Ep. 919: The Parable of America’s Wildlife Past and Future with Dan Flores

This week on the show I’m joined by renowned historian, best-selling author, and now podcaster, Dan Flores to discuss the rollercoaster history of wildlife and people in America and what that past can teach us as we move forward into the future as hunters, anglers, and people who simply value wildlife and wild places.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
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

(00:39):
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

(01:02):
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,

(01:24):
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,

(01:45):
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,

(02:06):
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

(02:29):
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

(02:52):
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

(03:14):
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

(03:35):
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

(03:55):
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

(04:15):
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

(04:38):
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

(04:59):
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

(05:19):
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

(05:42):
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

(06:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
Oh, it's a great pleasure. Mark. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
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,

(06:48):
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

(07:09):
over and over again. So just from the outset, thank
you for your contribution with those books and all of
your work today.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Man, thanks for saying that. I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
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

(07:44):
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

(08:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
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

(08:56):
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

(09:20):
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

(09:43):
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.

Speaker 4 (09:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (10:11):
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

(10:33):
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

(10:53):
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

(11:15):
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,

(11:39):
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

(11:59):
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

(12:22):
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

(12:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
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

(13:23):
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?

Speaker 3 (13:42):
Well? Where?

Speaker 5 (13:43):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (13:45):
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

(14:07):
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

(14:27):
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

(14:48):
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

(15:11):
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

(15:37):
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

(16:01):
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

(16:25):
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,

(16:49):
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

(17:12):
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

(17:35):
that's one of the one of the issues we face
as we go forward.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
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

(18:02):
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

(18:24):
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

(18:46):
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

(19:07):
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

(19:32):
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

(19:52):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
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

(20:25):
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

(20:45):
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

(21:06):
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

(21:28):
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

(21:53):
to move farther east. And those obstacles primarily consisted of
giant masses of ice beyond which we we could penetrate.

(22:13):
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

(22:36):
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

(22:58):
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

(23:19):
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

(23:43):
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

(24:05):
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

(24:29):
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

(24:49):
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

(25:10):
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

(25:31):
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

(25:55):
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

(26:16):
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

(26:37):
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

(27:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
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

(27:34):
first act of the larger story?

Speaker 3 (27:41):
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,

(28:05):
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

(28:26):
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

(28:50):
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

(29:13):
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,

(29:38):
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,

(29:58):
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

(30:20):
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

(30:42):
was a period of rather benevolent ten thousand years that
came after the pricescene.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
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

(31:13):
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

(31:35):
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?

Speaker 3 (31:45):
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

(32:09):
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

(32:35):
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

(32:57):
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,

(33:20):
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

(33:42):
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

(34:04):
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

(34:25):
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,

(34:49):
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

(35:09):
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

(35:31):
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

(35:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
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

(36:34):
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

(36:57):
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,

(37:21):
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?

Speaker 3 (37:35):
Is that?

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Is that track?

Speaker 3 (37:40):
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

(38:01):
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

(38:23):
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

(38:46):
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

(39:09):
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

(39:31):
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

(39:52):
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,

(40:16):
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,

(40:36):
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

(40:57):
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

(41:22):
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

(41:45):
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

(42:06):
suddenly the whole thing is set up for this extractive, exploitive,
kind of destructive approach to wild creatures.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
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

(42:37):
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

(42:58):
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

(43:19):
little bit unique because like in India they held onto
some of these large creatures and whatnot.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
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

(43:47):
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

(44:09):
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

(44:30):
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,

(44:54):
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.

(45:15):
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

(45:40):
else in the world. Well hasten to add, however, that
we don't have really great evidence that that, say, the

(46:00):
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

(46:27):
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,

(46:51):
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

(47:13):
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.

(47:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
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,

(48:21):
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,

(48:48):
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.

(49:11):
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

(49:36):
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

(49:57):
explain this massive crime against evolution in America, and then
we can get to what happened at the end of that.

Speaker 3 (50:06):
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

(50:27):
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

(50:51):
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,

(51:13):
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,

(51:39):
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

(52:00):
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,

(52:22):
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,

(52:43):
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

(53:07):
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

(53:30):
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

(53:52):
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

(54:14):
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,

(54:35):
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

(54:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:08):
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.

(55:29):
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

(55:49):
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

(56:12):
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,

(56:32):
Dan is how did they do it?

Speaker 3 (56:34):
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

(56:54):
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.

(57:14):
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

(57:36):
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

(57:57):
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

(58:18):
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

(58:41):
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,

(59:05):
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

(59:27):
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

(59:50):
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,

(01:00:13):
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

(01:00:37):
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

(01:00:59):
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

(01:01:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
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

(01:01:55):
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,

(01:02:18):
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,

(01:02:40):
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

(01:03:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:03:20):
Well, I wrote that piece for time.

Speaker 5 (01:03:25):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:03:43):
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

(01:04:04):
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

(01:04:30):
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,

(01:04:53):
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

(01:05:16):
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

(01:05:37):
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

(01:05:59):
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

(01:06:20):
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

(01:06:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
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,

(01:07:27):
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,

(01:07:48):
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

(01:08:09):
future that we want.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):
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

(01:08:35):
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

(01:09:02):
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

(01:09:25):
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.

(01:09:49):
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

(01:10:11):
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

(01:10:33):
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

(01:10:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:11:13):
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

(01:11:35):
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,

(01:11:57):
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

(01:12:20):
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?

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
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

(01:13:00):
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

(01:13:20):
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

(01:13:40):
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

(01:14:02):
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,

(01:14:26):
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

(01:14:46):
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,

(01:15:07):
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.

(01:15:30):
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,

(01:15:52):
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

(01:16:14):
imagine as a fictional, hopefully a non fiction future.

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
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

(01:16:41):
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

(01:17:03):
our lives today or tomorrow that might send us if
even with these individual actions might collectively lead to what
we've been discussing.

Speaker 3 (01:17:18):
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

(01:17:39):
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

(01:18:02):
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

(01:18:26):
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

(01:18:47):
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

(01:19:09):
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

(01:19:31):
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

(01:19:52):
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

(01:20:21):
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

(01:20:43):
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

(01:21:04):
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

(01:21:28):
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,

(01:21:49):
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

(01:22:11):
things that I think I can probably add Kate to
be borning.

Speaker 2 (01:22:18):
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

(01:22:38):
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

(01:22:59):
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

(01:23:22):
informative and useful for us to to kind of continue
to evolve that. As for lack of better term relationship.

Speaker 3 (01:23:32):
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

(01:23:54):
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

(01:24:15):
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,

(01:24:35):
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,

(01:25:00):
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

(01:25:21):
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

(01:25:42):
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

(01:26:03):
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

(01:26:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
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,

(01:27:02):
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

(01:27:23):
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

(01:27:46):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:27:56):
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

(01:28:18):
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.

(01:28:39):
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

(01:29:02):
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

(01:29:25):
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

(01:29:48):
is either to meat Eater or google me Dan Flores
podcast and that will come out pretty readily.

Speaker 2 (01:29:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:30:16):
That's my great pleasure to be with you. Mark, You're
dang great work.

Speaker 2 (01:30:22):
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