00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hunters and anglers have a superpower. I have it, You probably have it. I think just about any outdoorsman or woman out there who has fallen in love with the pursuit of turkeys or trout, walleye or white tails.
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Speaker 2: Probably has it too.
00:00:19
Speaker 1: And that superpower, that incredible gift, is optimism. Despite all the failed casts, the skunked outings, the seasons that just don’t go your way, we keep returning to the field, into the water, believing that it’s all gonna be different this time, Today is going to be the day. This is gonna be the year. Just this one last cast, it’s gonna be the one. To hunt or fish simply demands this kind of optimism, and almost to an unseemly degree, And because of that demand, it also seems to breed more of that same thing, at least from what I can tell, the more you hunt or fish, the more it seems that you become the kind of person that believes good things can happen and that you can.
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Speaker 2: Make those good things happen.
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Speaker 1: It’s for that reason I believe that hunting and fishing conservation organizations have become some of the most active and effective in.
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Speaker 2: The entire world.
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Speaker 1: These groups, these causes are armed not only with well appointed strategies and smart people and staff, but also an army of true believers, men and women who believe that yes, things will work out. Today will be the day things.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: Can get better. Take, for example, trout and salmon and.
00:01:42
Speaker 1: The many millions of people who obsess over them, myself included. As is the case with so many fish and wildlife today, trout and salmon do face some real challenges amidst this changing world.
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Speaker 2: But at the same time, there.
00:01:57
Speaker 1: Is very real cause for optim about their future too, and much of that I believe is because of the legions of incredibly, maybe rationally optimistic anglers who have dedicated themselves and sometimes their entire lives, to making sure that that better future.
00:02:15
Speaker 2: Becomes a reality.
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Speaker 1: One such angler and optimist is Chris Wood, the president and CEO of Trout Unlimited, one of the largest and most influential conservation groups in the hunting and fishing world. I’ve asked Chris to join me here today to help me better understand exactly what that future might look like for the fish and the rivers and the still waters that so many of us know and love, and why and how a brighter future might actually be possible. Trout and Salmon have a lot going for them, and I think, notably that can include us.
00:02:56
Speaker 2: Thanks for being here.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: This is Future Wild presented by Concert First Bank. Chris Wood, Thank you so much for joining me.
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Speaker 3: Hey, Mark, it’s good to see you man.
00:03:07
Speaker 1: I’m glad we’re doing this again, this time on a different show, a different kind of platform.
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Speaker 2: But any excuse to get to chat with one.
00:03:17
Speaker 1: Of the most well respected leaders of one of the most well respected conservation organizations that I know of is a treat I’m certainly appreciative of.
00:03:27
Speaker 3: So I’m not sure I deserve that introduction, but I love chatting with you, and I love the work you do, so it’s great to be here.
00:03:35
Speaker 1: Well, I apologize then for what I’m about to do to you here, Chris, because I want to start with a doozy. I’m gonna drop you right in, and I want you to help explain a dilemma, the dilemma that I think many of the folks listening to this show can relate to. I would love for you to explain for me why it is that Sam Men and Trout drive so many of us absolutely nuts.
00:04:06
Speaker 2: Why is it driven.
00:04:08
Speaker 1: Why has it driven so many of us crazy and obsessed us and hooked us and caused us to spend so many of our our vacation days and our savings accounts, and our our sanity in pursuit of them?
00:04:21
Speaker 2: What is it about these fish?
00:04:24
Speaker 3: I don’t know, I mean what I mean, I can think of one or two things that might be better than fishing for drout and salmon, but I’m not sure I know what they are, so I don’t really I think I’m going to object to the nature of your question. I mean, well, you know, it’s it’s I think there’s probably a complex and a simple answer. I think the the complex answer is that there’s something about these critters that live below the surface of the water. And it’s different. I know both both you and I hunt, and it’s different. When you’re hunt, to be, I mean, you’re sort of in your element, and and when you’re fishing, you’re not in your element. And it takes a lot of knowledge and experience and time spent to become a really good angler. And I can’t think of a single time that I went fishing in my life where I didn’t learn something a single time. And it’s I mean, and as much as I love the hunt, it’s not that way when I hunt and so and and you’re always becoming a better angler, always just by the people you talk to, the more time you spend on the water. And then I think there’s a there’s a there’s a more complex answer as well, and that’s you know, it’s uh it’s for me and not to get too woo woo here, but fishing is almost in affirmation of our ability to experience the wonder of God’s creation. I mean, it is. It’s just such a even whether it’s out here on the Potomac or I just just finished writing a piece that we’re going to publish soon, trying to encourage people to perhaps as it gets warm and we’re about to hit like one hundred and five degrees this week here, to maybe think a little bit less about going out for trout in this kind of weather, and maybe, as I’ve been doing lately, you know, start plying waters like the Potomac with big Klauser minnows and full sync line to go after giant blue cats which can which can use the hurt because they’re not they’re invasive and uh d c are our d n r here in Washington actually encourages you do poke them in the head when you catch them. Very different though, very different than trout and catch and release. Yes, but I just think there’s just something magical about being on the water. I was out this weekend speaking of the Potomac. We’ve got this little friends group that I’m a part of here called Friends of Fletcher’s Cove, And we did this event on Saturday with this organization called Blue Star Families, and this is serving military families and trying to get them into the out of doors, like trying to help military families through outdoor experiences. And we had about twenty five kids. I think I had. I had, I know, I had two parents and two little kids. So the youngest was probably four and the older daughter was probably six or seven. And just I mean, you know, between untangling the lines and answering questions about everything that, especially that little boy saw, I mean, every single thing I had, I had the best time I’ve had in weeks. And they caught fish and and and and now they’re hooked, you know, And so there’s just something special about that. And so I don’t think of it as a curse. I think of it as a blessing.
00:08:15
Speaker 2: I’m right there with you.
00:08:16
Speaker 1: Uh, and I can I can certainly relate to that second hand joy that comes from teaching right somebody else. I’m in the throes of that with my with my two young sons. We we just spent the past weekend up at our family deer camp and uh, we also did a lot of fishing. We’ve had a little creak on the property where there’s a little brookies, so we’re trying to get the boys on some little brookies. And then in the evenings we go to a lake down the road and they catch bluegill and uh, and yeah, it’s it’s so much fun to see them. Two things, one seeing them discovering the love of it and the joy of it and and and like you mentioned, like there’s there’s a different they recognize and appreciate all the things that we take for granted. After having done this for decades, they find so much joy just the excitement of.
00:09:02
Speaker 2: Look at look at the eye, look at look at how beautiful that eyeball is, you know, anything like that.
00:09:08
Speaker 1: But then also the the really interesting, uh opportunity you have to see someone figuring it out, not just how cool it is but figuring out how to do this thing, how to how to do this kind of complex activity that requires some precision and some uh a number of different things all working right together.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: That’s really fun to see in a young person.
