00:00:10
Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana.
00:00:14
Speaker 2: This is Col’s Week in Review with Ryan col Klahan.
00:00:18
Speaker 1: Here’s Cal. Hey, everybody another Oh, I can’t even remember what we call these segments, but it’s an interview. You’re gonna love it. Fascinating guest, Chris would ideally you’ve done your homework and have listened to Mark Kenyon’s podcast with with Chris Trout Unlimited. He’s the CEO. He’s got a fascinating history in the conservation space and with the Roadless Rule in particular. This you’re always gonna learn something new, So don’t don’t turn the channel if you think, oh boy, I’ve already heard this. I promise you haven’t. And on top of that, I guess we should just start off by saying thank you so much to Chris and tr Out Unlimited for just kicking so much ass on the public land sell off that was It seems like forever ago, but it was only a couple months down the road, and uh, here we are and another another chapter of just wanting some common sense management of our federally managed public land. But Chris, thank you so much for being such an outspoken voice from from the get go, in the beginning over there at tu On on public land.
00:01:44
Speaker 2: Thanks Brian, and thank you for all and all and media for all of your advocacy on behalf of public lands and conservation and hunting and fishing.
00:01:52
Speaker 1: Oh it’d be pretty simple if it was just a couple of us that could move the needle, right, but that’s not not have games played. We need everybody involved.
00:02:03
Speaker 2: That’s right, That’s exactly right, you know, especially hunters and anglers. This is one of these issues where I feel like for decades, really and I can say this now because I’m old enough to say this, but hunters and anglers were taken for granted by one political party and ignored by the other. And it’s just an incredibly powerful constituency that is slow to rile, but when it raises its voice, people take notice. And my hope is that we saw that happen on the public land sell off. Sportsmen and women were amazing how they came to the fore and make clear that that boneheaded idea should be killed, and it was. And this is kind of the spawn of that, you know, it’s a little more arcane and archaic. People are kind of like roadless rule what what’s that? But if I could summarize in just a sentence why the roadless rule matters, it’s because it provides habitat that provides the best hunting and fishing in America period.
00:03:08
Speaker 1: And it provides that.
00:03:09
Speaker 2: How so, you know, we have the luxury in America of having this incredible network of public lands, including one hundred and ninety three million acres of National Forest System lands, which are multiple use lands, which are you available for logging and roading and oil and gas development and hunting and fishing and picnicking and everything else that you can imagine. That’s why they’re called multiple use lands. But there’s about fifty eight million of fifty eight and a half million of them that simply don’t have roads, and they’re typically five thousand acres or larger in landscape, and that’s a lot of land, and it’s a lot of room to roam around. And you know, before we started taping, we were talking about I have a place in West Virginia that’s right alongside a road and it is a great meat bucket to hunt whitetail because whitetail like edge habitat, and you know, they’re not looking for these remote landscapes. But if you’re a mule deer hunter, or you’re an elk hunter, or you care about fishing for native trout and salmon, there is no better place to go than into these backcountry roadless areas. In some cases they’re wilderness areas. The difference between roadless areas and wilderness areas. Wilderness areas is they just were designated by Congress and they’re protected as wilderness. You know, where man is a visitor but who cannot remain. And roadless areas they’re typical multiple use lands. We’ve done all kinds of commodity development. But what we don’t allow in these roadless areas today by virtue of that roadless area conservation rule is we don’t allow for road construction. So it provides some backcountry habitat to provide a refuge for elk and mule deer and other big game species and especially trout and.
00:05:00
Speaker 1: Sham and by and large like that. I have to bring this up. It’s a little mixed. But you know, when I was, I guess I would have been just getting out of high school. We had protests in Missoula, Montana, which was on its way out of being a logging town. I would say most of the folks in Missoula probably wouldn’t have described it as a logging town at that point. But when the uh do you recall the road list today a jobless Tomorrow campaign?
00:05:41
Speaker 2: You know it’s it’s it’s back up in here somewhere.
00:05:45
Speaker 1: But we had UH protesters on the Higgin Street bridge stop a logging truck and a kid tied himself off to it and then repelled off the side of the Higgin Street bridge and dangled there to stop the logging trip.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: I don’t remember that.
00:06:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, you no, that wasn’t me. That wasn’t me. But you know, it wasn’t by magic that the roadless rule came to be. You’re right there. There are people on both sides of this issue, and through a lot of coming to the table and having a discussion over and over again, that’s how the two thousand and one roadless Rule came to be. And in my mind right now, that’s what is missing. And it’s like, if it’s happening, it’s happening behind a curtain, behind some closed doors in a room nobody gets to see. And that’s really why I had y on today. Is the public comment period is open, and folks are leaving comments at the Federal Register a very short window. I think we are fifteen days left right now.
