This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything.
The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I T E dot com. All right, everybody, we're joined today by
the Prairie Preacher. He's in from Tennessee. I was excited about him coming on as a guest, but I'm not anymore because he was just trying to explain to me that Pennsylvania is the South.
I told him parts of Pennsylvany.
I told him that's not true, because I of my own maxim if you can ice fish, it's not the South. Honestly, sitting here, he tried to lay some bullshit ecological argument on me and didn't even try to tackle the ice fishing question.
Lay a bullshit sociological reason on you. It's true, man, parts of southern Pennsylvania are the South.
Man. We'll get into this in a minute. I wish we were talking about Ohio because I have such a great Ohio story I want to tell, and I associate it with Pennsylvania because I had driven out of there into Ohio and then the story happened, So it doesn't really fit.
You're always starting stories and never finished.
But this is all on hold because there's all this stuff.
Crims just got a root canal she's got, she's all novacane up in this. Say something? Does it sound slurred?
Oh no, it's like in the front, I feel I feel weird. I feel like a fat I have a fat lip in the front, left side, right side.
You don't look fat lipped. Okay, it's all on your head. So if Chris is normal, is normal? Quick? I gotta get into some stuff. I got a h we got we got like a bucket of just tear. Like really, people, people really fed up.
About last week's episode, which I'm going to try to address for a while in a minute here why they're right and wrong to be mad. But but back to our the prayer Preacher Dwayne Askedes, doctor Dwayne Estes, Uh he's poor on geography, but strong on.
Strong on ecology.
Dwayne Essa serves as the executive director at the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, Full Professor of Biology, director of the A. P.
S u Rbarium. Where is that? What is that apple?
That's like a plant museum?
But what is a P. S You?
Yeah, Austin p State University just outside Nashville.
Okay, the herbarian Principal investigator for the Center of Excellence for Field Biography Biology.
Sorry.
In January twenty seventeen, he co founded the Southeastern Grasslands Institute with colleague THEO. Whitsell. And we're going to talk about a lot of his work with grasslands. And I got a boatload of questions for you. We got to do something. But then we're going to talk about the questions. And just a key up on the questions. One of my many questions is one already brought up. I'm going to allow you to to retort about why Brody's a Southerner.
No, I'm in.
Northern Brody's I'd be like a Brody's a Southerner.
Needs to be divided into several different states.
Okay, why Brody's a Southerner?
Upset?
Now, how Clay Clay should all in because he's gonna be like just distraught that now, Brody's that.
Southerner.
Yeah, I'm liking this.
Now.
I got another question about this, and I want to get into this with you. Is like.
When reading about the colonial American period, so late Colonial American period, mid seventeen hundreds, that that these long hunters would go into present day Kentucky and you see similar things from southern Indiana where they're like I can't see a tree, Like, how the hell is that true? Don't answer me now, but just noodle on that. And then when they talk about going into cane breaks that are so big you can get lost in cane breaks? How the hell is that true?
So noodle on that?
Got it?
Noodle can Yeah, how that be true? How long does he have he's got I don't know, five minutes, ten minutes. Uh? You cool very much?
All right, make sure you're on that, Mike, Dwayne when you're talking.
Got it?
Thank you?
He is just didn't hear him? He is cool with that.
There's I got so many questions about this stuff, why things are different? And then like, is there any possibility of getting southeastern grasslands fixed back up again?
Hmmm? Good question?
Noodle on that.
Uh okay, So lots of consternation about an episode we did last week where we do a State of the Union with We did a State of the Union sort of a State of the Conservation Union with Joel Peterson, who is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and people just upset about how that conversation went.
And I feel like, I want to, like, without Joel in the room, not that I would have said anything different with him in the room, I want to context you, Liza, a couple of things and offer a few observations to people who really feel like the way that the way that we've discussed the incoming administrations actions around conservation issues has been inadequate. But first, allow me to explain a
couple of things from my position one Joel Peterson. Joel Peterson is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, And for people that weren't listening carefully, the Theatre Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is they are a d C organization that works on federal policy. All right, This is not like they're not like grassroots protests movements. They work on federal policy, meaning engaging with lawmakers about federal policy.
As I tried to explain, this administration is here for four years. This administration might likely have a round two. Depending on how things go, they might have a round two where someone such as JdE Vance carries the MAGA mantle into another four years. If you worked in federal policy,
ask yourself this. If you worked in federal conservation policy, and you have a high likelihood the way things look right now, I would say a high likelihood that you will need to be engaging with this administration for the next eight years. Are you telling me that it's unfair to say that you're trying to get the lay of the land, trying to look at who's coming in, trying to look at how the decision making is going, and trying to take a somewhat slow, gradual process to engaging
with the administration around conservation issues. Does that really strike you? Is that irrational that you're waiting a second and watching and assessing how decisions are being made, what they care about, what they don't care about, in order to engage in a potentially eight year long dialogue about conservation now, Joel Peterson laid out when we sat down to talk with Joel Peterson. Prior to Joel Peterson coming on the episode,
Joel was already concerned. He's like, anything I say is going to become outdated by the time you post the episode. And before he came on, he wanted to clarify when is it coming out? I need to choose my words carefully about when it's coming out. I talked to Krinn Krin said, will be able to put it out the following Monday. We made a joke about how anything that happens today is already going to be obsolete by the time the episode releases on Monday. We release episodes on Monday.
It's always driven me kind of crazy, but that's how we do it. There's a bunch of reasons I'll explain some other day about why we keep a certain cadence and don't just drop instantly. Trust me, it makes sixty percent. That's sixty percent makes sense. So Joel Peterson comes on
already concerned. Then between Joel Peters Joel Peterson's appearance on the show and the release of his episode, The The Doge Boys, the Administration, however you want to put it, axes thousands of Forest service positions and at SOMEHAE we get a lot of emails from people again not listening carefully, being like, well, how could you not bring that up? Well, that's why that didn't come up. That hadn't happened yet.
In fact, this is the first time I've sat in front of a microphone since that did happen.
But hold that thought for a minute.
And think about this before you get like, before you start talking about who really has the back of public lands people and who don't ask yourself this like like Trump ran on the promise of having Elon Musk form a group called Doge, and that Doge was going to go in and look for federal efficiencies and reduce the federal workforce. He ran on this.
And won on this.
People that are run around saying it's a coup, It's like, that's an odd coup that you win in a that you win a landslide election campaigning on the fact that you're going to have a specific individual do a specific thing. If you win, then you win the specific individual does this specific thing. And somehow people are mistaking what this
is really all about. This isn't me saying what I think about it, But come on, like, like, don't just start reading the news one day and not go read the news from the other days and start thinking you understand what's going on. Also, ask yourself this, and I'm going to get around to what I think about this in a minute, ask yourself this. Do you think Elon Musk gives a shit about the environment? I mean, this guy has already focused. This guy has already set sale
for Mars. He's interested in Mars, which is a lifeless planet. So if you think appealing to Doge on the fact of conservation and land access and biodiversity, he's a interested in the in the least biodiverse place you can possibly think of, which is a place where life is inhospitable. That's where he'd like to go. He wears a colonized Mars shirt. So you think that coming to Doge and talking about access and biodiversity, they don't care. Like they
don't care. They don't care. As Trump pointed out Trump, Don Junior is a hunter. Okay, Don Junior has at times, like Don Junior has at times in the past, I'm not sure about currently has it at times in the past, supported different conservation groups, holds lifetime memberships with conservation groups.
The guy likes wildlife. Okay, he's not driving this. So for people to think that you might go that like that, For someone in federal policy to take on like a complaining tonality at this point right now might make Elon Muskin doge reconsider cutting forest service jobs. It's like, get real, that is not how you're gonna shape any kind of action with and within this administration. You're so naive to think that that that that's what you're gonna do. Here, Randall, butt in at any time.
I I don't disagree with you. I mean I think, like, do you want me to butt in.
Whenever you're writing. I'm just want you know you have the right to butt in and Dwayne.
Dwayne's probably sitting over there and wonder what the hell we're talking about because you didn't listen to the thing we're talking about.
And you can comment on it too, or you can just stick to what you want. This is something I have to do.
I'm not speaking for Dwayne at all. So here here's the other part about this. Other agencies like to understand these for services. I'm gonna read a letter from a for service gun a minute, but let's back up. Other agencies are being axed Okay, us A I D. Is being dismantled, enrolled in under the State Department. Now ask yourself this question to be honest when you answer this. Just promise me you're going to be honest with yourself. Did you know did you know that USAID was not
under the State Department? Like, answer that in all honesty.
Okay.
However, USAID is being dismantled to be put under the State Department. The administration ran on the idea of dismantling the Department of Education. They are closing doors, turning off email addresses, and axing the place. The Justice Department is making huge cuts, The FBI is making huge cuts. The military is probably going to be making big cuts. They're already outlining cuts they're going to make within the military.
So point being, I don't applaud any of this. These are areas that I'm not even an expert in, but I see this going on. So to see that the Forest Service, so the Bureau of Land Management, is going to make a bunch of cuts. I can't look at this. I can look at that and say that really sucks. And I personally think that really sucks. They're cutting things
that I care about. But I can't look at it and see that the administration is targeting land management agencies because they're dismantling non land management agencies.
So in looking at the cuts to Forest Service and the cuts.
To BLM, which are our big land management agencies, look at it in the context of a broader conversation about what is happening right now writ large across the federal government. Meaning, if you're going to understand these cuts and talk about these cuts, look at them in the context. This is not meant to be at this point in time. This is not meant to be an assault on the Forest Service. It's meant to be an assault on the federal workforce,
of which the Forest Service is part. If I had somehow like FIAT power as some kind of dictator to come in and say, like what ones are okay and what ones are not okay, believe me, I would probably wind up saying I don't get USAID. A lot of it seems kind of ridiculous. Go ahead, Forest Service, don't
touch it. In fact, take USAID's money and give it to the Forest SERVI US That would be my perspective, But that's not the position I'm in, and I don't really know that pointing out aspects that people are pointing out is going to reverse the situation. A lot of other people wrote in about this national debt question, like me having the audacity to talk about the impacts of
the national debt. Now, this is a kind of a little bit situation where you can choose to play chess or you can choose to play checkers around spending the national debt. Like I'm going to keep this within a within a conversation of National of Natural Resources Management, just to give you some perspective. Every year this country, we spend eight hundred billion dollars to pay interest, to pay
our interest on the national debt. Take a stab at what the BLM's annual budget is, which I bet you like I'm guessing most people don't know.
I had to look it up. Take a guess, Randall.
Oh, the national interest on the national debt is eight hundred billion.
The BLM, I'd say thirty million. Way low, one hundred million.
Billion, way low, way low.
One hundred billion is low?
Oh no, way, Okay.
We're getting somewhere now five hundred million.
Well, you know it's a problem you're creating for me right now. Exactly is you know, like if you're saying like like this bark was huge, guess how big he was, and then you guess bigger?
Two hundred We've run it got problem, I mean countless times over the last six years.
And then I got to go, well, no, it was one to eighty.
And then.
But let's back up.
Eight hundred billion in interest, and then the big.
This is not this is not paying down the debt. Servicing the debt is eight hundred billion dollars. The BLM's annual budget is one point seven billionllion dollars. So in any conversation about the long term, like way long term health of natural resources in this country and where we're spending our money, I'm just saying, I'm saying, and I'm
asking you to consider this. If we didn't have to factor in in our budget, in our federal budget, if we weren't factoring in eight hundred billion dollars in interest payments that don't pay down the debt, I have to think I have to think that there would be more
room than one point seven billion for the BLM. I can't sit here and guarantee you that that's where it would go, but I think that the health of the country, and by meaning the health of the country, the parts I like about this country, the natural resources, the public lands, the wildlife, those things are going to continue to sacrifice
if we have to continue to do this. So if I bring up, like even friends of mine get mad if I bring up the idea of the national debt, meaning like, oh, you would sell our prime, our our main global our national treasures in order to pay down the debt.
I never said that. Ever.
I'm pointing out that if you're gonna like a lot of times we keep conservation conversations like very.
In a bubble.
Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
I have over the years and talking about conservation, I have oftentimes looked at it in a bubble, certain things in a bubble, and these in this conversation. As the administration goes along, we will wind up, I promise you, we will wind up with plenty of bubbles. So when I said, when I sat there and said waiting for the people, are like, oh, I can't believe you would say you're gonna wait for the dust to settle or
whatever the hell I said. Let me rephrase what I said, because you're right, I would be disappointed to hear someone say that too. What I'm waiting for is parts of this to bubble wise. But right now it's hard to bubble it because I can't take like the Force Service cuts. Those can't be bubbilized because they're rolled into like a wholesale reorganization of all of these federal agencies. So you're not gonna be able to call your politician right now,
Like I'm telling you that, like it doesn't work. You're not going to call your politician right now and say, hey, hey, I understand like the thousands that the tens of thousands of federal employees are getting caught across all of these administrations or organizations. That's all fine. What I would like you to do is put the Force Service people back.
