Ep. 911: Creating a DIY Wildlife Refuge with Doug Tallamy

This week on the show I’m joined by professor, ecologist, and best-selling author Doug Tallamy, to discuss the fascinating ways that hunters can turn their properties into DIY wildlife refuges for the critters we hunt and other threatened species at the same time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to
the whitetail 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.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Podcast. This weekend's show,
I am joined by professor ecologist and best selling author
Doug Ptolemy to discuss the fascinating ways that hunters can
turn their properties into DIY wildlife refuges that can help
not only the species that we hunt, but also the

(00:40):
entire natural world. All right, welcome back to the Wired
to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light, and
today we are kind of putting a capstone on our
spring of habitat conversations. We've had these off and on
over the last two or three months talking about how

(01:01):
we can improve our properties for better deer hunting or
turkey hunting, how we can take maybe a tactical approach,
and also how we can take more of a holistic approach.
I think there's there's kind of two different ways of
thinking about the work we do on our hunting properties
and our land that we manage. One of those is
how do we tactically set up better hunting opportunities? And

(01:22):
the other one is how do we simply improve the
landscape for wildlife and for animals of all kinds. And
that's something that over the years, as you've heard on
this podcast, I've grown more and more interested in kind
of widening the aperture, zooming out a little bit and
looking at, you know, our opportunities on the places that

(01:43):
we own or manage, and seeing the really interesting things
we can do there when we think beyond just hey,
how do I kill more deer, but instead how do
I have great hunting but also really healthy habitat and
a strong sustainable future for this place. Those are the
kinds of things that you know, as someone like you

(02:03):
or I, if we own land, or lease land, or manage
land in any kind that's a huge privilege, a huge
opportunity to have someplace where you can make that kind
of difference. And with that in mind, our conversation today
is one that I'm very excited to have because our
guest is someone who's really helped me frame this kind
of thinking and understand the opportunity that we have to

(02:26):
make a positive difference to not only kind of make
our hunting better or our own personal experience better, but
actually make things better for a lot of people and
a lot of critters in a much wider scale than
maybe we ever imagine. So my guest today is Doug Ptolemy.
He is a professor at the University of Delaware. He

(02:46):
is an entomologist and an ecologist, and he is a
best selling author. He's written several books, most popular, maybe
is Nature's Best Hope. He also wrote the Nature of Oaks,
and most recently, his newest book is how can I
help Saving nature with your Yard? And this idea of

(03:08):
saving nature with your yard is kind of what put
Doug on the map, I think for a lot of
people with that book, Nature's Best Hope, because in that
one he talks about this opportunity that we have if
we were simply to convert half of the nation's yards
into wildlife habitat. There's something like forty four million acres
of yard across America, and his idea in his book was, Hey,

(03:28):
let's take about half of that and turn it into
something better. Can you imagine how we could help the
many different critters out there that are not doing so
well right now? If we change what's right now a
weekly mode lawn into some other kind of native, helpful,
useful plant life that could help birds and bugs and
small mammals and all sorts of stuff. Deer in turkey

(03:50):
is included. Well, I read that and I thought immediately,
while that's makes a lot of sense, that's exciting. What
if we could scale that up up? Because I know
some people that don't just own yards, They own or
manage or lease, you know, tens or twenties or hundreds
of acres of land for wildlife right our hunting properties.

(04:12):
What if we could do some of the things that
he was talking about on a yard scale and instead
ramp that up to a deer hunting property scale. What
if we could improve wildlife not for one acre, not
on one acre, but on one hundred acres or one
thousand acres. I mean, we can make a really huge difference.
So that's what I want to talk to Doug about.

(04:33):
How can we take his ideas around this concept he
refers to as his homegrown National park concept and scale
that up to what I've started referring to as a
DIY wildlife refuge concept, where we can improve these properties
for wildlife that we can hunt, but also for everything
else out there. This is something that we've talked about

(04:55):
over the years, and now I think Doug is going
to help us really tie a bow on it. So
I'm excited about this conversation. I'm excited about what Doug
has to say in this chat. We talk through his background,
We talk about how he kind of came to this
philosophy of land management. We discuss how his concepts that

(05:16):
were originally created for improving small properties for wildlife can
translate to bigger properties like what we have. We talk
about some of the I think hotly debated topics in
the hunting world around management, which would be like, you know,
native versus non native species, is it really that important?
Should you really be you know, having to get rid

(05:38):
of your automotive or your whatever stuff that's in there.
That's maybe you see animals using and deer using, but
technically our non native and maybe aren't so good. We
get into the details with Doug. He's someone who really
understands this stuff. We talk about responsible ways to use herbicide.
We talk about, you know, ways to actually think about

(06:00):
the plants that you are adding to your property or
the trees by using something called the keystone plant idea,
you know, really kind of leveraging plants that have an
extra high impact on the surrounding natural world. We talk
about some different ideas for dealing with invasive species. We
talk about why oaks are so important for wildlife, and interestingly,

(06:21):
it is beyond just the acorns that we think about.
There's much much more here. Doug's a fascinating individual. If
you have any kind of land to your name, whether
it be a thousand acres or forty acres or two acres,
this is a conversation you're gonna want to listen to.
It's going to help your hunting. It's going to help

(06:42):
you improve the landscape for wildlife of all types. You're
gonna enjoy it yourself, You're gonna help other animals and
other people around you. And I think that's gonna help
our hunting way of life moving forward to because if
we as whitetail hunters and land managers and be seen
as helping the natural world and being a part of

(07:03):
the solution, it's going to help us in many, many
ways down the road beyond the obvious. So with that
all set, I'm gonna quit beating around the bush. Here
we're gonna get to my chat with Doug Tollmy, and
I promise you're gonna enjoy this one, all right. Joining

(07:23):
me now is Doug Tolemy. Doug, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Very happy to be here, Mark.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.
You are someone who I've who have been reading for
a handful of years now, and I've listened to over
the years as well, and folks that tune into this
podcast have been requesting you for some time because we've
talked about a lot of topics that are within your world,
in your wheelhouse, I've probably danced around a lot of

(07:52):
the concepts that you specialize in. So I've had a
number of emails and messages over the last couple of
years saying, Hey, you got to get Doug on, You've
got to get Doug on. He's the He's the og
as some people say these days, and the original and
that that said, very excited to be able to talk
to you about a number of things that relate to

(08:15):
both wildlife management and landscape management and wildlife of all
types and kind of the intersection between all those things.
So to kick things off, Doug I want to kind
of just jump right off the dock, right into the
deep end here. There's no uh, there's no foreplay here.
Many of your books, yea, many of your books, Doug,

(08:38):
kind of open by establishing a foundation of where we
are right now, and that being setting the stage around
this concept that a lot of folks are calling the
biodiversity crisis or the sixth mass extinction. Can you share
with us your summary of that set of issues. If

(08:59):
you were sitting in a you know, in a school
classroom with a bunch of college students today and they said, hey,
you know, why is all this stuff so important? Why
are you writing all these books? If you were going
to open up that lecture or that discussion by explaining
this biodiversity crisis, how would you do that, Doug?

