Ep. 40: Becoming Natives of Place in the American West | The American West

Two ideas about living in the modern West, bioregionalism and rewilding, emerged in the 1970s and early 2000s, and while neither has gone mainstream they have influenced how residents who prioritize nature have made decisions about a new western lifestyle. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. 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, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:32Speaker 02

  Who gets to be a native resident of any place is always up for debate. But for the past half-century, two movements, bioregionalism and rewilding, have offered a new possibility. I'm Dan Florries, and this is The American West.

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  Becoming natives of place in the American West.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  We've all seen them everywhere in the West. Those bumper stickers on the nether end of a towering Ram or Ford 150 pickup proclaiming the driver is a native. As to where the attachment applies, it's almost always to a state, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Idaho, that's barely existed much more than a century. Nativity in these cases is usually intended to give the newcomers to understand that the pickup driver has kin who got to Idaho or Wyoming two or three generations before you did. So both truck and driver are due special privileges. In

• 2:54Speaker 02

  a part of America where people have resided for 23,000 years, that's maybe not the most convincing claim of nativity out there. But it is one version. All of us will probably agree, from life experiences if nothing else, that attachment to place is a fundamental of human life. Some of our earliest-century perceptions of the living world around us are of place-based cues. The geographer Yifu Twan's famous aphorism, "Space plus culture

• 3:32Speaker 02

  equals place," distills the whole equation. If you assume that space means the surrounding natural world, and culture represents all the human creations we bring to bear, economics, technological ability, philosophies of meaning, language, and social life, you can quickly see how specific places come to be. In episode 25 of The American West, I offered up a deep time history of the southern high plains to show how, over time, these factors could produce a succession of different places. In that example, across 13,000 years, the

• 4:14Speaker 02

  same piece of ground featured a place characterized by mammoth and giant bison hunters, and another a vast, irrigated cotton fields. Both kinds of place-based life have been possible on the southern high plains.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Applying an exercise like that is an intriguing way to look at places, a way to grasp what the possibilities are. But let's face it, we live out our daily lives in the 21st century. Even so, for all the similarities that the internet and advertising and popular culture lay down on every place everywhere, all of us are driving nearly identical automobiles and shopping in the same box stores, no matter where we live. Place-based life in the modern American West is actually quite distinctive from spot to spot. My stepdaughter, who grew

• 5:16Speaker 02

  up on the Wasatch Front in Utah, goes to college in Flagstaff, Arizona. Ogden and Flagstaff are within a day's drive of one another. Yet both nature and culture have made them into mind-bendingly different places. Churchy versus hippie, Great Salt Lake versus 100-foot-tall ponderosa pines. That's the West. It's Seattle and Phoenix, Aspen and Rapid City, Los Angeles and Cody. And at Yifu Twan's level of natural space, it's

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  the central coast and the high plains, the Tetons and the Terry Badlands, the Sonoran Desert and the Redwood Rainforest.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Even when we're attached to places and think of ourselves as natives or as coming from somewhere, modern life doesn't ask us to think very hard about just what it is we're attached to. For most of us, the affiliation, perhaps the name we offer when someone asks us where we're from, is to a purely cultural construction, a state or a city, maybe the residence of a sports team we follow. But especially in the West, our states are often just boundary lines of boxes, superimposed on the ground like an ancient Peruvian earthworks

• 6:47Speaker 02

  design. Inside those boxes are much richer topographies, featuring natural boundaries like river courses, or mountain ranges, or exposed geology. And inside that topography are many distinctive ecological settings. As I pointed out in episode 28 of this podcast, New Mexico, a state bounded pretty much as a classic Western rectangle, features within that rectangle eight principal eco-regions that at fine-grained mapping, map into an astonishing 55 different ecological subsets, what many of us have referred to since the