Yeah, you can't.
It ain't gonna happen.
Like, what's like top of mind and most concerning for us is not it doesn't translate to the entirety of the federal government or like the people who voted for the people who are running the federal government right like they're not necessarily They're top concern is not conservation and land access and things like that.
Yeah, because they're not looking at they're not looking at any bubbles. Yep, they're not looking at at this point, no one is talking about any particulars. It will come.
Like like starting already, it'll start to take some clarity, but like right now, there's a little bit of like
waiting to see what happened. And with the Forest Service cuts, like, yeah, I think it's I think it's like a catastrophic I'm gonna read a letter where someone puts it really well, But I'm inviting people to stop and like expand outside of the way that we've historically framed conservation questions and try to get a look at like where the national mood is at right now with people in power, there is this thing called the national debt, and know, like
the debt's not going anywhere, but they're going to make a budget, and within this budget they're going to try to find a way of how do you find the money to facilitate the interest payments on the debt? And how do you fund some tax cuts which they ran on okay, and still balance the budget in some way
or another. All of these questions about what we're gonna do on real specific conservation issues outside of like like how we're gonna fight to keep mining interests out of the headwaters of the Boundy waters, okay or sorry, on the borders of the Boundy waters. How are you gonna
work on that? Where you gonna do about ambler Road, What you're gonna do about anwar, What you're gonna do about pebble mind, Like, all of these things are gonna get specific with specific players doing specific things, and they're like these little battles are gonna play out NonStop for a bunch of years. But right now, on the employee thing, it's part of such it's part of such a broader conversation that gets really hard to explain how to be
like tactful at this moment. It's dizzying. It's dizzying. I try to follow politics very closely. It's dizzying right now. And it's like it's intentionally dizzy. That's a point people keep bringing up. It's like it's it's it's meant to be almost it almost appears without any kind of broader goal in mind.
Yeah, And I think that's I mean, I don't know that people who want to shrink the federal government want to shrink it in the way that it's being done right, correct. I think lost in all this is that these are just completely arbitrary decisions and that they've had to you know, I saw it the other day that they'd cut security people at nuclear facilities and then they realized they didn't have anymore, and so they're trying to get in touch with those people to bring them back. And the same
for bird flu. I saw just the other day of the USDA cut all the people working on the bird flu outbreak that's driving up the price of eggs, and now they need to figure out how to get in touch with those people to bring them back. So I think, regardless of like where you stand, I think like we can acknowledge that this is a very arbitrary and destructive way of doing it.
It is, yeah, it is.
It's emerging that, and it's like, and parts of this are hitting at things I care about deeply, But I'm not succumbing to the temptation to look at it as being an assault on the things I care about deeply rather than an assault on like a kind of hamhanded assault on the idea of the federal role in American lives.
When I'm scrolling through the news and it cuts here, cuts there, cuts there, cuts in the Forest Service or wherever. I've had to force myself not to like focus just on that one thing, right because it's kind of unfair. It's like unfair to think about it that.
Yeah, it's thousands and thousands and thousands of people and any person. I have a neighbor who is a school teacher.
He's like, he could.
Go on for a long time about what the Department of Education dismantling means for him. Meanwhile, I look at the Department of Education thing and I'm like, Eh, wells it all mess with the four Service? BLM, I'm cool. Do you know what I'm saying.
It's it's like.
It's a very hard like for the conservation space right now, for the conservation movement right now, for the environmental movement right now.
It's like a.
This is going to require a radical reorientation of how we talk about things. They're using a playbook on the federal workforce that was used on that was used on Twitter, like breaking Twitter.
Move fast and break things.
Yes, breaking Twitter is like okay, I mean broken, and they already broken.
It will always be broken. But they did break it.
It became a wildly less, wildly less effective company and lost a bunch of advertising and kind of sure took a dump.
Yes, so I'm saying, like breaking the government, taking the same approach to break the government, Like, I hope it
goes better than it did when he broke Twitter. Yeah, to return to my main point, to somehow pin it on a person, to somehow suggests that an individual that works in federal policy and is needing to figure out who am I talking to, what are we talking about, where are some areas we can succeed in the next four years or eight years, rather than saying, you know what, I don't like the way this is looking, I'm going home.
They have to work with who they have to work with, right, they don't have a choice. Yes, they've got to do what they can do.
Imagine if he says, you know what, Okay, I'm not going to talk to anybody about federal conservation policy for the next four years. That'll stick them, That'll show them.
And I think too, there's like a when you think about how a group like TIERCP works, there are other groups out there that are going to be throwing bombs at the administration. There are other groups out there that are going to be like rallying the troops and and taking shots. Right, But like, if you're in d C and you're serious about trying to make change or trying to protect what we like, you know, you got to go to work every day.
There's different groups with different.
Roles and the and you're not gonna the biggest the biggest advantage that you can have in d C is that someone takes your calls or that someone has a meeting with you.
Correctly if I'm wrong, But t RCP has like a very good working relationship with politicians on both sides of the aisle, right, like right.
That's their program, y, yeah, that is what that is what they are.
Yeah, that's how they get shipped done.
Yeah, and and and I mean that's that's how the how, that's how it works, you know, whether you like it or not, Like it's I mean, I think it's incredible that we have a group like that who's using the power, you know, like they're using the system in place, because that's where the rubber hits the road in DC, and it's it's somebody going to take your so you can't. You have to be the adult in the room sometimes and and not throw bombs.
And not name call so yeah, And I like I've even like as a board member at TRCP, you know I have, I don't like, I have a voice in the room. And the part about having a board is you try to assemble a board with a bunch of disparate voices. So sure I have, you know, I have perspective on things where I talk to someone privately about
what I think. When when Utah was trying to figure out a way to declare that public lands were effectively unconstitutional, I'm on the phone with TRCP, knowing the other people around the phone with TRSP, and I'm giving my take on it. Then they're in the role of taking these different takes, shaping them, asking who they can speak with,
and then make it some progress. But if you're just gonna throw Molotov cocktails for them, I'm not talking about me, Yeah, for them, if they're gonna throw Molotov cocktails and then one day call up and be like, but seriously, uh the farm bill? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, how are we gonna keep the CRP programs alive?
Like that still has to happen.
Oh yeah, And and you need a seat at the table, you're like, and it's very easy to lose your seat at the table if you if you come out and start throwing punches.
Yeah, if you want to be like like, ask yourself, like someone else said, oh pretty rich that Steve said, get involved in the conservation movement after saying blah blah blah whatever he said, uh to everyone else, I'll say this, if you want to get involved in the conservation movement and you want to do it in a way where you.
Have a voice.
At the you have a voice in a seat at the highest level of table, right the top table. You want to voice there, get on board with an organization like TRCP. That doesn't mean that people going out and protesting that their state capital isn't effective. It's a way to show forces. If that's where you're at. TRCP is not your group. If you like, if you are willing to be like patient and somewhat intellectual and strategic and play in Washington.
D C. That's different.
It's just different, and there's room for both and you can support both at the same time, right, Like, I mean, there's certainly it's effective to go and let your elected officials know where you stand and strongly worded calls to your reflected officials do work, but that there's also another model that's having like high stakes meetings with people who have the power, and you're not going to get very far with them by calling them up and leaving a strongly worded voicemail.
I'm gonna try to give a little bit to explain myself a little bit with with the with the parallel thing that occurred to me one time, Like picture that you picture. You're a kid growing up in America and movies come out, and you just in the movies come out, and you become aware of movies. You see movies, and then there's books that are in the bookstore, there's books in the library, and they just are there because they're there. And the movies that get made get made because they
get made. That that's how I grew up. I don't know, just like movies came out and you went so me never gave any thought to what happened. Right then, as my career went along and I got into my thirties, and I started going and having meetings with people that make TV shows and people that make books and people that make movies, and I understood, like why they do what they do, how they do what they do, how
it's finance how the whole bigger project works. All of a sudden, you go, all of a sudden, it's like, you know, I never use like the whole like stupid red pill thing.
You get red pilled. You're like, oh shit, that's how all this works. Do you know what I mean? And then you're like, oh, I get it now.
That's why the books that are out are out, and that's why this that that's how this whole thing functions, and all of a sudden you understand the world in a different way. I over time, being someone involved in wildlife conservation have had I've.
Like undergone a sort of evolution. What's the opposite evolution?
The evolution?
Do you know where opposite evolution? Okay, some might say, oh, he went through a de evolution.
I don't know. To me, it feels yeah, devolved.
No, No, because I don't want to seem my I my picture of how things happen.
Mmmm, there we go, rand.
Point. I'm trying to make point. I'm trying to make here.
My understanding of how things happen and why the world looks like it does in wildlife conservation has changed as much as my understanding of why what shows get made and what books come out in print. It's like it's changed with education. It has changed. I have come to see more of the value of like back room high level conversations. There are other people who've come up with a very different opinion. If you really want to get into this, you could go read about what happened with
Why did the Sixties fizzle? You could dig into Joan Didion. You can start watching things about the efficacy and evolution of Vietnam protesters. I don't know, there's different ways to engage in policy discussions.
The civil rights movement was disruptive and very effective. Other movements have been disruptive and they faltered and haven't worked. What else? Oh my for service?
Let I personally personally, Yeah, I'm gonna say a couple more personal things here. I've always had a thing where I have a I've tried to keep a brand promise where we stay out of issues that we stay out of issues that aren't directly relevant to hunters and anglers. Okay, so at times this is where I'm in a little
bit of a bind. At times I have expressed appreciation for some things half some number of things that the current administration ran on and is doing I have expressed appreciation for because it's just true.
It's just true. I appreciate a bunch of the things.
I would have to violate my pact with the audience to start talking about the things I appreciate.
There's a thing called a nypothesis. Randall knows what it is. I do.
An apothesis is when you bring something up by saying you're not going to bring it up. So my example will be your fighting with your wife. Your wife says, well, I'm not even going to bring up what you did on Friday. That's an apothesis. She's bringing it up by not bringing it up. So I'm gonna do an apothesis when I'm talking about this administration. I'm not going to bring up that I think that the country should have borders. Okay,
I'm not going to bring that up. I'm not going to bring up that I don't think people should have their livelihoods and careers destroyed because they fail to get on board with whatever.
New sloganism emerges in a given day. Like, I'm not going to bring that up.
Okay, I'm not going to bring up things I think about with human biology and distinctions between males and females.
Not going to bring it up.
But when I've talked about things the administration is done, I'm talking about some things I'm not going to bring up that I think are pretty good. Do I then think that what they're they're threatening to do, what it seems like they're going to do to American wildlife and American wild places and public lands? Do I think that
that's accessible? No, I don't. But I can hold two things in my hands at the same time that, like, there's things I like about the administration, there's also seems to be like some things that they're going to be doing and are doing that are going to be catastrophic for public.
Lands and wildlife.
And it's part of my personal thing to sort out these two issues and find out where I'm going to land on it. But I can't sit here and tell you that every single thing Donald Trump does pisses me off, because that's not true. Like it doesn't. Some of the stuff is absolutely going to But I'm not gonna look
at it like that. I'm gonna look at it like I'm going to find the areas and weigh in on the areas that I think they're screwing up, and it's starting to look like there's going to be quite a pile of them.
Any else? Uh? No, letter? Where do I begin the letter? Put my spectacles on.
My name is blank, and I am a Forest Service mule packer. As I write to you February fourteenth, I am still an employee of the US Forest Service. Today I lost many co workers that I call friends to the new administration's recent cutbacks on federal employees.
For valid and invalid reasons. The new administration has decided to pick on the US Forest Service. I'm going to step in and editorialize here. I'm outside of the letter for a minute. People don't want to hear this, But I don't think the word choice is right. I don't think they've decided to pick on a lot of people.
It'd be like if I went into a class. If I was a bully and went into a class and beat up all the kids in the class, they would.
Say he was picking on Bobby. Right? Is that a good announce Yeah? Yeah.
Throughout my career, I'm back to the letter. Throughout my career and the Recreation and Range departments, I have witnessed decrease in budgets every year, forcing us to do more with less. Last year, all seasonal non fire field workers were fired. That was last year under Biden. They left US field going permanence. They left US field going permanent employees feeling overwhelmed, to say the least, for the upcoming field season. But today the new administration fired over thirty
employees on the Beaverhead Deer Lodge National Forest. All but one of the wilderness rangers were let go on the Crassle Ranger District of the frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, and all the trail crews of the Spotted Bear Ranger District and the Bob Marshall Wilderness were let go. This is the Ranger district no longer has any trail crew to maintain the anacon of Pintler Willderness either a dear friend was days away from graduating from probationary status.