Speaker 3 (09:17):
Well, if I were talking to a bunch of college kids,
I would try not to depress them. But it is
it is a sad state of affairs. We the Earth
is in the sixth grade extinction event it has ever experienced.
But this is the first one to because by a
living being, and that of course is us. We've lost
two thirds of Earth's wildlife. You know, three billion breeding

(09:41):
birds gone from North America. In the last fifty years,
we've got global insect decline. Paper came out about three
weeks ago. Is just since the year two thousand, we've
lost twenty two percent of our butterflies. So you know,
there's a lot of bad statistics out there. That's the issue.

(10:02):
And the connection is that those are the species that
run the ecosystems that provide the life support that keep
humans alive. So we can look at this totally selfishly.
We will not exist on the planet without nature, yet
we're wiping nature off the planet. So since we know
what the problem is, it also makes it's something we

(10:23):
can fix. We can stop doing that. And that's what
I've been talking about for the last I don't know
twenty years now. How do we learn to live with nature?
The old idea the humans in nature can't live together,
that we're separated, that it's happy someplace else, not happy
someplace else. There are very few someplace elses these days,
and most of them are degraded by one thing or another.

(10:45):
So what we have to do is give up that
old notion and learn how to get nature to thrive
and human dominated landscapes, because that's just about everywhere, So
that's what I talk about all the time.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah, Now, as I understand it, a lot of this
kind of hit home for you on your own property
that you and your wife have been working on. Can
you share just a little bit about how your experience
is there? Open your eyes maybe to this, because there's
one side of this that's facts and figures on the page,
which are stark and compelling, but sometimes they can make

(11:19):
our eyes our eyes glaze over.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
A little bit.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
But when you see some of this, you know, on
the ground yourself, and you start to see what maybe
a healthy landscape versus an unhealthy landscape might look like,
that can be a little bit more eye opening, for
lack of a better term. What have you seen there
on your own piece of ground when you guys first
started that has led to where you are now.

Speaker 3 (11:39):
Well, we bought a section of a farm in Oxford,
Pennsylvania in the year two thousand. There's ten acres, so
I don't know what one hundred sum acre farm. It
was broken up into ten acre lots, very old farm
and farmed almost three hundred years and the last thing
they did was mow it for hay. So you know,
so I always exhausted that the crops were going, the

(12:01):
cattle were gone. They just mowed it for hay. And
when you mow for hay in this part of the country,
you're really mowing the rootstocks of all the invasive plants
from Asia. So you're mowing multi flour rows and our
elem bittersweet and Japanese honeysuckle and bush honeysuckle and autumnolive
and all of that. And they call it hey because
they're not really using it as hey. They're selling it
to the mushroom industry and they don't care what it is.

(12:24):
But when you stop mowing, so mowing does not kill
the rootstocks. So when you stop mowing, all those things
come back with a bench in vengeance. And we it
was out of mowing three years before we actually moved in,
So we moved into ten acres of just solid invasive
plants from Asia. We had to cut trails just to
be able to walk around. So that was an eye

(12:44):
opener for me. I mean, I'd heard of invasive species,
but I lived in suburbia before that, and even though
we actually had them on our property, I wasn't tuned
into that. But then I was tuned in and said, well, look,
you know this is this is this would be a
great ecosystem in Beijing, but not here. Now. I'm also
an entomologist, and we learned about host plant specialization in

(13:07):
graduate school back in the seventies that you know, perfect
example of that is the monarch butterfly. It is a
specialist on milkweed. You take milkweed away and you lose
the monarch butterfly can't eat anything else. Well, ninety percent
of the insects that eat plants are host plant specialists.
So right away I say, okay, we've just replaced our
native plants with plants from Asia. Our insects aren't going

(13:27):
to be able to eat eat that. So that actually
stimulated a new direction of research for me. I wrote
a couple of grants. They got funded, which is a surprise,
always a surprised when you get funded. But it told
me my peers weren't thinking about this either. Nobody else
was working on this, and that really set the stage. Okay,

(13:48):
we've got we've got to measure what the impact of
invasive plants are. What's it doing to the insect populations
that actually run our ecosystems. And I'm talking largely about.
Caterpillars are the meat and potatoes of terrestrial food webs.
If you don't have them, you're not They're transferring more
energy from plants to other animals than any other type
of plant eater. So you take them away, you lose

(14:11):
your birds, you lose all kinds of things. What's happening
to those ecosystems? Where are these plants come from? So
I found out, well, they're actually they're escapes from our gardens.
Just all the ones I mentioned are brought in by
the horticulture trade, and they're now in our natural areas,
actually millions of acres of our natural areas. So are

(14:32):
we just degrading the food web in our natural areas?
Yes we are, but nobody measured that, so we wanted
to get real numbers on it. We talk about caterpillars.
How many catapillarsts does it take to make one nest
of chickties six thousand and nine thousand caterpillars? To get
one nest of chicktys to the point where they leave
the nest. Where those caterpillars are going to come from,
not from automolive, not from crete myrtle, not from ginko,

(14:54):
not from all the things we have in our suburban landscapes.
So even if the plants are not in what we what,
we decorate our human dominated landscapes with our plants that
don't support the food with and that's what we wanted.
We want to get measurements on all of that stuff.
The next thing is how do we change that? But
you know, then I learned, gee, we've got a lot

(15:16):
of lawn out there. We got forty four million acres
of law. We've got one hundred and thirty five million
acres of residential landscape. That's where our invasive plants are
coming from. You know, that's an area bigger than all
of New England combined, dedicated to decoration. It's an ecological
dead scape. Does it have to be that way? Absolutely not.

(15:37):
We can turn that around. So that's the other thing
my property showed us. We got rid of the invasive plants,
and by we I largely meet my wife, and then
we put in the natives. And we have counted sixty
two species of birds that have bred on our property
since then. I am counting the number of caterpillar species
that I find just moths so far, and I'm up

(15:57):
to one three hundred and forty seven species that I
have pictures of because we put the plants that they
need back. So what that tells me this works. Nature
is really resilient. It will rebound if we use the
right plants, and that is that is the solution to
the whole thing. Using the right plants. Putting the right

(16:18):
plants back. Plants are capturing energy from the sun and
turning it into the food that supports just about all
the animals out there, certainly all the terrestrial animals. So
plant choice matters. If we choose their plants widely, we
can rebuild ecosystems. And I do get emails all the

(16:38):
time from people who are doing this. Hey, this really works?
Does it works? So that's what keeps me going. It works.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
So there is a common I guess retort to what
you're just describing there. I've heard it myself. There's debate
around it within the wildlife management and hunting community. I
know you written about it in your books. That being well,
the whole native plant thing is kind of like it's

(17:08):
dust in the way, and it's it's pointless. Nowadays, the
non native invasive plants have become naturalized they're part of
the landscape. Now, who says what's native and what's not? When?
What's the timescale you're looking at? We might see, you know,
back in the farm behind my house, there's all sorts
of automotive and I see all sorts of wildlife using

(17:29):
that stuff. I see deer bedding in there. I see
you know, birds feeding on the berries. I see critters
moving in. And you know what's so bad with that?
Why would we want to get rid of that? These
are all the kinds of things that start coming up
when we talk about this native versus non native how
And I know you talked about some of this already,
but could you expand just a little bit more on
that and and how the value of those native plants

