Drew Lanham: The Wild We Inherit, The Wild We Imagine

TWI_005_Drew_Lanham Thu, Mar 20, 2025 3:42PM • 49:53 SUMMARY KEYWORDS Wilderness, public lands, conservation, nature connection, human nature, wild idea podcast, Drew Lanham, Clemson University, environmental justice, outdoor experiences, inclusivity, kinship, writing the wild, ecological restoration, community engagement. SPEAKERS Anders Reynolds, Voiceover, Speaker 1, Bill Hodge Voiceover 00:00 The following is a production of wild idea media, Bill Hodge 00:06 and welcome to the wild idea podcast, where we are deeply exploring the intersection of wild nature and human nature. Anders give you some context. Today, there is a party out my window, and I think it's the perfect party for our guests today. Our guest is somebody that I've had the pleasure of getting to know over the years. Dr drew Lanham from Clemson, but he's from a number of places, and when I get to the bio, you'll know what I what I mean by that. But the reason I think it's appropriate that there's a party out my window on a day in which we're talking to Drew is it is a party of corvids going on out my window? Yes, a group of J's is called a party. Looks like a group of crows is called a murder. And the ballots today is a little bit different. Normally, I have two or three blues and 567, Stellars. Today, there's a lot more blues than Stellars, but there are at least 15 or so of them out my window today. Anders Reynolds 01:03 I'm glad you opened with, there's a party outside my window. Or not, there's a murder outside my window. I feel relieved. But yeah, speaking of parties, I heard you were down in Missoula recently, starting a party of your own, getting people shooting and hollering and Bill Hodge 01:18 yeah, maybe we'll call it the Bull Moose Party. Oh, wait that that was already taken at one point in history. Yeah, I got to speak last weekend at a public lands rally in Missoula. That boy, I was so excited for the community. There were about 1000 people that showed up, and when they marched towards the bear tracks bridge there over the Clark Fork looked really, really impressive. It was great to get to speak to them about what's at risk with what's going on with our public lands right now. A lot of the organizers who were not formally an organization were federal employees who had recently been fired, specifically public lands employees. And I was excited to get the crowd fired up. It was great to see the turnout. Great to see the energy. Things have sort of been in flux from that moment. We're now being told that those fired employees are going to be recalled to work, but we also know that that's meant to be temporary, right? Anders Reynolds 02:09 It seems like there may be a reduction in force coming even after that. So I I wouldn't take my foot off the gas. I get a lot of questions about, what should I be doing? There's lots of stuff to do, but I think top among them is exactly what you're describing. Show up. Yeah, absolutely. Bill Hodge 02:23 And again, there was such a great crowd there. It was joined on stage by Tracy stone Manning, who's the newly minted president of the Wilderness Society, but used to be head of the Bureau of Land Management, so she got to speak quite eloquently about her staff at BLM that she who had just been leading. But yeah, people need to show up. And if you're finding that voicemail boxes are full on Capitol Hill, then write letters and get your neighbors together and write letters. Because, just because, right now, a judge has stepped in, doesn't mean that, you know, I think E and E News has been reporting that the plan is to reduce the Forest Service workforce by 7000 employees, which is almost a quarter, I guess, of the Forest Service Work staff. And then, of course, we've covered before the executive orders about timber. So what workforce is going to be there is going to be about logs on trucks. So, but, yeah, a lot going on. But you know, maybe what we'll look for today in our conversation with Dr Lanham is joy. Dr Lanham lies sort of at the heart of why I want to have these conversations, why I want to explore what wild means, what wilderness means, what it means inside our own brains. And I think one way to illustrate why I'd almost call him a muse for this podcast, I want to read from his great book, the home place, Memoirs of a colored man's love affair with nature. And this is from sort of the introduction. It's literally called me an introduction. I'm just going to read I'm just going to read you a paragraph. What do I live for? I eventually realized that to make a difference, I had to step outside into creation and refocused on the roots of my passion. If an ounce of soil, a sparrow or an acre of forest is to remain, then we must all push things forward to save wildlife and wild places, the traction has to come not from the regurgitation of bad news data, but from the poets, prophets, preachers, professors and presidents, who have always dared to inspire heart and mind cannot be exclusive one another in the fight to save anything to help others understand nature is to make it breathe like some giant, a revolving, evolving celestial being, with ecosystems acting as organs and a living things within those places, humans included as cells vital to its survival. My hope is that somehow I might move others to find themselves magnified in nature, whomever and wherever they might be. So I think it's fair to say that is at the genesis of why we're having these conversations on this podcast, right? That Anders Reynolds 04:47 is exactly right. I know you and Dr Lanham go way back, and I'm a little bit jealous to the relationship, and that means I'm so excited he's here. I hope