roosevelt was a Republican. 00:47:43 Speaker 2: Right. I think that... He. 00:47:47 Speaker 1: Was a moose party guy, too. Yeah, he was. Right, right. 00:47:50 Speaker 2: He was an anomaly in that. I mean, McKinley, when McKinley was shot, you know, he was at the Ohio... Hannah, he said, now that wild man is in charge of the presidency. He goes, I told you, Mark Hannah, I told you not to put him in there. 00:48:11 Speaker 1: Yeah, now that wild man. 00:48:13 Speaker 2: Yeah, wild man is in charge of the presidency. I think that it's hard to get past the ideology, which is very convenient in a growing oligarchy. I think it's hard to get rid of the, not get rid of, it's hard to dismiss the ideology of privatization overall, right? And he goes back to, like I was reading about the, just the beginnings of all this, right? And the Koch brothers, you know, what did they believe really, right? We always talk about Charles and David Koch and their impact on our politics and all, but what did they really believe? Well, They believed in deregulating all the stuff that they wanted to socialize their costs and privatize their profits. They didn't like paying big judgments when people got blown up by a pipeline, for instance. Okay. They didn't like people saying they couldn't pour stuff in the river, you know, or the Clean Air Act, stuff like that. They thought that was an infringement on capitalism. ideals. And it's funny because when they started the Cato Institute, they partnered with a guy named Murray Rothbard, who was an anarcho-capitalist. And a very interesting guy. If you applied Murray Rothbard's theories to your life, It would be a disaster. Okay. But anarcho-capitalism. 00:49:46 Speaker 1: But he's a think tank guy. 00:49:48 Speaker 2: He's like a think tank guy, for sure. 00:49:49 Speaker 1: And the Cato Institute is a think tank. Right. 00:49:52 Speaker 2: And it doesn't think about things really that contradict what it wants, the outcome it wants. Yeah. Right. 00:50:02 Speaker 1: I used to want to work at a think tank, man. I used to think that was the job of jobs. Come up with crazy shit, dude. 00:50:08 Speaker 2: Yeah. The problem is, is the funders of think tanks kind of delegate what you can think about. Yeah. 00:50:17 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:50:18 Speaker 2: And so it takes some of the fun out of, you know, but that's not what you're supposed to be thinking about. 00:50:26 Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. 00:50:27 Speaker 2: I told you if you want to get paid, you're going to think about this. But no, I think that ideology of privatization overall is, the Republican Party can't shake it. And you and I, we could come up with a million ideas where privatization of things is good, right? And private enterprise does a better job, right? But you can't, it doesn't always. I notice in land management, in public land management, all the people get a say. And in private land management, which is right, we don't. And so if, I won't say who this was, but a county commissioner in Montana one time told me, they said, we revere, this is a very conservative person, they said, we revere private property rights in this county. But what do private property rights mean when somebody owns over a third of the county? Like, what do you do with the roads? What do you do with access to, you know, like, that's the problem with the privatization overall. You know, what happens to Gibson Reservoir west of my house? I don't think Doge doged to the Bureau of Reclamation, by the way. 00:51:51 Speaker 1: Do you? 00:51:51 Speaker 2: Do you know if they did? 00:51:53 Speaker 1: Oh, they didn't tap into BLM? 00:51:55 Speaker 2: No, the BLR, or BOR. 00:51:58 Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Bureau of Reclamation. 00:52:00 Speaker 2: They definitely doze the BLM. 00:52:03 Speaker 1: I don't know. 00:52:04 Speaker 2: But the Bureau of Reclamation is basically a federal giveaway of water. 00:52:10 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:52:11 Speaker 2: And I've often thought that if you wanted to privatize things and somebody privatized some of the activities of the Bureau of Reclamation— It would change our country. It would change the West once and for all, right? 00:52:26 Speaker 1: I mean, hold on. If you privatized water allocation. 00:52:29 Speaker 2: Holy smokes. 00:52:31 Speaker 1: Yeah. We talked to someone the other day where we were pondering what happens in the future when you think of water like you think of fuel. Yeah. And water scarcity gets to a point where you're like, hey, man, that stuff's a buck a gallon. Yep. 00:52:48 Speaker 2: Right? 00:52:48 Speaker 1: I think that you would accelerate our timeline to that outcome. Yep. 00:52:53 Speaker 2: For sure. Yep. 00:52:54 Speaker 1: If it was privatized. 00:52:56 Speaker 2: Yeah. And I mean, you could cut off you could cut off the USGS canal up north where I live. And ninety three eight thousand acres would now become dry land farm at best. So I just think people people who are in in this Republican ideology. have really, really been insulated from the consequences of what they claim they want. And it's kind of like the guy drinking water out of his tap and saying that this federal overreach is terrible. And, you know, he doesn't know what the Clean Water Act did for him or his property rights and values. 00:53:43 Speaker 1: You know, this is making me think of, it seems like a lifetime ago, that when RFK Jr. was campaigning, he made the ballot here in Montana. When he was campaigning, he came on the show and he brought up an interesting point I never thought about. He was talking about ways in which industry, as much as they might talk about fair value, And dislike handouts. 00:54:23 Speaker 2: Right. 00:54:25 Speaker 1: Why are they not asked to pay? Why is industry not asked to pay fair market value? Right? If GE, decades ago, but if GE destroys a fishery in a river, it'd be like, okay, you're doing your business. And your business cost this fishery and this river, and it cost untold billions in cleanup. 00:54:56 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:55:00 Speaker 1: The bill will never be submitted. 00:55:02 Speaker 2: Right. 00:55:03 Speaker 1: No one will ever say like, hold on, let me, I don't remember if he's talking about GE in this case, but the Hudson River. Right, that's where he started out. No one will ever be able to say, yeah, what was that worth? 00:55:12 Speaker 2: Right, right. 00:55:14 Speaker 1: What was the Hudson River worth? 00:55:16 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:55:17 Speaker 1: And who do we invoice for having lost the Hudson River? And to be totally fair about it, if we didn't give industry latitude and we didn't give industry access to natural resources, we wouldn't have been able to develop into the nation that we are. I want to do some crazy revisionist history and act like that we would have landed in a place of our power, our wealth, our privilege, our access to jobs, our access to education, all of our liberties. Like, yes, had we choked off industry... we might be in a worse position with less wildlife. 00:56:10 Speaker 2: Also, people wouldn't do that. They don't do that. I had a guy one time, I was bemoaning something about the Berkeley pit, you know, in Butte. 00:56:19 Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. 00:56:20 Speaker 2: And he was old guy and he said, well, you ought to say that in English instead of German. 00:56:25 Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. 00:56:26 Speaker 2: And because that copper helped to win World War II, you know, and he nailed me on it. Like I was like, yeah, I get it, man. 00:56:33 Speaker 1: No, there's a lot of bottleneck arguments, man. It's like, People like to do that. If blank hadn't happened, we would have lost World War II. 00:56:43 Speaker 2: Right. Butterfly effect type thing. 00:56:46 Speaker 1: I haven't read it in a long time, but we beat the Nazis because we could outproduce aircraft. We outproduced them. 00:56:57 Speaker 2: Yep. 00:56:58 Speaker 1: What was the limiting factor on aircraft? Aluminum. 00:57:01 Speaker 2: Aluminum. 00:57:02 Speaker 1: What was the limiting factor on aluminum? 00:57:04 Speaker 2: Electricity. Yep. 00:57:06 Speaker 1: Where do we get the electricity? We damn the Columbia. 00:57:08 Speaker 2: Correct. 00:57:09 Speaker 1: Right. And so all that loss to Sam, and he'd be like, man, what kind of idiot would build these dams? 00:57:15 Speaker 2: Yeah. And I've said that very thing. 00:57:16 Speaker 1: You got to go. Say that in German. Yeah. 00:57:19 Speaker 2: I've said that very thing. 00:57:20 Speaker 1: Say it in German, not English. 00:57:24 Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, but you do have to learn. What do they say? Extreme cases make bad law. 00:57:31 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:57:31 Speaker 2: Right? That was an old Second Amendment thing. 00:57:34 Speaker 1: Right. 