00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the White Tail Woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. 00:00:19 Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on the show, I am joined by a renowned historian, a best selling author, and now podcaster, Dan Flores, to discuss the big picture history of wildlife and people in America and what that past can teach us as we head into the future as hunters, anglers, and folks who simply love wildlife and wild places. All right, Welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light and their Camo for Conservation Initiative. And today is an episode I've wanted to do for a very long time. This is a guest who I have admired from Afar for many years. I've read his books, I've listened to his words. I have considered and pondered and and and likely ingested a whole lot of his ideas about wildlife, about the history of our nation and our people, and our relationship with wildlife and wild places. All this kind of stuff that that kind of forms the groundwork, the foundation for who we are as hunters and anglers. Uh Dan has has spent his lifetime teaching about, and writing about and speaking about. As I mentioned in the intro, he is a historian. He has been a best selling author, focusing and specializing in natural history. He's written a number of books, most recently. Most recently be Wild New World, which is about the very topic we're discussing today, which is this history of wildlife and people in America. Another book, another favorite of mine, is American Serengetti, which it looks to a similar topic but just kind of within the Great Plains landscape. Another great book is Coyote America and has got a whole slew of others, but really terrific. I mean, Wild New World and American Serengetti are two of my absolute top recommendations for anyone that's interested in this kind of stuff. He is also now the newest member of the Meat Eater podcast network. He's got a brand new podcast which just came out a few weeks ago, called The American West, in which he explores this kind of deep history of people and culture and wildlife in the American West. It's fascinating, it's really well done. It involves a kind of a deep dive from Dan into a specific topic and then a conversation between himself and Steve and Randall, Steve Arnella, Randa Williams there or mediator kind of rounding it out with some questions to kind of better understand the topic. So great new show from Dan. We're really excited to have him on the team, which is why you know, I'm super excited we can have this conversation today, which is about some of the big picture ideas that I mentioned kind of form the basis of how we got to this point. Because if you hunt and fish in America, if you want to make sure we can keep hunting and fishing in America, if you want to make sure we have wildlife and wild places well into the future in this place we call home, we need to understand how we got here. We need to understand the past mistakes and the past successes, and the stories and the lessons learned, and the foibles and the speed bumps and everything that got us to this point. If you don't know where he came from, you can't figure out where to go. And Dan today is going to help us understand that we have a really interesting conversation that explores everything from the Ice Age and the Pleistocene period and what was going on with people here in America and wildlife right on down through what happened over the next ten thousand years with Native Americans and wildlife, how they managed a somewhat sustainable relationship with the wildlife while their predecessors nearly wiped out all the big critters here in America. And then we're going to fast forward to the last five hundred years or so and take a look at how folks in somewhat more modern America nearly wiped everything out, and then in the early twentieth century, how we stop that and saved the day at the last moment. And that kind of sets the stage for the second part of the conversation, which is, what can we learn from that? What should we learn from that? What do we need to take from that past and bring forward into the future to make sure that we can keep doing this stuff, that we can keep having these wild critters out there and fish and clean rivers and healthy habitats and open spaces. What do we need to do to make sure that you and I aren't the last generation that gets to have incredible hunting and fishing experiences, but to ensure that our kids do, and their kids do, and many generations in the future. So, man, this is what I'm very excited about. I'm very thankful that we were able to do it, and I can't wait for you to listen. Now, I do have one piece of bad news. The bad news is that we had a technical issue in the recording of this conversation, which is tragic given how much I enjoyed it. But the audio and video quality on Dan's side are not what we wish they could be, especially the video. The video is very poor, so if you are watching on YouTube, I apologize in advance. The first nine minutes or so are good, I believe, but then after that it's going to be very low resolution. Sorry, please bear with us on it. The content that the audio, what we talk about, is so important so good. I beg you to please ignore the fuzziness, taking the sounds and the words and the wisdom of Dan, because it's good stuff. But that all said, without any further Ado, let's get to my chat with Dan about the parable of America's wildlife past and future. All right joining me now is Dan Flores. Dan, thank you so much for joining me. 00:06:21 Speaker 3: Oh, it's a great pleasure. Mark. Thanks for having me on. 00:06:25 Speaker 2: As I was just saying before we started recording, I have been a big fan of your work for many years. Steve has introduced me and so many other people to what you do. And it's a pretty fun gig that I have here, that I've had for more than a decade, getting to speak to a lot of interesting people. But you are right at the very top of the list, Dan, as far as writers who have influenced me and my understanding of my place in this wild world and how we got here and what all that means for the future. Your books, in particular American Serengeti and then more recently A Wild New World are you know, maybe two of the top ten books I recommend to people over and over and over again. So just from the outset, thank you for your contribution with those books and all of your work today. 00:07:19 Speaker 3: Man, thanks for saying that. I appreciate it. 00:07:22 Speaker 2: It's well deserved, and all that being the case, I apologize in advance. I'm going to run you through the ringer talking about many of those topics because They're endlessly fascinating to me and so many other people, And I guess I want to start by setting the stage around why this stuff is so important to you and maybe for the rest of us. You wrote in one of your books that, at least in the context of your life and kind of your experience as an outdoor person, you wrote that the prescription for you has been knowing the heaven and earth that was, while experiencing the world that is. And I took that to kind of mean, you know, you want to deeply understand our past with wildlife and wild places while also still you know, experiencing them fully today. But I was hoping you could expand on that for me a little bit and help me understanding, you know, why is that important for you in your own life, and why might that idea of understanding our past and our relationship with wildlife and wild places, why is that important for many of us still today. 