maybe when we're done, he'll add to that list of poets and politicians and people. P word podcasters, maybe we can earn a place. Bill Hodge 05:05 Well, without further ado, let's bring drew into the conversation. Dr drew Lanham, if I read the entire bio, I think we would be out of time. But he is a professor at Clemson University. He is a poet. He is an author. He is a curator of exhibitions at museums. He is the poet laureate of his home county of Edgefield County, South Carolina. His work has appeared in all my favorite places, places like Orion, true. I mean, I could go on and on and on, but thanks for joining us today. Speaker 1 05:33 Thanks, Bill. It's good to be here. Good to be here. Anders, listening to you guys talk beforehand about sort of what's been going on on the ground out there. And I think about how I always envision the West, and the West, in many ways, for me, was kind of a baseline for wilderness concept, at least as I came to this point of thinking about what I call conjugating the wild. So wild wildness and wilderness and the West seemed to me to be a place that was at another level, especially compared to where I grew up. I grew up in the middle of public land, on an in holding right and the Sumter National Forest, the long cane Ranger District, primarily recovered cotton fields, so a lot of loblolly pine, but then a lot of bottom and hardwood forest along the Savannah River and some pretty unique places. But it was, you know, because that was, that was touchable to me as a kid. I mean, I could walk out into the forest. There really weren't boundaries. There weren't fences to keep me out of the forest, but in that way and having this understanding of what my place in the wild was as a kid, but then only having Montana accessible through the M volume of the 1966 Compton's Brownback encyclopedia. You know, it was a different space. It was a place with with Grizzlies and bison and those things that I always thought of. Okay, that's a different level. And it's a place that I eventually want to be. So I think in some ways, our communion and meeting over such things has been preordained, because it just seems that everything wild and all of these issues and the time that I've got, gotten to spend out in Montana, you know, from American prairie reserve and in that amazing place, and then a lot of time in Livingston, right as a writer at Elk River look, time in Doug Peacock's company, and all of those folks that, to me, sort of brought all of that back as from being A kid and thinking, Okay, this is what wildness is, and this is what wilderness can be. But now, yellowstoneization, of it all, it has changed Montana, to say the least. Yeah, it means something different. I'm trying now in the conversations, some of the conversations that we've had, I wouldn't call it a reset, but I've sort of taken my binoculars down a little bit and looked closer to home to try to figure out how I conjugate why the wild here, while still keeping in mind my love for those far away places like you're blessed enough to be you're Anders Reynolds 08:37 describing something I noticed about your book. There's a journey in your book, the home place, and it takes the reader with you from Edgefield, South Carolina, where you grow up patrolling your family's ranch with a BB gun, to more far flung places out west, in Montana and also in New England, only to come back again to just a few miles from where we started tinkering as As you paraphrase Aldo Leopold, without losing any parts, you're obviously talking about land conservation here, but it felt like you're also talking about yourself. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the ways growing into a natural S has helped you grow into yourself. Wow, you didn't Speaker 1 09:15 tell me this was going to come with a couch. This is some therapy. Man, yeah, you know what that's that's a great way to put it, Anders. But in some ways, you know, the first part I tell folks the the initial impetus for being a naturalist is often what I call, call stopping for the commas and the mud puddle. You know, you see these little black spots in a mud puddle, and they're swimming around, and you're like, Wait, where'd those come from? Maybe you you squat there, and you look at these things and you count them, maybe, and, but they're just these little squiggly black things with with tails in there that you're curious. And so. You know, that's the beginning of becoming a naturalist. But then you you find a way I would go to my, you know, those encyclopedias, or the books that my parents had, both of whom were school science teachers, and all of a sudden you find out that these are tadpoles, that spontaneous generation doesn't happen, but that these are tadpoles. And then they didn't have to do so much talking about the birds and the bees, because you begin to find out that these tadpoles came from frog sex. But then you learn, in that process of stopping and noticing, of pausing for the pollywogs, as it were, that you become concerned about them, because you learn that they've got to go through this metamorphosis thing to become frogs. And maybe you take a few home in a jar, right, and watch them and feed them Iceberg lettuce or whatever, and they develop these, these back legs, and they begin to become little froglets. And you become increasingly concerned, because the there hasn't been rained for a while. You also know that maybe Daddy's gonna splash through that puddle with the truck taking hay to the cows, or maybe, you know, one of your siblings is gonna decide that they wanna ride the bike through and in that moment of concern about those pollywogs, those tadpoles that you've counted, that maybe you've