Ep. 667: The Prairie Preacher and a Rant By Steve

Steven Rinella https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork talks with Dwayne Estes https://www.instagram.com/the.prairie.preacher/ (aka "The Prairie Preacher") of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute https://www.segrasslands.org, Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/, Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/, Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en, and Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en. Topics discussed: How parts of Pennsylvania are the South; Steve's thoughts on recent executive orders, DOGE, and cuts to the Forest Service, National Park Service, and more; the double meaning of apophysis; how it wasn't all forest and the myth of the squirrel; the impact of bison on vast prairies and grasslands; lacking the natural predisposition to move easily; the great challenge of getting rid of invasive weeds; how our previous podcast episode on quail https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcf5OMAVK_M stirred feelings; the impact of habitat erosion on the bobwhite quail; "Make America Grassy Again"; donate to the Southern Grasslands Institute https://www.segrasslands.org/give; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:12Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  We're the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything.

• 1:23Steven Rinella?

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• 1:44Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  I told him, "Parts of Pennsylvania."

• 2:01Steven Rinella?

  I told him that's not true because of my own maxim. If you can ice fish, it's not the South. Honestly, it's a miracle he's still sitting here. He tried to lay some bullshit ecological argument on me and didn't even try to tackle the ice fishing question.

• 2:15Speaker 04

  I'll lay a bullshit sociological reason on you. It's true, man. Parts of southern Pennsylvania are the South, man.

• 2:23Steven Rinella?

  We'll get into this in a minute.

• 2:27Steven Rinella?

  I wish we were talking about Ohio because I have such a great Ohio story I'd 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.

• 2:41Steven Rinella?

  Follow me.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  You're always starting stories and never finishing them.

• 2:44Steven Rinella?

  But this is all on hold because there's all this stuff. Crin's just got a root canal. She's got, she's all novocaine'd up.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Indisposed.

• 2:50Steven Rinella?

  Eating a granola bar. Say something. Does it sound slurred?

• 2:53Speaker 05

  I don't know. It's like in the front. I feel, I feel weird. I feel like a fat, I have a fat lip in the front.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Left side?

• 2:59Speaker 05

  Right side.

• 3:00Steven Rinella?

  You don't look fat lipped.

• 3:01Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:02Steven Rinella?

  It's all in your head.

• 3:03Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:04Steven Rinella?

  So if Crin's not as chatty as normal.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  If she's slurring her words a bit.

• 3:08Steven Rinella?

  If she's story worried and not as chatty as normal.

• 3:10Speaker 05

  So much.

• 3:11Steven Rinella?

  Um, quick, I, I gotta get into some stuff. Uh, I gotta, uh, we got, we got like a bucket of just terror, like really people, people real fed up. About, um, last week's episode, which I'm going to try to address for a while in a minute here. Um, um, why they're right and wrong to be mad. Um. But, but back to our, the Prairie Preacher, Dwayne Estes, Dr. Dwayne Estes. Uh, he's poor on ge- uh, geography, but strong on, um.

• 3:44Steven Rinella?

  Strong on ecology. Dwayne Estes serves as the executive director at the Southeastern Grasslands Institute. Full professor of biology, director of the APSU herbarium. Where's that? What is that? Apple?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  That's like a plant museum.

• 4:02Steven Rinella?

  But what is APSU?

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, Austin P. State University, just outside of Nashville.

• 4:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay. The herbarium principal investigator for the Center of Excellence for Field Biography, Biology, sorry.

• 4:16Steven Rinella?

  Um, in January 2017, he co-founded the Southeastern Grasslands Institute with colleague Theo Whitzel.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 4:26Steven Rinella?

  Um, and we're going to talk about a lot of his work with, uh, grasslands. And I got a boatload of questions for you. We gotta do something, but then we're going to talk about the questions and just to key you up on the questions. One of my many questions is one already brought up. You know, I'm going to allow you to retort about why Brody's a southerner.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  No, I'm not. I, I, I'm a northerner.

• 4:51Steven Rinella?

  Brody's, I'll be like, ha, Brody's a Southerner. Pennsylvania needs to be divided into several different states. Okay, why Brody's a Southerner?

• 4:59Speaker 05

  Clay and Glenn are all upset now.

• 5:02Steven Rinella?

  How Clay, Clay should call in, cause he's gonna be like, just distraught that now Brody's, that to dare call Brody a Southerner. Yeah, I'm liking this now. Um, I got another question about this and I want to get into this with you is like,

• 5:17Steven Rinella?

  when reading about

• 5:20Steven Rinella?

  the colonial American period, so late colonial American period, mid seventeen hundreds,

• 5:27Steven Rinella?

  that, that these long hunters would go into present day Kentucky.

• 5:34Steven Rinella?

  And you, you see similar things from southern Indiana, where they're like, can't see a tree.

• 5:42Steven Rinella?

  Like, how in the hell is that true? Don't answer me now, but just noodle on that.

• 5:48Steven Rinella?

  And then when they talk about going into cane breaks,

• 5:52Steven Rinella?

  that are so big you can get lost in cane breaks. How the hell is that true? So noodle on that. Got it.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Noodle on cane.

• 6:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. How could that be true? How long does he have? He's got, I don't know, five minutes, 10 minutes?

• 6:09Steven Rinella?

  Uh, you cool? Very much. Alright. Make sure you're on that mic, Dwayne, when you're talking. Got it. Thank you. He is, just for people that didn't hear him, he is cool with that.

• 6:22Steven Rinella?

  Uh, there's, I got so many questions about this stuff.

• 6:27Steven Rinella?

  Why things are different and then, like, is there any possibility of getting southeastern grasslands fixed back up again? Hmm, good question. Noodle on that.

• 6:40Steven Rinella?

  Uh, okay, so lots of consternation about an episode we did last week where we do a State of the Union. With, uh, 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, I wanna like, without Joel in the room, not that I would have said anything different with him in the room. I wanna contextualize a couple of things and offer a few observations to people who really feel like the way that, um, the way that we've discussed the incoming administration's actions around conservation issues has been inadequate.

• 7:23Steven Rinella?

  But first allow me to like, 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 Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is, they are a DC organization that works on federal policy. All right? This is not like, they're, they're not like grassroots, um, protest movements. They work on federal policy, meaning engaging with lawmakers about federal policy.

• 8:02Steven Rinella?

  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 JD Vance, uh, 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.

• 8:44Steven Rinella?

  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? Is that, does that really strike you as 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

• 9:25Steven Rinella?

  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 Corinne, Corinne said we'll 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.

• 10:04Steven Rinella?

  Trust me, it makes 60%, it 60% makes sense. So Joel Peterson comes on, already concerned, then, between Joel Peterson's appearance on the show and the release of his episode, the Doge Boys, the administration, however you want to put it, axes thousands of Forest Service positions. And then somehow we get a lot of emails from people, again, not listening carefully, being like, "Well, how could you not bring that up? 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

• 10:46Steven Rinella?

  start talking about who really has the back of public lands people and who don't. Ask yourself this, like, Trump?

• 10:53Steven Rinella?

  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 running around saying it's a coup. It's like, that's an odd coup that you win and 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 the 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

• 11:37Steven Rinella?

  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, but ask yourself this. Do you think Elon Musk gives a shit about the environment? I mean, this guy is already focused, this guy's already set sail 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 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's, he wears a colonized Mars shirt. So you think that coming to Doge and talking about access and biodiversity, they don't care. Like,

• 12:21Steven Rinella?

  they don't care. They don't care. As Trump pointed out, Trump, Don Jr. is a hunter. Okay? Don Jr. Has at times, like Don Jr. Has at times in the past, not sure about currently, has 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 Musk and Doge reconsider cutting Forest Service jobs. It's like, get real. That is not how you're going to shape any kind of

• 13:03Steven Rinella?

  action within this, within this administration. You're so naive to think that, that, that that's what you're going to do here. Randall, butt in at any time.

• 13:14Speaker 06

  I, I don't disagree with you. I mean, I think like,

• 13:22Speaker 06

  Do you want me to butt in?

• 13:23Steven Rinella?

  Whenever you're ready. I just want you to know that you have the right to butt in. And Dwayne, Dwayne's probably sitting over there wondering what the hell we're talking about. Because you didn't listen to the thing we're talking about and you could comment on it too, or you can just stick to what you, uh, this is something I have to do. I'm not speaking for Dwayne. Um. At all. So. He, here's the other part about this. Other agencies, like to, to understand these Forest Service cuts, I'm going to read a letter from a Forest Service guy in a minute, but let's back up.

• 13:53Steven Rinella?

  Other agencies are being axed. Okay. USAID is being dismantled. And rolled in under the State Department. Now, ask yourself this question to be honest. When, 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.

• 14:38Steven Rinella?

  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, because these are areas that I'm not even expert, an expert in, but I see this going on. So to see that the Forest Service or 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 because 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,

• 15:20Steven Rinella?

  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 Service.

• 16:04Steven Rinella?

  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 the kind of a little bit of situation where you can choose to play chess or you can choose to play checkers around spending. The, the national debt. Like I'm going to keep this within a, within a conversation of national or of natural resources management, just to give you some perspective.

• 16:41Steven Rinella?

  Every year, this country, we spend $800 billion 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 800 billion. The BLM. Let's say 30 million. Way low.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  Hundred billion.

• 17:19Steven Rinella?

  Hundred million.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  Billion.

• 17:20Steven Rinella?

  Way low, way low.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  Hundred billion is low?

• 17:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no, way high.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 17:26Steven Rinella?

  We're getting somewhere now. Five hundred million. Well, you know, this is the problem you're creating for me right now rhetorically is you know, like if you're saying like, like this box was huge, guess how big he was and then you guess bigger than he was.

• 17:39Speaker 04

  We've run into this problem, I mean countless times over the last six years.

• 17:42Steven Rinella?

  Then I gotta go, well, no, it was one eighty.

• 17:49Steven Rinella?

  But let's back up.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  Eight hundred billion in interest and then the BLM.

• 17:54Steven Rinella?

  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 billion 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.

• 18:19Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 19:04Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  In a bubble.

• 19:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That's a great way to put it.

• 19:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:25Steven Rinella?

  I have over the years and talking about conservation, I have oftentimes looked at it in a bubble. Certain things in a bubble. And, 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.

• 19:52Steven Rinella?

  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, is parts of this to bubbleize.

• 20:01Steven Rinella?

  But right now, it's hard to bubble it, because I can't take, like, the Forest Service cuts.

• 20:10Steven Rinella?

  Those can't be bubbleized, 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, like, it doesn't work. You're not gonna call your politician right now and say, hey, hey, I understand, like, the thousands, the, the tens of thousands of federal employees are getting cut across all of these administrations or organizations. Uh, that's all fine. What I would like you to do is put the Forest Service people back.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can't.

• 20:39Steven Rinella?

  It ain't gonna happen.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  Like, what's, like, top of mind and most concerning for us is not, it, 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, their top concern is not conservation and land access and things like that.

• 21:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because they're not looking at, they're not looking at any bubbles.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 21:08Steven Rinella?

  They're not looking at, at this point, no one is talking about any particulars. It will come, like, in, like, starting already, it'll start to take some clarity, but, uh, like, right now, there's a little bit of, like, waiting to see what happened. And with the Forest Service cuts, I, like, yeah, I think it's, I think it's, like, 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 no like the debt's not going anywhere.

• 21:51Steven Rinella?

  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 going to do on real specific conservation issues outside of like, like how we're going to fight to keep mining interests out of the headwaters of the boundary waters. Okay. Or sorry, on the borders of the boundary waters. How are you going to work on that? What are you going to do about Ambler Road? What are you going to do about Anwar? What are you going to do about Pebble Mine? Like, all of these things are going to get specific with specific players doing specific things. And

• 22:36Steven Rinella?

  like, these little battles are going to 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 dizzying. That's a point people keep bringing up. It's like, it's, it's meant to be almost, it almost appears without any kind of broader goal in mind.

