00:00:00
Speaker 1: Are hunters and anglers living up to their conservation legacy? It’s an interesting question at an interesting time. We, the hunting and angling community, represent a distinct minority here in America. But, at least from a conservation standpoint, we’ve long punched above our weight. The question is, is that still true today? In a day and age defined by controversy and polarization, and a fire hose of new changes coming for our wildlife and waterways and wild places, are hunters and anglers meeting the moment? I’m turning today to a friend to help answer that very question. Hal Harry is a hunter, an angler, an environmental journalist, podcast host, author, and one of the leading conservation thinkers and, dare I say, philosophers in the hunting and angling community.
00:00:54
Speaker 2: Few people have.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: Thought longer and harder about our conservation legacy and opportunities than he has. And so today, I’m asking Hale, as a force for conservation and the future of wildlife and wild places, how are we doing? Where are we missing the mark? What can we do now? Thanks for being here. This is Future Wild, brought to you by Conservation First Bank.
00:01:29
Speaker 3: Hey, Al Herring.
00:01:31
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for being here.
00:01:32
Speaker 3: Glad to be here, man.
00:01:33
Speaker 2: Really glad.
00:01:35
Speaker 4: Honored.
00:01:36
Speaker 1: I feel the same way every time I get a chance to talk to you, every time I get a chance to have you on one of our podcasts.
00:01:43
Speaker 2: I think to myself that I am getting to chat with one of the real, original people.
00:01:50
Speaker 1: You know, voices and leaders of our generation right now. And I’m thankful for that, Hale.
00:01:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, I’m glad that’s true. You know, because at the time I was doing it, you don’t ever know. It feels like pounding sand down a rat hole sometime.
00:02:04
Speaker 5: And that, I’ll say, between High Country News and Bugle Magazine and all Field and Stream, I mean, my Lord, what a platform.
00:02:17
Speaker 3: Field and Stream just… They never backed up, man. Yeah. I remember just writing stuff.
00:02:24
Speaker 4: My wife and I were talking about a congressman down in Nevada, Dean Heller, and they were doing some kind of sagebrush rebel stuff, you know, and Field and Stream just was publishing my stuff, and we did rebuttals and all kind of stuff, man, like he would rebut and really powerful times. And yes, they’re gone, but they are part of the fabric.
00:02:53
Speaker 1: Well, it’s that perspective you’ve got, Hale, that long-term perspective that I think is what I’m most interested in mining today. Because you were publishing articles in this space, conservation, wildlife, public lands, hunting and fishing.
00:03:12
Speaker 2: Was that the late 90s when you started publishing? Is that right, give or take?
00:03:15
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, I think I started in the game farm debate here in Montana, and that was 98, 99. I was published at High Country News first, and then I did my first story about the divestiture movement or the privatization of public lands for Field and Stream in 2001.
00:03:34
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:03:35
Speaker 3: So, yeah, 25, 30 years, you’ve.
00:03:35
Speaker 2: Been in the trenches on this stuff.
00:03:42
Speaker 1: And so I want to get your take on something that I’ve been thinking a lot about, but I don’t have that same lens, that length of a timeline to compare things to.
00:03:51
Speaker 2: So tell me this, Hale.
00:03:53
Speaker 1: From where you started in the late 90s to where we are now, how would you say we stand as a hunting and angling community? Would you say we are in a better spot now?
00:04:09
Speaker 4: Or were we.
00:04:10
Speaker 1: better back in the late nineties when you first began in this line of work, how would you compare and contrast, you know, our position, our influence, our opportunities, um, our impact as a hunting and fishing community right now?
00:04:25
Speaker 4: Um, well, we said we’re going to be brutally frank, right? Um, it’s, it’s not, it’s not good.
00:04:33
Speaker 3: Um, comparatively.
00:04:34
Speaker 4: So when I, when I started, this is, this, this, when I started working on this game farm debate in Montana, that was in 98. And, um, I could go to the sportsman’s clubs. There’s one down Gallatin County sportsman, uh, Gallatin County fish and wildlife, uh, a guy named Glenn Hockett, uh, he’s like a major Montana conservationist, um, Ravalli County Fish and Wildlife Association. They took the, they, they did huge court cases in the eighties that did things like establish the access to state lands in Montana. These are old guys. A lot of them are retired military. They had this like really intense, uh, ability to do the drudgery of citizenry. Like I imagine, um, One of my heroes, Harry Lafreniere, who was at Ravalli County Fish and Wildlife, he had been a military guy. And I’m not sure what he did, but I think he did a lot of requisitions and stuff. Like he really knew detail and minutiae, right? And they did a bighorn sheep case down Sula State Forest in the 80s that established our ability to go on state land, which is a huge cornerstone of my life in Montana.
00:05:57
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:05:57
Speaker 3: Is looking for the blue on the map, right?
00:06:01
Speaker 4: And that did not exist before these sporting associations.
00:06:06
Speaker 3: Great Falls. I can’t remember.
00:06:10
Speaker 4: Russell Country Sportsman. They’re still around, right? But, like, when I was going there, they were already old guys. And they came from another time when things were not so assured that it was going to be all right, you know? And they were battlers. And we don’t have that anymore. And we don’t. I think Meat Eater has done a great job in uniting people to this, right?
00:06:39
Speaker 3: But it’s a totally new way.
00:06:43
Speaker 4: And those old sportsman’s organizations in Montana were extremely crucial to the things that we have now here.
00:06:52
Speaker 2: So do you think that Why do you think that is, Hale?
00:06:57
Speaker 1: Why do you feel like there was a different level of battle in our community back then than there is now?
00:07:06
Speaker 4: Well, they were coming from a time when there was a lot of things that were going down.
00:07:13
Speaker 3: We’re victims of their success.
00:07:17
Speaker 4: It’s like I always talk about Clean Water Act 1972. People turned on the water. I mean, you’ve been around the world quite a bit. You know, I spent a lot of time in Mexico and Guatemala and Central America and stuff when I was young, Brazil. And, you know, you keep your mouth closed in the shower, right? Even in Mexico City in like a really nice neighborhood, you know. And so I never took that for granted. And I think of people turning on the tap, you know, and drinking a glass of water going, that federal government overreach, it’s killing me.
00:07:50
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
00:07:51
Speaker 3: And so it was not a given that these things were going to be around at all.
00:07:57
Speaker 1: What about, you know, the modern trappings of life now?
00:08:03
Speaker 2: I think there’s some who I think would say.