nurtured that you've learned so much about at that moment of concern you become a conservationist. So, you know, for me, sort of that journey of going from curiosity to a naturalist to conservationists really started at places like those puddles. And so I always try to remind my peers, you know, who are very high level and doing all this great work and getting all these formally federal grants. And why do you do this work? And you do this work because you stopped at a puddle, or there was, there was a flash of red in a tree that didn't look like the red bird that was always in the yard there was black in the wings. And all of a sudden you begin to learn that the tropics are coming to you through something called a scarlet Tanager. So all of that to say, it became this sort of additive process to a point for me and necessarily being objectified in the data that we gather. That science, the data doesn't have room for feeling in it right? It has to be gathered in this rigorous, objective way and then analyzed and disseminated through peer review, and then the people read it, they we go back and forth about that. That's all part of that process where I became a little bit disenchanted, was that we said, okay, the science doesn't have room for feeling, but the things that we're doing, the science about, deserve feeling. And those two things aren't mutually exclusive, as far as being a scientist and being an advocate for tadpoles or Scarlet Tanagers or whatever, so I began to peel away sort of who I had become as a scientist, not to leave science behind, but to uncover my heart again, to get back to that point of Wonder as I did when I was a kid, stopping by a puddle or seeing a different flash of red in a tree that I had not seen in a whole season, brought me to this place of wanting to communicate that to others, and so that that's been sort of the the evolution for me, and But it's all it's come attached with, quite frankly, with this idea that I have to think outside of my Western science box, that I've got to go back to some of what my grandmother used to talk about, that I have to hearken to, to different spiritual traditions. And thinking about birds is not things, but beings that that are worthy of consideration as beings and individuals, and not just things on a list. You know, that's the long form answer, I guess. I hope it gets sort of at what you were talking about. But for me, again, it goes back to being able to express awe and wonder, curiosity and concern. I Bill Hodge 14:25 think in my paraphrasing your robust biography, it doesn't capture the sense of what you just captured in that answer to Andrew's question, which is, you know, you're an academic, you're a scientist. There's a pretty fuzzy line between those two things. But there, there used to be, in my mind, this demarcation, then, though, between the other things that you are, like poet as an example, and you just illustrated how your mind evolved to being able to break from the empirical collection of data to the seeing things in a I don't I'm going to use the word spiritual way. But. However we want to characterize it as, as, you know, I've thought about you, and I've had these prior conversations, and as, as we say, with the wild idea, we're wanting to explore this intersection of human nature and wild nature and and obviously, sometimes that captures this debate about whether man is separate from nature, and that dichotomy of of what are we and I also think about the word man a lot, and it's gendered. It also assumes that all men or humans are of the same, and we're, of course, not, but you and I have a lot in common. You and I both grew up in the Carolinas. We grew up 100 miles apart. We're like almost literally the exact same age. And I think reading the home place. You grew up on a cultivated land. I grew up going to a family farm in West Virginia, cultivated land. And yet it's those cultivated lands of where I felt a connection to nature. And I wonder if you would maybe give your thoughts on like, do we over analyze what's wild, both in our mind and in practice? Speaker 1 15:59 I think that's where I am now. I've come to it only after and at some point, being able to get to these places that we have defined legally as wild or wilderness, right? That that sort of ultimate manifestation of wild, and being able to get to those places, and at times, feeling like the only one there and and, and having that feeling that so many before me may have had, but then snapping back to some reality and saying, Okay, first of all, to be To understand my privilege to be in that place, but to also understand I was not the first and but then to sort of trace back into my mind how people were thinking about what the place was, whatever the word was, or if there was for wild, or what the permutation of of that place meant. Did it mean that it was a good place for salmon? Did it mean that it was a good place for berries? That it mean that it was a good place to set up camp? Whatever it meant. But it was still, by our minds, wild or maybe Wilder as a kid, you know, for me, wild was defined by paved road. I mean literally, because the road that led to our house, they were dirt roads, and they would get man almost impassably muddy. When it rained. During droughts, it would get so dusty that when you rode your bike on it, you know, you'd have that little dust plume behind, and you could pretend to be Evil Knievel and all that sort of stuff. But when you got to the blacktop at the end of our road, there was sort of a boundary there. My older brother was bold enough to go out on the blacktop and ride his bike, and I can remember seeing him, and he would ride his bike, you know, with no