Ep. 385: A Wild New World

know what negging is? I don't know the exact definition, Like, uh, how do you explain it? Phil? When you nag something, it's a it's a strat feel smaller on purpose, it's a straight It was it was popular state. It was popularized as a strategy to pick up. Like let's say here, I'm gonna I'm gonna be me and Krant are gonna role play. No, no, I don't want to do it that way. Me and Krant are gonna role play? You

neg me? Like, like how you use it as a pickup strategy as a hit on strategy, like I would say to Krinn instead of being like, oh, let's say let's say we're young or young single people okay, And I would approach Krinn and I would say, um. I could approach Krean and said, like, my goodness, you look beautiful today, right, and that has one that's one approach. Or I could come up and go like your shoesn't look kind of funny, And that was popularized for a time as a way too, as a subversive way to

hit on someone. If you don't come in with a compliment, you come in with a with a like you know you should get you should change your hair. I don't like your haircut doesn't look great on you. And then you leverage that. Then that's leveraged. This is there's a whole book about how when people get all interested in kind of responding to that, there's a whole book about how to do it. Like Steve, I'm not sure your glasses matcher today, and it's in instead of the expected

thing would be like, holy cow, you look amazing. Would you like to have dinner? You come in and you're like, man, you should think about your updating your wardrobe. Right, and you've set this whole You set and play this dynamic. Right. The tension starts from every woman in the world just just can't help, but live the rest of her life to impress that man got it and try. It's very subversive, it's very manipulated, manipulated. Let's get back to nagging. Oh well,

I showed you my moose. I showed you my moose antler and it's n e G. I showed you this definition I would check the urban diction urban. It's like a slang term point being. I walked in, like, uh, you know, how do you have something impressive? You just kind of walk in with it? He was so happy about it. I'm sorry I didn't. I didn't mean to pull your attention away. You noticed this this giant moose andler. Um, I mean it's pretty huge. It's like as big as

like a baby's cradle. Yeah, I was. I was pointing out to our guests, who who I'm about to introduce. I was pointing out that I have a plan in which I'm going to turn it into a chair for my kids. It's that big. Well, I brought it in and Yohn, He's like, why are you showing me that? I don't know, is it big? Just right now? What's interesting? Are you going to make it into a chair? After you saw the pictures of the moose andler chairs that I showed you from Latvie. No, no, no, it is

a chair. No, it doesn't need to be. It already is a chair. Look at it huge. But that the idea from we're gonna do a whole might be We're gonna do a whole episode about Yi's Latvian trip. We just decided, so we'll we'll save that. Uh no, point being the only reason I'm bringing this thing up is, uh we there's been a long thing like how to bring this this, this is this is applicable to a very small subset of of our audience. Is how to get stuff from Alaska down to the lower forty eight.

So this year we're up hunting and Clay got a moose and he had the moose rack. I had my moose shed. We all the moose meat, and we used a service called Alaska Trophy Express. It's a great job, dude. We had like just frozen moose meat, the skull. I had my shed antler. It's like it's cheaper than than trying to get it all packaged and shipping it home on a plane now with baggage for ease in lo and behold, not too much long later there it all.

This was cheaper. I don't know the exact details on, but we ran the numbers and it was cheaper, especially like you know, especially if you wind up with the people. Got a couple of moves and just showed up safe and sound. Clay stuff got delivered down to He had a drive. You know, he lives on the border but Arkansas in Oklahoma, and he drove over to Oklahoma and picked it up. My my antlers sitting right here in the damn office the Laska Trophy Express with some attention

to it as well. Look look at the duct tape to make sure that that that lower prong doesn't get broken off. Right. They did a wonderful job. Um, and I was holding off on standex I wanted to see how it went. But they did a wonderful job. Uh. Our Steve guest Dan Flores, who we did an event with at the bookstore last night, who's out promoting his new book, Wild New World. I'm gonna have you explained the book real quick. But first I want to point

out there's something you might not know. You when we were first starting the show out, you were in one not first starting the show off, but in the infancy of the show. I can't remember what episode number it was. The episode we did with you was our first episode that ever like really got traction. Hm. That was shared you know, that that had a life that lived, They had a life at the time that kind of lived

beyond the normal subscriber base. Well, yeah, okay, it was kind of one of our first, like real serious shows that really just became a thing for us. This was the one we did in Seattle, that's correct. It looks like that might be episode three three. Was it that early? It may have been that early, but it looks like Dan's been on episode thirty three in we went We went back to the well, didn't we m hm. Tell folks about your new book. Damn um okay, I want

to set it up for you though. Yes, I read the entirety of that book, probably within about seventy yards of that moose antler without knowing it was there, Without knowing that antler was there. Yeah, Well, finished the book and then realized it was there, and realized it was an antler sitting right beside you in the grass. It's kind of tucked into some willows. But yeah, I read the whole damn book, not knowing it was there, but

it was there the whole time. Well, I suppose that says something about either your power of concentration or the ability of the book to hold you. Uh. Well, first of all, Steve, thanks for having me on again. It's great to be back with you guys, and hang out

with with you as well. Um. This new book, while New World is the title and the subtitle is an epic story of animals and people in America, is an attempt to try to, uh to write in a single volume of a little short of four hundred pages, um, the whole story or at least a whole story of the North American human, wildlife, wild animal experience. And um it's what is known in the trade as a big history.

It was kind of inspired when I began working on it by you've all Harari Sapiens, which I know almost all of us have read, which of course was a big history book about the origin of humans. Um. But I wanted to focus specifically on North America. It's where I live, It's the country that the United States is the place that I know best and where I know the amal's best in the history best. But I wanted uh to do justice to it. And so I've started

the story sixty six million years ago. This is a book that in three pages goes from sixty six million years ago down basically two events earlier in two so, in other words, up to yesterday. Um. And I wanted to start it that early because the only way to really explain how North America acquired its beast sherry of animals, uh, is to look at what happened on the continent in the wake of the great asteroid impact that wiped out

the dinosaurs and created the age of mammals. Of course, we oh that asteroid which which is called, by the way, the chick Salube impact or I didn't know, Yeah, I never heard that. We're you point out that it's a great word. It's a great word. It's a great word. Uh uh and it's uh it's coming into more common

use and recognition. I think it's named after a little Mayan town on the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, which is where this uh, this asteroid hit um And, as I said, the purpose of talking about it to begin with and describing the the effect of of the

impact on on the continent and on Earth. It was really to set up the age that follows, which is called the paleo scene, which is when North America began to acquire its animals, and that acquisition took place as a result of evolution of species that emerged in the wake of the demise of the of the dinosaurs. Uh, and also as a result of the migration of animals from other parts of the world, the most spectacular and charismatic of which animals like mammoths and massdons, for example,

and bison came out of Asia. Hey. Uh, I want to pause from it to ask a couple of questions about that strike had there If that strike happened right now, Uh, there's no way humans had survived or is that not true? Well, it would be. So that strike wiped out seventy of of life on Earth. It didn't take out everything. Um, it took out most terrestrial life, though. I mean we ended up in terms of vertebrates in North America with

only a couple of percent of creatures surviving it. I mean alligators survived it, crocodiles did, mostly reptiles and amphibians. And what enable things to survived was that they tended to be uh. Hidden back behind the mountain ranges on the opposite side of where the impact took place, and so it was possible for a few creatures that were isolated to survive. And I suppose, uh that's probably what would happen with people if we had an impact like

this one. I mean, this was a solar system wide impact. It was a gigantic asteroid more than seven miles uh in diameter, and I was traveling at two so it was the huge impact. We did it. We did this conversation last night at the local bookstore. I was talking about I never and the two things never occurred to me until I read Dan's book, is that it wasn't the first time that thing passed by. No, right, humans would be like, oh there it is again. Yeah, I

got a little closer. And every thing is that hit at a shallow angle? Yeah, like almost maximized for just blasting stuff right straight down out of the sky. Yeah, it did not hit from straight down. It hit at an angle, and it hit at an angle that uh was really severe on North America because it was it hit basically in the what would today be the Gulf of Mexico. Uh So North America a lot of it got fried. I mean, creatures just really got wiped out.