00:09:30
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, amen, And you know one of the things I love about. And my kids are older now than yours, and so we’re past this phase. But I get this vicariously through these weekends where we do stuff like we did with the Blue Star families this weekend. You know, one of the kids, so we have these uh, these cool like shale formations almost like these striations in the rock, and this you know, four year old boy, you know, after asking me about like scars all over my body and why I was losing my hair and are you sweating so much? And he looked at the rocks and said, why are the rocks like that? And you know, I looked at him. I thought, I don’t know, I’m gonna have to go look that up. Yeah. So kids they also teach us, you know, they they help us to see things that I’ve fished that river a thousand times, maybe ten thousand, and I’ve never really wondered about those rocks. But I can be I can tell you for sure. This week I will look that up and find out why are the rocks striated that way?
00:10:28
Speaker 2: Yeah?
00:10:29
Speaker 1: Is there is there any moment in your own life when you were getting into these things that you can point back to as standing out as a moment when you realized, oh wow, these fish, this experience with them, this is like it’s got me you. Was there a moment for you or some series of moments when all of a sudden you realize, like your life is different now because this thing is so something.
00:10:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it’s funny you ask that, and a lot of people assume that because I can’t you know, I work at Child Unlimited, that I came here because I love to fish, and I do. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a freak. I love I love to fish and hunt. But I came here because of conservation. It was it was, you know, the desire to protect wild places and and restore areas that led me here. And and so I my fishing background is is it’s uh, it’s more checker than pedigree. I remember I was. I went to school in Vermont and I had the Orvis. They still make this. It’s like the tenth edition. Tom Rosenbauers, you know, orvis Guide Oorvis one oh one guide to fly fishing.
00:11:45
Speaker 2: I’m sure you do.
00:11:47
Speaker 3: We all do. And I remember sitting on my dorm floor, you know, cross leged. It was also obvious and black and white when it was on paper. And then I get to the river and I didn’t care a trout for the first thirteen times I went on the unlucky thirteenth I caught a trout and I’ll tell you how I caught it. I was untying a knot in the line, not even a knot in the leader, so it was this Gorgian knot and in the line, and my zugbug was trailing behind me. I had a little zugbug on and after about five minutes, some trout came by and ate the zug bug that was trailing fifteen feet behind me in the That was how I caught my first trout.
00:12:39
Speaker 2: That’s amazing.
00:12:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know, but it’s I you know, I think if there was ever a time where I kind of realized this is it, this is what I want to do it, and I think I’ve shared this story with you so I won’t do it again. But it was in Alaska, and there I discovered salmon. And you know, I grew up in New Jersey in the northeast had you know, we didn’t have any public lands in New Jersey, and it wasn’t until I graduated and I went on this cross country trip across America with my dog Gus in a big box of Dnty Moore beastew and you know, we camped our way across America, and it was just incredible to me this notion that you know, you just by virtue of being an American citizen, I have the right to camp on all these lands, and in fact, not only I own them, and you know, for most of us, it’s all the land we’re ever going to own. And that’s where I discovered the love of public lands. But the love of fishing happened later that summer. I went to visit my friend and Mickey, and I discovered salmon and the life cycle of these remarkable creatures that you know. They they they’re reared in fresh water, they remained there for varying times, migrate out to the ocean. They come back after a certain period of time to the very place they were born to have sex one time before they die, and then their bodies, their decaying bodies, provide the nutrients that keep those systems intact. And I was so I was so captivated and taken by that. And again, sadly, this is when I was like twenty six years old. Shows how ignorant I was, you know, but I remember that sentiment of learning about salmon and saying, I want to save the salmon, that’s what. And I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my career, and I was like, that’s it. I want to save the salmon. I want to be part of this great movement of all of us to try to recover these most remarkable of God’s creatures.
00:14:44
Speaker 2: What’s that? What’s that journey?
00:14:48
Speaker 1: What does it feel like to have been on that journey now for all the years since then, to have had a moment like that so impactful, so real and tangible, well, and then saying I want to I want to help protect this thing. And now many years later, you’ve you’ve been a very real, intangible part of doing just that. How does that feel to be able to look back and see that trajectory?
00:15:13
Speaker 3: It feels great. I mean, look, when I was in high school, I was. I went to Saint Peter’s in Jersey City, and it’s a Jesuit with school, and I had a great uh. He was a former Green Beret in the Vietnam War who was who taught theology, and I was convinced after taking his class as a sophomore, I wanted to be a priest. And and I was fine with the vow of obedience, and I was fine with the vow of poverty. It turns out that the valve of chastity became a bit of a bridge too far.
00:15:49
Speaker 2: And I get it.
00:15:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, but but and the family is in the and but I have that same sense of service every day that I go to work. I mean, I have told people that that we have a group of interns. We have three of them in here right now, and I tell them the same thing every time I meet with interns, that you know, I come to work every morning like it’s Christmas morning, because I truly I get the sense that we’re trying to make the world a better place. And whether you’re doing that through conservation or through you know, service as a priest, or through whatever else you can do to give back to the world, I just think it’s a great thing. So I’m I’m. You know, I’ve got brothers that are investment bankers. One of them is a CEO of a public and chairman of a publicly traded company. And I wouldn’t trade what I do. I wouldn’t trade a day of what I do for anything in the world.
00:16:47
Speaker 1: When you think of all of the different projects underway right now, initiatives, campaigns, you know, the many, many, many different things going on right now that are impacting the future of trout and salmon. What gets you the most excited of the ongoing work at this moment? What is the thing that’s getting you You mentioned waking up in the morning and going to work and being really charged to have this opportunity of service. What specific thing out there right now has got you the most fired up?