00:08:06
Speaker 1: You know, we’re starting to become a little bit louder as a community. We’re starting to find our feet as a community. We’re finding our way into the rooms where people should be listening, right? But at the same time, you could also make a case that there’s so much digital distraction, there’s so much noise, there’s so much polarization that it’s either pulling us apart in too many different directions or it’s just causing us to be distracted by so many different shiny objects. Some might make the case that right now we’re being fractured in that kind of way. Do either of those things resonate in your view?
00:08:45
Speaker 3: They do. And I’d say all of the above, right?
00:08:51
Speaker 4: Here’s the demographic reality. 6% of Americans or less buy a hunting license. There’s 50 million new people in the United States since 2000. That might not even count the many illegals, but that’s just migration to about 1.82 million a year. You have 6% of the population. I’m going to get to the point here because.
00:09:21
Speaker 4: Americans, there’s 50, 60% of people are indifferent to hunting. They think it’s probably okay, not really sure about it, you know, don’t know nothing about it. But 6% of us buy the hunting licenses and really go, we say we love it and we do it. And for me, it’s subsistence. It’s the way I feed my family. It’s been my life. It’s been my North Star since I was nine years old. So you got 6% of the people, well, Those people who are indifferent in the middle, they know that we did things like the 1934 Pittman-Robertson Act.
00:09:58
Speaker 3: They had this weird, vague idea.
00:10:00
Speaker 4: That hunting and conservation are synonymous and that some of the most beautiful things, wildlife refuge, one out of three of every endangered or threatened species has its redoubt, its final hold, right, on the American U.S. wildlife refuge system funded by duck snaps, right? Yeah. So people have this… They see this connection between hunting and conservation.
00:10:24
Speaker 3: And then you get to.
00:10:26
Speaker 4: Now, where so many hunters were so outraged at, say, wolf reintroduction in Colorado, that they called people in public on the radio, libtards and panty wastes and worse, right?
00:10:41
Speaker 3: I’m using the correct stuff, right? In public.
00:10:45
Speaker 4: Well… 94% of the people in Colorado don’t hunt. And so it’s a little bit like going into Mogadishu with a five-man team. Right? And it doesn’t matter how skilled the people are around you. 94% of them have just decided that you’re calling them names.
00:11:09
Speaker 3: We can’t live, we can’t make it that way.
00:11:11
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:11:12
Speaker 3: If we cut, if we.
00:11:16
Speaker 4: cut conservation from hunting. And I hate the idea of public perception and who tolerates me, right? Yeah. Who I tolerate as if we have power to not do that. But you can’t, you have to be the good guy, the good woman, the good hunter, the woodsman, the outdoorsman.
00:11:40
Speaker 3: The conservation.
00:11:42
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:11:45
Speaker 1: When I think about this question of like, you know, where we stand now compared to 25, 30 years ago, there’s so many different angles you could take on that.
00:11:54
Speaker 2: There’s so many different ways to look at that, right?
00:11:57
Speaker 1: And it’s interesting, the first way that you looked at it was from a, from our position of influence and our ability to impact things, right? And then you kind of transition to what you just mentioned there, which is kind of how we’re perceived and kind of how we represent ourselves, which to your point, probably impacts our level of influence and impact, right? But what about this third way of kind of assessing our current moment? And I think all of these things will eventually come together, but what about our actual lived experience right now, Hal? How has our lived experience as hunters and anglers changed in that time period? Are we better off now or worse off when it comes to the opportunity to The access, the wildlife, the opportunities and rights and experiences that we get to experience as part of this lifestyle.
00:12:54
Speaker 2: How would that compare and contrast in your eyes?
00:12:57
Speaker 4: So if you want to be a hunter now versus then, I’ll give you a personal experience. I worked in the woods most summers in the 90s. I would tree plant in the spring. We’d saw all summer, do trails, whatever the job was. wrap up in September and October and have a big paycheck and there’s your winner, right? And in Montana, you get to hunt from October 27th through, say, December 1.
00:13:26
Speaker 3: So I didn’t make plans about where I was going to go.
00:13:30
Speaker 4: I didn’t really apply for special tags unless I had somebody call me and go, let’s go to the Missouri Breaks or let’s try down at Broadus or something like that, right? Some big trip. which we usually didn’t do because it costs too much money when you could just hunt at home.
00:13:47
Speaker 3: I didn’t make plans. I just went hunting for a month. And you can’t do that now.
00:13:55
Speaker 4: If you don’t have plans, if you haven’t figured out where you’re going to go, and you’ve got to be much more intentional now because the regulations are more complicated and there’s more people competing for the resource. And so that’s really changed. And, um, that for an attention deficit person like myself.
00:14:18
Speaker 3: That’s a big challenge. And I, um, I’ve come up dry.
00:14:23
Speaker 4: I mean, I’ve still killed some deer, um, but I’ve come up dry a lot because I didn’t, I was still working hard, right. Making and didn’t make those plans. And nowadays, like my son is pretty good at that, making the plans because he comes from another generation and he also got skunked with me a lot by not making plans.
00:14:43
Speaker 3: You know, learn, learn.
00:14:45
Speaker 2: From his old man’s mistakes, huh?
00:14:48
Speaker 3: Exactly. And his old man’s weaknesses.
00:14:50
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:14:51
Speaker 5: Right.
00:14:52
Speaker 3: But I think it’s really interesting.
00:14:54
Speaker 4: You can find great hunting now, but you have to be intentional and you have to be willing to get on the computer and look at, look at the incredible data that’s available.
00:15:06
Speaker 3: That wasn’t available at all. There’s no such thing.
00:15:09
Speaker 4: I mean, I just drive up to Lost Trail Pass and park and start walking. Yeah.
00:15:13
Speaker 3: You know? See what happens. See what happens.
00:15:17
Speaker 4: And you knew that you couldn’t shoot spikes this side of Trail Creek on the big hole side, right?
00:15:23
Speaker 3: And so all you’d see was spikes, right? If you saw anything at all.
00:15:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:15:29
Speaker 1: So my point with these questions, Hale, my line of thinking here, is that we have this multiple kind of, that are all kind of leading to where we are right now. You’ve talked about how things are getting more difficult from a hunting perspective, increasing competition for limited resource. It hasn’t been mentioned yet, but a lot of these resources are challenged in many ways, right? You then also have this increasing challenge of like, hey, how do we make an impact and how do we influence things? That’s getting harder and harder than ever before for some of the things you mentioned. While at the same time, our perception is, And the way the rest of the world sees our, you know, 6%, you know, as hunters, 6%, if you add anglers, it’s a little bit larger than that. But still, we’re a relatively significant minority across the country, right? All of these things are kind of stacking on top of each other to put the hunting and angling community in a really interesting place in 2026, right? When you and I talked last on a podcast, it was almost two years ago. And it was just before this administration that we’re currently with right now was coming to office. And you had been kind of talking through your thoughts looking forward into these next handful of years. And you had talked about how you were expecting there might be this kind of challenge or that kind of challenge. Of course, like some very pro-business things coming down the line. There’s going to be some changes, et cetera, et cetera. But you spoke pretty confidently, pretty forcefully about an optimistic vision.