Of course, the aftermath of it, it goes for several weeks, producing tsunamis that are a mile tall, that bounce off of land all over the globe. Uh and if still left, uh these big piled up remnants of mud and debris five and six stories high on the ocean floor. I mean those things still exist and U and also hold do they have chunks of that thing? Yeah? Yeah, that the asteroid itself basically was obliterated, But what we have are the remnants of the shocked geology from where it

where it hit. But you can't there's no there's no known piece of the thing. I'm not aware of there being any known pieces of the thing still there, although uh, I may be wrong about that. Because we do know that it was we do know what the substance of the asteroid was. It was a chondrite, which is the most one of the most common forms of meteorites today that fly through the sky and and produce those beautiful

uh night sky uh comment like like appearances. But so we know that it was a condrite, that may imply that there was some some residue of it that that enabled people to identify what it was. But I was really intrigued when I was doing the research on this, and there's a lot of new work on it which I ride to. I tried to incorporate in the book by the fact that it was such a blast that the ojecta uh from the impact exited Earth's gravity and

essentially spread across the entire Solar System. And there are paleobiologists out there who argue that there is a good chance with an impact on a planet like Earth that was filled with life, that although it nearly destroyed life on Earth, it very likely spread microbial life across the Solar System two places like Mars to Jupiter's moons to

Saturn's moons. We're not gonna know any of this until we definitively find out whether or not there is life on places like Enceladus or Europa or uh some of the moons of the outer Solar System. But this impact was was large enough that it may have done that very thing. It may have been a kind of a

genesis effect for life in the Solar System. Did you research at all, um, when you're looking at the impact of such a great thing that has such mass and speed, could it or did it affect at all like the Earth's rotation, it's orbit, its path, and if not, if it was still super so small, like what would it take, did you like look into what would it take to actually move the Earth out of its orbit or to

pause its rotation for a second? Yeah? I uh, well, you know, as a as a writer who is not you know, a scholar of this um, I was able to use only the the articles that I found, and I haven't found anyone yet who has actually investigated whether or not this this nudge the Earth in its orbit

or slowed its rotation or anything like that. I mean, uh, you know, we think that the impact that created the Moon, I mean very early in in Earth's formation, there was a gigantic impact that probably produced the moon, blew the Moon off the Earth to create the Moon that orbits

around our planet today. That that one probably did affect the orbit and probably the rotation, But that would have been one many times larger than even this chick slube impact or uh and the chicks alube impactor seems you know, that seems plenty big enough that it can produce a mass extinction. It's hard to imagine one that would be even larger. But I mean, you know, you look at the Moon through a telescope, or look at Mars sometimes

photographs of Mars. I mean, and it's fairly clear that planets are constantly being bombarded, particularly by asteroids that formed from the planet that wasn't created between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. That's the asteroid belt, and that was a place where a planet was trying to form and never quite did so. And so it's the spot that shoots all these projectiles out through the through the Solar System, especially to the inner planets of the of the system.

So I mean, I include a photograph uh in the book of UH this gigantic to me, gigantic meteor crater in Arizona, because when I was right, yeah, no, there's no looking at that one, and what happened? No, you don't look at it and wonder I mean, when I was writing about this, I thought, well, you know, hell, I've got I mean, I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I've got there's a meteor crater. I know, that's only about a five hour drive from here. So I hopped in my jeep and drove over there to look at

this thing. And uh, I mean it is worth. It's very far off Interstate forty east of Flagstaff, just a little south on a dirt road. I mean, it's well worth going out and having a look at. But I wanted to shoot a photograph I've had in order to sort of give readers of the book some sense of, Oh, no, it does a great job of it. I don't I don't want to dwell too long on this whole, Like, we gotta get from there. We gotta get from there yesterday.

But got to two things. Have you, um you saw in the news that that NASA just was toying around with how to nudge, nudging an asteroid to alter its trajectory as like a sort of, you know, a potential future defense mechanism from such thing happening in the future. And have you seen the movie Melancholia. I have not seen Melancholia. No, it's dark one through most of the movie. You can't everybody, it's just a movie about people going

about their lives, and you can't tell. It's just everything's off. Everything's frantic and off, and it takes you long time to realize that it's it's counting down to a strike mm hmm. And everyone's known for a long time. Yeah, and just everything's gonna end. And so it's a it's a it's not society is an unraveling, like in a way that you know, the people who traffic in zombie movies would have it unroll. It's just unraveling socially in strange ways, and an eventus you put together what the

issue is. This is what's looming over and you're you're experiencing you're experiencing life, um toward its end. But it's been known for quite some time. Well I think that's that's precisely what would happen, because we do have the ability now to uh figure out when an asteroid is coming close enough to hit or to pass very very near us. Um. So yeah, I mean NASA obviously takes all of this seriously enough that it's developed and it's working on a technology to try to deflect asteroids that

could possibly strike Earth. And you know, as you just said, we had about ten days ago an example of what appeared to be certainly a successful hit it and uh working out the movements of that body through space. It looks like it wasn't nudged out of the direction it was it was going previously. Uh. In that moment as you, as you explained, sets up where you've basically wiped the slate clean, and it gives you a great starting point to explain how things came to be here when humans

discovered the place. Yes, that's what I try to do with this opening chapter. Um. And so after the chick slue impact, I mean, I'm able to cover millions of years uh in pretty rapid fashion by in effect describing the evolution of the North American species that come to be kind of the icons of continental evolution. And they're not quite the animals that most people assume, because two of the most iconic creatures that emerge from North American evolution we don't many of us don't even think of

as being American animals. And one of those is that the camel, which evolved some forty five million years ago in North America, eventually spread to other parts of the world where it survived, but by about ten thousand years ago, Camel's the most recent camel that we had in North America was called Yesterday's camel. It was a single humped camel that would look very familiar UH to those of us who have the image of a camel in our heads,

and it became extinct about ten thousand years ago. And the other animal, which of course UH has produced a modern day dilemma is the whore, which is a distinctively evolved North American UH group of animals that emerge fifty six million years ago, fairly quickly after the the chicks alop impact. And UH they also work here down to about eight thousand years ago we think, when once again they became extinct in North and South America and somehow

survived in the rest of the world. But in addition to those, I mean we we evolved UH wolves and coyotes. Those are the family of canads are North American creatures from about five and a half million years ago. So they've been around singing what I call in another book of mine, the original national anthem in America for for a very long time. UH. Jaguars are North American evolved cat.

We have a whole host of species that that we know are distinctively American evolved animals, but many of the ones that UM that Europeans from the last five hundred years have thought of and and that wildlife departments still kind of think of as the classic North American animals are actually migrants from other parts of the world, from

places like Asia. So newbies too, Yeah, newbies. I mean, as I was saying last night at the bookstore, I mean one of the ones that we have now realized here just in the last why you why I had you talked about that? Yeah? Yeah, is the buffalo? Yeah? So we were we were discussing. I was discussing one place where I think where I was challenging Dan. I think I said, you're out of your mind, is um?

I was putting to Dan, how uh, considering the debate around wild horses, feral horses or wild depending on your sentiments, the debate around areas where you have conflict between feral horses and native you know what people would call native wildlife, like desert big horns and mule deer. Um, how could you be a wild horse advocate considering that they're in

some ways detrimental to native wildlife? And and I was teeing Dan up to explain his viewpoint, which which I know from reading the book about you know, the need to be precise and careful around throwing around like native wildlife when you look at it from a deep history perspective. Yeah,

that's exactly right. And so I mean the horses probably our classic example of that very thing that you teat up for me, because it's an animal that has been around for fifty six million years in North America, with the single exception of the eight nine thousand years prior to fifteen hundred or so when Europeans reintroduced these animals to nor America. So they were just gone for a very small amount of time, which is one of the reasons.

As a result of their adaptation in North America and their evolution here, they've done so well when we when we brought them back, I mean they were completely preadapted, having evolved here two conditions in North America. Um. But the point of that chapter two describe what happened in North America after the the impact is to set up

the beast shary that was here when humans arrived. And the last about eight or nine pages of chapter one is actually about the turn to Africa then and describe the evolution of of humans there and eventually they're spread humanity spread out of Africa around the rest of the world. And so what I'm trying trying to to create. Obviously, is the possibility of humans ultimately finding these sort of lost continents North and South America, which are uh the

farthest away from Africa on the planet. They're the last

continents that humans migrating out of Africa find. And what they find there is this unique beastary that's composed of all these animals that evolved in America and a whole host of others that ended up over time traveling the land bridges between Eurasia and America and becoming part of our our native beast here animals like mastodons and mammoths and sabertooth cats and all the bears that we have, all the deer, all the sheep, um, the mountain goats uh,

and of course the bison, which is I was about say a minute ago, is one of the last ones to arrive. We think bison only arrived in North America about two hundred fifty thousand years ago. Uh. Passenger pigeons, for example, had come or the progenitors of passenger pigeons we think fifteen million years ago, and mammoth's seventeen million years ago. So we had animals that had come to North America and become part of the native bastry far far longer ago in the past than than bison did.

And yet we think of bison, you know, I'm not arguing against this, but we do think of them as being our classic North American iconic animal, distinctly American, distribute American. Yeah. You there's something that surprise when you're describing the how things shook out with our bast areas that and I might be getting this a little bit wrong. Is you can talk about imagining the western half of the country is being easy attic. Yeah, in the eastern half of

the country was it? Is it more of a European And my message is up, no, no, you're not. Uh no. I I do make that point and in several places in the book, um and sort of start with that as a essential premise of the book by describing what North America was like at the time of that that asteroid impact. It was not actually a single continent yet

it consisted of two pieces. Appalachia is the eastern Peace and it's basically from the Mississippi Valley eastward to the today's Atlantic coast, and of course the Appalachian Mountains are already in place, a very very old mountain range, and the connectivity through land bridges to that piece of North America was to Europe through UH today's Greenland and Iceland,

and UH down through the British Isles into Europe. The western piece, which was in the two pieces were separated by what's called the Inland the Great Inland Sea, and the Western Peace, which is known as Lara Media is basically a piece that would be from the Rocky Mountains, which didn't exist yet at the time of the impact

westward to the Pacific coast and it's it's connections. Land bridge connections were to Eurasia on the on the western side, primarily to Asia itself, and so the exchanges of animals to those two different parts of America tended to come from two different directions. I mean, even some of the European naturalists who got to North America UH in the

seventeen hundreds. For example, Mark Catesby, a famous UH British nationalists who who works in the American South, was far more interested in America's birds and reptiles because he thought the mammals in the eastern part of North America that he was himself studying were too much like the mammals of of Western Europe for him to spend much time on them, So he sort of ignored the mammals because they were familiar and focused on on these other groups.