00:17:19
Speaker 3: Such a good question. You know, it’s a combination of the profound in the mundane, to be honest, and I’ll start with the mundane. And this is something I just wrote about. Like if you look at like the Colorado River basin right now, forty million Americans, you know, get their water from that basin. It’s it’s been in a prolonged mega drought, right a mega drought and now there’s this you know, conflict between the upper basin states and the lower basin states. That’s probably going to be resolved by the Department of Interior, but we’ll almost certainly go to the Supreme Court at some point. And you can look at that issue. And obviously climate change is having a profound effect on the basin this you know, where we’re in the midst of a twenty year drought. It’s you know, it’s not getting any better. And and you know, tragically, over the weekend, we just lost three federal firefighters who were fighting a fire on the you know, the Utah Colorado border, and those fires aren’t going to get any better. And and then in places like the northeast, you’re getting you know, one hundred year floods occurring at the catal intervals. I mean, it’s and so you know, it’s easy to look at that and and to basically sort of take the you know, throw your hands up in the air and just sort of say what I can’t there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s like, you know, taxes, what are you going to do about you know, I mean, and I think a lot of people take that approach, but one of the things that I enjoy about Trout Unlimited is that. And you know, and when you think about it in the grand scheme of things, this business that we’re in, this business of conservation, like it’s it’s really the business of overseeing loss, right, It’s you know, we had twenty eight trout species in this country. Historically, we’ve got twenty five now three have gone extinct. Of those that remain, seventy five percent occupy less than a quarter of their historic capitat right, I mean, and water quality, open space. I mean, you can go on and on, and I think it’s really easy to become disconsolate or defeatist in the presence of that reality. And one of the wonderful things about TU is and I think it’s because we’re an organization of anglers. You know. It’s like this addiction that you talked about to kick the show off. I mean, it’s why we’re all we were perpetually late for dinner. You know, one more cast, one more cast. That’s the fifteenth last cast, you know, and all of that adds time, yes, and so, but you know, anglers are inherently and I think fly anglers take this to a ridiculous level. We’re optimists, you know. We we cast this combination of fur and feather and wire at river ghosts, and we’re perpetually late because we think that the last cast is going to yield the biggest fish of the day, and so we our lives and so we take that sentiment into conservation. And so you look at the situation that I just talked about in the Colorado River basin, and it’s kind of like, well, what are we going to do about it? What is little old trout on Limity going to do? Well? The reality is we’re doing We’re we’re replicating or we’re modeling the kinds of things that can actually ameliorate or even help to fix the problems in the Colorado River basin by you know, by by doing these small mundane things like we have probably built over the past two years ten thousand beaver dam analogs minimum ten thousand. And what a beaver dam analog It’s simply you go in and you drive steaks across the stream, wooden steaks by hand, and then you weave alders or willows or whatever your native vegetation is, to try to basically replicate what beavers have done historically. And by doing that you slow the water down, you create more pool habitat, you create more complexity to the habitat, which is just inherently good for trout. But it keeps the water in the system longer. And then that’s good not only for those of us who love to fish, but it’s also great for late season flows for irrigators. For example. The longer we can hold the water in these systems, the more that we can recover the natural resilience of these rivers and streams to the effects of climate change, the floods and the fire and the drag out. The better that is for fish, but it’s also better for downstream communities. And I see that literally. I mean, I don’t have the number, but I bet we’re working on over one thousand projects across national forests and private lands in the Rockies across the West that helped to hold water in systems longer, which obviates the need, for example, to build storage reservoirs, which are bad for fish, definitely bad for salmon. It provides late season flows, which is great for downstream farmers and ranchers. It frankly helps to filter water, which diminishes downstream water filtration costs, And now is this work even if we could take it to scale like we’ve got this proposal, we in seventy other entities proposed a two billion dollar fund in the Colorado River basin to be able to take this kind of work to scale. And will will that solve the problem? Probably not? Will it make a big difference? Absolutely? Absolutely will? And so you know, that’s the mundane piece is that these every day working with tribes, working with our partners like the Forest Service and the Bureau of Reclamation and the BLM, and working with other nonprofits to go out there and just try to help recover the natural resiliency of these systems so they’re better able to withstand the effects of changing climate. That inspires me every day to know that that work is happening right now. And then the profound is really the you know, the it’s the harder stuff, right, it’s the you know, I got involved in this because I wanted to save Snake River salmon And the only way we’re ever going to save Snake River salmon is by removing the four lower Snake River dams. And that’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to happen anytime soon. But I do think it will happen in our lifetimes. And I think it will happen because common sense prevails, and there isn’t a single use of that river system, of those four dams and the reservoirs that’s behind them, There’s not a single economic or social use that we couldn’t replace, not a single one. And I just think it’s going to take the right political climate and you know, the right application of common sense to common problems for the common good before we can have the conversation that leads to those the vested interest, the ones who want to keep those dams in place, realizing, well, why are we arguing these dams had a lifespan of fifty years, We’re now you’re fifty seven. What are we doing here? I can be made better, I can be made whole and better. So it’s you know, it’s the So it’s a long winded answer mark to your question. But it’s a combination of that, just the everyday stuff that TU staff, our four hundred staff in the field and our tens of thousands of volunteers are doing in local communities around the country to you know, just frankly, make our rivers and streams more resilient and the potential to do really big things. The you know, the Bristol Bay, the protecting places like Bristol Bay, and the passage of federal legislation like my friends Senator Heinrich and Senator Heinrich from New Mexico and Rish from Idaho what they made possible and passing good Samaritan legislation. It’s it’s the combination of those two things that get me fired up every day.
00:25:47
Speaker 2: Do you think that the dams on the Snake.
00:25:53
Speaker 1: Is that the single most impactful you know, if you were to wave a magic wand and change the thing right now for salmon in the United States? Is that the thing is that like the greatest lever we could ever pull to change the game right now.
00:26:09
Speaker 3: Without question, without question. So you look at that basin, about forty five percent of it is either wilderness or roadless in the Snake basin. That is because of the great you know, the network of wonderful wilderness we have there, like the frank Church River of No Return and then all those the nine million acres of roadless areas in Idaho that you know, Senatorish helped to protect, and you know, we do a ton of work on the coasts, Like we’re involved in this thing called the Salmon super Highway, which is this awesome effort on the coast of Oregon to basically help coho and steelhead primarily that aren’t impacted by dams, but are impacted by things like culverts that are perched. And when these culverts blow out, they happen to take the road above them, which makes it impots possible for farmers to move their products to market. So it’s been this great collaboration with like creamerries and cheeseries like, and we’ve I think we’ve recovered, We’ve reconnected. Now it’s like, I think it’s ninety eight of one hundred and seventy miles that we have for the Salmon super Highway. The problem is, though, that those are lower elevation areas and we don’t know what’s going to happen in it with a changing climate. To be certain, what we’re doing has immense psychological and perhaps even more profound social benefits. But the Snake basin those are high elevation systems. Seventy percent of that area is high elevation wilderness quality, roadless quality habitat. That’s the best remaining habitat for Pacific salmon in the lower forty eight And that is the one thing. And we’ve got all kinds of like small to adult return survival ratio that show the difference between having to traverse four dams, because there’s eight dams that they have to traverse to get you know, up to the you know, south fork of the Salmon River drainage for example. But we have great data in other basins like the John Day Basin and the to Shoots basin and show what happens when salmon just have to traverse four dams versus eight. It’s the it’s the death of eight cuts that is making salmon unsustainable in the Northwest, at least in the Snake River basin. If we could remove those four dams, they’d not only have a great chance, they’d have I mean it’s it’s their best chance without question.