He was fired from the NRCS in Alaska along with her entire tribal relations team. Out of all the wasteful spending and government, for this administration to pick on the hardest working, lowest paid, and most dedicated workers makes me ill. This may be an honest, uneducated attempt to cut wasteful spending in government. Now this is this is like why this particular letter resonated with me because of this line. This may be an honest, uneducated attempt to cut wasteful
spending in government. He says, in my off season, I work for different outfitters guiding elk hunts in multiple states. We rely on these trail systems, do our job and earn a modest living doing what we love. These layoffs are taking away access to our public lands. Over one hundred and twenty years of blood and sweat by the American working class maintaining these trail systems will be lost.
Those that making that make a living in these areas will suffer, but most importantly, the American people will lose their access to the last place they can escape the modernities we call progress in this world. And he ends with a plea, use your voice to let the American public know what these government cutbacks are costing us.
A lot all across the board.
Yeah, I mean, I think, like.
Just on the subject of people who are working in these jobs, like beyond the end and and there's lots of people wondering how they're going to pay their mortgage this month, or how they're going to pay their rent, and beyond that, like immediate in individual tragedy, like there's a larger I think tragedy, and like there's probably some talented young kids right now in college who are studying. They're trying to figure out what they're going to study
and what career they're going to pursue. And if I was graduating from college right now, I probably wouldn't be thinking about trying to go work for the Forest Service, you know, or try and try to go work for the National Park Service. And those jobs require a ton of sacrifice year after year after year to get your foot in the door, and then the pay is not great and then you're probably transferring around to you know, if you're in the Park Service, bouncing from park to park.
Or wherever you are.
Like I think we're going to see generational consequences from the past few weeks just on the types of people we can attract to those jobs. And that, for me, I think is like a pretty profound Like even if they hired all these people back next week, Like there's a chink in the armor that it is hard to polish out at this point, and it's just like, yeah, I don't know. I mean when I was when I was finishing college, I tried really hard to get my foot in the door at a public land management agency
and couldn't do it. I did, you know, And I'm lucky that. I'm lucky that things went the way they did. But yeah, it's just like, these people love the resource, and I never go out on our public lands and think I wish there were fewer I wish there are fewer guys working on roads, you know, I wish there were fewer interpretive rangers telling people what's great about this landscape or telling people about these animals we're looking at.
Like I just yeah that.
Obviously I'm having a hard time like putting my finger on it. But it's really hard to not sort of have your thoughts spiral when you think about the compounding consequences of this stuff that's being done by twenty year old kids that don't know anything about the government.
And the impact like the like the real world impact to hunters and anglers and all kinds of outdoor recreation people. Like it's gonna take a while to see what actually happens, you know, with like trail access and boat ramps and like who knows, Like, we don't know necessarily what we're gonna be facing when the fall rolls around for hunting season.
No, you don't. And to return to my analogy about the bully coming in and beating.
Up everybody in the class, like the like it's kind of great analogy, but not trying to quit the same thing. But you might look and be like, well, yeah, I mean a lot of those kids had it coming, but little Billy, well, he's the nicest kid in the world.
And so yeah, like, I don't think you're gonna find like, you're not gonna look at the Forest Service and the Rocky Mountain West and and and and Musk aren't gonna be like and look at all the embarrassing look at all the embarrassing, crazy expenditures they were making.
It's not gonna happen.
Yeah, but here's where here's where a thing I do predict happening as this goes on.
And again, this is all new news, but I could picture this.
Do you remember when Dwayne I'm sorry, where I'm almost done? He could cause that a bad moment. Do you want to come back? Do you remember when when Trump floated the idea, and I talked about this the other day, Like I was the ere day. I was explaining, if I get really mad at my kids about iPads and phones, I'll say something like I'm about ready to take all those iPads.
Out and run them over with my truck. I use that one.
Now they know I'm not gonna run the iPads over the truck, but they also know he's gonna do something.
He's fed up.
I was saying, how I was just joking around, saying how when Trump said I got half of mine to the out gaza and make a big resort, he was kind of saying, I'm gonna put all the iPads in the driveway and run them over my truck. Meaning people are like, he's not gonna do that, but he's pissed. He's gonna do something. Well, who's the guy who's the libertarian from Kentucky?
Oh, Paul right away?
He uh now that Twitter's not Twitter, it's called the X When you tweet, what are you doing xing?
He They still say, tweeted just a horrible businesses. Yeah, he tweets this thing.
He's running the government, ran Paul tweets. I thought we voted for America first. Right, Yeah, Now, just to capture that sentiment, here's a thing that I do picture happening. Much of this conversation about the right and the left in this country has been framed over the previous years as a as a rural people, interior people battling for the soul of the country against the coastal elites.
Remember this, mm hmm.
Okay, as doge, if they do take a wrecking ball to the interests of rural people, to the people that were supporting Trump, he won overwhelmingly in this state. When you run for office in this state, you have to I'm talking about Montana. If you're running for office in Montana, I don't care what you're doing, you have to pay lip service at least to being pro public lands. You have to say public lands in public hands. You have
to do it else you can't win. You have to do it, just like you can't say at the federal level, I'm going to cut social Security.
You lose. If here you say I want to sell off public lands, you lose.
Now, So that's true of Montana, Montana. I've met Trump the first time, won Montana by fourteen points. Right, they don't even need a campaign here gonna win. But what happens when what happens when you start seeing in the erosion of these things that the people and not in this state care a lot about, which is their public lands of public land access. You risk alienating your own support network.
You risk the pendulum swinging the other way.
Yeah, and people in a couple.
Of years when the midterms come.
Up, and just like rand Paul, was it, Rand Paul, Yeah said I thought we were voting for America. First, someone might say I thought I was voting for guys like me. This isn't serving my interest.
No, excuse yourself, Randall, I'm really sorry.
Keeping that in that was incredible.
I was wondering where you can't tell where it's coming from.
Excuse me?
That was only supposed to be fin was elsewhere at the moment.
Can I start interviewing Dwayne? But what's up?
We should re enter do him because everyone probably forgot who he is.
It's terrible joining us today.
Doctor Dwayne asked us who I have heard about from a ton of people and has been uh and Krim was very eager to have him on The Prairie Preacher, co founder and executive dress director of Southeastern Grasslands Institute. I first have to say everything I just said is me talking, not Dwayne talking.
But I would like to invite if Dwayne, if you have.
Any comments about anything about what we just said, because you're sort of now like like you're sort of affiliated with the conversation.
You could either sit it out or you could give you some of your thoughts. You'd say whatever hell you want. I don't care.
Yeah, yeah, let's talk about it. Well, number just wade in number one, there's a there's a double meaning to apothesis. Oh yeah, yeah, it's the it's the broad portion of a pine cone scale. Just just f wi from a little bit botanical. Yeah, like you had a pine cone, right, You've got the little the prickle there. It's that broad triangular face that you see. That's the apopthesis.
Ship. Yeah, I love that, you.
Know, drop knowledge next week show. No, uh, you know, I find it fascinating, man, because we're all in this limbo right now, and as a founder and executive director of a conservation organization, we're like everybody else, you know. I talked to a good friend of mine who is a former senator, and he said he reminded me he said, you know this, Uh, I hear you. He says, not about you, it's you know, there's worldwide ramifications of what's happening.
And I think that helped to frame it in a context that made me kind of just sit back and try to chill and get through it and just say, you know, it's going to take a little while for us to kind of figure out what the road ahead looks like. You know, we're trying to go through planning right now and to think about what are our options. You know, it could be that we get by unscathed. It could be that our organization fails in four weeks
because of what we're currently faced with. So yeah, it's scary, man. People's livelihoods at stake. Good people, good hardworking people doing habitat restoration work, you know, planting seeds, plant and prairies, doing prescribed fire, people with babies and kids and elderly parents, farmers that we work with, seed producers, they're all they're all uncertain right now, and they're you know, a little
bit scared about what's coming. So to me, I found the fascination conversation be very fascinating.
I just was enjoying it, really. I wouldn't call it a conversation.
Is more like a monologue.
But it's okay, monologue version verging on rant, But that's okay.
Yeah, wasn't rant because a rant you're pushing a thing. I was pushing a question mark.
Your face wasn't red and there wasn't like a blood vessel sticking out of your forehead.
Thank you? Yeah. Uh, let's let's set the stage for Grasslands. Yeah. Can we can we tackle this first? Explain how Brody's a song again?
Right?
Okay, So Brody and anybody, well, anybody in southern Ohio, southern Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey. Imagine that you're in the South man, Yeah, you're in the South. I'll draw you the South. I'm gonna tell you that.
I'm familiar with two ways of drawing this line. I'm familiar with the Mason Dixon line.
Yeah.
And I'm familiar with my thing about where it's a line of where you ice fish or not.
Yeah, and the Mason Dixon line and got nothing to do with what I'm about to show you. So I do like I do like geography. By the way, By the way, you gotta put the Chesapeake Bay in there, you know, you got to put the New Jersey in. There's your Long Island right there, that's the that's the northern extent of the South right there. Yeah, no ship man, absolutely,
need they talk. No seriously, man, we could even make a case for southern Nova Scotia and Cape Cod I'm telling you, all right, So then what we do is we draw that line coming across the southern two thirds of Pennsylvania.
Okay, not no, no, no, he's a Yankee.
Yeah, ere, he's out. You're in those glaciated plains, yes, very close.
All right.
Now, now what you're going to just bring it down the trader. Yeah, you're gonna pull in the edge of Appalachia, country of Ohio. You do, bring in Cincinnati, Yeah, southern third of Indiana, southern Illinois, cut right across south of the Columbia a US map a shirt now.
Yeah, so you're drawing a map of basically what right there, what wasn't covered by.
The middle of Texas.
You want to hold that up for the camera.
I can't believe you just did that without having a reference.
Man, I've been studying since I was wearing a diaper. Bro. Yeah, that's the South right there, The SGI focal region.
I'm still Yankee, twenty four states.
It all gets down to biogeography, Steve.
So you're you're you're a Johnny reb now there around yep, Yeah, just south of the south of the Hills there. Yeah. Look weat explain that to me. What's going on within that map?
Yeah, so pretty much when you look at this region and you know, again this is not the cultural South, right, this is that kind.
Of stuff we're talking to, Collegy.
Yeah, if you're talking about plants and animals, you know, there is a high level of endemism here. So lots of species that occur within this region that that don't occur anywhere else on earth. And so there's lots of these clusters of endemic species, and they all are really clustered, like in the southern Appalachians or in the what we call the Interior Plateau or parts of Florida East Texas, and many of those species are really narrowly distributed, you know.
But then you also have wide ranging species. That's the ones we look at, like look at post oak trees for example. Post oaks grow all the way out to the cross timbers of Texas. They grow up into southern Illinois, they go all the way up to Long Island or so they don't go any farther north. So what you have then is this perpetual pattern of species that reach their northern range limits and their western range limits because
of climatic barriers. So here you get into the boreal northeast, you get into the true you know, the tall grass prairie of the Midwest and the Great Plains, and then the arid basically Chiwalla desert margin right here in South Texas. So that means then everything in this region is kind of temperate. It's got seasonality, with exception of South Florida, which is subtropical, it's mostly you know, people think of it as a deciduous forest region. That drives me bonkers.
You don't like that term, No, I don't. Actually, it's a huge misnomber and it's not based in science or his.
Can you tell what it means and why you don't like it?
Yeah, because what it does is it extrapolates you know, all parts of the East as being you know, people think, well, it all used to be forest, right. There's this what we call the myth of the.
Squirrel that tell you the squirrel.
Yeah.
I was raised on this good Okay, what the squirrel could go from blank to blank and never touch the ground. Squirrel could go from Kentucky to Michigan, from Florida to New Jersey, that's right, whatever and never touched the ground.
Yeah. I heard it as my sixth grade teacher, Tommy John's, who also paddled me thirteen times for talking too much.
Does he invent the surgery?
He told me?
No, I don't know Tommy john surgery.
No, this is.
I call it. I call it Tommy John's in the fabled squirrel.
You know, we still got whooped when I was a kid.
Yeah, I'm forty six. Huh yeah, I got I got thirteen of them in nineteen ninety.
Yeah, mister Bricken, Yeah, man, he called me down, whooped me one time.
But he told me, he said, look, a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.
That's what I heard it. I was screwing the whole thing up. That's my dad would like to tell me.
Yeah, and you know it really no, I don't buy it at all. And it has its origins. The origin is kind of complex. I wrote to the pretty well known author Stephen J. Pine and said, you know, do you know where that originated? And we both have been sort of scratching our heads over the true origins. That myth are a little bit hard to put to nail down.