(17:53):
is so much greater, especially you talked about the insects
and and kind of you know, selective partnerships, but between
insects and plants and whatnot. I've loved your writing on this.
Would love to hear just a little bit more on
that front.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
Well, you brought up about ten points with that. You know,
if things were in good shape, the monarch would be
in good shape. We've lost ninety six percent of them.
We wouldn't have lost three billion breeding birds in the
last fifty years, we wouldn't have biodiversity decline everywhere. So
you might see a few deer in your automolive back there,

(18:27):
which they're not eating. By the way, the interaction between
deer and our basis is a really important one. The
deer don't eat them, but they do eat all the natives.
So what do you have left. We think they're superplants,
but they're not. It's just that the deer and the insects,
all the things that usually keep things in check over
here don't use them at all. Do birds eat the

(18:48):
berries from multi floor rows and autumn alive, Yes, they
do for two reasons. It's the only thing there, and
they need nutrition, particularly in the fall when they're migrating.
But when there's a choice, it's been shown they will
choose the native berries over the non native ones every time.
Why because the native berries things like like dogwood and

(19:10):
Virginia creeper and a native by burnhams, they're very high
in fat, and that's what the birds need, particularly when
they're migrating, and it's what the birds need to overwinter.
They need fat to get them through the rough times.
The berries from automaalive and bush honeysuckle and multi flower rows,
all of those guys, they're high in sugar. So yes,

(19:31):
the birds eat them, but it doesn't give them what
they need. So yeah, I mean, I do hear this
all the time too. I see, Oh, there's lots of
bees on these flowers. Well, they're mostly honey bees, which
is an introduced bee itself. We've got thirty six hundred
to four thousand species of native bees, and anytime anybody's
measured them, they're all in decline, just like the honey

(19:52):
bee is in trouble. So yeah, I mean it's you've
got to have a baseline. You got to say what
was there before for these things invaded, Know what was there,
and then compared to what's there now before you can say, hey,
it looks great. This is something called shifting baseline. We
think that the way things were when we were kids,

(20:12):
when we were growing up, is the way they've always been,
in the way they always should be. So if you're
born into a world that has suffered defination, like you know,
you don't have the American chestnut anymore, you don't miss
it as it's been gone. You don't miss the passenger
pigeon because it was gone before any of us were born. Well,
when you're born into that world, do you think that's normal?

(20:33):
So there's no issue. That's the way it was when
I was born. Well, it's highly degraded compared to what
it used to be. Why does that matter. We've got
to get back to ecosystem function. Way back in nineteen
fifty five, I guess it was Robert MacArthur was a
theoretical ecologist who said, you know, ecosystems depend on the

(20:53):
number of species in them. The more species that are
in an ecosystem, the more stable it is and the
moreductive it is. And by productive, we're talking about those
life support ecosystem services that we live off of every day.
So when you start taking species away from an ecosystem,
it becomes less productive and less stable, and that's why

(21:16):
the loss of these numbers. And you can talk about
you know, ecosystems function locally too. So you look at
the number of species that are in your yard now
compared to what it was before it was your yard.
It's a tiny fraction of it. You say, well, yeah,
but it's happy someplace else. We're adding eight hundred thousand
acres of new residential landscapes to the US every year,

(21:38):
So we could say it's not a problem, but that
doesn't make it not a problem.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah, So something you just said there sparked another common
question within my world. For many worlds, I suppose, I
think there's a lot of folks out there who have,
like a favorite species in the hunting world, might be
the favorite species to hunt and managed for in you know,
in the non hunting world, Hey, I love bluebirds, I

(22:06):
want more bluebirds around. Or hey, I really love seeing
elk in my neck of the woods in Colorado. I
want to make my ranch better for elk or whatever
it might be. Or in our case, you know, there's
folks who love white tail deer, so they want to
make their landscape better for white tail deer. When speaking
to these people, it's sometimes hard to expand the aperture

(22:27):
beyond just that favorite species. We're thinking, well, if I'm
going to invest time and money in doing something better
for my yard or my one hundred acres or whatever
it might be, why wouldn't I just direct all my
efforts towards the very single best thing for this one thing,
The best thing for my bluebirds, or the best thing
for the white tail deer, the best thing for the
bob white quail. But something you spoke to right there

(22:48):
is a pretty powerful concept that I'd love you to
expand on, which is just the necessity of diversity and
productivity within an ecosystem. Can you just speak a little
bit more about this sometimes fluffy idea of how everything's connected.
We always hear like, oh, everything's connected, there's this web

(23:08):
of life, and what happens to the bugs will impact
your deer. That's like a nice concept in theory, it's
harder to understand and practice. Can you build that out
a little bit more for us?

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Well, you've said it pretty well. Nothing exists in isolation.
You can't have healthy deer population without having the resources
to support those deer, and unfortunately that includes the predators
to keep the deer population in check. I live in
Chester County, Pennsylvania, where the deer are about fourteen times
over the carrying capacity of the environment. There's no understory left,

(23:43):
there's no ground nesting birds or anymore. There's no recruitment
into our forest because there's so many deer. I could
get up and look out my window right now, and
there'll be four or five deer standing right there because
they live here all the time and they're eating everything.
I have no golden rodunless I have a cage around it,
you know, even violets, evening primrose, all the things that

(24:06):
actually create a healthy meadow system are are gone. What
I do have is Japanese stilt grass and porcelain berry
and all those little automotives and multiple rows keep trying
to come back that the deer don't touch. So the
overpopulation of deer is an issue. It is not the
deer's fault. It's the fact that we have We have

(24:29):
given them perfect edge habitat they love that taken away
their predators. So of course there's nothing, nothing checking their
population until you get to the point where where you know,
you get disease outbreaks and starvation. That's not the way
we want to manage our deer populations. You want to
have bluebirds. They're just like the chickadees. They they're rearing
their young on caterpillars and grasshoppers and crickets and and

(24:53):
if you don't have those, you don't have bluebirds. We
have a nest of tree swallows in our bird house
Now why are they there, Because there's a healthy meadow
that's actually producing that flying insects that they need. Where
do those insects come from. They come from the plants
that are in that meadow. They're not coming from the
stilt grass that has invaded that meadow. So this is

(25:16):
the connection. And the same thing gets always gets back
to the quality of the plants. And one of the
things I didn't talk about before is that it's not
just native plants versus non native plants. It's productive native
plants versus not productive plants. So this is where the

(25:44):
concept of keystone plants comes in. If you're trying to
pass food on up the food web so that you
have lots of other types of animals, you have to
have the plants that are willing to do that. That's
why the non native plants are, you know, a problem
here because nothing eats them, so they don't pass on

(26:04):
their food. The ones that pass on the food the
very best in North America, at least in eighty four
percent of the counties in North America are oaks. They're
passing on more energy to food webs than any other
plant genus. But we got a lot of high productives
native native prunus, willows, hickories, even black walnuts. They're all

(26:27):
very highly, highly ranked. But there are native plants like yellowwood,
even spice bush, you know, supports a spice bush swallowtail,
but not a whole lot more than that. I could
design a native landscape that produces very little because there's
such differences in the productivity of plants. So we want

(26:49):
to focus on We want to at least make sure
that our landscapes all have keystone plants in them. They
can have a diversity of other things as well, but
if you have landscapes without the keystone plants, you have
a failed food and then everything collapses.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
So we have this high level problem across the nation,
across the world. We have this invasion of non native plants.
We have this invasion of human development and our footprint
in so many other ways, degrading landscapes and you know,
sending wildlife populations of all types into decline. You wrote

(27:26):
in your book Nature's Best Hope that you thought the
elderly Leopold had it figured out pretty well. You wrote
that his solution was to teach farmers and ranchers techniques
to restore and conserve natural resources on their own lands
with incredible foresight. Leopold suggested, quote rewarding the private landowner

(27:46):
who conserves the public interest. Can you expand on that
a little bit further and how that kind of led
you to your homegrown national park concept.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
Well, think about the people that live in cities with
the people in Manhattan. Manhattan is not generating any ecosystem
services to support those eight million people. It's all coming
from lands elsewhere. And that's what I was talking about.
It's the farmers. It's the natural areas that we have
preserved that are creating the life support to keep everybody alive.