00:07:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it goes to September nineteenth, is the official deadline.
00:07:15
Speaker 1: What’s happening with these comments? Are like, I know they’re supposed to be reviewed, but where’s the power lie right now? And are we able and capable of having a discussion on this at this point?
00:07:34
Speaker 2: It’s such a good I mean, there’s so many facets to that question I want to talk about. I was asked by the Montana Logging Association to come and talk to their annual meeting around the time of the incident that you describe, although I don’t remember that specific incident, and you know, Montana sticks in my mind because we just did an analysis in ninety three percent of the summer range for ELK in the state of Montana is in roads series, for example, just to give you a sense of how important they are. What they are not important for though? Is logging right? The reason I assure.
00:08:11
Speaker 1: The economics do not support this logging conversation, and it’s been driving me crazy that that’s what’s dominating the roadless conversation because I cannot find how it is true.
00:08:24
Speaker 2: It’s true. No, it’s ryan. No, you’re absolutely right. It’s dissembling. It’s a canard. It’s not real. So it’s a ghost dance from forty years ago when they did matter. And the reason it mattered forty years ago was because the Forest Service back then was really good at going into these remote landscapes and building roads and cutting those trees. And the fact is we did that. They’re gone now we’ve cut jack Ward Thomas, one of the chiefs who retired in Missoula. Actually that seems to be a hot bed of places for chiefs to retire. You’ve got a couple more live there now. But he talked about how the Forest Service cut the face of the National Forest, meaning they went into all the easy to act they they got all the timber that was the most accessible and of the primary stuff the stuff that hasn’t been harvested that remains, it’s not economical. It’s in high elevation areas with highly erosive soils, very steep slopes. Those roads have a tendency to fall off the hillsides. What’s typically below the hillside a stream, and the timber values aren’t high and so there’s just there is no demand in the lower forty eight anyway to get into these backcountry areas for logging, and to suggest otherwise demonstrates and ignorance of the reality on the ground. And by the way, one of the reasons that truth in advertising here. I worked at the US Forest Service when the roadless rule was developed, and I worked for the guy who was the chief at the time they called the CEO of the Forest Service the chief. And one of the reasons we did it was that every single timber sale in the United States that was proposed in a roadless area, every single one lost money and was litigated and held up in court. So we were we were spending all of our time burning.
00:10:23
Speaker 1: With the litigift in that.
00:10:27
Speaker 2: It would have been it would have been typically it was the environmental community who were litigating these roadless sales. And eventually what happened is the in the Congress back in two thousand, ninety nine, two thousand, we’re going way back here, the Congress came within a vote, a single vote, of passing a law that would have eliminated the Forest Services road budget. And so you know, for those of you listening in home, you’re like, well, who cares? You know, well, part of the road budget for the Forest Service was actually maintaining the three hundred and seventy thousand mile road system that already existed on the landscape, and that road system was falling apart. We had eight and a half billion with a b. We had an eight and a half billion dollar backlog on maintenance of just the existing road system, And we thought we were taking a very conservative approach by saying, well, you know, we should be taking care of the existing network of roads that we have to continue to provide public access before we get into these controversies. So we can lose a bunch of money to sell timber at a loss, to sell a public asset at a loss. Owing by the way, it’s wildly unpopular in the local community. It just the roadless rule we thought represented a common sense approach to doing a better job of taking care of the initial investments that the Forest Service to the United States govern taxpayers had made in this massive road system, largest road system in the world, before we tried to pump roads into these backcountry areas, so we could lose a bunch of money on timber sales that were wildly controversial. That was basically why we did throughout this rule.
00:12:18
Speaker 1: And we aren’t hearing where the funding is going to come from. I’ve heard some blanket statements from some elected officials that basically suggest that, oh, Ryan, the free market economy is a magical thing. And I’m thinking, even with government assistance of some sort, we’re not going in and mechanically thinning fire fuel out of the wildland urban inner because nobody wants to pay people to go do that. There’s no there’s no market for that. You know, hot fast burning fuel that you can’t make a two by four out of. Maybe you can make and kill it rill fuel out of, but we don’t have the industry built in close enough proximity to these places to have that be viable in a free market economy. So I agree. I’d rant and rave on on the regular podcast on this topic enough to where the audience should know, uh how I feel about this, and ideally have done some of their own pondering and research. So if it’s not about the logging, what’s it about?
00:13:58
Speaker 2: So it’s I mean, you’re right, the free market is an amazing thing, and if we actually operated well, I want to be careful here because I have a lot of friends in the Forest Service and they’re not. They’re not The Forest Service is not pushing this rulemaking. This has been imposed on them from above the Forest Service. This is a this is a fight from thirty years ago that they do not want to rejoin. There’s not a forest supervisor in the country that’s licking their chops trying to get into those backcountry areas, those highly erosive soils to build a highly engineered road that’s going to fall off the hillside in a few years so they can lose money on a timber sale. Oh an engender a ton of controversy. It just is not. That’s that’s a fight from a long, long time ago.