00:17:06
Speaker 2: That you had for the coming years.
00:17:09
Speaker 1: And, and a big part of that, and I’m paraphrasing your words here, Hal, so feel free to correct me.
00:17:13
Speaker 2: But a big part of that is that you believed that.
00:17:17
Speaker 1: America’s hunters and anglers and the wider population, but especially hunters and anglers would be able to speak up. They’d be able to stand up for the things they care about. They would be able to put their foot down and say.
00:17:28
Speaker 2: Hey, you know what? We’re going to do this the right way. Hey, you know what?
00:17:31
Speaker 1: We are going to protect these resources or this way of life or these opportunities or these public lands or these waters, whatever it might be. And we would be able to fend off any of those challenges, those worst threats. So with two years now passed since that conversation, my question for you, Hal, is if we have met that moment, have we done that?
00:17:55
Speaker 4: We did it when Senator Mike Lee proposed the actual sell-off of public land.
00:18:01
Speaker 3: And that was a really beautiful moment.
00:18:05
Speaker 4: However, I underestimated the level of political polarization within our community. And that was something that I didn’t see coming where people doubled down.
00:18:22
Speaker 3: Well, I didn’t see, for instance, dig this.
00:18:26
Speaker 4: There was a propaganda campaign that was basically anti-conservation, anti-environment that began in 1980. There was a lot of think tanks, and the Heritage Foundation was one of them. They were founded in the 70s.
00:18:41
Speaker 3: They were funded by big money.
00:18:44
Speaker 4: They have influenced the discourse of America in a way that I underestimated. And when I look at the debates over the roadless rule, which I’ve literally been covering since 1999. I mean, it’s like talk about ad nauseum, you know? But what I see there is an amazing absorption of disinformation over 20-something years where a lot of people are confusing the Northwest Forest Plan, which was the spotted owl, with the roadless rule. And that it somehow bans logging and all this stuff, right? When really what it was is simply a taxpayers for common sense concept of stopping the taxpayer building roads to marginal timber supplies. There was a fire down at Mavericks Key Area over there, kind of west of you there, you know, and outside the big hole there yep and um somebody wrote on there they said look at this billions of dollars worth of timber has just gone up because of forest mismanagement right and i’ve been cutting timber involved in timber since i was very young you know and i was like dude that is 75 year old lodgepole which is a fire adapted species. It doesn’t grow unless there’s fire. And what we call piss fir, which is subalpine fir. And if you’ve got a market that’ll pay you billions of dollars for that, I’d love to get in on it with you, you know? And what it was, was this person wasn’t really stupid or anything, right? It was just, they saw a big fire and trees being burned. And their bias against the Forest Service, against public lands, against what they saw as libtard environmentalists, caused them to believe that this huge asset had just gone up in flames. It’s like the misconceptions that we have and it’s confirmation bias.
00:20:55
Speaker 3: I underestimated that, Mark, to the max. I never saw that.
00:21:00
Speaker 4: I thought that people were operating off of a, a relatively universal set of facts, you know, that that piss fur and lodgepole are not worth a billion dollars, right? And they’re valuable for watershed protection. They’re valuable for elk security cover. They have to burn periodically or they don’t exist. Could they be thinned by somebody like I used to be on a thinning crew?
00:21:26
Speaker 3: Hell yeah.
00:21:27
Speaker 4: Let’s get some work going, you know? Do I need to repeal the roadless rule to do that?
00:21:32
Speaker 3: Absolutely not.
00:21:35
Speaker 4: I’m very concerned about the Iowa water pollution crisis. And I just go back and I think of friends of mine, good people, who told me, and this was all propaganda, that they had been absorbing because we’re all kind of center right, right? Like a lot of people in the hunting and fishing space are pretty conservative.
00:22:02
Speaker 3: And they’re like, you know that Waters of the U.S. rule, Hal?
00:22:06
Speaker 4: If they pass that, and they didn’t realize it wasn’t a law, it was like really disinformation. They say, we won’t even be able to fish your dad’s farm pond. And I’m like, I’m in this, this is what I do for a living, right? I’m writing about the orders of the U.S. rule for field and stream. So I’m like, well, that’s not true.
00:22:25
Speaker 3: And they’re going, yeah, yes, it is. Totally. So, I mean, Trump got rid of the Waters of the U.S.
00:22:31
Speaker 4: Rule among one of the first things he did in 2017, 2016. He addressed the Farm Bureau there, and it’s a famous speech because he said, I don’t even know what it is. I just know that you guys don’t like it, and I’m giving you this gift. But the Waters of the U.S. rule was kind of like the roadless rule. It was worked out over decades of how do you address water pollution from non-point source that’s not coming out of a pipe. because some crazed capitalist industrialist wants to socialize his cost strike.
00:23:11
Speaker 3: He’s going to.
00:23:11
Speaker 4: Pour all the poison in the river instead of paying to have it hauled away. And the people downstream are the people who he socializes his costs on them, and he privatizes profits.
00:23:22
Speaker 3: Well, the Clean Water Act of 1972 was directly for that.
00:23:26
Speaker 4: And then we let it creep and crawl out because we needed clean water and to non-point source.
00:23:34
Speaker 3: Ag runoff, et cetera. And that cost people money that they didn’t want to pay.
00:23:40
Speaker 4: Right. And so they did this propaganda campaign against the orders of the U.S. rule. And I stand here today that if we had the orders of the U.S. rule and we had a healthy natural resources conservation service, which was the soil conservation service built, created during the Dust Bowl, right, to solve American problems, crucial, critical American problems. We had a really healthy NRCS, Natural Research Conservation Service.
00:24:06
Speaker 3: The Waters of the U.S.
00:24:07
Speaker 4: Rule would have incentivized farmers and paid them, because I want to pay them for buffering creeks, for not channelizing, for not draining wetlands. WRP, Wetland Reserve Program, which became EQIP, environmental quality incentive program, you know, all of these better than I did. Like these were really good ideas.
00:24:26
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
00:24:28
Speaker 4: Uh, but, but if I can drain a wetland and put a crop in there and then insure it with federal crop insurance and it fails and I get paid, well, as a businessman, a farmer, I’m probably going to do that. Right. And so water’s us rule was to de incentivize the destruction of, of the water resources.