But what's easily provable is that it's not true. All you got to do is go back into the annals of American history the days of Boone and in his contemporaries, or you can look at multiple lines of scientific evidence at many different places across that and say, oh, there were vast prairies there, there were cane breaks there, non forested eco systems. So for us to take this mantra that it was all forested has had a deleterious effect
for biodiversity and conservation. Think about it. We've invested billions of dollars in the eastern United States into forests. When we go by land for protection we create public new state parks or new national parks. It's all the mountainous forested or big swampy bottom lands that get all the attention. Yep. Nobody thinks about the open spaces when you do prioritization for you know, conservation action, all the places that get
the conservation focus. And I'm talking about terrestrial week systems, not streams and rivers at this point. But you know, it's big river floodplains, it's big swampy intact forests, it's big mountain systems that are still forested. Nobody gives a shit about pasture lands and crop fields, but those are the areas that used to be grassland, and they no longer are in most places.
Is it safe to say that those went first because you could grill a corn, a crop of corn on them without needing to girdle all.
The trees, and so it just everything got gobbled up.
Yeah. Absolutely, And we were beginning to sort of lay a fact trail of evidentiary information that proves that exact point. You know, you got people in the eighteen seventies who are writing back about conditions and say the eighteen forties in Tennessee and say, you know, the earliest waves of settlers, for example, who went from Middle Tennessee into West Tennessee when that land was purchased by Andrew Jackson from the
Chickasaw Nation. They settled in the already open lands first, because quote it opened, you know, a crop of corn and cotton very quickly, and so you can look again and again in places throughout the East, and what we have begun to advance is what we call this push
pull hypothesis. You know, it's the same thing that was driving Boon to Daniel Boone to want to kind of move around, and he didn't like the pressure of a neighbor being ten miles away from it, So he was being sort of pushed by this ever increasing population density factor. What we like to say, though, is look at the pool sure, right, why was Boone being attracted to the Kentucky Bluegrass or the Nashville base in the Cumberland River Valley. He certainly wouldn't going to hunt in a big, vast,
extensive forest. He was going to hunt the meadow lands, the cane break margins, the savannahs. That's what people were attracted by. Like these early land surveyors and land speculators, they wanted good land that was going to open up settlement opportunities for incoming westward migrating settlers and colonists. So that's what was pulling America's migration patterns in the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds. It was the availability of open space.
That story has never been told in American history, but we're.
Telling speaking of history, you know the I don't know if you know Randall's specialty.
M tell me about it, Randal.
Well he doesn't.
Yeah, I was waiting to hear you.
Randall has been formally trained to your thing about where did that squirrel thing come from? He's been formally trained to find that kind of stuff. Wow, he's a pH d in history.
That's what we need, man, we need we need to figure it out.
The first time I ever heard that.
He's busy right now.
We need more PhDs.
But if you put Randall on that, he'd probably coming after a couple of weeks. He'd come tell you where that first appeared.
Well, I don't know about that.
I mean that stuffs so hard to pin down.
But yeah, like never mind, Well, well it's a great compliment.
I really I feel like I'm sitting up straighter in my chair now. But uh yeah, I think you're probably doing the Stephen Pine as well, the as much as can be done on that.
What Uh I wish I had.
I wish I had compiled more specific examples, but places random This will jogging memory, places where I don't. I don't necessarily from Boonez descriptions, but places where guys seven around seventeen seventy whatever are describing could be north of the Ohio and some places, mostly south of the Ohio River, are saying that like not.
A tree in sight. Yeah, I mean, where in the world is that happening?
I thought that was when you're reading all those accounts. I mean they're describing savannahs and.
The barons.
The Barons is this region that they talk about all the time. And in my mind, having grown up in Ohio and driven interstates, you know, up and down to the you know, to the south and throughout sort of Tennessee, Kentucky, how this I picture? It's trees on the hills and farms in the bottom. And you read these descriptions from that time period of all this open country, and for me, it was just like I didn't have a visual reference in my imagination for what that looks like.
I kind of think about the land as I told a friend this recently, and she kind of looked at me like she didn't believe me. I said, imagine if you were to go into like the eighty one Corridor, which takes you from Pennsylvania down, you know, into Tennessee. The Great Valley as it's called, you know, it's the
bottom of the valley is relatively open today. I think the vast majority of Americans would look at that valley and say, oh, at some point in our past, it's been cleared, you know, it's been deforested.
I would think it was open anthroporogenically.
Yeah, exactly, you know. And I would maintain that many sections of eastern United States are relatively about the same in terms of the approximate closure of the landscape versus openness as it was to pre settlement times. So that you know, those open cattle pastures you see down in there in western Virginia today, or cornfields or valley bottom
hay meadows, those were probably mostly always open. Sure, there are blocks that were deforested, yes, but the relative balance of land open to closed, I think is relatively the same. It's just what happened to the land. The forests went through the mountain sides, some of them were cleared and logged and grew back up into secondary and tertiary forests. Those valley lands, though, those were part of that pull factor that attracted for people moving out of Chesapeake Bay
and stuff and Tidewater, Virginia. And when they moved into that, they moved in state forever. Right. They converted those meadow lands and those savannahs into the first cornfields and crop lands and plantations. And when those got exhaust then sometimes they let them go back and go follow into pasture lands, or they went into pasture lands from the beginning. And many of our grasslands too, especially the savannah types, they've
always had trees. And that's one of the big hallmarks of what we call southern grasslands is not all of them had trees. There are certainly many examples that were essentially treeless that we can point to, and we can talk about where they were and why. But eighty percent at least of southern grasslands had somewhere between probably ten and fifty percent tree cover. And so many of our friends said, well, hell, why don't you just call that
a forest and be done with it. Well, because you could call it an open forest, you can call it a woodland. We don't really give a shit what you call it. The fact of the matter is we need to understand what its structure needs to be, right, what does it need to be to be healthy and flourishing for both native plants and native wildlife. It needs to
be something other than what it is today. We have deviated from the natural condition so profoundly that people in the East are just unaware of that deviation.
Good, well, this is a non sequitur.
I don't even know what that means.
It's not going to fall what you just said. I wasn't sure what we were walking into today. And I love profanity, but you've said the word shit a few times, which is not something that I expected from the prairie preacher. Now I'm understanding that they heard.
It from you guys the gospel.
Oh please, I mean I thought he was a preacher, yeah, from the prairie. No, I mean I read that.
I was like, I wonder sort of where the preacher comes from. And now I'm getting you know, you've got your own gospel here of of what the East used to look like. But yeah, I don't know, that's just my thought. I don't really have a question.
Thank you. Back to you, how much of your work is about.
Where do you split your work and your worldview from
trying to capture what things looked like? I'll add a little bit on that because random I have experiences as well as in some of our research about market hunting that we've been doing lately, where we're sort of taking the first far west meaning Appalachia, Kentucky, Tennessee south the Ohio River and looking at the source material that explains what that looked like, who was there, what it looked like, what are the first experiences that Euro Americans had there.
The source material for that versus the source material for the Rocky Mountains. The source material for the Rocky Mountains is just relatively vast. I mean, you can't in a lifetime, you can't get through all the first hand accounts of what a quote unquote untouched West looked like, like the what it looked like in the Native America state. You can't read it all. If you're trying to find accounts of what this what we're talking about looked like in an untouched state, it's like it's.
Like a paucity of material.
The people that weren't talking and describing weren't describing that. So like, how much of your focus is understanding what that was because it's so mysterious what it looked like, how it functioned, what it did and how much of your work is about, well, what do we do now? Like knowing that, what do we do now?
Yeah? Yeah, I would say we're equally split, cause it took us, you know, for our first eight years. We've
we've been around since twenty seventeen. You know, we really kind of grew first out of this desire to know what it was and document and substantiate how we know what it was, right getting back to that original source material, educate the public and the masses to the extent we could about you know, what it looked like, giving someone a visual reference for you know, ecosystems that are nearly extinct.
So we really were heavily research based and sort of into the documentation up until now, and we still are. That's one big branch of what we do as an organization. And then the other thing that we've grown into really in the past three to four years is the restoration. It's like, what do we do about it? You know? So we have these remnant grasslands where we have these areas that a private landowner wants to restore or the
National Park Service wants to restore. We've been rapidly building our team up until the big freeze I have to say, we've been rapidly building our team up and we were just poised to really begin to do some real impactful on the ground habitat restoration work. Those are the two equal halves of our organization, and yeah, I'm excited by you know. One is I listened to the audible version of the Long Hunter.
Book that you use there is.
I love it, man, you know, I love the complementary. Is that a word between You're in Clay's southern accent? Yeah? I thought that played off real well.
Yeah, but like one of these guys is obviously, uh, you know, a man of the people.
But I love the book. And you know what I found is that you found You talk about the paucity of those records, You found some of them. You found some of the few. You know, like you mentioned the Casper Mansker and the Bloods. I always forget if it's Isaac or Anthony, you know, the brother two?
Yeah, yeah, and I can't remember which one was with Mansker when they encounter the lick and what is modern day Summer County s and you know the first time they came, as you alluded to in your book, they were on horseback and they shot a deer.
It was in the middle of this giant herd of bison, right, and they couldn't get off their horses for fear of being trampled to death. But as long as they stayed on their horses, they were good. You know. There were hundreds, possibly you know, a few thousand buffalo into that particular lick that they were in, and you found that reference to that. There's a couple more to that exact same
same place though. That has always stuck with me, For example, when they came back the following year, and I think you may have references too. All those bison had been exterminated French. Yeah, the French hunters like Timothy de Munbrin and his his you know, cronies were all kind of hunting around in that area. So you know, you've stumbled upon like one of the very few references to what I would say is a reference that alludes to the
savannahs around the Nashville area. Some regions have really well documented grasslands, like the black Belt Prairie region of Mississippi and Alabama. It goes all the way back to like seventeen oh one, you know, when that was French territory. You had French generals and stuff like, they were based in New Orleans, they and their armies were crisscrossing northern Mississippi. Those are all recorded in the French archives, and I've got a colleague, doctor John Barone, who's published and pulled
that stuff out. But part of the challenge of the South and the East in general is that many of these areas were settled so rapidly and hectically chaotically that the original landscape. We always say they were gone before the camera was invented. They were gone before people who could write about them visited. In some cases they were transformed before they could be recorded, and oftentimes they were
gone before the first artist came through. So the record has to be sort of pieced back together, like Humpty Dumpty. And that's one of the things that we're actively doing, is piecing back where they were, what they looked like. One of our great friends, and you gotta have them on your show. He's amazing. He's the best oil painter you'll ever meet.
And careful knockcuse, my wife's taken over now, man.
But he goes back and he tours like when William Bartram was an explorer in the South in the seventeen seventies. He goes back to where William Bartram was in Montgomery, Alabama, and he uses Bartram's words and his ability to look at the modern landscape to put back the scene that Bartram would have seen. And it's a vast prairie that looks like the Flynn Hills of East Kansas.
You were talking about bison, Do you guys suspect that they played a role in maintaining these these grasslands?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Now, bison in the East, as you guys, I'm sure no, is very complicated. You know, I've read Ted Bulow's book. I love It's one of my favorite of all times.
This whole thing is a great story.
I got them a backpack. But you know, there's some new evidence emerging on bison in the East. There's some archaeology and paleontology work that's been done. You know, we thought that bison had kind of re emerged in the South in like the middle fifteen hundreds early fifteen hundreds, after the depopulation of Native Americans from some of the different pandemic diseases that they came back in from the Great Plains I think that the supporting evidence suggests that
is true. Right, But if you had asked, most people, Okay, so bison came back into the South, because you know, they were definitely here in the South in ice age times we had multiple species of bison. But most people kind of considered that in states like North Carolina, Georgia, you know, Tennessee, that bison had essentially been gone for you know, since fifteen thousand years ago, up until about
the year fifteen fifty or so. And so then you get into saying, well, well, wait a minute, does that mean there were no big animals grazing southern grasslands three thousand years ago, five thousand, nine thousand years ago. That was kind of the I think the consensus.
But this this wedgend, if you have wedging, well, I just want some of the things people have looked at and describing that That that I've read about is like that the the Spanish and the French would come through places in the early sixteen hundreds and they'd describe everything right down to possums, no mention of buffalo.
Yeah, you go to the.
Effigy mounds, like the mound builders, the Mississippian cultures on the Ohio Mississippi River. They carve and have things every snake, turtle, deer, bear.
They don't have buffalo effigies.
And I think that that like that kind when we're talking about evidence, like that kind of evidence, it's almost like a omission. I'm try like omission equals absence. I'm familiar with that kind of evidence, like, well, if they were there, they would have talked about them, so they must not have been there.