00:14:42
Speaker 1: Well, find me a fire science lab in the country that thinks this is a worthwhile venture.
00:14:47
Speaker 2: And you won’t because I was going to get to the fire piece of this. Eighty percent of all the fires in the nation, and these are Forest Service statistics, eighty percent of all the fires in the National Forest System occur within a half a mile of a road, and eighty five percent of those fires are caused by people. So presumably in most cases, right you would think that roadless areas are not adjacent to communities of people because they’re remote. Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some landscapes like I think about, like you know, the Coutiny. There are some communities up there in Montana that have roadless areas adjacent to them, and in places like Idaho, and we specifically try to unlimited and me personally worked on a carve out or rule making for Idaho back in two thousand and nine, which allows for more permissive treatments in communities that are directly adjacent to roadless areas, and there are a precious few of those, Ryan, it’s the vast minority.
00:15:49
Speaker 1: If listeners want to pause real quick. It is extremely easy to get this visual because of our friends that on AX you can pop up the roadless and waste more time on on X, you know, dreaming about hunting and fishing spots like I do. That’s yeah, but very easy tool and very pertinent to this conversation. So sorry to cut you off there, Chris, but.
00:16:19
Speaker 2: No, no, no, that’s okay. But the other piece of this is that in the twelve Western States, it’s like fifteen to twenty percent of all the hazardous fuels treatments that have happened over the past ten to fifteen years. They’ve happened within roadless areas, and so the hazard. What I mean by hazard is fuels treatments, because I know that’s kind of a wonky term. Is almost all of the forests in the Western United States evolved with typically at least east of the Cascades, typically with frequent fire. West of the Cascades it was more infrequent, big catastrophic fires every couple hundred years. But east of the Cascades, in places like Montana and Idaho, you’re talking about these are systems that need fire. They evolve with fire, and the Forest Service, starting in the twenties, after some horrible fires, big fires that killed a lot of people, like the man Gulch fire, they instituted a policy of all fires out by ten am the next day. And so we’ve got these systems that they need.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: The marketing magic is known as the ten Am rule.
00:17:27
Speaker 2: The ten Am exactly, the ten Am l and smoky Bear was created. And you know all that, you know, only you can stop fires. Well, these forests need fires, and because they haven’t burnt, what’s happened is fuels have built up over time. So instead of having you know, fifty five stem trees per acre, maybe there’s two hundred and fifty five. And then those are more prone to insects and disease, which are exacerbated by things like a changing climate. And so the Forest Service has actually done a really good job of going into roadless areas and treating those systems, doing the kind of thinning. Now, your point that you made about the free market is a good one. Much of that timber isn’t salvageable. It’s not saleable. You can’t make two by fours out of it. It’s typically smaller diameter stuff. But the Forest Service has done a really good job I think over the past fifteen twenty years of going into these areas, treating them for ecological purposes, taking out whatever commercial value they can, which often isn’t very much, but still doing right by the landscape and right by hunters and anglers and taxpayers. And I don’t know why the administration is pushing this rule. I think this is less of a logical. It would be one thing if they had said, look, a quarter century has gone by, you know, when this rule was promulgated, Chris Wood had a big you know, I had a big curly hair. I had brown hair and it was curly, and it’s neither any longer. And we’ve learned some things, and so we want to apply those things that we’ve learned in fire science and fire behavior and how to protect better protect human communities from fire in this new rule making trial limited would be we would be a fulsome participant in that conversation. And in fact, that’s what we’re going to encourage the administration to do in this comment period that ends September nineteenth. But that’s not what they’re doing. They’re they’re they’re just kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So I don’t think this is I think this is more of a religious argument for the advocates of doing this than it is a logical argument, because fire science doesn’t justify this, the economics of the timber industry certainly don’t justify it, And it’s really just kind of hard to figure out what the justification is other than sort of a you know, a derec liatory agenda that isn’t necessarily based in either ecologic or economic sense.
00:20:08
Speaker 1: Just go back to the first Trump administration. I went for folks in the fire world, this is a famous name, and if you’re a quail hunter, this is a famous name. But went over and hung out at Tall Timbers right there on the Florida Georgia line and and did some prescribe burning and talked fire science. And they for folks who don’t know, this would be considered like the you know, like the Ivy League of Fire Science. Really they are an authority. They educate and and send students out into the world and and then it’s a it’s a circular loop. Those students come back and they changed, and they adapt and they continue to learn and apply fire science on the landscape. And you know, so just four and a half five years ago, they were excited about implementing more fire in the West. They opened up an office in LA to do more prescribed burning in western landscapes to proactively fight catastrophic fire. And they were excited about the Trump administration for that reason, like we’re going to get this done. And now that conversation has gone back to this ten A M rule essentially, which is put it out fast and it kind of doesn’t matter or where it is.