Whereas when people like Lewis and Clark, for example, crossed the Mississippi River and began to approach the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Pacific Coast, I mean, they their journals are full of these very distinct impressions of being in a whole new world with animals that, having grown up in places like Virginia and Tennessee, none of them had ever seen before, they had never been exposed to. They

were all brand new to Western science. I mean, from prong horns to prairie dogs to mule deer to grizzlies. It was a completely different world. And it's a world that was much more influenced by Asia and migration out of Asia than the eastern side of the continent that was more influenced by by Western Europe. I'd love to cover it again, but we've covered so many times with

um archaeologists and different paleontologists. The the blitz Creeg hypothesis in the in the in the correlations between UM the arrival of humans in the New World and the extinctions of the man with the Masodon, and all the debates about who is to blame. UM. So I don't want to I don't I'd love to you, but I don't want to rehash it. How but you get a new

thing I haven't thought of for a long time. So you you cover the Clovis period UM, and the chapter is via the Beautiful And I learned a bunch of stuff about Clovis that I had never known. UM. I had never known an accounting of how many Clovis points archaeologists have recovered in the continent and where they came from, which was fascinating. And I learned all kinds of suff

about Clovis. And anyone that reads a book is gonna I guarantee you, I don't care how checked out you are on ice AH hunters, You're gonna learn more about ice A hunters. And you cover the extinctions and the mysteries and different explanations for the extinctions, and in some of the smoking guns that did attribute human cause to

those extinctions, and other stuff beautifully. Well. Then you then you get into a period in the book, which you I think you called the Native period, and we go through all these extinctions when humans arrive, but then you focus in on what doesn't happen for ten thousand years extinct and stop for ten thousand years you have people here, extinctions stop and then holy ship, do they start back

up again when Europeans arrive. But but can you talk a little bit about why they stopped, what went on that where you had some semblance of of stasis with

North American wildlife. Yeah, it's a it's a fascinating period because it speaks to this, uh, this almost romantic hope we have that at some point in time humans uh were a benevolent force in nature and that somehow we were able to go in the past, we hope, looking back on it as a kind of a lesson for us now, we were able to go for many thousands of years, in the case of North America, ten thousand years after the Poli Sustine extinction with almost no extinctions.

Uh you know you're talking about. Yeah, there's there's one. It's not it's not quite a complete success story. There is one. There is a flightless sea duck on the Pacific coast of North America basically from the Channel Islands in California along the California coast up into Oregon. Um that was present when this period, which I refer to as Native America. Yeah, I call the chapter Ravens and

Coyotes America after these deity figures. But it's basically ten thousand years of Native North America after the end of the Palistocene. And we know that those sea ducks were hunted um as soon as this period begins, and they do finally become extinct, but it takes seventy five hundred years for this to happen. They don't become extinct according to the archaeological sites of about eight or ten different uh kills of these sea ducks until about twenty years ago.

So even with hunting, the sea ducks themselves last a long time. I will also say that flightless birds all over the world. As humans spread out of Africa and settle other parts of the world, flightless birds are usually the first things to go. They're the low hanging fruit. That's what people can get at easily. Uh when we have dogs, the dogs can get at them two and so flightless birds of all kinds all over the world

are going to go pretty quickly after humans arrived. It was the Dodo flightless, it was yeah, and then the MOA's and the MOA's the Great Hawk, which was our northern hemisphere penguin, which became extinct during the eighteen forties. It was one of those that became extinct as a result of the UH, the sort of mayhem you mentioned after Europeans arrived. But this ten thousand year period is

really fascinating for the relative lack of extinctions UM. And we've also made it into this kind of UH, this kind of baseline model, because Europeans preserved when they arrived five hundred years ago this image of UH, this feconed wonderful, kind of virgin continent that was just brimming with wildlife of all kinds. And so at the very end of that ten thousand years you have this this European UH journaling that describes a continent that was really rich in life.

So the question obviously is how did this happen? How was it possible for people to live here for ten thousand years and inflict almost no extinctions in contrast to the earlier period and the later period, And so it was it was something of a puzzle to figure out because not frankly, hardly anybody has tried to work on this, and in contemporary like in Europe during that ten thousand years,

they never slowed down. I mean they continued to like, they continued to extirpate, you know, from Great Britain and just on on and on like species. Maybe maybe it hit a crescendo with the Plcesne extinctions, but they continued

to whittle away at the place. They whittled away at it to the point where the only reason in Western Europe in particular, that we still had horses, and we still had wild cattle rocks, uh, and we still had sheep, and goats were numerous enough that they were more difficult. But cattle and horses in particular survived only because we

domesticated them. Had we not domesticated them, we would have simply in Western Europe followed the trajectory of the earlier period where I mean there's a there's a side in France where the remains of twenty thousand horses have been excavated from being corralled and slaughtered by these these late hunters.

So yes, the that was over a period of time that was over time, it was Yeah, it wasn't a single event would have been quite a rodeo, but uh no, and horses obviously were you know, they were really hard

to kill. I mean, you know, I I have information in the earlier parts of the book about the Neanderthal hunters who very clearly were hunting horses, and I mean these guys ended up being beaten to death by close in encounters with these really powerful, aggressive animals, I mean broken thigh bones and fractured faces and gall dout eyes and and so it was not easy to do that, but Europeans managed to reach to get horses to the point where we had to domesticate them, essentially to save them.

In North America, though, here's this ten thousand year period

where hardly anything like that really happens. And what I came to uh and I start that chapter out by the way by uh by climbing up on the cliff at the Madison Buffalo Jump one morning and walking back to the spot where I had read that the herds were often started running towards the edge of the cliff and running it myself down to the point where the animals were falling off the cliff into this huge bone bed five six seven ft deep at the bottom of

the cliff, and sort of speculating with that sort of strategy, which happened all over wherever buffalo were found, I mean the buffalo jump. At one point down in West Texas a place place called Bonfire Shelter. So many animals were driven off that cliff that the reason it has that name today is because they spontaneously combusted a huge massive animals at the foot of the cliff spontaneously combusted and burned this cliff for hundreds of feet up towards its rim.

How then with those kind of techniques were people able to do this ten thousand things? I got to interrupt you. I was my boy was mowing the lawn and I was trying to save up leaf clippings, you know, for the garden and stuff. And he left, so he like parks the lawnmower over a can of gas, leaving all the leaf clippings in the leaf bag. Oh boy, I'm trying to explain him when he like does not believe me, I'm like, listen, man, you can't like that stuff, you know,

can spontaneously combust. How could that be true? I'm like, I can't explain it, dude. Look at but I'm telling you, man, you can't leave big bags of leaf clipp It's like, no kidding. Yeah, well he could have created his own bonfire shelter then. Yeah. So so this, you know, is sort of how i'd set this up to start the chapter with with accounts like this, and so here's what

I think. Here's what the various explanations are. There is a map in that chapter that provides readers with the regional populations of Native people at just before the arrival of Europeans. And that map goes from the northeast to the southeast, to the midwest, to the southwest, to California, the Pacific, Northwest, the Great Plains, the Arctic, and all

together north of Mexico and this includes Canada. Were convinced that five hundred years ago, the total population of North America north of the Rio Grand River in north of Mexico was a little less than five million people. In order to keep your population at that level, you have

to actively try to control population. And so one of the arguments in this chapter is that because Native people understood the relationship between their population size and their use of nature and the the ability of nature as hunters and gathers to sustain them. They deliberately kept their populations small, small enough that they didn't stress uh, the animals that they depended on. Now, there were some animals like buffalo.

After the play su seeing extinctions removed all the grazing competition, buffalo become the only major grazers left on the Great Plains. The horses are gone, the mastada are the mamis are gone, the camels are gone. There's almost nothing left out there. Uh. And so buffalo, like passenger pigeons, are going to multiply to such numbers that they basically are adapted better to the continent than humans are. Humans acting as predators on

the populations of both of those animals. Buffalo and passenger pigeons are not sufficiently large to ever really lower their numbers. But there are plenty of other animals like elk, for example, that could have been hunted down to very low populations, and in some areas there's archaeological evidence they probably were

hunted down. I mean, I try to in the following chapter, when I get Europeans in North America, I try to start out with us the story of a h Spaniard has shipwrecked on the Gulf coast in the fifteen twenties. And this is before the effect of the Great Disease die offs for native people can have any kind of effect. And this guy describes a North America that's not brimming with wild animals. Uh. He describes a North America that,

uh where the animal populations are fairly low. I mean, at one point he says it was almost an accident if anybody had a deer skin in there, uh, in their village. But mostly what people do over that ten thousand year period is to keep their populations low. There's also the effect of a delayed movement to the so

called Neolithic revolution, which is the spread of agriculture. Uh. That had happened in Europe and Asia and even in Africa much earlier because of population pressures on wild life, people turned to domesticating plants and moved to domesticating animals and agriculture. That happened about five or six thousand years later in North America because the population pressures weren't so

severe here. So we have a much later movement to an agricultural revolution that can produce larger populations of people. And then the last thing I talked about in that chapter is this ideological difference. And I tend to argue I think that this is accurate that Native people in America preserved a very old way of thinking about the relationship between themselves and other animals, and that old way was that humans are simply another part of the animal world.