(28:20):
So that's why they should be rewarded for that. The
farmer who adds a pollinators strip to its soybeans or
his corn ought to be compensated for that. And actually
we have a CRP program where they are compensated for that.
Not only are they helping the pollinators, they're intercepting top
soil before it gets into the watershed and all the
nutrients that create a dead zone in the Gulf. I mean,

(28:43):
it's a win win for everybody, but it shouldn't be
on the farmer's back to do that. Everybody needs these
ecosystem services, so everybody ought to be paying for them.
We have this idea that the earth is free, you know,
water is free, air is free, and we can and
it'll be there forever. Well, the Earth's not growing at all.
Our population is growing, but the earth isn't growing the resources.

(29:05):
We're using resources faster than the Earth is replacing them.
Do we have to know? But we are, and we
need to address that issue. So I talk about a
pay per use fee. We won't call it a tax,
We'll call it a fee. Just like you're watching netfix,
you're willing to pay for that. Well, if everybody paid

(29:26):
ten dollars per year and a pay per per earth fee,
I'm just talking about the US, that would generate three
point two billion dollars a year that we could put
terms of environmental issues and in terms of the individual
it's one trip to Starbucks. You know, you wouldn't even
notice it. It just but it emphasizes that these resources

(29:47):
are not free. They have to be managed. And the
sooner we start doing that, the better effort going to be.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
So with individual homeowners and landowners. You then talked about how,
hey there's forty four you know some million acres of lawn.
There's one hundred and thirty some million acres of residential landscape.
What if we also started finding ways for those people
to have influence of some kind, whether it be a
quarter acre or one acre or five hundred square feet.

(30:17):
What if they could also start doing some of those
things that you just mentioned, you know, farmers are doing
on a larger scale with their pollinator strips or whatever
might be. What if they started taking little positive actions
on their own postage stamp of whatever size that might be.
That's that's what led to your homegrown national park idea
that I know you've written a lot about. Could you
could you talk a little bit more about what that

(30:38):
looks like.

Speaker 3 (30:40):
Yeah, and I got that idea when I saw the
forty million acre lawn figure that was way back, you know,
early two thousands. I said, well, what if we cut
that area in half? So cut everybody cut the area
of lawn they have in half. That would give us
twenty million acres we could restore right at home. Then
I said, how big is twenty million acres? And I

(31:02):
started adding up the acreage of all of our major
national parks, and you add them all up, it's still
less than twenty million acres, So I said, gee, we
can create a new national park. We'll call it Homegrown
National Park as we're doing it at home, and it'll
be the biggest park in the country. So it's kind
of disconnected. But the object here is we've got these
viable habitats. Those are our parks and our preserves, but

(31:25):
in between it's no man's land, which means the population
in those parks and preserves of everything is small and
small popular. All populations fluctuate, you know, good times they
go up and bad times they go down. Small populations
go in their bad times, they blink out of their
little habitat and then they're gone, and you've lost that
population from that habitat. Unless they recolonize it, it's permanently gone.

(31:48):
And that's happening all over the place. So with our
isolated little parks and preserves, they're bleeding species on a
regular basis. How do we stop that? Not only do
we connect them with what people cook biological carters where
plants and animals are moving back and forth. There's no
inbreeding depression in those sites. That helps, but the populations

(32:09):
are still small. So what we need to do is
restore the land in between those and where is that.
That's our that's our properties, that's where we live, where
we work. I won't even touch the farming. Just where
we live, where to work, where we pray, play, our
little parks, at our little preserves. We've got to make
them viable habitat against so that when you move outside
of a real park, it's not no man's land. That

(32:31):
we can have viable populations right there with humans. And
so Homegrown National Park and lists all of the property
owners out there, and there are millions and millions and
millions of them. They become the future of conservation. And
the only downside there is that they don't know that yet.
So that's that's what National Bard is all about, is

(32:53):
to get that message out that the amount of law
on you have and the plants you choose for your property,
they're going to determine how much life can exist where
you live. And if everybody did that, you know, seventy
eight percent of the entire country is privately owned. Eighty
five percent east of the Mississippi is privately owned. So
if we did this on private property, and actually we

(33:16):
have to do it on private property because if we don't,
you've eliminated most of the country. Then it can succeed,
and if we don't do it, we're going to fail.
And failure is not an option because we cannot live
without nature. So what it does, what Homego National Park
does is empower the individual. We don't have to go

(33:37):
through the government, and that's a good thing because that
not only does it take forever and often goes in
the wrong direction. You get to decide whether you're going
to fix the earth. You've claimed you can own piece
of the earth. So along with that comes the responsibility
of taking care of it. And Homegong National Park is
simply about getting that message out.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
I love it. I think it's empowering and exciting to
give that sense of agency back to the individual. You know,
and my family. We've been trying to follow some of
your precepts. We've shrunked the size of our lawn. We've
added now two different kind of native plant gardens that

(34:18):
we're trying to kind of steward and showing our kids,
and the kids are planting things and watching stuff grow
and seeing how all the little critters are using it more.
And that's been a lot of fun and I also
had a very funny thing just happened. We also participate
in no mo May and so we've been doing that
for the last four weeks. And I got a text
message from a neighbor just yesterday and he texted me

(34:41):
he said, are you out of town? It looks like
you need to bawl your yard And I had to
tell them you, no, we are not out of town.
Just a lifestyle choice here. But this is a long
winded way of me saying for people who are interested
in the homegrown national concept idea and want to practice it.
You mentioned, you know, prioritizing native plants, but can you

(35:04):
can you speak to any of the other precepts of
this kind of change with how we manage our yards
other than prioritizing native plants or in addition to what
else would you add to that or what pillars are there?

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yeah, there's lots of things we can do that will help.
A major one in terms of insect decline, and remember
insects are the little things that run the world. Is
light pollution. We have lights on all night long. We
don't need them, so you could turn them off, but
oh no, the bad man will come. You could put
a motion sensor on it, so it only turns on
when the bad man does come. But the real solution

(35:41):
is to if you're not going to turn them off,
is to take the white ball out of those those
security lights and put in a yellow bulb, yellow incandescent
or yellow LED because yellow wave links do not attract
nocturnal insects. Most of the insects that are attracted are
the moths that are laying the caterpillars producing the caterpillars
that run the food web. So it's a very you know,

(36:02):
one trip to the hardware store solution to a really
really serious environmental issue. That's that's one thing you can do.
You know, when as they reduce the lawn, people say
why you do that. I to just plant a tree,
plant one tree a year. In ten years, you've got
ten trees going in there. When we moved in, you
know mode for Hay, I planted egcorns. They were all free.