• 7:29Speaker 02

  1980s as bioregions. What I've been preparing to say, then, is that natural settings like bioregions actually have a long history themselves as human places. And one way to become a resident of place in the West or anywhere else is to immerse yourself in the history and ecology of your local bioregion. That makes at least as much sense as an affiliation with the Denver Broncos' fan viewership.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  When I was 35, I was a professor at a university in a city a friend referred to, pretty memorably, I thought, with the line, "My God, ghastly place." Nonetheless, it seemed the right time for acquiring my first house. The dwelling in question was an unfinished, two-story tar-paper shack outside the city. It had a well and electricity, but beyond a tin roof possessed no exterior surface except for plywood covered by faded, black tar paper. Inside was exposed framing, wiring, and plumbing with no insulation in the walls.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Downstairs was a shower and a john minimally enclosed in sheetrock. There was no heat beyond a kitchen oven and no cooling unless you factored in the very considerable West Texas wind. Needless to say, no bank would mortgage such a structure.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  What existed of this house was the work of a founding musician of a somewhat famous Texas band called The Flatlanders. But the house had become a pawn in the musician’s failed marriage. His ex-wife got the building and the 12 acres out of a former cattle ranch it stood on. She decided owner financing was the only way she could sell it, and I bought it from her. Then chased nesting kestrels out of the upstairs, squashed centipedes and scorpions fleeing across the floors, and at disturbingly frequent intervals coaxed west Texas rattlesnakes off the front porch.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  I had no idea how to complete a house like this beyond stapling on fresh tar paper, and I wasn’t always a success at that. And I’d bought a house that needed a lot of completion. I was going to have to get better at that kind of thing. The real reason I’d bought an unfinished tar paper shack was because of its location and because of what my instincts led me to do with its setting. The house was on ground nearly impossible to find where I was living in the 1980s. That ghastly city was Lubbock, Texas, a town with the irony of having somehow produced

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Buddy Holly amidst an almost unmatchable Bible Belt pred. Lubbock in the 1980s wasn’t even three-quarters of a century old. It had been incorporated as a city in 1912 in the midst of an agricultural remaking of the southern high plains. A young Georgia O’Keeffe arrived on the Texas plains about the time Lubbock emerged and utterly fell in love with this horizontal world. “The biggest thing she had ever seen,” she claimed. But this soon-famous American artist was on the scene before the agricultural assault nearly entirely banished nature in west Texas.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  I’m not sure to which Lubbock particulars my friend had directed her ghastly descriptor, but erasing an ancient ecology of bison, pronghorns, prairie dogs, wild horses, and gray wolves overnight, and replacing it with an ocean of cotton plants and nodding pumpjacks, struck me as a strong candidate.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  In Lubbock County, the ground where the tar paper shack stood was a singularity, a piece of barely surviving nature in a region that had all but excommunicated the natural. The house was in a small canyon called Yellow House that, in a now pretty abused form, sliced down through the vast plateau where Lubbock and its endless cotton fields stood. A few miles outside town, the little canyon became the mile-wide setting of cattle ranches, some started back in the 1880s. Although most of the original wildlife in Yellow House was gone, those ranches and

• 12:22Speaker 02

  the canyon’s topography had at least saved its prairie grasslands, the only 3% of ground in all of Lubbock County still harboring natural vegetation. As for the shack I’d bought, it was attractively sighted. It stood on a slope below Yellow House Canyon’s south rim. A hemispheric rimrock loomed behind it, while on the eastern border of the acreage was an up-swept mesa snagged in geologic time like a frozen wave, providing a graceful profile against morning sunrises. In the Louisiana woods where I’d grown up, my buddies and I had thrown up inexpertly

• 13:06Speaker 02

  built cabins since I was a 10-year-old. Much of my adult life, I had longed to escape city life for nature. For me, finishing that house and homesteading in west Texas’s Yellow House Canyon was the dream of youth finally realized. I tell this story because of several points I want to make in this episode about residing in bioregional places. The experiences I had across 15 years of living in this place, in this canyon, it’s true, did sate the childhood hopes I’d long had for emulating Henry David Thoreau,

• 13:46Speaker 02

  and ecologist Aldo Leopold, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, writers like Zane Gre and Wallace Stegner, by living with nature out my doors and windows as opposed to city streets. But that was only part of the effect. Equally important, living there never really had me thinking of myself as a resident of Lubbock or Lubbock County or even the state of Texas. I already knew when I bought that piece of canyon that Yellow House was part of a newly-recognized bioregion on the Texas plains, a 200-mile-long setting of 16 canyons entrenched into the