• 23:09Speaker 06

  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?

• 23:20Steven Rinella?

  Correct.

• 23:21Speaker 06

  I think lost in all this is that these are just completely arbitrary decisions and that they've had to, you know, I saw 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, 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.

• 24:03Steven Rinella?

  It is.

• 24:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:04Steven Rinella?

  It is. It's emerging that and it's like, and, 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, like a kind of ham handed assault on the idea of the federal role in American lives.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  When I'm scrolling through the news and it's 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? Cause it's kind of unfair. It's, it's like unfair to think about it that way.

• 24:43Steven Rinella?

  It's thousands and thousands and thousands of people and any person, um, I have a neighbor who's 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, meh. As long as it don't mess with the Forest Service BLM, I'm cool. Do you know what I'm saying? It, it's, it's like,

• 25:13Steven Rinella?

  it's a very hard, like for, for the conservation space right now, for, for the conservation movement right now, for the environmental movement right now, it's like a, uh,

• 25:24Steven Rinella?

  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, uh, on, on, that was used on Twitter. Like breaking Twitter.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  Move fast and break things.

• 25:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Breaking Twitter is like, oh, okay. I mean, it's already broken.

• 25:45Speaker 06

  And they.

• 25:45Steven Rinella?

  It's already broken. It'll always be broken.

• 25:47Speaker 06

  But they, they did break it. It became a wildly less, uh, wildly less effective company and lost a bunch of advertising. It kind of took a dump.

• 25:56Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 26:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:05Steven Rinella?

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• 26:49Steven Rinella?

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• 27:25Steven Rinella?

  To return to my main point, to somehow pin it on a person, to somehow suggest 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.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  They have to work with who they have to work with, right? They don't have a choice.

• 27:56Steven Rinella?

  Yes.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  They've got to do what they can do.

• 28:00Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 28:09Speaker 06

  And I think too, there's like a, when you think about how a group like TRCP 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 DC and you're serious about trying to make change or trying to protect what we like, you know, you gotta go to work every day.

• 28:39Steven Rinella?

  There's different groups with different roles.

• 28:41Speaker 06

  And the, and you're not gonna,

• 28:45Speaker 06

  the biggest, the biggest advantage that you can have in DC is that someone takes your calls. Or that someone has a meeting with you.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, but TRCP has like a very good working relationship with politicians on both sides of the aisle, right? Like,

• 29:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 29:01Steven Rinella?

  That's their program. Yeah. That is what, that is what they are.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's how they get shit done.

• 29:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and, and I mean, that's, that's how, 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

• 29:22Speaker 06

  the power, you know, like they're using the, the system in place. Cause that's where the rubber hits the road in DC and it's, it's somebody gonna 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.

• 29:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And I like, I like as a board member at TRCP, um, you know,

• 29:44Steven Rinella?

  I have, you know, 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.

• 29:54Steven Rinella?

  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, to declare that public lands were effectively unconstitutional. Um, I'm on the phone with TRCP, knowing the other people are on the phone with TRCP 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 making some progress. But if you're just gonna throw Molotov cocktails and for them, I'm not talking about me.

• 30:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:27Steven Rinella?

  For them, if they're gonna throw Molotov cocktails and then one day call up and be like, but seriously, uh, the farm bill.

• 30:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:35Steven Rinella?

  I mean, like, you know, how are we gonna keep the CRP programs alive? Like, that still has to happen.

• 30:45Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, and, and you need a seat at the table. You like, and it's very easy to lose your seat at the table if you, if you come out and start throwing punches.

• 30:56Steven Rinella?

  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 the blah, whatever he said.

• 31:09Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 31:18Steven Rinella?

  At the, you have a voice in a seat at the highest level of table. Right? The top table, you want a voice there? Get on board with an organization like TRCP.

• 31:29Steven Rinella?

  That doesn't mean that people going out and protesting at their state Capitol isn't effective. It's a, it's a way to show force. That's, if that's where you're at, TRCP is not your group. If, if you like, if you are willing to be like patient and somewhat intellectual and strategic and play in Washington DC, that's different. It's just different.

• 31:48Speaker 06

  And there's room for both and you can support both at the same time, right? Like, I mean, there's.

• 31:55Speaker 06

  Certainly it's effective to go and let your elected officials know where you stand and, and strongly worded calls to your elected officials do work, but.

• 32:07Speaker 06

  That, 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.

• 32:20Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to give a little bit to, to explain myself a little bit with, with a, with a, with a, with a parallel thing that occurred to me one time. Like, like picture that you, picture you're a kid growing up in America and movies come out and you just, and 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, saw me, never gave any thought to what happened, right? Then as my career went along and I got into my 30s. 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,

• 33:05Steven Rinella?

  how they do what they do, how it's financed, how the whole bigger project works. All of a sudden you go, all of a sudden it's like, you know, I, I never use like the whole like stupid red pill thing, but 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'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 of evolution? De-evolution? Do you know a word, opposite of evolution?

• 33:50Steven Rinella?

  What is it? It's de-evolution. Okay. Some might say, oh, he went through a de-evolution. I don't know. To me, it feels like- Evolve. Yeah, devolve. No, no, because I don't want to seem, my, I, my, my picture of how things happen- Regression?

• 34:06Speaker 05

  Hmm, there we go, Randall.

• 34:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  Thanks, Doc.

• 34:09Steven Rinella?

  Point I'm trying to make- Took a little while. Point I'm trying to make here. A sip of coffee. 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, backroom, high-level conversations. There are other people who've come away with a very different opinion. If you really want to get into this, you could go read about what happened with, um, why did the 60s fizzle?

• 34:53Steven Rinella?

  You could dig into Joan Didion, you could start watching things about the, uh, the efficacy and evolution of Vietnam protesters. I don't know. There's different ways to engage in, in, um, policy discussions. The civil rights movement was disruptive and very effective. Other movements have been disruptive and they faltered and haven't worked.

• 35:19Steven Rinella?

  What else? Oh, my Forest Service letter.

• 35:24Steven Rinella?

  I personally, personally, um,

• 35:31Steven Rinella?

  I'm going to say a couple more personal things here. I've always had a thing where I have a, uh, I've tried to keep a brand promise where we stay out of issues that, uh, that, 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

• 36:02Steven Rinella?

  have some number of things that the current administration ran on and is doing. I have expressed appreciation for it 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 an apophysis. Randall knows what it is. I do. An apophysis is when you bring something up by saying you're not going to bring it up.

• 36:31Steven Rinella?

  So my example would be you're fighting with your wife. Your wife says, well, I'm not even going to bring up what you did on Friday. That's an apophysis. She's bringing it up by not bringing it up. So I'm going to do an apophysis when I'm talking about this administration. I'm not going to bring up that, that I, I, 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 failed to get on board with whatever new sloganism emerges in a given day. Like, I'm not going to bring that up. Okay? Um, I'm not going to bring up things I think about, uh, with, with human biology and distinctions between males and females, not going to bring it up.

• 37:15Steven Rinella?

  Um, but when I've talked about things the administration's 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 acceptable? No, I don't. But I can hold two things in my hands at the same time. But like, there's things I like about the administration. There's also seems to be like some things that are 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

• 37:58Steven Rinella?

  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 going to look at it like that. I'm going to 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.

• 38:23Steven Rinella?

  Anything else?

• 38:25Steven Rinella?

  Uh, no. Where do I, where do I begin? The letter. Put my spectacles on.

• 38:34Steven Rinella?

  My name is blank. And I am a Forest Service mule packer.

• 38:40Steven Rinella?

  As I write to you, February 14, I am still an employee of the US Forest Service. Today, I lost many coworkers 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.

• 39:07Steven Rinella?

  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. They're picking 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 wouldn't say, he was picking on Bobby.

• 39:26Steven Rinella?

  Right? Is that a good amount?

• 39:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:29Steven Rinella?

  Throughout my career, I'm back to the letter. Throughout my career in 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 permanents, um, 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 30 employees on the Beaverhead Deer Lodge National Forest. All but one of the Wilderness Rangers were let go on the Crassell Ranger District of

• 40:11Steven Rinella?

  the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, and all the trail crews of the Spotted Bear Ranger District in the Bob Marshall Wilderness were let go. The Wisdom Ranger District no longer has any trail crew to maintain the Anakanah-Pintler Wilderness 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 in 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.

• 40:56Steven Rinella?

  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 to do our job and earn a modest living doing what we love. These layoffs are taking away access to our public lands. Over 120 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."

• 41:44Steven Rinella?

  And he ends with a plea. Um, use your voice to let the American public know what these government cutbacks are costing us. A lot. All across the board.

• 41:59Speaker 06

  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 or how they're going to pay their rent and beyond that like immediate 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

• 42:43Speaker 06

  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's 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 that for me, I think, is like a a pretty profound like even if they hired all these people back next week. Like there's a there's a chink in the armor that is hard to polish out at this point and it's just like.

• 43:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I 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.

• 43:38Steven Rinella?

  Had to settle for me either.

• 43:39Speaker 06

  I did, you know, and and I'm lucky that I'm lucky that things went the way they did, but. Yeah, it's just like these these people love the resource and I never go out on our public lands and think I wish there were fewer. I wish there were 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 I just, yeah, that.

• 44:10Steven Rinella?

  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 20 year old kids that don't know anything about the government.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 44:54Steven Rinella?

  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, like, it's kind of not a great analogy, but I'm not trying to equate it to the same thing. But you might look and be like, well, yeah, I mean, a lot of those kids had it coming. The little Billy?

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Why him?

• 45:12Steven Rinella?

  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 Doge and Musk aren't gonna be like, and look at all the embarrassing, um, look at all the embarrassing, crazy expenditures they were making. It's not gonna happen.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:32Steven Rinella?

  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 can picture this. Do you remember when, Dwayne, I'm sorry. We're, I'm almost done.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  You could cause that bad moment.

• 45:50Steven Rinella?

  Do you want to come back?

• 45:53Steven Rinella?

  Do you remember when, when Trump floated the idea, and I talked about this the other day, like, I was, the other 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.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  I've used that one.

• 46:08Steven Rinella?

  Yep. 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 empty 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?

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  Rand Paul.

• 46:40Steven Rinella?

  Rand Paul. Right away, he, uh, now that Twitter's not Twitter, it's called X. When you tweet, what are you doing? X-ing?

• 46:48Speaker 04

  I think they still say tweeting.

• 46:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Just a horrible business decision.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:53Steven Rinella?

  He tweets. Good thing he's running the government. Rand Paul tweets, "I thought we voted for America first." Right?

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:01Steven Rinella?

  Now, just to capture that sentiment, here's a thing that I do picture happening. Much of this conversation about the, 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?

• 47:24Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 47:27Steven Rinella?

  As Doge, if they do take a wrecking ball to the interests of rural people, to the people, to, 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, or else you can't win. You have to do it. Just like you can't say at the federal level, "I'm gonna cut social security," you lose. If here you say, "I wanna sell off public lands," you lose.

• 48:11Steven Rinella?

  Now, so that's true of Montana. Montana, I, I bet Trump, the first time, won Montana by 14 points.

• 48:20Steven Rinella?

  Right? They, they don't even need to campaign here. He's gonna win. But what happens when, what happens when you start seeing an erosion of these things that the people, and not in this state, care a lot about, which is their public lands and public land access, you risk alienating your own support network?

• 48:39Speaker 04

  You risk the pendulum swinging the other way.

• 48:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  In a couple of years, when the midterms come up.

• 48:44Steven Rinella?

  And just like Rand Paul, was it Rand Paul?

• 48:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:49Steven Rinella?

  Said, "I thought we were voting for America first." Um, someone might say, "I thought I was voting for guys like me. This isn't serving my interests."

• 48:59Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 49:01Steven Rinella?

  Excuse yourself, Randall.

• 49:02Speaker 06

  I'm really sorry. I'm keeping that in. That was incredible.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  I was wondering where, you can't tell where it's coming from.