(36:26):
Today those trees are over sixty feet tall, so you know,
it was pretty easy and they are definitely running the
ecosystem on our property. Be mindful about when you do mow,
set the mower high enough so if you go over
the box turtle or if you go over the toad,
you know it's not mince meat. Don't mow at dusk

(36:46):
when those things are out walking around. Put plastic covers
over your window wells they all, you know, these creatures
fall in there and they can't get out and then
they starve to death. These are little things that do
make a diffference in that suburban setting. When you when
you see something crossing road, don't run over it with
your car. You know, see that every single day, Stop

(37:08):
and move it. Things like that.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Yeah. So so one quick specific question on the nomo
may thing. Uh, what do you think about nomo may
is it? Is it all hype or is it actually helping?

Speaker 3 (37:25):
You know? The concept, I'm all for it. The concept
is take that unproductive law you have and make it,
make it useful. But if you have a really nice lawn,
there aren't any blooming plants in there. Part of the
fertilizer you put on there actually has a broad leaf
herbicide in it, and all you have is grass. So
if you don't mow it, then you have tall grass.

(37:48):
Grass isn't going to support any of those pollinators, whether
it's mode or not. I think a much better well,
the other thing is if you if you don't mow
it in May, let's say you're supporting a bunch of pollinators,
but then you start mowing it in June July, you've
pulled the rug out from underneath all those pollinators that
you're supporting. So it's much better to have less lawn
and have no mow. Areas that you never mow, and

(38:09):
we call them pollinator gardens. They're not going to be
based on grass. They're going to have the blooming plants
that are blooming from April all the way through the
end of October. That's what our pollinators really need. The
lawn you keep and this will make your neighbor happy.
You're going to mow that. You know it's going to
be swaths of lawn that go through your property. We

(38:29):
call that a queue for care because it shows you
haven't moved out, that this is intentional. You are managing
your yard. You do understand what the status symbol is,
and lawn is a status symbol. You're just going to
have less of it. But if you take care of
it in the standardized way, and that doesn't mean you
need fertilizer and herbicides and just keep it mode and

(38:50):
nobody knows that, then nobody has a problem with it.
It's totally acceptable. You'll have more plants on your property,
but people don't notice that either. As long as you
got that lawn mode, then you're in good shape.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Yeah, all right. So I want to take us to
kind of the the crux of this whole conversation, Doug,
and the reason that I really wanted to get you
on here, which was this kind of epiphany I had
over the last i don't know, over the last decade,
since I first started reading some of your work and
following some of what you have to say while also

(39:24):
doing some of these types of projects myself. You know,
I read about this homegrown National park concept and how
you're you know, proposed, and we apply this to the
twenty some million acres of yards out there. Well. At
the same time, I've been reading and looking at studies
and work around this scale of recreational land across the nation,

(39:45):
And a study came out from UC Berkeley a number
of years ago that put a number of three hundred
and fifty six million acres across the nation that are
either owned or leased primarily for hunting. And so when
that quantification of the kind of scale of influence that

(40:08):
the hunting community has. When I saw that it was
it was a huge eye opener for me. I realized, oh, wow,
we're not just a bunch of people out there that
have this pursuit that we enjoy so much, but we
also influence a tremendous swath of the American landscape. As
you mentioned, that's more than the National Park System.

Speaker 3 (40:25):
That's really a times more than what the National Park
System is managing.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
It's a huge area, it's a huge number, and the
total amount of federal public lands of all types US
for service wilderness areas BLM National Park that's six hundred
and forty million acres. So we're we're, you know, more
than halfway to the entire public land the state of
the nation that's managed by people who hunt and have
that kind of relationship with the natural world. So I

(40:51):
know that community. I know there's a lot of people
within that community who want to improve their land for wildlife,
who want to have maybe originally came into this wanting
just better hunting, but oftentimes when you start down that path,
it becomes like a gateway drug into wanting to do more.
That's certainly what I've experienced personally, and so I got
to thinking, what if we took Doug's homegrown national park

(41:14):
concepts that should help us address the biodiversity issue on
our lawns to twenty to forty million acres. What if
we took similar concepts and apply that to three hundred
and fifty six millions acres managed by hunters who also
want to see wildlife thrive. That seemed like a massive
opportunity for me. That seemed like this this huge important

(41:38):
role that the outdoor community could play, And I started thinking, like,
if the landscapes for of our yards are a homegrown
national park where you know national parks you can't hunt, well,
then what would the hunting version of that be. Well,
it'd be like the national Wildlife Refuge system which we
have as public land, which is where landscapes are managed

(41:58):
to help wildlife populations, but there is still hunting allowed
and engagement in that kind of consumptive way too sustainably carefully,
what if we made diy wildlife refuges by applying your
ideas to this larger scale. So this is this idea
that I've been riffing on in my own head and
writing for the last year or two, and I'm just

(42:19):
curious what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 3 (42:21):
Right at the gate, it's a wonderful idea, and there's
also examples of how well that works when you talk
about managing waterfowl and that those funds come from ducks unlimited.
You know, I mentioned that we have lost three billion
breeding birds in the last fifty years. Every bird group
except one declined and the one that increased were waterfowl,

(42:45):
and they increased because we started to actively manage the
resources those waterfowl need, which shows we can turn it around.
And it came from management. It wasn't an accident, and
it came from hunters. So can we do that? Yes,
we can. Now, managing waterfowl is easier than managing you know,
six hundred million acres of landscape. The problem with that

(43:09):
is those invasive plants. They're covering millions and millions area
and getting rid of them or managing them is a
no trivial thing. They are not increasing the productivity of
the landscape and no matter what it looks like behind
your barn, So how do we do that. One thing
we can do is to reduce the seed rain, and

(43:30):
as I said, if you lift you look at the
invasive plants that are out there. I think I actually
got to figure it's like eighty five percent have come
from our gardens and they're still there. As a matter
of fact, they're still being sold in nurseries across the country.
Not everywhere they're starting to ban them. But so privet,
for example, that favorite hedge we have, they're actually nine

(43:51):
species of privet in the US. They're all highly invasive.
There's a million acres of privet in Alabama alone, so
very serious, serious issue. How do we manage that. One
thing we can do is reduce the seed rain that
comes from our property. So I talk about people removing
the invasive plants just on their property. That's manageable, you know,

(44:16):
you you really most people don't have enough property that
wouldn't take them more than an afternoon. But one, one
burning bush, you know, produces I don't know what, two
hundred thousand seeds or something that every fall. Get rid
of that burning bush over the over time, that will
limit that will reduce the seed rain that allows these

(44:36):
things to keep expanding and keep keep coming up. I
don't have a great solution for how we manage them.
In the millions of acres of natural lands that we have.
I really don't. It's a it's a problem that was
created by us, created largely by the horticultural trade. I'd
love to give them the bill and say, hey, you
got to clean it up now. But but that's if

(45:01):
you want to increase the productivity of those lands that
will support the wildlife that we're talking about. I mean,
you talked about bob white quail, you talked about I
don't know if you mentioned woodcock. These are these are
animals we hunt. We don't have them anymore. They're gone,
you know, And and they're gone largely because of habitat
degradation as opposed to over hunting. So how do we