That yeah, okay, we'll tell I'll tell a story of the ticket for sure. You remember that one. Oh it was great because I to get into what you're going to get into it, you need to tell the chicken. Yeah, okay, I'll tell the chicken story for sure. But let me say, in order to set the chicken story up properly, Native people tended to think of other species as as kin

to humans. And I mean their stories are full of examples of people being able to pass from human societies to animal societies, to joining buffalo herds and intermarrying with

other animals. It's an old idea, and the reason I think it's old and it got preserved is because much of our early um the art, for example of Chauvet Cave in France, includes what archaeologists call therian thropes, where you have a figure painted on the walls that's half human and half animal, half human and half buffalo, for example. And so this kind of lingering sense of humans as part of the connection a kinship with other other creatures

informs the way Native people think about wild animals. I mean, I mentioned at the bookstore last night. You know this wonderful these wonderful accounts of the ceremonies that they created to do whenever animals were difficult to find the purpose of the ceremonies were was to convince the animals that no, we're not engaging in any hubris. We don't think we're exceptional. We think that you and we are are just the same, and we want you to return and will engage in

in these marriages, these faux marriages. So people will dress up in the skins of animals and they'll do these kind of uh simulated coital uh things in the ceremony. And one of the wonderful descriptions of this is that

when these ceremonies were successful, the animals came dancing. They came dancing out of the buttes where they were hiding, out of the ground where they were hiding, out of the waterfalls, where they were hiding and turned to humanity, this idea that when they weren't, when you weren't finding animals, it was on people, like like the way you'd approach a friend that you offended, You have to come and make it right. Yes, you can make it right. What's

the problem, something got askew. We'd like to make it right. You please come back. That's exactly it. And they would, and the you know, I'm not prepared to say whether the ceremonies themselves produced new herds of bison, But what I am prepared to say about that is that the ceremonies in cullocated a belief in the people who did them that we've renewed our relationship, our kinship with these other creatures. We're not separate. We humans are not exceptional.

We're the same as you are. And we have, uh, we broke your trust, and so we're coming to you to try to make things right. That became a very different kind of ideology than the one that Europeans brought Your chicken as evidenced by my chicken. And I I tell I'm glad you like that story because this is

my my oldest memory. Um, this is from when I'm four years old, and um, I went to dinner last night, uh with a woman who is uh, she's a psychologist, and she was confirming my idea that one's oldest memories usually or from about four years and uh, and the ones you remember those four year old memories obviously don't remember everything that happened a four years old, but you remember the ones that imprint as a result of an

emotional response. And this was a very emotional one. And it's probably set me uh in motion to ultimately writing a book like this, because I was haunted by this my entire life and what it involved was being four years old and uh having a pet chicken. I had a little little yellow chicken that my parents had bought for me, and it was only a few weeks old,

and uh it was. It lived in the house with me, and I fed it and I gave it water, and we also engaged in these games have chased through the house, and so we would chase underneath through the kitchen, underneath the furniture, around the sofa in the living room, around my mom's sewing machine. For some reason, I still remember the legs of the sewing machine as my chicken would run through. It was a way the chicken get away from me. But one day I'm chasing the chicken and

I miscalculate. I'm four years old, probably pretty clumsy, and I stepped on my chicken and kill it. And so my mom and I go out in the backyard and we have a little box and we dig a hole and we berry my chicken. And so the question that I asked her, and more specifically her response to the question, is the thing that haunted me my whole life and probably led me towards ultimately writing a book like this. I said to my mother, So Mom, I'm going to

get to have chicken again in heaven, right. And what my mom said in response sort of encapsulated the whole European perspective on the relationship between human beings and other animals. I mean, she essentially went right to the heart of what Europeans brought to North America with their religion, their market at economy, and their ideology about how animals were in a completely subservient position with respect to the human beings. And at four years old, somehow that didn't seem right.

That didn't seem right to me, and through most of my life, it hasn't seemed right, and so I go to some links in this book to explain the origins, particularly the religious origins, of this idea, where humans are the only creatures made in the image of God, the only creatures that have an immortal soul. Everything else, all other living beings are not made in the image of a deity. Of course, Native people would have completely insisted that that was wrong, because they had all sorts of

animal deities. But Europeans had the idea that there was a God in the sky, that humans were the only ones made in that image. We were the only ones with souls, and so everything else was completely subservient to us. And UH was there, as the Bible says, for our use unto your hand, I will deliver them, is the line in Genesis, And so that sort of thinking led

to UH. What I argue in the book is four hundred years from fifteen hundred to nineteen hundred of the most widespread and complete destruction of UH populations of wildlife of millions of years of evolved ecological diversity on the continent White wiped out much of it over a mere four hundred year period, and it's not comparable to any thing else you can find anywhere else in modern history. I mean, I looked around for other examples, and there

are certainly places where people will take out a particular species. Uh, they'll they'll focus on a particular region that they want to convert the farming and try to wipe out all

the predators or something. But nothing that looks like what we did between fifteen hundred and nineteen hundred in North America, where one species after another we either pushed to complete oblivion, are reduced to the point that we have to go to these heroic, herculean efforts to save the last few of them so that those of us who are alive now still have a few animals to look at. I mean, and it's a you know, it's a kind of a

it's a bummer of a story. I try to interleave in that story accounts of naturalists who are studying all these animals that Europeans thought, you know, the Bible doesn't say anything about America, so Europeans think, hell, how can this place even exist? And how can these animals even exist? Whoever heard of a prong horn antelope or a grizzly bear that's not in the Great Chain of Being that uh,

that Aristotle put together. Uh, so it becomes this, uh, the prelude to this kind of enormous destruction that in the twentieth century we have to kind of move heaven and Earth to recover from. But of that four hundred year period, for three hundred years of it there was I was surprised learners. For three hundred years of it, there was an honest debate, a debate I don't evenally understand it. It It was debated whether extinction could even be possible,

whether extinction was was is it theoretically possible? I was very surprised to hear that's the thing that people used to argue about. Yeah, they did, indeed, And the explanation for that is part of this religious ideology. And I mentioned something called the Great Chain of Being a few minutes ago. It comes from Aristotle, but it was wholly adopted by Europeans who came to the America's five hundred

years ago. And it was an idea that goes back two thousand years in Western civilization that everything, every living thing on earth was created at a moment of creation by a deity, and so everything that was created was perfect everlasting, immutable, which means that no animal ever changed. Everything stayed exactly the same, and there was no possibility

because it was part of a divine creation. There was no possibility for what we today call extinction, for something to ultimately go away, because the world was perfect as created by a divine being. And so Europeans bring that without even questioning, this great chain of being idea to America.

And it's only in the late eighteenth century when workmen digging for rock and gravel in Europe and then people investigating UH these old hot spring sites and salt licks in North America began discovering the bones of creatures that nobody can identify as being living creatures that anyone begins to wonder, well, so if there are these gigantic bones, why is there not an animal out there with bones

like this? It's there. If there is a creature here with what appears in North America to be l elephant tusks, we don't have any elephants in North America. How could that be a possibility. And so it's the discovery of all these extinct animals out of the Pleistocene UH that sets this debate in motion. And only in the very beginning years of the eight hundreds, does Western science began to say, well, wow, it looks like so things don't last forever. It looks like there have been animals that

were once on the earth and are now gone. And of course that ultimately begins to raise the question of so why are they gone? And the next thought that occurs to you, in a logical chain from that one, is what would cause an animal to go extinct? What factors out there in the world would produce something like the complete loss of an animal. This is a whole new area, as as I think you gathered when you

read this, of thinking about how the world works. And it's what finally began by about the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties to have people wondering what in the world cause the extinction of mammoths and mastodons and a whole host of other creatures, and can we somehow, can something,

somehow do this to existing animals? And meanwhile they were busily doing it, being they were busily doing it, and they didn't have to wait very long to find out whether it was possible, because by the eighteen forties, this northern hemisphere penguin. These giant, heavy beaked birds called great auks which nested. Uh, they nested all over the North Atlantic, but from Newfoundland all the way down to Florida, all along the the Atlantic. These great hawks were a feature

of coastal life. Had a penguin. We had a penguin in the northern hemisphere, and we completely wiped it out by the eighteen forties. I was surprised. Uh, egg picking, Yeah, egg picking people, they're cooking for breakfast. They went after eggs, yeah, And and it was kind of a tragic thing because these were birds that only laid one egg. I mean they had a nest with one egg in it and year, one egg a year, and so you you take away

their eggs. I mean this happened to you know, we think that things like this happened to animals like masks or mammoths, because mammoths don't These giant elephants, they didn't. They weren't able to give birth until the cows were ten years old or so, and they would only give birth. They had a really long gestation period, so you only give birth every two or three years. And with a low population turnover, like just like the auk with its

one egg. I mean that makes certain creatures more susceptible to extinction than those like passenger pigeons, for example, are like bison, which are exists in the millions, or creatures are rats are? I mean, you know, there are a whole host of other animals that uh certainly multiply into

large numbers. But yeah, these animals that humans were focused on, not that they weren't focused on on rats, because they were bringing Norway rats into America, and obviously we had pack rats here already, but the animals that we were focused on as part of our market economy. And I

want to make sure that I make this clear. It was the idea of wild animals essentially functioning like trees you could log, like coal, you could dig up out of the ground as natural resourced commodities in a market economy that produced this wholesale slaughter of so many creatures. That's why the ox disappeared, is the birds became fair for sailors in the Atlantic who found that you could I mean, and this was true of so many species

in North America. They were naive of humans as predators, and so they would let humans just walk up I mean there's a horrible account of people hunting great ox where they would say, we would just go up to an island where where great ox were nesting, gather up their eggs, and then we would set up a board plank between the island and our boats and have a couple of guys get off and just heard the ox over the plank into the boats, where we killed them

as soon as they arrived. And the account goes on to say, you know, thanks to the deity for creating a creature so innocent that it comes sustenance for hungry sailors on the seas. I mean that happened over and over again with creatures that were innocent of human predation and essentially sort of allowed themselves to be wiped out by an economy that was based around turning animals into resources.