• 49:10Speaker 06

  Excuse me. That was only supposed to be five minutes. My mind was elsewhere at the moment.

• 49:15Steven Rinella?

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• 49:59Steven Rinella?

  a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.

• 50:05Speaker 00

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• 50:38Steven Rinella?

  Is everyone good? Can I start interviewing Dwayne about what's up?

• 50:40Speaker 05

  Yes, let's.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  We should reintroduce him because everyone probably forgot who he is by now.

• 50:45Steven Rinella?

  It's terrible.

• 50:51Steven Rinella?

  Joining us today,

• 50:54Steven Rinella?

  Dr. Dwayne Estes, who I have heard about from a ton of people. And it's been, and Krim was very eager to have him on The Prairie Preacher. Co-founder and executive director of Southeastern Grasslands Institute.

• 51:11Steven Rinella?

  I first have to say that 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 send it out, or you could give your summary of your thoughts. You'd say whatever the hell you want. I don't care.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, let's talk about it. Well, number one, number one, there's a, there's a double meaning to apophysis.

• 51:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh geez.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's the, it's the broad portion of a pine cone scale. Just, just FYI from a little bit botanical.

• 51:44Speaker 04

  One more time?

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, like if 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 apophysis.

• 51:53Steven Rinella?

  You're shitting me.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  No shit.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  Wild. I love that.

• 51:56Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for joining today.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Drop a little botanical dollar. On next week's show?

• 52:04Speaker 03

  No, 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, I hear you. He says, it's 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 to think about what are our options?

• 52:49Speaker 03

  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 are at stake. Good people, good, hardworking people, doing habitat restoration work, you know, planting seeds, planting prairies, doing prescribed fire, people with babies and kids and elderly parents, farmers that we work with, seed producers. 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 to be very fascinating. I just was enjoying it.

• 53:31Steven Rinella?

  Really? I wouldn't call it a conversation, it was more like a...

• 53:34Speaker 03

  Monologue, but it's okay.

• 53:38Speaker 04

  Monologue verging on rant, but that's okay.

• 53:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That wasn't a rant.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  I know.

• 53:44Steven Rinella?

  Cause a rant, you're pushing a thing. I was pushing a question mark.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  Your face wasn't red and there wasn't like a blood vessel sticking out of your forehead.

• 53:54Steven Rinella?

  Thank you.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:58Steven Rinella?

  Let's set the stage for grasslands.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:01Steven Rinella?

  No, no, can we tackle this first? No, explain how Brody's a sovereign again.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Okay. So, Brody and any, well, anybody in southern Ohio, southern Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey?

• 54:14Speaker 04

  Imagine that.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  You're in the south, man. Yeah, you're in the south. I'll draw you the south. I'm gonna tell it.

• 54:20Steven Rinella?

  I'm familiar with two ways of drawing this line. I'm familiar with the Mason Dixon line.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:25Steven Rinella?

  And I'm familiar with my thing about where it's a line of where you ice fish or not.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the Mason Dixon line ain't got nothing to do with what I'm about to show you. So, I do like geography, by the way, by the way. You gotta put the Chesapeake Bay in there.

• 54:39Steven Rinella?

  I see that.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  You gotta put the New Jersey in. There's your Long Island right there. That's the northern extent of the south, right there.

• 54:47Steven Rinella?

  Long Island?

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, no shit, man, Long Island, absolutely.

• 54:50Steven Rinella?

  They need to change how they talk.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Does that catch Brody or not?

• 55:04Speaker 03

  Nope. No, no.

• 55:06Steven Rinella?

  So, he is a Yankee?

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, Erie's out. You're in those glaciated plains.

• 55:09Steven Rinella?

  Is Seth a Yankee?

• 55:11Speaker 04

  Yes, very close.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  All right, now, now what you're gonna do is bring it down.

• 55:15Steven Rinella?

  He's an infiltrator.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. You're gonna pull in the edge of Appalachia, country of Ohio.

• 55:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  You do bring in Cincinnati, yeah. Southern third of Indiana, Southern Illinois, cut right across, south of the Columbia River.

• 55:28Steven Rinella?

  This is a hell of a US map.

• 55:29Speaker 05

  Steve, this needs to be a shirt, the south.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:32Steven Rinella?

  So you're drawing a map of basically what wasn't covered by ice sheets.

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Down through the middle of Texas. You wanna hold that up for the camera when you're done, Wayne?

• 55:39Steven Rinella?

  I can't believe you just did that without having a reference.

• 55:41Speaker 03

  Man, I've been studying maps since I was wearing a diaper, bro, yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  That's the south, right there, the SGI focal region.

• 55:51Steven Rinella?

  I'm still Yankee by a long shot.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Twenty-four states. It all gets down to biogeography, Steve.

• 55:56Steven Rinella?

  So you're, you're, you're a Johnny Reb now there, right?

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 04

  Just south of the, south of the hills there.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:03Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Look away, Dixieland.

• 56:08Steven Rinella?

  Explain that to me, what's going on within that map?

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so pretty much, when you look at this region, in, you know, again, this is not the cultural south, right?

• 56:16Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm following.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  That kinda stuff.

• 56:17Steven Rinella?

  We're talking ecology.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you're talking about plants and animals, uh, 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.

• 56:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  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, are, uh, 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.

• 56:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  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 than north.

• 56:59Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  So what you have then is this perpetual pattern of species that reach the northern range limits and their western range limits because of climatic barriers.

• 57:09Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  So here you get into boreal northeast, you get into the true, you know, the tall grass prairie of the Midwest and the Great Plains, and then the arid, uh, basically Chihuahua Desert margin right here in south Texas. So that means then everything in this region... Is kind of temperate. It's got seasonality with the 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.

• 57:37Steven Rinella?

  You don't like that term?

• 57:38Speaker 03

  No, I don't actually. It's a huge misnomer and it's, it's not based in science or history.

• 57:43Steven Rinella?

  Can you tell what it means and why you don't like it?

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, because what it does is it extrapolates, you know, all parts of the east as, 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.

• 57:57Steven Rinella?

  Can I tell you the squirrel myth?

• 57:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:59Steven Rinella?

  I was raised on this.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Good. Okay.

• 58:02Steven Rinella?

  So the squirrel could go from blank to blank and never touch the ground. A squirrel could go from Kentucky to Michigan, from Florida to New Jersey.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 58:13Steven Rinella?

  Whatever, and never touch the ground.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I heard it as my sixth grade teacher, Tommy Johns, who also paddled me 13 times for talking too much.

• 58:23Steven Rinella?

  Did he invent the surgery?

• 58:24Speaker 03

  He told me. No, I don't know.

• 58:26Steven Rinella?

  Tommy Johns surgery?

• 58:27Speaker 03

  No.

• 58:27Speaker 05

  The one was probably smarter than his teacher.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  I call it, I call it Tommy Johns and the fabled squirrel.

• 58:33Steven Rinella?

  We still got whooped when I was a kid.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm 46. Yeah, I got, I got 13 of them in 1990.

• 58:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Mr. Bricken.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, man.

• 58:41Steven Rinella?

  He called me down and whooped me one time.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  But he told me, he said, look, a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.

• 58:49Steven Rinella?

  That's what I heard.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 58:50Steven Rinella?

  I was screwing the whole thing up. That's what my dad would like to tell me.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you know, it really.

• 58:54Steven Rinella?

  You're not buying it.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  No, I don't buy it at all. And, and it has its origins. The origin is kind of complex. I, I wrote to the pretty well-known author, Stephen J. Pine. I said, you know, do you know where that originated? And we both have been sort of scratching our heads over the, the, the true origins of that myth are a little bit hard to put, to nail down. But what's, what's. Easily provable is that it's not true.

• 59:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  All you gotta do is go back into the annals of American history, the days of Boone and 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 ecosystems. 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. We go buy land for protection. We create new state parks or new national parks. It's all the mountainous forested or big swampy bottomlands that get all the attention.

• 1:00:03Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  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 ecosystems, not streams and rivers at this point. But, you know, it's big river flood plains, 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.

• 1:00:39Steven Rinella?

  Is it, is it safe to say that those went first because you could grow corn, a crop of corn on them without needing to girdle all the trees and so it just, everything got gobbled up?

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And we're beginning to sort of lay a fact trail of evidentiary information that proves that exact point. You know, you got people in the 1870s who are writing back about conditions in, say, the 1840s in Tennessee. And they'll 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, uh, 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, what we have begun to advance is what we call this

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  push-pull hypothesis. You know, it's the same thing that was driving Boone to Daniel Boone to want to kind of move, move around and he, he didn't like the pressure of a neighbor being 10 miles away from it, right? So this, he was being sort of pushed by this ever increasing population density factor. What we like to say though is look at the pull.

• 1:01:57Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  Right? Why was Boone being attracted to the Kentucky bluegrass or the Nashville basin, the Cumberland River Valley? He certainly wouldn't go in hunt in a big, vast, extensive forest. He was going to hunt the meadowlands, the cane break margins, the, the savannas. 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, for incoming westward migrating settlers and colonists. So they, that's what was pulling. America's migration patterns in the 1600s and 1700s. It was the availability of open space. That

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  story has never been told in American history, but we're telling it.

• 1:02:44Steven Rinella?

  Speaking of history, you know, the, I don't know if you know Randall's specialty?

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  Tell me about it, Randall.

• 1:02:50Steven Rinella?

  Well, he doesn't know either.

• 1:02:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was waiting to hear you.

• 1:02:55Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:03:06Steven Rinella?

  He's a PhD in history.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  Dude, that's what we need, man. We need to, we need to figure it out.

• 1:03:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is the first time I've ever heard that.

• 1:03:12Steven Rinella?

  He's busy right now.

• 1:03:13Speaker 06

  We need more PhDs.

• 1:03:14Steven Rinella?

  But if you put Randall on that, he'd probably come after a couple of weeks, he'd come tell you where that first appeared.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:03:22Speaker 06

  Well, I don't know about that. I mean, that stuff's so hard to pin down, but yeah, like.

• 1:03:28Steven Rinella?

  Nevermind.

• 1:03:30Steven Rinella?

  Well, I will say this.

• 1:03:32Speaker 06

  It's a great compliment. I really, I feel like I'm sitting up straighter in my chair now. But yeah, I think you're probably doing the Stephen Pine as well, doing the, as much as can be done on that.

• 1:03:47Steven Rinella?

  What, uh, I wish I had, I wish I had compiled more specific examples, but places, Randall, you, this will jog your memory. Places where, I don't, I don't necessarily from Boone's descriptions, but places where guys seven, around 1770, whatever, are describing, could be north of the Ohio in some places, mostly south of the Ohio River, are saying that like, not a tree in sight.

• 1:04:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:04:13Steven Rinella?

  Where in the world is that happening?

• 1:04:15Speaker 06

  I thought that was, when you're reading all those accounts, I mean, they're describing savannas. And, um, the Barrens, the Barrens is this region that they talk about all the time.

• 1:04:30Speaker 06

  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, and throughout sort of Tennessee, Kentucky, all this, I picture every, 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.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  I kind of think about the land as, uh, 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 I-81 corridor, which takes you from Pennsylvania down, you know, into Tennessee. The Great Valley is 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.

• 1:05:26Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  You know, it's been deforested.

• 1:05:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I would think it was open anthropogenically.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. You know, and, and, 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 close, 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

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  grew back up into secondary and tertiary forests. Those valley lands, though, those were the part of that, that pull factor, that attractant for people moving out of Chesapeake Bay and stuff, and tidewater Virginia. And when they moved into that, they moved and stayed forever, right? They, they, they converted those meadow lands and those savannas into the first cornfields and, and crop, crop lands and plantations. And when those got exhausted, then sometimes they let them go back and go fallow into pasture lands, or they went into pasture lands from the beginning. And many of our grasslands too, especially the savanna types, they've always had trees.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  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 80% at least of southern grasslands had somewhere between probably 10 and 50% tree cover. And so many of our friends say, well, hell, why don't you just call that a forest and be done with it? Well, you could, 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, for both native plants and

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:07:55Speaker 06

  Good. Well, this is a non sequitur. I don't even know what that means. It's not going to follow 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 sort of the Well, I heard it from you guys first. The gospel, oh, please. I mean, I

• 1:08:17Steven Rinella?