00:24:51
Speaker 3: And it would have worked. It was a great idea.
00:24:53
Speaker 4: And that propaganda campaign went in so decisively amongst people that I knew. They were like, yeah, we got rid of it. And I was like, how’s that working out for you?
00:25:06
Speaker 1: Well, when I look at our situation from my perspective, and I look at where we as hunters and anglers sit, both in the resource we have available, and then also where our seat at the table is, one of the biggest challenges that I see is exactly what you’re talking about, which is because of our cultural polarization sometimes. And you said more often than not, hunters and anglers tend to be center, center, right. And so I think because of that, because of how politics have seeped into everything, there seems to be, there has been definitely over the last 30 years or more and more, a growing distrust of environmental regulations and, you know, the kinds of things you’re talking about, because many of those things maybe are being supported.
00:25:56
Speaker 2: By left sides of the left side of the aisle.
00:26:00
Speaker 4: Right.
00:26:00
Speaker 1: And you’re seeing the roadless rule being put in place during the Clinton administration, et cetera. And so then it becomes just like a team thing. Well, okay, that’s not my team. So it must be bad. It must be something that’s going to be socialist and Uh, we gotta get rid of it.
00:26:16
Speaker 2: Right. Um, and there’s, there’s so many times where I see.
00:26:22
Speaker 1: Portions of our community have this political reaction to something that actually is really helping the resources and the things we care about.
00:26:31
Speaker 4: Right.
00:26:32
Speaker 1: But because it came out of a certain administration or it came out of a certain, um, just the assumption that if it’s environmental must be not me. Um, that we’re seeing this kind of thing pop up again and again. And I’m thinking this is beginning to change. I think we are seeing glimmers of that changing now, Hal. But I’m curious if you feel.
00:26:53
Speaker 2: That way or not. Or if not, how do we break out of that?
00:26:56
Speaker 1: Because, I mean, you’re talking about all this kind of stuff that you and I and many folks know helps anglers, helps hunters, helps fish, helps wildlife. But man, when you say regulations, that’s like a toxic.
00:27:10
Speaker 2: Word to a lot of people.
00:27:12
Speaker 1: When people say red tape and bureaucracy and all these things that will sometimes get lumped into a conversation about the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act or the Endangered Species Act, those are used as like weapons against those things.
00:27:29
Speaker 2: How do we make sense of that? How do we kind of get out of that morass?
00:27:33
Speaker 4: Well, what you’ve got to do is get out of that morass before something completely collapses, right? Like, like the cancer rate in Iowa or the.
00:27:43
Speaker 3: Dead zone in the, where the Mississippi goes in the Gulf.
00:27:47
Speaker 4: Um, we have, dude, you’re going to have, if you, anarchy is one thing, right? But power abhors a vacuum. And so there’s never really been an anarchist society before.
00:28:01
Speaker 3: In the world, right? Where everybody just does, there’s no regulations. I just do whatever I want, man. Have a good time, you know?
00:28:09
Speaker 4: And I like smoke four packs of cigarettes a day because I like that, right? I enjoy drinking, you know, 20 Keystones and taking my four-wheeler downtown.
00:28:19
Speaker 2: That rarely works out, does it?
00:28:21
Speaker 3: It always works out, right?
00:28:22
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:28:23
Speaker 3: And so the truth is, is you’re going to have a government.
00:28:28
Speaker 4: The only real question in a country like America where the citizens have autonomy and agency and can affect the government, a representative democratic republic, participatory, if you participate.
00:28:41
Speaker 3: The only question is, what do you want that government to do?
00:28:45
Speaker 4: And I’ve always thought that government was like a Chevy Silverado with an AR-15 on the console, right? And somebody’s going to drive that. Somebody’s going to put gas in it. Yeah. And in America, we can say where we want it to go more, when the AR-15 is appropriate to use and not, and we’re paying for the gas, right?
00:29:11
Speaker 3: And so, like, we’re going to have a government. Do you want a government that.
00:29:17
Speaker 4: Builds the Ambler Road through the Brooks Range for a foreign mining company?
00:29:22
Speaker 3: Oh, my God, if I.
00:29:23
Speaker 4: Would be on my dime giving away BLM lands, Or do you want a government who does a measured approach and says, like, what is the resource in there? Shall we repeal the 1872 mining law, the greatest giveaway of American assets in the world’s history? i mean like we have got to hunters and anglers have been taken advantage of for all of my adult life for their votes and and they have not they’ve just been we have been used for our votes I remember there was some very anti-conservation politician here very early when I first lived in Montana 35 years ago.
00:30:07
Speaker 3: And it was like sportsman for so-and-so.
00:30:11
Speaker 4: And even then, like I’m like 25 years old, I’m like, oh, what.
00:30:14
Speaker 3: Sportsman would vote for that dude? But he was a conservative, right?
00:30:21
Speaker 1: Right.
00:30:22
Speaker 3: And so I’m a conservative. He’s a conservative. I went to University of Alabama. I yell, roll tide, right?
00:30:30
Speaker 4: But I do draw the line, say, if the referee was entirely on the side of Roll Tide and they were telling the War Eagle people that there were different rules and they had to use a square ball, you know, I wouldn’t go with that. Yeah.
00:30:46
Speaker 3: But I believe some people would, right?
00:30:48
Speaker 4: I think our tribal nature, our team nature, you know, they say that there’s a special kind of endorphin that drips in an elk when the herd is all running in the same direction.
00:31:02
Speaker 3: I don’t have that endorphin.
00:31:06
Speaker 4: And I’ll tell you what, really successful species like whitetails, they all got a different idea about how to get away.
00:31:12
Speaker 3: If you’ve ever been watching.
00:31:14
Speaker 4: Them, they have a diversity of opinions about how to escape X, Y, or Z problem.
00:31:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s the truth.
00:31:21
Speaker 4: And so these team concepts, Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal, They don’t actually work.
00:31:33
Speaker 3: On the ground.
00:31:34
Speaker 4: If you want to drink clean water, it’s not about conservative versus liberal. If you don’t want your kids to get sick from drinking the water out of your tap and you live in a city, that’s not a conservative or liberal concept. And to call clean water regulations or any kind of, not any, so regulations are supposed to incentivize people to innovate.
00:31:59
Speaker 3: And make things better. We live in a fallible, it’s a government of laws and not men, but men do run it, men and women, right? And they are fallible.