I've encountered a lot of that logic, right, Yeah, And I think that's that's generally it seems like there's wide agreement that there generally were few to know bison in
the East and Southeast before the early fifteen hundreds. You know, when you get to the French explorers of the sixteen eighties through you know, the seventeen twenties, ample, ample discussion of bison just just it's it's everywhere, you know, when you get to the seventeen sixties and seventies seventies, everybody who goes out is talking about bison in every valley in West Virginia and every big you know whatever. Isn't that crazy, It's crazy, you know? But and so many
place names too. But here's the challenge. Uh we we thought they essentially had disappeared at the end of the ice Age. But I think his name is doctor Gary Moore. He's an archaeologist from East Carolina State University. Was doing some work at a archaeological site in the Piedmont of South Carolina and using a technique where they looked at
these spear points, these stone projectile tools. Right, they were able to go into you know, you guys have seen those flint nappers, right and you're sitting there making it, making a projectile. Yeah, there you go. Well, those those stone tools have little microfractures in them that through capitalar re action, you know, draws in blood and other types
of material when you when you kill an animal. And what doctor Moore's work has shown is that they can actually extract not the DNA, but they can extract the protein residues of animals that were killed with these stone tools. Is well, I know I've heard mixed opinions on it too, but but if it's true, let's just say if it is, and you know, it's gone through peer review, publication and
that kind of stuff. But what his work shows is that there's a continuous record of bison in South Carolina from the Late Ice Age, so probably fifteen thousand years ago, all the way up until seven thousand years ago. So that's a totally different story. If you got bison in South Carolina at seven thousand years ago, you probably had them in Tennessee, Kentucky. You may have had them even farther,
you know, to the west and south. So then that means that the window without bison is actually much narrower than we suspected gotch So it's that kind of that kind of emerging evidence which adds to and somewhat you know, clouds the whole picture of southeastern grassland ecosystems.
Can you speak to the impact of Native American burning like this? This was I can't remember what year it was, but this became a very fashionable.
Idea that.
Open country, that all this open lands was a result of slash and burn agriculture, or there are accounts, I believe there's French accounts where they were using fire and game drives. Yeah, I mean they would encircle big areas, get some hunters staked up, and just burn the place
to push out deer. And so for a while it seemed like everybody was really hip on this idea that all that open country was that was anthropogenic and not natural, you know, like not whatever the hell the opposite anthropogenic is.
Yeah. I think I'm reading the book Forgotten Fires right now, right and they talk about you know, it's written by an anthropologists, so it relies heavily on that perspective and
sort of the science of anthropology. There's no question when you go back into the earliest seventeen hundreds and sixteen hundreds and maybe slightly beyond that, there are just ample documentary evidences and observations of Native Americans burning the landscape for you know, setting large, you know, circular fires on the land, and that's really well documented. I think, though, there's a slippery slope and it's just too far to go. It's too big of an extrapolation to say with surety
that Native Americans created open ecosystems of the South. And I think what that does is it makes a bunch of assumptions. One of the ways I think in my colleague who's our chief science advisor, doctor Reid Nass, he wrote a book in twenty thirteen called Forgotten Grasslands of the South, and it really was a game changer and turned the messaging around southern ecosystems. There's one very clear line of evidence as to why it doesn't make sense
that Native Americans created these landscapes. They probably moved into them and found them already largely open. They may have expanded some of the smaller ones to make them larger, But the clear line of evidence that they did not create most of them is in the presence of endemic species. When you have plants and animals that have, you know, through the process of evolution, it just takes time. Most of the species that evolve on this planet, they require
tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Some of them require millions of years to evolve. If we have conclusively had people in the South for say thirteen fourteen thousand years, most of these modern species likely originated prior to the arrival of man into the southeastern United States. Grassland species, they're grassland obligate species. That's the biggest testament to that
longevity factor. Now here's the other one. Very rich fossil evidence for grasslands and grassland endemic species in the South. And so if you know you say, okay, well, you know what if it's true that Native Americans uh came into and created these. Again, I am not in any way trying to take away the importance of indigenous management. I think that is a exceptionally important, you know, component
to this. But you can go back to the fossil record in Florida and East Tennessee and various places, uh and find a rich wealth of some of the biggest grassland dependent you know, megafauna and carnivores. You can imagine. You know, there's a recent discovery of the American cheetah in the in the the Appalachians of southwest Virginia. Seriously, yeah, no joke, found out.
I was reading there was caribou in Alabama, Georgia.
Yeah, yes, that you know, uh, big longhorn bison. And by the way, that that cheetah was found within the county adjacent to Cumberland Gap.
Mmm.
No, kid, yeah, I know, you know, I know you love Cumberland Gain.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, huh.
So there's a there's a wealth, I mean, the endemic species alone. Man, that that that is the biggest piece of evidence.
I remember when I was a little kid, man, do you remember what did do you guys remember what the I don't know.
It's still around the Epcot Center.
It's very much still, isn't it.
It's a big glass.
It's like a big glass, like a giant.
I went there when I was just a youngster.
I went down I remember we went down there to we fished, We watched them shoot a space shuttle off, and we went to the Epcot Center and they did this thing where you were like cruising at very low altitude, Like it's like a planetarium experience where it's like you're cruising very fast at very low altitude over the country.
Uh.
I know, there's like some budget problems.
Has have you guys tried like any kind of wide scale visual representation.
Of what a flyover like, you know, I mean, like what a flyover of the area you mapped out looked like in fourteen ninety two.
That sounds like a good collaboration with meat Eator if you want me to tell you about it. But no, what we have, what we have embarked on is the creation of a web platform we call Grasslandia.
You know it sounds kind of fanciful, right, Come with me to the grassland the world of Grasslandia.
And No, I think that needs to happen. We need to have that sort of visual you know, flyover reenactment so people can see it, because nobody can can see it and understand it today and if you can't see it, you can't visualize it. Or the largest remnants you have left is the footprint of this building, you know, or
a quarter of an acre. How are you going to inspire people to go back in and care about those landscapes and rebuild them and reconstruct them so we can prevent the continued collapse of our wildlife and bio diversity which is all around us.
Yeah, yeah, tell us about some of those patches you found, Yeah, well, like native patches of like yeah, historic.
Grass and how small they are.
Yeah. Well, the probably the best patch that we have left in Tennessee where I'm from, it's called May Prairie. And you know, the story is back in the sixties, a couple of professors from the University of Tennessee. We're sitting at a cafe across the street on Highway forty one, you know, which like goes from Chicago to Florida. And they're sitting at this restaurant it's called the Prairie Cafe, and they look over to the lady and said, miss ma'am,
why is this called the prairie Cafe? She said, you see a line of trees over there across the highway. Well look through there. You see how it kind of looks open and sunny. There's a prairie in there. And these were two botanists, right like I am. So they get they finish up their meal and they go out across road to walk in and they find May Prairie, which is eleven acres and it's still to this day is eleven acres. May Prairie is the most biodiverse single
eleven acres in the eastern interior United States. Kid, you know, oh crazy, totally separate side story. In two thousand and eight, I was part of the Natural Areas conference that came to Tennessee. It was in Nashville, and they asked me, I said, will you lead a grass identification hike down to May Prairie for the for the conference? I said, for sure, will I go down there? And I'm walking through this prairie It's October of two thousand and eight,
and I see this plant. I look down and I said, man, this is weird. This is the type of little member of the sunflyer family. I said, this is not anything currently known from Tennessee. And Buddy Mine says, how you know? I said, just trust me. I know, I know the floor of Tennessee. There's nothing else like it. I don't
know what it is. So I get back and later that email, I sent an email to the national uh, the international expert on that particular group of plants, who happened to be in Waterloo, Canada, and he wrote back and he said, congratulations, you have discovered a completely new species. And not only did it prove to be new, but it's endemic to that single prairie and nowhere else on earth.
You're kidding me?
Did you get to name it?
He actually named it for me, so.
I thought you couldn't do that anymore.
No, I can't. I can't name it for myself.
So by new it was actually old, like is that what you're saying?
Like?
It was endemic to probably all over damn place once upon a time, endemic in the sense that it Yeah, it probably was more widely distributed because that area had had about a million acres.
Of grass historically. That's one of the last fragments left. But yeah, and old in the sense it probably took tens of thousands of years to evolve as a species. Yeah, the name is sympiatricum estesia. Well not the sexiest name around.
Like, we've got prairie out here, and it's you know, obviously it's diverse and there's different kind of plants and animals and stuff. But like, what would like a patch of that prairie that size of this table look like that year talking like, is it a bunch of different flowers and plants and grass and.
Yeah, I mean it's gonna look like your tall grass prairie and like parts of Missouri or Iowa very similar. It's just oftentimes it is gonna have a bit more tree cover, you know, it's gonna.
Have what would those be, conifers or hardwoods or both, mostly hardwoods.
So like in lots of the Upper South you'll have post oak, black jack oak those those or burroak those in my you know, my way of thinking, especially for our region, are essentially grassland trees, which is kind of a weird concept for people. Like black jack oak won't even reproduce anymore, Like it's acorns just never germinate because most black jack oaks today are shrouded in forest that
is unnaturally forested, where the forest has overtaken grassland. So you've got an oak that essentially can no longer germinate and reproduce itself.
Like he's dropping his acorn in a place that yeah, or excuse me's acorn, that's.
Right, and it doesn't do any good, and he's on his way out, you know, and another generation or two, those oaks will die and they will never replace themselves without things like fire and buffalo and those kind of things. But you know, yeah, visually very similar to what you'd see with the eastern tallgrass prairie. That's essentially what ours were. They were sort of eastern outliers of but they were
very different in terms of the plants. They had their own species, their own composition, They were unique, and now they're mostly gone.
What's it look like subsurface in that may prairie.
Yeah, that particular prairie does have you know, it's it's an intact system. So it's the underground is intact too, and it's prairie soils and stuff. But that's that's a big misnumber, big misconception a lot of people have is that prairie is always associated with a given soil type. You know, in the Midwest, a lot of your prairies
are these black prairie soils they call mollosaws. But in the South we get prairies on every soul type imaginable, So that really doesn't hold much water for us with the actual sul type.
Got it? Yeah, yeah, What is the history of how that made prairie? How did it stay intact just because something didn't happen.
Well, that's the sort of the case that we see with a lot of our eastern grasslands. Is the thing that caused them to survive four hundred years of you know, Euro American settlement was Oftentimes they're too wet or too rocky, or maybe they're on the natural edge. So in this case, it has it's we'll call hard pan prairie. So if you dig down them by a foot, it actually has a clay hardpan that restricts tree growth and actually favors grasses and wildflowers and those kind of things. So it's
naturally predisposed to being being grassy. But it's also really really wet in the wintertime. You can't really develop there. It's not a good good for cropping soils are highly acidic, so that's one of the reasons why it's kind of you know, persistent to the modern day. But a lot of these other sites, you know, if they're rocky that will preclude development, or if they're in a like a power line corridor. We see a lot of our best
grasslands in power lines and on roadsides. Really yeah, but strangely, you know, or not strangely, I guess, but especially in the past twenty five years, those are the hardest hit, you know, from the usage of herbicides to kind of manage those environments. So they were the last to remain and now they're the sort of those little last scraps are being devastated, and those remnants are key to rebuilding efforts.
You know, if you want to rebuild prairie, if you want to rebuild savannahs, it's important to know where those remnants are.
Can can those remnants if you rate the right conditions. Do those remnants want to grow or do they want to shrink based on what's on the edge of them.
Yeah, they do not grow. They that's they're not They don't have a natural predispicient predisposition to being able to move easily as a as a vegetation type.
So it's not like a BlackBerry patch.
No. Now, in fact, that that's one of the things that's really hard for a lot of people to understand. You know, in the wildlife biology arena, the term early successional habitat is like rampant, right. That's actually one of the terms that's least helpful to us, because I think people have always looked at grasslands as early successional habitat. That's true of some types, but what we're talking about are grasslands in some cases that have survived hundreds or
thousands of years. They are old growth ecosystems. So you know, a lot of effort to recognize old growth forests almost no effort to recognize old growth grasslands. That's what may prairie is. And if people could visualize them like that, I think that would maybe add to the appreciation that people have for them. But it's really hard for people to get by. You know, see is just a grassy
patch or just an old field. It's hard to It's not like an old growth forest where's immediately clear to all why it's old.
Growth yep, yep, oh.