You covered so many um extinctions, new or extinctions, and in some cases you can in some cases you can imagine that that a lot of the players involved perhaps weren't entirely clear on what they were doing. The human players involved perhaps couldn't picture the old outcome of what they were up to. But there are cases where people damn sure knew you talk about that with the sea Otters. I mean they knew in fur seals, they knew we

got them all. We heard there was another spot. Let's go, let's go look and say and when they leave, they're gone. And they were aware that they were They were the masterminds behind it. The people really making the money behind it, had all awareness that it was a race for a vanishing resource. And there was no impetus to call it quits. No, and you're you're competing against uh, you know, people from other nations. I mean with the sea Otters and the

first Sales. I mean it's you know, the the Americans, the Russians, the Spaniards, the I mean, the whole host of of nationals are out killing these animals. And I mean it actually reached the point between the Americans and the Russians where there were so few of these animals left that they began cooperating with one another to locate and exploit the last last groups. And yeah, that that Pacific Coast hunt for for for for fur seals, uh

and and sea otters. Man, that's an abysmal story. You know, it's a particularly since I mean in the case of sea Otters, I mean, these these animals are critical to the ecologies of the Pacific coast because they keep the kelp beds in check. And UH, once they're gone, I mean, the whole Pacific Coast just becomes drowned in kelp uh I mean, and it's just it's it's a story that

you can I mean. It even features the deliberate conscription of native hunters, kidnapping them to make them go out and and hunt these animals for these European fur companies UH and American fur companies UH, down to the last few colonies of them. And the only reason they're not gone, particularly in the case of sea otters, which were regarded as you know, I mean, I think I said last night at the bookstore, there's an account of one of these uh sea otter hunters where he says, why do

we go after these animals? You don't understand except for a gorgeous woman and a newborn infant. The pelt of the sea otter is the most beautiful object in the entire world. And UH, you could get big money for sea otter pelts in China, and so that's where most of them went. Uh. They were harvested off the Pacific coast of North America and then hauled by ship over

to China where you could sometimes. I mean there was an account that really set the sea otter hunt in motion where uh, and China people were willing to pay a hundred and twenty dollars per pelt. Most pelts didn't bring that. Eventually they brought twenty or twenty five dollars though, and that was a lot of money back in those days. So yeah, they knew what they were doing. They knew

what they were doing with passenger pigeons too. I mean that's one of the you know, bizarre ones in fact, in fact, because the passenger pigeons story only happens like about a hundred and thirty thirty five years ago. Uh, my grandparents were still alive when they were passenger pigeons flying in the skies in Louisiana. I mean I actually chart in the book how many years it was that I missed passenger pigeons in my home state of Louisiana,

and it was about forty five years. Uh. Yeah, it's incredible, and there were, of course billions of them. I mean, in the last ones were the reason I know that people understood what the hell they were doing is that they were slaughtering them on the nests, not giving them an opportunity to raise the next generation of birds. You just went in and found out where they were nesting,

and you killed them on the nests. So they understood that this was going to be the end of the most numerous bird uh in the world, the most numerous bird species in North America UH, and yet went ahead and pushed it, and nobody seemed to be worried when that last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in hardly any newspapers ran an obituary about her death, and one of the newspapers I found that did this is what it said, Well, you know, it's too bad about Martha, but we all

ought to be happy that the passenger pigeon decided not to stick around with us the way grasshoppers have, I mean, so there was no remorse about it. There was a sense that animals like passenger pigeons, like bison, like wolves, ag wars, grizzly bears, these were just too wild to stay in a country that was modeling itself on Europe.

England didn't have brizzly bears, England didn't have jaguars, England hadn't had wolves since the four Hell, we're just gonna We're gonna emulate England and wipe out all those things in North America. They're just too wild for civilization. Talk about when when the British used extra patient or try to use regional extinction as a weapon against America. Yeah,

that's a fascinating story and it's it's uh. The shorthand version of it is the creation of the fur Desert in the American West, and it happened in the eighteen twenties, primarily over a period of about eight or nine years, when the Hudson's Bay Company, when England and the United States were still debating on who own the country west

of the Continental Divide. You know, Thomas Jefferson had claimed and had sent Lewis and Clark to affirm America's claim to the country west of the divide all the way to the coast. But the Hudson's Bay Company and Great Britain we're still claiming that they owned much of that country. And we don't resolve that debate um actually until the eighteen forties when we finally draw the line between the

United States and Canada. So the country in the Rockies, west of the divide was a disputed territory, but the British traders realized that in the Husson's Bay authority realizes that we can't keep these damned Americans out. They're crossing the divide no matter who claims it, and they're trapping beavers and all kinds of animals on the west side of divide. So here's the way to keep them out. Will just as they the term they used was, will

ruin the country, will kill everything that's over there. I mean, this is when bison disappear from west to the divide too. But what they particularly focus on because it was the target of the American trappers, were beavers. And they worked out a strategy with these Hudson's Bay brigades, but led by people like Peter Skeen Ogden, for whom Ogden utah his name, that you send out these parties of trappers with their wives and girlfriends to sort of keep everything

camp life going along well. And you go from stream to stream to stream. You do a bunch of trap sets uh one afternoon, you do another round of trap sets the next morning, and that's usually good enough to wipe out all the beavers on a particular stream in a place like the bitter Root Mountains. So over about eight years, these guys trapped west to the divide and

what is mostly now Montana and Idaho and Utah. They trapped thirty five thousand beavers, and they liberate our ruin six thousand beaver ponds which had stored water, of course, all over that country, that water, providing camp sites for native people, water for wildlife. All those beaver dams now fall into disrepair and drain, and the streams began running through them and tear the dams up, so that they've affected a kind of an ecological transformation of the entire

country by removing the beaver and it's dams both. So it's the story is and I write about a couple of other instances where this is the case too. I even argue that the American Revolution and part was set in motion by the anger that American colonists had for the British government trying to stop them from hunting white tailed deer, which they were wiping out and almost all the colonies, and also trying to prevent them from crossing the Appalachian Alleghany Divide to hunt the animals in the

Mississippi Valley drainage. The British government had actually passed a law, the Proclamation of seventeen sixty three, to stop that movement to preserve the wildlife of that region. So the idea of killing animals actually becomes a kind of a geo political idea, as a contest among people's colonies and competing nations for territory. You uh try your best in the book to put to rest the idea that killing off the buffalo was actually a deliberate, articulated government play to

subjugate the Native Americans. Yeah, I do, uh, it keeps explain that a little bit. Well, I think our Uh what I can say to sort of initiate that is that one of the most common explanations for what happened to the buffalo is what you just described is that the buffalo were wiped out by a conscious government policy, a conspiracy actually between particular players in government in the federal government and the American military and the post Civil war riors to wipe out buffalo in order to force

Native people onto reservations in the Indian Wars and initiate the process of a culturation and assimilation for Native people. I mean, and that's a that's probably the most common explanation that people trot out. What I trying to do with this story was to figure out how did a story like that begin? And what I came to was a very interesting story. I didn't find really any references an occasional one to something like this being the explanation

for the demise of buffalo. It's certainly not, for example, in William Hornaday's great book The Extermination of the American Bison, which is published in does anything like that. But by the early decades of the twentieth century, people were starting

to talk about this as an explanation. And I tracked it back to the publication by a former buffalo hunter of a memoir called On the Border and the Buffalo, and it was published in nineteen o six, and this particular author essentially describes his comrades and himself as agents, sort of secret agents of this conspiratorial government program to wipe out the buffalo in order to force Indians to

yield in the Indian Wars. And what he says is, we should be given and there are people in government who know this, we should be given medals of distinction for what we did for North America. And then the thing that really set me in motion looking at this because there was an easy way to check whether or

not it was true, he says. And I even understand that when the State of Texas was considering a law to stop the hunting of buffalo in s Texas, General Philip Sheridan journey to Austin and made an impassioned plea to the Texas legislature not to do this. And the guy even goes on to recreate a speech that Sheridan was supposed to have said. Now, you know, as a historian, is fairly easy to go. Okay, let's look back at the records of the Texas Legislature at a bill that

was designed to do this. Because what sort of caught my my attention was I had studied the attempts in the Federal Congress in the eighteen seventies to pass a couple of bills to protect Western animals, and the Texas

Delegation had always been resolutely opposed to those bills. The Texas Delegation always referred to those bills as they would say to other members of Comngress, you're just being sentimental, and of course in the eighteen seventies calling another guy sentimental that was that was casting aspersions on your manhood because only women were supposed to be to have sentiment.