00:57:36 Speaker 2: Which I agree with. and, uh, extreme cases make bad law. So, so when you're under fire, tell me back, what do you mean by that? Well, like you don't want to take the most extreme cases and ban everything. 00:57:49 Speaker 1: Oh, I see. 00:57:49 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:57:50 Speaker 1: Right. 00:57:50 Speaker 2: Like you say, well, he got poisoned by, um, you know, he ate like 20 boxes of raisin bran and it made him sick. So we're going to make a law says you can only buy one box of raisin bran. Yeah. 00:58:01 Speaker 1: There was just a tragedy we covered last spring in Wisconsin where, uh, uh, uh, a three year old was involved in a shooting incident in a hunting accident. Yep. Sort of. Yep. It seems very clear, like very clearly this was on that three year old's father, but it brings, so then there are people being like, why are we letting. 00:58:22 Speaker 2: Yep. Right. 00:58:23 Speaker 1: And it's like a freak occurrence. Right. We'll, we'll likely possibly drive a, a thing where like kids shouldn't be able to be doing that. 00:58:33 Speaker 2: Yep. Legislation. 00:58:35 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:58:36 Speaker 2: And I mean, law is a dangerous thing because it's backed by the power of the state, right? To actually come to your house, knock on the door. And I mean, you got to be careful, right? So extreme cases make bad law. And I think that after we won World War II with the copper and the aluminum and the damming, that we could have taken a little different look at things and said, maybe how do we do fish passages? We now have the luxury to figure out How to do this less destructively and super fun, super fun, which came under attack in the 80s, was created to do that, right? To fix the abuses of the past. I think about the Bankhead-Jones Act, Farm Tenant Act, 1937. It allowed the federal government to buy and use money to take over those abandoned farmsteads we're talking about. In all that pink you see, I know Onyx doesn't do it, but if you have an old paper map, all that pink you see in eastern Montana, that's Bankhead-Jones, managed by the Bureau of Land Management. And it was acquired after the homesteaders ran for their lives when it quit raining in 1917. 70,000 people left Montana during those years. Is that right? Yeah. And that Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937 allowed the federal government to use all the taxpayers in America to put what they ended up with, crested wheatgrass. I mean, it had to do something, right? It wasn't great, but it was better than nothing. Just like kudju down south. right tuskegee national forest they planted thousands of kudju crowns oh did they really yeah under that bankhead jones act okay they got money they said there was no dirt left dude there was no soil it was called the most destroyed land in alabama that talladega national forest and what became the tuskegee competed for the title of the most destroyed land is that right yeah. 01:00:37 Speaker 1: Man i would have guessed you told me that it was like somewhere in uh, Western Oklahoma. 01:00:41 Speaker 2: Yeah. Nope. It was, we, we did it quicker down South, uh, because of sharecropping. We pushed the sharecroppers up into the forest lands, the uplands. Okay. And they had to do whatever they could do. So all the dirt like ran off. Um, and yeah, we had the most destroyed. That's the Talladega national forest. That was the one that they, and that was abandoned. Right. The feds didn't, they didn't have to buy that so much. People were, people walked off. They walked off Talladega to, uh, the Tuskegee too. Um, they couldn't even find anybody to take the Tuskegee until 1959. It was, it was, well, it, it passed around. It was just abandoned land and it passed around. Auburn university was offered to Auburn university, but they didn't have the money to really manage it. It was offered to the state for a game range. Okay. The state said, well, there's not any game there right now. Oh, you know, and, and so, uh, they'd had to go to federal. And what I wish people understood about public lands was that, um, when you're, when you have, they, they're only really valuable in their aggregate. 01:01:48 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:01:49 Speaker 2: Like an acre of though, why he's not going to do you any good. I see. Or an acre of the Missouri breaks, but in aggregate, uh, you know, 800,000 acres of that is watershed, right? And it's elk hunting. But if you were to have a modern homestead act and give all that away, you would just come up with the Dust Bowl Redux. 01:02:14 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:02:14 Speaker 2: It doesn't work. You know, you might have people in the OY, he could tow it out, tough it out until the water ran out, until there was a dry year, and they're gone. Yeah. And you've got the Medusa head and the cheatgrass that they left behind when they grazed their last horse. 01:02:32 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:02:33 Speaker 2: It's really powerful in aggregate. 01:02:35 Speaker 1: You know, there's a point I make, and I made it thousands of times here and elsewhere, that I get nervous. Even though I do it, I get nervous when people start justifying public lands or justifying wildlife because of its economic output. 01:02:57 Speaker 2: Yeah, me too. 01:02:59 Speaker 1: It's very tempting to do it. There are organizations that that's what they do. There are organizations, trade associations, there are organizations that exist where they try to put a dollar value... public lands they put a dollar value on american wildlife they then go to dc they go to state capitals and they say hey you know i know we're talking about the value of oil we're talking about the value of minerals we're talking about the value of timber let's talk about the value of outdoor recreation let's talk about the value of wildlife because because deer hunting in iowa drives Blank millions of dollars of economic activity. 01:03:41 Speaker 2: Wolf watching. 01:03:42 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:03:43 Speaker 2: That's where I saw it first, yeah. 01:03:45 Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. The value of wolf watching. And I'm like, I get what you're trying to do and cool. 01:03:52 Speaker 2: Fine. Yep. 01:03:53 Speaker 1: But what makes me nervous is that if you came and told me it costs us money, my opinion wouldn't change at all. 01:04:06 Speaker 2: Right. 01:04:08 Speaker 1: I wouldn't then be like, oh, I wasn't aware that public lands cost us money. We better sell them all off right now. Right. So I don't want to act like I'm motivated by a thing that I don't want to like point out this thing to, to change people's mind about something. One, if they were to demonstrate the opposite, it wouldn't change anything. I think. 01:04:28 Speaker 2: Right. 01:04:28 Speaker 1: You know, the same way that if someone demonstrated to me, my kids cost me money. I wouldn't be like, oh, I hadn't thought about it like that. 01:04:38 Speaker 2: I've seen that one too. They go, you know how much it'll cost to raise a baby in 2026? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't care. 01:04:46 Speaker 1: Okay, sure. Doesn't make me love my children less. So I'm just making that point that that happens, right? 01:04:55 Speaker 2: Agreed. 01:04:57 Speaker 1: And I bring this up because you've brought up some points about, you brought up some very emotional, spiritual things. things about public lands right and things that you love about the american experience tied to public rights right but what do you ever play the game do you ever play the game of of stepping outside of matters of emotion matters of spirituality oh yeah and go like okay let's play the game Let me talk about what we lose if we lose public lands. 01:05:30 Speaker 2: Yes, and I do. And I also would say that if you wanted to do intrinsic values versus extrinsic or quantifiable values, I believe the preponderance of the evidence still maintains that you hold on to 640 million acres of American public land. 01:05:48 Speaker 1: Let's play with it for a minute. Even though it makes me uncomfortable, let's play with it for a minute. 01:05:51 Speaker 2: All right. So and I go back to let's go back to the Tuskegee. or not to Tuskegee, it's 11,500 acres, right? Let's go to, say, the National Forest, San Bernardino or whatever that they set aside early outside of L.A. because they realize that's where the water comes from. 01:06:10 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:06:12 Speaker 2: Um, there's a really cool story in that one too, where, uh, John Brown's last remaining surviving sons have a homestead there. 01:06:19 Speaker 1: Really? 01:06:19 Speaker 2: Yeah. And that that's where they ended up. You kidding? Yeah. So there's all this incredible. 01:06:24 Speaker 1: Cause some of his sons were involved in his, his insurrection, right? 