(45:24):
improve that those habitats. We have to understand what what
those creatures eat. They eat insects, you know, you got
to put the insects back. And some of the programs
are starting to recognize that. I have a former grad
student who is working on reclaimed oil pads in the

(45:44):
West after they play out, uh, And what he's doing
is putting all the native plants back, and and that
you know, the sage grass are returning. It's a huge
success simply by saying these are the important plants that
have to be here. So were I think we could,
but it's not gonna be easy.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Yeah. So, if I were a landowner, and let's say
I own one hundred acres that I use recreationally. My
family and I hike on it, We look for mushrooms
on it, we hunt on it, and we do all
these things. And I want to apply the framework that

(46:23):
you've that you've generally proposed for lawns if I want
to try to translate that to my one hundred acres
of which I'm trying to improve in the ways we've discussed,
what would be the preceps that you would recommend, like
translate if you could take, you know, what you've written
about on the lawn scale and now zoom it out
to one hundred acres or two hundred acres. What would

(46:45):
be your pillars or like your four steps or four
rules that you must follow if I'm trying to manage
my one hundred acres for biodiversity in this more holistic way,
what would those those rules or best practices be well?

Speaker 3 (46:58):
Step one would be find out what what is already there?
What do those hundred acres look like? Right now. If
you started out with one hundred acres of corn and
you're trying to re establish that, you're starting with a
bare slate, and that's a very different story from starting
with a patchwork of forest and probably invaded meadow. I
bet you do not have one hundred acres of invasive species.

(47:20):
You might have twenty all edge habitat or something. So
I would come up with some kind of an inventory
of what you have managing for maximum diversity. And that's
what you mentioned means sunlight. So the most diverse ecosystem

(47:41):
terrestrial ecosystems in North America are much closer to savannahs
oak savannahs that include a lot of prairie plants, big trees,
but not closed canopy, so a lot of sunlight gets
in there. Those are extremely productive and diverse ecosystems. The
really dense closed forests is probably an artifact of us

(48:02):
killing off the large place to see mammals ten thousand
years ago. They didn't used to be get closed in
like that. There were a lot of big creatures eating
a lot of plants, and it was much more open.
So you might think about opening up if you do
have a dense patch of woods, opening up the canopy
a little bit. There are groups that talk about sustainable forestry,

(48:25):
and by sustainable they really mean it. You're not taking
the best trees and a clear cut once. You're taking
the leaners and the sick trees and the small ones
more frequently, but you leave the very best trees. There's
a group in northern Minnesota, Indigenous groups been managing a
forest for over one hundred years. They have more wood

(48:46):
there now than when they started, and they take it
out every single year. So sustainable harvesting really can happen,
and that produces a healthier landscape for the wildlife that
we're trying to So you have an inventory, you might
then you then you could say, well, how many of
those keystone plants do I have here? Can I add some?

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (49:10):
If you have an overabundance of deer, you probably have
to cage the little ones for a while. But that's okay.
That's what we did here and we still do it.
I still move cages around, but we get the plants
back anyway. Then you're going to have your heavily invaded areas,
probably your edges and things that stuff loaded with the
buck thorn and the bush honeysuckle and the autumn alli
and all that stuff. You have to take them out.

(49:33):
And you know, people say that's impossible. You know ten
acres here. My wife cleared it, and she did it
over time, and she did it because she enjoyed doing it.
But what it showed me is that it's possible. Yes,
it's a lot of work, but it is possible.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (49:54):
And if you have to do it really fast, then
then you got to invest a little bit, get it.
Get a high school crew there. They love to kill things.
But you know, if they're ecological tumors, if you leave them,
it just keeps spreading, It keeps getting bigger and bigger
and bigger. So you got to get that under control,
then you would have a really productive underdating.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
You mentioned keystone plants and earlier you specified oaks. But
can you speak a little bit more just on that
keystone plant concept, because I think a lot of folks
within the wildlife habitat management world, the idea of diversity
is really getting out there. The idea of managing for

(50:46):
sunlight is really getting out there. The idea of yeah,
there's some invasives that we really do need to start
getting rid of. That's getting out there. But then you know,
what's the next thing you want to manage for. Maybe
there's some more questions around that, and this idea of
keystone plants is a little bit unique in my world.
Could you talk a little bit more about that and
then also maybe mention some specific examples.

Speaker 3 (51:09):
All right, well, let's start with oaks again. They're keystone
plant and a number of respects. But there's four things
that your one hundred acres my yard, everybody's landscape needs
to for ecological goals. They all want to support pollinators,
they all want to have a viable food web, They
want to manage the watershed in which they lie, and

(51:31):
they want to sequester carbon, which plants are best at
doing that. Well, oaks are you know, they're long lived,
dense tissues. They sequester more carbon than almost all the
other trees out there, so it's great for carbon sequestration.
The big oaks, and most of them are big, have
huge root systems, so they're really good at managing the watershed.

(51:53):
They're the best in terms of producing that insect life
that keeps the food web going. Oaks nationwide support over
nine hundred and fifty species of caterpillars. Tulip trees. You know,
it's a big, fast growing, you know, important tree. In
our eastern forest they only support twenty one. So we're

(52:14):
talking about huge differences here in the productivity of these plants.
Do I want a forest with no tulip trees?

Speaker 1 (52:21):
No?

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Do I want a tulip tree monoculture No. So that's
that kind of knowledge. It makes the difference. Yellow wood
it's a nice yellow, nice native tree, and it's good
for pollinators when it's in bloom, which is about one
week a year. Otherwise it supports no caterpillars, you know,
so a few yellowoods here and there. Okay, but that's

(52:42):
the concept of keystone plants. Black cherry supports four hundred
and fifty six species of caterpillars in the mid Atlantic
States alone. It's a really important plant. Willows, particularly as
you go farther and farther north oaks drop out, willows
take over in terms of being the number one tree
out west cottonwoods. People don't like the cottonwos because they

(53:05):
make the little white, fluffy thing, but they are essential
along our riparian carters and supporting wildlife. So those are
that's the little bit of knowledge that can help you
make a really important landscape. Now I talk about keystone
plants in terms of making caterpillars, but there's keystone plants
in terms of pollinators as well. Those are the ones
that are going to support the most specialist pollinators. Just

(53:27):
like the caterpillars that can only eat a few plants,
thirty percent of our native bees can only reproduce on
the pollen of particular plants. So if you don't have
those plants, you've lost those bees. And the very best
plants for supporting specialist pollinators are golden rods perennial sunflowers.
In California alone, there's sixty species of bees that won't

(53:50):
be there if you don't have perennial sunflowers. Native asters
really important for specialist bees. Now, all the other plants
have specialist bees too, but instead of supporting thirty or forty,
they drop down to one or two. So focusing on
the most productive ones is what can really help.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Back to oaks, that one is something that I think
a lot of folks understand the importance of. For I
think the caterpillar side will be a surprise to a
lot of folks. A lot of hunters when they think
of oaks, they think of acorns and a very direct
connection from that hard mast to know deer and other
wildlife utilizing those acorns. So there's strong interest in my

(54:31):
world to try to manage for healthy oak healthy excuse me,
healthy oak populations. What would your recommendations be, being someone
who has written an entire book about oaks, for helping
us steward those tree species. What can we do to
make sure our oaks are healthy, are thriving, are present

(54:52):
on the landscape.