What is I mean? You're probably gonna get to this, But what would restoration look like? Is it cutting down trees and replanting stuff or is it because you said it won't grow on its own, right, So you've got to step in at some point.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's first important to kind of understand what type of grassland you're dealing with, right, So, like in our work for this entire southeastern geography, we've identified one and eighteen major types of grasslands. Those can be further subdivided into probably six hundred types, so you're you're dealing with a vast number. First of all, you know, coastal dune grasslands versus lonely pine savannah grasslands versus tall grass,
prairie type grasslands versus the meadow in West Virginia. They all are going to require different starting points for healing and restoring and rebuilding those landscapes. That's kind of the first thing. So you know, if we go into let's say, an area that used to be prairie in central Kentucky, we first want to know is there any remnant potential left? Most times it's no. We have a landowner says, yeah, I want to build prairie out here. Tell me if
it's a good site. You know, we don't want to necessarily rebuild a prairie that naturally should be in a forested landscape. You're fighting a losing battle there. So we try to use our knowledge of the local history. We try to use our knowledge of biodiversity too, you know, constructively and very thoughtfully suggest what should be there to begin with. That's all based in science.
Real quick, let's say you had this hypothetical landowner, yeah, in central Kentucky on what you Let's say we're in a spot where you know, categorically like you know that this was prairie. Is it possible that the guy comes forward and he's got a thousand acres and you go look and there's none?
Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, it's just gone. Yeah. We're working on a five thousand acre farm right now, just south of the Kentucky line. It was founded by George Washington's cousin, and it was the second largest tobacco plantation on earth in the decades before the Civil War. There's nothing left. There's no prairie there are.
You know that it was prairie and now there's none, right.
Yeah, And there's there's none left. And so you know, the three states. Essentially you can think of is that those areas with really fertile, agriculturally productive soils in all cases in the East, all of them have been decimated by ninety nine point ninety nine percent. That's not hyperbole, that's demonstrated loss. The second group is what we're formerly like,
less fertile, but they were meadowlands. Shennonto a valley of northern Virginia comes to mind, the new river settlements that I know you and I have read a lot about the River Valley on these areas. They were really fertile, but not like good for plant and crops. They were fertile for grazing lands. Well, those got overgrazed in the early periods of American history. Then they got improved by planting tall fescue and you know, Scottish grass and all
these other kinds of invasive species. And today they're like ninety nine point nine to nine percent pasture lands dominated by Eurasian grasses. And in the third category, like you're more rolling, sandy, sort of rocky grasslands with trees, those were savannahs. Those really dependent on fire, you know, places like tall timbers in South Georgia, for example, you take fire out of the equation, you take big animals out of the equation, those grow up and become forests.
God.
So the you know, vast swaths of our public lands today in the south Piney Woods of East Texas, big game lands in central Virginia, into Piedmont big lands in the Florida Panhandle that are today densely, densely forested and dry, used to be open savannahs. God, and we've lost it. But that's actually the greatest potential for recovery. And so you know, back to your question, Brodie, is how do
you how do you rebuild these? Well, again starting with knowing what they were, But you know, what you do to recover a savannah is very different what you do to plant a prairie. So savannahs are probably the trickiest. They're the easiest to restore, the most potential right now as a nation, to restore millions of acres of savannah that are just suppressed under artificially forested conditions. It's not gonna be popular because you're gonna have to cut trees.
That's what I was kind of getting that people don't like that, And unfortunately the biggest.
It comes from a good place though, Yeah it does.
It comes from reading low Rex and all that, like it comes from a good day.
Well, to circle back to the earlier point, I mean when I growing up, when if someone said they're going to restore something, I thought, oh, you're going to plant trees there, Just more trees is restoration.
I found myself trying to explain to someone the other day that we're talking about conservation, and I was talking about it's so regions specific, like what that means. And I'm saying that there's a perception among the general populace of well meaning people the conservation means not doing anything.
Yeah.
Yeah, And I was trying to explain the concept of active land management that if not doing anything doesn't give you what in some places, not doing anything doesn't deliver what you want.
Oh absolutely. And in the case of grasslands, which they either require most grasslands not all, but most require either some combination of big animals bison, elk especially fire. Again, not all types. The blue grasses of animals, the blue grass of Kentucky, for example, was probably a bison elk dependent ecosystem, not a fire dependent ecosystems. Right, yeah, But you take those two combinations of factors out and you then you know, interject you know, conversion to crop land
or overgrazing. That's how you lose what we had. But if they're done well, they almost always require people to be involved in the process. I think that's part of the success story is the people who love land and conservation and hunting. There's a great opportunity and it's enjoyable. I mean, I think about the farms that we work with. One of the best is this eleven thousand acre farm in Alabama. This farm's nine miles wide and this family
it's been in their farm since nineteen eighteen. They've never needed the federal government or the state government or anybody to tell them what to do with it. And they just they've made managed it perfectly in one hundred years. And it's like stepping back into a time capsule to about the eighteen teens in west central Alabama. It's amazing.
You mentioned her. Besides having a big impact on you know, killing all this stuff, do you in order to combat all those Eurasian evasive grass species, do you have to whatever hold hands with the devil and use that stuff? Also?
Absolutely? Yeah, And boy, that's a big hot button issue for us because you know, right now the technology and then know how to take something from a field of johnsngrass, which is this nasty invasive from Africa. For us to do something better than Johnson grass, we have to nuke it like six times, you know, and we don't want to do that. But guess what once we take care
of the Johnson grass problem. Like we're doing a project right now with Google, and you know, we are treating a site and preparing it, but once we get it planted with the most diverse species mix it's ever been planted in Central Tennessee, you know, except for coming back in and just with our volunteers and spot treating a couple of problem areas, we'll never again have to use
that stuff there. And you know, we've got American bumblebees coming back, We've got grasshopper sparrows, got Northern harriers, We've got otters coming in from the Creek Bank. So hopefully, Yeah, that's a big problem here. I mean, I have some really high profile clients that say, no, this is a certified organic farm, and we don't want to give up on doing it organically. It's just really right now, very
challenging to do it at scale. You could do it at one to two acres, but the how you're going to do it at one hundred acres you know, or even ten acres is very challenging right now.
That's to take a lot because you're throwing off the balance in the soil as well, so you probably need a yeah, a lot of layers deep.
It's it's very complicated. I mean we've had to turn away some you know, high profile clients that said, hey, this is this is a certified organic farm. You won't be using that stuff on my place, and there's just nothing you can do. Then no, And then they actually did plant before we came in. They tried to plant, and it fails because if you don't take care of the invasives all, it takes about three years to get
on top of it. I know that's a lot, but if you can, if you can manage the invas as well for three years to make sure that you are planting into something that is very you know, receptible to all these you know species of grasses and wafflars that you need for healthy wildlife habitat. It's just a three year quick sacrifice.
And once it's established, it can kind of hold that stuff at bay.
Yeah, it can. Now, it may depending on the severity infestation. You know. Again, what we're trying to do is build a team of young men and women who come in and we stay on top of it. Right And that's the thing is that you can't just build a prairie and walk away. That's one of the reasons why it's exceptionally hard to get a lot of people on board with this idea of eastern grasslands is because it does require perpetual management.
How many years of management or do you mean perpetual perpetual?
Yeah, I think perpetual, you know, and you know it's going to need most of them are going to need fire. You know, some of them would benefit from grazing, you know. So where we have the greatest success is working on you know, nothing's guaranteed, but we're right now we're having the greatest success. There's probably some of the private lands where people are still young and active and they're like,
my kids are into this, and it's all hands on deck. Otherwise, it takes a fairly steep monetary investment to get into some of this and right now, we're trying to. What we're trying to basically inform the American public on is that we can't afford not to because so much of our Eastern bid diversity, northern bob white countless songbirds, pollinators, you know, they're in free fall collapse in the eastern
part of the United States. We would argue largely in part because we're not doing what we need for our habitat.
Do you think that's what that's what is ultimately has happened to the bob Wait Quail.
One thousand percent? Yeah, And I you know, I enjoyed the episode that you guys had on Quail recently. Not everyone did well, you know, I enjoyed it, but uh and I learned a lot about eye parasites, you know. But I was thinking the time the whole time I watched it. Well, when you take an ecosystem or a collection of open, brushy, grassy ecosystems that offered Quail everything they needed, and then you take away ninety five percent of that, what the hell do you expect? What do
you expect? And even even I'm not even just talking about pre settlement landscapes. Uh, As a boy growing up in southern middle Tennessee. In the eighties and nineties, every hillside for miles around was just broomsedge fields, you know, golden broomsedge Athropogon virginicas standing through the winter.
What is that?
It's a it's a type of blue stem native blue stem grass. It's it's it's shipped for forage. So farmers don't really like it, and it's often a sign of beat up pastures and stuff. But you know what, Quail, Quail loved it. And we had BlackBerry patches everywhere. I mean, this is this is not your ideal, pristine, high quality habitat. It was very much an agricultural beat up, brushy pasture land on somewhat poor farms that I grew up on.
But the thing is it was everywhere. But then by the latest nineties, everybody, everybody in their mama started mowing religiously, and oat side started getting sprayed and fence rows started getting taken out. And I think what we hear a lot of times is I've heard some colleagues push back and say, well, yeah, but you know, Quail, they really made a big spike in this sort of era of
land disturbance and clearance, and this agricultural revolution. I think that most people saying that don't really have a grasp on what we just lost. They're working from this nineteen fifties mindset that it was all easternsiduous forest. They got
opened up into brushy, scrubby great quail habitat. They're not even stopping to consider the three point seven million acres of prairie lost from central Kentucky, the barons, the Big Barons as it was called, that today less than one hundredth of a percent remains.
And that was quail country.
That's quail country.
Yeah. You know what's kind of funny is my buddy Kevin Murphy. I was down hunt with him in Kentucky. Where is He's not? Is he Paduca?
Yeah?
I thinks Anyways, he gets permission on an Amish farm, gets real exciting because that's where the game's at. And uh, he was right, only quail I've ever seen walking around, Kevin.
They grew up on quail.
The only quail I've ever seen walking around with Kevin Murphy's One day he got permission on an Amish farm, And I'm like, why is that just different?
He's like different practices. The fence rose right, but.
Again highly disturbed, highly disturbed landscape. But he had he had said a couple things, hell on predators not cutting fence rows, dirtier areas meaning like you know, like big areas full old equipment that kind.
Of grew up and cover.
So you start to associate quail today, You associate quail with man made ecosystems that somehow give them what they need.
But then you got to try to remember that that's not what they came from.
They use it as refugeia, but it wasn't like the main thing. Yeah, the main thing was like grasslands. Otherwise whitetail deer.
You just think they came from tracktomes in suburbia, right.
Exactly right, yeah, exactly right, Like you drive around exactly what they need. Yeah, you see a big bucket?
What did they do before all this?
What they do before that neighborhood? Well, you know that big buck lip.
And in the archaeological record, we've got you know, we've got records of quail going back you know, ten thousand years ago. In North Alabama. There's a cave called Dust Cave near Florence, Alabama, And uh, dust Cave is one of these sites where these academics that study these sites basically detailed all that the Native Americans were utilizing from the landscape that they could that they could find in the remains of those cave settlements. Right, They put together
like a list of one hundred animal species. It's crazy, at least dozens. Every kind of duck and waterfowl and thing you could imagine being in the backwaters of the Tennessee River. They were utilizing it. Every kind of turtle, every kind of major fish species. They had fragments of it, rattlesnakes, boom, they got it. But they all said quail and greater praid chickens, you know, and we see greater prayer chickens, which has often thought of as this classic sort of
Midwestern species. But you know John James Audubon when he painted in his original paintings of the species hardin County, Kentucky, you know, just south of Louisville, greater prairie chickens, greater prayer chickens. And before we end today, I hope it's not right now, but when it is, I need to tell you one of my favorite quotes. I'll tell you right now.
Tell me.
I need you guys close your eyes. Okay, we're gonna do a little prairie preaching right here.
Okay is the lap? Okay, I'm ready.
We're gonna ask Wanda to come up and play on the Oregon. We're gonna have an ultra call.
Well, where's the music job?
It would be difficult to imagine anything more beautiful, For as far as the eye could reach, they seemed one vast, deep green meadow, adorned with countless numbers of bright flowers springing up in all directions. Only a solitary tree now and then a scattered post oak were to be seen. It was here where the wild strawberries grew in such profusion as sustained the horses hoofs a deep red color.
It was here that I afterwards met with the prairie bird, or the barren hen, as we called it, which I afterwards met with in such vast numbers on the great prairies of Illinois. Ruben Ross eighteen twelve.
Hallelujah, Where was he?
This is right on the Kentucky Tennessee line, just about an hour southwest of Bowling Grain, near well my town, Clarksville, Tennessee, where we're based.
It'd be a sweet deer hunting permission.
Strawberries got me strawberries, and I butchered that quote a little bit.
The strawberries actually coming to the end.