01:06:28 Speaker 2: Oh yeah. They got so many of them got white wiped out. Right. Um, and, uh, so two of them ended up there, but they set that aside for its ecosystem services first and foremost. 01:06:39 Speaker 1: And, uh, The. 01:06:41 Speaker 2: Original case that gave the Forest Service, and I'm going to get the date wrong, but it's called Grimald versus the U.S. Forest Service. They gave them the right to regulate grazing on the new national forest. This was like post-1907. It was watershed protection. And they had these Basque sheep herders in the Sierras, and they were just pouring the sheep on them. And then they would set fire to it to get new growth, you know? 01:07:09 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:07:10 Speaker 2: And it was falling apart, the watershed was. When the snow came, there was nothing to hold it, and it just ran off. And then it filled up the irrigation stuff with sediment, right? 01:07:20 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:07:20 Speaker 2: So they were going, we got to do something about this. And public ownership was the answer. Right. And and so. 01:07:27 Speaker 1: To save the wealth downriver. Yeah. 01:07:30 Speaker 2: And a great one. It came out of John Weeks came from New Hampshire. Right. He was a businessman in Boston. He was a he was a really successful and he was an attorney. But he did a lot of stuff. But he's from New Hampshire. And one of the things happened in the White Mountains was after they slicked it off. So this was unclaimed federal land at the time where you could buy it for pennies. 01:07:50 Speaker 1: Right. 01:07:51 Speaker 2: So they slicked off the timber, all of it. And everybody relied on a mill wheel. down then to grind corn and wheat, right? So the millpond's filled with sediment. And you didn't have a steam shovel, right? This is like back. You got to get out there, drain it. You got to dig the mud out of it. And here, next time it rains, here comes another slug of mud. Takes care of your millpond. You can't run your wheel. You can't run your business. So the logger, the logging industry... had externalized the cost of their operation, own all these people down low. 01:08:26 Speaker 1: Yeah. This is the point I was trying to make earlier around what RFK Jr. was describing some of the work he did when he used to work with river keepers. 01:08:37 Speaker 2: Yes. 01:08:38 Speaker 1: You're right. Those loggers, the mill people... Never had a place to send the invoice. 01:08:46 Speaker 2: No, they never had a place to send it. 01:08:48 Speaker 1: For the destroyed mill pond. 01:08:50 Speaker 2: The Hudson is particularly relevant to this because it's full of what's called legacy sediment. And that's from that log-in boom after World War I. Civil War, mostly. And it had so much sediment that they couldn't navigate it, right? They had to use whatever they had for dredging back then to keep it open. And they're like, where is all this dirt coming from? French Broad River in Asheville, same thing. It was coming off of what's now the Pisgah National Forest. And just the mud was just pouring down, right? 01:09:22 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:09:22 Speaker 2: And they'd slicked it off and left, right? And that's true of Conecuh National Forest in Alabama. They took the long, after they ran out of white pines up in your country. 01:09:34 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:09:36 Speaker 2: They figured out that the longleaf was the next big deal, right? And they took the longleaf out really fast because they had more mechanization. And they were paying like, I think it was 65 cents a day at a big labor force farm. in the South, right, that was waiting, hungry to work. And that land was literally, like, if you go to the Conecuh National Forest now, they're restoring the longleaf. It's an incredible success story, right? It's National Forest, and they have a, I'm going to get in the weeds here, Clark-McNary Act, which came after the Weeks Act. it expanded the scope of the federal government to acquire lands that had been slicked off and abandoned. So it wasn't just for watershed protection anymore. It was for sustainable timber. And that's called the Clark-McNary Act. I think it was 1927. And that Conecuh was acquired under that. 01:10:34 Speaker 1: Go back to that Weeks deal you were talking about. 01:10:36 Speaker 2: So John Weeks, the Weeks Act of 1911 was passed by Congress. to address the deforested watersheds and the sediment coming down. That allowed the federal government to acquire these slicked-off, logged-out landscapes and reforest them to address flooding and water quality issues down low. The Weeks Act of 1911 gave us the Eastern National Forest. And there were other people in that debate Um, the, one of my favorites was, uh, the Mississippi women's garden club. 01:11:14 Speaker 1: Hmm. 01:11:15 Speaker 2: Uh, they were like all for the week's act because they said, man, this is just ugly. Like, why did you do this? We love Mississippi and we don't think it should look like this. You know, they were aesthetics, right? The garden clubs. Yeah. And that's true in Northern California too. Uh, these garden clubs were really big proponents of, of federal ownership. 01:11:36 Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. It's like an early ally. 01:11:39 Speaker 2: Yeah, early ally. And so under the Clark McNary Act, they acquired like the Apalachicola National Forest, the Conecuh, all that longleaf country. 01:11:49 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:11:50 Speaker 2: And that's because it was slicked off and abandoned. And the Apalachicola's got more stuff to it where they tried to drain it and it affected the fishery in Apalachicola Bay. So these are ecosystem services. Yeah. I still believe, not still, down here right in the viscera and combine it with the brain, that the preponderance of the evidence says to keep these lands in public hands and do not open this Pandora's box. And we can then also enjoy And that's an experience. We can also have what you're talking about, that this is intrinsic value as well, aesthetic, political. It empowers each American citizen to own a piece of our dirt. 01:12:47 Speaker 1: No doubt you've noticed that most of your, you mentioned Mike Lee earlier, Jason Chaffetz, most of your people that are philosophically opposed to the federal estate, as they'll often say, come from states where the majority of the land is federally owned. What's your, like, from their perspective, walk through what that frustration looks like, from their perspective. 01:13:25 Speaker 2: They don't rule the roost in their own backyard. 01:13:30 Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. 01:13:31 Speaker 2: And, uh, there's a shift in Utah, by the way, um, that, that I, I spent a long time interviewing, not a long time. I interviewed quite a few people that are like running cows on the like grand staircase out in the desert. Yeah. And what the, the state lands agency of Utah has been selling land. 01:13:51 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:13:52 Speaker 2: Big time. 01:13:52 Speaker 1: I didn't know that. 01:13:54 Speaker 2: And yes. 01:13:55 Speaker 1: I mean, I knew, I didn't know it was more than normal or whatever. 01:13:57 Speaker 2: Yeah. And, and there's some, some, uh, kind of, uh, exhibit a cases where these guys have a grazing lease for, you know, since back to the Mormon settlement days. 01:14:08 Speaker 1: Right. 01:14:09 Speaker 2: And all of a sudden those sections of state land have gone to this guy. Who's a sculptor. He's also pretty cool dude. Right. He wants it because it's so beautiful and so interesting. And that grazing lease is terminated right now. And you got like a 40 acre in holding that you pay taxes on and you got cows, you got no place to put them. 01:14:29 Speaker 1: Right. 01:14:29 Speaker 2: So they, they have kind of gone against what's called SITLA, which is their state lands agency and see it as run out of salt Lake city by people who are interested in real estate and not cows, you know? 01:14:41 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:14:42 Speaker 2: So that shows you the, and you, you know, this as well as anybody like in Colorado, you can't really access state land at will. 01:14:49 Speaker 1: Right. 01:14:50 Speaker 2: So like the idea of transferring these public lands to the state is going to be a terrible rude awakening for us hunters. 01:14:59 Speaker 1: Um, Because you know what the state's going to do with them. 01:15:02 Speaker 2: They're going to divest them. 01:15:04 Speaker 1: And sometimes, by the state constitution, they almost have to. That's right. They can be sued for not doing it. 01:15:11 Speaker 2: Yeah, they can be sued for not doing it. 01:15:13 Speaker 1: Because they're not doing maximum value. 