  We thought he was a preacher.

• 1:08:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Steven Rinella?

  From the prairie.

• 1:08:20Speaker 06

  No, I mean, I read the, I was like, I wonder sort of where, where the preacher comes from. And now I'm getting, you know, you've got your own gospel here of, of, uh, of what the East used to look like, but yeah, I, I don't know. That's just my thought. I don't really have a question. Thank you. Back to you. Yeah.

• 1:08:41Steven Rinella?

  How much of your work is about?

• 1:08:44Steven Rinella?

  Where do you split your work and your worldview from trying to capture what things looked like?

• 1:08:55Steven Rinella?

  I'll add a little bit on that because Randall and I have experienced this as well is, uh,

• 1:09:01Steven Rinella?

  in some of our research about market hunting that we've been doing lately, where we're sort of taking

• 1:09:09Steven Rinella?

  the first far west, meaning Appalachia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South of the Ohio River, and, 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, you can't, in a lifetime, you can't get through all the firsthand accounts of what a quote unquote untouched west looked like, like.

• 1:09:48Steven Rinella?

  The what it looked like in the Native America state. You can't read it all.

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  If you're trying to find accounts of what this, what we're talking about, looked like an untouched state. It's like, it's like a paucity of material. The people that were talking and describing weren't describing that. So. How like, how much of your focus is understanding what that was? Cause 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?

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I would say we're equally split. Um, it took us, you know, for our first eight years, we've, we've been around since 2017. You know, we really kind of grew first out of this, um. 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, 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, um. Into the documentation up until now, and we still are. That's one big branch of what we do as an organization.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  And then the other thing that we've grown into really in the past three to four years. Um, 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 really impactful on the ground habitat restoration work. Those are the two equal halves of our organization. And, um, yeah, I'm, I'm excited by, you know, one is I, I listened to the audible

• 1:11:56Speaker 03

  version of, uh, the Long Hunter book that you-

• 1:11:59Steven Rinella?

  It's the only version there is.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  I love it, man.

• 1:12:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  You know, I love the, uh, complementarity, is that a word? Between your and Clay's, uh, southern accent.

• 1:12:09Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I thought that played off real well together, man.

• 1:12:12Steven Rinella?

  We like that one of these guys is obviously, uh, you know, man of the people.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  But, uh, but I love the book and you know what I found is that you found, you talked about the paucity of those records. You found some of them.

• 1:12:26Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  You found some of the few, you know, like you mentioned the Casper Mansker and the bloods, so I always forget if it's Isaac or Anthony, you know, they were brothers.

• 1:12:34Steven Rinella?

  There's two, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I can't remember which one was with Mansker when they encountered the lick in what is modern day Sumner County, Tennessee. And, um, you know, the first time they came, as you, 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?

• 1:12:53Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  And they couldn't get off their, 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, uh, you know, a few thousand buffalo in, into that particular lick that they were in. And, and you found that reference to that. Um, there's a couple more to that exact same, same place though, that, uh, has always stuck with me. For example, when they came back the following year, and I think you may have referenced this too, all those bison had been exterminated.

• 1:13:24Steven Rinella?

  But French?

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, the French hunters like Timothy de Mounbrin and, and his, his, uh, you know, cronies were all kind of hunting around in that area. So the, you know, you've stumbled upon like one of the very few references to what, what I would say is a reference that alludes to the savannas around the Nashville area. Um, some regions, you know, have, uh, really well documented grasslands, like the black belt, uh, prairie region of Mississippi and Alabama.

• 1:13:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  It goes all the way back to like seventeen, seventeen oh one, you know, when, when that was French territory, um, you had French generals and stuff like they, they were based in, uh, New Orleans. They and their armies were, were crisscrossing northern Mississippi. Those are all recorded in the French archives and I've got a colleague, Dr. 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 and chaotically that the original landscape, they were, we always say they were gone before the camera was invented.

• 1:14:32Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:14:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  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 him on your show, he's amazing. He's, he's the best oil painter you'll ever meet.

• 1:15:01Steven Rinella?

  Careful now, because my wife's taking oil painting lessons.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  No, man. But he goes back and he tours, like when William Bartram was a explorer in the South in the 1770s. 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 Flint Hills of East Kansas.

• 1:15:28Steven Rinella?

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• 1:16:11Steven Rinella?

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• 1:16:19Speaker 08

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• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  You were talking about bison. Do you guys suspect that they played a role in maintaining these these grasslands?

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Now, bison in the east, as you guys, I'm sure, know, is very complicated. You know, I've read Ted Ballou's book. I love it. It's one of my favorite of all time.

• 1:17:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's a great. This whole thing is a great story.

• 1:17:11Speaker 03

  Got it in my backpack. But, uh, but you know, there's some, there's some new evidence emerging on bison in the east. Uh, there's some archaeology and paleo, uh, paleontology work that's been done. You know, we thought that bison had kind of reemerged in the south in like the middle 1500s, early 1500s, 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? Uh, but if you'd asked most people, okay, so bison came back into the south because, you know, they were definitely here in the, in the south in Ice Age times. We

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  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 15,000 years ago up until about the year 1550 or so. And so then you, you get into saying, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Does that mean there were no big animals grazing southern grasslands 3,000 years ago, 5,000, 9,000 years ago? That was kind of the, I think, the consensus. But this, this

• 1:18:28Steven Rinella?

  Can I wedge in a few?

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, wedge in, please.

• 1:18:30Steven Rinella?

  Well, I just want, like, some of the things people have looked at describing that, that, that I've read about is like that the

• 1:18:37Steven Rinella?

  The Spanish and the French would come through places in the early 1600s. And they'd describe everything, right down to possums. No mention of buffalo.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:50Steven Rinella?

  You go to the effigy mounds, like the mound builders, the Mississippian cultures along 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 trying, 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?

• 1:19:29Speaker 03

  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 1500s.

• 1:19:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  You know, when you get to the French explorers of the 1680s through, you know, the 1720s, ample, ample discussion of bison. Just, just, it's, it's everywhere. You know, when you get to the 1760s and 1770s, everybody who goes out is talking about bison. In every valley in West Virginia and every big, you know, whatever.

• 1:20:01Steven Rinella?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:20:02Speaker 03

  It's crazy, you know, but, um, and, 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, um, I think his name is Dr. Gary Moore. He's an archaeologist from, uh, East Carolina State University. Was doing some work at a, um, archaeological site in the Piedmont of South Carolina. And using a, a technique where they looked at these, um, spear points, these, uh, stone projectile tools, right? They were able to go into, you know, you, you guys have seen those flint nappers, right? And you're sitting there making, making a projectile.

• 1:20:37Steven Rinella?

  Sitting in that chair you're in.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, there you go. Well, those, those stone tools have little micro fractures in them that through capillary action, you know, draws in blood and other types of material when you, when you kill an animal. And what Dr. 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.

• 1:21:03Steven Rinella?

  Is that reliable?

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Well, I know.

• 1:21:04Steven Rinella?

  I keep hearing about this and I keep being like, really?

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  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, the late Ice Age, so probably 15,000 years ago, all the way up until 7,000 years ago. So that's a totally different story. If you've got bison in South Carolina at 7,000 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, the window without bison is actually much narrower than we suspected.

• 1:21:42Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  So it's that kind of, that kind of emerging evidence, which adds to and somewhat, you know, clouds the, the whole picture of southeastern grassland ecosystems.

• 1:21:52Steven Rinella?

  Can you speak to the impact of Native American burning? Like this, this was, I, 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.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:12Steven Rinella?

  Or there are accounts, I believe there's French accounts where they were using fire and game drives.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Steven Rinella?

  And 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, was that, was anthropogenic and not natural, you know, like, like not, whatever the hell the opposite of anthropogenic is.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think, um, I'm reading the book Forgotten Fires right now, right? And, and they talk about, um, you know, it's, it's written by an anthropologist. So it, it relies heavily on that perspective and sort of the science of anthropology.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  There's no question, when you go back into the earliest 1700s and 1600s and, and maybe slightly beyond, that there are just ample documentary evidences and observations of Native Americans burning the landscape for, you know, setting large, uh, you know, circular fires on the land and, and, and that's, that's really well documented.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  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, and my colleague, who's our chief science advisor, Dr. Reed Nos, he wrote a book in 2013 called Forgotten Grasslands of the South. And it really was a game changer in terms of 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.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  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, 13,000, 14,000 years, most of these modern species likely originated prior to the arrival of man into the southeastern United States.

• 1:24:45Steven Rinella?

  Grassland species.

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  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 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 an 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.

• 1:25:30Speaker 03

  You know, there's a recent discovery of the American cheetah in the, in the Appalachians of Southwest Virginia.

• 1:25:36Steven Rinella?

  Seriously?

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, no joke.

• 1:25:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was reading there was caribou in Alabama, Georgia, you know?

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, stat, you know, uh, uh, big longhorn bison. And by the way, that, that cheetah was found within the county adjacent to Cumberland Gap.

• 1:25:51Steven Rinella?

  No kidding?

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know you know, I know you love Cumberland Gap.

• 1:25:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. Huh.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  So there's a, there's a wealth, I mean, the endemic species alone, man, that, that, that is the biggest piece of evidence.

• 1:26:04Steven Rinella?

  I remember when I was a little kid, man, uh, do you remember, um, what the, do you guys remember what the, I don't know if it's still around, the Epcot Center? What the hell was that?

• 1:26:11Speaker 06

  Like Disney?

• 1:26:12Steven Rinella?

  It's very much still around, yes. Feel a lot in here.

• 1:26:16Speaker 04

  Isn't it the giant golf ball?

• 1:26:19Speaker 06

  I love Epcot Center.

• 1:26:21Steven Rinella?

  It's like a big glass.

• 1:26:22Speaker 04

  Looks like a giant golf ball.

• 1:26:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  It's like a big guy.

• 1:26:24Steven Rinella?

  Fill us in. I went there.

• 1:26:26Speaker 06

  Fill us in.

• 1:26:26Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:26:42Steven Rinella?

  Um, like it's like a planetarium experience where it's like you're cruising very fast at very low altitude over the country. Uh,

• 1:26:53Steven Rinella?

  I know there's like some budget problems.

• 1:26:57Steven Rinella?

  Has, have you guys tried like any kind of wide scale visual representation? Of, of what a flyover, like, you know what I mean? Like what a flyover of the area you mapped out looked like in?

• 1:27:15Steven Rinella?

  1492.

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  It sounds like a good collaboration with me, Dieter, 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.

• 1:27:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  You know, it sounds kind of fanciful, right?

• 1:27:31Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  Come with me to the

• 1:27:33Steven Rinella?

  Grasslandia.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  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 could 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 remnant you have left is the, 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, and care about those landscapes and rebuild them and reconstruct them? So we can prevent the continued collapse of our wildlife and biodiversity, which is all around us.

• 1:28:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:12Steven Rinella?

  Tell us about some of those patches you found.

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, um.

• 1:28:17Steven Rinella?

  Like native patches of like

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Steven Rinella?

  Historic grassland.

• 1:28:20Speaker 05

  And how small they are.

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, the, the, probably the best patch that we have left in Tennessee, where I'm from, is called May Prairie. And, um, you know, the story is back in the 60s, a couple of professors from the University of Tennessee were sitting in a cafe across the street on Highway 41, you know, which like goes from Chicago to Florida. And, um, they're sitting at this restaurant, it's called The Prairie Cafe. And they look over to the lady and said, uh, Miss, uh, ma'am, why is this called The Prairie Cafe? She said, you see that 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.

• 1:29:01Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:29:01Speaker 03

  So they get, they finish up their meal, they go out, they cross the road, they walk in, and they find May Prairie, which is 11 acres. And it's still to this day is 11 acres.