Speaker 3 (54:54):
We have ninety one species of oaks in this country.
Now they don't belong everywhere than rockies and the driest
deserts we don't have oaks, but everyplace else we do.
The center of distribution for oaks is the southeast, but
I think California has I don't know, twenty eight species
of oaks or something. So so if you were in

(55:14):
an area that where oaks thrive, then you've got to
figure out which species belong where you are. There are
oaks that like acid soil, there are oaks that like
basic soil. There are oaks that like rocky outcrops. There
are oaks that like bottom land, so putting the right
oak in the right place is important. The biggest challenge

(55:35):
for oaks today are the diseases we've brought in. We've
got sudden oak death syndrome in the West, which threatens
to come east all the time. We've got oak leaf
scorch bacteria leaf scorch hitting the red oak group in
the east. We've got oak wilt hitting the white oak
group in the Midwest. The good news there Now, it's
bad news because they're killing a lot of oaks, But

(55:57):
the good news is in all of the populations that
have been studied, it is most of them there is resistance.
There are oaks out there that are resistant to these diseases.
They are the future of our oak forests. So you
can hire the arborus to try to save the sick
oak on your property. He's going to fail. I mean,

(56:21):
he can extend the life for a few years. But
people have big oaks and they're sick and they want
to save it, and I get that, but it's probably
not going to work. The best thing to do is
to favor the oaks that don't die, the ones that
have resistance in it. Those are the eggcorns that the
blue jays are going to disperse over time. You know,
blue jay will pick up an agcorn and weigh it

(56:42):
if it's light, if it's small, they reject it and
they take the big one. And they only remember where
one out of every four eggcorns they bury for the
winter are. So they're planning our oaks all over the place.
So that's the good news. You know, it's better news
than with the ashes. With the mer lash boarder. There

(57:03):
is some resistance there, but it's really small, really, you know,
most of the ashes are already dead. But oaks better news.
They're going to the resistant varieties are going to spread,
and we have to let them do that. So again,
when the arborus says don't plan any more oaks, they're
just going to get sick, that's when you ignore him
and plant more oaks than ever. And some will get sick,

(57:23):
that's right, but you're going to discover the ones that
don't get sick and they're the future.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
Okay, a little bit of a hard pivot, but herbicide use.
If I'm thinking about all the various ways we can
be managing vegetation on a landscape on our kind of
hypothetical one hundred acres, when I start talking about our
thinking about removing invasive species. If I'm trying to help oaks,

(57:49):
one thing I could use as the chainsaw cutting down
other trees around it. But herbicide might be another way
to utilize or to manage these things. But there's a
lot of questions and concern around herbicide to use. Two,
where do you fall on using herbicides to manage undesirable species?
And if we do use it, how do you, if

(58:11):
at all, recommend best using it.

Speaker 3 (58:14):
I think of herbicides like chemotherapy, particularly in terms of
invasive plants. They really are like ecological tumors. I had
a guy send me an email not long ago, and
he said, well, can I leave just a few? I said, well,
how many tumors do you want to leave in your body?
You know you don't want to leave any because they
just keep spreading, So you have to have something that

(58:36):
kills them. Herbicides. You've got to kill the roots or
it just keeps coming back, so you can you can
cut it, but unless you cut it once every two weeks,
every time it puts a little green above the ground,
you are not going to exhaust that root system and
you'll be doing it the rest of your life. So
that's where herbicides come in. And like chemotherapy, they have
to be used properly. You can you can overuse them,

(59:00):
you can misuse them. I don't like spraying because I
always hit on targets. Underneath that multi floor a rose
is probably a baby yoak that the deer couldn't get to.
I want to save that. Well, if I spray, I'm not.
I'm not going to say it. So I what I
do when I use herbicides is cut the stump and
paint it. So I use this very little material and

(59:22):
it kills the roots, and you know that's the goal.
It's a really important tool in our management toolbox, particularly
if you're talking about one hundred acres. You know, one
hundred acres without herbicides be very very tough.

Speaker 2 (59:37):
Yeah, the scale changes things for sure. So one last
question then, on this scale, we talked earlier about when
it comes to yards, you know, changing your landscaping, prioritizing
native plants, especially that might benefit pollinators. You mentioned the
importance of pollinators from the you know, the ecosystem services

(59:57):
they provide for so much. But when we've got this
larger scale, when we have one hundred acres, we might
have entire fields or meadows that we could maybe manage
differently to benefit pollinators. Is there anything you would you
would share with somebody who does have a fallow old
farm field or something like that that they could start
doing something with. Now, what would you recommend for them

(01:00:20):
or have them think about when considering the importance of
pollinators and what they might do to.

Speaker 3 (01:00:24):
Help well timing of you know, most people are managing
their meadows with mowing, and the timing of that mowing
becomes really important not just for the pollinators, but for
the other resources those plants produce. So mowing at the
end of the summer takes out all of the seed
production that are sparrows and other things will use all

(01:00:45):
winter long. So if you're going to do your mowing,
you want to do that at the beginning of the year,
and that would be typically before things start to grow,
after the seeds have been used all winter long. So
depending on where you are we're usually talking about march
burning is a really valuable tool. If you're in an

(01:01:05):
area where people let you do that, and if you
have the expertise to do that, it's better than mowing.
Because it returns nutrients to the soil very quickly. It's
not a management tool for invasive plants. For the most part.
It's just like just like mowing. It doesn't kill the rootstocks,
but it does. You know, our our prairies and meadows

(01:01:28):
were managed by fire with for the indigenous people around
the country for thousands of years. Uh and before that,
just simple thunderstorms in the in the summertime would would
start it, and it would it would reset the clock.
In the east, we get enough rainfall that if you
don't mow or burn, they don't stay. They don't stay

(01:01:51):
meadow or prairie anymore. The woodies come in and take
take them over. So you want to actively manage for that.
You can mow heavily in the spring. So let's say
you're starting with largely cool season European grasses and you
want to push that to native bunch grasses and fords.
You mow heavily in the spring and keep those cool
season grasses down and then you don't mow the rest

(01:02:13):
of the year. You do that for two or three years,
and the native warm season bunch grasses will start to
take over. You know, enterpogon and other things will come in.
So without using any herbicide or any management tool other
than mowing, you get to shift the species composition of

(01:02:36):
the plants in your field. You probably are going to
have to spot treat those woodies that come in because
they do. They come in all the time, and some
of them will be native, and if you're trying to
return your field to a forest, you leave them. Otherwise
you got to treat them too. If you don't want
to use insecticide. Mattic works great, particularly when they're small.

(01:03:00):
Like a pickaxe with a broad end. You just go whack,
whack and out it comes, and you can do a
large area in an afternoon walking around. But some kind
of management is required to keep it in a meadow
state in the east.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
Yeah, So three hundred and fifty six million acres is
that number that is believed to be under the influence
of hunters. Let's say I don't know, I have no
idea how many individual landowners that is. But let's just
say for simple, easy numbers, let's say there's a million
folks who own that three hundred and fifty six million

(01:03:37):
acres they own or release it, and let's hypothetically say
that we had an auditorium that was large enough to
house all one million of those hunters, and you were
standing on a stage in the middle of that auditorium
speaking to every one of those hunters who has influence
over that three hundred and fifty six million acres. If
you could get across just two very important, most important

(01:04:03):
points or principles, they would walk out of that stadium
with and then put into action on their three hundred
and fifty six million acres of land. What would those
two very most important lasting ideas be.