01:15:14 Speaker 2: That's right. And another thing that Utah tried to do is say, well, these aren't school trust lands when we get them. We don't have to sell them. But there aren't enough people in Utah to distribute the tax base to manage lands that don't have any, that aren't producing pounds on cows or oil and gas or there's just, I mean, you've been, you've been in the Utah desert, you know, it's incredibly beautiful, but it's monetarily, it's not making any money. That's why it's never been claimed. 01:15:43 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:15:43 Speaker 2: I mean, they homestead acted. How many homestead acts do we have? Railroad Act. 01:15:49 Speaker 1: Give it away. Give it away. 01:15:50 Speaker 2: General Land Office was made for divesting the federal government of the land that we took from the Native Americans. I always put this back. Rome had what's called the Azure Publicus for about 400 years, and it was land that they took from the barbarian tribes, right? 01:16:08 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:16:09 Speaker 2: And it lasted until, like, the— The politicians and the legionnaires divided it all up. And Romans of every kind of ilk grazed. They were pastoralists. They were free, kind of free rangers for a long time until that. And I think about England and the Enclosure Acts. which drove so much of the migration over here, the feudal lords in England were like, well, we don't want the serfs on there anymore. We're going to run sheep. We don't need them there. And poof, you're gone. 01:16:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. 01:16:50 Speaker 2: I see this privatization of American public lands movement in a direct way. direct course from Rome through the, from ad republicus loss to the enclosure acts to what we have now. 01:17:05 Speaker 1: And as public lands fights have come, I feel, I think, I think it's fair to say that some of these big public lands fights have become national news stories. Yes. Um, The Chaffetz proposal became a national news story. The Lee proposal became national news stories. People were opining on it all over the place. Editorials and Wall Street Journal, New York Times, people are reading about this that never stepped foot on public lands, that don't use public lands. It became a thing. Out of that, there's been some interesting results like coming out of a Like here in the state we're sitting in, coming out of a House race and a Senate race. We have a House race. The Democrat nominee and the Republican nominee clarified, both clarified, that they will not stand for large public lands sell-offs. 01:18:10 Speaker 2: Right. 01:18:11 Speaker 1: They have policy differences about public lands management, but they've both said. 01:18:16 Speaker 2: Right. 01:18:18 Speaker 1: Said slash need to say. 01:18:19 Speaker 2: Right. 01:18:20 Speaker 1: To get elected, you oppose large public lands sell-offs. 01:18:26 Speaker 2: Right. 01:18:26 Speaker 1: Both sides of the aisle. Are we unusual? Is this state unusual in the West, or are you seeing more examples where a politician will need to lay out, here's what I think about this, here's what I think about the war in Iran, here's what I think about tariffs, here's what I think about whatever the hell they think about. um and and then they gotta go and here's what i think about public lands right are you seeing that elsewhere or is it is montana an anomaly right. 01:18:59 Speaker 2: Now you're seeing it in utah okay but the With the Latter-day Saints kind of dominating the political structure, the people's voices probably don't matter as much yet, right? Like that. Like Governor Cox in Utah had that huge take our lands back movement or whatever. He had the billboards all paid for with public money, by the way. 01:19:25 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:19:26 Speaker 2: And it didn't really work because so many people have moved to Utah already. that love public lands and that use the Canyon lands, you know, but in Montana there, they recognize that we had a Democrat governor not long ago, Bullock, you know, and he was a strong champion of public lands and public lands management. Uh, and, and they recognize here that, that the game is still in play. And so I have a hard time trusting anybody telling me how much they love public lands now. if they're in the same party as Mike Lee in the Republican party, which has in its 2016 platform to privatize public land. 01:20:09 Speaker 1: Yeah. That's the thing I point out, pointed out often at that time is that when they got together that year, that, that, that was on their mind. 01:20:23 Speaker 2: Yep. 01:20:25 Speaker 1: And it made it across, but in all fairness, they're not, They're not a monolith. Just like Democrats. The other day I had a conversation. She became in a lot of hot water very soon after that around this ballot confusion around the Dan Sullivan controversy. 01:20:44 Speaker 2: In Alaska. 01:20:45 Speaker 1: Yeah, we interviewed Mary Peltola. Mary Peltola would be really, seems to not really care about what she's supposed to think as a Democrat. 01:20:58 Speaker 2: Right. 01:20:59 Speaker 1: You're not going to be getting– she's not going to be bringing gun control legislation. 01:21:03 Speaker 2: To Alaska. 01:21:04 Speaker 1: She's not going to be spearheading a bill, a piece of gun control. She's not going to be part of a hunt ban, a method of take ban conversation. 01:21:16 Speaker 2: Anti-trapping legislation. 01:21:18 Speaker 1: So it's like they're not a monolith. Neither party is a monolith. 01:21:21 Speaker 2: They aren't, but the Republicans– I'm not afraid one way or another. 01:21:27 Speaker 1: I'm an American, right? 01:21:29 Speaker 2: We'll fix this thing or not. Letter book. But they concerned me greatly when nobody stood up other than Tom Tillis to say anything while all this was happening. It kind of blew my mind. I can't get over that, dude. 01:21:46 Speaker 1: I can't get over it. It kind of blew my mind. But the same thing, man, and this is a point I've made. At that same time, Like this is the thing, this is the thing that always sticks in my mind. And it's like, it's irrelevant now because so much has happened, but it's irrelevant now. But in, in 20, so when Trump was campaigning in 2015, he, he, he did an appearance at shot show. Yep. And I went down to watch and it has to have been that seconds before he got on stage, someone whispered into his ear. a thing that would not be top of mind for him. Someone whispered in his ear, say, this is my theory, I don't know where this came from, say, I'm not going to sell off your public lands. 01:22:38 Speaker 2: Right, I remember when he did that. 01:22:41 Speaker 1: Because it, like, and I'm not picking on him when I say that someone whispered in his ear. Every time a politician gets up in front of anybody, somebody's whispering in their ear what to say. But he got up and said it. And I remember thinking, I was like, man, the Republican Party just, made it a plant a plank in the platform right and here was this guy right saying i'm not going to right and as much as a lot of as much as a lot of democrats and liberals hate to admit it he. 01:23:10 Speaker 2: Didn't right not in the first term no yeah well he didn't he hasn't yet right he did because he's been executive ordering stuff like mad he could easily easily had executive ordered. 01:23:19 Speaker 1: That one too yeah but he but he but like like so do you think that's the third rail What's the third rail mean? Like when you touch the subway third rail and it electrocutes you? So nobody wants to touch the third rail? Do you think he thinks that would cause too much trouble? Or do you think he doesn't care? Well, we got to define what we're talking about. I think my feeling is, again, I don't think this is a personal issue for him. 01:23:48 Speaker 2: Right. 01:23:48 Speaker 1: I don't think this is a personal issue for him. I think that like, you know, I think that the work he's doing around DC with, with cleanups and restorations and adding new buildings. I think that that, that is clearly of a personal passion to him. Yeah. And he even said like, it's what I do to relax. 01:24:09 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:24:09 Speaker 1: Right. He's a developer, a builder, right. Fixer upper. Like he likes that stuff. Yeah. I don't think, I mean, here's a guy like he, he raises children in the penthouse. 01:24:18 Speaker 2: Right. 01:24:19 Speaker 1: He plates stuff in gold. I don't think this guy's thinking about, public lands in the american west i think there are people around him that do yeah and i think that under this administration i i don't think had that big proposal had lee's proposal to to to sell off three million acres of public land in utah and nevada right primarily in utah and nevada i think had that moved along i have reason to believe from people i've had conversations with that have Awareness and access. I think that had that moved along, they would have interfered. Now, that is not to say that they wouldn't want to just go build data centers all over on public land. 01:25:06 Speaker 2: Right. 