• 14:26Speaker 02

  eastern escarpment of the high plains plateau, the canyon headwaters of the Colorado Brazos and Red Rivers. So in the 15 years I spent finishing that house and rewilding my 12 acres as much as was possible, the place I inhabited, researched, and felt allegiance to was the Caprock Canyon Lands bioregion. That was my place. Life sent me to other places over the decades after that, so taking small pieces of the western landscape and homesteading and rewilding them, much as I’d done in west Texas, and feeling an attachment primarily to bioregions is something I’ve done twice more.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  All my places have been in the west, but ecologically and culturally, they’ve been like different planets. Beyond a western zip code, the Bitterroot Valley and the Montana Rockies had little in common with Yellow House Canyon. The third and current of my outback places on the south rim of New Mexico’s Galistao River Valley, south of Santa Fe and the southern Rockies, is thoroughly distinctive from the other two. I did, to be sure, feel an allegiance to Montana and to Missoula, where my university was located, and I still do. And I love New Mexico and am proud to be associated with a city as beautiful and inspiring as Santa Fe.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  But as a resident of place, in Texas, I was a resident of the Caprock Canyon Lands bioregion. For 19 years after that, I was a bitterroofer. And since then, I have been an inhabitant first and foremost of the Galistao Valley bioregion.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  In modern form, this way of thinking about the places you occupy dates to the 1970s. But in the west, it’s actually a much older idea. In 1878, explorer and erst-western bureaucrat John Wesley Powell laid before Congress a complete rethinking of western settlement he titled “The Lands of the Arid Region.” It was the first time Powell proposed tossing aside the cadastral, or grid, system of survey in a west that he found to be so unlike the east. But it wasn’t the last.

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  In 1890, Powell passed out to members of Congress a remarkable colored map of the west, mapping out 24 major natural provinces subdivided into 140 candidates he proposed as commonwealths, based on watercourses and topographical cohesion. Facing a chilly reception in Washington, Powell tried his best to persuade the territorial legislature in Montana to adopt his commonwealths for governing the soon-to-be state. But by then, America had been using the survey grids of range, township, and section for more than a century.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  However inappropriate imposing a grid on diverse western ecologies, tradition and momentum were just too strong. For designating western bioregional places, Powell’s Commonwealths map was brilliant. Today, it’s just the pretty signposts of a road not taken. But however faded the sign, or dimmed the road, a few decades back, there were westerners who found that Powell Trail and took it. Before Google, before the world wide web, there was the Whole Earth Catalog.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Half the size of a coffee table, the Whole Earth Catalog was the brainchild of a Californian named Stuart Brandt. Interviewed recently in the New York Times, Brandt explained his famous book this way: “For various reasons, a whole lot of people in college in the early 60s and on through into the early 70s thought they needed to reinvent civilization.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  So, sometimes, as I would put it, in communes, sometimes occupying abandoned mining towns, sometimes buying small acreages to homestead on, they relocated to rural America, including many places in the west. As Brandt put it, “These were college dropouts who didn’t know how anything worked. They had not been raised on a farm or a ranch.” So that was what the Whole Earth Catalog was. It turned out what it really did is what YouTube does now: it conferred agency.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  In a famous commencement speech at Stanford, Apple founder Steve Jobs said Brandt’s book was, as he put it, “Sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along.”

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  With its discussions of building and tools and solar panels and composting toilets, the Whole Earth Catalog made a 20th century version of living on the Western landscape possible. Unlike Western homesteaders in the decades after the Civil War, though, people like me had no need or particular desire to call on pieces of American earth to make them money, which had been a primary function of American homesteads throughout our history. Not that there weren't plenty of people who wanted to be self-sufficient off the grid, to garden and raise chickens and ducks and goats or have horses, and if they were couples, maybe engage in a kind of proto trad wife-ism

• 23:45Speaker 02

  on their modern version of a Western homestead. But there was also a different way of doing things, which is how bioregional place living came to be. Bioregionalism was part of the Whole Earth Philosophy from the first. But as an idea for living, it had its genesis in the early 1970s with the writings of a Canadian named Alan Van Newkirk. Various bioregional prophets, many of them Californians, like the famed poet Gary Snyder and academics such as Raymond Dasman and Stephanie Mills, were regular speakers on campuses like the University of Montana in the early 2000s.

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  In their various publications and a couple of journals, one called Coevolution Quarterly from 1974 to 1984, published essays on living sustainably on the land, while Raise the Stakes was the voice of a San Francisco group called the Planet Drum Foundation. In these journals, a bioregion was a geographic idea, defined by natural characteristics, including watersheds, landforms, soils, geological qualities, native plants and animals, climate and weather, that, and this is a quote from the bioregional prophets,

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  "includes human beings as a species in the interplay of these natural characteristics." As Raise the Stakes editor Peter Berg described it, "Bioregional living was a kind of spiritual identification with a particular kind of country and its wild nature that's the basis for the kind of land care the world so definitely needs." In the 1980s and 1990s, the field of geography was particularly taken with the movement and what one geographer described as "its remarkably sensitive, literate group of adherents

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  who were the architects of a new, popular grassroots geography of living on the land."