• 1:29:12Speaker 05

  That's

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  May Prairie is the most biodiverse, single 11 acres in the eastern interior of the United States.

• 1:29:18Steven Rinella?

  No way, really?

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  I kid you not.

• 1:29:20Speaker 05

  That's so crazy.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  Totally separate side story. In, uh, 2008, uh, I was part of the Natural Areas Conference that came to Tennessee. It was in Nashville. And they asked me, they said, will you lead a, a grass identification hike down to May Prairie? For the, for the conference? I said, sure I will. I go down there and I'm walking through this prairie, it's October of two thousand eight, and I see this plant and I look down and I said, man, this is, this is weird. This is the type of little member of the sunflower family. I said, this, this is not anything currently known from Tennessee. And Buddy Monce says, how do you know? I said, just trust me. I know. I know the floor of Tennessee. There's nothing else like it. Um, I don't know what it is. So I get back and later that email, I sent an email to the national,

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  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. Wow. And not only did it prove to be new, but it's endemic to that single prairie nowhere else on earth.

• 1:30:19Steven Rinella?

  You're kidding me. Did you get to name it?

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  He actually named it for me.

• 1:30:22Speaker 04

  So by new, it was...

• 1:30:24Steven Rinella?

  He named it for you? I thought you couldn't do that anymore.

• 1:30:26Speaker 03

  No, I can't, I can't name it for myself.

• 1:30:28Speaker 04

  So by new, it was actually old? Like, is that what you're saying? Like, it was endemic to...

• 1:30:34Steven Rinella?

  Probably all over the damn place once upon a time.

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  Endemic in the sense that it, it, um, 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.

• 1:30:46Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  Um, but yeah, and old in the sense it probably took tens of thousands of years to evolve as a species.

• 1:30:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:30:53Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, the name is Symphytricum estesia. Not, not the sexiest name around.

• 1:30:58Speaker 04

  Like, we've got prairie out here and it's, it's, you know, obviously it's diverse and there's different kinds of plants and animals and stuff, but, like, what would, like, a, a patch of that prairie that size of this table look like that you're talking, like, is it a bunch of different flowers and plants and grass and...

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's gonna look like your Tall Grass Prairie in, like, parts of Missouri or Iowa, um, very similar. It's just oftentimes it is gonna have a bit more tree cover. You know, it's gonna have...

• 1:31:28Speaker 04

  What, would those be conifers or hardwoods or...

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  Uh, both. Mostly hardwoods. So like, in, in lots of the upper south, you'll have post oak, blackjack oak, those, those, or bur oak. 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.

• 1:31:47Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:48Speaker 03

  Like, blackjack oak won't even reproduce anymore. Like, its acorns just never germinate because most blackjack 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.

• 1:32:06Steven Rinella?

  Like, he's dropping his acorn in a place that...

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:08Steven Rinella?

  Or, excuse me, his acorn.

• 1:32:09Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:32:10Steven Rinella?

  In a place where it doesn't do any good.

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  And he's on his way out. You know, in another generation or two, those oaks will die and they will never replace themselves.

• 1:32:18Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  Without things like fire and buffalo and those kind of things. But, um, but you know, yeah, visually, very similar to what you'd see with the eastern Tallgrass Prairie. Uh, 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. Uh, they were unique, and now they're mostly gone.

• 1:32:40Steven Rinella?

  What's it look like subsurface in that May Prairie?

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that particular, uh, prairie does have, you know, it's, it's an intact system. So it's, it's, um, the underground is intact too. And it's prairie soils and stuff. But that's, that's a big misnomer, a big misconception a lot of people have is that prairie is always associated with a given soil type.

• 1:33:00Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  You know, in, in the Midwest, a lot of your prairies are these black prairie soils. They're called molossoles. But in the South, we get prairies on every soil type imaginable.

• 1:33:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  You know, so, uh, that really doesn't hold much water for us with, with the actual soil type.

• 1:33:14Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What is the history of how that May Prairie, uh, how did it stay intact? Just 'cause something didn't happen?

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  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 400 years of, you know, Euro-American settlement was oftentimes they're too wet or too rocky, or maybe they're on a natural edge. So, in, in this case, it has, it's a, we'll call it hardpan prairie. So if you dig down about a foot, it actually has a clay hardpan that restricts tree growth and, and actually favors grasses and wildflowers and those kind of things. So, uh, 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, persisted to the modern day.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  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 road sides.

• 1:34:21Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, but strangely, you know, or not strangely, I guess, but, but especially in the past 25 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 the, those little last scraps are being devastated. And, and those remnants are key to rebuilding efforts, you know? If you want to rebuild prairie, if you want to rebuild savannas, it's important to know where those remnants are.

• 1:34:49Steven Rinella?

  Can, can, if, 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?

• 1:35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, they do not grow. They, they, that's, they're not, they don't have a natural predisposition, predisposition to being able to move easily as a, as a vegetation type.

• 1:35:10Steven Rinella?

  So it's not like a blackberry patch?

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  No, no. 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, 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, 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 my prairie is. And if, if people could visualize them

• 1:35:55Speaker 03

  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, seeing it just a grassy patch or just an old field.

• 1:36:06Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:36:07Speaker 03

  It's, it's hard to, it's not like an old growth forest where it's immediately clear to all. Why it's old growth?

• 1:36:14Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Steven Rinella?

  Oh, go ahead.

• 1:36:17Speaker 04

  What is a, I mean, you're probably gonna get to this, but what it, 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.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  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 118 major types of grasslands. Those can be further subdivided into probably 600 types. So you're, you're dealing with a, with a vast number, first of all. You know, coastal dune grasslands versus, uh, lonely pine savanna grasslands versus tall grass prairie type grasslands, uh, 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.

• 1:37:13Speaker 03

  So, you know, if we go into, let's say, an area that used to be prairie, uh, in central Kentucky, um, we first want to know, is there any remnant potential left? Most times it's no. It, we have a landowner that 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, 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 to, uh, you know, constructively and very thoughtfully suggest what should be there to begin with. That's all based in science.

• 1:37:50Steven Rinella?

  Uh, real quick, let's say you had a, this hypothetical landowner.

• 1:37:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Steven Rinella?

  In central Kentucky, and 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 a guy comes forward and he's got a thousand acres and you go look and there's none?

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, absolutely.

• 1:38:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay, it's just gone.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're working on a 5,000 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.

• 1:38:28Steven Rinella?

  And you know that it was prairie, and now there's none.

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  Right, yeah, and 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 99.99%. That's not hyperbole, that's demonstrated loss. The second group is what were formerly like less fertile, but they were meadowlands. Shenandoah Valley of Northern Virginia comes to mind. The New River Settlements that I know you and I have read a lot about. The New River Valley, all these areas, they were really fertile, but not like good for planting crops. They were fertile for grazing lands. Well, those got overgrazed in the early periods of American history.

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  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 99.99% pasture lands dominated by Eurasian grasses. And then the third category, like your more rolling sandy sort of rocky grasslands with trees, those are savannas. Those really depended 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.

• 1:39:51Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:39:52Speaker 03

  So the, you know, vast swathes of our public lands today in the South. Piney Woods of East Texas, big game lands in Central Virginia, in the Piedmont. Big lands in the Florida Panhandle that are today densely densely forested and dry, used to be open savannas.

• 1:40:12Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:40:13Speaker 03

  And we've lost it. But that's the actually the greatest potential for recovery. And so, you know, back to your question, Brody, 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 savanna is very different what you do to, to plant a prairie. So savannas are probably the trickiest. They're the easiest to restore. They have the most potential right now as a nation to restore millions of acres of savanna that are just suppressed under artificially forested conditions. It's not going to be popular because you're going to have to cut trees.

• 1:40:47Speaker 04

  That's what I was kind of getting at. People don't like that.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  You, and, and unfortunately, the biggest.

• 1:40:52Steven Rinella?

  It comes from a good place.

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:54Steven Rinella?

  It comes from reading Lorax and all that. Like it comes from a good place.

• 1:40:58Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:41:10Steven Rinella?

  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 region 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.

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:30Steven Rinella?

  And I was trying to explain the concept of active land management.

• 1:41:36Steven Rinella?

  That if not doing anything doesn't give you what, in some places, not doing anything doesn't deliver what you want.

• 1:41:43Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. And in the case of grasslands, which they, 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 bluegrass of Kentucky, for example, was probably a bison elk dependent ecosystem, not a fire dependent ecosystem.

• 1:42:07Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:42:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. But, but you take those two combinations and factors out and you then, you know, interject, you know, conversion to cropland or, or overgrazing, that's how you lose what we had. And, 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 11,000 acre farm in Alabama. This farm's nine miles wide.

• 1:42:49Speaker 03

  And this family, it's been in their farm since 1918. 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 managed it perfectly in a hundred years. And it's like stepping back into a time capsule to about the 18 teens in west central Alabama. It's amazing.

• 1:43:15Steven Rinella?

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• 1:44:00Steven Rinella?

  a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.

• 1:44:06Speaker 07

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• 1:44:35Speaker 04

  You, you mentioned herbicides having a big impact on, you know, killing all, all this stuff. Do you, in order to combat all those Eurasian invasive grass species, do you have to, whatever, hold hands with the devil and use that stuff also?

• 1:44:56Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah. And boy, that's a big hot button issue for us because, you know, right now, the, the technology and the know-how to take something from a field of Johnson grass, which is this nasty invasive from, from Africa, for us to, to do something better than Johnson grass, we have to nuke it.

• 1:45:16Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  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, um, you know, we are treating a site, uh, and preparing it, but once we get it planted with the most diverse species mix that's ever been planted in central Tennessee, you know, except for coming back in and just with our volunteers and, and spot treating a couple of problem areas, we'll never again have to use that stuff there.

• 1:45:48Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

  And, you know, we got American bumblebees coming back, we got grasshopper sparrows, we got northern harriers, we got otters coming in from the creek bank.

• 1:45:56Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  So hopefully, yeah, that's a big problem area. I mean, I have some really high-profile clients that say, no, this is a certified organic farm.

• 1:46:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:46:06Speaker 03

  And, 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, but the, how are you going to do it at 100 acres? You know, or even 10 acres is very challenging right now.

• 1:46:21Speaker 05

  That's gotta take a lot, because you're throwing off the, uh, balance in the soil as well, so you probably need to

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Speaker 05

  Go a lot of layers deep.

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  It's, it's very complicated. I mean, we've had to turn, 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.

• 1:46:43Steven Rinella?

  And there's just nothing you can do then?

• 1:46:44Speaker 03

  No, and then they actually did plant, uh, before we came in. They, they tried to plant and it fails, because if you don't take care of the invasives... All it takes is about three years to get on top of it. I know that's a lot. But if you can, if you can manage the invasive well for three years to make sure that you are planting into something that is very, you know, uh, receptive to all these, you know, species of grasses and wildflowers that you need for healthy wildlife habitat. It's just a three-year quick sacrifice.

• 1:47:16Speaker 04

  And once it's established, it can kind of hold that stuff at bay?

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it can. And now it, it may, depending on the severity of the 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, 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, to get a lot of people on board with this idea of eastern grasslands is because it does require perpetual management.

• 1:47:46Steven Rinella?

  How, how many years of management? Or do you mean perpetual perpetual?

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think perpetual, I, you know, and, and, um, you know, it's gonna need, most of them are gonna need fire, you know, some of them would benefit from grazing. You know, so where we have the greatest success is working on, um, you know, nothing's guaranteed, but we're, right now, we're having the greatest success. It'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. Uh, otherwise it takes a fairly steep monetary investment to get into some of this. And, and, 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 biodiversity, northern bobwhite,

• 1:48:32Speaker 03

  countless songbirds, pollinators, uh, 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.

• 1:48:45Steven Rinella?

  Do you, do you think that's what, that's what is ultimately has happened to the bobwhite quail?

• 1:48:51Speaker 03

  A thousand percent. Yeah. And I, I, you know, I enjoyed the episode that you guys had on quail recently.