00:28:43
Speaker 1: Could you paint the picture a little bit more broadly for someone who maybe is coming into this without the background as far as why that’s nake You mentioned it being a high elevation wilderness roadless set of you know, watersheds there, but I mean house antel of the Salmon Pacific Northwest salmon population we’re talking about that’s impacted by this what’s the scale of the impact here? And then can you help me then understand how actually could these dams be removed? What would that lead to? How would that change things? I guess I’m asking you for quite a lot here, but give me the cliff notes version of a little bit more detail of why that population is so important, and then what this possible pathway looks like to changing the current situation.
00:29:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, so just to give you a sense of again, we’re talking about largely wilderness quality habitat in high elevation areas. So it’s more it’s better able to withstand drought, it’s better able to withstand heat you know is higher in the watershed, so it’s better able to withstand flooding. Half of all of the steelhead for examp in the Columbia River basin used to come from the Snake basin, so it you know, it was historically the driver, the productivity driver for the entire Columbia River basin, the snake was. And that’s what we’ve lost, I mean, we haven’t had we haven’t. And those you know, the little towns in Idaho that used to have salmon fisheries. They depended on those They were absolutely economically dependent on those fisheries, and it would be the biggest shot in the arm to the Northwest’s economy that I can think of. And the reality is that, you know, we get about three percent of the not the power in the US, but we get about three percent of the region’s power from those four dams, three percent of the regent’s power, and that can easily be offset by either renewable sources or other power sources. It’s just it’s a paltry amount of power. We can build rail to move the wheat that is being or the other commodities that are being grown in places like Idaho and western Washington. We can we can extend the pipes down to the river to a free flowing river for the farmers and the irrigators who depend on that system for water, for irrigation water. We can literally replace every single social and economic benefit air quotes that’s provided by those four dams. But the salmon, they need a river. They need a river, you know, And it’s and it’s not that complicated. Congressman Mike Simpson, Republican from Idaho, a few years ago in twenty twenty two, I think it was he came out with a proposal that basically it would have left the dams in place. Actually his idea was to keep the concrete there, don’t reach them, just bypass them, you know, literally build the river around the dams. So we can keep the investment in concrete. I guess even though it’s already outlived, it’s you know, projected lifespan, we can still keep that and bypass bypass the dams with a river, a functioning river. And the key thing that would happen Mark is we get rid of the the dozens upon dozens of mile of bathwater warm reservoirs that are predator laden and that are killing the smolt. It’s it’s really, I mean, there is a five to ten percent mortality at each of those dams as you march upstream. And you know, if you have a cohort, say have one hundred coming upstream, you can do the math at each but it’s the downstream mortality on the smalt. So the juvenile salmon, they don’t actually swim to the ocean. They’re pushed by the spring freshet. So they’re pushed by the snowfall the melting snowfall and all that that creates the spring flow and they actually get flushed downstream and when they hit those reservoirs, what used to take maybe forty eight hours to get down to the ocean now can take weeks, and they undergo physiological physiological changes. They’re more likely to to, you know, become affected by disease. And and they’re really the you know, the giant issue is all the predators that are in there, you know, species like Wiley that weren’t there historically, bass that you know, wouldn’t persist in a free flowing, cold water environment. And you know, and I you know, I thought we would get there in twenty twenty two. I really did. Maybe it was twenty twenty one. And you know, I’m you know, having been in d C for as long as I have, I’m rarely surprised by politics anymore. But and you know it, a lot of our tribe like to blame the Republicans for everything, but the reality was that we had a very conservative, powerful member of Congress come up with this proposal, and there was one Democrat who supported him, a liberal Democrat from Portland supported him. But the silence on the left was deafening, and I just think it’s a failure of imagination. It’s a failure of leadership, of course, but it’s a failure of imagination to help us to realize that there’s a way to bring these magnificent fish back and to make everybody socially and economically whole. And that’s our job. Our job as advocates is to help our elected leaders understand that it’s in their best interest to do this, and it’s in the interest of the people that they represent to do it. And that’s the work we have cut out for us.
00:35:28
Speaker 1: So, speaking of imagination, though, one of the hard things to do is you just alluded to, is helping people recognize not just the reality of the boogeyman, the bad stuff that’s going on. That’s easier sometimes to help folks understand and for people to take action against, but it’s sometimes harder to help people imagine.
00:35:49
Speaker 2: A better future. That’s possible if we were to do a B or C.
00:35:53
Speaker 1: But in this case, with the idea of removing these dams, we do have some other analogs to look to right some other places where where dams have come down, and we’ve seen some really encouraging results, right, I mean, can you speak to some of these examples, like the climate or any others where we’ve yeah taken damil down.
00:36:11
Speaker 3: A great example is the El Wah in Washington State. The Elwah dams basically blocked habitat for about one hundred years. They came down about ten years ago or so, and steelhead were functionally extinct from that base because they were impassable dams. And we had a group of scientists go in there and snorkel it. A couple of years after the dams came out, they found three hundred pair of spawning steelhead. So what happened was the rainbow trout uncorncas MICUs, which are the same as steelhead anchorncas MICUs oh MICUs. They remembered that, hey, wait a minute, we can be an adremus fish. So they called they recovered their anadromy They remembered, I don’t have to be a resident rainbow. I can move down and go into the estuary and migrate to the ocean. And they did that, and then you know, a more recent example, of course, is the famous example on the Klamath. You know those I remember when I first started a trout unlimited it was. It was a little bit before I started, actually, but they had had in I think it was two thousand, the Clinton administration chose to shut the river off to irrigators in order to protect an endangered sucker fish. And then there was an election, and in two thousand and one, similar drought condition, the Bush administration shut the river off to the river and they allowed the irrigators to take all the water they needed, and as a result, they were tremendous low flows in the Klaimate and we lost thirty to fifty thousand Imperial old salmon and steelhead that year to low flows, to hypoxia and other diseases. And four years later that year class never you know, it never materialized, and so they shut the commercial fishing industry down off the coast of California for the first time in its history. And it was from that controversy that twenty years later we were able to negotiate an agreement to take out the four Klamath River dams and not only take them out, but engage in you know, we had actually acquired an organization called the Klamath Basin rangeland trust I think it was called I could be wrong, but our VP for the Pacific Northwest may have founded it, but they were doing restoration up in that area for a long time before the dams came out, and so you know, we were able to see fish colonizing and receding areas they hadn’t been doing one hundred and six years. There’s incredibly cool videos. If you want to be inspired, take a look look up on you know, on the internet, salmon returning to the Klamath. They were coming back like right after the dams were taken out. It was unbelievable. And you know, we’re in the midst of a really a big, hairy project now that you know. The Nature Conservancy did great work in securing a purchase agreement for four dams on the Kennebec in Maine. And the reason the Kennebec is important. We were very much involved in removing two dams and bypassing the third on the Pinobscot about ten years ago, and that resulted in huge returns of a host of anadremus fish like ale wives and shad and striper’s straight bass, et cetera. We also saw increases in Atlantic salmon. But you know, the part of the problem is that you know, the population levels are so low there that we didn’t get the big pulse back like we did, you know, seeing one hundred times the number of stripers coming back. But the reason that the Cannebec is so important is the Sandy River is a pristine It’s like it’s kind of like the headwaters of the Snake. It’s this very pristine watershed with great habitat that will now be accessible once we take those dams out on the Kennebec. And we actually think we have a shot there with Atlantic salmon, our best shot in the lower forty eight. And so, you know, there’s examples of how fisheries respond to dam removals around the country, large and small. I was in Rhode Island a few years ago. I’m not going to name names because I don’t want to get any of my friends in trouble, but I remember there was I had been there a couple of years before, and there was a little dam like like a like a like a dam you’d build with your kids, like a six foot maybe a four foot dam, And the temperature differential on the upstream side was like eight degrees It was eight degrees warmer or nine degrees warmer in this reservoir created by this little dam that it was downstream, and it was just thermal pollution, and it was also a physical barrier for migrating brook trout. So I got it invited to come out there and we were going to take this dam out. So there were like fifteen people and we had a winch off somebody’s jeep, and we winched this jeep or this concrete dam out of the river. And I remember asking we did have a fisheries biologist. I asked him if I could see the plans, and the plans were something he had handwritten on a like a napkin. And this is the truth. After we took that dam out, a bunch of us walked up to the trucks to get sandwiches or whatever, and it took us like an hour, and this young woman who was volunteering there came running up the trail screaming because she literally had seen brook trout passing through the opening that we had created in the river, like like while we were there getting sandwiches. And so these are you know, I guess the point in this is rivers and streams are incredibly resilient, and salmon and steelhead and trout for that matter, are incredibly resilient creatures and if we give them half a chance, they will come back. We just have to give them that chance.