00:08:32 Speaker 3: That's a great question, obviously, like relevant question to all the things we're trying to accomplish in modern America and figuring out how we go forward with a healthy world around us, one that we get to enjoy and experience and thrill to and not have to confront a kind of a diminishing return in our lives. And the quote you use, of course, that's how I end Wild New World, which is a book that spends three hundred and ninety seven pages trying to get us up to the present moment, and that's pretty much how I come to the conclusion of it. I think it's important that we know the past, but we use that knowledge in order to experience what's here now our own lives. I think the reason it's struck me for a lot of my writing career that that's a critical thing for us to do. I mean, not just personally myself, but really all of us. 00:09:55 Speaker 4: Is because it's fairly evident that we come out of a historical past and an evolutionary past, and even deeper evolutionary past that extends much much farther back in time. 00:10:11 Speaker 3: Than what we've recorded as history. I mean, I trained as a graduate school as an environmental historian, but what historians do generally focuses on documents and things that you can read and put together and as symbol kind of a functioning past. But I've always been interested in the past that extends beyond the documentary record, back into archaeological time and back really into evolutionary time. And when I look back at that big story, that deep time story of humans, I mean, it's sort of unavoidable to recognize that we come out of the same evolutionary river that all the rest of life does, and that we have been intricately involved with other creatures, all the life around us for millions of years. Really, for probably at least two and a half to three million years, humans have been an early human species, have been really involved with the other creatures around us, and so it's part of our To me, it's part of our legacy. It's one that I fear a lot of people have lost sight of in the modern world. I mean, we're so caught up in what's on our phones, what's on social media, that we tend to lose sight of this bigger picture of who we are. But I think in that big question of who we are, this is a way of getting at it, of looking at this deep time story. And when you look at it and you realize what role humans have played in the world and what role other creatures that played for us, I think it brings you to this present moment in time where obviously the thing to do if you want to honor that tradition in that history, is to spend as much time as possible with the wild world and with other creatures that are around us, and try to take advantage of the possibilities that we still have. We don't have the possibilities anymore of seeing mammoths, for example, or sabertoothed cats, or indeed of more recent creatures like Carolina parakeets or passenger pigeons are bisoned by the millions. We can't experience that, but we can experience what's available to us, and that long story is so important. I think that that's the reason why I and I think a lot of other people just intuitively want to spend a lot of time in that real world and natural world that's around us. 00:13:00 Speaker 2: I want to I want to kind of ask you to walk us through a little bit of that story that you spend a lot of time covering in your podcast, most recently in those books that we mentioned, but before that, I want to do I guess do this again because I already asked you a skip to the ending on your book, and I'm going to ask you a skip to the end of this store too. You mentioned that by understanding this past, it can tell us who we are. It can help us understand who we are when you look at this past that that I know you understand as well as almost anyone nowadays. What's the answer to that question? Who are we? 00:13:42 Speaker 3: Well? Where? 00:13:43 Speaker 5: Uh? 00:13:45 Speaker 3: The animal that's dominating the world that doesn't recognize that it's an animal. I mean, that's one of the ironies of our our situation. Uh, we have a or the notion of human exceptionalism to such a degree that we don't really think of ourselves as being kin and close to the other life that's around us. We through various sorts of training, really religious training is one of the ways we've done it. But I think the humanities are probably equally guilty and convincing us that we're something completely different from everything else on earth. And I think that's put us in something of a precarious situation really, And to me, understanding this big story, this big picture that I tried to sort of outline a couple of minutes ago, is one of the keys to getting back to understanding that who we are is we're animals. We're another one one of the life forms that evolution created on this planet, and evolution never particularly selected us out to be the dominant life form of the planet. It just happened through a series of contingencies that we've ended up in that situation. But there's no question that we have ended up as the dominant species. And I think that's probably one of the critical points in our story, is that we've reached the stage and we have every ability, of course to recognize who we are as animals out of the evolutionary river, because of course, Charles Darwin published on the Orizona species in eighteen fifty nine, so we've had the evolutionary story available to us for at least that life. And one of the things I discovered in doing Wild New World in particular is that I think the understanding of who we are has been a part of the insights of previous cultures for a very long time. I think humans, for example, Native people here in America have seemed to have long known, and it's philosophies and their religions and their respect for other creatures that humans were a part of the natural world, that we and other creatures were can. I mean, in many native cultures there's even a possibility for humans to enter marry with animals like bisoner elker wolves, and so there's that metaphorical probably certainly not necessarily literal, but in a metaphorical and allegorical way. Native people understood those connections. But I think in the Western world, and I don't know how far back it goes, I tracked it back at least to the Greeks. While the world we've had this sense that we stand separate from everything else, and we gave it a kind of a religious veneer that we're the only creatures created in the image of God, We're the only ones with everlasting souls and all that. So I think we kind of have to come to an understanding of the reality of the human condition, and that's one of the one of the issues we face as we go forward. 00:17:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, and I guess as you, as you alluded to earlier, this understanding of both who we are and what we have done is important, not just because it's fascinating and inherently intuitively interesting, but it's also important because of how it informs our future right and how we might be able to make better decisions. You know, I don't I think this was a sign to Mark Twain I'm not sure if he actually said it or not, but supposedly he said that history doesn't always repeat itself, but it usually rhymes, and uh, I think there's there's probably some truth to that. But in the case of many of the examples from our past with Wildlife, I don't think we want to repeat or even rhyme with some of these things. So it's important to understand where we came from, though, to ensure we don't go there again in the In the scope of what we can cover today, there's way, way, way, way too much of the history to cover. I would ask everyone to go and listen to your new podcast and to read your books, which, as I already mentioned, are terrific. So so check out those other resources for the full story of this history. But I do want to provide a little bit of context for people, just in case they haven't, you know, seen your previous work and understand this larger story. But I'd like to spend most of our time exploring how all this pertains to our future. But all that said, we've had this roller coaster ride with wildlife here in North America. There's maybe been three big drops on that roller coaster ride. The first of which being around the Pleistocene period the Ice Age. There was another big drop off again when European Americans spread across the country. We're probably in the midst of one of those dives right now. So could you lay a kind of a cliff notes of that first drop for us, just to set the stage a little bit more, What was that first act of the story when people's first came to North America and they entered this incredible swath of wilderness with wild dinosaur like creatures. Can you can you just briefly set the stage there and what happened to end that period before we move into the next act of this kind of stage setting. 