• 1:48:56Steven Rinella?

  Not everyone did.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I, I enjoyed it, but, uh, and, and I learned a lot about eye parasites, you know?

• 1:49:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  But, 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

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  that offered Quail everything they needed, and then you take away 95% 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. As a boy growing up in southern middle Tennessee, in, in the eighties and nineties, every hillside for miles around was just broom sedge fields. You know, golden broom sedge, Andropogon virginicus, standing through the winter.

• 1:49:44Steven Rinella?

  What is that?

• 1:49:45Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a type of blue stem, native blue stem grass. It's, it's shit for forage, so farmers don't really like it.

• 1:49:51Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:49:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:50:07Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  On somewhat poor farms that I grew up on. But the thing is, it was everywhere. And, um, but then by the latest nineties, everybody, everybody and their mama started mowing religiously. And roadside started getting sprayed and fence roads started getting taken out. And I think what, what we hear a lot of times is, I've heard, um, some, some colleagues push back and say, "Well, yeah, but, you know, Quail, they really made a big spike in, in this sort of era of land disturbance and clearance and this agricultural revolution."

• 1:50:44Speaker 03

  I think that most people saying that don't really have a grasp on what we just lost. They're, they're working from the, this, uh, 1950s mindset, it was all eastern deciduous forest.

• 1:50:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  They got opened up into brushy, scrubby, great quail habitat. They're not even stopping to consider the 3.7 million acres of prairie lost from central Kentucky, the barrens, the big barrens, as it was called, that today, less than one hundredth of a percent remains.

• 1:51:12Steven Rinella?

  And that was quail country.

• 1:51:14Speaker 03

  That's quail country. Yeah.

• 1:51:15Steven Rinella?

  You know what's kind of funny is my buddy Kevin Murphy, I was down hunting with him in Kentucky.

• 1:51:22Steven Rinella?

  Where's, he's not, is he Paducah? Yeah, I think it's Paducah. Anyways, he gets permission on a, um, Amish farm. Gets real excited.

• 1:51:34Steven Rinella?

  Because that's where the game's at.

• 1:51:37Steven Rinella?

  And he was right. Only quail I ever seen walk around. They grew up hunting quail. The only quail I've ever seen walk around with Kevin Murphy is one day he got permission on an Amish farm. And I'm like, why is that? Just different. He's like different practices.

• 1:51:50Steven Rinella?

  Fence, fence rows, right? But again, highly disturbed. Highly disturbed landscape, but he had, he had said a couple of things. Hell on predators. Um, not cutting fence rows. Dirtier areas, meaning like, you know, like big areas full of old equipment that kind of grew up and cover. So you start to associate quail today, you associate quail with manmade ecosystems that somehow give them what they need. But then you gotta try to remember that, but that's not what they came from. They, they use it as refuge, but it wasn't like the main thing.

• 1:52:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:28Steven Rinella?

  The main thing was like grasslands.

• 1:52:30Speaker 03

  Otherwise whitetail deer, you just think they came from tract homes in suburbia.

• 1:52:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Like you drive around.

• 1:52:39Speaker 03

  Exactly what they need.

• 1:52:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You see a big buck in the neighborhood.

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  What did they do before all this?

• 1:52:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, what did they do before that neighborhood?

• 1:52:45Speaker 03

  Well, you know.

• 1:52:46Steven Rinella?

  Where'd that big buck live?

• 1:52:47Speaker 03

  And in the archaeological record, we've got, you know, we've got records of quail going back, you know, 10,000 years ago in North Alabama, there's a cave called Dust Cave near Florence, Alabama. And, uh, Dust Cave is, is one of these sites where, um, these academics that study these sites basically detailed all that the Native Americans were, were utilizing from the landscape that they could, that they could find in the remains of those cave sediments, right? They put together like a list of a hundred animal species. It's crazy. At least dozens. Every kind of duck and waterfowl and thing you could imagine being in the, the backwaters of the Tennessee River, they were utilizing it.

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  Uh, every kind of turtle, every kind of major fish species, they had fragments of it. Rattlesnakes, boom, they got it. But they also had quail and greater prairie chickens. You know, and we see greater prairie chickens, uh, which is 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.

• 1:53:56Steven Rinella?

  Greater Prairie Chickens.

• 1:53:57Speaker 03

  Greater Prairie Chickens.

• 1:53:58Steven Rinella?

  God. Hardin County.

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  And before we end today, and 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.

• 1:54:07Steven Rinella?

  Tell me.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  I need you guys to close your eyes.

• 1:54:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  We're gonna do a little prayer preaching right here, okay?

• 1:54:12Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:54:13Speaker 06

  Bauer heads.

• 1:54:14Steven Rinella?

  My eyes just laugh. Okay, I'm ready.

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  We're gonna ask Wanda to come up and play on the organ. We're gonna have an altar call.

• 1:54:21Speaker 05

  Phil, where's the music drop?

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  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 to stain the horses' hooves 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 afterward met with in

• 1:55:07Speaker 03

  such vast numbers on the great prairies of Illinois. Reuben Ross, 1812.

• 1:55:15Steven Rinella?

  Amen.

• 1:55:16Speaker 06

  Hallelujah.

• 1:55:17Steven Rinella?

  Where was he?

• 1:55:18Speaker 03

  This is right on the Kentucky-Tennessee line.

• 1:55:20Steven Rinella?

  God, man.

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  Just about an hour southwest of Bowling Green, near, well, my town, Clarksville, Tennessee, where we're based.

• 1:55:26Steven Rinella?

  That'd be sweet deer hunting permission. Those strawberries got me excited.

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  Strawberries, yeah. And I butchered that quote a little bit. The strawberries actually come at the end, but.

• 1:55:36Steven Rinella?

  You know, if you, you used a term earlier, tertiary, what's that mean? Tertiary forest?

• 1:55:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like the, the third, you know, it's, you know, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, you know?

• 1:55:53Steven Rinella?

  I've been so much more familiar with the West in my adult life, but like, let's say you have a, let's say you go 20 miles from here in the mountains.

• 1:56:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:56:04Steven Rinella?

  And something burns. And 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.

• 1:56:17Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:56:33Steven Rinella?

  It'll, you know, a lot of these forests, it'll wind up being, that it winds up being like, it'll be big lodge poles. And it'll be those little knick, knick berries growing on the ground or whatever. You know what I mean? It'll like find its way back to that. Is that not, does that wind up not being true in the East because of non-native plants? Meaning if you had gone in 1400 and you had put Roundup on a patch of this prairie, you put Roundup on it, till it, put Roundup on it, till it, put Roundup on it, till it, and just till it's good and dead. And left.

• 1:57:11Steven Rinella?

  Uh, by 1500, whatever the hell, it probably would have been back to being.

• 1:57:17Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:57:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. What you're describing.

• 1:57:19Steven Rinella?

  It would have been back to be in prairie.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, well, there's a couple of things there. One is you're describing that pioneer process, right? That's a primary succession. So when you take something back to, you know, just bare 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.

• 1:57:44Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  It has a very low, what we call conservatism value. It's like a one or a two on a scale of one to 10. 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 pioneer species. That's why I don't call them early successional.

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  You know, you go open up a, a new cornfield, you let it go fallow, and let's say you've 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.

• 1:58:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38Speaker 03

  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 Dr. Joseph Veldman at Texas A&M has published a paper a few years ago, 2015 or so, that talked about old growth grasslands, they require thousands of years to assemble.

• 1:58:58Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:59Speaker 03

  That's, man, nobody's thinking about this stuff.

• 1:59:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's, the term you're using is helpful, assemble.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Steven Rinella?

  Because it's not like how you're going to have fireweed, but then all of a sudden immediately you're going to have all these little lodgepole pine things, and then pretty soon lodgepole pine's going to win out.

• 1:59:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:17Steven Rinella?

  And you're talking about two things coming together.

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:59:20Steven Rinella?

  Which, which would be like dwarf wortelberry, lodgepole pine, whatever, two things. You're talking about how do you get these, perhaps dozens?

• 1:59:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, and, and you also were asking about invasive species. Yeah, now that's the, the factor that gets in the way, right? You've got a site that is going through this early phase of disturbance, invasives are going to move in and sort of suspend that natural successional pathway. And that complicates things for us out there in the, in the habitat restoration world big time, you know, but you're always going to have weeds, you know, where, where you would have had this weedy flora in the east, let's say, 3,000 years ago. Would have been around a Mississippian, probably a thousand years ago, Mississippian Native American village, you know, lot of cornfields and stuff where they were disturbing. You would have expected native weeds to be all in and around their settlements.

• 2:00:14Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 2:00:14Speaker 03

  Where you had a bison wallow, you know, 300 years ago, the weeds would have been around that bison wallow. But your 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 grazing pressure or fire, they don't, they don't have the same kind of detrimental resetting effect that like plow and till and wallowing have.

• 2:00:41Speaker 04

  Is there, like in your eyes, is there an acceptable, like approximation of the original as far as restoration, where it's like,

• 2:00:50Steven Rinella?

  That's a good question.

• 2:00:51Speaker 04

  It's not perfect, but it's close enough that like, it's pretty damn good?

• 2:00:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, what we do is we look to remnants where they exist. You know, I mentioned Long Island earlier, right? There was 60,000 acres of prairie up until about 1905, 1910. That prairie lasted longer than the prairies near my home and at Fort Campbell Army Base, or in Middle Tennessee, Kentucky.

• 2:01:14Steven Rinella?

  Didn't they have that moor hen out there?

• 2:01:16Speaker 03

  They, well, they had the, what do they call it? The heath hen.

• 2:01:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right. And it went extinct a decade or two later. But today, out of that former 60,000 acre landscape, there's only 24 acres left adjacent to Nassau Community College.

• 2:01:30Speaker 04

  What?

• 2:01:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. So if you want to rebuild a grassland on Long Island, one, you got to, where are you going to do it?

• 2:01:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  But then you could go look at that, 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.

• 2:01:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:54Speaker 03

  And then those we collect seeds from, and we work with seed farmers, like Roundstone Native Seed out of Kentucky, or Ernst Native Seed out of Pennsylvania. We buy the seed from them, and then we rebuild those ecosystems to the very best that we can.

• 2:02:10Steven Rinella?

  And what's, like to Brody's point, to put a finer answer on it, like what is,

• 2:02:19Steven Rinella?

  What's as close as we could get to good enough?

• 2:02:23Speaker 03

  I think.

• 2:02:23Steven Rinella?

  Fifty percent, sixty percent of, of the species biodiversity, like, like, when do you go like, sweet, let's go find a new spot?

• 2:02:30Speaker 03

  That's a great question. I think, um, I'll give you just, I'll just give you a, a, a real scattershot of what people are, have been doing, right?

• 2:02:39Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 2:02:39Speaker 03

  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 planted native warm season grasses like twenty years ago.

• 2:02:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  And they would use three species, big blue stem, Indian grass and little blue stem. Sometimes they'd add a fourth switch grass. That's not cutting it. You're not adding.

• 2:03:00Steven Rinella?

  So three ain't enough?

• 2:03:00Speaker 03

  Three ain't 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 pollinators and songbirds. You need the whole package. So then about ten years ago, people were stepping up, because a big limitation is where are you going to get the seeds? If you don't have farmers producing seed, you're shit out of luck.

• 2:03:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:26Speaker 03

  So, you know.

• 2:03:27Steven Rinella?

  Cause that little eleven acre patch isn't gonna.

• 2:03:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:03:29Steven Rinella?

  Put off the.

• 2:03:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you would exhaust those patches too.

• 2:03:32Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  Right? They need their seeds to rain back down on that site to some extent. So you do need these native seed producers, uh, 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.

• 2:03:51Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:03:52Speaker 03

  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, 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 a 89 species mix on a private farm in Tennessee. So, you know, we're trying to get our mixes up. Eighty-nine. Eighty-nine, yeah. Now, that's not for everybody, you know, but I would say you need to be somewhere A little rich for my blood. That's a little rich, but you need to be somewhere in that 20 to 40 range is, is, is the sweet spot.