00:42:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. I really like this focus that to you in particular, and others.
00:42:32
Speaker 1: As well, but to you, over the years, you guys have leaned so much into the act of and the storytelling around hands on work and restoration. Yeah, and like you mentioned, there’s all these different things that can discourage you.
00:42:46
Speaker 2: But when you have a hands on.
00:42:50
Speaker 1: In front of your face, you know, experience and then you can see the change on the ground. A it makes a difference and b it fuels you in a different right, got it. I feel like another way you guys a story kind of done some storytelling around this is this conservation town initiative and the list that you guys launched earlier this year.
00:43:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, why’d you guys do that? Why why are you highlighting.
00:43:15
Speaker 1: Some of these specific places where it seems like this kind of thing is happening and having really exciting results.
00:43:22
Speaker 3: Well, you know, the conservation towns thing. It’s it’s interesting. Mark, we we talked. I remember when I started in my career, it was kind of at the tail end of the whole spotted owl fight. You know, it had already happened, and they had come out with the Northwest Forest Plan that you know, protected you know, old growth reserves and spotted owls and salmon, et cetera. But the old timers would talk about, you know, what are we going to do about these resource dependent communities. And these are communities, whether it’s Hancock, New York, you know, in the Upper Delaware, or the timber towns out in the Pacific Northwest that were reliant on you know, forests like the Wilamott cutting a billion board feet of timber a year. Just to give you a frame of reference, a billion board feet. Today the Forest Service cuts nationwide about three billion. And they were taking a billion off off that one forest, the Lamote, back in the day. And so you know, these and the incentives were all twisted in frankly perverse. I mean, so it used to be that twenty five percent of every timber sales proceeds would go to these rural communities for schools and roads, and so the education of people’s children was dependent on the harvest of old growth trees from the Pacific Northwest. Like I mean, talk about a losing proposition to.
00:44:54
Speaker 2: Argue, yeah, I did want to do that.
00:44:57
Speaker 3: Of course, it’s your kids. I mean, what wouldn’t you do for your kids? And so anyway, these and and people would talk about these resource dependent communities and the reality is they’re still resource dependent today. They are they remain resource dependent. I mean, I think about Phillipsburg, which is one of these we named this. We picked five conservation town finalists and we picked Philipsburg to be the winner. And I think this will be an annual project for us. But you know, Phillipsburg was a you know, it had a heavy mining presence, heavy forestry presence, just like thousands of other communities around the Pacific Northwest, and then it all went, it all cratered, you know, the mind shut down, the timber ran out, and the community suffered. But what makes that community so special, and there’s dozens of other communities like this around the country, is they never gave up on the town and they realized that they wanted to remain resource dependent. But the resources didn’t have to be unsustainable. They could be sustainable. It could be the recreation economy, it could be the fishing, it could be the hunting, it could be the you know, people that want to move to an area like that because there’s an amazing quality of life, And so we wanted to celebrate those people who never gave up on their communities or who moved there to help build new resource dependent communities. But in this case the resources are sustainable and again and in many cases, like you know, if you think about you know, we’ve worked in these different conservation towns. I think we’ve engaged in about one hundred projects in the five of them over the past decade or so. We’re active involved with those communities doing that work. You just talked about a moment ago, getting our hands dirty actively cleaning up abandoned mines or you know, creating beaver dam analogs as we were talking about earlier, or helping with tree plantings, or taking wounded you know, helping wounded veterans to heal through fishing and time on the water, whatever it is. So we felt like we had a presence in these communities and we could credibly not as you know, some outside group that doesn’t have roots in these places hold them up and celebrate. And so, you know, I think this is a cool if I if I if I lifted the computer up and brought you outside. We have a replica of the sign you know how like in you drive into a lot of these rural communities, like in my town in West Virginia, you drive in and there’s a sign up that says like, you know, Kuwanas Club or ret and Club or you know whatever. So they have a conservation towns sign up, and we’ve got to replica over here on our wall. And I just think it’s a it’s a way to celebrate these places and the resiliency of people who they never gave up on their towns, even though the economic base shifted, they never gave up on their places, and and we never gave up on them either. And and it’s it’s wonderful to be able to celebrate the incredible. I mean, it sounds condescending to say comeback, but it’s it’s just amazing to celebrate the resilience of some of these.
00:48:30
Speaker 2: And is it fair to say that.
00:48:33
Speaker 1: There are many examples like that, Like this is a growing trend.
00:48:37
Speaker 2: There more and more and more.
00:48:38
Speaker 1: Communities like this right that are that are seeing conservation payoff and in tangible and economic and lifestyle in so many different ways.
00:48:47
Speaker 2: Right, this is not rare.