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  In the West, bioregionalism became famous for inspiring a management map of the Yellowstone Plateau's natural boundaries, what we now call the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, as opposed to the rectangular block of the park. But as the back to the land movement began to wane by the turn of the 21st century, bioregionalism faded into the background of new issues like the battle over wolf recovery. Still, if you don't care one way or another whether you're part of a movement, the ideas and attachments of bioregionalism are yet out there. For one, there's absolutely no reason you can't live in a city

• 26:48Speaker 02

  and still think of yourself as a native of a surrounding bioregion. I have a friend in LA who identifies as a citizen of the Los Angeles River, which barely exists as an expression of nature anymore. Nonetheless, residing out in the natural world amplifies the bioregional possibilities, as I'll explain. Finding a piece of ground that appeals to you, building a house on it, and providing it with power and water and all the connections to the larger world, this is a fundamental dream for a large share of humanity. In fact, it's always been so. Greek and Roman elites commonly had country estates they could retire to.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Navajos in the American Southwest famously lived separated from one another in the Four Corners High Desert. These desires were the very core of homesteading, which from the early 1600s to the 1930s enabled old worlders to settle America and the West. But modern urban life means that the majority of us never come close to such an experience now. Jobs and intertwined social connectivity keep us in cities. So do having and raising children. Living rurally may be cheaper than living in the city, but in 21st century America, it's way less convenient.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  For those who hang on to their dream of life away from cities, and many of us do, actually living such a life most often takes on the form of a second place, a cabin on the lake or in the woods. Or it awaits retirement when children are gone and no one has to worry about access to local schools, the quality of their teachers, or whether roads are plowed enough for you to make it to work. Or it means foregoing children and working from home, both of which happened to be far more possible in the 21st century than they've ever been before. Don't get me wrong, I hold no animus against cities.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  I love their sports and music venues, bookstore events, car shows, restaurants and fine dining. I always thought Thoreau hit on a near epiphany when he wrote that "the happiest humans are those who live with one foot in civilization and one foot in nature." The question is, which foot do you rest on? The foot in nature has long been my choice. It's not a choice for everyone, nor is it even possible for most. But without children and unmarried for most of my life, I could do it and I never hesitated.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Drive rural roads anywhere in the West and there's this ready insight. Country life is highly individualistic. That's not so much the case if you're in a community governed by a homeowner's association, which will keep your neighbors from doing anything crazy, but also limits how crazy you get to be. Among normal city people, there's a deep suspicion that some folks are living in the country to avoid the restrictions of ordinary social life and to escape the gaze of others. Given the number of posted signs decorated with portrayals of Smith & Wesson revolvers along rural roads, there's probably some truth in that.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  There are also enough trad wife influencers online these days that it's obvious there's a whole subculture in the countryside that's trying to emulate the lives of 19th century homesteaders. In historical reality, a pretty brutal existence, especially for women. And in a base reversal from HOA settlements, there's also what I've long thought of as "the country vomitorium," a place that's erected shrines to the Industrial Revolution by vomiting onto their property broken travel trailers, rusting pickups on blocks, stacks of tin roofing, and every failed refrigerator or well pump their first cousins have no

• 31:14Speaker 02

  room for. A vomitorium does create ecological habitat, all right, but mostly for rodents and snakes and as a toe hole for every invasive plant Eurasia has ever offered America. For those of us inspired by bioregionalism and by the natural history of the natural West, there's another possibility. In 2003, former Ed Abbey acolyte Dave Foreman founded the Rewilding Institute, a nonprofit

• 31:55Speaker 02

  environmental think tank established to fight the American extinction crisis and return predators and other native species to landscapes at every scale, most particularly to large Western wildlands. Over the quarter century since, the term "rewilding" and the movement itself have gone global. When Dave Foreman imagined rewilding, he imagined bears, wolves, big cats, and the ecologies associated with them to landscapes on a grand scale. I've done previous episodes of The American West describing the classic large-scale rewilding projects set in motion by American Prairie in Montana and the Southern Plains Land Trust