Speaker 3 (01:04:19):
You asked tough questions. It's my job, Doug, you know,
I would like to back it up and rather than
talk about the hunters that want to use that the
hunters are there actively using it. But everybody in the
country is using that acreage. Those are the acres producing
the ecosystem services that are keeping us alive. Everybody needs

(01:04:40):
to be paying for the maintenance of those properties. Everybody
needs to be keeping the the expansion of the you know,
sprawl out of there, improving the connectivity, buying the sections
in between parks and preserves that. That's a responsibility that
goes to everybody can use that to their advantage too.

(01:05:02):
But It's not just for them, it's for everybody. So
that's a message I would love to get across to
the entire voting public. These lands are essential for the future. Second,
I guess I keep coming back to, you know, managing
the plants that are there to to you know, if
you've if you have a million acres in Alabama, but

(01:05:25):
it's all privet, you know, you've got to fix that.
So and you got millions more acres that are kadzu
uh and millions more acres that are are hodgepodge of
everything else. So huge management issue. We want to break
it down into into manageable sections. But you know, if

(01:05:45):
you do have a hunting lodge and it's one hundred
acres there that is manageable, you get you get fifty
hundreds there, and you spend a weekend in the fall,
you could do a lot. It really could, uh, and
you make it an annual event. I would think about
like that. I just don't I don't want to make
it all the hunter's responsibility to managing the resources that

(01:06:07):
everybody needs. Everybody in Philadelphia and Saint Louis and San Francisco,
they all need those ecosystem services.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
When we think of it at that kind of scale, though,
and you look at the many different pressures on wildlife
of all types, and then also recognize how divorced so
much of the public is from those species. And when
you look at the state of the world today, Doug,

(01:06:42):
how do you handle the reality of that challenge? Like
I like, you know, there's that I bring us up
all the time. But there's this wonderful line from Leopold.
He talks about the curse of an ecological education, being
kind of realizing that you live in a world of wounds.
And I feel this like every day the more I
learn both, You've got two things. Both you learn how

(01:07:03):
wonderful the wild world is that we still have, while
also understanding how damaged it is and how dire the
state of affairs can be. Sometimes. How do you live
with that yourself? And how do you make decisions about
what you do and how we can somehow try to
change things for the better given them.

Speaker 3 (01:07:23):
You know, the great gift that Leopold gave us was
to point out that we have wounds, that all is
not well, because back in the thirties and forties when
he was writing, we were oblivious, I mean everything we
did was counterproductive ecologically. We cannot fix it until we
recognize that the wounds are there. What do I do?

(01:07:46):
I talk to you, I write books, I give talks
all the time. It comes down to educating that individual
who's living on this planet, to get them to recognize
that everybody has a responsibility to good or stewardship. Cause
everybody needs it. Everybody. The little old lady on the
eleventh floor in an apartment in Manhattan needs it as

(01:08:07):
much as everybody else. I got asked the other day,
very unpopular question, but I answered it anyway. I said,
what is one thing everybody can do? So everybody can vote?
Because how we vote makes a tremendous amount of difference.
And what happens to our public lands. I mean, you know,
now there's the proposal we're going to sell off our

(01:08:28):
public lands and expand housing on it. Well, that affects everything.
I mean, you know, So these are really important issues.
And that's where that little old lady in the eleventh
floor comes in. She still has a vote. So you're right,
we are totally divorced from the natural world that supports
us very dangerous place to be because it still supports

(01:08:49):
it's just because we don't recognize it isn't going to
change that. So what do I do is I just
try to turn that around to educate people. And the
interesting thing is I have been talking about this, particularly
the native plant connection and people's personal role, for twenty
years now, and I do see it catching on. I
do see you know the need of moving. Look, you

(01:09:10):
asked me to talk here. That wouldn't happen twenty years ago.
We wouldn't have even recognized this as a problem. So
that you know, that's that's good. That keeps me going.
And it is much more. The UN is meeting about
the biodiversity crisis pretty much on an annual basis. Now
they talk about it, they make resolutions, we ignore them,

(01:09:32):
but at least it's part of the public, the global discussion. Now,
you know, our parks and our preserves were established because
they were beautiful places, and as Teddy Roosevelt said, you know,
they were wonderful places for us to recreate and it
created good citizenship and all that. They were not created

(01:09:53):
with the idea of conservation and mind. So the goal
was to preserve the places because because so the future
generations could enjoy them. They're not there for our enjoyment.
We can enjoy them, they're they're tremendously entertaining, but we
need to preserve them so that we have future generations,
which is a much more important goal, I think, And

(01:10:15):
if we can get that into the public's mindset, then
then we'll be in good shape. And that's that's what
we're trying to do here.

Speaker 2 (01:10:23):
Well, I certainly appreciate all of your efforts to do that.
You've you've been leading the charge with your speaking and
your written works, of course. So I want folks who
are listening to this and are intrigued to to go
to your books to learn more, because they're they're great resources.
Your newest is, uh, how can I help, which I
have found is full of the questions that my wife

(01:10:46):
and I have been asking and many great answers. So
I appreciate that personally, And like I mentioned earlier, I
really loved Nature's Best Hope that was that was pretty
formative for me in many ways. So can you quickly
plug the new book anything about that you want people
to know about, or any other projects in ways people
can connect with you or your your work.

Speaker 3 (01:11:08):
Well, yeah, I wrote the new book because people send
me questions on email every day. They still do that,
and they're good questions. These are people that have heard
my talks and they have read my other books, and
they still have really good questions about things that I
haven't talked about. So I answered them for several years
and said, you know, I had to save these answers
and put them in a book. And that's that's what.

(01:11:29):
How can I help? Is this four hundred and ninety
nine questions? People say, why didn't you do five hundred?
Because we did the whole thing and they edited it
and they took some out and then we finded it up.
You know, it wasn't a conscious goal. But that's what
that book's all about. It's people. A lot of people

(01:11:50):
have accepted the responsibility that I talk about, but they
need more information to act on it, and that's what
we're trying to address there.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
That's great. And where do you want folks to buy that?
Do you have a preferred bookstore? Do you have a
website you want people to go to anything like that?

Speaker 3 (01:12:07):
Well, just for general information, you want to go to
our Homegrown National Park dot org website. Everything's there, But
you know, books are sold all over the place. Timber Press.
That's the publisher. They don't have one one outlet. Amazon
carries that many of the private bookstores but not all

(01:12:27):
will carry it. But if you know a lot of
people don't want to support Amazon, they want to help
their local books, then ask them to get it and
that will help in that regard. But no, we're not
selling them otherwise.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
Terfect, all right, Doug. Well, as I mentioned, thank you
for your work and thank you so much for taking
the time to chat about this with me here today.

Speaker 3 (01:12:48):
Well, I appreciate the opportunity, I really do. Good luck
to you, Mark.

Speaker 2 (01:12:52):
Thank you all right, and that's going to wrap it
up for us today. Thank you for joining me. I
appreciate you being here for this conversation, and until next time,
stay wired to Hunt.