01:25:08 Speaker 1: That they wouldn't want to industrialize the south slope of the Brooks Range. Yep. That they wouldn't want to drill ANWR. 01:25:17 Speaker 2: Right. 01:25:19 Speaker 1: That's not to say any of that. They would. But I don't think they would have allowed or will allow, they still have two years to go. I don't think they would have allowed or will allow some number like in the millions of flat out privatized public lands. Right. Because they'd lose too many allies. Yeah. Politicians like, everything sits at 50% in this country. Mm-hmm. They already know, like every politician knows that 50% of the people hate them. Mm-hmm. And so guarding percentages, they have to guard percentages. 01:25:56 Speaker 2: Right. 01:25:58 Speaker 1: And if they look and they're like, that one, that one is going to cost us a percentage. 01:26:05 Speaker 2: A percentage point. 01:26:08 Speaker 1: Or 1.5%. Right. And that's really a problem because those are people that are otherwise going to have our back. 01:26:14 Speaker 2: Yep. 01:26:14 Speaker 1: And I think that that kind of thing, that like millions of acres. 01:26:20 Speaker 2: Right. 01:26:21 Speaker 1: Isn't a thing they were going to let slide. They'll let slide all kinds, as they have. Right. They'll let slide all kinds of other stuff. I mean, they'll attempt to neuter the Forest Service, like as we saw, like attempt to neuter the Forest Service from a lot of the responsibilities. But no, I don't think it. Yeah. 01:26:38 Speaker 2: I don't think you're wrong. I think that's right. It's just my thing with the Mike Lee bill was– I do want to talk about this. I want people who are listening to this to start delving into history of public lands. I've got another book I'm working on right now with that focus. 01:27:02 Speaker 1: Where they all came from. 01:27:03 Speaker 2: Where they all came from. And the drudgery of Congress in creating this public estate that solved, and I'm telling you, that addressed, that didn't solve it. It addressed the natural resource crises that have dropped lesser nations since Rome. You know, when the English were looking around, they were going over to Central Europe to try to get yew wood to make longbows so they could go back to war. They had gotten rid of all their yew trees except the ones in the cemeteries, right? 01:27:39 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:27:40 Speaker 2: Like, it was a natural resource crisis. 01:27:42 Speaker 1: Yeah. You remember when I was talking about going to a Mayan ruin? Yeah. 01:27:45 Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. 01:27:47 Speaker 1: They developed and grew themselves to death. 01:27:54 Speaker 2: And crashed themselves out. 01:27:55 Speaker 1: Crashed themselves out. Had someone come in and said, hey, let's do some watersheds protection. Yeah. And create some national forests. 01:28:01 Speaker 2: Right. 01:28:02 Speaker 1: They might have showed up and the Europeans might have counted a lot more resistance from the Maya. 01:28:06 Speaker 2: That's right. Right. Exactly. So that's why I want people to prize themselves. During the Mike Lee bill, I kept asking. We have SNPLA 1998. The Southern Nevada Land Policy Act, right? It allows you to sell BLM lands with great transparency and accountability for the American people who've paid to manage these things and own them, right? So why weren't they referring to SNPLA 1998? Congress passed that. I don't know why. 01:28:38 Speaker 1: I never heard of it. 01:28:39 Speaker 2: I don't either. It's because they didn't want transparency. There was a bad game afoot in that proposed sell-off. And I just kept saying, well, if St. George, Utah needs infrastructure land, you go to SNPLA. It passed by Congress. We get a fair market value. The American people that own the lands, that paid to manage them all the way since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, right? Who paid blood and treasure to get them, to take them from the Mexican government, right? I mean, that's no small thing. The Mexican War wasn't, like, it didn't just appear and everybody, nobody had to pay for it. The lands are not free. You know? 01:29:26 Speaker 1: Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. 01:29:27 Speaker 2: But I just wanted to know, where is SNPLA in all this? And the thing was, is most people didn't know about it. And so they couldn't ask Mike Lee, what is it that you have planned that you cannot do under the existing legislation? 01:29:45 Speaker 1: What would have been the answer? 01:29:46 Speaker 2: I don't know. 01:29:48 Speaker 1: When they started looking for an off-ramp on that 3 million acre sell-off. 01:29:53 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:29:54 Speaker 1: Do you remember what the off-ramp was? 01:29:55 Speaker 2: No. 01:29:56 Speaker 1: No, it was that the off-ramp, when it got too hot, you know, and like I said, and there were rumors that the administration would have stepped in. The off-ramp was someone pointed out, how would you prevent China or Chinese proxy, China proxies or Blackstone? 01:30:25 Speaker 2: Yep. 01:30:27 Speaker 1: How would you prevent them from buying the land? Right. If it really is, if it's like as part of the plan, it has to be, oh, no, it's the highest bidder kind of thing. 01:30:36 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:30:38 Speaker 1: And they were pointing out, too, at the time, because you always have to point to something that's expedient. And at the time, housing, right? 01:30:45 Speaker 2: Right. 01:30:46 Speaker 1: Housing was a thing that was top of mind for people. Yeah. And so you attach it to a thing that there's public awareness around, housing shortage, housing crisis, housing expense. 01:30:56 Speaker 2: Right. 01:30:57 Speaker 1: Cost of living. So you're like, okay, we're going to take this thing we want to do ideologically, dispose of a bunch of public lands. Right. Reduce the federal state. How are we going to sell it to people? Affordable housing. That's the thing people care about right now. 01:31:08 Speaker 2: You bet. 01:31:09 Speaker 1: Or you'd be like, or China's going to crush us with rare earth minerals and we'll sell it with that. 01:31:14 Speaker 2: Right. 01:31:15 Speaker 1: There's some thing. You take what you've always wanted to do. 01:31:18 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:31:18 Speaker 1: You put a costume on it. 01:31:20 Speaker 2: Boom. 01:31:21 Speaker 1: You put a costume on it that makes it appropriate for the moment. 01:31:24 Speaker 2: Yep. 01:31:24 Speaker 1: So is affordable housing. But then you lay out the plan and you'd be like, but where in the plan does it dictate that the buyer makes affordable housing? And is the federal government really going to get in the business of dictating to these buyers what they do with it? And how do you prevent Chinese proxies from buying it? And the off ramp wound up being one of like national security. Gotcha. 01:31:54 Speaker 2: Yeah. Not... Another thing we can all agree on. 01:31:57 Speaker 1: Yes. Not... The off-ramp wasn't like, man, this is really pissing off a lot of people. 01:32:03 Speaker 2: Right. 01:32:03 Speaker 1: And a lot of hunters are incensed. 01:32:07 Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, that's fascinating. I just... Knowing the water resources down there, I'm not sure what the affordable housing, you know, inhabitants... Like, that's going to restress... that St. George country, it's raining down there now, you know, but, uh, I just looked at all that land and I'm just, you know, it, it, it's not really human. Inhabitable. 01:32:33 Speaker 1: Yeah. But what is changes so much? 01:32:35 Speaker 2: What's that? 01:32:36 Speaker 1: I said, what is. Yeah, that's right. 01:32:38 Speaker 2: Yeah. If you bring a big pipe from somewhere or desal and shoot it across the coast range, you know, yeah, all true. Um, as we, that would be externalizing the costs to an extraordinary degree. 01:32:54 Speaker 1: Yes. 01:32:55 Speaker 2: I think, you know, with the national debt, what it is, like I don't know that we really want to pipe more water, a new Bureau of Reclamation project. 01:33:05 Speaker 1: Yeah, to make more of the desert bloom. 01:33:08 Speaker 2: Yeah, bloom into houses. 01:33:10 Speaker 1: Yeah. What do you imagine being up next? I remember someone pointing out, that a big sell-off, a big public land sell-off, there's a cadence to it. And I wish I remember the details of it, but someone went back to the sagebrush rebellion. Maybe they went back more than that. And they're like, there's a cadence to this. 01:33:36 Speaker 2: Totally. 01:33:37 Speaker 1: You know, I can't remember. Maybe it's a 10. You know how snowshoe hares have a 10-year cycle? You bet. Someone's like, there's a cadence to public land sell-off. It might have been 10 years separated, but... Chaffetz 3 million acre proposal. 01:33:50 Speaker 2: Right. 01:33:52 Speaker 1: From Lee's 3 million acre proposal. And both of those went up in flames in the same way. 01:33:57 Speaker 2: Right. 