And so that this whole story made me kind of really wonder And so I I had a graduate student who I sent to Austin who was he was very into the whole Buffalo story, and he spent his spring break there combing through the records of the Texas legislature and came back and I said, because he had gone down with the idea, I'm going to write the full story of this, all the texts of the bill they

were proposing, exactly what else Sheardon might have said. He came back and said, Man, I gotta tell you, Texas never proposed a bill two do what this story says. And not only that, I can't find any record anywhere that Philip Sheridan ever addressed the Texas legislature about any topic, and certainly not about a Buffalo topic. And so I looked back at this story and realized the entry to it was it is said, so this guy in his book was basically just providing a hearsay account anyway that

strategy is still us today. A lot of people are saying yeah. A lot of people people say yeah, yeah, it's that great passive voice thing. You know. I can't say exactly who it was, but a lot of people are saying, yeah, he's corrupt. Yeah. Yeah. So that's how the story started. And when I began looking at the actual evidence for all of this, I couldn't find any other evidence that there was ever. I mean, Philip Sheridan, you know, who has been the villain in this story

for a century. I mean that guy was actually a kind of a nationalist who spent his last year's protecting at wildlife in Yellowstone National Park. And uh So, anyway, what is fairly clear is that this is a story sort of like the story we were telling ourselves in the early twentieth century about the Civil War, that the Civil War wasn't really about slavery. It didn't have any the South wasn't trying to defend slavery. Civil War was

actually about states rights. Well that makes you know, everybody feel a little bit better about things. Okay, so Southerners weren't actually fighting to defend slavery. Uh they were fighting just to defend states rights. And and that's all there was to it. A Southern way of life. This wasn't about slavery at all. This story about Buffalo is one of those stories that kind of makes everybody feel better. Okay, it was the government that did it. It wasn't the

fault of anybody else. The government, you know, the dastardly federal government once again had this plan to to wipe out one of our great iconic animals. The truth is, the federal government had never entered into the whole wildlife story at all, and wouldn't do so until the year nineteen when it finally started acting to stop the market hunt. But the federal government had just sort of stood back and been paralyzed and not been able to do anything.

And so they just let market capitalism do its thing. And what market capitalism did was it wiped almost every single buffalo off the continent. They just let these guys go out and shoot them down and strip their hides off and cut their tongues out and ship them back. And I mean, it was an industrial It was very

much like the Industrial revolution elsewhere in America. The whole thing was kind of an industrial process of wiping out these these animals talk about the talk about the I rebuild Woodpecker, which is something we covered off on last night. But I'll I'll tee it up right now the same

way I teach it up last night. Is Uh, after reading the story about the ivybuild Woodpecker, um, which I wasn't I knew, I knew it roughly, but I I didn't really put together how intact and recognizable America was at the time, at the time we lost ivorybuild Woodpecker, where Americans were having a unified common experience. We were in the A. We were in the age of being able to immediately distribute news and ideas all around the country.

We had suburbia, we had a middle class. Uh, it was like we were America and we and it wasn't a case of only realizing later what we'd done. It was a case of, um. It was a case of we just watched it happened, like like like if someone said, these two cars are gonna collide, um, but we're just gonna let them quide to see what happens. Yeah. There was no sort of mystery about who was to blame or what went on. It was just we just I mean,

we culturally we we kind of signed off on it. Yeah, I'm afraid that you you described that very very accurately. I mean, this this happened at a time when modern America existed. I mean everybody was driving cars. Uh, they had phones, they had the country had been electrified. People had electricity in their homes, they had washing machines, and I mean it's it's modern America. I mean, and the

story kind of comes to its conclusion. Uh, it doesn't come to its conclusion actually until last year, when the Fish and Wildlife Service declares that the ivory bill woodpeckers

officially extinct. But this last hurrah of uh what's probably the second largest woodpecker in the world and another one of our charismatic creatures from America from millions of years of of American ecology gets just think I and I think the explanation for the way you you did tee it up is that we were so used to just letting these things happen because people adopted the position, well,

this is just inevitable. This is the inevitable consequence of civilization. Uh, it's the it's this is just collateral damage in creating a modern country. There's not anything you can do with it. Sure we're gonna wipe out, you know, ten billion passenger pigeons. Sure we're gonna wipe out thirty million buffalo. Of course we're gonna wipe out you know, our only native parents, the Carolina parakeets, these beautiful tropical birds that uh, that existed all the way up in the New York State.

Of course we're going to do that. And so people acted as if this is just collateral damage and what what can you do? Uh, you know, and making our fortunes. This is uh, this is what happens. So the story kind of unfolds this way. It's the nineteen thirties. We have just lost the eastern prairie chicken, the heath hen I mean, and this is you know, a kind of

almost allurid peeping Tom's story of uh. New Englanders were observing these birds go one by one, uh in the late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties, until finally there was just one last heath and a male, booming ben they called him, who survived about three years by himself booming every spring to try to call a female and having no luck because there were none. So we've lost this bird. Did you know about did you know about that? There was a like a prairie chicken on the East coast.

I'd maybe heard without thinking about what a heathen was. It was a prairie chicken. Yeah, you've everybody's heard about a heathen. But no we didn't. I didn't know the in and outs of this like a cool little prey chicken that people would go hunt for it. And yeah, it sounds like they who did, just like the dusky

on the coast, Yes, very much like that. And so that bird was gone by one We had discovered that the Biological Survey, which is the forerunner of the Fishing Wildife Service, had discovered in the nineteen thirties that we were down to the last sixteen whooping cranes, that trumpeter swans were almost gone, that the bald eagle was in

danger of extinction. In fact, one of our sort of the first endangered species kind of act that we pass is the ball Eagle Protection Act in Y. And the only reason it gets passed because well, the balleagle, after all is our damn national symbol. So what do we do with all that money with him on there? So? What are how are we not going to save this bird. That's our national symbol. But in the midst of all this, of all four of these birds going, this is when

the Carolina parakeets the last. There are two subspecies. In the second subspecies, the Atlantic Coast version, goes extinct in that same stretch in the n thirties. So it's kind of a come up, this come up, this period, and right in the middle of it, the incredible beautiful ivory bill woodpecker is pronounced by the Biological Survey to also be extinct, same year that the heathen was was announced

to be extinct. And then three years later a group of ornithologists from Cornell are in Louisiana and one of the last pieces of old growth forests left along the Mississippi River, and only by the way, about a hundred and twenty five miles from where I grew up. And that place has been the center of cool bird ship for a long time. It has, indeed. Yeah, it's the Mississippi and all this, all these great forests. I'm sorry,

I'm sorry, you're right. When I was out speaking of the cornellogy Lab, they've been leading to charge on bird stuff for a long time. They have for sure, yeah, and they were, they were on top of this. And so a couple of their people, including of a videographer guy with a video camera or a motion picture camera UM is on the scene when they discover in this patch of old growth forest that they find along the Mississippi, seven pairs of ivory bill woodpeckers still alive in this

patch of forest. The forest is called the Singer Tract because it belongs to the Singer Sewing Machine Company. And so when the Cornell folks make this discovery, and and I've got, by the way, a screen grab from the motion picture imagery they shot of the ivory bills there in the book. It's one of the few still photographs that anyone has of an ivory bill woodpecker. You know what, I somehow didn't know that existed. You didn't know what existed.