00:22:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s very disappointing, especially in the Southeast where they frankly both on public and private lands, have done a great job of keeping fire on the ground and in the landscape. Now, granted, it’s a lot easier because it’s much more humid and there’s a lot more water, and you know, it’s it’s easier to burn. But you know, there’s a famous hydrologist, I think his name was WB. Hindes who once said that you cannot divorce a river from its floodplain. You know, you can build all the levees you want, Eventually that river is going to find its flood and anything that’s in it is going to get wet or swept away. And the same is true for these these fire adapted forests. Eventually they will burn. And we can either understand that and try to create policies that allow us to live in harmony with fire, or we can continue down the path that we’re on right now, where you know, we we end up once a fire ignites because there’s so much fuel that’s built up, it blows up and then it’s you know, Katie bar the door, all hands on deck to put the fire out, and it’s not sustainable. It’s it, you know, And and I know the idea of talking about zoning or those kinds of you know, rules in the West is anathema. But as long as we allow people to build next to these systems, these fire prone forests that want to burn and we have suppressed their ability to burn, we’re putting people in harm’s way. I know that’s not popular, but it’s it’s a reality.
00:23:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know, if they want to build there, that’s one thing. Should the American taxpayer at large be on the hook for their fire suppression build because they made the choice to build the inn a very scary area.
00:24:04
Speaker 2: They’re super hard questions, they really are, and there are no easy answers, and I definitely don’t have them. But the one thing I will say is the Forest Service is an amazing research fire research arm, and they have all kinds of publications that make clear they actually have amazing steps that individual landowners can make to make their communities and their homes fire safe. And there’s all kinds of evidence that you know, these fires will lay down if area is adjacent to the communities have been treated properly, and that’s exactly where we should be focused as an I mean, I’m not willing to go to that thorny question that you raised about you know, who should pay, because you know, one day it might be me in my place in West Virginia. But but but I do, I do think there are really logical steps that we can take as a nation and agree that it makes good public policy. Where hey, let’s agree that we’ve got these communities, you know, in California and Colorado, all across the country really that are built up along national forests, and we know that we’ve suppressed fire in those national forests for a long time. So let’s go in and make sure that we treat those forests that have had fire suppression for a long time, either through prescribed fire or in many cases through thinning. You know, you go in there with these feller bunchers and basically you just take out the small diameter timber and you know, as Americans, we’re ingenious. We will find uses for that fiber, you know, whether it’s biofuels or other organic materials. I mean, well, if the Forest Service really focused its efforts on those communities and what they call the wildland urban interface and thinning those and bringing back bringing them back to sort of a more normal or a balance thatch aloge health, So if a fire does occur because it will it won’t turn into one of these crown fires, which you know, gets up into the top of the trees and then you know, spreads it sparks, you know, half a mile in any direction. That’s the way. That’s the way to go.
00:26:17
Speaker 1: I think in order to do that, it may be faster to get rid of rural internet starlink cell phone serve us. So it’s only rural Americans that live in those interface areas, because it seems like the turnover of residents that like to live in those areas these days have no tolerance for fire or smoke. And that education piece is a hard pill to swallow when when it’s like, well, this is our time to use our season all the home or our retirement place that we’ve dreamt about forever, and for three months, all we’re doing is smell and smoke. Yeah, and you know, I know this is kind of like a smart ass he type of way to say it, but it is a part of the equation is we got to get we got to get buy in from these communities, and we got to do some some educational outreach to say here’s here’s how this proactive approach will affect you more than likely. And here’s how the reactive approach will affect you more than likely.
00:27:50
Speaker 2: And and and I’ll tell you ran. One of the things that I truly believe is that the Forest Service is the right agency to leave that conversation because they live in these communities, they’re members of these communities, they’re from these communities in many cases, and they could have that conversation. They could do that kind of education that you’re talking about. We could create pilots models all around the country where these largely rural not always don’t forget the fires in California, you know, a couple of years ago, but these largely rural communities, we could pilot all kinds of approaches by focusing on that roaded country, the front country, not the back country. And instead, what’s happening now is the Forest Service is going to be asked to kick the can on this roadless rule. It’s basically settled law. The agency hasn’t seen any decline in its timber base because of protecting these roadless areas. The fires are obviously more threatening and damaging to people in the front country because that’s where the people live. And so we don’t get the agency to have those kind of thoughtful conversations with these communities that they are a part of, because they’re going to be busy trying to push this, you know, anachronistic rule through which harkens back to the sixties and the seventies, and we’re not there anymore.