00:48:49
Speaker 3: It’s not rare. It’s it’s you know, it’s it’s happening all over the country, and you know it’s it’s it. And you know I started out earlier by saying, you know, one of the challenging things about this work we do is that conservation is almost literally about loss. But it’s also the single most optimistic, affirmative, forward looking idea that America ever gave the rest of the world. Write this idea that like you and I can take specific actions today. Anybody listening can do this to make the world a better place for your kids, and even if you don’t have kids, you can make a better place for those who you know will come because you believe there will be others who come because you have faith. You have faith that we can make the world a better place than the one we inherited. I mean, and that’s what communities are doing all around the country. I mean, I think about Phillipsburg. So we did this cool video about conservation towns, and they had a I think there’s like eight hundred people in Phillipsburg. They had one hundred and twenty seven people show up to the oldest operating theater in Montana, by the way, to watch this video, one hundred and twenty seven out of eight hundred people showed up, and that just it shows you the pride that they have in their community. And I remember back in the day, like in the early aughts, you know, people would talk about like these New age economists would talk about like the recreation economy of the West, and it kind of became this divisive thing, you know, this us against them, thinking, oh, you’re going to have a bunch of likera clad you know, freaks coming into my community. And I just it’s so cool to see how far we’ve moved beyond that. And I do think that it is in part because of the groups like to you that make investments in these communities and don’t give up on them.
00:50:51
Speaker 1: So speaking of communities that folks have not given up on and encouraging examples. When I look back at the last twenty years or so and I try to find wins moments where a community of diverse individuals, different stakeholders all came together to protect something they really care about. Relevant to salmon and trout, you can’t not think of Bristol Bay and just this years and years and years long effort by so many different people from so many different walks of life, both locally right there on the ground, and nationally and statewide. So many different stakeholders came together to save this last greatest stronghold of salmon and.
00:51:40
Speaker 2: So many other fish species. What do you what do you take from that?
00:51:45
Speaker 1: Looking back on that journey over the last twenty plus years.
00:51:48
Speaker 2: I’ve spent a good amount of time over.
00:51:50
Speaker 1: The last couple of years trying to dissect that, trying to understand that, what we learn from that, what can we take from that for the next, you know, the next battle down the road, and also a source of hope because that was a big one that there were many, many, many financial incentives. Like the financial incentive there was massive.
00:52:07
Speaker 2: And salmon came out on top. Though.
00:52:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you look at that, what stands out to you is is how that happened, as why that happened, as how we can make sure the next one happens.
00:52:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, there’s I’ll tell you that I’ve never said this before. I just thought of it. The microcosm example of the win in Bristol Bay may have been, and I bet you’ve never heard of this, the Wyoming Range Legacy Act.
00:52:37
Speaker 2: I have heard of that.
00:52:38
Speaker 3: You have, Okay, then I take it forget, But I would love.
00:52:41
Speaker 2: For the rest of the audience to hear about it because it’s amazing.
00:52:43
Speaker 3: So that passed in two thousand and nine, I think in an omnibus Public Lands Bill, which is basically a bill where they grab a whole bunch of different bills that have gone through the regular process. But you know, for whatever reason, we it’s another conversation. Congress doesn’t have votes on standalone bills anymore. And it protected I think it’s one point eight million acres of the Wyoming Range habitat to three of the four Native cutthroat in Wyoming from oil and gas development forever. And to do something like that in Wyoming is analogous to stopping a mine in Alaska. Alaska had never in the state’s history not permitted in mine. And the reason it’s also analogous is we did polling in the state of Wyoming prior to leading the campaign the Wyoming Range Legacy At campaign, and I think the numbers were like thirty five percent of the people in Wyoming had ever heard of the Wyoming Range. Wow, that’s who in Wyoming, And so we had a huge job to do, and I don’t think it was dissimilar to what the job we had to do in Bristol Bay. Most of us, including this guy, hadn’t heard of Bristol Bay before I heard about this threat that was posed up there, and we had a great director at the time named Tim Bristol who encouraged me to get up there. He wanted me to see the queen Jack River, which is one of the systems, one of the rivers that would have been affected. An amazing place, and someone who’s become a good friend of mine, Brian Kraft, owns the Alaska Sportsman’s Lodge up there, and he took me out and he flew me over the proposed mind sight on Tallaric Creek. We sat out on the queen Jack, which, for those of you who’ve never been there, it’s this wonderful river system full of braids and it’s just a super cool river. Have this enduring memory I have to share of the Quijack. I had to, and so I fished there a lot of times since then, since Brian convinced me that Trout to libit In need to needed to get involved in this campaign. Yeah, but I was on the quijack and I had to leave early, and so I was actually going to see the CEO of Tiffany and Company, who became a benefactor of our efforts to protect Bristol Bay. Shout out to Tiffany and Company, those of you looking to buy your spouse and get the little blue box. They put their money where their mouth is for conservation. But I remember we were they. You know, you can fish eggs or beads, which you know, honestly gets a little boring to me, but you can also swing flash flies or big streamers. And so I was swinging a flash fly. I didn’t look like any other minue. It was looks like a piece of drifting flesh of a stick. Pretty strange too, It is strange, yeah, so anyway, but I remember it. You know, you swinging, swinging, and then you let it get straight and you lift the line a couple times and then boom it hit and it all the fish almost sets himself. And then I remember, on a ninety degree angle to my right, a fish came out of the water as this one hit. And I turned to my guide next to me, and I said, did you see a fish jump over there? And he says, yeah, that’s your fish. And so that fish was it was. It was only twenty five inches and it’s that powerful that it hit at the end of my drift down there and it came out of the water over there. So they were just incredibly powerful rainbows. And but I remember Bryan making the case that you know, TU need to be involved in this. And I think the other similarity between the Wyoming Range and Bristol Bay is we realized that nobody wanted to listen to a bunch of fast talking white guys from DC that wasn’t And so much of Alaska’s history of conservation and I’d say for better has been imposed by the Lower forty eight, whether it’s an Ilka, the Alaska Lands, Alaska Native Lands Claim Settlement Act, or all the land that President Carter protected, the forty nine million acres. I think it was we realized support had to come from the communities, and I think that’s one of the things that’s coolest about that whole campaign was the amazing support that came from By allowing the indigenous people to lead, by allowing the commercial fishermen to lead, we created and then the proponent for the mind did some boneheaded things we could talk about, but we created a climate where it became okay for Alaskans to say, wait a minute. You know, we like resource development, we really like resource extraction, but we want to keep the world’s finest salmon fishery intact. But you know, I think that conservation that is most local is often most durable. And this goes back to a question you asked earlier. It’s not there’s a lot of organizations that do on the ground restoration. You and I are members of them, Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever Wild Turkey Federation, and there’s a ton of groups that do advocacy BHA, NWF, the Wilderness Society, and RDC. There’s one group that does both, and that’s t you. And what we do is we try to leverage the goodwill that we create in thousands of communities around the country to drive policy gains. And there’s a reason people don’t do both because it’s really complicated. Like you, when you do advocacy and you litigate things, you antagonize people by definition, you make them angry with you, and so it’s hard, you know, but I think that we have managed to find that balance of engaging local voices who are familiar with us, And it was a little different in Alaska because we we now, by working with companies like kin Ross in places like Resurrection Creek, we actually have a strong portfolio of on the ground restoration. Back then when we started that campaign, we really didn’t. But I think there’s enough credibility and goodwill that’s been created through all those local projects that when we try to engage people as advocates, whether it’s for good Samaritan legislation or protecting Bristol Bay or keeping public lands in public hands, we bring a little bit more street cred than other organizations that Jester advocates.