• 2:04:36Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set.

• 2:05:21Steven Rinella?

  Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.

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• 2:05:56Speaker 04

  Well, let's say someone has a, whatever, 100 acre farm and they've got a 20 acre pasture. It's like ideal for restoring, 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 invasive? Or it just can't handle the?

• 2:06:17Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:06:29Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:30Speaker 03

  For example, horses. Horses can't tolerate certain types of grasses that maybe cattle can, for example.

• 2:06:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh, like you might have a toxic plant?

• 2:06:38Speaker 03

  You could have a toxic plant, or you could have a plant with bristles on the spikelets of the grass that get into the mouthparts. So those are all considerations, and we try to be real mindful of those kinds of things. But now, this same farm, it's called the Westington Plantation, north of Nashville. You know, we're putting 89 species in that mix, but we're absolutely gonna be lightly grazing that.

• 2:06:58Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:59Speaker 03

  That site's really cool. It's got a two documented buffalo forage just down in the valley. And you can still go and see the impressions where the bison would cross this creek.

• 2:07:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, shit.

• 2:07:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

• 2:07:11Steven Rinella?

  Hey, I got a tactics question for you. You were talking earlier, you used the expression nuke in the ground.

• 2:07:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:18Steven Rinella?

  To get it ready. I appreciate the term.

• 2:07:20Speaker 03

  We hate to do it.

• 2:07:21Steven Rinella?

  I'm assuming you're talking about glyphosate?

• 2:07:23Speaker 03

  Glyphosate and a few others, yeah.

• 2:07:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:29Steven Rinella?

  That winds up, you know, earlier we were talking about political complexities?

• 2:07:32Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:07:32Steven Rinella?

  To return to the beginning and to return to the rant, political complexities. Way back in there.

• 2:07:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:37Steven Rinella?

  Nah, I'm not going back in there. Just bringing up like, we had a feller sitting in that seat one time that is very adversarial to Roundup, 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 Roundup becomes like, can't get it?

• 2:08:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:08Steven Rinella?

  Can't put it on the ground, do you then have to be like, oh shit, this whole thing's over? Or is there a plan B?

• 2:08:17Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, 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 can say, well, it's about the cost. No, it's not about the cost. It's about, uh, 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, um, you know, right, right now we've got six big anchor grasslands that were just been funded to begin restoring. And some

• 2:09:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:09:15Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:09:16Speaker 03

  Now.

• 2:09:16Steven Rinella?

  Now, Randall, do you remember how many acres did Dan Florries do by hand?

• 2:09:20Speaker 06

  Oh, I think that was, I think that was 20 or 40 acres.

• 2:09:24Steven Rinella?

  It was, it was like a arid grassland thing, but he had, uh, I think he did spotted knappweed and leafy spurge.

• 2:09:32Speaker 06

  Years.

• 2:09:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:34Speaker 06

  Years.

• 2:09:34Steven Rinella?

  Any spare moment.

• 2:09:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:36Speaker 06

  Knappweed is back. So what is the, what is the current footprint of your organization look like in terms of on the ground, been here, done that, or under, underway?

• 2:09:49Speaker 03

  Let me just answer one last thing that Steve brought up, which is, uh, we are about to experiment, uh, with using a flame scorcher to do probably somewhere between five. It's a propane fueled flame scorcher. So, you know, hot. And even for those, uh, you know, then that gets into like fuel consumption and carbon emissions kind of territory. Um, either, either way you go, you don't have a good approach.

• 2:10:15Steven Rinella?

  Like you could get that shit so hot that you wound up with an equal.

• 2:10:19Speaker 03

  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 100 acres? It's just not feasible.

• 2:10:29Steven Rinella?

  And everybody's all mad at plastic now.

• 2:10:31Speaker 03

  Right, you know, and that stuff's gonna break down.

• 2:10:33Steven Rinella?

  Just can't win these days.

• 2:10:35Speaker 05

  Just put solar panel.

• 2:10:37Speaker 03

  You could, you could disc the hell out of it, but that don't work on a slope where you're subjected to erosion.

• 2:10:43Steven Rinella?

  People after you.

• 2:10:44Speaker 03

  And then the last one that comes to mind is, you could graze the hell out of it for a long, long time. I hear a bunch of goats.

• 2:10:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:10:52Steven Rinella?

  No, that's a myth, man.

• 2:10:55Speaker 03

  But then you, there's all these come with complexities, right? The quickest and most efficient is the approach we use. Uh, but it, it does have its, you know, it comes with its drawbacks, for sure.

• 2:11:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:07Steven Rinella?

  It's a complicated world, man.

• 2:11:08Speaker 03

  Complicated, yeah.

• 2:11:09Steven Rinella?

  The world, it's annoying, this world.

• 2:11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, uh, and now Randall, you asked me, what's our footprint?

• 2:11:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, like, how, how many acres are you working on now? How many acres have you worked on? What's, how's the scaling been?

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the region is 24 states. We're actively working in or contracted before the freeze to work in 17 states. We just this year with the funding that, the projects that we've already started,

• 2:11:43Speaker 03

  and what we've been funded to do, we would be able to begin, uh, our first 10,000 acres of restoration. So that's, that's a big accomplishment for us because, um, just a year and a half ago, we had sort of reached our first 1,000 acres. I mean, you know, as an organization where you're starting from scratch to build what is now a 50-person team. Uh, you know, eight years ago, first, no one really knew about southeastern grasslands as a thing.

• 2:12:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:11Speaker 03

  So we had to educate why they're here. Then, you know, we had to just build the team organically, you know, administrative assistants, communications team, on the ground, representation, fundraising, all that stuff. And it took us a good eight years to reach our first thousand acres.

• 2:12:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but you're you're using as inspiration 10 acre patches.

• 2:12:31Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:12:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. When you when you put it in that, like when you consider that, that's makes it more all the more extraordinary.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  It's and it's so it's so difficult. So to go from a thousand acres in 2023 to now 10,000 acres.

• 2:12:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:46Speaker 03

  But our ability to do that, you know, is is currently in limbo with the freeze that we're currently facing. We were super excited at the beginning of this year.

• 2:12:58Speaker 03

  We had just received major funding from a few major federal agencies to begin working on 40 US national parks from Mississippi to Vermont. To do a few thousand acres of 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 1720. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Cades Cove, you know? These are places that are really well known.

• 2:13:29Steven Rinella?

  What states are they?

• 2:13:30Speaker 03

  It's Tennessee.

• 2:13:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, these are all Republican states. They might still get it.

• 2:13:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, they might get it, you know, they might get it.

• 2:13:36Steven Rinella?

  Pennsylvania is a battleground state, so they need to keep them happy. They might send some of that money over there, hopefully. Assuming they're going to use that money and strategically until like.

• 2:13:46Speaker 03

  I'm gonna be positive. I'm gonna hope it's gonna clear up and go through, but I think if.

• 2:13:51Steven Rinella?

  It's gotta be nerve wracking.

• 2:13:52Speaker 03

  If things don't clear up in a three to four week, five, six week process, we we risk losing 90% of our team.

• 2:13:59Speaker 04

  Is there?

• 2:14:00Steven Rinella?

  Seriously?

• 2:14:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:01Speaker 04

  And there's no hope to like working directly with state agencies? They're just not the money's not there?

• 2:14:07Speaker 03

  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 get into his business.

• 2:14:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:15Speaker 03

  But, you know, when we got the agreements in place to work with the US National Park Service, you know, and these were mostly funded funded by through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. You know, those those took 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, right? Those are obligated funds.

• 2:14:41Steven Rinella?

  Congressally approved.

• 2:14:42Speaker 03

  All congressionally approved. And so then we spent all of last year staffing up to get ready for that. So we hired almost 25 employees, endless rounds of going through searches and interviews, et cetera. We had to 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?

• 2:15:08Speaker 03

  One major seed producer said, you know, I need about two or three weeks to deliberate. This is a big, big opportunity for our small business. You know, they employ about 40 people. They said, um, 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 better restore these lands, restore this wildlife habitat. And when the freeze took effect, it now puts that farmer, that small business, those 40 people employed in that business at risk. My friend had to go out and take a $1 million business loan to be able to have the, to staff up and have the capacity needed to meet this federally obligated project.

• 2:15:53Speaker 03

  And, and I'm not trying to bitch about our situation because again, everybody's in the same boat.

• 2:15:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:59Speaker 03

  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, and so as the leader of our organization and the co-founder, and I'm deeply worried about what 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 $30 million 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 entire team go.

• 2:16:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:16:52Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:53Speaker 03

  And so many of my friends are going through the same situation.

• 2:16:58Speaker 03

  Both sides of the aisle. This is a bipartisan, you know, effort.

• 2:17:01Steven Rinella?

  Yep. That feels pretty America first to me.

• 2:17:05Speaker 03

  It does.

• 2:17:06Steven Rinella?

  Getting the grasslands.

• 2:17:07Speaker 03

  It does. Yeah. And we're telling the untold story, brother. Yeah, man, this is America. Yeah.

• 2:17:14Steven Rinella?

  Put that first.

• 2:17:15Speaker 04

  Is there a?

• 2:17:16Steven Rinella?

  MAGA, make America grassy again, man.

• 2:17:18Speaker 03

  I, I've heard that. Somebody's mentioned that before.

• 2:17:20Speaker 04

  Is there any way for, like, if someone owned 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?

• 2:17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, there's definitely lots 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 Ibarger coming up in a while, you know, with the Native Habitat Project. You know, Kyle does this kind of work. You know, he came up about five, 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 ever been right with somebody, Steve?

• 2:18:10Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, man. I barely know what that means.

• 2:18:12Speaker 03

  That's when you start throwing out a couple of by gods.

• 2:18:15Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. He's tries.

• 2:18:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I went in, I went in this gathering of about 100 people. And I said, by God, it is past time 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 forests and you talk about wetlands and you talk about coastal ecosystems and you talk about climate change. Grasslands harbor half the biodiversity of temperate eastern North America.

• 2:18:53Speaker 03

  And their biodiversity is collapsing.

• 2:18:55Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:18:56Speaker 03

  You gotta do something about it. So I had a by God moment. I do apologize for getting

• 2:19:01Steven Rinella?

  Did they hear you?

• 2:19:02Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know. I think they're hearing. I think I think we're witnessing the explosion of interest in this topic, but we ain't got it far enough yet, Steve.

• 2:19:11Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'll tell you, this is, um, I'm new to the whole conversation.

• 2:19:17Steven Rinella?

  You know, what 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 and these early accounts of people rolling into these spots and describing them for the first time. If I hadn't encountered that, I would never even have thought about it. I would have still told everybody about the squirrel running from,

• 2:19:38Steven Rinella?

  you know, wherever.

• 2:19:39Speaker 03

  That's one of my

• 2:19:39Steven Rinella?

  Ran into the Mississippi and never hitting the ground.

• 2:19:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, the long hunters were one of my gateways into this and, uh, but I do need to apologize. I just committed blasphemy.

• 2:19:48Speaker 05

  I was gonna say.

• 2:19:48Steven Rinella?

  We can beep it out.

• 2:19:49Speaker 06

  No, no, I appreciate that.

• 2:19:51Steven Rinella?

  No, beep that out, Phil. People know what was said.

• 2:19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:19:56Speaker 05

  God darn.

• 2:19:57Steven Rinella?

  Well.

• 2:19:58Speaker 05

  Not even that.

• 2:19:58Steven Rinella?

  I think you should bleep it out, Phil. Phil should bleep it out.

• 2:20:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, bleep it out.

• 2:20:02Speaker 06

  Get that burp I had earlier. No, I'm actually, I'm gonna make that louder. 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. Yeah, we'll see.

• 2:20:15Steven Rinella?

  Anytime Randall, yeah, he has something regrettable, he says, just put his belch in there.

• 2:20:22Steven Rinella?