I didn't know you could look at a picture one, yeah, because usually all the ship you got to look at paintings. You gotta look at paintings. You have to look at Autubun and Wilson in people like that. I want to I want to let me interject for one sec. People need to pay attention to fact here that uh they thought they were gone. Yeah, you know what, someone has We talked about this with a friend of ours last night. When someone has a sort of near death experience, it

readjusts their priorities. So at this point that you're getting at where they find these, it was assumed they were gone. Imagine what what what? What? How Is it not just national elation that that you'd be like, oh my god, we thought we had destroyed the species. But look we've been given a second chance. It's like, you know, and uh, well, what's the Jay the Jimmy Stewart movie. Everybody watches every Christmas Wonderful Life, Right, you know, he gives us a

second chance. He's good, everything's gonna be better. Here we are like we killed them all. Then some time goes by and it's like, no, you know, by the grace of God, we have a we can start afresh, exactly the one would think, because yeah, they had been pronounced extinct in nine now we have found seven pairs of them. So the story proceeds like this. Cornell sends a young graduate student, a guy named James Tanner, down to do what amounts to kind of salvage natural history on the

Ivory Bill woodpecker. I mean, the only natural history we really had done on ivory bills was done by people like Audubon and Alexander Wilson. Nobody in the late nineteenth century had really studied them. Um, and so Tanner, with all the modern expertise that an ornithologist can bring to the game, puts together and writes a book about it, this wonderful study of ivory bills, of their nesting habits,

of their mating habits. Uh, how they're young, react, what sort of predators they have, how they respond to people, he said. For one thing, they're not really shy around people. I mean, they don't really go duck and hide when I show up. They just kind of exposed themselves out in the open, he describes. And we actually have recordings with that, uh, with that motion picture film that was

shot of them off their cries. They made several different uh sounds, including a sound that people way back in colonial history had referred to as the toy trumpet in the woods. The ivory bill sounds like it makes a cry like a toy trumpet, they said. And he described how ivory bills flew through this beautiful old growth forest, you know, and as I say in my description of all this, John James Ottoman had always said, whenever he saw an ivory bill fly through the forest, it reminded

him of a Van Dyke painting. It was just this gorge, just image. And so Tanner studies these birds for about four or five years, and Cornell sends him out meanwhile on this reconnaissance all over the South everywhere there is remaining old growth to see if there are others, And everywhere he goes he can't find them anywhere else. So they know by about nineteen thirty eight or ninety nine,

these are the only seven left. These are the only ones, and they're sometimes they're getting a chick up, occasionally a chick is getting snagged by an owl or something. Their population is growing a little bit. And at this point the Singer Sewing Machine Company announces to the world that it has sold the logging rights to this piece of ground It owns to a Chicago logging company which plans

on commencing logging the area in nineteen forty. And so there's a couple of more years as the logging is actually taking place, of people dashing out uh trying to get one last glimpse of the birds. Roger Tory Peterson, for example, goes down in n gets one one glimpse

of the birds. But the last bird anybody ever sees is a female nesting in a tree that the loggers actually cut down, and as the tree is falling, she flies out of it and goes doing this this sort of rollicking, sweeping flying motion that these woodpeckers made over the Mississippi River. And it's the last time anybody ever sees one in North America. It's the if you put that in the movie, I would roll my eyes. Yeah, I know, I'm like, oh, brother, yeah, it's unreal. Yeah,

it actually happened though. Yeah, And so you can roll your eyes at the fact that we let this happen, as we had done so many freaking times. It's just somehow that one, I don't know, that one just feels different. Well, it happens in the modern age, as I think, part of the difference. And you know what, one of the ways it feels different is if you look at look at what damning, Damning is in the Columbia base and whatever, what damning has done to salmon. You know, you can

point and be you can point look like okay. But one way to understand World War two was that, um, we beat the Germans by out out smelting them. We produced more aluminum. Therefore we produce more aircraft. Producing aluminum is extremely energy dependent, right, you know, we beat this, this this global threat. Um, we had a nation to feed.

We produced all this agriculture and so all shipping, big all this stuff, and so a casualty's salmon and one could come in, one could come in and present a trade we made and you look and be like, yeah, you know, when you put it that way, I guess that was a trade we made. But in this case, it's just like it's what, it's a logging tract. It's a logging tract, a single log like an amount of money that will sort of wind up in a very it's like a sort of money. It's not a nation's history.

It's a it's a chunk of money that will wind up in a very few people's bank accounts. You know. It's so it's just very it becomes very personal. You can almost go and find you could go and be like, oh no, it was kind of like this guy and this guy and those are the two people that like that that it came down. Yeah, it's like those are the two people that said, Okay, who they were, Well,

I don't know who they were either. And although I have not seen that the Singer company ever made this this argument, the timing of this is in ninety right before the year before the United States enters the war. And of course there was the argument that the Olympic Peninsula got logged Olympic National Park got logged because we needed the lumber for the war effort. So I think, as I said, I haven't seen that this they could patriotic,

they could make it as a patriotic act. We had to do this in order to win the war, so we had to sacrifice those last seven pairs of ivory bills, you know. And that's in in historical terms. I haven't seen that. Though I haven't seen it in historical terms of one of the family. Yeah, it is a hot tip for the family. I mean, Alan nevins the Great American History and one of his arguments about capitalism, you know, capitalism, Okay, it did all these things. Uh you know that, Uh,

we're not so pretty. And he didn't really know about this story, I tell, but I would add you know, this destruction of so many, so many animals. But then he argued that, but what capitalism enables us to do was to win World War Two, to defend, to defeat the Germans, uh, to defeat the fascist menace to the world in World War two, and so that kind of argument.

Then ultimately you could say almost we've used it to trump everything else, anything that got sacrificed, the collateral damage is too bad, but it enables us to do this. Did you you ever read Kurt Vonnegut? Oh, yeah, sure, Kurt Vonnegut I was talking about he had two great observations about military uniforms. He said of the Nazis that it was almost like they knew when they chose their uniforms. It's almost like they knew that they would always be

bad guys in the movies. That's a great line. And he also talked about when it came out with Desert Camo. He said that apparently they're preparing to fight the next war on top of a Denver omelet. Yeah. Man, Yeah, those Nazi helmets in particular, you look at it was like, we need to come up with something that nobody else has a helmet like that. Yeah. No, kidding. Oh man, you got any follow ups? Johnny, I got too much,

too many follow ups. It's such a good book. I want to point out a little bit um to our readers who are have you know, tend to be heavily involved in hunting and fishing. It's um. It will challenge a lot. It'll challenge a lot of your notions about uh, your It will challenge a lot of your notions about your heroes and icons and idols. Um. I didn't get it in all that today, but uh we did last night.

Something make makes quick work of the mountain men. Well, if I can squeeze one in before we get he's like edging towards it. He doesn't want to let it. I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it. I was telling people that be prepared for be prepared for some of your your hunting, your your iconic hunting heroes, including some of the early players in the in the wildlife conservation movement. Be prepared for a perspective that will

challenge some of your assumptions about um. There their heroic deeds, which is good, it's good for your brain. Sure. Well, here's one that I've been tangling with lately just in my head, and so I'm glad we're here and I can pose this to you and just kind of get your thoughts on it after you've exhaustively been thinking about it. But I always I'm a proponent that we all think of ourselves as part of nature and as hunters. I think that you know, we we play that out to

a maximum as much as we can write. But what is it to say that all this destruction that we've done and these changes over the last couple of hundred years, four hundred years, that that isn't natural and that's not

the way that it should be. And I want you to understand that I'm all for, Like I wish I could see the pilliated woodpecker and had seen the great penguin of the East coast, right, But when I really try to step back and look at it from like a really really big viewpoint, it's like, well, if we really are as part of it, we're being animals that yeah, there's been other animals that have They don't show remorse when if they wipe out a certain you know, species

that they used to feed on and they adapt and start feeding on another gets a weird freeze and they can cross out to an island ever been to before, and they go out there and kill every damn thing

on the island. Are they evil? So? I mean, I can kind of keep going on that, but you can you understand my sort of question and just sort of this idea that I grapple with right that, even though it is terrible and it makes me sad to think that we as a human species are gonna what looks like just you know, eat ourselves out of house and home, But in the end, is it is it just as natural as an ice age. So it's a great question. Uh, yeahnny.

And I'll also say, and Steve can back me up on this that the listeners who uh are convinced that hunting is uh a lifestyle that has characterized human beings from the beginning and all through time, are not going to be disappointed in reading this because this story with in terms of humans, starts at the point when we become upright predators in Africa and develop a strategy for a whole new, whole new approach to living, and it

produces who we are. It enables us to grow big brains, It fosters a language that increases the connections the neural network and our brains so that we are able to take culture, which I argue in the book every single animal just about we now know is cultured and transmits culture down through time. But as a result of the hunting impress on us, we are able to put together a language that allows a very rich culture for human beings.

And I mean I tracked that story through the point where I mean, as I said last night in referring to the Neanderthals who are our ancestors, all of our ancestors, we all have Neanderthal genes in us. These people who were present down to forty thousand years ago had a lifestyle that was more carnivorous than wolf packs. And we know this from nitrogen isotopes in their bones. They ate

more meat than wolves of the time. Yeah, it would, no kidding, and they and they also rested when when humans finally got to North America and began hunting the wildlife they found here. They represented forty thousand generations of previous hunters, which is one of the reasons they were so good at it. I mean, I tell a story and the like I think about getting into hunting, no they didn't wake up and think about that man. They

then there was nothing like that. I tell a story in the book about a mammoth hunt that took place in southern Arizona, president southern Ariza, near Tucson, where there was a herd of mammoths. This group of Clovis hunters approached. Thirteen of the fifteen animals were adolescents and calves, And when archaeologists did the excavation of the three sites associated with this particular kill episode, all thirteen calves and adolescents were found in one spot, each of them with one

Clovis point in them. Thirteen Clovis points for thirteen adolescents and calves. Then they found the bull about out eight miles away with two Clovis points in it, And five miles away they found the cow, who had obviously fought to the end to try to protect those calves. She had eight Clovis points in her. I mean, this is a record of people who were damn good at this. So you're not gonna be listeners out there. You're not gonna be disappointed at this long term story of the

role of hunting in the human experience. You may be disappointed when you encounter humans who are motivated by an idea that they're exceptional from all other creatures and that they have an economy called the global market, who will go out and slaughter animals by the thousands in order to provide pelts, are leather or some other part for

a global market economy. Now, can you give the can you quit give the This is this helps to respond to the honest uh the quote by the buffalo hunter who's like, well, you could say we were whatever, or you could say we were I can't remember what it was. And he goes and I guess that's probably more true. Yeah, it's a sentence that we're talking about, how are we different than animals whatever. It's a sentence that an animal isn't gonna say. No, It's a sentence that an animal

isn't going to say, uh, that's true. An animal besides us, isn't gonna conjure up this this sce hell. And it rests on you know, hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated culture that enables Frank Mayor to say this. But and it follows by the way I I sort of look at about four or five of the buffalo hunters and how they react to what they've done. And some

of them are completely defensive. I mean, there's a guy named Jay Wright Moore who basically says, you know, all this bullshit here with these conservationists about what we did to the buffalo, there was not a buffalo out there between the Arkansas River and the Canadian border that was worth a grain assault compared to any one of the settler families that got killed or died in the migration westward.