00:29:11
Speaker 1: So where I want to move on to a coeuple other topics, Chris, ye, do them quick? Where are you at? Where’s tu at on the idea of roadless reform? Like, are there some some opportunities to uh carve some things out?
00:29:30
Speaker 2: Yeah? So I during the Bush administration, if you I mean this is now we’re going again go back to ancient history. But right after the Clinton administration, the Bush administration put in place of policy that allowed states, every state has the ability to ask the federal government frankly all of us to as citizens, to develop a regulation. And so the administration said, come to us, tell us what you think. States, and so the only a bunch of them stepped forward initially, but in the end it was only Idaho in Colorado that actually went through the process and developed separate rule makings for the four point two million acres. I think it is in Colorado and the nine million acres in Idaho. Idaho has more roadless lands. I killed my first elk in a roadless area in Idaho years and years ago. But they have more roadless lands than any other state in the lower forty eight.
00:30:22
Speaker 1: They also have a hell a lot more steep, irrodiable country than a lot of places do.
00:30:27
Speaker 2: Right, That highly granitic soil, that erosive. They have a name for it, the Idaho batholith. In the Yeah, it’s just incredibly erosive, and.
00:30:36
Speaker 1: It’s great if you’re going downhill, folks. It does the work for you. If you’re going the opposite direction, two steps four and one step back, for sure.
00:30:45
Speaker 2: Not so good. Not so good. Anyway, It was a story I could tell you about hunting in that country. But so in two thousand and nine, right, So the roadless rule was done in two thousand and one. Eight years later the states of Idaho and these rules were developed in the Bush administration or Republican administration. I was part of a group that helped in the development of the Idaho Rule and the Colorado Rule, and then it was approved in the Obama administration. And so there’s a way to do this if we wanted to give states some deference to allow for the unique circumstances of those states, as we did in Colorado, as we did in Idaho. We could do that, and I would argue from a conservation perspective, the Idaho and Colorado rules are just as protective as the one rule. And so I think there is and that’s where we’re going to try to convince the administration that they can get to And there may be of the you know, there’s fifty eight and a half million acres of world this areas. You know, I think there’s about forty five and a half that are at play here because of the you know, carving out the Idaho and Colorado portions. But there’s an argument that you could map out. We have a GIS team that could probably do this in about thirty five minutes. If they listen to this, they’re going to be like, he has no idea what he’s talking about. But they could easily map out, well, what are the communities that are actually out of whack from a forest health perspective, that are in fact adjacent to roadless areas where the Forest Service hasn’t actually gone in and done treatments. Because as I said, you know, fifteen percent of all the treatments that have happened in the twelve Western states over the past ten to fifteen years have been in roadless areas. So presumably the Forest Service has focused on the roadless areas that are closest to communities. But let’s assume that there’s some that they missed for whatever reason. Well, let’s that should be what we talk about. That should be where we’re talking about a carve out to allow for what we’ve learned over the past twenty four years to apply the blanket sort of. Even the language like the recision of the roadless rule, it just it just flies in the face of common sense.
00:33:10
Speaker 1: Well, it flies in the face of a lot of you know, voting taxpayers who were a part of this effort back in the late two thousand teams and in early two thousands. Right, So that’s something that gets rolled over on too.
00:33:29
Speaker 2: Well, that’s right. One thing I’d be remiss not to mention I was a kid when the roadless rule was developed, and one of the jobs this kid had was to take all the meetings that the chief of the Forest Service didn’t want to take on roadless which, by the way, was about all of the meetings and so I met with all the regulated industries, the timber folks, the oil and gas guys, the coal guys, all of them. And I met with all the environmental community, wilderness society, defenders of wildlife, and already see all of them. I never had a single, not one meeting request from an organization that focused on hunting and fishing, not one, including trout onlimited. And so we have a chance. And there’s only one constituency I think that has the ability right now to turn this thing around and put it in a more logical direction, and that is the hunting and fishing community. And I just think it’s absolutely imperative that those of us who hunt and fish and care about the outdoors that we As I said earlier, you know, this is a constituency that’s slow to ire, but it’s absolutely imperative right now that we make our voices heard.
00:34:39
Speaker 1: So this is just one piece of the puzzle right now. So I want to talk about Land Water Conservation Fund, the secretarial order that just came out for folks. I can give you a quick synapsis for the folks that are listening right this is not your tax dollars at work. This is is offshore oil and gas excise tax that goes into this bucket, and each state agency different groups can match and receive grants for those funds to do access work. It’s one of their largest access tools and one of the interesting parts. Also, this is very brief, Chris, bear with me, and I’m not an expert by any means, but typically there’s lists that are put out that basically outline the projects that would be considered, and we really haven’t seen that out of the out of the Forest Service yet and the USDA. I’m not sure if there’s a real list that’s come out of Secretary of Rawlins yet. But the thing to remember is this money is being putting this fun it’s earmarked for this. It can’t legally, I should stress, legally be used for anything else. And there’s been projects done in all fifty states and almost every single county, I think.