00:59:49
Speaker 1: Where do you see that specific the specific instance, the Bristol Bay dilemma, Where do you see that headed? Because you know, I just saw the issue the clan water protections. They’re being protested in court just just recently that came up again. Yeah, so I think a lot of us feel like it was put to bed, but it’s not quite. Yeah, what’s like, what’s what’s yet to come there?
01:00:14
Speaker 3: What’s that zombie show that never ends? Walking Dead? Walking Dead? Yeah, it is a little bit like that. But look, the important thing is that it was the Trump administration that actually dealt the death blow in twenty twenty by denying the Clean Water Act permit that the Pebble Partnership needed. And you know, the Trump administration defended their four O four CE determination in court. That court hearing that you’re talking about, that just happened last week. And you know, I’m I’m hopeful that because we built such a strong ground game from the bottom up in Alaska and and and the Pebble Limited Partnership has you know, demonstrated that well, let me not even speak to the Pebble Limited Partnership. I’m I’m confident that we will continue to prevail their their these court cases will have to play out like they always do. But I mean, I’m not I’m not going to say, you know, it’s kind of like that Monty Python, I’m not dead yet. I mean, it is kind of like that. You know, it’s like, I’m not dead yet, but but it really is. It should be dead at this point. It’s had, it’s got tremendous bipartisan support. The economics of the mind don’t make sense. The economics of the fishery do make sense. But you know, as with all these things, you know, Number one, they take decades. In some cases, they take decades, and you have to stick with them.
01:02:01
Speaker 1: So speaking of sticking with something then, and I’m not sure if there is a celebratory way to spin this one, because this one seems like something a little bit the opposite of Bristol Bay, in which there was something that was protected twenty some years ago, and now it seems more and more likely that we are possibly going to lose that. This is what we talked about last summer. You and I had a great chat last year about the Roadless Rule and what that was and why so many people were concerned about the possibility of that being rescinded. In the year since, we’ve continued to see more and more progress towards that, several different attempts to do that in different kinds of ways. All the tea leaves seem to suggest that the administration will follow through with that it will be rescinded. But tell me what you know now, you know, twelve months ish since we last chat about this, where do you back to see this end up in the next few months. What’s going to happen with the Royless Rule? What does that mean for salmon and Trump.
01:03:10
Speaker 3: As you know, this one is a bit of a passion play for me. I was there at the Forest Service when we promulgated that rule twenty five years ago. Now, and to answer your last question first, from a trout and salmon perspective, the roadless rule is the single most important conservation tool we have. When you look at the where native and wild trout and salmon are today, there’s a direct overlay with roadless areas on our national forest system. I mean direct, so in places like Idaho, eighty seven percent of all the chinook and steel head habitat found in roadless areas. In places like Oregon, sixty five percent of all the bull trout habitat in various basins are found in roadless areas. In places like Idaho, as you probably well know, you know you have the longest center fire rifle seasons in roadless areas and you have in places like Wyoming. It’s about you have a ten times greater likelihood of succeed in succeeding and taking an elk or a mule deer in a roadless area than you would in e roaded area. I mean, we’ve done a report on this that’s at tu dot org. That’s well worth taking a look at, because if this were simply a question of benefits to hunters and anglers, we wouldn’t have this conversation. The social and ecological and economic values of hunting and angling in the places far outweigh the benefits of building roads into high elevation roadless areas with low timber values so that US taxpayers can lose money. And knowing full well that eighty percent of our fires start within half a mile of a road, and eighty five percent are caused by people, So why on God’s green earth would we ever want to put roads in these backcountry areas? It makes no sense. The Forest Service has a ten and a half billion dollar maintenance backlog today the vast majority of those our are a backlog on its existing road system. So if logic were to prevail here, we wouldn’t have this conversation right now. And I can tell you that there’s absolutely no appetite within the Forest Service for doing this. This is it’s not a substantive issue. It’s a religious issue. It’s basically there are certain people who just are deregulatory, They don’t believe in regulation. And I mean I remember I sat down with some of the Forest Service leadership, and you know, they said something to me like, we want to just make sure that all of these decisions are made at the forest plan level. And I said, we did that for twenty five years, and it wasn’t working. The Forest Service was getting crushed by these stupid proposals to build roads and roadless areas everywhere they did that, it compromised the social license that they otherwise would have benefited from in those communities to do other projects, to do aggressive thinning, for example, around communities, to protect communities of people. You know. And the irony of this whole situation is this report that I mentioned brings this out. Our report, we’ve actually, on a per a basis, we’ve done more hazardous fuels treatments in roadless areas than we have in the general forest. It’s insane and so anyways, but to answer your question, I imagine that, and as you know, Congress entered the Fray a few weeks ago and on what would have been a tremendously bipartisan fire bill, a bill to help promote the kind of hazardous fuels treatments that we’re talking about here, there was a poison pill amendment that was inserted into that bill that would rescind the roadless rule and then make any such similar rule in the future illegal. So the good news is that the proponent of that idea was the same fella who made clear that he doesn’t believe in the very idea of public lands last year. And I mean, you know, in Mark, you’re going to you’re going to now get cynical and be like, wait a minute, this guy’s always looking for the pony and the pile. But I mean, the good news is that I think more hunters and anglers are activated now on this issue because of his doing that than would have been otherwise. And my hope is that we can rally with the same kind of effect and force that we did last spring, not this spring, the spring before, to beat back that boneheaded idea of selling mandating the sale of two to three million public acres or public land acres a year. And I look, my hope is the administration, and we’ve been trying to talk to them about this, that they just try to make it a little more nuanced and don’t make it this whole all or nothing thing. And because we worked on to you and I personally worked on both the Idaho Rule and the Colorado Rule, and I know some in the conservation community, some of the environmental community, I don’t love those, but we defended them in court and they prevailed. And I would argue that the Idaho Rule is even more protective than the OH One rule that I was associated with, you I was, frankly an architect of. And so my hope is that at least the administration will give states the opportunity to advance their own roadless rules, you know, in a regulatory setting, as frankly the Bush administration did, which is how we ended up with the Idaho and the Colorado Rule. But it is it is, I mean, it’s disheartening, you know too, see that it’s such a I mean, there’s so many important things that the Forest Service needs to work on, and frankly, this isn’t one of them.