00:20:02 Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I and you know, there's certainly are a rhyming element to the story that that we're about to take on here. And I think the reason there there is a rhyme is because of human nature, because of who we are. I mean, we are compelled. We're a social species. We evolved as a social social species. We're much concerned with staffs within our groups. Uh. And of course we have biological needs. Clearly, we have to exist, we have to and our evolution with big brains and very capable abilities physically produced an effect where we became consumers of protein. That's how, of course we grew our big brains, and that that protein that desire for status and probably a desire for adventure. There's no question that humans have something of that. You know, that kind of genetic background propelled us out of our evolutionary homeland, which was in Africa, and into first the Middle East and finally into Europe on a northward movement, and then we began moving eastward across the Eurasian land mass, ultimately into Siberia, where humans confronted probably about twenty five to thirty thousand years ago, maybe as far back as forty thousand years ago. In fact, humans confronted obstacles to our ability to continue to move farther east. And those obstacles primarily consisted of giant masses of ice beyond which we we could penetrate. And so it took a while to make this next step into North America. And I should point out to those who are following your podcasts here that North and South America are the last big land masses on Earth that humans are going to find. I mean, we have spread across Africa, through the Middle East, through all of Western Europe through Eurasia, and the only big land mass is left, of course, other than islands like Australia, New Zealand and the islands in the Pacific are North and South America, and those are the last places we gin to. One of the things I argue in while in the world is the reasons were propelled in these vast journeys to populate the earth is that we're looking for places that other humans haven't found yet. And one of the reasons we're looking for places like that is because the creatures there are unfamiliar with humans as predators. If animals have emerged in a landscape or habitat where humans are not present, they don't automatically react to us, since we tend to kind of instinctively think, well, sure, any animals sees humans and they're going to run because they know who we are. Well, that's not, in fact what happened when people got to North America, when finally we waited out the melting of the Lend map, the ice masses in Alaska and present day Canada and the called Mackenzie Corridor open. To be sure, there have been some humans who probably in boats, had gone along the coasts and gone inland. In America, we have a pretty good site in the presence state of New Mexico and southern New Mexico of humans having arrived in North America by before the last glacial, the height of the last Wisconsin Glacial two to twenty three thousand years ago. Well, we don't really get here in numbers until about fifteen thousand years ago, when the ice sheets finally open. And when that happens, the group that comes, who we now know as the Clovis people, are going to arrive in a continent and two continents in fact, because they spread into South America as well, where none of the creatures here has ever confronted humans as predators before, and particularly those that have evolved specifically in North America have had no exposure to humans, and so this is called a biological first contact. By the way, there's actually a paleum logical term of art to describe this. And the result is that quite a number of animals are going to be fairly easy for these people, who also have come from forty five thousand generations of hunting backgrounds and who are extremely good at it and have an extremely effective toolkit in the form of clothes points. So pretty much just some way the wildlife of North and South America, and for several of those species, the ones that are so called k species that take a long time to produce young and to repopulate their numbers, those animals are going to fairly quickly, it seems, began to decrease of this new predator. And so we know, for example, that probably the various mammoth species in North America of which we have a pretty strong record, pretty much faded away in the face of this kind of predation. Some of the other species are not so sure about. Horses were really numerous courses became extinct in the American Pleistocene while surviving elsewhere in the world. We don't really have an answer to that yet. We don't really have an answers to win. Camels, which were also an animal that evolved in North America, somehow became extinct here, survived in South America but not in North America, and also survived in other parts of the world. But it really looks as if quite a number of species were pushed to extinction, or at least to a point where their populations were so separated from one another, that they couldn't exchange their genes, and they may have faded as a result of a lack of genetic So that's kind of the Pleistocene story. We lose thirty two genera, not just species, but thirty two genera of our largest and most charismatic animals in North America. All the ones that may North America look like a version of Africa pretty much are going to disappearls the same by about nine thousand years ago. 00:27:12 Speaker 2: If you were writing the children's version of that story, Let's say I've got a five year old and a seven year old son, and let's say you had compiled an elementary version of that story, just this segment. We'll call it a story on its own. What would the moral of that story be. What's the takeaway from this first act of the larger story? 00:27:41 Speaker 3: I think probably the takeaway of this first act. This obviously requires so some speculation to understand it, but my guess is that while these early Americans, the Clovis people, and later the fulsome people who follow them who probably eradicate our large species of Iso, those people, I think probably didn't quite understand the consequences of their actions. I think they too. In fact, I'm pretty certain of this judging from their descendants, from all of us who have interpreted the world until the advent of modern science, primarily through religion, that they use religion as their cause effect explanation for why things happen, and religion may not be so good at understanding how ecology and environments work. And I think the truth is they probably didn't quite understand what the consequences of their actions were until it likely was too late. I have also a sneaking suspicion, and this would be I think a part of a sort of a short version answer here is that in the wake of the Pleistocene extinctions, because my research indicated that we got a ten thousand year period following the Pleistiscene where Native people seem to have learned the lesson of what happened in the Pleistocene, applied it liberally in North America, and ended up over that ten thousand year period that followed down to the time Europeans come, I could find evidence only one extinction in what is now North America during that time period. At some point they understood what had happened and what role they may have played in it, but I think it was a realization too late, and so that may be one of the takeaways is that you have to figure out, you have to come up with a good explanation of how the world works around you, and you can't let things proceed too far to the point where it gets away from it runs away and you can't stop it. I mean, at the end of the process of the Prices, I think people did understand, Wow, you know, there's a reason why we don't have mammoths and all these other creatures around us, and our own role may have made us culpable. And so what followed was a period of rather benevolent ten thousand years that came after the pricescene. 00:30:53 Speaker 2: I was going to ask you what the moral of the story of the next act would be, but maybe you just told me what it was right there, because I would I would describe that next act being this ten thousand or so years of relative equilibrium, And at least what stands out to me now when you frame it that way, is maybe the greatest lesson of the next ten thousand years with only one extinction and relative equilibrium and sustainability, Maybe that at least The takeaway I have when I think about that now is simply that we can learn from our mistakes, We can recognize how we have aired in the past and adjust course. Is that a fair takeaway when looking at that ten thousand year period before year Pear in contact? Is there anything else when you look at that and try to put a why behind it or how behind it that stands out to you? 00:31:45 Speaker 3: Well? It was. It was a bit daunting to take on the task of writing that story, because, to be honest, when I started working on Walney World and knew I was going to do that, I couldn't find anyone else. Really I attempted to take that on, and there were plenty of people who had studied various specific groups, but that big story I think no one had tried to do before, because it is a pretty daunting thing to answer that question of First of all, you've got to look at an awful lot of different cultures in different ways of seeing the world. I mean, native people. There were at least a dozen great large language families akin to like the Germanic family of languages the Latin family of languages in Europe. There were twelve different ones in North America, so these were very different people, but I think they did come to some sort of understanding about what had gone before and recognition of the kind of change that was wire in order to make things work in the future. And I found that in a couple of other specific instances in the historic period as well, among native people, among the people who abandoned an empire, for example, a thousand years ago, they seem to have learned from the experience of hang Choko collapsed. So the task was to try to figure out how they did it, and I came up with about two or three explanations for how