  Hey, I keep meaning to ask, what's up with that wedding ring you got on there, huh?

• 2:20:26Speaker 03

  Dude, I tell you what.

• 2:20:27Steven Rinella?

  How long you been married?

• 2:20:28Speaker 03

  Uh, almost 25 years.

• 2:20:29Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 2:20:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. Yeah.

• 2:20:31Steven Rinella?

  You got married at five?

• 2:20:33Speaker 06

  Or you're just, uh,

• 2:20:34Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:20:35Speaker 06

  You aged gracefully.

• 2:20:36Speaker 03

  It's probably 22, 23. Yeah, my wife and I have been together since like, what, 2002? That's when we got married. Been together since 97. Yeah. Long time. First girlfriend ever.

• 2:20:46Steven Rinella?

  Good for you, man.

• 2:20:46Speaker 03

  First girlfriend turned into my wife. Yeah.

• 2:20:48Steven Rinella?

  You guys got kids?

• 2:20:49Speaker 03

  We do. Got three kids.

• 2:20:50Steven Rinella?

  What's your wife's name?

• 2:20:50Speaker 03

  Uh, Shawna. And I got an 18 year old, 16 year old, and a 10 year old named Boone.

• 2:20:56Steven Rinella?

  You guys got right to it.

• 2:20:58Speaker 03

  I'm right, bro.

• 2:21:00Steven Rinella?

  See, that was a good move. My buddy Clay did the same thing. Got right to it. Young.

• 2:21:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:06Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 2:21:18Steven Rinella?

  Like, picking up your grandkids, taking them turkey hunting?

• 2:21:23Steven Rinella?

  You're right on the cusp.

• 2:21:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's true.

• 2:21:26Steven Rinella?

  You'll still be able to walk around. I'll be rolling up in a wheelchair.

• 2:21:31Steven Rinella?

  If at all.

• 2:21:36Steven Rinella?

  Give me a piece of marriage advice.

• 2:21:39Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, man.

• 2:21:42Speaker 03

  My wife's always right. That's for one. Yeah. And, uh...

• 2:21:48Steven Rinella?

  You're not telling me that she is. You're just saying you pretend that's true.

• 2:21:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretending. Man, I'll tell you, I got lucky, man. I got lucky. I'll tell you this. I will say this. All credit to... There, you know, there's a reasons why the Southeastern Grasslands Institute exists.

• 2:22:04Steven Rinella?

  Are we off marriage?

• 2:22:05Speaker 03

  No, no, no. I was gonna say...

• 2:22:08Steven Rinella?

  This is gonna roll. This is gonna bring it. This is gonna bring it.

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  This is coming full circle.

• 2:22:11Steven Rinella?

  I'm with you. Strong move.

• 2:22:12Speaker 03

  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 50, soon to be 65, man, I had to have a strong woman in my life. And, and all credit to her.

• 2:22:41Speaker 03

  When I had to work sometimes 30 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.

• 2:22:52Steven Rinella?

  That's great. You know the quote my friend told me?

• 2:22:54Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 2:22:55Steven Rinella?

  "Behind every successful man is a woman who thinks he's an idiot."

• 2:23:02Steven Rinella?

  Because it pushes you.

• 2:23:07Steven Rinella?

  Keeps you out, keeps you awake and gets you up in the morning.

• 2:23:10Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:23:10Steven Rinella?

  "I'm not that bad. Come on."

• 2:23:13Steven Rinella?

  "I'm gonna get to it."

• 2:23:16Speaker 04

  Dwayne, are you guys, are you guys like a nonprofit that people can donate money to?

• 2:23:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, we are housed out of a university, because I've been a professor for 18 years, right? We currently function in sort of two capacities. We function as a nonprofit, part of the university is our fiscal sponsor is what we call it. And then we function very much like an academic department out of our university. And that really gives us a lot of amplitude and flexibility. This year, we are going to be creating our own nonprofit still affiliated with the university.

• 2:23:54Steven Rinella?

  Will it run like a foundation?

• 2:23:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. So we'll, you know, we'll have our own board of directors. We're going to be assembling that this year. And I think that's going to help us, you know, get to a point where we need to be as part of our business plan already, anyway.

• 2:24:09Steven Rinella?

  Tell me the university you're out of?

• 2:24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's called Austin Peay, P-E-A-Y. And our motto is, let's go Peay.

• 2:24:19Speaker 04

  You guys occasionally do well in the March Madness.

• 2:24:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, basketball.

• 2:24:25Speaker 04

  That's how I know that name.

• 2:24:26Speaker 03

  And a lot of people say PA or PEA or whatever you call it, but it's just Austin Peay named for one of our former governors. Yeah, it's a good school.

• 2:24:35Speaker 04

  So at some point, people will be able to jump on a website and donate some cash to you.

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I hope they do. Check it out at, you know, our website, Southeastern Grasslands Institute, segrasslands.org. And of course, we're on, you know, Facebook and Substack and, you know, all that stuff.

• 2:24:51Steven Rinella?

  And if you're sitting there and you got a big property within your south, the Dwayne south.

• 2:24:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:00Steven Rinella?

  And you're just wading through piles of money and you're thinking about how you want to do something good for your land. Because as Doug Duren says, it's not ours. It's just our turn.

• 2:25:11Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:25:12Steven Rinella?

  And you want to do something right by your land, maybe go check these guys out.

• 2:25:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I would like to, there's three things in particular I'd love for your listeners to kind of help us think through.

• 2:25:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:25:23Speaker 03

  And you guys, too.

• 2:25:25Speaker 03

  One is...

• 2:25:28Speaker 03

  We've got so much existing public land and private land. It just needs to be managed in a better, different direction.

• 2:25:35Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:25:35Speaker 03

  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 ESRI, is designed to be that decision support tool that both public land managers and private landowners can come to Grasslandia. And you better go into that world and see maps of where the grasslands used to be. See the quotes from the early historians who followed the long hunters' 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.

• 2:26:20Speaker 03

  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, those places like May Prairie. They're critical as the building blocks to build back from.

• 2:26:42Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 2:26:43Speaker 03

  Seeds or to protect them because they're oftentimes, they need to be protected and managed because they're the last of their kind.

• 2:26:49Steven Rinella?

  Just it's the model, right?

• 2:26:51Speaker 03

  It'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 11,000 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.

• 2:27:34Speaker 03

  Now imagine if we did big scale grassland here in central North Carolina and western Kentucky.

• 2:27:41Speaker 03

  I think people have given up on that as a possibility. SGI, the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, 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.

• 2:28:00Steven Rinella?

  Amen. I'm a convert.

• 2:28:03Speaker 03

  Come on down. And I have been told to extend a

• 2:28:06Steven Rinella?

  I've been saved.

• 2:28:07Speaker 03

  A hunting invitation to have you guys come on down

• 2:28:10Steven Rinella?

  Don't bleep this all out.

• 2:28:11Speaker 03

  Some turkeys.

• 2:28:15Steven Rinella?

  That's gonna be a long belt.

• 2:28:16Speaker 03

  Long belt.

• 2:28:19Speaker 03

  I'll tell y'all.

• 2:28:20Steven Rinella?

  Go on, go on.

• 2:28:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I want you guys to come on down and see that bison trail at the, at the Westington Farm.

• 2:28:26Steven Rinella?

  I would love to see that.

• 2:28:28Speaker 03

  Come down and see the bison traces. You can hunt in our newly restored grasslands down there.

• 2:28:32Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 2:28:32Speaker 03

  Got some amazing turkey, deer. Come on down. Love to have you.

• 2:28:37Steven Rinella?

  That sounds good.

• 2:28:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:39Steven Rinella?

  You know what book you might like to read, man?

• 2:28:41Speaker 03

  Tell me, I'm looking for some good ones.

• 2:28:42Steven Rinella?

  Have you read The Landbreakers?

• 2:28:43Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:28:44Steven Rinella?

  It's from the 60s?

• 2:28:45Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:28:46Steven Rinella?

  So the other day I had dinner with my editor and my publisher at Random House. And I was talking about, they were asking 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.

• 2:29:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:29:08Steven Rinella?

  Which led us to a conversation of who gets it right. And I was making the case that, I was making the case that Coram 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 Landbreakers? From 196, I think it was from 64. And I hadn't. But The Landbreakers, as you can imagine, it's like 1780, right? And it's new people moving in to break the land. It's so well done.

• 2:29:46Speaker 03

  Is this kind of like the Lou Lamour's, the Sackett series? Sort of similar to that?

• 2:29:50Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I don't want to hack on Louis Lamour.

• 2:29:52Speaker 03

  Yeah?

• 2:29:53Steven Rinella?

  How do I put this? I've read Louis Lamour, Dirt is big Louis Lamour, Dirt's always reading Louis Lamour. I don't know how to say this in a gentle way.

• 2:30:03Steven Rinella?

  Just go for it. No.

• 2:30:06Speaker 03

  I mean, I think, I think that's

• 2:30:07Steven Rinella?

  To say he's not your cup of tea and move on. That's an hypothesis. No. It is unbelievable.

• 2:30:14Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:30:15Steven Rinella?

  Uh, it is like, like how that dude knows what he knows. And I've gone and checked a little bit, like what?

• 2:30:23Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 2:30:34Speaker 03

  I can't wait to read it, man.

• 2:30:35Steven Rinella?

  The Land Breakers.

• 2:30:36Speaker 03

  I'll read it.

• 2:30:37Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 2:30:46Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 2:30:47Steven Rinella?

  Strong as shit out there.

• 2:30:48Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:30:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But no, I think it, it like, uh, I think you'd really appreciate that novel, The Land Breakers.

• 2:30:56Speaker 03

  I'll check it out. Absolutely.

• 2:30:57Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I got nothing to gain from this.

• 2:31:03Steven Rinella?

  Well, in fact, I take that back. You should go check out, Meter's American History.

• 2:31:11Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 2:31:12Speaker 03

  Hey, it's a tremendous honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

• 2:31:15Steven Rinella?

  Uh, is, is, how, how best to come find you if people want to find you?

• 2:31:21Steven Rinella?

  Go to where?

• 2:31:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Check us out on, uh, social media and, uh, come to our website and there's an email link there.

• 2:31:28Steven Rinella?

  Say the website?

• 2:31:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. S E grasslands.org.

• 2:31:32Steven Rinella?

  S E grasslands.org and on social, what are you?

• 2:31:35Speaker 03

  Uh, on Facebook and Instagram, at Instagram, it's S E grassland without the S.

• 2:31:41Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31:42Steven Rinella?

  I like grasslandia.

• 2:31:44Speaker 03

  Grasslandia is gonna be cool, man.

• 2:31:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:46Speaker 03

  And it's gonna be cool for, uh, any research that you need for your book projects. So hit us up.

• 2:31:52Steven Rinella?

  Excellent. We're kind of moving westward on our book projects, but we'll come back.

• 2:31:56Speaker 03

  Come back.

• 2:31:56Steven Rinella?

  We'll double back.

• 2:31:57Speaker 03

  Come back, man.

• 2:31:58Steven Rinella?

  We'll go so far west, we'll wind up back east.

• 2:31:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 2:32:00Steven Rinella?

  Just do a whole thing on the south.

• 2:32:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:03Steven Rinella?

  All right. Thanks for coming on, dude. Thank you.

• 2:32:04Speaker 03

  Appreciate you guys. Thank you.

• 2:32:32Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house, they all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and

• 2:33:15Steven Rinella?

  years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today.

• 2:33:23Speaker 09

  Cool fall nights always make me want to entertain more. A few friends around the table, maybe a fire outside when the sun goes down. Before everyone comes over, I stop at Total Wine & More. Right now, there's a cranberry flavored wine, a crisp apple wine, even a pumpkin spice cream that's perfect in coffee after dinner. And with the lowest prices, I can bring home a few different fall flavors for everyone to try. Find your favorite fall flavors at the lowest prices at Total Wine & More. Spirits are not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Must be 21.

• 2:33:57Speaker 10

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• 2:34:38Speaker 05

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.