But you know, if you you use the term earlier tertiary, what's that mean tertiary forest.
Yeah, it's like the third you know, it's you know, secondary tertiary, quaternary.
I've been so much more familiar with the West and my adult life. But like, let's say you have a let's see you go twenty miles from here in the mountains, okay, and something burns. I mean it burns down to the rocks. Let's say, like that kind of fire. Right, It's like dirt and rocks are done. It's hard to picture, but I would say to my kids, like it'll go through a bunch of steps, and if nothing happens from people or whatever.
It'll it's hard to picture, it'll.
Wind up just like it was when it burnt. It'll, you know, a lot of these forests, it will wind up being that. It winds up being like it'll be big lodge poles and it'll bet those little knitic knick berries growing on the ground or whatever.
You know what I mean.
It'll like find its way back to that is that does that wind up not being true in the east because of non native plants?
Meaning if you'd gone in fourteen hundred and you would put round up on a patch of this prairie, you put round up on it till it, put round up on it till it, put round up on it till it, and just till it's good and dead and left by fifteen hundred whatever the hell, it probably would have been back to being right.
Yeah, yeah, what you're described back to be in prairie. Yeah. I mean, well, there's a couple of things there. One is you're describing that pioneer process, right, that's primary succession. So when you take something back to you know, just bear subsoil, right, the things that are first going to colonize that are the weeds, you know. So broom sedge, which I mentioned earlier, is a type of native grass, but it's a weedy native grass. It has a very
low what we call conservatism value. It's like a one or a two on a scale of one to ten. Something that's a one, two three can just move right on in. It tends to persist for a little while as other things then invade and stabilize that ecosystem over time, and some natural communities are really adapted to long term stability, you know, like meaning like not just complete disruption. You know,
prairies are pretty stable, you know. But then but most of your native prairie grasses are not pining your species. That's why don't call them early successional. You know, you go open up a new cornfield, you let it go follow and let's say you got a prairie next to it. You can hope and wish all damn day, but those prairie species are not going to move into your cornfield. Yeah, they don't do that. They don't behave that way. It takes a long time for these natural communities to assemble,
what's called assembly time. And in the case of doctor Joseph Weldman at Texas A and M has published a paper a few years ago, twenty fifteen or so that talked about old growth grasslands, they require thousands of years to assemble. That's god man, nobody's thinking about that stuff.
Yeah, that's the term you're using, is helpful assemble, Yeah, because it's not like how you're going to have fire weed but then all of a sudden, immediately you're going to have all these little lodge pole pine things and then pretty soon lodge pole pine is.
Gonna win out.
Yeah, and you're talking about two things coming together, right, which which would be like dwarf wortleberry, lodge pole pine, whatever, two things you're talking about.
How do you get these perhaps dozens?
Yeah? Well, and you also were asking about invasive species, So yeah, now that's the factory that gets in a way. Right, You've got a site that it's going through this early phase of disturbance. Invases are going to move in and sort of suspend that natural successional pathway, and that complicates things for us out there in the habitat restoration world a big time. You know. But you're always gonna have weeds.
You know. Where you would have had this weedy flora in the east, let's say three thousand years ago, would have been around a Mississippian probably a thousand years ago Mississippian Native American village. You know, a lot of cornfields and stuff where they were disturbing. You would have expected
native weeds to be all in and around their settlements. God, where you had a bison wallow, you know, three hundred years ago, the weeds would have been around that bison wallow, But you're more ecosystems that are not, especially when it comes to soil disturbance. That's the big thing that they like,
the weeds like. But your other forms of disturbance, like you know, grazing, pressure or fire, they don't have the same kind of detrimental resetting effect that like plowing till and wallowing half.
Is there, like in your eyes, is there an acceptable like approximation of the original as far as restoration where it's like it's not perfect, but it's close enough that like it's pretty damn good.
Yeah. What we do is we look to remnants where they exist. You know, I mentioned Long Island earlier, right, there was sixty thousand acres of prairie up until about nineteen oh five, nineteen ten. That prairie lasted longer than the prairies near my home at for Campbell Army Base or in Middle Tennessee, Kentucky.
Did they have that moor hen out there.
Where they had the what they called the heath hen. Yeah, you're right, and it went extinct a decade or two later. But today, out of that former sixty thousand acre landscape, there's only twenty four acres left adjacent to Nassau Community College. What Yeah, So if you want to rebuild a grassland on Long Island, one, you got to where you're gonna
do it right. But then you could go look at that, at that last surviving remnant, harvest the seeds from it, learn how to then structurally attempt to rebuild it across the road. That's the approach we're using all across our region.
Now.
We go look at the last surviving remnants on army bases or someone's private ranch or farm, and then those we collect seeds from and we work with seed farmers like Roundstone Native Seed out of Kentucky or Earned Native Seed out of Pennsylvania. We buy the seed from them and then we rebuild those ecosystems to the very best that we can.
And what's like to Brody's point, to put a finer answer on it, like, what.
Is what's as close as we could get to good enough? I think sixty of the species biodiversity? Like like when do you go, like, sweet, let's go find a new spot.
That's a great question. I think I'll give you just I'll just give you a real scattershot of what people have been doing. Right. So you know in the nineties and two thousands, Uh, we have a saying back where I'm from, where native warm season grasses, everybody planning the native warm season grasses like twenty years ago, and they would use three species big blue stem indian grass and little blue stem sometimes ate out of fourth switch grass.
That's not cutting. You're not adding sore three in enough. You're not adding what we call groceries on the ground. You don't have the seeds, the nectar, the cover, the structural diversity needed to support a diverse array of wildlife, including polleners and songbirds. You need to hold package. So then about ten years ago people were stepping up because a big limitation is where you're going to get the seeds. If you don't have farmers producing seed, your shit out of luck.
Yeah. So you know, was that little eleven acre patch isn't going.
To right and you off the Yeah, and you would exhaust those patches too, right. They need their seeds to rain back down on that site to some extent. So you do need these native seed producers, these private companies mostly to go and buy the seed from. And so ten years ago most people were just barely able to get like a mix of like ten fifteen twenty species, and it wasn't really that cost effective to be able to You couldn't really afford to do a lot more
even if they did exist. But in the last ten years, that's five years, those same companies now are offering to three hundred species. So what our project with Google when we planted it in twenty twenty, we used seventy seven species in our mix. That was the most at that time. We just planted an eighty nine species mix on a private farm in Tennessee. So you know, we're trying to
get our mixes up eighty nine. Yeah. Now that's not for everybody, you know, but I would say you need to be somewhere, but you need to be somewhere in a twenty to forty range is a sweet spot.
Let's say someone has a whatever, one hundred acre farm and they've got a twenty acre pasture. It's like ideal for a storing. They restore it. Can they then use that as a pasture or is it like hands off now because the animals might graze somewhere else and then bring in in base or it just can't handle the.
Yeah, you can. It depends on the kind of grassland, right, Some are really conducive to being great for grazing. You do need to pay attention to like what you put in your forage mix. You know, for example, horses. Horses can't tolerate certain types of grasses that maybe cattle can.
For example, Oh, like you might have a toxic plant.
You could have a toxic plant, or you could have a plant with bristles on the spikelets of the grass that get into the mouth parts. So those are all considerations and we try to be real mindful of those kind of things. But now this same farm is called the Wessington Plantation north of Nashville. Uh, you know, we're putting eighty nine species in that mix, but we're absolutely going to be lightly grazing that. That site's really cool.
It's got a two documented buffalo fords just down in the valley and you can still go and see the impressions where the bison would across the screen ship. Yeah, it's pretty awesome.
Hey, I got a tactics question for you. Uh you were talking earlier. You use the expression nuke in the ground. Yeah, to get it ready. I appreciate the term we hate to do it. I'm assuming you're talking about glefil Sate.
Glyfe Sate, and a few others. Yeah, yeah, yeah, uh.
That winds up you know earlier we're talking about political complexities.
To return to the beginning of the return to political.
Back in there, yeah nah, going back in there, springing up like we had a Feller sitting in that seat one time.
That is.
Very adversarial to round up. Right, how do you like, is there another.
Emerging technology that gives you what you need if the tide against roundup turns with like the class action lawsuits and stuff. If round it becomes like can't get it, can't put it under ground, do you then have to be like, oh shit, this whole thing's over or is there is there a plan B.
Well, yeah, that that's a great thing to consider, and it is something we worry about, you know, because right now it's just the knowledge and the the technology and the cost right of doing other options. And people could say, well, it's about the cost. No, it's not about the cost. It's about some of the top experts that I've been able to talk to on this issue have not found a way to do it. Above one to two acres at a time, and if we're tackling one or two
acres at a time, damn it, we're not doing enough. We have to think about scaling this. And you know right now we've got six big anchor grasslands that were just been funded to begin restoring, and some of these are in very bad shape. They're going to require two full years of getting on top of the weeds so that we can have something better. If we were presented with an option where you can't use it, it would completely derail conservation efforts for grasslands.
Now, Randall, do you remember how many acres of dan floories do by hand?
Oh? I think that was.
I think that was twenty or forty acres.
It was.
It was like a arid grass landing. But he had I think he did spot a nap weed and leafy spurge years years any spare moment.
Yeah, Now, so what is the what is the current footprint of your organization look like in terms of on the ground being here, done that, or under underway.
Let me just answer one last thing that Steve brought up, which is, uh, we are about to experiment with using a flame scorcher to do probably somewhere between five. It's a propane fuel flame scuorture, so you know, hot hot, and it even for those you know, then that gets into like fuel consumption and carbon emissions kind of territory. Either either way you go. You don't have a good approach, like you could get.
That ship so hot that you wind up with an equal.
Yeah, you'd have to do it several times. I mean, otherwise you're looking at solarization. You'd have to put black plastic down. Can you imagine trying to cover black plastic on one hundred acres? It's just not feasible.
And everybody's all mad at plastic.
Now right, you know, and that's what's going to break down.
I just can't win these days.
You could, You could disc the hell out of it, but that don't work on a slope where you're subjected, subjected people after you. And then the last one that comes to mind is, uh, you could graze the hell out of it for a long long time with.
A bunch of goats.
Yeah and all that.
Yeah, but then you there's all these come with complexity. Sure, the quickest and most efficient is the approach we use, but it does have its you know, it comes with its drawbacks for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a complicated world. Complicated, Yeah, the world. It's annoying this world.
Yeah, it's uh. And now, Randal, you asked me what's our footprint?
Yeah, like, how how many acres are you working on? Now? How many acres have you worked on? What's how's the scaling been?
Yeah? So the region is twenty four states. We're actively working in or contracted before the freeze to work in seventeen states. We just this year, with the funding that the pro we've already started and what we've been funded to do, we would be able to begin our first ten thousand acres of restoration. So that's that's a big accomplishment for us because just a year and a half ago we had sort of reached our first thousand acres.
I mean, you know, as an organization where you're starting from scratch to build what is now a fifty person team, you know eight years ago, first no one really knew about southeastern grasslands as a thing, so we had to educate why they're here. Then you know, we had to just build the team organically, you know, administrative assistance, communications, team on the ground, representation, fundraising, all that stuff, and it took us a good eight years to reach our first thousand acres.
Yeah, but you're using as inspiration ten acre.
Patches, that's right, Yeah, which is when you put it in that like, when you consider that, that makes it more all the more extraordinary.
And it's so it's so difficult, so to go from one thousand acres in twenty twenty three to now ten thousand acres. But our ability to do that, you know, is currently in limbo with the freeze that we're currently facing. We were super excited at the beginning of this year. We had just received major funding from a few major federal agencies to begin working on forty US National parks from Mississippi Vermont to do a few thousand acres of
much needed eastern grasslands focused representation. And I'm talking about some of the most iconic landscapes that we have, like Gettysburg Battlefield. People don't realize that southeast Pennsylvania was home to grasslands before seventeen twenty. Great Smoking Mountains National Park, CAD's Cove. You know, these are places that are really well stated. It's Tennessee.
These are all Republican states. They might still get it, Yeah, they might get it.
You know, they might get it so.
Battlegrounds now they need to keep them happy. They might send some of that money over there, hopefully and assuming they're going to use that money and strategically into.
Like I'm gonna be positive, I'm gonna hope it's gonna clear up and go through. But I think if if things don't clear up into three to four week five six week process, we risk losing ninety percent of our team.
Is there, seriously, Yeah, And there's no hope to like working directly with state agencies, They're just not the mould.
And we've we've been cultivating what we've built for eight years, you know. And I had a farmer I don't want to say his name or getting in his business, but you know, when we got the agreements in place to work with the US National Park Service, you know, and these are mostly funded through the Inflation Reduction Act in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, you know, those those two two and a half to three years of discussions to get
in place. We signed them all well ahead of the past several months, and those have been all obligated.