• 32:40Speaker 02

  in Colorado. When I bought my piece of Yellow House Canyon in the early 1980s, rewilding as an idea was still two decades in the future. Nonetheless, my instincts, along with an immersion in the history of the West Texas Canyonlands country, led me in a direction with my 12 acres no one else I knew then was attempting. In a classic of Western expansion, my piece of ground had clearly suffered ecologically from prior owners' various efforts to make the canyon pay off.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  On my subsequent place in Montana, and the one in New Mexico as well, in Montana on 24 acres in the foothills of the Sapphire Mountains on the east side of the Bitterroot Valley, and later on the 11 acres I own on the south rim of the Galiseo Valley in New Mexico, the same processes had played out. In all these places, market hunters, wolfers, cattlemen, sheep and goat herders, wheat farmers, and loggers had manipulated and transformed the ground in their quest to make money. Then fire suppression policies had made all their dismantlings and destructions even

• 34:06Speaker 02

  worse. On pieces of ground of 10 to 15 to 25 acres, I wasn't going to be able to reintroduce bison or pronghorns or see wolves impose top-down ecological change, but I could affect what I've come to think of as reverse homesteading, turning back the clock on a piece of land towards some earlier, healthier version of itself. So in three American places, on the kinds of rural personal home acreages some 16 million of us in the West now live on, employing fire, restorative forestry, and a massive removal

• 34:50Speaker 02

  of exotic weeds, I've restored my pieces of ground to make them familiar and welcoming to the original wildlife. According to the Global Rewilding Alliance and the Rewilding Institute, this is called rewilding. In a country as recently settled and altered as the American West, though, I've come to a different conclusion about restoration like this. It seems more accurate to me to say that I'm trying to return small pieces of the Western landscape to the form thousands of years of native management gave them.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Restoration like this has a bioregional dimension. One of the arguments about being a citizen of a bioregion is that you should endeavor to understand your place, learn something about the local geology, about how the landforms you see around you came to be. What was the climate in the past and how has it changed over time? Immerse yourself in the natural history and ecology of the place. What wild creatures have played dominant roles in the bioregional landscape? Then dig deeply enough into the local human history to be able to track its sequence of inhabitants through time with a view towards figuring out how they managed the place or how they altered it by their presence.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Maybe even how art, photography, and literature have captured the spirit of your local place. There's a name for this kind of place-based study. It's called bioregional history. Bioregional history shows that the three very different Western places I've built and lived on were inhabited by native people who were not that similar to one another, but who seemed to have managed the places I inherited for generally the same ends. The Kiows, Comanches, and Plains Apaches, who for centuries before me camped in Yellow House Canyon, used fire to beat back mesquite shrubbery and maintain the High Plains canyons

• 36:59Speaker 02

  as a country of grasses and forbs for bison and pronghorns. Before I took on the onerous task on my Bitterroot Valley place of thinning thickets of young ponderosa pines and eradicating an exotic plant-spotted knappweed that was suffocating my bunch grasses, for 2,000 years before me, the Bitterroot Salish had fired the valley to produce an open parkland of widely spaced pines and to maintain those bunch grasses for elk, buffalo, and horses. On my Galiseo Valley place in New Mexico, starting 800 years ago, Pueblo people built

• 37:40Speaker 02

  eight towns up and down the valley, not abandoning the last of them till 200 years ago. Village-based farmers who located on the tributaries of the Galiseo River, they seemed to have left my piece of upland grassland of scattered pinions and junipers a commons for hunting mule deer, pronghorns, and elk. As had happened on my Texas and Montana places, their successful management also meant a healthy presence of wolves, bears, coyotes, and cats of all kinds. In New Mexico, the project for recovering the Pueblo version of a healthy habitat has

• 38:22Speaker 02

  meant reversing the effects of centuries of overgrazing by Spanish and American settlers who unleashed millions of cattle, sheep, and goats onto this fragile, high-desert environment. The only way to get that Pueblo landscape back is by annually hand-pulling thousands of the classic invading plants of a disturbed West, the infamous tumbleweed or Russian thistle being the primary one. Now, though, needle and thread and blue grammer grasses and forbs like winterfat are once again becoming a lure on my place for jackrabbits and mule deer and the canids and cats that