00:36:30
Speaker 2: Every congressional district in the country.
00:36:34
Speaker 1: So this is real deal stuff. It’s helped on paper at least everybody. I often point out the fact, like if you’re driving through some very off the beaten path town and rural I’m a Western guy, so rural why or Montana or the Dakotas, and you’re like, how did this town build such a nice bike path or a swimming pool or even a skate park here and there. Oftentimes it’s done through LWCF funds and it’s getting people outside. It ties in very, very well with the Make America Healthy Again movement that we’re seeing right now. This is something that should be at the bare minimum, a hell of a public relations tool from the USDA and the and the Forest Service to provide new access opportunities for Americans.
00:37:53
Speaker 2: Including including you know, using LWCF funding to help I can’t remember the is a term of art and I’m gonna forget and you’ll correct me, Ryan, but to help those public lands that are bound up by private lands, and LWCF has been used to provide access to that public the lands that we own that we otherwise can’t access without trespassing. Yes, yeah, that’s right, and so it there’s I think there, I think, I mean, I’m I’m I have been accused of you know, I’m a I love to fly fish, and so I’m an inveterate optimist. I don’t know why you’d stand in freezing water casting you know that these river ghosts as often as I do. But I’m hoping that this will fix itself because this is the same president that signed into law the Great American Outdoors Act, one really signature conservation achievement that made permanent the funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund used to be that it had to be authorized every year by Congress, I’m sorry, appropriated every year by Congress, and instead of getting the nine hundred million that you would get from those offshore whaling gas revenues, which you correctly identified as the source of the funding, we would typically get less than half of that, because you know, there’s all kinds of funding exigencies that the Congress has to worry about. But this president signed that into law that made that funding permanent. And the idea that we wouldn’t allow for the BLM to fix some of the checkerboard ownership and provide access to these you know, popular areas to hunt and fish or allow like you said, you know, I mean, I’m sitting here in Washington, d C. And I coach my kids in basketball and football, I’m sorry, basketball and baseball. We have a ballpark here that was built in part by LWCF funding, and like you said, every Congressional district in America, every single one of them has, if not every county has parks in open space that have benefited from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. And so I’m optimistic that this will work out. That there has to be a pony in this pile somewhere. If we keep digging, we’ll find the pony.
00:40:13
Speaker 1: But yeah, if you jump back to Trump one, I had a hell of a good time telling people in the Mixed Company, I keep that if you really think about it, between lw CF and I keep, I’m sorry, I have raw wah on the mind, but that’s not it. But the American Great American Outdoors Act. Between the Great American Outdoors Act and l w CF, I’m like, we’re gonna be talking about Donald Trump and Richard Nixon as two of our most influential common servation President consequential.
00:41:02
Speaker 2: I mean, it was don’t forget it was President Trump that denied the key permit for the pebble mind as well, you know, And I just think part of our job as hunters and anglers, you know, we’re never going to bang the drama as loud as the environmental community. And I think that’s frankly our strength in terms of we’re not shrill, but I just think it’s it’s it’s time we got up. It’s time we got up off the couch, and you know, we have to make our voices heard because again, as I say, the history of this community, at least over the past fifty years, has been that it’s you know, we’re typically ignored by one political party and take it for granted by the other. And and you know, if they ignore you long enough or take you for granted long enough, they’re not going to care about your interests. And so we’ve got to speak up and make sure that they know that we’re paying attention.
00:41:53
Speaker 1: The third leg of this stool that I want to talk about today to bring your point home, is the use of the Congressional Review Act to rescind regional management plans. Regional management plans. I know you’ve listened to me jaw on about it on the podcast. That is another process that is long and lengthy, and it takes a monumental effort and a lot of time to bring to fruition because it’s designed to take in all stakeholders point of view and interests into the management of our public lands. And that is Monpa Kettle and their RV driving down the road. As much as it is you know, Conoco Phillips or name your wind power energy company or or hard rock mining outfit, whatever, but think of that onerous task of bringing all of that information together and saying in this region, this is how we’re balancing it out. And it doesn’t stay like that forever. Right, These management plans turn over and they use not only the best available science, but the input from everybody to come together to make a plan.