Those are obligated, congressionally approved, all.
Congressionally approved, and so then We spent all of last year staffing up to get ready for that. So we hired almost twenty five employees in the rounds of going through searches and interviews, et cetera. We had then build up our partnership base on the East coast, and so we reached out to a couple of private companies and said, do you guys have the capacity to join us with this effort. One major seed producer said, you know, I need about two or three weeks to deliberate, as this
is a big, big opportunity for our small business. You know, they employed about forty people. They said, need some time to think about it. They came back two or three weeks later they said, we're in. We're going to work with you to help make sure you got all the seeds that you need to be to restore these lands, restore this wildlife habitat. And when the freeze took effect, it now puts that farmer, that small business, those forty
people employed in that business at risk. My friend had to go out and take a one million dollar business loan to be able to have the to staff up and have the capacity needed to meet this federally obligated project. And I'm not trying to bitch about our situation because again, everybody's in the same boat. But you said it when it starts coming back and biting people in the ass who are just everyday Americans trying to have kids and babies and care for their elder aging parents and go
out and hunt on some good lands. I don't know, you know, And so as the leader of our organization and the co founder, and I'm deeply worried about with the next three weeks. I just talked to a good friend of mine and a philanthropist and an advisor. I mean, I'm looking at the reality of needing to go raise thirty million dollars in six months. I got friends that tell me it's physically impossible. I got this mighty man
attitude that says I can do it. I really don't know where to go, but I know I don't want to face the reality of letting my ONTUR team go. And we were we were standing at the world's highest point three and a half weeks ago. It just feels like we got our damn teeth kicked in. And so many of my friends are going through the same situation. M both sides of they this is a bipartisan, you know effort.
Ye. That feels pretty America first to me. It does get in the grasslands.
It does. Yeah, and we're telling them about brother Yeah, man, this is America.
Yeah, put that first. Mega make America grassy again.
Man, I've heard that somebody's mentioned that before.
Is there any way for like someone on land and they wanted to like try to do some of this on their own, Like, could they contact you and get advice? Or is there like a handbook for so to speak, for doing this or is it something that needs to be done on such a larger scale that it's not.
Yeah, I mean there's definitely a lot of people doing it, you know, on their own properties and stuff. I think you guys are going to talk to my good friend Kyle Iibarger coming up in a while, you know, with a Native habitat project. You know, Kyle does this kind of work. You know, he came up about five or six years ago, started this kind of work. You know, increasingly we're beginning to see a lot more attention. All we ever wanted was to give eastern grasslands an equal
seat at the conservation table. I went to a conference recently and I got right with these people. You have been right with somebody, Steve, I don't know what means. That's when you start throwing out a couple of by gods, you know, yeah, yeah. So I went into I went into this gathering of about one hundred people, and I said, by god, it is pastime for y'all to start having
a damn conservation conference in the southeastern United States. There better not ever be another conservation conference where grasslands don't get an equal seat at the damn table. I said, you can have forest and you talk about wetlands, and you talk about coastal ecosystems, and you talk about climate change. Grassland's harbor half the biodiversity of temperate eastern North America, and their biodiversity's collapsing. You got to do something about it.
So I had a by god moment. I do apologize forgetting to the here you well, I don't know. I think they're hearing. I think we're witnessing the explosion of interest in this topic. But we ain't got it far enough yet.
Steve, Well, I'll tell you this is.
I'm new to the whole conversation, you know, the whole thing that I even started thinking about it. I would never even become aware of it had I not had such an interest in this particular era, in these early accounts of people rolling into these spots and describing them for the first time. If I had an encounter that I would never even have thought of it. I would have still tell them everybody about the squirrel running from.
You know wherever. That's one am I going to the Mississippi never hitting the ground.
Yeah, the long Hunters are one of my gateways into this. But I do need apologize. I just committed blasphemy.
Oh we can beat it out.
No, No, I appreciate that people know what was said.
Yeah, God, well not even that.
I think you should bleep it out, Phil sleeping out, Yeah, bleeping out. Get that I had earlier that loud that could be the new bleep we use.
And my terrible, my terrible guess at the BLM's annual budget. I'd like that one stricken from the record as.
Well anytime randalled Yeah he has something, Regrettably, he says, just put his belch in there.
Hey, I keep meaning asked, what's up with that wedding ring you got on there?
Uh, dude, I'll tell you what probably been married almost twenty five years? What yeah, man, Yeah, you got married at five.
Or you're just a age gracefully.
It's probably twenty two, twenty three. Yeah. My wife and I've been together since like two thousand and two. That's when we got married. Been together since ninety seven. Yeah, long time first girlfriend ever.
Good for you.
My first girlfriend turned into my wife. Yeah.
You guys got kids?
We do, got three kids. What's your wife's name, Shauna? I got an eighteen year old, sixteen year old, and a ten year old named Boom.
You guys got right to it.
I'm right, bro.
See that was a good move. My buddy Clayed the same thing, got right to it young.
Yeah.
Like I keep thinking about, you know, like the kind of being the kind of old dude where you go get your grandkids because your kids don't want to hang out anymore. But I'm so far away from that happening, man. Yeah, like picking up your grandkids, taking them turt young your back. You're right on the cost.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
You'll still be all walk around. I'll be rolling up in a wheelchair if at all. Huh, give me a piece of marriage advice.
Oh gosh, man, my wife's always right. That's for one. Yeah, and uh.
You're not telling me that she is. You're just saying you pretending.
Yeah, pretending. I tell you I got lucky, Man, I got lucky. I'll tell you this. I will say this. All credit to you there. You know, there's a reasons why the Southeastern Grasslands Institute exists.
Are we off marriage?
No? No, no, I was.
Gonna shout this is this is gonna bring this, gonna bring.
It coming full circle.
I'm with you, strong one.
It wouldn't exist if a philanthropist from New York City hadn't discovered us and said, I want you guys to dream big, think programmatically, and create something special. But it also wouldn't exist without the relentless support of my wife because man, this to grow a new organization from nothing to a team of fifty soon to be sixty five, man, I had to have a strong woman in my life, and all credit to her.
Uh.
When I had to work sometimes thirty hours straight, got no sleep day in, day out, she made sure I had what I needed to keep running. And I'm deeply appreciative to her for that.
It's great.
You know, to quote, my friend told me, what's that behind every successful man is a woman who thinks he's an idiot, right, right, because.
It pushes you, keeps you, it keeps you awakening and gets you up in the morning.
That's right.
I'm not that bad. Come on, I'm going to get to.
It, Dwayne. Are you guys? Are you guys like a nonprofit that people can donate money to.
Yeah, so you know, we are housed out of a university because I've been a professor for eighteen years, right, we currently function in sort of two capacities. We function as a nonprofit. Part of the university is our fiscal sponsors, what we call it. And then we function very much like an acidic department out of our our university, and
that that really gives us a lot of amplitude and flexibility. Uh. This year, we are going to be creating our own you know, nonprofit still affiliated with the university.
We'll run like a foundation.
Yeah yeah, right, so well you know, we'll have our own board of directors. We're going to be assembling that this year. And uh, I think that's gonna help us, you know, get to a point where we need to be. It's part of our business plan already.
Anyway, what tell me the university you're out of.
Yeah, it's called Austin P P E A Y. And our motto is let's go pee and uh.
You guys that you guys are occasionally do well in the uh in the march madness.
Yeah, yeah, you know, I know that. Yeah, And a lot of people say Pa or Paya or whatever, but it's just Austin P named for one of our former former governors. Yeah, it's good school.
So at some point people will be able to jump on a website and donate some cash.
Yeah, if they do check it out at you know, our website, Southeastern Grasslands Institute Segrasslands dot org. And of course we're on you know, Facebook and substack and you know all that stuff.
And if you're sitting there and you got a big property within yourself, the Dwayne South, Yeah, and you're just wading through piles of money and you're thinking about it's how you want to do something good for your land because as Doug Duran says, it's not ours, it's just our turn that's right, And you want to do something right by your land, Maybe go check these guys out.
Yeah, and I would like to. There's there's three things in particular, I'd love for your listeners to kind of help us think through Okay, and you guess too. One is we got so much existing public land and private land, it just needs to be managed in a better different direction. Right.
Our organization, through this web portal that's been funded by the USDA called Grasslandia, is designed once we roll that out next year in partnership with EZRA, is designed to be that decision support tool that both public land managers and private landowners can come to Grasslandia and you'll better go into that world and see maps of where the grasses used to be, see the quotes from the early historians who follow the Long Hunter's work or Native Americans,
and have that at your fingertips, along with information the photos what they look like, and the information of how to restore the seed mixes the fire regime that you need. So we need to do a lot better with the land we already have. But the second key points one is that we have remnants left on the landscape that are clinging to existence. They need us to recognize them for what they are. They need our help, and that's a hard thing to do. But we can't forget those
remnants of places like May Prairie. They're critical is the building blocks to build back from seeds or to protect them because they are oftentimes they need to be protected to manage because they're the last of their kinds. That's the Model's the model. And then the third is I fear that people in the East especially have given up on this idea of big scale conservation. And we're not giving up. So our vision is in my lifetime, is
to create two dozen large scale grasslands again in the East. Now, large scale is relative, you know, that's the eastern version of large, right, So there's no reason why we can't build an eleven thousand acre prairie in parts of Alabama Mississippi that connects to and integrates farms and you know, just all the different kinds of efforts grazing, et cetera that needs to happen at a large scale. Now, imagine if we did big scale grassland here in central North
Carolina and western Kentucky. I think people have given up on that as a possibility. S g I, the Southeastern Grasslands Institute. That's that's where we're heading. That's our future, that's our next big thing, and what we want is to attract people to come join us on that bold, big vision. That's the future of Eastern conservation right there.
Amen, I'm a convert.
Come on down, and I have been sold to extend a hunting invitation to have you guys come on down some turkeys. I tell y'all, Yeah, I want you guys to come on down and see that bison trail at the at the Wessington.
Farm, and I would love to see that.
Come down, see the bison traces you can hunt in our newly restored grasslands down there. Really got some amazing turkey deer. Come on down.
I love to have you like sounds of that. You know what book you might like to read?
Man, tell me I'm looking for some good ones.
Have you read The Land Breakers? No, it's from the sixties.
So the other day I had dinner with my editor and my publisher at random House, and I was talking about They were asked me if I'd seen something that's out right now that everybody's watching, and I was saying, I have a hard time with stuff like that because I'll see something that wasn't accurate, historically accurate, and I'll forget all about what I'm watching and I'll just be real annoyed about that, so I can't watch it, yeah, which led us to a conversation of who gets it right?
And I was making the case that I was making.
The case that Corn McCarthy gets his stuff right like other writers, Alan Eckert gets his stuff right. They're just good, which led someone to say, have you read The Land Breakers from the six nineteen six? I think it was from sixty four and I hadn't. But the land Breakers, as you can imagine, it's like seventeen eighty right, and it's new people moving in to break the land.
It's so well done.
It's just kind of like the Liul Lamore is the Sacket series. It's sort of similar.
Dude, I don't want to hack on Louis the Moore. How do I put this? I've read Louis, the more Dirt is a big Louis. Dirt is always reading Louis. The more I know how to say this in general way, just go for it.
No, I mean I think I think.
No, it is unbelievable. Uh. It is like like how that dude knows what he knows?
And I've gone and checked a little bit to be like what, yeah, including this, but I mean, the stuff about trees and plants is unbelievable.
Like he's done a lot of work. He later got involved in politics as an advisor.
I can't wait to read it.
Man, The land Breakers, I'll read it. Unbelievable. Anyhow, I learned in there, and I went and looked, and this is true when you're making leather wang for like leather stitching groundhog. Whow strongest ship out there? Wow?
But no, I think it's like, I think you'd really appreciate that novel, The land Breakers.
I'll check it out. Absolutely.
I got nothing to gain from this. Well, in fact, I take that back. You should go check out Meterre's American history. Thanks for coming on.
Hey, it's a tremendous honor to be here. Thank you for having me.
Is how best to come find you? If people want to find you, go to where.
Yeah, check us out on social media and come to our website and there's an email.
Link there, say the website.
Yeah, se grasslands dot org.
S grasslands dot org. And on social what are you?
On Facebook? And Instagram? At Instagram it's se grass land without.
The yes all right, Yeah, I like grassland.
Grass landy is gonna be cool man. Yeah, and it's gonna be cool for any research that you need for your book projects. So man, it's up excellent.
We're kind of moving westward on our book projects, but we'll come back, come back, We'll double back.
Come back, man, So far west will wind up back east. Yeah, right, just this South yea, thanks for coming on.
Appreciate, appreciate you guys,