01:33:59 Speaker 1: Do you think that that's dead now? Do you think the attacks will just be different now? Like that strategy isn't working? 01:34:09 Speaker 2: No, that'll come up again. They'll say, we're just too much in debt. We have to divest the lands. The Forest Service costs X and the lands are costing X. We have to divest because we're in debt. 01:34:21 Speaker 1: You're anticipating that's the argument. 01:34:22 Speaker 2: I anticipate that. But here's what happens first. And so I was working for like Bugle magazine and The Economist and all these people. I was freelancing, like, you know, like pulling from wherever I could. And I was reporting on the Pinedale anticline. right down in Pinedale, Wyoming. And they were running that mule deer study and pronghorn study there. And the herd just kept going down, right? 01:34:49 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:34:50 Speaker 2: And the Jonah field, they had an experiment there where they were going to directionally drill every section And all the whale pads had to be in the same place. So they would lessen their imprint. 01:35:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, lessen the surface impact. 01:35:04 Speaker 2: And do like. 01:35:06 Speaker 1: There'll be blood where he's like, my straw. 01:35:08 Speaker 2: Yes, yes. 01:35:10 Speaker 1: Reached across the room and drank your milkshake. 01:35:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm drinking your milkshake. And in this case, it was great, right? Because you had the less surface impact and imprint. And they quit doing that because they were operating under a categorical exclusion and the BLM rules. And so they could put the wells wherever they wanted, you know, as dense as they wanted. And that impacted the mule deer herd. That was the externalization of the cost of that production. At the time, we were still reeling from 9-11. And energy independence, right, was a huge thing. I was all– I also– I wrote about this and saying, you know, we have to– there are going to be tradeoffs to drill, baby drill, America first, energy independence. 01:35:54 Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. 01:35:55 Speaker 2: And that place was one of the trade-offs, right? And it didn't have to be done, that high impact, but the BLM and the federal government did not impose those rules that would make it less impactful. So what I see, I'm going a long way around. I see the 1872 mining law has not been repealed or rewritten. It gives away assets, rare earths, copper, whatever. The 1872 mining law is a disaster for American treasury. And so if we're going to, what I see is You could mine this, externalize the costs, privatize the profits, leave the hole in the Ambler Road, leave the hole in the Bitterroots, let it drain out to the rivers and have the taxpayers try to fix it, right? And then people will say, well, you still have the public lands, but it looks like the Pinedale Anticline. Are you going to go out there and pronghorn hunt And you can. I had people go, well, I still pronghorn hunt out there, dude. You're driving this like matrix of roads, you know? So the intrinsic value is kind of gone. 01:37:02 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:37:03 Speaker 2: But I see a. 01:37:05 Speaker 1: I do... Go ahead. No, no. Go on. But this is what I was trying to say earlier. I think that this is where... This is the new play. 01:37:15 Speaker 2: Yes. And it's to take the value from the public lands and let us keep them. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and dude, that goes right back to the, like the white, like Peshtigo fire in, is that, was that Wisconsin or Michigan. 01:37:30 Speaker 1: That Peshtigo fire? Well, it went up into the Michigan's upper peninsula, but it was, it was, it was, it was Northern Wisconsin on the Eastern side, long Lake Michigan, but yeah, big fire boiled people in their wells. 01:37:43 Speaker 2: Yeah. And that, and that was a huge impetus to federal ownership of land. Yeah. Right. Because they said, well, Holy smokes. They, they not only took all the, timber, they left a slash piled up high as a house. Right. And then it burned people alive and destroyed. 01:38:00 Speaker 1: All that land. By some arguments, like our biggest wildfire disaster. 01:38:05 Speaker 2: Yes. And that was a huge fuel. 01:38:07 Speaker 1: Talk about an externalized cost. 01:38:09 Speaker 2: Talk about it. Yes, exactly. 01:38:11 Speaker 1: Like, you know, that's the funny, like that same point, like after the Peshtigo fire, where did all those people that lost their children and their mothers and fathers and their homes go? Did they send a bill? 01:38:22 Speaker 2: No. 01:38:22 Speaker 1: Were they able to send a bill to whatever logging company had come through? 01:38:28 Speaker 2: Had done that and left them. Left them to burn. 01:38:32 Speaker 1: Be like, hey, I think you owe us something. 01:38:35 Speaker 2: And it burned so hot, it ruined that topsoil. So that's what I see. I think we could face that. And here's what I want. I think we should talk about this. I want there to be a... Sort of kumbaya moment. And I want us to fight hard over management. I think conflict is good, right? And I have an example of why this is the thing. But I want us to hold on to those 640 million acres. If we sell any small parcels here and there under something like SNPLA. SNPLA didn't work out very well, by the way. Affordable housing was not. That was part of it, too. It's like this stuff plays over and over like. 01:39:19 Speaker 1: A record, you know. 01:39:21 Speaker 2: I want us to, as an American, like I think we agree on the Constitution, you know, and the Bill of Rights mostly. And I know that. And I want us to agree on the system of public lands. and then argue over management. And people really apprise themselves about that, externalizing the costs and stuff, and re-empower federal agencies to do the hard work of citizenry and guard these assets for us so that people can't socialize their costs and then leave us with a mess. They can still take the things that we need. You got to repeal the, you got to rewrite the 1872 mining law. That has to be done right now. 01:40:09 Speaker 1: Tell me, without taking up too much time, tell. 01:40:12 Speaker 2: Me what you mean by that. It just gives the person who makes that claim ownership over the resource. There are bonds and all that stuff that the federal agencies impose, but you could literally, like Randy Newberg has said, if you paid a $ 50 entrance fee to a national park, you paid more. 01:40:33 Speaker 1: Into the U.S. 01:40:34 Speaker 2: Treasury than all the mining industry. 01:40:37 Speaker 1: In history. 01:40:39 Speaker 2: It was written in 1872 for a guy with a burrow and a pick to go out into the mountains of Nevada and find something that we needed as a country. Yeah. And that's what it was for. It is a motivating law. And it is now used by the largest corporations in the world. to take those assets. And so, again, like things have to, people have to keep apprised of what's happened so that we understand that the 1872, which was, there's many well-intentioned laws that end up, look at agriculture policy in Iowa, right? Like we need some changes, right? And many well-intentioned laws that outlive their usefulness and have to be readdressed. 01:41:31 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:41:31 Speaker 2: I mean, you didn't necessarily get rid of it all, throw babies out with bathwater, but you got to look at the ass, the, the, the, the intention versus the outcome. 01:41:42 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:41:43 Speaker 2: Um, so 1872, mine and law, let's, let's, let's rewrite that. And then, um, I, the roadless rule thing that you spent so much time, y'all are champion. You are heroes to me over the coverage of the roadless rule. Thank you. And, uh, And I found out that many people commenting have it confused with the Northwest forest plan and the spotted owl stuff. Yeah. And I was like, dude, like, like this is your asset. This is your national forest. Like, like learn the difference between the forest plan, which was highly controversial and the roadless rule. I had a guy, I don't know if it was on one of y'all's. The Maverick Mountain down in the Pioneers, like, you know, that thing that caught fire, burned the Maverick Mountain ski area recently. 01:42:28 Speaker 1: No, no, I'm sorry. 01:42:29 Speaker 2: Anyway, it just blazed through there. It was a lodgepole fire, you know. And one of the comments was, billions of dollars of timber just went up in flames because of mismanagement of the Forest Service. We got to repeal the roadless rule. And I've done a lot of timber projects. Related stuff. Then in sawing, I think 28 years, you know, working as a sub or contractor in the Forest Service or BLM. And I just, I wrote on, I couldn't stop myself. I wished I knew where you were selling your timber, dude. Because this is literally. 