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  go with them.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  My thermostat may be turned a few degrees more towards nature romance than most, but I do experience a form of bliss stepping out my door into landscapes restored to natural. Maybe inspired by Thoreau, or simply by being on the scene and observing the miracle of change, I follow the progressions of the seasons and the timing of migrations. I note when leaves and flowers appear and recede, when certain birds arrive or leave. I've had the thrill of lying on my bed beneath a skylight cranked open to the morning and listening to Elk Bugle, and at night, hearing the howl of wolves returning to the west

• 40:02Speaker 02

  for the first time in my lifetime. I regularly hear the scream of red-tailed hawks soaring overhead, and glimpse coyotes trotting by my windows with a sharp, quick-eyed look. My nights are brilliant with jittering stars, the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light that flies. Living out, I pretty much always know the location of the moon and the stage it's in, and where the planets are in their pursuit of one another through the ecliptic. I register the movements of sunrises and sunsets along the horizon from solstice to equinox to solstice. In fact, in all three of my western places,

• 40:44Speaker 02

  I've laid out a rock circle with spokes marking the points on the horizon where the sun rises at solstices and equinoxes, an ancient analog chart of a repeating linkage between sun and earth. That kind of reveal of place, through observed life, but also from knowing the history and science of my places, gets me at least closer to a greatest story ever told narrative than any other way of knowing I've come across. Although we don't think of ourselves as such, we are, after all, just another species of animal out of our

• 41:29Speaker 02

  planet's evolutionary river. But we're an animal whose primary difference from the rest is that we have a shot at understanding who we are, and maybe why place is so important to us.

• 41:54Speaker 00

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• 42:35Speaker 00

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• 43:30Speaker 04

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• 44:37Speaker 00

  Dan, it's always good to chat with you.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely, Randall.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Today, we are discussing your episode on place and identity and bioregionalism.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  And I really liked where you started this episode with the bumper sticker that says, "Native Montanan." And it's funny, because I've lived here for 16 years, 17 years, I've lived in the state of Montana. And if someone asks me, "Where are you from?" I still don't feel comfortable saying, "I'm from Montana." Say, "I live in Montana, I'm from Ohio." And I don't know if other parts of the country are as prickly about claiming

• 45:33Speaker 00

  your identity in this particular state, but man, it's a real, it's a real thing in the West.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a real thing, particularly, and I've seen it most visibly in the two of the states that I've lived in, and in the case of New Mexico, still live in. New Mexico and Montana seem to have that more than anywhere else. And New Mexico, I've always thought, okay, so, you know, asked a guy recently from the, you know, old Spanish colonization line, "So how long has your family been in New Mexico?" He said, "16 generations." And so I've kind of felt like, okay, I mean, 16 generations, that might, you know, and so certainly for the pueblo people who are still there, still in their pueblos that

• 46:23Speaker 02

  they've been in for 1,000 years. I mean, absolutely. I think you get to, you know, put "native" on your bumper sticker. Montana is a little bit different to me, because, I mean, this place has barely been a state more than a century. And so, you know, and people didn't really start getting out here until the mining strikes in the 1860s, at least the, you know, the people who tend to put those bumper stickers on their, on their Ram pickups and their Ford F-150s. So at most, I mean, it's maybe, you know, four generations or something, and then you've got native people around who have been in

• 47:03Speaker 02

  America for 23,000 years. So it's an interesting phenomenon, but as I say, in that, that script, this particular script, it's, you know, it's one way of doing it. It's, you know, it's just another way of, of assuming that you are a resident and inhabitant, and that you have roots in a particular place. And so, I'm not going to, you know, throw a beer can out the window at some truck that has "native" on the bumper sticker. I mean, for one thing, you'd probably get run over, but for another thing, it's, that's fine with me. But there are different ways of doing it, and that's kind of what I was wanting to write about in this particular episode.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  There's a, I wanna, I wanna go from the bumper stickers we're seeing on the trucks around town here today, back to another thing that tickles me, uh, which is John Wesley Powell's vision for how to organize

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  The United, the, the West. Um, and you describe in his, uh, you, you describe in this episode, his vision of organizing, politically organizing the Western United States according to watershed.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  And it's one of those notions that it never occurred to me. I think it probably I encountered it in, in one of your classes, but it makes so much sense. And yet it's just sort of one of those, it was a blip, it was a blip in, in sort of the discussion. We continued on with the

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  The grid system and all that.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  With exactly what we were doing, yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Talk a little bit about where he got that idea and, and where, where its roots are and sort of what ultimately killed that idea?