I think it worked. I mean, one of them was the fact that because the Americas ended up getting settled by humans a lot later than Eurasia did the procession of history to the point of what we call the Neolithic Revolution, which is the time and history when humans have usually reduced the numbers of huntable animals to the point where we start looking for other ways other economic pro coaches and pros usually is to domesticate some animals and domesticate plants. So the Neolithic Revolution is through the advent of agriculture and domestication that had happened in Europe a lot longer, a lot earlier, but you aready been settled by humans a lot more distantly in the past. So in the America is we don't start doing that sort of thing until about four thousand years ago in what is now the United States and Canada. And the reason that's important is because when you do proceed to the Neolithic revolution and agriculture and domestication of animals, you began to grow the human population at a fairly rapid grade. And I think the lower human population is a second explanation for why Native people were able to do so well over that ten thousand years after licensing, the human population never gets above five million people north of the Rio Grand by the time Europeans come, and so a population that means that it's possible to keep North America in a fairly healthy situation. But I also think the religion and the philosophy that Native people bring to the game is important, and as I mentioned earlier, it centers around this idea that humans are a part of the natural world, that other creatures are our kin, They're the same as we are, and this is not a story where humans are somehow exceptional and everything else is just out there for us to use, and that kind of philosophy and that respect which was expressed in ceremonies, annual ceremonies in order to renew the connections between humans and other animals. I think that played a role in this story too, and so it produces as we're describing, a ten thousand year period, that's an extraordinarily long period of time where native people are here fully occupying North America. I mean, there are instances where animal popular as are drawing down to some extent as the population begins July is after the at ent of agriculture. Nonetheless, the biological diversity is still here with you repeated. 00:36:12 Speaker 2: It's interesting to me when you think about this, this idea that there was this recalibrating or this adjusting of course, or this this learning of the lessons from the past that led to this ten thousand year period. And then you look at what happened on the other side of the ocean, and when Europeans came across and entered North America for the first time, things changed drastically. They brought a whole new set of values into different philosophy to you know, resource extraction and relationship with the natural world, and you would think, well, they experienced the same thing that happened here many many years earlier, right They the folks on the European continent and across Asia, they wiped out their large mammals and large species too. You would thought that they would have learned from that and recalibrated and have found some sense of equilibrium themselves. But I wonder if there was like a shifting baseline syndrome that happened that after so many tens of thousands of years, they lost track of that history, and by the time we get to the fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred, seventeen hundreds, you have a European philosophy of the natural world that has lost that deeper connection that here in North America was still fresh. Does anything that ring true? 00:37:35 Speaker 3: Is that? 00:37:36 Speaker 2: Is that track? 00:37:40 Speaker 3: Yes? I think it does track, And I think maybe the critical element of it is the small time frame between the demise of large creatures of the Pleiscescene creatures of Western Europe and the advent of the Neolithic Revolution in the Old World in Eurasia. Those two events follow one another in fairly rapid succession. So you have the demise of the large creatures there by about twelve thousand years ago, and the beginnings of the Neolithic Revolution by ten thousand, nine thousand years ago, so it's a much narrower window of time. And as I said, the critical thing about the Neolithic Revolution is that when people begin settling down and farming and depending on domesticated animals. In the case of Europe, it's cattle, it's horses, it's camels, it's hogs, its sheep, it's goats, chickens, I mean. And of course Eurasia is a connected land mass, so everybody who domesticates a creature like the chickens, for example, and ducks and hogs are first domesticated in Asia. But because Asia is connected to Europe, it's not very long before those ideas are going to find their way into Western Europe along with the animals. So you have this kind of Neolithic Revolution that happens very much on the heels of the demise of the Paleolithic hunt, and that puts it really far back in time, so that I think you're probably right mark any of the lessons perhaps that were learned seem to have been learned in North America had receded into the past for people from the Old World, and they had depended on not only a larger human population based around agriculture and domesticated animals for a much longer period of time, but that period of time put their stories farther back in the past, and so they came out of a completely different sort of mindset as a result of domesticating animals like sheet and goats. A at they very early Old World is very aroun developed the idea that predators were an enemy. I mean here in America, the animals that got domesticated were essentially things like wild turkeys and muscovie ducks and things like that, and so native people never evolved the idea that wolves, cougars, bears, coyotes are enemies that you make war on in the natural world. In fact, they use those animals as teachers, and when you went out and did a vision quest, those were the animals who became your totem animals sometimes because they were fellow hunters. And the Old World predators very early on, probably by six seven thousand years ago, had become the enemy of the agricultural world. So that's one of the things that develops. The other thing, of course, the other two things that developed that Europeans are going to bring that I think changes the whole point of view. Is first of all, a religious tradition, the Judeo Christian tradition that spreads over Europe in the last couple of thousand years, that replaces many of the old pagan religions like that of the Druids for instances in the British Isles, and Judaeo Christianity is the religion that teaches Western Europeans or all people in Europe, they are exceptional, the only preachers made in the image of God, and all other creatures are made for humans to use. And so that's one element of a difference. And then the next element, of course, comes about as a result of the colonial age and the emergence of the global market economy, where you take that philosophy of human exceptionalism and other things are made for our use, and then you plug them into a market capitalist system where new world animals like beavers and vice and then otters and on and on and on are just resources in the global market. And suddenly the whole thing is set up for this extractive, exploitive, kind of destructive approach to wild creatures. 00:42:16 Speaker 2: You know, one of the angles of this story that I personally don't know as much about is how all this translated to the east of Europe. We we kind of oftentimes, or at least maybe I have in my understandings, have skipped over. We see, like the the initial migration of humans out of Africa, and then we kind of skipped to and then Europeans developed and industrialized, and then there was this whole thing going on over in North America, and then Europeans arrived in North America and it all went to hell. But what happened in Asia or the Far East? Did they? Did they? You know? What was that story like for them over that ten thousand year period after their first you know, moment of their own version of the Plaistocene moment that we had twelve thousand years ago. What was that like as it moved across Asia or Russia? Was it just the slow burn that you were describing earlier, or it seems like it's a little bit unique because like in India they held onto some of these large creatures and whatnot. 