hands, and here he was on this smooth blacktop That, to me, meant something other than wild, right? It was it was speed. It was out of bounds in this way. I didn't, I didn't go on that black top a whole lot because we didn't have permission to do it. But here I was on land that had been under cultivation for a very long time, and land even before it was under cultivation that had been stewarded by indigenous peoples, you know. And it was at the boundary of Cherokee and Choctaw lands and those peoples. So it was at this crossroads and by all the arrowheads and artifacts that my dad used to pick up out of plowed fields. It was obviously not a place that had been unpeopled, but the knowledge that we had back then, or thought we had in sort of this rasovian kind of idea of a noble savage, you be like, Oh, well, it must have been Wilder because indigenous people were there. And so you lived by some of that, that there were people there before you who didn't have the same things that you had. And therefore they were primitive. And therefore primitive is wild. And the more primitive you get, the Wilder it is. So you come forward through all the training or whatever, or the brainwashing or whatever it is, and you again, just like you begin, I think, at some point in your life, to deconstruct all the labels that you have. You begin to deconstruct this whole idea of what wild is. And for me, part of it again is being able to go to some of these amazing places that are just off scale, off grid, but I'm creating this pretty big carbon footprint to get to this place where I can then talk about how wild it is. But then, you know, we buy this farm, and this farm is in many ways. I mean, it's been cultivated. It's been under cultivation by various people, free and bound, and. And then poor, and the person who owned it before us very rich. And so as I walk about this property and I see what the last owner did, I realized it was ravaged by almost 200 goats. There's several huge patches of giant bamboo, which is a major invasive, right? There's privet, there's Nandina, there's all this stuff. And the hardcore trained ecologist in me would say, Okay, you need to go in. You got to bring in a big old d5 dozer and get rid of all that giant bamboo. You need to bring in something and get rid of this privet. You need to immediately burn. You need to do this that and the in the knee jerk restoration ecologist takes over. But then, like with the giant bamboo, I realized in that first winter that we were here, that it was an amazing roost for white throated sparrows, like all the white throated sparrows on the property white throated sparrows that could be from the furthest reaches of their range in Alaska and into these really, really wild spaces. But here are these wild, wild birds that are in a thicket of an invasive species. How am I going to handle that? I'm going to go in and just root it all out, right? So then the sparrows can find something native to be in. Or I found out that deer love bidding in this stuff. And so the wild things, the wild beings, who know what wildness is and wild is, I mean, they live it. I don't live it. They live it. Bill Hodge 21:39 They've adapted to it, and they've adapted to it, yeah, and if we're a part of it, we brought it to being, and they adapted to it. So Speaker 1 21:47 I'm having a bit of a struggle honestly. Y'all with some discussions, not all, but some discussions about invasives and what we do on landscapes and that we don't listen to what wild beings are telling us, and they're saying, you know, I'm adapting to this. I'm using this and how selective we are. I mean, can you imagine? I hope I would have enough sense that if you know, I don't know, I'm doing a podcast for South Dakota or North Dakota, or whoever is there, and what I decide I'm going to rail on is ring neck pheasants. That's going to go really, really well, right? We pick, and I say that to say we choose, we choose who we want or what we want, and we choose what we don't want. So you know, that idea that, to me, builds into this whole deconstruction of of wildness, but then I try to be careful, because I don't want people to think that I'm saying, oh, we should do away with this. No, what I'm saying? Then I had pulled up, I had written this. I'm gonna, if you don't mind, and I probably wrote this in an airport somewhere, right? But I said this was for katamack Bay in 2023 the concept of wild wildness and wilderness is constructed and construed. The concept of wild wildness and wilderness as constructed and construed through North American environmental and conservationist paradigm grew mostly from a genesis of white male conquests through transcendental and romanticized portrayals of humanless, Beast filled Edens to recent demands for roadless respite in remote, unpeopled lands with exclusive access to current considerations for re wilding this exclusivity and revisionist paradigm has a privileged momentum supported by agencies and industries that have largely ignored what Eurocentric, patriarchal wilderness paradigm means for everyone else, not white, not male, not affluent and not heterosexual. What does the future of conservation hold for those who don't have the disposable time or income to leave it all behind? How does current policy and paradigm move forward to make conservation in the Anthropocene and beyond a more intentionally inclusive effort? What are the ramifications for redefining our precepts of white calibrated nature? This essay attempts to address the historic through current issues in a way that provokes thoughtful response more than silver bullet answers. Such responses will involve a broadening of land ethic concepts at both the