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think what killed it was inertia and momentum of the grid system we'd been using for surveys since the 1780s, um, just imposing from like space, uh, grid, uh, of sect, townships and sections and so forth on the landscape, no matter what the landscape beneath the grid looked like.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  I mean, it could be the tops of the Tetons, it could be the Great Plains, it could be the Pacific coastline. We were just gonna impose a grid on it and do this very methodical, uh, kind of very rational way of surveying and, and offering for sale Western landscape. What Powell realized when he started going west in the 1860s, uh, and particularly after he became the director of the United States Geological Survey and went west every year

• 49:57Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Was that the West was different from the country where grid survey had been pioneered. I mean, grid survey doesn't work particularly well in lots of the East either.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  But he concluded that in the West especially, it did not work at all because the most important item, uh, for settlement was water in an arid country. And the part of the world that he was interested in, and he wrote a government report in 1878 called The Lands of the Arid Region, he realized that you had to somehow conform your political ideals around the availability of water. I mean, what this ultimately leads to, and it's always kind of intrigued me that Powell was not necessarily a champion for it, it came from other minds, but it ultimately led to the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Nevadas and the Cascades being set aside as forest reserves and what became the National Forest in order to protect the one place where the water fell. It fell as snow on the peaks, so we're gonna protect that. And that of course becomes the, the origin of the public lands in the West. But what Powell ultimately came up with was the idea of damming rivers that flowed out of the mountains. And, and as head of the irrigation survey, he basically did maps that set up most of our 20th century reservoirs in the West. But what he realized that led him to the map we're talking about, which was submitted to

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Congress in 1890, was that rather than imposing this kind of rectangular state size grid as territories and states, what we ought to really be doing in an arid landscape is managing the countryside based on where water was available. And so he put together this remarkable map. It's still one of the most beautiful

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Creations of the 19th century, um, ideas about settlement in the West with all of what are essentially these little bioregions that are built around streams. And he did it as a color map. And so it's all beautifully variegated in terms of color. And he drew the, the, uh, arid line, the isothermal line for aridity around the borders of it. And so the Pacific coast is kind of excluded because it's wetter. And then down through the Great Plains, he basically follows the 100th meridian. And he says, east of that, you can continue to use the grid system. But in this area I've outlined, we should

• 52:39Speaker 02

  base our settlement patterns and our political ideals around these, all these little scores of small bioregions. Basically, Congress took a look at that and said, pretty map, uh, let's go on to the next issue. And so all we really have is the map and the idea of those bioregions. But of course, that reemerges a century later.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's interesting. You point out that the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and I guess I hadn't really made those connections explicitly in my mind, but the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is sort of a manifestation in some ways of Powell's vision

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  For the West.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Even though it's, they're not necessarily hard political boundaries, but in terms of, in terms of administrative management of public lands and things like that, it sort of brings to life a vision of what sort of could have been.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the bioregional idea, I mean, had a second life

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  As I recount in this episode, uh, it, uh, was sort of reborn in the 1970s and 1980s, first as an idea by a, a Canadian and then, uh, in a group of kind of former hippies who had been involved in going out during the 60s and 70s and sort of part of the so-called back to land movement when that was happening, uh, you know, inspired by the Whole Earth Catalogues and Stuart Brand, uh, which is I say in that this episode, you know, it's the, that's the Google

• 54:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Of the 1960s and 1970s for all these people who want to do it.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Another really unexpected parallel for me.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's the Google of that time period. And if you flip through those things, I mean, that's exactly what it is. You can today YouTube, okay, I want to set up a composting toilet, or you can open up your Whole Earth Catalog and look in the index, composting toilets, how to set them up. And there's the page with, and it's also in, it includes all the places you can buy one.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  And, yeah. And I mean, it's just this marvelous coffee table almost sized book that covers every dimension of moving on to the landscape and building a house and setting up a septic system and setting up solar panels and everything you can imagine, what sort of animals, if you want to have animals, you know, how to try to restore nature. And it becomes this kind of guide for what is a rediscovery really of Powell's

• 55:33Speaker 02

  bioregional vision from 1890. And so for about, uh, three decades really, and basically up until the time when the battle over wolf recovery sort of steps on everything else.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Uh, but through the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, when I was first at the University of Montana in the 1990s, uh, bioregional speakers were showing up like two or three times a semester. I mean, I went to hear Gary Snyder speak in the Wilma Theater in about 1995, and it was an absolute overflow crowd of people, people standing in the aisles in the Wilma, upstairs and downstairs to hear Gary Snyder talk about bioregionalism and settling the land. And then in the early 20th century, it kind of dwindles away over new battles in the West. Uh, but as I point out in this episode, we now have 16 million