00:43:33
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, the law requires them to be redone every ten to fifteen years on Bureau of Land Management and for a service lends And you’re right, you know, in the agencies again, I think they do a remarkable balancing act to remarkable job of balancing all these multiple interests that want these lands protected and or used. And one of the things that I think the Forest Service in the BLM have gotten really good at in the past ten to fifteen years is sort of the focus on these collaborative, stewardship oriented groups that come together in these communities and bring together commodity interests and conservation interests and you know, maybe state and local government interests and they’ll come and present to these agencies an alternative that for how to manage you know, a million two million acres of land over a ten or a fifteen year period. And the Forest Service in BLM have been promoting that kind of community engagement because it guarantees you the buy in that you need to have a durable plan and to have you know, Washington d C. Swoop in at the eleventh hour through this Congressional Review Act and do away with the it’s not hours, it’s days and day, weeks and months of conversations and give and and you know, it’s not I don’t think it’s particularly productive. You know, I’ll tell you I mentioned that Idaho roadless rule. You know that the committee that was formed to develop that rule was created during the Bush administration, and so you know, they they it was fairly strong representation of commodity interests that were on that committee. But you know, Ryan, when we got to success, the reason we got to success was I realized as a conservation advocate, I had to know what winning looked like for the timber advocate, and for the off road vehicle advocate, and for the oil and gas guy. And they did the same pivot for me. Or for us, and once it was sort of like, oh, I see what you need. Okay, here, let’s try that. But you understand what I need. And in the end what happened is they were advocating more effectively than I was for some of the stuff I cared about because they knew that we had to have that. And that’s what these collaborative processes allow for it. You become friends, you hang out. I remember when my second son, Casey was born, Jim Riley, who was the timber representative from the Inner Mountain Forest Products Association, which I think may be gone by now, but he stopped at the house one night with a little a little logging truck filled with little log you know, little logs for a kid, and he had a note that I still have that says, hey, Casey, let me know if you ever want a real man to take you out in the woods. But you know, we all we all became friends, and we all and you know we’re still friends to this day. And that’s what that local collaboration develops. And and and and I just think these things like the Congressional Review Act, I understand why they have it. And of course it’s there, you know, there are elected leaders, but that should be a tool that’s used very rarely because it can upset a lot of apple carts.
00:46:59
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, And folks, the buzzword that you’re here thrown out all the time, right as local stakeholders. And that’s what we’re talking about when these huge acts go through, is it’s local stakeholders coming to the table over and over and over again. These regional management plans are are the same thing. And when Chris says the Congressional Review Act, it is it really is like uh, trying to clean a dinner plate with a sledgehammer. It’s not going to go out right.
00:47:48
Speaker 2: Uh.
00:47:50
Speaker 1: The way the way this is written is if they get rid of these regional management plans through use of the Congressional Review Act, anything good in that management plan and anything bad, none of it can be used again, even if it is the proper representation of local stakeholders and the proper representation of the best available science for that particular landscape, right that particular region.
00:48:21
Speaker 2: That’s right, No, that’s exactly right. I mean, Eastland managers have such a difficult job. They’ve got to balance these local interests with the national interest because these are public lands. That we all own and we it’s not dissimilar to this effort to undo the roadless rule. Right, we ought to be encouraging for supervisors and district rangers to have as much time available to go out into their communities to understand what the what the needs of the communities are and to balance those out against what the law says they have to do. And and things like this roadless decisions that they distract from that most essential work of of our of our public service, and and it’s frustrating. But you know, as I said earlier, we you know we can’t. We can’t sit on the sidelines. We can’t or or we’ll continue to be ignored or taken for granted.
00:49:17
Speaker 1: So what what do we do? Chris? I’m gonna ask you what we do? And then I want to hear your decomposed granted Idaho story.