00:43:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, well, it's yeah, it's a variable story as you go eastward from say western Europe as far east as the Caucasus Mountain Sewitch in the you know, seventeenth eighteen nineteenth centuries. Sale today is often sort of regarded as the most eastwardly reach of the Russian the Slavic peoples I mean, Russia sort of mirrors the story of Western Europe. Russia is it's Greek Orthodox in religion, but it's still nonetheless a Christian religion with many of the same tenets of belief, and so Russia well, and for the discovery of North America, the primary fur bearing region of the world that supplied this desire for furs and leather, and fur and leather two different things from animals. Fur often used to designate status I mean, just think of, for example, in our own time, a mink coat, a particular kind of fur, can be regarded as an emblem of high status among humans. Leather, of course, serves another purpose, a more practically utilitarian purpose, but animals provide both those things, and Russia was the locust of much of the search for fur and leather before the discovery of the Americas. When America's, particularly North America, came into the global market, then the focus on fur and leather sort of squish. North America so the h story prep Orthodox still Christian as far as the Caucasus Mountains is very similar. When you get beyond the Caucasus Mountains and you get to Asia, of course, what you enter the world with a variety of different religious traditions, many of which don't have that same kind of focus on tumas as exceptional to everything else in the world. Well hasten to add, however, that we don't have really great evidence that that, say, the wild creatures of Asia to any great extent, and places like India, for example, where cattle, for instance, are regarded as gods and deities, you do get a difference, as you mentioned. But I mean, there was a sort of a famous book back I was in graduate school and studying environmental history called Religion and environment in History, and many of the scholars who worked on that book were attempting to demonstrate that a different kind of religious tradition in the Far East could produce a different outcome. Without a great deal of success, there still was a lot of exploitation of animal life, and a lot of it based on kind of religious notions that we all still realize today. Where people in Asia would regard, for example, the horn of a particular animal, a particular analoge or the rhino, if it came out of Africa as having and all our special magical sort of uses. So there's still exploitation of wildlife even with these other religions, but it doesn't take the sort of form it does in North America. In fact, I mean, I say, in Wild New World, I said this also in America. Dren getting working on those two books, I really could find an example anywhere else in the world that rivaled the widespread destruction of wild life that was the case in North America. I mean, we seem to have done it in a way that nobody else was able to do. I mean, the largest destruction of wild animals in the colonial age anywhere on the planet took place in North America. And that's a story that we need to understand and know about, particularly as a result of the future. 00:48:00 Speaker 2: And that's a perfect segue to the next act of the story here in North America at least, which is after that ten thousand year period of relative equilibrium, we have the settling of the continent, European Americans spreading across America and across the North American continent, and as you write in a recent article in Time magazine, you said, here's an inconvenient truth. Our forebears use the unrestrained free market to affect a staggering destruction of continental wildlife, an unforgivable crime against evolution in America. And as you just described, you know, the greatest example of such destruction in the history of the world, possibly I think the biggest. Yeah, I think most folks know the broad strokes of that story. Maybe Buffalo stand out as the premier example, but at least I hope most people in the hunting and fishing world know the odd theme of that story, the fact that we nearly wiped out our wildlife in this content, but the last moment saved, saved the day to some degree. Could you, could you, I guess, very briefly flesh that out just a little bit beyond what maybe the average person understands, just enough so that we can speak about a few specifics. Because what I am particularly interested in, and that we'll get to here in a moment, is is how we stopped it. Because we reached a n a deer. We we nearly destroyed this heaven on earth here in America, and then we didn't just barely. We caught ourselves. And that's the part that intrigues and excites me the most because I think there's a hope there's something we can learn from that there. But but before we get to that, I just want to make sure that people who aren't fully familiar with this story that they get just a little bit more context. Can you can you just set the stage a little bit and explain this massive crime against evolution in America, and then we can get to what happened at the end of that. 00:50:06 Speaker 3: Yeah, And I'll try to do it briefly because I agree with you. I think quite a number of people, particularly people who are interested in wildlife, from whatever background they come from, no thing about this. They probably know the Shorthand version, the cocktail party version of the short course centers on the buffalo. I mean in the Shorthand version is once there were many millions out of them, and suddenly, within the space of a century there are fewer that thousand of them left somehow. And another story, of course that's out there that people I think know the fundamental elements of, is the beaver story. The beaver supplied one of the first targets for the global market economy in North America as a result of richness of its fur. And that animal has a really unique story because it provides the first example. It's not the only one. Bison provide this too, and some others do as well, but it provides the first example of how it was possible for the Old World, which had, as I've mentioned before, sort of preceded by a few thousand years along in its historical trajectory. The arc of the Americas arrived in North America with a transformative technology of iron and steel products, and the existence of that technology enabled them to seduce the native people into participating in this market economy for animals. It was a kind of transformative technology that gave native people, for example, iron arrowheads instead of flat ones, and iron blades for their spears, and other war and hunting implements, and iron hoes and rakes for agriculture and firearms ultimately, and what it meant was that if you were a native group that didn't participate in this while your neighbors did, do we disadvantage she probably going to disappear from the story of history. So by incorporating many people into the hunt for some of these animals. I mean, the beaver story proceeds across the continent in an astonishingly rapid way which transforms the whole continent because it destroys the ecologies, this wetland ecology that beaver had established across North America. We do the same thing with sea otters on the west coast, which had this extensive coastal ecology that depended on eating sea earthens that kept help forest down. And when se otters were gone in the market economy of beds began to really soak along the coastline. So that's just an example of how it happened. There are many other species that it happens with, but it proceeds like this to sort of sum it up animals that had been able to survive here in undiminished numbers for millions of years. And one of the species I mentioned in that time article you reference is the passenger pision. We know now passenger pigeons had been here for fifteen million years, and for the last fifty thousand years they were in billions of numbers. The most numerous bird on Earth. Could not survive this global market hunt for more than three hundred years until they were completely wiped out. The last passenger visions became extinct in nineteen four. We lost the Northern Hemisphere version of the penguin by the eighteen forties. I mean, it's just one species after another until we reach the beginning of the twentieth century, and as people look around us, we realize, those who were sensitive to say, the George Bird Grenelles and the Teddy Roosevelts of the world, that holy shit, we are going to destroy everything here if we don't somehow get a grip on ourselves. And that, of course, is the moment that you reference a minute ago, when we finally start to wake up a little bit and try to begin at least to protect in the early stages, at least the animals we wanted to continue to be able to hunt. And that's sort of what Teddy Roosevelt, Barnelle, the Boon and Crocotbob and all these new state agencies were folk folks on, We've got stop the market hunt and let's at least protect the animals out there that we want to continue to be able to hunt. 00:55:08 Speaker 2: You know, after a big football game, oftentimes the coaches and the team will review film from the game and they'll walk through each quarter and talk about what they did right, what they did wrong, what