00:32:09
Speaker 4: Yeah. So maybe there’s a regulation that’s so stupid that I can think of lots of them. You know, I think about the short rifle thing from 1934. That’s a silly regulation.
00:32:21
Speaker 3: We should have gotten rid of it. We never have, you know.
00:32:24
Speaker 4: But regulations are going to be part of your life no matter what you do. whether or not you like it, if you live in an organized society, what do you want them to do? Want them to keep people from pouring poison into water? You want them to keep people from shooting all the elk and selling them downtown because beef is real high?
00:32:44
Speaker 3: Well, that’s a regulation.
00:32:46
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:32:47
Speaker 1: So I feel like that’s a great kind of transition into, I guess, kind of where all this leads us, which is, you know, if you’re telling me that We’re in this world, hunters and anglers, which, of course, I can certainly agree with a lot of this, that we’re in a resource-constrained world these days in many ways.
00:33:09
Speaker 2: We’re facing all sorts of change.
00:33:12
Speaker 1: We’ve got possibly decreasing levels of influence, polarized takes on all sides.
00:33:21
Speaker 2: Back to kind of our political moment, right?
00:33:23
Speaker 1: We’re in this moment where there has been this massive flux of it’s like overwhelming. I’m sure you’re in the same boat as, as so many of us. And I’ve talked about this a lot in the show the last few months. It’s, you know, the last couple of years has seemed like a fire hose just constantly, like every week it’s some new thing, new thing, new thing, um, just related to hunting and fishing and wildlife and conservation.
00:33:45
Speaker 2: Right.
00:33:45
Speaker 1: I’m ignoring all the rest of it, but, um, you know, with all of that, back to when we first talked a couple years ago, just prior to this, you had some predictions. You had some expectations of where we were headed and what was going to happen. What’s been your take? Has this two years met your expectations? Is this where you thought we would be? Man, it’s a great question.
00:34:11
Speaker 4: For one, I didn’t expect the fire hose effect coming out of Washington, D.C., You know, I didn’t really expect, uh, the, I didn’t expect them to drop the royalties on oil and gas from 15% to 12% when the debt, when the, when the federal debt was 40 trillion. Yeah.
00:34:32
Speaker 2: Let’s, let’s make less money on that stuff.
00:34:34
Speaker 4: Yeah. Even though they were doing fine at 15%.
00:34:38
Speaker 3: Um, I didn’t foresee stuff like that.
00:34:41
Speaker 4: That, that seemed to me to be really wild card, you know, um, there’s some, there’s some movement on the migration.
00:34:48
Speaker 3: Corridors with pronghorn and all.
00:34:51
Speaker 4: Um, and, and that’s not, that’s been a positive, you know, uh, oil and gas has got kind of less, they’re not that interested in, in doing terrible stuff.
00:35:02
Speaker 5: Right.
00:35:03
Speaker 3: They want to be part of a citizen.
00:35:05
Speaker 4: Um, but there’s no, there’s no, there’s a lot of carrots. There’s not a lot of sticks because the federal government is not doing that. Right. They’re not in that business at the moment. Um, of, of regulating on behalf of, of, uh, the common good, right? There’s a, there’s a liberal concept, right? The common good.
00:35:25
Speaker 3: They go, well, I’ll tell you what, I don’t believe in that. Well, you know, it’s, we’ve had a lot of luxury, Mark.
00:35:34
Speaker 4: We’ve been running on the environmental decade of the 1970s that gave us the Clean Air Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, the Clean Water Act, um, The expansion of the Clean Water Act, which was rolled back by the two Supreme Court decisions, which that’s a whole other thing you and I could talk about off the podcast, but the Clean Water Act didn’t actually say it protected isolated wetlands. We just all knew you had to protect isolated wetlands because they connected to the river, right?
00:36:07
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:36:08
Speaker 4: But when you brought that to the Supreme Court, they said, well, it doesn’t actually say that.
00:36:12
Speaker 3: And so it got trimmed.
00:36:15
Speaker 4: And we’re still living as the beneficiaries of back when it wasn’t trimmed. When Ducks Unlimited and landowners and everybody worked together to protect wetlands for ducks, flood control, pollution control, all the ecosystem services that wetlands provide, biodiversity, if that’s what you’re interested in.
00:36:39
Speaker 3: It seemed to me that in 1999, more hunters were.
00:36:46
Speaker 4: Kind of like biodiversity is kind of cool.
00:36:51
Speaker 3: Really? Yeah.
00:36:53
Speaker 1: That was more kind of culturally relevant and okay to be on board with, you think, back then?
00:36:59
Speaker 3: I think it was.
00:37:01
Speaker 4: And then the Wolfrey introduction, 94, all of those polarities came in. Oil and gas development during the George Bush administration after 9-11. I mean, I was a big supporter of American energy independence, you know, and I knew we needed to make some sacrifices for that. But developments like the Pinedale Anticline in Pinedale, Wyoming, were so extreme. And I was there and I was like working for out, you know, hunting magazines. And I was like, wow, we don’t have to do it like this. Like, this is not how my country would actually do this. This is more like some kind of third world thing. Yeah. And I wanted more federal action to incentivize, say, Encana or Questar to develop those natural gas resources, which we needed in a very, you know, in a way that did not socialize the costs out onto the, to the future.
00:38:04
Speaker 3: You know, you could protect sage grouse, pronghorn and mule deer on the.
00:38:08
Speaker 4: Anti-cline and, by using best management practices, but a company couldn’t choose to do that because they were giving away shareholders’ money. So the government’s role was to set a flat playing field for all companies that this is how you’re going to do it. You’re going to directionally drill this, and as the wells give out, you’re going to reclaim before you drill the next well. And they said, that was just radical direction. Mark, they were like, no way. And I was like, well, that means though that there’s going to be like, there’s not going to be a lot of livestock grazing up there. The mule deer herd is going to decline by 73%. I think sage grouse are gone. And then like, you know, and they had like a rally to hell with the bird where they didn’t like the federal regulations that protected sage grouse. And a lot of people I know who are kind of center, right. They’re like, yeah, well, we need the energy so bad, you know, so badly. And I got that. And then in 2015, Congress overturned the petroleum export ban and began selling all those same resources on the global market that oil and gas companies did. After 9-11, when we were taught to drill, baby, drill for American energy independence. and that we had to make sacrifices of our sage-grouse and our mule deer and our pronghorn. And so you could say I became a little more skeptical over the years. I think without some regulatory hand that people will not necessarily do the right thing. Yeah.
00:39:51
Speaker 2: So we’ve had this like yo-yo effect, right? Where there was.