• 56:34Speaker 02

  people who are living the way you and I do. I mean, you lived this way too. Uh, it's not off the grid, although I did that for a while, but in these rural places where you're down a dirt road, uh, and you have neighbors maybe in view and most of them actually are pretty far away, and you have a piece of land of five, 10, 15, 20, 30 acres, and you're deciding how to settle on it. And so the bioregional idea is to, as it's been resurrected, is to think of yourself in terms of being a native, not necessarily

• 57:19Speaker 02

  as I'm from, I'm a native of Montana, I'm a native of Wyoming, but in your case, I'm a native of the Paradise Valley

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  And the Yellowstone River corridor. And, and so what I talk about in the episode obviously is the three places where I've done that same thing.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the, one big distinction I'd like to draw between where I live and where you've lived is that you've gotten your weeds under control. And that's an uphill battle for us. But that always struck me as, as, um,

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Like, I couldn't describe your place in the Bitterroot to someone without talking about

• 57:59Speaker 02

  The knappweed infestation.

• 58:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that was a battle of many years. But I did manage to get that place. I had 24 acres in the Bitterroot. And, I mean, all the surrounding countryside, of course, was infested with knappweed. And so was my place. And I managed to get it under control, but it took me years and years to do it. But what I discovered when I did that, and this has been the case in New Mexico, too, where, uh, what previous settlement, I mean, what I describe in this, and this, by the way, this episode is kind of the topic of the next book I'm doing, which is called Homestead.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  And in all these places, in West Texas, in the Bitterroot Valley in Montana, and in New Mexico, what you're kind of battling are the mistakes that people who owned the land before you made. And in a lot of instances, you know, not to, uh, single out a particular economic activity, but the truth is, it's been grazing and overgrazing that has allowed weeds to spread. In New Mexico, the battle against weeds is, it's against the tumbleweed. The, you know, the Russian thistle that-

• 59:21Speaker 00

  I'm very familiar.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, I mean, and it's a battle. I mean, uh, my wife, Sarah, and I have for years pulled up tumbleweeds by hand. But what I've realized, both in, in, in all three places, really, West Texas, the Bitterroot and, and the Galistale Valley in New Mexico in particular, is that if you can get the weeds removed, the original vegetation is there. It's underneath the weed cover and it's just strangled, especially when I managed to clear spotted knappweed off my place in the Bitterroot. I mean, that beautiful bunch grass prairie just began to, to bloom and blossom underneath it. But it took removing the knappweed to get it to come through.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  And that, what you're doing there is not just property management. Like, there's a, there's an element to that work that, for you, has a higher meaning, right?

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does. And what, you know, so what we generally call that is rewilding. I mean, you, you know, which Dave Foreman sort of launched in the early 20th or 21st century. And of course, it's all over the world now. There are international rewilding associations, and we're kind of, American prairie in Montana is doing that. Uh, the Southern Plains Land Trust on a ranch they own in Colorado is rewilding. And it, you know, refers usually to returning the predators and the big ungulates and, and so on. 12 acres of land or 25 acres of land, you know, you can't, I can't really reintroduce a grizzly bear or a wolf or a buffalo. But what I can do is try to get the land back to the health, a healthier version that

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  it was once in. And as I've been doing it on, and did it first in West Texas, in Yellow House Canyon, and then in the Bitterroot Valley, and now in the Galistale Valley in New Mexico, what I've realized I've really been doing is I'm trying to return the land under my management to the way it was managed by the prior inhabitants, not the New Mexican sheep herders who brought in the tumbleweed, not the cattlemen in the Bitterroot who are the beekeepers who spread spotted knappweed across the entire valley. But I'm talking about the native people who had it.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  And so I'm really trying to replicate native management, uh, in New Mexico of what the Pueblo people did with that country. In the Bitterroot, it was the Bitterroot Salish and the sort of landscape they managed and created. And in West Texas, it was all those Plains people, like the Comanches and the Kiowas and the Southern Cheyennes.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  Well, Dan? Always a pleasure to chat with you.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Thank you, Randall. It's been great fun doing this.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

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