they can learn from, what they need to do better next game to make sure that they, you know, get better and have better results. Or what did we do right in this moment that won us the game? And if you would reply that to this element, to this part of the story, and you look at this moment where we reached the Nader and there was this wake up moment with the Roosevelts and the pin shows and the birds and horned days and all these folks, if you were reviewing the film of that game and trying to identify what won us the game, or at least won us this battle this moment, what are the key takeaways? What are the things that led to us stopping the bleeding in that moment and resetting the stage a little bit, because, as I mentioned earlier, as we are now amidst this next wave of the sixth extinction that folks talk about, many of us, I think are are are searching for answers, searching for a way forward. And you can look back and see one moment where we did face a similar perilous moment and we righted the ship. So what I'm trying to say, Dan is how did they do it? 00:56:34 Speaker 3: We did, Yeah, we we righted the ship part way. And as I said, I mean and I remain, particularly in a wild in the world, a bit critical of the heroes of the conservation progress conservation back at the beginning of the tenth century. You also have to be sympathetic to them in a way, because evolution is still new. Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species, as I mentioned earlier, in eighteen fifty nine, and this is only about forty years thirty five or forty years later. Some of these people horn to Day I think probably is guilty of this. Tady Roosevelt, I think maybe is guilty of this. They don't quite have a really good understanding of evolution yet. I've guess some reasons that I outline in the section in Wild the World out why I think that. But what they did, and I think how they did it remarkably enough, and using probably George Bird Grunell as the primary example, they did it through the written media. George Bird Grunelle was the editor of a famous magazine of the day, Forrest and Strength, and Bell also wrote for a wide variety of newspapers and other magazines scriblers in particular, and what they were attempting to do, of course, was to alert the public to the dangers of what was happening, and they were using the media. They were using the kinds of voices that I think we're doing ay podcasts as an example, to reach a larger and larger audience of people. The ready group that they find that's willing to listen, of course, are the people who are person hunters, who very readily joined the conservation movement as laid out by the Boone and Crockett Club and Teddy Roosevelt because they recognize that we don't do now, we're going to lose me of all animals, big tail deer. We're done to fewer then twenty five individuals. At the beginning of the twentieth century, we reduced prong horns from fifteen million to seven thousand, I mean, And that story just goes on and on and on. And so the sportsman led by Roosevelt and George berg Grenelle and the Booney Crocket Club and Hornity too understand that we've got to continue just kind of engage with the world that we think is importa where I think they didn't quite get the ship upright. And in some ways it's not their fault because the science of ecology doesn't begin meeting formally the American Ecological Society doesn't begin meeting until nineteen fifteen, is that they didn't understand that it's ecologies that you have to protect and not just individual animals. And of course what they didn't recognize, primarily following this folklore tradition from the Old World, were the role of predators in the world, especially in North America, where, for examples and various secies at present, for a billion years, all the prey animals had long since co evolved alongside the predation of animals like that, And so without doing any science at all, we just loved to this program of we're going to say to elk and prong horns and whitehails and mule deer and upland birds, and we're going to introduce all kinds of new species from elsewhere in the world to be able to hunt. But meanwhile, we're also going to wipe out mountain lions and gray wolves, and we're going to try to wipe coyotes off the continent, and we're i mean, so it's not until really about nineteen fifty when the ecologists, led by Aldo Leopold are able to show the world what we have to protect. Are these old American ecologies, not just select animals out of the past that we want to continue to haunt and exploit. And so by that point we start getting into a period of history when we can finally get to something like the endangered species deack of nineteen seventy three, where we began to realize that it's a whole set of other creatures too that we have to be concerned with. 01:01:35 Speaker 2: So this story with that ending, and that leads us into where we are now, which you know, as I've talked about in previous podcasts, I know you've talked about in other places we are and you speak on your book, we are now in the anthropist scene. We are in this new epoch defined by the impact that humans have on the world, and we are seeing this next wave of wildlife declines I've described in the past as a clear cutting of our wildlife populations, and you write about that in this piece I mentioned earlier in the Time magazine, and I want to read one last excerpt because I think it informs this final set of questions I have, And you say here in the piece, you said, is this story ideological? I don't think so. It calls on an undeniable history to point out how nature will fare when governments are missing in action with respect to environmental regulation. It's an American story that urges us to be very suspicious of a future of unregulated capitalism. The purpose of history, after all, is not to make some look good in others bad. Its purpose is or should be, to let us consult the past so we can create the future we want. So, given this story of this past, that we are trying to understand what are the very most important morals, takeaways, key tenants of a philosophy that will allow us to create a future that we want and not a repeat of the past. 01:03:20 Speaker 3: Well, I wrote that piece for time. 01:03:25 Speaker 5: Because of of a current fear that I have, and I'm certainly not the only I think many of us who share avidity for nature and for wild places and wild creatures. 01:03:43 Speaker 3: We share this fear that there is an inclination in the American story, and it seems to be very prevalent at the moment to economic growth, making money as the ultimate value above every other kind of value out And what I attempted to point out in that piece is that when we do this, and there is a history one that we've been talking about in this podcast of when we've done this very thing, it really is almost certain to produce a crisis for the natural world. Because when you make money and the pursuit of economic growth the sole value of your society, that the rest of the world is going to suffer. And the idea of deregulation, of turning the environ Protection Agency, for example, into an agency that's going to engage and the biggest deregulation in the history of the United States, as Liezel and the but the President director of the EPA has put it here in the last couple of months. I mean, that's pretty scary because the reason we've managed to turn the story around is by regulating human nature. I think we all understand from the history struggle, you let human nature run up and you create that what we often referred to as is just like a wild wet We mean when we say this, it's a place where there are no regulations whatsoever. I mean that sounds great, it's free. Well, when you do let every body be fielt is the selfishness greed tends to overwhelm uh the natural world one example after another. Is to call it, as I said in that piece, this is not an ideological story. This is it's just a story based on looking back at the past and realizing what we did. So I think we have to be smart about our brothers and our future, and we have to understand that we've got to have some sort of regulation in order to bring the rest of the world. And that regulation is based around a whole other set of values. Some of us have the value of appreciating wild creatures and getting to experience nature. Some of us have the value of appreciating literature or art or film, and those are all things that create to me a really rich experience of life. And it's certainly I think it's one of the things we celebrat in the American story, not the only thing. There are a lot of things out there that are important, and I think we have to keep it. 01:07:07 Speaker 2: As someone like you who has these values, who cares deeply about the natural world and wildlife and wild places. I frequently find myself looking back again, looking back to the Roosevelts