01:09:55
Speaker 1: If if I were to tell you that ten years from now, let’s say it’s twenty thirty six, if I were to tell you then twenty thirty six, things were actually better for salmon and troue ten years from now than they are now. What would have to happen in that ten year span between now and then if you can place yourself at that time period looking back, tell me the story of what happens between now and then that led to us celebrating a better world for salmon and trou and for my kids. My boys will be sixteen and eighteen, and they’re living in a far better world for wild trout and salmon, and they’re full of hope and excitement about what’s happening right then.
01:10:40
Speaker 2: They’re living in the good old days. What happened to us there.
01:10:44
Speaker 3: That’s great. Well, your eighteen year old is is leading our chapter in Livingston and he’s the chapter president. And he is the president because he and his friends are so fired up about out all of the work that they’re doing to help protect, reconnect and restore trout and salmon populations, and to help make those rivers and streams that they depend on more resilient to the effects of a changing climate. They’ve both got on their bucket list going to Bristol Bay, but more immediately they want to go up to the Klamath because Dad will allow them to borrow the car and fish for what is now a self sustaining and healthy population of salmon and steelhead that are returning up there. And most important, they want to be able to use your car to drive up to some of the incredible roadless areas like Kelly Creek and Idaho or too many to mention in Montana to fish for native westloak, cutthroat and other native trout in in pristine roadless areas that have remained that way. And I will say that to get out of uh, you know, looking ahead ten years for just a second. Although it’s in the same context, we shouldn’t think that the sky is falling because of something like the proposal to rescind the roadless rule, because there is no appetite at the Forest supervisor level in that agency to pump a bunch of roads into roadless areas zero zip, nilp none. And and it may be that by staying attentive at the local look, my hope is that you know, I hate the pendulum that swings back and forth. And one of the things we’re not going to talk about today but we could is, you know, the Clean Water Act is another one of our you know, sort of bedrock environmental laws that is under siege right now. And what I would love nothing more is to begin a dialogue with the development with development, the development community and the agricultural community, and sportsmen sportsmen organizations that do advocacy, and there are many of us to actually figure out if we could come up with a workable solution to clean water rules that allow for some measure of protection for intermittent and ephemeral streams, but provide the certainty and stability that the you know, ag and development industries need on their end. But the we may or may not get there. But I don’t think there’s going to be a strong appetite to suddenly get into roadless areas that you know, the forests are. They’re not that agency anymore that they used to be. The desire to. I remember I used to work with this old time fish biologist. They used to call them combat biologists, and he defined old growth in a joking way as timber that needed to be moved to a home. Get it old growth like an old folks home. And I just think that agency is in the rear of the mirror. And so what you know, I do you know, I imagine another administration will probably you know, repromulgate or you know, you know, however, whatever the right word is, create a new regulation that protects roadless areas. I hope they create carve outs for places like Colorado and Idaho still, but I don’t think there’s going to be this grand design of lowering the blades and starting to cut roads into these back country areas. And if that happens, then I think the Forest Service will have truly lost its way. And I don’t think they have. I don’t think there’s any desire to do that.
01:14:48
Speaker 2: I’ll throw one more softball at you and see where you take this. Give me the one thing.
01:14:57
Speaker 1: You’ve mentioned a couple of things here that are possibly concerning, but that you have belief that will work out in the end. What’s the one thing of Maybe it’s one of the many examples we’ve talked about already, maybe it’s something different, But what’s the one thing as you look forward that And I guess I’m circling back to my very first question in some ways, what’s the one thing looking forward that gives you that sense of that same sense of excitement that you were talking about earlier about your trajectory and the years have led you to this moment. What’s that one thing when you look forward to the next ten years, five, ten, fifteen, years. What’s that one thing that makes you believe that that better future my kids will hopefully experience could actually happen.
01:15:43
Speaker 3: I have two answers. One is just my experience with our brand of conservation we call it collaborative stewardship, that I’ve seen it yield wins, like we’ve talked about the Klamath in Bristol Bay. There’s ten thousand wins and little small projects all around the country nobody will ever hear about on a show like this that are providing thousands of family you know, I paying family wage jobs across rural America. So that’s one answer, and the other is more recent. And you know, I think for years sportsmen and women were taken for granted by one political party and ignored by the other. And I don’t think that’s the case anymore. And it was something to behold to see hunters and anglers rise up the way we did in opposition to the sale of public lands. And there’s still fifty eight million of us. You know, that’s a big number. And you know, if we can continue, I don’t even want to say begin, because there’s groups like BHA and NWF and TU and others that are doing a great job of helping to give voice to hunters and anglers. But if we continue on that path, I think that it could become an incredibly powerful political force, even more than it is today. And that gives me great hope.
01:17:18
Speaker 2: I’m right there with you.
01:17:20
Speaker 1: And I’ll tell you one other thing I’m right on board with is I do see that same future with my kids possibly being leadership roles at their local chapter of to you.
01:17:31
Speaker 2: So I just want to get out ahead of that and just throw it out there.
01:17:34
Speaker 1: If there’s any career opportunities for them, let’s say, ten years from now at TU, just just let them letting, you know, take it, keep an eyeut for that Kenyan last.
01:17:42
Speaker 2: Name, and get them at least an interview.
01:17:45
Speaker 3: All right, Yeah, No, So I mean, just so you know, I’m going to probably regret this. But when I came to DC, I came here because I wanted to do policy work. So I started in Idaho doing working for one of the research stations out there for the Forest Service. But I was dating a girl who lived in DC, and so I wanted to come back here and I wanted to do policy work. And I think I had thirty two informational interviews, and mom and dad had bought me a suit. When I graduated, I did thirty two informational interviews. On the thirty third, I got offered a job that was an internship that was free, that meaning I didn’t get paid, it was free. I could work for free at this organization. And I made a vow which I have kept to since then, that I will talk to any kid that wants to get involved in conservation as a career, because I had thirty three people who were willing to do that for me when I was completely clueless. I didn’t even know it until I had that trip to Alaska. I didn’t even understand the life cycle of salmon. I mean, it’s almost you know, I’m like the perfect example of fake it till you make it. The fact that I’m the head of Child Unlimited, and you know, in my mid twenties knew nothing about Sam Well.
01:19:10
Speaker 1: What you had that helped you is what I think we all have as hunters and anglers. And what is, to your point, the thing that gives me a lot of hope for the future too, which is that hunters and anglers are incredible optimists by nature. That is the thing that keeps us out there in the field day after day because we believe it’s going to happen. Today is going to be the day, and that’s going to keep us moving forward in the right direction, I think, and I appreciate your role in making that possible.
01:19:36
Speaker 2: To thank you, Chris, No, thank you Martin
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