paradigm and practice levels, from the grassroots of stakeholder relevance and involvement up through the stem of restoration ecology and into the canopy of corporatized Enviro conservation organization, boardrooms. Keywords, wild, wildness, wilderness, land ethic, inclusion, diversity, Anthropocene. And I never got any further than Bill Hodge 24:53 that. It's a thought starter right there for sure. Again, Speaker 1 24:56 man, those are such critical questions, and I know we're not asked. Asking them of our students in the classroom. I mean, in that first question is, what does wild mean to you? And we don't ask people that, but we expect everybody to buy in to it, and so I think we have to retrace but I think we're afraid to retrace it, because what if the answer changes? We just Bill Hodge 25:19 saw an example of that. I mean, it's fair to say that Andrews and I are both practitioners of the wilderness. Act like we have found it to be a very effective tool, but I also have found that there are those in our community who knee jerk react to any dialog around its wholeness and its context. Recently, there was a panel of indigenous scholars talking about what wilderness means, what may come after wilderness. And the entire chat room became an explosion of a justification of what has always been, as opposed to an exploration of what it could be, right? I'm curious. You've mentored dozens of grad students like, do you challenge them with the these sort of things? And as Have you seen that go out into the world, and what you're seeing come back in theses? And you know what? I mean, curious, what, in that role as a mentor to grad students, what you've done to foster those conversations? Speaker 1 26:16 Yeah, I mean, we, we would have the conversations right before it came to us sitting around a table in the stress of a defense, to be able to just sit and think about what we're doing and the questions, first of all, that you're asking. And so much of the research that they were doing was based upon impacts of forest disturbance, primarily through forest management, logging, etc. But you know, we also had long term studies where we were looking at impacts of hurricanes and natural disturbances. And what's the difference between, you know, 20 acres that's cleared by a hurricane and 20 acres that's cleared by a feller buncher. What does that mean? And can the feller buncher mimic what the hurricane does? And so boiling questions down to some what I would like to say, I would really love for people, I asked them at first to come up with the simplest analysis that they can come up with, and that maybe that's a t test, and then you go from there and expand how you're thinking about your question. So I think that if I look at over, you know, these 50 something graduate students, from the first person who suffered through my stumbling about in the dark trying to figure out what the hell it was that I was doing, to that last person who I welcomed the weeds. I wanted them to wander into the weeds. And I can say consistently, that's one of the things that most graduate students don't want to do. When you say, you know, unless they're studying the weeds or the wildflowers however we're perceiving them, you know, they don't want to wander into them. They're like, wait a minute, you know, is this part of what I'm supposed to be doing, or are you presenting new questions that are going to cost me another three years in the field? So, you know, I look at where a lot of those people are now, and there are a lot of them in federal agencies with leadership positions, state agencies, quite a few at institutions. I'd like to think that, you know, when we would have those initial meetings, there was some feeling of kinship with those folks. And I've had a chance to see and watch some of them work, and feel like there's still that kinship. And that's how I measure things. You and I have a kinship, and that kinship of over wild and how we think about it and how we love it really. Because I, you know, honestly, for me, it comes down to, you know, can I somehow assess how you feel about a thing? I mean, I can know what you know about a thing and still hate you. But if I understand, if there's some point of empathy between us and we both love wildness and wild beings, then we have room to grow in a way that maybe we don't otherwise. So most of those students, I know that that kinship exists, still exists, and I watch them. You know, I'm watching one of my last PhD students, Dr Keenan Adams, who I hope at some point you'll invite to this podcast. But Keenan, for a while, worked out west. Think he was chief of bio survey, or something like that, down in Colorado for Fish and Wildlife Service. But then he went on special detail to Puerto Rico, and to watch this young man, a former football player at Furman University, to watch him go into, I think the name of the forest, I think it's Vicus National Forest, I can't remember, but to watch him as older millennial, to. To pick up Spanish, to pick up the language, to think about forests and forest management and and wildness and all of those things. As a Southerner who he and I, deer hunted, Turkey, hunted together. But now here he is on the island of Puerto Rico, making a different kind of difference. He has is on Vinca. He's doing sustainable agriculture there. So I look at a student like him, a former student who's who's a peer, I can learn from him. There's so much that I learned from former students who I didn't have to wait for them to graduate, to think of them as peers. I was learning stuff from them, you know, almost from day one. I mean, there was this one guy, Aaron Kilpatrick. He's a college professor now, but he, he