01:43:05 Speaker 1: There ain't no one to buy that, man. 01:43:07 Speaker 2: This is literally subalpine fir. and 70 year old lodge bowls in a place that was cut for railroad ties in the 1900s. Like, like if it was billions of dollars, they'd have a road in there tomorrow, cutting that stuff down and milling it right in the mills that don't exist anymore. So I was just like these, the, the level, and I'm not putting people down because people are busy, man. This is another reason why y'all y'all's channels are so valuable. Right. Um, People are busy. You running a roofing company, you can't know what the details of the roadless rule are. Somebody has to care about that and, and, and drop it off. That's why I love being a journalist. Yeah. 01:43:51 Speaker 1: I try to point that out when I'm, I try to point that out as much as I can that like, I have the luxury of being able to justify from a professional standpoint, spending time on these issues. That's right. 01:44:05 Speaker 2: And, and you come to that from a passion and an understanding that of what's important to you personally. 01:44:11 Speaker 1: Yeah. That's, that's, that's, but you're right. Most people raising kids, trying to make a living. Like they don't have time to be reading all kinds of books about the week's act. 01:44:20 Speaker 2: Nope. They do not. They do not. And yet they live every day with taking the kids to the, to the Sipsy Fork in the Bankhead National Forest. they are they are profound beneficiaries yeah of something that they don't have time to to know so. 01:44:39 Speaker 1: Thank god yeah you know yeah god it's great i don't begrudge anybody man not a bit that kind of stuff. 01:44:46 Speaker 2: And and i'm too busy to know i don't even really know how the wi-fi works you know so yeah yeah. 01:44:53 Speaker 1: You're guilty in your own way yeah totally complicit you. 01:44:56 Speaker 2: Know i'm part of it uh But I really have, I've gotten, just like you, this was my passion. And I've been hunting and fishing since, I've been hunting since I was nine. And then I got into this, you know, I managed that little ranch in front of the Bitterroot National Forest. And I killed a bull like the first year I was legal in Montana. And I had never, I never looked back, man. I was like, this is, this is awesome. You know, spend two weeks walking across the Selway Bitterroot and then come back and you're all fit and stuff. And you got to go back to work for a while. And then you go hunting to say, you know, I mean, what could be, what could be more powerful than that? 01:45:44 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:45:44 Speaker 2: What could be more powerful than being in those, those weird canyons in the Bankhead National Forest in Alabama to take a break from, from being in hunts full traffic. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I don't want to see it gone on my watch. 01:45:59 Speaker 1: So you were saying that next steps would be positioning the dialogue that there's 640 million acres of public lands, federally managed public lands, and there should be. Agreed. 01:46:19 Speaker 2: I think that's true. The preponderance of the affidavit says that these lands are best held In public hands. Yeah. 01:46:28 Speaker 1: So that's a thing. 01:46:29 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:46:30 Speaker 1: You had a detailed proposal, not a proposal, but that you feel the Mining Act has not kept pace with technology. 01:46:42 Speaker 2: Correct. Or like corporate global capitalism. Okay. And let me throw one more in there because I have been a contractor for 20, I'm going on 30 years now. Subcontractor. I want to reconnect communities with employment on public land. 01:46:59 Speaker 1: Okay. 01:46:59 Speaker 2: I want there to be a high school shop teacher in Superior, Montana that's teaching chainsaw stuff and people. If there's a thinning job in Mineral County, Montana on that national forest, I want local people to get it. If there's a big tree planting gig going on, I don't want to see desperate people on visas from some other country Planting those trees. I want people from the Darby, Montana planting the Bitterroot National Forest. How we're going to do that, we can work those details out. I want to reconnect communities. I want to see the BLM have more employees. I think the privatization of the labor on public lands has gone too far. 01:47:44 Speaker 1: Got it. 01:47:45 Speaker 2: And I want to see, I want there to be in Crawfordville, Florida. I want a bunch of kids coming out of the high school, going to like the Florida Conservation Corps and learning about blackwater swamps and how you grow timber and how you thin and burn longleaf. And maybe 20 of those people aren't interested at all. They want to go home and play on their. 01:48:08 Speaker 1: Phones, right? 01:48:09 Speaker 2: But maybe four of them are, and those are our foresters in the future. And when those four kids come home with a paycheck to that house in Crawfordville, their dad is going to say, you know what? I like that Apalachicola National Forest. This stuff about the feds seems pretty good to me. Junior's got a new truck. Yep. But we got to reconnect community. 01:48:31 Speaker 1: Not a bunch of trucks rolling in from some other state for a couple months. 01:48:34 Speaker 2: Dude, I sat there in my house in Bitterroot one time waiting on a tree planting job in St. Mary's, Idaho. And the trucks were coming with Oregon tags to plant the butterfly timber sale right up above my house. I was like, this is nuts. I knew every tree planter around the Bitterroot. We were all like, this is crazy, man. We can't do this. This ain't working at all. But when something's not working, you fix it. Yeah. So reconnecting communities with the public lands through employment. I mean, like building ecosystem resilience, watersheds. I mean, nurseries full of native plants to reforest some of these burns. I mean, there's your public-private partnerships. I mean, we're going to do this or else I think we're going to do it. But it's going to take all of us because we all own the asset. Yeah. 01:49:34 Speaker 1: When you've alluded to your book, we got you kind of talking to you and you're mentioning your book, but your book's not. People can't go buy it. 01:49:41 Speaker 2: No, it's coming out in October. I think they're still cutting parts of it because I guess I'm more long-winded even in the. 01:49:48 Speaker 1: Coming out when? A year from now. 01:49:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, a year from now. 01:49:50 Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy how long it takes with a print book? 01:49:53 Speaker 2: I don't know. You've done it. You've done it so many times and done it well. And I've done a gun book like in 2008, 9, and it wasn't nothing compared to this. 01:50:07 Speaker 1: What's your book going to be called? 01:50:10 Speaker 2: So right now the title is Carrying the Fire, Journeys Through the Past and Present of America's Public Lands. Okay. And it's about nine different forests or BLM or national monuments. You go to Gold Butte down in Nevada. It starts out in the Shoshone, which was the first national forest in Wyoming. And all of these are based around like some of them are big trips. Like the Shoshone National Forest is like a 40-mile above timber backpack. It's the wildlife forest. That's what the name of that chapter is. Because that was kind of the genesis of our wildlife restorations with the Yellowstone Timberland Reserve. And it goes through Apalachicola, which has the most interesting history, I think, of all of them. With the War of 1812 stuff that happened there. Yeah. And that goes through Bradwell. It's a hike through Bradwell Bay Wilderness, which is like this big swamp. It's cool. It's wild. So there's a trip in each one of them, right? Got it. So that people don't have to eat all the vegetables of history. 01:51:21 Speaker 1: Yeah. I look forward to reading it, man. 01:51:23 Speaker 2: Well, I'm looking forward to having it behind me, actually, at this point. How many years have you worked on it? I've signed the contract in 2020. Oh. And I was supposed to deliver in about three and a half. And then that just didn't work at all. 01:51:39 Speaker 1: What's funny about being in that position is what can they do? 01:51:46 Speaker 2: Not much, right? 01:51:47 Speaker 1: Because you'd be like, well, you could lean on me and publish it, but there ain't nothing to publish. 01:51:53 Speaker 2: It's not there, right? It's not there. It's kind of. 01:51:57 Speaker 1: Like it's in a weird– but, I mean, that's. 01:51:59 Speaker 2: Why also– Have you ever gone over? 01:52:01 Speaker 1: What's that? 01:52:01 Speaker 2: Have you ever gone over? 01:52:02 Speaker 1: I've never gone not over. Right, okay. I've never gone not over. 01:52:06 Speaker 2: Okay. 01:52:08 Speaker 1: I think that they know. I think they know. 01:52:12 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:52:12 Speaker 1: I think it's baked into the whole thing. I got friends that, man, they deliver on time. 01:52:17 Speaker 2: I'm ready for that. 01:52:19 Speaker 1: Well, you know, our Meat Eaters American History stuff, I shouldn't say never gone out over. We hit a lot of deadlines. I've had some stuff go long. I got a thing running along right now. I'm doing a history book. You know, it's a history book from stuff from late 1500s, early 1600s. And it's just, you can't write a sentence of it. You can't write a sentence of it without needing to go check on something. 