or the Leopolds or the Rachel Carson's or whoever it might be, looking for some kind of clue, looking for some kind of blueprint or a template for how I can be that kind of person today. How do I do what they did then to stop this bleeding? How can we be that next great generation that can somehow change the trajectory that we're on. So, as individuals, what takeaways have you found from the story of these iconic people who did these things that change the world that we now live in. What have you taken from them that you've been able to apply as an individual yourself, and that we too might be able to put into action in our own lives to try to create this future that we want. 01:08:14 Speaker 3: Well, I think that most of the people that we referred to in the course of this discussion conversation we've had, have been people who attempted to evangelize and spread the word in one form or another. As I mentioned, George burg Renelle was an editor of famous magazine at his day, but he also of course founded the Autuburn Society and was prominent in the creation of an organization like a Boon and Crocket Club. So it's not just evangelizing as into itself. People we've referred to Rachel Carson for example. I mean again, what Rachel Carson did was she wrote one of the most important books anyone has written about American nature, and she was able to use that sort of bullyhole pit in her voice in Silence Spring to get Congress actually to pay attention to that. Many people, of course detrated her, people who call her a hysterical woman, and she was overreaching by attacking the chemical companies and so forth. So chemistry was going to be the wave of the future in providing us with the good life, and she was pointing out the malevolent effects of it. But I think it's probably in order to create this generation, one of the ways of doing it is to to use the the pullpits that we have that have arek you do and in the talks that you do that I suppose I probably have in the books that I write, to try to take our insights to as many people as possible. I mean, you know, one of the great things about watching a terrific film or reading a really good book is that those experiences have the ability to kind of rearrange the furniture in your head. And that's only important thing to do, I think, in confronting the future that we're facing, and we've really got to rearrange the furniture in as many heads as possible to make us understand what the possibility if we don't act and we're not smart, and what the possibilities are we are. And really it's about that, It's about being. I mean, we pride ourselves on being this intelligent species. Well let's demonstrate. Let's show how smart. 01:11:13 Speaker 2: Yeah. So I'm going to ask you to participate in an exercise that might be uncomfortable given your history as a nonfiction writer, But I'm going to ask you to write for me a fictional story, an imagined story of the future. You've specialized on telling the story of our past with wildlife and wild places, but I'd love for you to imagine a future with wildlife and wild places that anticipates a new relationship between us and our wild neighbors. If there were to be a future, let's say, fifty years from now or one hundred years from now, in which we in America still have thriving populations of wildlife, that we have grizzly bears roaming the continent, that we can hunt deer and elk, that buffalo are maybe even more prevalent than they are now, That we still have incredible wild places where we can seek solace, or fill our freezers or just go for a hike. If all that we're still present and possible fifty or one hundred years from now, what would have to be true for that to come into existence? What changes or actions would need to be taken in those subsequent decades for that story to come to life? 01:12:39 Speaker 3: You know, maybe predictable In order of someone who thinks that understanding the past is the key to the future, based on the idea that the truth is the past doesn't stay in the past, its how we live in the present, I think I would have to argue that standing we are in for a way, understanding that we are animals out of Earth's evolutionary river, and that we and other creatures can coosist side by side as a result of that, that's probably key step to this imagine the future that you lay out. I mean, I can certainly imagine a future like that. I think it would center around, for example, a good bit of rewilding where people living in for example, the rural parts of America these days, actually, rather than trying to turn a piece of ground that they're living on into a money making project, sort of subsistence project with pigs and cows and horses and chickens, actually attempts to live on a piece of ground that they try to restore to the way Europeans found it, the way maybe people had for ten thousand years. That that might be a eap to actually living in a work where you can coexist with features. I mean, that's kind of, in a way a far fetched trajectory that we haven't really talked about, but I think it's a possible future. And I think what that also means is that people living in living lives in urban settings going to have to probably consciously try to it's the natural world, either through more urban parks, like a sort of a wilder Central Park in Manhattan, for example, and wilder urban parks in cities like Denver or San Diego, where you freely accept the fact that there may be coyote packs roaming through the park, there may be an occasional mountain lion coming through that's taking down a deer. I think getting back to something of the wild world that we seem to have been so committed to escaping is going to be the key to a future like that. I mean, I sort of railed a little bit in a wild new world that America had this chance to create a whole new kind of civilization based on living in natural conditions, and instead what we did was we tried to turn America, the United States into a clone of England, un plants of the countries of Western Europe, which had long since destroyed most of its natural world. And here we had this wonderful opportunity to do it all over again, and somehow we just tried to emulate what was your Europe was. But I still think we have have the opportunity to do in the future. So that's the kind of ecotoy. Yeah, I think I would imagine as a fictional, hopefully a non fiction future. 01:16:21 Speaker 2: Could you describe for me or hypothesize maybe two tangible actions someone could take today that might lead us closer to that future. If there were two things that maybe you yourself are trying to do now, or that that I could consider trying to add to my life in some kind of way, because because so many of these things, when I think about them, can be abstract can seem you know, these larger philosophical shifts. But then I wonder, okay, what does that look like in daily life? And you described a few things that are like that I guess could be applied. But could you give us a couple examples of clear, tangible things that we could do in our lives today or tomorrow that might send us if even with these individual actions might collectively lead to what we've been discussing. 01:17:18 Speaker 3: Well, for full disclosure, I should admit that what I just said about rewilding personal spaces is the theme of a book I just sold to my publisher in New York a few months ago, where what I am going to be writing about are three big places adult where I attended, and one of them was in West Texas back in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. The second one was in the Bittery Valley in Montana in the nineties through about twenty fifteen, and the thirdies here outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. And all three of those that I lived pieces of ground fifteen twenty miles outside town. The pieces weren't large, twelve to twenty five acres, but what I did with them and what I describe in the book, what I call it is reverse homesteading. I mean when the homestead acts in America were designed to take pieces of ground that native people had managed for ten thousand years and turn them into any matcheck in the global market economy. And so we transformed them into with the technological infrastructure fences and plowing and so forth, into pieces of the ground they would produce money. And what I've tried to do with these three places is to turn them around and take them back the other direction, to remove and eradicate all the evidence that previous people had done with respect to taking money off these pieces of ground and trying to restore them to kind of healthy original ecosystem, so rewild them. In effect. I think that's you know, four picturely live out and on pieces of ground. That's one of the things you can think about about doing. Another thing that I'm kind of intrigued by. And again full disclosure, I'm doing. My Coyote America book will be