00:39:56
Speaker 1: Some momentum, like you mentioned, in the 90s, but then things became more polarized. And then during the Bush era, some of the things you just mentioned happened. There was definitely a more radically pro-business era there. There was definitely a preference given to this deregulatory stance and sacrifices were made, as you discussed. And then there was kind of another swing back towards the Obama era. There was a little bit more of this– a little bit more regulation, a little bit more focus on some of these things. And then back again, Trump number one, and then back the other way for Biden number one. Now back to Trump number two. We’re just– we’re back and forth, back and forth. And every individual one of us can argue about which we think is better and for what reasons. But you made an interesting point in an article yesterday. Recently, earlier this year, on a website called Republic. And I wanted to kind of get your take on it, given what we just described there, given this kind of trajectory we’ve been on for the last 30 years, that you’ve lived reporting on all this, that I’ve lived kind of as becoming an adult and then diving into this world myself. Having kids. Having kids, yes, all those things. So, writing about this current moment we’re in, this moment.
00:41:14
Speaker 2: Of change and challenge.
00:41:16
Speaker 1: You said, When we as a nation have weathered this current storm, I believe that we are going to create an entirely new vision for our public lands— one that honors their creation story in a way that we have failed to do during the.
00:41:49
Speaker 2: Past 100 years. So Hal, I’m curious.
00:41:54
Speaker 1: When it comes to specifically public lands, as you mentioned in that article, or also.
00:41:59
Speaker 2: Our waters, our environment, our wildlife, all these.
00:42:02
Speaker 1: Things that hunters and anglers care about, what do you envision this new future looking like that you believe we can build once we get Once this storm passes in whatever way it’s going to be, whatever’s next, what do we build?
00:42:15
Speaker 2: How do we build that? What are you seeing?
00:42:18
Speaker 3: So we have to build it now.
00:42:22
Speaker 4: We have to be part of the people who are on the ship navigating through this storm. We have to be able to say no to the most egregious abuses that are.
00:42:30
Speaker 3: Going on now.
00:42:32
Speaker 5: And whether we do that or not, I don’t know.
00:42:36
Speaker 4: I think the jury is still out on whether they moderate hunting and fishing community, or whatever we are, can stand up and say no to the worst abuses that are going on right now.
00:42:50
Speaker 3: I mean, the roadless rule repeal, it’s terrible. in a way.
00:42:57
Speaker 4: Right. But they’re not going to go crashing roads through there because they defunded the forest service. Right. Like, I like who is going to pay. There’s no engineers working there. They they’re cutting the staff everywhere. Who’s going to design the road. Maybe, maybe some guy from a local community will take his dozer up there, but it’ll still be public land.
00:43:15
Speaker 3: He, they, they it’s, it’s not going to have an immediate effect.
00:43:20
Speaker 4: When the storm is over, we are going, as hunters and anglers, especially, hunters and fishermen, especially, we are going to have been asked, what is it that you really value? And we’re going to be joined. So there’s this huge, one reason I’ve gone with the Carryin’ the Fire podcast, I’ve started the new podcast, is I see this modern homestead movement, just been very interested. And like the Mayha people, you know, that Make America Healthy Again, who pin their hopes kind of on RFK.
00:43:53
Speaker 3: For better or worse, right?
00:43:55
Speaker 4: But the impetus behind that is really cool, right? Like raise kids without, and not an anti-vaxxer or anything like that, but raise kids on healthy food, outdoors, pretty feral, right?
00:44:09
Speaker 3: And you got to have clean water to do that.
00:44:11
Speaker 4: You got to, you can’t, the upstairs, the upstream neighbor cannot be dumping the hog manure in your creek if you’re going to be mayhaw. If you’re going to raise a bunch of wild kids out there on your little property that you’ve worked your butt off to afford.
00:44:30
Speaker 3: Right. So that’s coming. All of those people also seem to be.
00:44:35
Speaker 4: They kind of like guns, right? There’s a whole new like, like be self-sufficient, self-defense and firearms. And that’s a, that’s hasn’t gone down. That’s expanded. So they like the idea of taking a whitetail or a turkey. And cooking like with the Hank Shaw book or a Steve Rinella cookbook, right?
00:44:57
Speaker 3: This is expanded.
00:44:59
Speaker 4: And it’s amazing to me because all of these demands for clean water and homestead life and a garden that you can water with clean water and doesn’t get poisoned by overdrift, which happened to my CSA neighbors.
00:45:14
Speaker 3: The overdrift from this herbicide spray took them out. And you don’t want that. So somebody’s going to have to regulate that, right?
00:45:26
Speaker 4: Because you can’t just go ask the guy to stop spraying the drifting herbicide.
00:45:33
Speaker 3: His farm depends on it, right?
00:45:34
Speaker 4: He’s probably not even him doing it. So we have this back to the land kind of movement going on that includes hunting and fishing. And it’s going right into, like T-boning at an intersection, this deregulate everything thing.
00:45:51
Speaker 3: Um, who cares about that?
00:45:54
Speaker 4: You know, and it’s fascinating to me and somewhere that’s going to have to come, that’s going to come out because people don’t really want to have a poisoned river running like the Mulberry Fork in Alabama with the chicken grease in it from the Tyson company. If you’re a private landowner, own the Mulberry Fork. That is the ultimate takings. People go, well, the Endangered Species Act, it’s related to takings of people’s private property rights if you have to protect the wed-cockaded woodpecker by not cutting down those trees over there.
00:46:26
Speaker 3: That’s kind of true, right?
00:46:29
Speaker 4: And you could tweak the Endangered Species Act if people would quit just trying to get rid of it.
00:46:34
Speaker 1: Right.
00:46:35
Speaker 3: We could tweak it and make it better.
00:46:36
Speaker 4: But I will tell you what the ultimate takings is, is when the power plant next to you is deregulated and that smoke comes down on your pecan grove and your family and it kills all your trees and gives your kids whatever the disease is. That’s the ultimate takings. And that goes on every day all over the world. And we have said no to that for, I don’t know, 80 years here. We’ve been working on saying no to it. since the last Buffalo keeled over, you know, since the last 54 caliber bullet went through the last Buffalo up north of mile city, we’ve been working on that idea. Yeah.
00:47:19
Speaker 2: How do we make some of this stuff tangible?
00:47:20
Speaker 1: Hell, like what are some ways like in your own life or that, you know, any one of us in our own lives could start to move the needle in this direction we’ve been talking about? How do we go from, The trend we’ve been on since the 90s to now, how do we change that trend moving forward over the next 10, 20, 30 years?
00:47:39
Speaker 2: How do we build this new future? Like, tangibly.