00:49:27
Speaker 2: So the decomposed granted Idahoo story is good, But uh, just go to We can make it really easy for you. Trow Unlimited is t You just go to tu dot org and we’ve got an action alert that you can sign up there. You you know, if you’re someone who does hunt or fish in in roadless areas, you can personalize it, you know, you can talk about you know, taking your kids there or your grandkids, or favorite fishing and hunting experiences. The more personal you make it, the better. But that’s one thing you can do. You know. One of the things that we did back in the day when we created the Roadless rules, we had like four hundred and fifty public meetings around the country, and then we had a very extended public comment period. It wasn’t fifteen days, it was like one hundred and twenty days, because we wanted to hear what people thought of what we were doing. And I think asking for a little more time in deliberation is not a stall tactic. It’s just leads to good policy. So that’s what I would do in terms of the roadless Rule. My Idaho Batholist story, though, is it’s less about my hunting and fishing, although, as I say, I did shoot my first elk there. But there was a place called the South Fork of the Salmon River drainage which had like fifty percent of all the steelhead in the Snake River system, and the Snake has fifty percent of all of the steelhead historically had all the fifty percent of all the steelhead and salmon in the entire Columbia River basin, and then the Snake River dams, of course, which I know, Ryan, you’re intimately familiar with. You know, took a toll there. But in the sixties the Forest Service went into this steep, high elevation roadless country and they built roads to do a timber sale in this highly granitic soil, meaning it’s highly irrosive. As you walk up hill, you come one step up, two steps down kind of thing that Ryan, sand fun to sit on your butt and slide down, it not so fun to walk up it. And then there was a big rain on snow event that happened and five six seven feet of sediment came off those hillsides and poured into one of the most productive salmon rivers in the United States, the South Fork of the Salmon River drainage. And the system never came and of course the dams were also constructed, and that has kept fish from coming back, but the system was never the same they’ve been. That system has been flushing itself out for the past fifty years. And that’s the point. We have the ability, i think, in this country to look at the fifteen to sixteen billion dollars that we have spent trying to recover salmon in the South Fork of the Salmon River drainage, in the Snake drainage in the Columbia Basin generally, and we can decide in places like these roadless landscapes, let’s leave those intact. Let’s leave them just as God created them. The options that we have there for development in the future. If we come up, if there’s some mineral that we need to fight an alien invasion that’s only available in a roadless area, it’s still going to be there. It’s not going anywhere. We can go get it later on if we need it, but for now, it would be such a demonstration of maturity to simply say we’re going to leave those places intact. For the hunting and the fishing and the other ecological values, the drinking water supply values, all the ecological values that the otherwise supply of the United States. We don’t have to make the same mistakes that we made in the South work of the Salmon River drainage. In other roadless landscapes around the country, we just have no need for it.
00:53:15
Speaker 1: That’s well put pro gress. The interesting juxtaposition here is the way these lands are talked about often, right, is that changing big sweeping changes that we talked about today, that rescinding the roadless rule, they’re rolling back the smashing a dinner plate with a sledgehammer of our MPs are going to bring value to this land is how they’re often talked about. And we completely negate gloss over the extreme and increasing value of these ecosystems landscapes as they are right now. We’re not making more of them. If you’re living in the West, it is very noticeable that they are more and more in demand and used than they ever have been in my memory, which again basic economic low supply, high demand. That is an increasing value on the landscape, so we got to treat it as such.
00:54:38
Speaker 2: That’s right, Brian. Look, I mean, I think there was a time in the fifties and the sixties and the seventies where the Forest Service, in the BLM for that matter, they saw their role as bringing out this basket of commodities to be supplied for the US. Today, for all the reasons you just said, most Americans view and value public lands, including and especially those who live around them, for the sense of wildness and naturalness that they provide, not the fact that there’s an extra barrel of gas or a blade of grass or a board foot of timber that we can extract from them. It’s knowing that we can pass on a richer land and water legacy to our kids than we inherited from our parents. Like, that’s what most of us care about.
00:55:31
Speaker 1: I just just finished Nate Schweber’s book. I’m not sure if you if you’re read it, is this America of Ours.
00:55:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s just recommended to me.
00:55:47
Speaker 1: There’s a couple of great takeaways. But there’s this quote that really stuck with me, and is about Bernard who dropped into the Willamette Valley, right, and this is in the forties and he saw firsthand the dust bowl and the top soil, that awesome volcanic top soil was blowing everywhere.
00:56:13
Speaker 2: Devoto, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Amper’s Magazine.
00:56:18
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, and he uh talked to a farmer who was like, Oh, don’t worry about it. The soil is so deep here, it will never run out. And I think Devoto’s quote that I just looked up here was in the West, nothing would run out until it ran out, And it’s like this A lot of what we hold here right now is finite.
00:56:51
Speaker 2: That’s exactly right, well said, that’s a yeah, Bernard de Voto. He was one of the most passionate early advocates of public lands and fighting back the public land transfer ideas that you know come up. I call them. I say that they have a Cicadian rhythm, because just like cicadas emerged from the earth, at least in the east, every fifteen to sixteen years, that’s when these ideas come up.
00:57:12
Speaker 1: You know.
00:57:12
Speaker 2: It’s the Sagebrush rebellion, the wise use movement, the War on the West, you know, the county supremacy movement, and most recently it was Mike Lee’s idea of you know, selling two to three million acres of public lands. It’s just we have to remain ever vigilant because you’re right, they’re not making much land anymore.
00:57:33
Speaker 1: That’s right. Well, not to belabor this, Chris, but thank you so much. As you just pointed out, land sales for this brief moment are off the table and they’re trying it a different way. They’re gonna manage it into valuelessness if we don’t stand up and fight for it. Remember, if you’re not willing to advocate for yourself. Don’t worry because somebody else will. You may just not like how they do it.
00:58:02
Speaker 2: Up. Had sunder in action at the DA
Read the full article here