was initially a guy who was interested in, mainly her petal Fauci, reptiles and amphibians. But I remember the first time we went out on the school forest here, he identified, like, three new species of grass. I was like, wait a minute, grass. What? What? How do you do that? And he went into this detailed explanation of the parts, you know, and the corm and all this stuff that you had to look at with these grasses. I learned from him immediately that he was paying a different kind of attention to detail. And every last one of those students, I can go back to, yeah, I can look at their theses or their dissertation. I can say, Okay, this is where we advance the science or the practice, whatever. But more so to remember them as human beings in a kinship. And so I see that well, more than see it, I feel it. And I feel it in them, and I feel for many of them, because I, you know, know, so many of them now who are on the in the federal workforce, and most of them are, hopefully far beyond you know what happened? Because they are have moved up the ladder, but some of them are still moving up the ladder, right? And if they got caught in between, that's sort of a dangerous place to be. So, so I do see, you know, we would have the conversations bill, and we would have the conversations and and when we get together, we still sort of have those conversations. You know, I look at them and I think about how much I learned, and how much of my concepts of conservation and wildness were shaped by them, and I'm grateful for that Anders Reynolds 32:31 so much of what you're talking about is is about perceptions, you know, doing a better job of talking to each other about how we come to wild places, how we understand them, or learning more about grasses that we didn't know existed before, your career and your passion for outdoor spaces has often been met well, on occasion, has been met with skepticism from people with preconceived notions of what a birder and an outdoor enthusiast should look like, and worse, frankly, with racist beliefs about who fits in the outdoors. So many of those beliefs are supported systemically by adventure magazines and who they choose to feature by NGOs and who they choose to amplify in their messaging and so on. I want to ask if you've seen any change in that posture during your lifetime, and if so, who out there is doing the good work to change those preconceived notions? Speaker 1 33:29 Man, I was talking about joining the other day, right? And I can be very specific, and I will about that. I've seen sort of marginal pushes right, nudges around the edge of it. And I think, honestly, Anders, part of the realization that I came to almost sort of mid stride right, was that, wait a minute, we are saying, why can't we get more of them involved in what we do more specifically. Why can't we get more black and brown people involved in birding or whatever? And then I really started again deconstructing. I was like, wait a minute, but do you know what black and brown people are doing in the outdoors? Are you looking at how we are thinking about nature and away from that, that sort of homogenized paradigm that we've had. So I came up with this thing, and I think about how I first came to so much of my outdoor experience, at least enjoying it and using it was fishing, and I can remember going to chevis Creek, you know, my father would, we could tell when it was going to be a good Saturday in the spring or summer, right? Because he would have the black 49 Ford would be in the yard, and there would be cane poles strapped to the side of it. You know, I probably would have seen him digging worms out of the. Feed lot, and that meant we were going fishing. And we go fishing. And first of all, it was some of the only contact, physical contact I can remember having with my father, because he would hold my hand as we walked across this bridge that had chevis creek running across it, and it was snot slick with all kinds of stuff. And you know, they had told us that if we got swept over, we'd get pulled down the suck hole and disappear forever. So there was that special part of it. But then we would fish. Daddy was the only person with a rod and reel. Everybody else had a cane pole, you know. And you'd pull out brim and horn aheads, mostly blue head chubs. But Daddy would, you know, he'd wander down the creek and he'd come back with war mouth and maybe a little bass or something. But all of those fish went home, and so there was no catch and release until it was into a pan of grease. And so that was my appreciation for it. So how would we have reacted to slot limits? This is basically sort of subsistence people, you know, that was about dinner that night, and so you didn't look at a horn ahead chub at a horny head and say, Oh, we don't want that and throw it back. There were no fish that we didn't keep. So that would be seen as lawlessness, not as people being in nature, right? And I'm not saying, I'm not advocating that we disobey slot limits or or take limits, but I'm saying people haven't taken enough time to say, well, how are black people in nature? Because we've been in it. Maybe we haven't been calling northern cardinals, northern Cardinals. Maybe we've been calling them red birds. Maybe we've been calling yellow Bill cuckoos, rain crows. But folks have noticed. So I think the reluctance has been for mainstream to sort of go up the feeder stream and say, Wait a minute. Let's see how we can be inclusive. There's that bad word, and include the way that other people think, our thinking alongside our thinking, and not say that this thinking is necessarily better, especially, you know, if we're both obeying the law, but we're seeing things