out ten years next summer, and its publisher is having me do a tenth anniversary edition of it, so I'm providing a new preface to it, which I'm working on in fact right now, And in that preface, I'm not only talking about some of the things that have happened with the coyote story since, for example twenty sixteen when that book came out, on which his coyotes are now expanding in the South America. They're the first animal to do this in three million years. But another thing talking about it, and I think this answers to your request about things people can do, is I'm talking about something that I again have sort of done personally, where I have kind of adopted an individual animal that I have, first of all located because of their physical characteristics. In the case of the coyotes. Three, there is a little female coyote who I have been watching for about six or seven years now, and she's distinctive enough to identify because under most coyotes that have a black tip on their tails, she has a white tip at the end of her tail. And so I've been watching her as an individual animal and trying to understand not just coyotes in general around me, but this particular animal, especially how she moves through the landscape, how she appears and doesn't appear, what she hunts, what kind of pups she has, and what she does with them. And I've been doing this, as I said, for about six or seven years. And Yep, another thing I've been doing. I talked about this on Adill Rogan episode a couple of years ago. I have a raven that has sort of become certainly not a pet, it's a wild raven, but it's a bird that I cultivating kind of a personal relationship with the last about three or four years. And this is a bird that comes down. I mean I've never touched it or handled it, but it comes down and lands within about three feet up me and waddles around while I talk to it, and it talks back. And it's the same kind of thing where I've taken on sort of an individual animal, not just ravens in particular, but an individual and try to establish some kind of report so or maybe getting into a little bit of a kind of different short of relationship to a wild world around us. It caused all these individuals just like us. It's one of the things that I think I can probably add Kate to be borning. 01:22:18 Speaker 2: That's a really paradigm shifting way to look at our relationship to wildlife for a lot of us, especially within you know, the community here mutator, and in which we we we have a relationship with wildlife, in which we consume it, in which we pursue it, in which we give a lot of credence to the biological and the scientific management of species, and looking at things from a species perspective. It's challenging to rethink that and to look at wildlife as an individual a little bit. And I think we've been We've been trained in a certain way not to do that. I think because of maybe some early some early tendencies to maybe overdo that sometimes with like the Bambi effect or the nature fakers that Roosevelt bemoaned in the early twentieth century. But I wonder if there is a place in between those that that is informative and useful for us to to kind of continue to evolve that. As for lack of better term relationship. 01:23:32 Speaker 3: Yeah, it is a different sort of approach than focusing on species. And that's of course what game and fish programs did from the very beginning, and it's what Roosevelt and Giffer pincho and one Today and the others. They focused on saving species and sort of really kind of ignored that animals, after all, are also individuals. But I noticed that, for example, in the last years of the destruction of wolves in the American West, one of the things that ranchers and those government wolf hunters were doing is that they were individualizing particular animals. They were even giving them names. I wrote it, several of them, I wrote wild New World, because they were identifying these animals as being very specific and very individualistic animals. And we tend to do that to a certain extent today. For example, in Yellowstone RK. Macnar, who has watt a whole series of books about the Wolves of Yellowstone, he is very definitely focusing on individual animals. And I think I probably got into a habit of trying to do that when I was working on Coyote America and I was talking to the people at the Predator Research in Utah. I mean, now, how individualistic the animals were that they were doing these experiments on, That the coyotes that they were working with were all very individualistic, And that sort of started me thinking. And it's what I think has telled me Sion, where I have been picking out individual wild animals around me here outside Santa Fe, Like this particular coyote with a white tipped tail, and this particular raven that I'm describing, I mean, so, okay, ravens tend to all look alike, to be sure, but this particular raven has a specific perch that he lands on near the house, so I think it's tempting to demonstrate his uniqueness from any other raven that would happened by. And the other thing that my wife and I have noticed it is the peculiar brig of feathers neck come out from under his neck that stick out sort of like a cow lick. And so by trying to pay close enough attention that you can identify something specific like that, you can begin to locate individual animals and start to watch them and see how they function in the world. And if you do that, you start noticing that these animals are different from the other ravens and the other coyotes that are around us. And that's You're right, that's a stept for a lot of people, but I think can be pretty valuable. 01:26:39 Speaker 2: Yeah, And I guess for anyone listening to this podcast at least, and anyone reading your books and listening to your podcast or Steve's podcast, I think all of us can agree that these wild animals, whether we look at them from an individual capacity or at a species level, or from a regional perspective, or as hunters or bird watchers, whatever it might be, they bring great value to our lives. They color our lives. They in fact allow for us to be alive through their services and being a part of the ecosystem that we all depend on. So I, for one, am very thankful that you are taking the time and and you know, giving your life to telling these stories and teaching all of us about where we came from and what that means to the future. It's very important and very appreciated. So Dan, thank you for that. And then I would also ask you to please tell our listeners where they can connect with you, where they can listen to your podcast, how they can find your books, because we're just scratching the surface here today. There's so much more that you've done that I would love for people to be reading, to be consuming, to be aware. 01:27:56 Speaker 3: Of easy way for the books, particularly for the last three that I've done a Wild New World, American, Serengeti and Coyote America is to go first to your local bookstore. I mean, I'm a champion of local bookstores. And these are books that have a big enough presence that I think most bookstores probably are carrying them. But if you can't find those books at local bookstore, of course, they're all available on Amazon and a whole host of different forms, kindle forms, digital forms, paperbacks for a couple of them. There's still cloth versions out there, and as I said, and audio books too of all three of those. And there's also going to be a new death anniversary edition of Coyote America as well coming out there. And as for the pod cast, I mean, obviously you can go to meat Eater and you can find it, but it's called the American West. Dan Flores uh uh, Steven and Randall and I discussing these scripts that I produce primarily from a work an Unbolished. They're going to be twenty six episodes. I believe three of them have appeared so far. There are on Tuesdays every other week. Uh. And you can find them as venues uh, their versions on YouTube, a couple of audio only versions. Basically, all you two is either to meat Eater or google me Dan Flores podcast and that will come out pretty readily. 01:29:55 Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I've listened to the first three that are publicly available and thoroughly enjoyed them so far, so can't wait for the next twenty three to come out to the world for the rest of us. And and with that, Dan, I just want to echo what I said earlier. Thank you for this conversation today and for everything you've been doing. 01:30:16 Speaker 3: That's my great pleasure to be with you. Mark, You're dang great work. 01:30:22 Speaker 2: And that's a wrap. Thank you for joining me today. Please go and read Dan's books. Please go listen to his new podcast on the Meat Eater Podcast Network the American West. You won't regret it. You will enjoy it. You will learn so much so that I'll say thank you for being here and stay wired to Hunt