00:47:42
Speaker 1: Give me something I can sink my teeth into and do tomorrow or next month.
00:47:47
Speaker 3: Well, part of it is to be the change you want to see, right?
00:47:52
Speaker 4: Like Aldo Leopold said, the only change that matters is a change on your own back 40.
00:47:57
Speaker 3: And one of that means is.
00:48:00
Speaker 4: Is you’re not going to be hostile to people who have commonalities with you about the public land. At the time, like the mountain bikers, they really mess up a bugle and elk hunt, right?
00:48:13
Speaker 3: They really do. And that’s true.
00:48:17
Speaker 4: But we won’t be able to argue about that one way or another if the White River National Forest is privatized. Yeah.
00:48:25
Speaker 3: And you know what? They’ll probably still be riding bikes in.
00:48:28
Speaker 4: There on some kind of permit from the corporation that owns it, but you won’t be elk hunting in there, right? So I’m just, there is so much commonality amongst the people who love their public lands. Right now, we can go back to the luxury of arguing over the little tidbits. And one of the things I think we will win, if the hunters in particular, establish ourselves as the foremost premier conservation voices in America again, as we were all the way from 1934 on, I think that then we’ll again punch above our weight politically. At the moment, the polarization in the hunting community between left and right or left and center Republicans right and center, um, has rendered us like we’re, we’re first to be thrown under the bus. Like, like people give us lip service and then they’re like, get the vote and throw it out. I remember during the Wyoming wolf debates, you know, um, The politicians really loved the anti-wolf fervor amongst the hunters.
00:49:43
Speaker 3: Because they would go, I hate the wolves! And everybody would go, yeah! I’m voting for him!
00:49:48
Speaker 4: And then he’s also privatizing public land, defunding the state wildlife management areas. We have fallen for these catchwords and these hot-button abstractions.
00:50:07
Speaker 3: For way too long.
00:50:10
Speaker 4: And it’s time to, it’s time to see this as it is, which is that we’re all on this ship together going through heavy seas, navigating these reefs, and we need all kind of folks on deck bailing and somebody trimming the sails and one dude that knows how to steer and a bunch of people.
00:50:31
Speaker 3: Getting over on this side when the wave pushes it that.
00:50:33
Speaker 4: Side, right? Because there, make no, Make no mistake, in the country that is envisioned by these people who are doing the anti-conservation stuff now, there’s no public hunting and fishing.
00:50:52
Speaker 3: It will be for the wealthy.
00:50:54
Speaker 4: There are many people already who cannot imagine why there should be a Lewis and Clark National Forest where me and my kids can go hunting for free.
00:51:06
Speaker 3: Next week. That’s ridiculous to them. They’re not even paying?
00:51:17
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:51:19
Speaker 1: If you were to fast forward 25 more years, if we’re working on this quarter-decade basis, and if you could imagine one single decision or one single line that we need to hold today that would ensure that there is public hunting and fishing 25 years from now for my kids or your grandkids or the next person down the line? One single thing. What could you leave us with that would point us in that right direction?
00:51:58
Speaker 3: It’s an abstraction. So it is.
00:52:03
Speaker 4: that American hunters and fishermen apprise ourselves of the concept of the public trust doctrine upon which all of our fishing and hunting depend.
00:52:16
Speaker 3: Now, there’s my abstraction.
00:52:19
Speaker 4: So my more concrete is we want to keep the American system of public lands, the U.S. wildlife refuge system, and the state lands system We want to keep those intact so that there is a place for younger generations to go shoot and learn basic outdoor skills. So my answer is a zero, I’m not going to say zero loss. My answer is that we keep the American public land system and build on it and make it better. and, and all of the things that I talked about in that Republic piece where we, we reinvigorate that concept and we embrace this idea of, of really it’s the public trust, but as made manifest in the system of American public lands, let’s hold on to that, recognize that there’ll be conflict all the time. I, I, So it’s the job of Western Watersheds Project to challenge grazing on American public land. It’s the job of the cowboys and the ranchers who lease that land to push back and say, no, that’s too much. And the Western Watersheds comes in.
00:53:49
Speaker 3: It’s conflict.
00:53:50
Speaker 2: Find that middle, though, right?
00:53:51
Speaker 3: Find that middle, man.
00:53:53
Speaker 4: And embrace conflict and recognize that conflict in America is not a zero-sum game.
00:54:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, like constructive conflict, right?
00:54:02
Speaker 1: Constructive conflict versus demolition.
00:54:07
Speaker 4: And also versus demolition based on somebody else going, ah, he got something you wanted.
00:54:12
Speaker 3: We should get rid of the whole thing. My buddy wants it.
00:54:15
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:54:16
Speaker 4: You know, ah, they put some ugly taillights on your truck, man. I think my buddy, if he owned that truck, he’d put kind of tail lights.
00:54:24
Speaker 3: You like on them. You wouldn’t be driving it.
00:54:27
Speaker 4: But constructive conflict is the best part of the United States. It’s what we do best. You know that Shelby Foote thing, Ken Burns documentary? And Shelby Foote says that Americans love to say that they never compromise.
00:54:44
Speaker 3: I never back up.
00:54:45
Speaker 4: And he said, but the whole experiment of America is based on compromise. Conflict leading to compromise, right? And he said, like from the founding fathers, and he said, and the one place it failed, 1861, we killed 620,000 people and burned down a third of the country. And he said, you know, he said, the genius of compromise, the times it has failed have been catastrophic.
00:55:13
Speaker 3: So we’re supposed to learn from that, right? Not do it again.
00:55:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. So true.
00:55:22
Speaker 1: I think sometimes this stuff can seem.
00:55:28
Speaker 2: Just so big.
00:55:29
Speaker 1: These are big ideas and concepts, and sometimes it feels like this stuff’s happening somewhere else, and I’m just little old me sitting here in my room in Montana or Mississippi or wherever I am. I just want to go hunt and fish, and I want to pay the bills, and I want to have a nice time with my friends this weekend. But man, sometimes you have to kind of stick your hand up there in the clouds and shake something out and try to be a part of making that better future real. And that only happens by each and every one of us doing our little bit, right?
00:56:01
Speaker 3: It is.
00:56:01
Speaker 4: And, and the, and the job of citizenry is I’m, I’m, I’ve been remiss in it as a journalist. Like I’ve, I’ve like let that be my get out of jail free card of being a citizen.
00:56:11
Speaker 3: Sometimes I don’t advocate it like I should, but, but.