These animals just weren't worth anything. And of course what he's expressing is the classic we're creating civilization here, and these were all the collateral damage, uh, animals, of of doing that. But Frank Mayer was kind of more thoughtful about it, and he was a buffalo hunter in Kansas in the eighteen seventies and he wrote a memoir, a really good memoir of of doing all this and he kind of reaches the end of his memoir and he says, and I can't remember the exact quote, but it goes

something like this. You know, some people say that we just did this for the country, and others say, hell, we just did it for ourselves, and we didn't really give a crap about the buffaloes or what anybody else who comes later and is not going to get to see a buffalo ever thinks. And he says, when I reflect on it, I think that's the way it was. We just didn't give a crap about either the animals or what anybody else who came later was gonna kind of thing. Uh. So there's a range of opinions, as

you would expect from all these guys. But yeah, it goes like that. And while I said last night, when when Steve was sort of holding my feet to the fire on this particular one, that I was breaking his heart, uh by talking the way I was about buffalo hunters and about beaver trade, I was saying that you denied them their lived experiences in humanity. I think he said

something like that, very thoughtful. But what I said, sort of in defense is that actually throughout the book, and I do this at least four different times, including with buffalo hunter, including with Jay Wright Moore and his brother, including with a wolf bounty hunter in Colorado, including with a plume hunter, these guys who kill snowy egrets and roseate spoonbills and all for the plume trade to decorate

women's hats, uh, and a couple of other instances. What this market hunt for animals did do is it enabled people who were rural who had really no access to an economy where you can make money. It allowed them to make money, and it allowed them entry into the middle class. So Jay Wright More and his brother, after they stopped hunting buffalo, they're able to buy a ranch and stock it with cattle in Texas. The wolf bounty hunter in Colorado is able to do the same thing.

He kills UH. He makes seven thousand dollars on a hundred and forty wolves he bounties in one year, and he buys a ranch in Colorado and stocks it with with Herford's one of the guys who is the plume hunter in Florida and who is almost wiping out UH snowy egrets in Florida and driving flamingos basically out of the country. This guy ends up making how much money doing it that he buys himself an island a yacht, builds a house, and puts all this great furniture, brand

new furniture in his house. So it's a way of getting into the American middle class. But for somebody like me looking back on that which happened in my home

state in Louisiana. I mean, who I identify most with is somebody like Henry David Thureau, who, looking back on what happened in Massachusetts before he ever came along, penned this incredible journal entry in eighteen fifty six where he says, you know, I just I don't want to look up at the night sky and think that before I came along, some demigod came along and plucked all the best of the constellations out of the sky, so I don't get

to see them. He said, It's like listening to a symphony where hell the French horns are gone, and the strings are gone and the drums are gone. And he ends this with this classic line, I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth, not one that somebody has come along and defiled before I ever appear in my own life. And so I mean, that is

the other side of the the story. You know. John mcfee's phenomenal trilogy on American geology, Uh from the Planes and Yeah, it was collected altogether as Annals of the Former World. At one point in the book he says, if I had to sum up this book, meaning his book, in one sentence, it would be that the top of Mount Everest is a marine limestone. Uh. Dan does the same thing, and he sums up this story in two words that he puts at the end of one of

his chapters. And those two words are fucking pathetic. Yeah, all that ship you're talking about. Yeah, you know, I think about all the time. Man, Like if I wasn't to get into my own psychology, okay, which I guess I am, becaume there the story of the Clovis hunters killing everything off, it's seductive for a lot of reasons, like it tickles the imagination, but it's there's a seduction

there um for this reason. And likewise, like oh, wolves will go to an island and kill all the moose or kill all the deer out an island, and and and you love them. You love them those stories because then you can sit back and go see it just happens, man, It just happens. Nothing to get worked up about. But in the bad year, in the deeper, deeper part of your brain, there's like there's this there's a inherited carried guilt, and you can be like, I don't know why dold

wolves have it. I don't know, they don't. I don't think they have it. But that ain't gonna make years go away. No, and I don't I don't wish it to go away. How you wrote about that in your Buffalo book. I can't remember what specifically. Yeah, when you when you kill that buffalo, Yeah, you you wrote about you know you couldn't help feeling some guilt about it. Yeah, especially something is beleaguered and as complicated as that one. But now I realized that it's just a it's just

a new be fake. It's a it's a new bee fake American animal. Anyways, I should have called it eight in seven American Buffalo. I should have called that book Asian Buffalo. It should have been about horses. Yeah, it should have been about horses. That's right, Steve well may In It's it's a um, it's a chance. It's a really challenging, uh in depth book. I don't know what will happen. I don't pay a super I don't know

how it all works. But like for me to to see that book nominated for a National Book Award, or to see that book nominated for a Pulitzer prise, wouldn't even kind of surprise me. I don't know how you're gonna top it. Well, I may not be able to top it, that's right. I mean, I'm no doubt write more books, but yeah, this one is kind of a it's uh, it represents thinking about this since I was four years old, That's what. That's what I mean. I mean, there's so much in it. Reading I was like, how

the hell do you know all this? There's so much in it, and so much note carding and and taking, like wildly disparate stories and sets of ideas and come by ironing them all, hunting everything down. Um. It's ah, if you had just been a historian and been an academic and in the end you you laid that book out and fell over dead, um, people will be like, oh, you know there, it is right what works are saying. But I don't know what you'll do. I don't I don't know how you'll I joked last night that your

next one will have to be about the cosmos. Yeah you did, because I don't know where you go from here. Ah, unless you narrow back in. Yeah, well that's probably what one would do, is narrow back in so this this is very likely the the big story, the big narrative, like you might there's another. This last thing I'll point out about the book is, um, there's some incredible restraint there, because there are areas that I know, you know really well and that you spent years of work on and

have written about widely, and you don't do them. Yeah, you know, And I was like, dude, man, that dude just he just he could have gotten just twenty three pages right there with his other ship. But you just the restraint, well, part of the restraint was trying to hold this thing to under four hundred pages, which I managed to do by only two pages. And so there were there were plenty of spots I have to say.

I mean, you know, it would be easy to write an eight out of this story because I'd be like, he damn sure knows a lot to flesh that story out that he didn't include the Yeah, well that just there were times when I said, Okay, I've already done

something like this, so I'm not gonna go there. I mean, the coyote story probably yeah, sure that And then I mean just stuff about with when when the horse was reintroduced or you know, or or what might say and introduced to reintroduced, depending on your perspective, Like the implications of that, the fact that you resisted the urge just to lay that ship out all over you. Yeah, well

I felt like I had done that. So and and as as I said, I mean a lot of it was trying to make this a book that that one could read, that you could sit out in three or four days and you could actually read it and not have to you know, I mean books that get too long to me. You know, you tend to after two hundred pages, you put them away and you may not go back for a month. And I was trying to make sure that I was writing a book that somebody would start and within about three or four days you

would you would go through it. Man, I will send you a couple of men emails while I was reading it, but didn't. Well you should have. I'm I'm always up for main emails. Uh someday I'm gonna do uh some do I'm gonna take it, and I'm gonna do a footnoted version where where like I was, I was telling you last night, all my footnotes are going to begin with well, yeah, but stay commentary huh, well, yeah, but keep in mind they were super badass. Might be a

little essay. Yeah, Steve should just take notes all over the book, and then we can reprint a copy of Dan's book with Steve notes better he reads the whole thing.

And then I get to just pause and be like, what Dan's leaving out here that I think people should really pay attention to you, man, is like some of them that can be a new audio, yeah, version of the audio book, Like, for instance, on the Eldo Leopold stuff, I would pause and be like, I'd like to point out that Eldo Leopold was and remained throughout his entire life a very abada hunter play. It's like somehow that got left doubt age do this to you. But we

gotta get to some trivia. Dan's gonna be Dan's gonna win trivia, I'm afraid. Okay, well, it looks like last time the trivia guess once that was my lovely wife Adrian say that congratulations to her. You're gonna say for trivia, right, all right? Stay two for trivia. Wild New World, The Epic Story of Animals and People in America by Dan Flores.

Check it out and it'll it'll stretch your brain out and and sometimes uncomfortable ways, but ultimately your brain will just be bigger and in better So enjoy and for people listening now, it's actually available. It is available. Wild new world, it's a wild old world. Thanks Dan, Are you bad guys like you? Tw