01:52:53 Speaker 2: No. And, and so with, with like the new internet resources, you can check on stuff that nobody's ever been able to find before. Yeah. And, uh, I talked to Peter Stark about this. He wrote the Coronado book. Yeah. And, um, he, he said, you know, there's a point where you just have to make the You have done it. You have done the research. You are there. But a lot of this stuff I was doing, man, you hit JSTOR. Yeah. And you can get stuff. There's a manuscript of a guy who took a trip from Charleston to New Orleans through the Longleaf in like 1815. And it's on there. You can read it. It's searchable. Yeah. 01:53:33 Speaker 1: Those dudes used to crank it out sitting down there like visiting archives and stuff like that, you know? Yeah. 01:53:38 Speaker 2: Um, sure. 01:53:39 Speaker 1: But it's still, it's painstaking and it's painstaking. 01:53:42 Speaker 2: And then. Doesn't it give you a respect for them? Yeah. 01:53:45 Speaker 1: But you, you know what you want, but you want, Oh, huge respect, man. You go like guys, like, you know, you think of those historians like Shelby foot and stuff, man. 01:53:51 Speaker 2: Like. Yeah. 01:53:52 Speaker 1: The day had to, you know, you had to go spend, you had to like leave your family and go spend a month down to some archive. 01:53:58 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:53:59 Speaker 1: Blowing dust off books. And now you got like searchable online documents, but still, like I said, you can't do a sentence. 01:54:05 Speaker 2: Yep. 01:54:06 Speaker 1: Without needing to check on something. And then when you finish that sentence, you're like, man, I better go check on that. 01:54:11 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:54:11 Speaker 1: I don't want to be the guy that gets it wrong. 01:54:13 Speaker 2: No, and it kind of wakes you up at 4 a.m. And it's going. Yeah, that's yeah, that's cool, though. I'm glad you're doing that. I just I read that Peter Stark book and I was most fascinated by the stuff we're out on the prairie. Where they, it's just like, so. 01:54:32 Speaker 1: Wild, man. Yeah. The best detail out of the Coronado X, not the best, but one of the greatest details out of the Coronado expedition is they get out to the Texas panhandle and they're blown away that there's these people that just live off Buffalo. Yep. And he mentions one of them, one of the, you know, there's multiple people chronicling the whole thing. Yeah. I can't remember who chronicled this, but he mentions that there are That they're pressure flaking flint tools with their eye teeth. 01:55:05 Speaker 2: Far out. Yeah. 01:55:08 Speaker 1: Sharpening their blade with their pressure flaking flint with their eye teeth. 01:55:12 Speaker 2: Wow. 01:55:13 Speaker 1: You ought to talk about something that seems like an uncomfortable endeavor. No doubt, man. Yeah. 01:55:17 Speaker 2: And no horses, man. Just dogs. 01:55:19 Speaker 1: Dogs. 01:55:20 Speaker 2: Just dogs. Yeah. 01:55:21 Speaker 1: No, that's good stuff, man. 01:55:23 Speaker 2: Well, I hope... I'm looking forward to that, too. Being over deadline like that is... well, you know, you know what, what's the difference between hunger and, and, and producing, right? Like, like hunger is a motivator. 01:55:39 Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. 01:55:40 Speaker 2: Anger is a motivator. Mm-hmm. You know, uh, But it's hard to say. For an outdoor person like myself or yourself, sitting in there writing is pretty difficult. I think it's more difficult. I don't know. That's not a good thing to say, more difficult than. But for me, I felt like, man, there were some hunting seasons where I just was like, man, I can't do this. I just got to get going. I got to go hunting and I got to stay out long enough to get that. Feeling of reconnection. Yeah. Like one day doesn't do it. No. Three days doesn't do it. 01:56:18 Speaker 1: My wife warned me years ago, be very careful who you complain to. 01:56:25 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:56:25 Speaker 1: So I try to honor that. 01:56:27 Speaker 2: I keep that in mind. 01:56:28 Speaker 1: I try to honor that advice. 01:56:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, I do too. I keep that in mind because I've had jobs that I didn't feel particularly meaningful. And I have a hard time with that. And this does seem meaningful to me. But the minutiae is, like you said, the research is, you know, it can be excruciating. 01:56:52 Speaker 1: I had a job one year chipping, hand chipping paint off handrails in a sewage treatment plant because you couldn't run a sandblaster or soda blaster and getting all that blast into the sewage treatment plant. So it all had to be hand chipped. 01:57:06 Speaker 2: No solvents on it. 01:57:07 Speaker 1: Just watching condoms float by below you all day so when i say writing's no fun yeah yeah beats paint chipping at a sewage plant. 01:57:15 Speaker 2: Yes it does yeah i i did i did roto-rooter for a little while and i got the shirt with my name on it and i it depressed me profoundly i did eventually get fired but uh yeah i roto-rooted for a while and But a lot of that work, here's another thing about reconnecting communities. Man, doing control burns on public lands, that was like some of the best times I ever had in my life. 01:57:44 Speaker 1: Oh, really? 01:57:44 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:57:45 Speaker 1: Haven't had the pleasure. 01:57:46 Speaker 2: No, and we had this job in the Swan Front up Condon. 01:57:51 Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. 01:57:52 Speaker 2: And these helicopter units were all logged out. You couldn't see them from Highway 93, or which I think that is, not 93, whatever the Swan Highway is. You couldn't see them there, so you had to park your truck, take your camp, build your camp, and then hike in following a Sawyer's Trail to... these units. And then we slashed them, fire lined them. So it's like a 12 foot cut and got them ready for control burning later, which we didn't do, but, but, uh, that job was just, it was like a huge adventure every day, you know, and, and you get paid. And I won't, I don't, I won't be, uh, my kids are there, you know, they have adventures, but I want kids in Darby, Montana or big fork, Montana. Like maybe you're the lone poor family in big fork, you know, and you get this job, man, working right down there. You know, I used to, I had a thinning contract one time where you could walk to the swan bar. the end you could put your saw in your truck and walk and get a beer at the swan bar you know like that i just want people to have i want americans to have those experiences because they make you strong and they develop all these weird skills that are reality based yeah and you know how many calories do you need to plant a thousand trees yeah you gotta work that out right and that's good that's just that's just part of my deal here. 01:59:23 Speaker 1: My older boys in speech and debate and they do this thing where they get a you give them a quote and they gotta use it as a prompt and he was practicing the other night and I gave him he said I need a quote and I gave him that Aldo Leopold quote um I'm glad I will not be a young man in a future without wild places yeah and that struck him yeah you know Because he feels he won't be either. He feels he won't be. 01:59:52 Speaker 2: He feels he won't have the wild spaces? No, no. 01:59:54 Speaker 1: He thinks that that's another person's problem. 01:59:57 Speaker 2: Gotcha. 01:59:57 Speaker 1: He doesn't think that'll be his problem. Right, right. But I've taken to some cool-ass places. 02:00:02 Speaker 2: I bet, yeah. 02:00:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, right. 02:00:04 Speaker 2: He probably has an abundance of experiences to draw on. 02:00:07 Speaker 1: He's been to some cool-ass places so far. 02:00:09 Speaker 2: Yeah. 02:00:10 Speaker 1: Oh, one last thing. Now that you've been educated by Hal Herring and the election is behind you, starting on november what date nate starting on november 3rd you can go watch new meat eater episodes on youtube we got some great stuff coming up including a big stay too because there's a big four pack all up and none of it that involves seal hunting polar bear hunting with the inuit um check it out it's gonna be awesome well hal herring man is so good to have you on. 02:00:40 Speaker 2: Good times man thank you i appreciate it thank you very much great i'm i love what y'all do

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