00:56:15
Speaker 4: The participatory democratic Republic requires that you participate. And if you don’t want the data center down there in your duck hole, then you’re going to have to join with people, like-minded people on that cause, right? It’s like, it’s just really difficult, and that’s what makes it wonderful.
00:56:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:56:40
Speaker 4: Like, I really just, right now, you and I were talking about writing the books and doing the podcast and just living this life with technology always at hand. I really just want to hunt and fish and cut firewood and live. And the truth is, is I’ve been doing this other gathering this information for so long that I can’t, I have to be part of it now because I, I learned all these things that are actually, I feel more useful now than ever right at the time that I really prefer to take some time off and just hunt. Yeah.
00:57:18
Speaker 1: You know, I think that just that simple idea of just participate. If nothing else, I think that is such an important first step that leads to so much. It doesn’t have to start big. It could start small. Just dip your toes in there and do something and then see where it takes you.
00:57:40
Speaker 4: I have a question for you. How best to participate?
00:57:46
Speaker 1: I have found it’s like a twofold thing for me, at least I found there’s like the individual track and then there’s this collective track. Um, and that, this is a big thing. This, this, this idea kind of came to me while working on, on my book project that you alluded to and that I write about in it. And it’s this, this idea of an active, um, conservation approach right i think sometimes conservation or the environmental movement will will come off as as kind of just ideas and rhetoric but if you can find ways to make it active and tangible um a that leads to better outcomes many of the positive things you talked about only came about because there was some degree of this like activity happening but then it also has like a uh like a like a it builds a reservoir in you to do more So, you know, what Eldo Leopold said, the idea of like, man, there’s no progress unless you’re making progress in your own back 40 or however it was, he said it like that is so true. I think as an individual finding simple, small ways to do something tangible today.
00:58:53
Speaker 2: Like that’s huge.
00:58:56
Speaker 1: Like plant a tree in your backyard or pick up the trash on the trail or cut down the fence on your part of the property. So wildlife can get through or whatever the thing is like, find something like that.
00:59:08
Speaker 3: And then, That.
00:59:10
Speaker 1: And this is kind of like the way I’ve been thinking about more and more is like that puts fuel in the tank that builds like a reservoir of, of like ability to make a difference. And then all of a sudden you can like use that fuel to be a part of these broader collective action projects. initiatives, whether that is trying to make a difference when it comes to the roadless rule, or if it’s changing some policy down the line, or getting somebody elected who you think would represent your community well, whatever it is, I think if you can do that first individual action, start building that reservoir of hope and autonomy and ability, then you can then take withdrawals to then be a part of these broader group initiatives, and that that stuff just snowballs and gets bigger and bigger, bigger. And for all doing that, I think that is how most of the, of the good things that have happened for our wild world.
01:00:06
Speaker 2: That’s how most of that stuff happened.
01:00:08
Speaker 1: And I think we have an opportunity to, to be a part of that again. Um, but it takes that first step, like you said, of just deciding, okay, I’m gonna, I’m going to participate. Yeah.
01:00:19
Speaker 4: And what do you think the role of nonprofits is in that? Like ducks unlimited or mule deer or a bugle.
01:00:25
Speaker 1: Or, I think they’re the shepherds. I think that they help steer. They help teach. They help point in the right direction. They help gather. If you can imagine, every one of us individuals is like a snowball. And if you get a star rolling down the hill, that’s great. But you’re not going to build a big snow fort.
01:00:47
Speaker 2: You’re not going to build a big wall. You’re not going to build an.
01:00:49
Speaker 1: Igloo unless you can get all those snowballs together in the same place and building off of each other. I think that’s where you can get you know, RMEF and, you know, NWTF and BHA and all these organizations in their own ways are doing that. Um, and I think, you know, the more we can support them, I think that slots us as individuals into those collective opportunities.
01:01:11
Speaker 4: Right.
01:01:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do. I definitely do.
01:01:13
Speaker 4: I think that nonprofits are very difficult, you know, and it’s like, uh, there’s a lot of politics and stuff, but I’ve always said like, especially with, I think of ducks unlimited a lot and, and, If you weighed that on a scale, it would flip over on the positive side big time. Whether you’re mad at them or you’re doing all this stuff, like the fruit, the proof of the.
01:01:39
Speaker 3: By their fruit, she shall know them.
01:01:41
Speaker 4: That wetlands protection that they have accomplished would not have been accomplished without the nonprofit Ducks Unlimited.
01:01:48
Speaker 3: It’s really a powerful thing. And so.
01:01:54
Speaker 4: uh, that I, I wanted to, I wanted to leave on something too.
01:01:57
Speaker 3: And I’ve written about this, but.
01:02:01
Speaker 4: I’m always quoting Teddy Roosevelt, uh, Aldo Leopold, um, John Muir. Um, I mean, you, you’ve got a world of them in your first book. Um, and I’m, I love that, that we know those things, right. But that was a hundred and some years ago.
01:02:19
Speaker 3: Yeah. And, It’s not enough now to do those quotes.
01:02:25
Speaker 4: We have to be the people that are quoted by our great-grandchildren or the descendants. We need to be the people who are quoted. We need to stand up because it’s not enough to know the history. You have to be this history. We have to be the people who solved this water crisis in Iowa and the Mississippi River. We have to be the people who get these migration corridors established so somebody can hunt that mule deer in 50 years and go, wow, like have an experience like I had 30 years ago in 50 years from now and go, holy smokes, This is what Mark Kenyon said about this. We got to be, it’s no longer, it’s a wonderful time to be a hunter and fisherman conservationist right now because what we know, if you’re a hunter and you’ve spent a lot of time in the woods and you know how things interact and how they work and what breaks it and what makes it stronger and you get better deer hunting or better turkey hunting or what they feed on, Man, you know something that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans do not know.
01:03:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:03:51
Speaker 4: And that knowledge is golden right now. It is worth its weight in gold. And so, like I said, I ended like we did last time. I believe this. I believe in this, man. And I believe that we can do it.
01:04:09
Speaker 1: And I love that thought. I love that thought, Hal. You’re 100% right.
01:04:15
Speaker 2: It is not enough to lean on that history. It’s time to make our own history.
01:04:20
Speaker 3: It’s time to make history.
01:04:22
Speaker 1: And I would just say amen to that. And thank you, Hal, for walking that walk, for being one of those people that’s helping us build that future and writing a better history for our kids to someday look back on. And I damn sure well know my boys will be quoting Hal Herring someday.
01:04:43
Speaker 2: So thank you for that it’s something.
01:04:44
Speaker 3: To aspire to yeah that’s
01:04:46
Speaker 1: The truth hell well hey thank you so much for for all you do and for having this conversation same to you man
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