differently. So I've seen some move where, you know, mainstream has been met with, you know, people coming to mainstream, but where I've been disappointed is that we're not asking the questions. We're not asking the questions of of of what birds. How did you come to know the birds? How did you come to know the land? You know, what does the land mean for you? And I can tell you, one of the positives of social media is seeing so many incidences of especially here in the south black folks who are still hunting deer, hunting, small game, hunting, fishing, all of those kinds of things. I think about a good, great friend of mine, Richard Morton, here in South Carolina, who is, you know, running one of the larger game management areas in the mountains of South Carolina. There are not a lot of black folks up here in Appalachia, but here's Richard running things right, knowing how to get along with people who you know would never see a man like him coming much less appreciate it. So I've seen those incremental changes. But again, I think in order to affect actual, effective change, it's not about twisting somebody's arm behind their back and saying, do it my way. It's holding their hand and saying, let me come along with you and see how you do it. And if we do that, then we begin to get an exchange, and we begin to understand in a sort of mutualism. Yeah, I'm seeing why all this way. You're seeing while this way. But guess what? We're overlapping in this way. It's like Bill was saying earlier, you look at Bill, you look at me, and nobody knows either one of us. They've never seen us, and you're gonna have a hard time telling us apart. I Anders Reynolds 39:13 love this answer, and I'll tell you why. One of the formative things that happened to me in my conservation education was hearing a very, a very well funded explorer of the Arctic criticize a very well funded speed runner of the Appalachian Trail for not having an authentic outdoor experience. I'm putting that in quotes. And I thought to myself, I don't think either of you are having the most authentic outdoor experience. I think the most authentic outdoor experience might be a picnic on the edge of the park. And it really got me thinking about, we gotta, we gotta readjust how we're talking about these kind of things. Well, how Speaker 1 39:48 much of it do you think Andrews and Bill is playing keep away? Are we playing keep away with the places that we want to say, Okay, we're gonna reserve this for. It those people who can afford to get there, and those are our five percenters. And if we can keep it restricted to the Five Percenters, you know, here we go. Obviously, Bill Hodge 40:10 all we can ever know is what's in our heart. But what I think I see in the NGO community maybe isn't, isn't the failure of playing keep away, though it's keep away in a different way. It's like, well, I want people to experience it in the way I experience it, not necessarily that I want to keep it to myself or I want to keep it to this set of people, but I want everybody to experience it, to experience it in my way. And I think you just spoke to that with, you know, to what you were just speaking about. And another way to put it, I've heard Dr Carolyn Finney put it, you know, the conservation community is always wanting to bring people to our table, but we never show up at other folks table, right? You know, I want to be clear. I'm sure there are some people who are playing keep away, who are buying up property that have joined public lands, and then they're closing the gates, right? So they're quite literally playing keep away. But I think, by and large, is generally a failure of refusing to accept what you just outlined, which is holding somebody's hand and going, let me see how you experience it. Not hey, you need to come experience this on my terms, right? So that, Anders, what do you think? I mean, that's my perspective. I Anders Reynolds 41:15 think that's right. But I think some of the prejudices are pretty hard baked. I mean, before we even started recording you and I were talking about, you know, every time there's a list that comes out that says the most remote place in every state. And I was telling you, my initial reaction to that is always, oh, well, kiss that goodbye. It won't be remote anymore. That's a terrible reaction. Of course. I want people to go experience more places, you know, like that. Stuff's pretty hardwired in folks, and so I think, I think it's going to take conversations like these constant reminders that, like, your way of thinking isn't the only way of thinking. And being challenged a little bit. I mean, I hope people have capacity for that. I It's, it may be obvious that some people don't, but I want to believe that a lot of people do. Speaker 1 41:56 Well, it's what did Leopold say? You know, ecologists live in a world of wounds, but I think we also want to be in rooms by ourselves. You know, this whole for me, I tell people, you know, we talk about Myers, Briggs, right? I tell them INFP, right? And I said, well, that stands for I'm not for people, but I am. But I think about justice, I think about all those things that make us better as a species. Sometimes I have to go back to that level of thinking as a species as a social ape, social hominid. You know, what is it that would would drive the species, and I don't even want to say in an artificial way, but, but in a in a positive way, socially, and I don't think we think about that enough, right? What is, what does it mean, you know, and that when that bone is thrown into the air at the beginning of 2000 43:09 called 2001 Yeah, Speaker 1 43:12 yeah, what does that mean? And who does that bone hit in the head? And so I wonder with with wildness. And I think again about these places that I've been, and I think about what it feels like just this knowing your smallness in the midst of of Denali, right? And, and thank you for saying Denali too. You know, well you won't hear me say anything else, but being there that God was visible to me for 11 days straight, and in the small group of people that I was there with and seeing what We saw. And you know, out it's, it's a religious experience for me, but I can remember at one point, sort of being out in this space and in these by, in these cyclists came by. I was a little miffed. I was like, where did you guys come from? You didn't fly in here. What are you What are you doing here? Cyclists and Andrews. It was that same feeling of feeling like, oh, well, here I am. I'm able to to experience it, feeling like, I own 6 million acres of this, and you can't have any, you can't, you can't have any of this. So, you know, how do I disabuse myself of that? How do I, you know, do I want a train that runs 24 hours a day to truck people to that space? No, I don't think that's what it takes. But I think it does take, as we're doing here, having conversations. Yes, so that we don't run the risk of not having had the conversation. If we don't talk, where are we going to be? Bill Hodge 45:09 Because I think when we talk, we understand that we're all made of multitudes, right? I think, and not we're running short on time, but I think of a conversation that you and I had one time that made me think about how you had to recognize your own multitudes when it came to like an effort to build a Walmart on top of a, you know, a wetland, and the birder in you says, No, don't lose the wetland. But the human and the member of a community of you said, the people living there are living in a food desert, even though most of us would probably agree Walmart's not a good solution for a food desert. But like, you know, it's, it's all those sort of things you know, with us running out of time here, one thing I wanted to ask about is, what you know? What do you have going on now? I know, one thing that I think you do to give forward to to spark these conversations is your role in writing the wild. Could you tell us a little bit about writing the wild and how people find out about that? Speaker 1 46:05 Thanks, Bill. My co conspirator, the founder, Chrissy Clute, who contacted me, sort of in the midst of COVID, and said, Look, I've got an idea. You know, I know you're doing this work and writing and thinking about wildness and nature and human being, would you be willing to come in and and be a part of it? And so we have these cohorts. I'm now on my third cohort for that cohort, for us to be really at this place where we're bringing in people to be able to talk to us online. Right now, we're about to have our first experiential outing at at the shack in in Baraboo. But the whole idea is to get people together in kinship. And writing is a way for us to come together in kinship, and so in that way, to come together in that kinship brings us again to a different space. We can then talk to people that we don't know, and we can allow these people to have a voice, or not allow them, but really facilitate it. So that's what writing the wild is about. Writing the wild is about gathering and kinship for our words to leverage our feelings about nature. Yeah, we talk about the writing craft, we talk about the art, but we also just talk about being. We like to call it soul school. So soul school and writing the wild is about expression, and it's about the kind the kind of expression that we're doing here. So I can tell you now you're going to get an invitation to come on to talk to us about what you do and what you have done, both of you really because again, I think that's part of what we've been missing as a conservation community. We have taken for granted kinship, and now we need to re establish that. And I'm grateful that you guys are the at the point of the spear for doing that. Anders Reynolds 48:11 I'm so grateful you're out there doing that work, and even more grateful that you came on today. This has been fantastic. I've enjoyed it so much, talking to you about perceptions and polywogs and podcasters too. So thank you so so so much. Oh, Speaker 1 48:27 you're very welcome. Anders, thanks man. And thank you, Bill, thanks for all that you guys are doing. Well. Bill Hodge 48:31 It's been a pleasure having you on. And it's Dr drew Lanham. He is a number of things, but he is a prolific poet, a fantastic poet and author, we mentioned it earlier. You can find links in the show notes about his books, one of the ones that I swear drew you write of a time without being in the time that's just amazing. And your your collection joy is the justice we give ourselves captures an awful lot of sort of what we're all feeling at this difficult time. So we really appreciate you coming on, and I don't think this will be our last conversation. We look forward to having many more. 49:08 Thank you, brother. I appreciate you. Voiceover 49:12 The wild idea is a production of wild idea media and hosted by Bill Hodge and Anders Reynolds, production and editing by Brent Russell at podlad Digital, support by Holly wilkorzewski At day pack digital. Our theme music spring heel Jack is from railroad Earth and was composed by John ski hand. Our executive producer and ring leader is Laura Hodge. You can find the wild idea wherever you listen to or download your favorite podcast. If you have a minute, please take a minute to give us a rating, and if you really like us, we hope you'll subscribe. Learn more about us at the wild idea.com you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai