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#7 Dan Flores on de-extinction, reintroduction, and the American West
182 Plays3 months ago
Dan Flores is a historian and writer who writes about the natural and cultural history of North America. His books—including Coyote America, American Serengeti, and Wild New World, bring to life North America’s most iconic species and landscapes, weaving together science, folklore, and history. Dan’s work not only illuminates the past but also asks urgent questions about the future of conservation, rewilding, and our relationship with the land.
Dan looking very calm during his Joe Rogan Appearances:
- Dan mentions proof of human footprints on North American soil from 23,000 years ago.
- Giant beaver looking awfully giant.
- Were North American dire wolves dominated by Eurasian gray wolves?
- The debate about whether the massive die-off of North American megafauna was caused by climate change or human presence.
- Should the Clovis people — for their mammoth genocides — be… cancelled?
- Colossal Biosciences—an organization devoted to bringing back extinct animals, such as the wooly mammoth.
- The Wooly Mouse.
- Should we reintroduce animals originating in North America (cheetah, camel, etc.) and reintroduce them in places where there is habitat.
- The Thylacine to be de-extinictified and reintroduced in New Zealand.
- Will there ever be a huge Great Plains National Park?
- Will Trump/Vance sell off any public lands?
- American Prairie
- Dan’s next book’s working title: Homestead: Building a Green Life in the Modern American Countryside.
- Some of Dan’s books:
- Dan’s recommendation: Lone Wolf by Adam Weymouth:
Music by Duncan Barrett, who you can follow and listen to, here and here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:05
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis.
00:00:19
Speaker
Dan Flores is a historian who writes about the natural and cultural history of North America. His books, including Coyote America, American Serengeti, and Wild New World, bring to life North America's most iconic animals and landscapes, weaving together science, folklore, and history.
00:00:41
Speaker
Dan's work not only illuminates the past, but also asks urgent questions about the future of conservation, rewilding, and our relationship with the land. Dan, hello.
00:00:54
Speaker
Hello, Kjans.
Unusual Friendship with a Raven
00:00:55
Speaker
Pleasure to be with you. Thank you. So I did a little bit of research to prepare for this, and I watched clips of your appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast. And um I think you've been on joe Joe's podcast twice.
00:01:11
Speaker
In the most recent one, you describe having pet raven. um which you fed mice and rats to. I thought I'd start by asking if you're still friends with that raven and if that relationship has evolved in any way.
00:01:26
Speaker
As a matter of fact, I am still friends with that raven. Our relationship started about probably three years ago. And the raven is strongly enough committed to it that When I go off and I, as I think I mentioned to you when we were talking about doing this, ah my wife and I, we live in Santa Fe, New Mexico most of the year, but we have a winter place outside Phoenix.
00:01:54
Speaker
And so we're gone from essentially the first of January to about the first of May. Although I usually go over a couple of times in the spring to check on the place.
00:02:05
Speaker
And as soon as I drive up the driveway after an absence of six weeks or so, that raven immediately appears. It is as if he has been watching and waiting for six weeks for me to come and resume our our friendship. And so we do. And he flies down and lights within three or four feet of me. I feed him these days dog kibbles.
00:02:30
Speaker
And occasionally when we catch a mouse or a rat, he gets that too. But this time when I went over last week, hadn't been there in six weeks. And the raven immediately saw me as I was driving up, immediately flew up on the perch that he takes in order to let me know that it's him and not another raven.
00:02:50
Speaker
And he's got a very specific spot so that he can convey that. And as soon as I got some kibbles out to feed him, he not only flew down and got the kibbles, but he turned after he did that and walked directly toward me to within about two feet of me and stood there cocking his head and looking at me. So yeah, I mean, these are highly intelligent birds.
00:03:11
Speaker
And obviously ah their memories ah leave nothing to be desired. And so ah he and I are are still continuing our relationship. And what's the end goal? Do you want this thing kind of perched on your shoulder and petting it and and whatnot? You know, I don't think so. i've I've not tried to feed him out of my hands or get him to hop up on my shoulder or anything.
00:03:34
Speaker
But I do like the fact that it's not just about getting a mouse or getting some kibbles, he very often, which I just described, he very often after getting that will walk around me and walk up to me. And sometimes he will do that for seven or eight minutes.
00:03:54
Speaker
And so he's clearly interested ah in you know, who knows what is going through a raven's mind. I can't really come up with a good suggestion about what he's thinking, except that He's expressing curiosity and expressing to me what I'm reading is a kind of a camaraderie that, you know, and I almost had the idea when he did this ah last week that, OK, this guy missed me.
00:04:26
Speaker
I've been gone for six weeks and, you know, he was ready to come and walk around and stand there and cock his head and look at me and listen to me talk to him. And I do talk to him. And I think that's one of the things he likes.
00:04:37
Speaker
He likes to hear me. kind of in the back of my head, i was like, oh, is this just transactional? You know, is he just interested in the calories? But no, it sounds like there's some actual mutual affection there.
00:04:49
Speaker
There is a mutual something to be sure.
Career Transition and Media Influence
00:04:51
Speaker
and you know, um I don't know. i can't read my raven's mind. You know, I shouldn't use the the possessive my. He's not my raven. He's his own raven. But um he hes certainly conveys to me that he's happy that I'm back. And even after he's had seven or eight kibbles, he wants to hang around.
00:05:15
Speaker
Okay. Well, we have a lot more animals to discuss. First, I kind of i wanted to just stick with your your writing career for a second. And speaking of your appearances on Joe Rogan, it appears to me that your career has kind of entered a new phase in the past eight years or so. Because from what I understand before, you were ah professor who wrote fantastic books that probably didn't get the attention they deserved.
00:05:42
Speaker
And suddenly you're something of like a celebrity historian. And I guess at first I'd like to know, what is it like to get this level of public recognition? Well, i you know I don't know if celebrity is the the right word. I mean, it translates, I suppose, into occasionally getting an invitation to appear on Joe Rogan or having someone come up to you in an airport and ask you if you're not that writer who wrote so-and-so book. But I think probably what what the difference is maybe...
00:06:18
Speaker
now as opposed to when I was still at the University of Montana, still mostly writing for academic audiences. And I wrote eight books in the course of the time that I spent as a university professor.
00:06:34
Speaker
i think probably what's different now is I do feel as if I get to ah to weigh in on things, on issues. sometimes even on decisions that people are making in a way that I was never asked to before.
00:06:50
Speaker
And so it's, i guess it's in some respects, a useful thing to be better known these days because whenever some particular issue about coyotes, for example, comes up and CBS News wants someone to explain to their audience why coyotes shouldn't be feared why they engage with pets in cities and so forth, uh, they'll call on me. So I get the chance to, to actually influence the world quite a bit more, uh, than I did when I was just kind of purely a, an academic professor.
00:07:31
Speaker
So, I mean, and all of this dates to the time when I retired, I retired fairly early. I was, uh, 65 when I retired, uh, in 2014. And so it's 11 years ago. And, um, and I immediately recognized that, okay, there's no need for me to write books for university presses anymore, but because usually the way you're rewarded for a university press book is your, your own university gives you you, know, market raises and advances in rank and things like that.
00:08:03
Speaker
And of course I wasn't in that world anymore. And so at that point um I did the sensible thing and got an agent and, uh, started shopping my work in New York and, and got lucky enough to, to start landing books there.
00:08:18
Speaker
And of course, that's a, that's very certainly a way to get a lot more exposure. And into what do you attribute the, the huge successes of your recent books?
00:08:30
Speaker
Like was getting on programs like, like Joe Rogan, was that like a marketing strategy or were these books just merely made to, to reach a bigger audience? Yeah. Well, my my writing career went through a ah couple of alterations over my career. and And what I mean by that is that before I went to graduate school and got a PhD and got professorships at various universities, I spent about about three or four years as a freelance writer for magazines. And so I was writing for magazine editors
00:09:09
Speaker
ah some of them national magazines here in the States. and um And I learned in doing that, and it's about four years, I suppose, I did that.
00:09:20
Speaker
I learned, I think, how to pitch stories at general audiences. When I became a professor, your audience changes. You're essentially writing your work primarily for an academic audience for other professors and other people who are working in the same field.
00:09:39
Speaker
And so I spent a good chunk of my career then doing that. But when I retired, I still remembered how to do the the magazine writing thing.
00:09:51
Speaker
And so in the next batch of books that I wrote, I just returned to that kind of approach. And, you know, and there's no question that things like getting on Joe Rogan, I mean, that that sort of catapults you into a kind of a visibility that you wouldn't have otherwise.
00:10:09
Speaker
I mean, and that's kind of an interesting story in itself because I had a friend, Stephen Ronella, who is a good friend of Joe's and who's appeared on Joe's podcast a number of times. And about the time I was working on Coyote America, Stephen said, so Joe Rogan would like to have you on his podcast.
00:10:33
Speaker
And And I had to say to Stephen, Stephen, what the hell is a podcast? I didn't even know what a podcast was, let alone who Joe Rogan
Pleistocene Fauna and Human Impact
00:10:44
Speaker
was. i had no idea.
00:10:46
Speaker
So you probably weren't starstruck by the whole process, by beating Joe and all that. I was not starstruck in the least because was too innocent. You looked very comfortable on the YouTube was too to be starstruck.
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah, so, and the first time Joe and I talked about Me appearing, I told him no, because and the reason I did is that the Coyote America book was not yet done.
00:11:11
Speaker
And I told him that and I wanted to wait until the book was out before I appeared on this podcast, whatever it was. And so I mean, that was very smart. Yeah. i Well, I think that was a smart thing to do.
00:11:24
Speaker
And Joe, to his credit, you know, a year later or whatever it was when I got in touch with him, I then had his email address when I got in touch with him. He said, ah well, absolutely.
00:11:36
Speaker
I want you to come on. And, um, so, so I did, and he was still in Ventura, California at the time. And so he flew me out to LA and, uh, had me picked up at LAX and driven out to his studio, which was just a ah little small thing compared to his studio in, in Austin, Texas now.
00:11:56
Speaker
And, um, And he had actually sat down and read Coyote America before I got there. And I knew that he didn't do that with all the writers that he had on. No, mean, you're doing so many podcasts. You can't keep up on all the texts. No, you can't keep up.
00:12:11
Speaker
And I certainly don't hold it against him that he doesn't do that. But he had actually read Coyote America. And so after we did that podcast um that year, which was 2017, he picked three books as Joe Rogan's book picks for 2017. And Coyote America was...
00:12:28
Speaker
was one of those. So yeah, Joe obviously got me a lot of exposure. And so it's kind of, it's kind of mounted from there, I guess I would say. Amazing.
00:12:39
Speaker
um And, you know, I started reading your books 10 years ago, starting with the natural The Natural West, I think it was called that. um And i don't know if you'd call that an academic book, but it was brilliantly written. It feels like it was written for a popular audience.
00:12:54
Speaker
ah But I'd like to focus on your your latest Wild New World, the Epic Story of Animals and People in North America. And you start by writing about the animals of the Pleistocene, which is a period from about 1.8 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago.
00:13:14
Speaker
And in some way, this time would look um very familiar to a lot of us geographically. you know The Grand Canyon would be there, Niagara Falls would be there, but the animals would be very different and the abundance of animals would be very different.
00:13:28
Speaker
And as you describe, we'd see animals like the saber-toothed tiger, the woolly mammoth, cheetahs, camels. And you write about this time with a bit of reverence. I'm picking that up.
00:13:40
Speaker
um And also a bit of melancholy, because it sounds like you'd really like to be around these places and these animals. So so humor me for a second, Dan. If you had a time machine and you could pick any place in North America at any time during the Pleistocene, when and where would you go?
00:14:02
Speaker
I think I would go to the Southern High Plains 13,000 years ago when the Clovis people are first beginning to appear.
00:14:16
Speaker
And in part, that's that's an intellectual interest because the Clovis people are still really hard for us to get a handle on. i i mean, we know, we're pretty sure what they did.
00:14:32
Speaker
and how skilled they were at doing it. They were absolutely hunters par excellence. And, and they probably precipitated, ah there was some background ah extinction going among elephants around the world, especially in the Northern latitudes. But the Clovis people probably precipitated the die out of the, most of the mammoth species anyway.
00:15:02
Speaker
and possibly the mastodons too, but the mammoths in particular. And I would really like to have you know, perched on the edge of that big lake at the Clovis site out on New Mexico border with a pair of binoculars and just watched one of these scenes take place because, you know, taking on an animal like a mammoth when,
00:15:32
Speaker
you're doing it essentially with spears. I mean, we humans are, you know, we've we've done remarkable things. I mean, you know, we, we fire, you know, dune buggies at Mars and hit it almost every time, but wow, taking on a gigantic animal like a mammoth with nothing but a spear.
00:15:53
Speaker
And, you know, there are some sites, there's a site in, in Arizona, in Southern Arizona, I wrote about where There's a herd of 15 mammoths, 13 adolescents and calves and um a bull and a cow.
00:16:09
Speaker
And the Clovis hunters surround that group and kill every one of those animals. They get every one of them. And like the adolescents and the calves are all killed with a single point.
00:16:21
Speaker
Each one of them in the archaeological sites there, ah but a single point in them. The bull had two or three points in him. But the cow obviously fought to defend her young. She had eight Clovis points in her when when she was found.
00:16:35
Speaker
So mean it it was um was an epic kind of experience that humans engaged in. And I just would have loved to have watched it. um'll We'll have to get you some plate armor there because they were very good with their pointed projectiles.
00:16:51
Speaker
but So... A little context here. Human beings have been in North America. We're not sure exactly how long, but I think I read something like 33,000 years or something like that. Yeah. We think very certainly 23,000 years because we had footprints in Southern New Mexico that where 63 prints were found in 2019, where people had stepped on a grass that was growing near a lakeshore and
00:17:24
Speaker
The United States Geological Survey radiocarbon dated that grass and its seeds to 23,000 years ago. So at least that far back. We've got sound evidence.
00:17:36
Speaker
So then the Clovis came over, presumably um via Alaska um and ah Eurasia. um and um And there was something special about their...
00:17:51
Speaker
projectile points and their hunting techniques. What is it exactly about these fluted projectile points that were so advanced compared to the other peoples of North America?
00:18:05
Speaker
Well, we don't, you know, so far we haven't found any ah projectiles associated with the earlier group of people. And I am not entirely sure how many pre-Clovis people there were in North America.
00:18:21
Speaker
Excuse me. I've got a sneaking suspicion that those, that very early arrival, and there may have been others, of course, were a little bit like the Vikings getting to the East coast of North America a thousand years ago. And it's a fairly small group of people.
00:18:40
Speaker
They may not have been around long. And one of the reasons I think that is because when the Clovis people do come, I mean, and they, as you, indicated They come when the ice sheets in Alaska open to the point, the McKenzie Ice Quarter opens to the point that you can actually come from Beringia down through the ice sheets, which open up into what is now southern Alberta and northern Montana.
00:19:04
Speaker
And when they come, they come as a ah fairly significant population of people coming overland. And they end up within about 300 years spreading all the way down to Tierra del Fuego, the tip of South America.
00:19:17
Speaker
And what that says to me is that they must not have been encountering very many people in front of them because it nothing seemed to slow them down. They just, i mean, 300 years from Alaska to the tip of South America is a fairly remarkable place.
00:19:37
Speaker
kind of migration. And if there were significant populations of earlier people in front of them, I think it couldn't have happened that fast. But yeah, they come, i mean, the earlier people probably came by boat along the, along the Pacific shore and would go inland whenever they would find a river that they could track inland.
00:19:56
Speaker
Um, And that probably was a route that was used more than once, because, I mean, even today, as I write in Wild New World, had a geography professor when I was in graduate school who had written a book called Earlier Than You Think. And one of the things, and he really kind of sparked my imagination about this, he said that even today, when Japanese ships off the coast of Japan dump their garbage in the ocean, the Pacific currents will within about two months deposit it on the shores of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Wow. And it sort of follows the, you know, the kelp highway around the Northern part of the Pacific down to, and so I think if you got out in a boat and just hugged close to shore,
00:20:46
Speaker
you could ultimately end up in North America, which is probably, like ah think it has to be how those earlier groups got here because it wasn't possible to get through the ice sheets until about 13 or 14,000 years ago.
00:20:59
Speaker
That seems like an unpleasant trek almost any time. I lived up in the Brooks Range for for seven summers. I know how um treacherous it can be up there.
00:21:10
Speaker
um So around this, um but around 14,000 years ago, around the time the Clovis people came, it also coincided with this massive loss of megafauna in North America. We lost about 40 species over a short period of time, species like the giant beaver, mastodon, American camel.
00:21:30
Speaker
um There's some debate about the causes of this die off. Some experts blame climate change. Others blame climate change. humans and their new hunting technologies. Now, what I gather from from your writing is that it's largely human caused in your mind. Is that that settled in your mind?
00:21:50
Speaker
Well, I think it's settled for some species. my My thinking is, There's a paleobiologist named Don Grayson who writes about the Pleistocene mammals of the Great Basin.
00:22:07
Speaker
And he makes a pretty compelling argument to me, which I followed some in The Wild New World, that you kind of have to look at all this animal by animal, species by species.
00:22:18
Speaker
And so some species, the direwolf, for example, which was a I mean, the direwolf was a specifically American species. Dyer wolves did not. They were in South America, Central America, and North America.
00:22:32
Speaker
They weren't anywhere else in the world. But about the time that they faced extinction, gray wolves, which were coming from Eurasia,
00:22:43
Speaker
through Beringia, down through ah the open ice corridor into North America, following the herds now, gray wolves quite possibly out-competed dire wolves and may have pushed them towards extinction.
00:23:00
Speaker
And there may have been some other other creatures that were out-competed by new arrivals that that came through once the ice corridor was free and and it was possible for species to come out of Siberia and to North America.
00:23:16
Speaker
I think the evidence, I think most paleontologists and paleobiologists probably today have reluctantly come to the conclusion that it's hard to avoid the role of humanity in this, that we what compelled our journeys around the world was we were looking for new places where the animals were naive and um and didn't see us as a threat.
00:23:44
Speaker
And that's what compelled us to search out and finally find North and South America. And that many of these animals like mammoths, for instance, ah have really slow gestation periods.
00:23:59
Speaker
I mean, a couple of years. I mean, and a cow mammoth doesn't, she's not able to bear young until she's 15 or 16 years old. So they have really long gestation periods.
00:24:10
Speaker
They just don't have a high reproductive turnover. And when humans arrive and begin taking them out, the fact that they lack a high reproductive turnover and the fact also, which seems to have happened at least on that one with that one population of mammoths that got on an island out in the Bering Sea,
00:24:31
Speaker
is that when their genetic variability drops as low as it did on that island, we don't think humans ever got there. ah The mammoths survived through the change of climate from the Pleistocene to the Holocene,
00:24:47
Speaker
But they they were so genetically narrow that they finally, over two or three thousand years, reached a point where they couldn't reproduce anymore. And I think this may be a useful sort of avenue of inquiry these days to look and see, to try to come up with with some way of demonstrating that populations of animals may have been driven apart one from the other by this new human presence.
00:25:13
Speaker
And they weren't able to exchange genes and remain genetically healthy and that that may have assisted in the extinctions too. But there were so many animals that became extinct, you know, and and as Paul Martin always pointed out, the only places is animals became extinct in the late Pleistocene was where humans were showing up.
00:25:33
Speaker
I mean, that was the one commonality. Humans show up, animals, one species after another starts dying off. And You know, you look at Africa at the same time with analogs of all these same North American species and Africa loses virtually none of them.
00:25:50
Speaker
And these, of course, are animals that had had had the presence of humans among them for a very, very long time, whereas the North American creatures didn't.
00:26:02
Speaker
Should we be thinking critically of the Clovis people because of what they they did? I wonder if you if we had our time machine and we can go back and we could speak their language somehow.
00:26:13
Speaker
I wonder if they were at all aware of what was happening. I wonder if they were at all aware that they were possibly ah partly responsible for the deise the demise of these animals or if it was just impossible to know.
00:26:26
Speaker
you have any sense of that? I don't have any sense of it from the evidence that we have. My common sense makes me believe that because these people, they were just like us. They were just as smart as we are.
00:26:43
Speaker
And probably about wild animals, they were much more experienced and smarter. I mean, they represented 45,000 generations of human hunting. And so common sense tells me that they had to have seeing what was going on they had to have observed that these animals were disappearing i don't think they could do anything about it i don't think that was within their ability even if they had wanted to and it's kind of you know why i said a few minutes ago what i'd like to do is go and perch on that that lakeshore at the col clovis site in new mexico and watch what happened over time because
00:27:25
Speaker
I do really wonder, and I know a lot of people have wondered before me, what happens when you start seeing these these creatures that you depended on gradually disappear until the point where you you don't see them anymore at all?
00:27:38
Speaker
I mean, we have plenty of modern examples of that, of course, in in history, in our own time. I mean, native people with the buffalo herds in the American West, they experienced that very thing.
00:27:49
Speaker
You know, the Blackfeet go out in 1884. expecting to kill 20,000 animals, 20,000 buffalo, and they come back with six. And so people have experienced this kind of thing. And, you know, we're experienc experiencing something like it now with our so-called sixth extinction.
00:28:07
Speaker
But you have to pay attention, you know, and I'm afraid in the modern world, you know, so many people are are so caught up in different concerns that they're probably not paying close attention.
De-extinction Ethics and Potential
00:28:20
Speaker
Mm-hmm. You'd be there watching the Clovis with your binoculars and plate armor. I'd be standing right next to you, wagging my finger saying, no, no, no, just take one mammoth. You you don't need the whole don you don't need the whole herd ah um So this is kind of all relevant to the the debate around de-extinction because if the animal die-off is human caused, that might have some implications on questions around reintroduction and de-extinction. Because if it's humans who were responsible for the extinction, we might have some, how shall we say, moral responsibility to bring these animals back.
00:29:01
Speaker
And as you write about, there's organizations that are hoping to de-extinctify certain animals animals like the woolly mammoth, the passenger pigeon, or so genetically alter plants like the American chestnut to make it more blight resistant.
00:29:18
Speaker
What are your some of your overall thoughts on and de-extinction? is it Is it ethical to play God and recreate animals?
00:29:29
Speaker
Well, full disclosure, i am on the advisory board, the conservation advisory board of Colossal Biosciences, which is one of the very prominent organizations that is attempting to do this.
00:29:46
Speaker
And in fact, in the last two evenings here in Bozeman, Montana, a couple of the Colossal Biosciences guys who I know pretty well have been here and I've been having dinner with them in the previous two nights before...
00:29:59
Speaker
Yeah, so we've been having we've been having conversations very much like this because they are they were rather close. that There was a story, in fact, in the news yesterday that colossal scientists, they're geneticists, and I have been to their labs, and I mean, it's a remarkable thing. For one thing, they have, I believe, about 135 employees at least half of whom, maybe more, are actual scientists, geneticists working in their labs.
00:30:31
Speaker
And um when I first went to Colossal, which is headquartered these days in Dallas, Texas, I was struck by something really remarkable, which seemed to me i didn't expect it.
00:30:44
Speaker
The average age of that 135 people was probably about 27 28. people was probably about twenty seven or twenty eight Most of them were brand new PhDs out of graduate programs from all over the world.
00:31:00
Speaker
And they'd come to work for Colossal because I think they believe in this mission. I mean, the guy who is the CEO of it, he's maybe 45. He's the oldest person in the group. All the rest of them you know are in their 20s and 30s. So it's a very young group of people.
00:31:21
Speaker
And They do, I think, and I certainly share this with them, have a sense of a moral responsibility about doing this.
00:31:34
Speaker
I mean, to some extent, it's, you know, it's fun and exciting that we can actually, we're at a stage where we can actually take CRISPR technology and do gene editing.
00:31:48
Speaker
And yesterday there was a story in the news that Colossal had produced a woolly mouse. They had isolated the same genes in a mouse that produced the woolly coat, the resistance to cold, all those kinds of things ah that they're trying to do with mammoths.
00:32:11
Speaker
And they had done the same with mice and they had actually produced one. And here's this little you know, fuzzy ball with hair three or four times longer than a regular mouse. But here it is. It made it onto the news here over in Scotland on the BBC.
00:32:27
Speaker
so So the other thing that Colossal does, by the way, is they're very heavily, and this is the group that I'm with, is the Conservation Advisory Board. They're very heavily involved in trying to keep existing species from from dropping over the edge into extinction. And they're doing that all over the world.
00:32:42
Speaker
So I think, you know, I feel quite good about being a part of that organization and helping in a small way to kind of direct it. But I do think that there is a kind of a ah moral obligation among most people who are involved with it.
00:32:59
Speaker
And based on exactly what you described, most of the animals that we have lost, humans pushed them over the edge. And maybe it's our responsibility to try to bring them back. i'm I'm right there with you, Dan. And I guess another question is,
00:33:13
Speaker
reintroductions of animals that um existed here, say the ah the cheetah and the camel, I believe those are homegrown animals. They they came from North America and wound up in and and Africa and elsewhere.
00:33:30
Speaker
um Horses, camels. and Horses, of course, yeah. So if we have, let's say, if we have the habitat Is it reasonable to kind of reintroduce a camel and a cheetah and some of these animals that are doing okay in Africa over here again?
00:33:49
Speaker
Well, I would love to see it. I think the ah Colossal is still, mean, Colossal is only about three or four years old as an organization. They're still, to me, struggling to find pieces of of ground where it would be possible to recover say, a woolly mammoth population. And that's probably ah next step. But of course the argument about woolly mammoths is if we can release them in the Arctic, they could work to restore the natural grasslands and and prevent the thawing of the tundra and the release of methane from the Northern latitudes.
00:34:27
Speaker
So it's a for the woolly mammoth in particular, they have an an idea. There's an explanation for ecologically for why you would want to do this. For some of the other ones, it's a little more difficult to figure out exactly how it would work.
00:34:43
Speaker
I mean, Colossal is working on bringing back a dodo, a population of dodos, the classic extinct animal in the last few hundred years.
00:34:56
Speaker
They're working on bringing back the thylacine, which is, course, ah a New Zealand carnivore. that only went extinct in about the 1930s or 1940s. They haven't been extinct for very long, but that's one of the ah the animals they're working on.
00:35:16
Speaker
They're working on a whole host of creatures. But ah right now I know what the the idea is for the mammoth. I don't know what the idea is for some of the others, the thylacine, for example.
00:35:27
Speaker
There may be a national park in New Zealand where thylacines could be reintroduced. But I think you do have to ultimately, in a moral way, you have to push for releasing these animals back into the wild, back onto the planet, rather than just have them as curiosities in a zoo.
00:35:45
Speaker
Yeah. And let's say say the habitat question was was solved and we magically had 100,000 square miles of land and whatever. hundred thousand square miles of of love land and whatever what what should we be thinking about in terms of what animals to bring back? Like, what is the proper baseline? Because we could say 14,000 years ago and the Clovis, you know, knocked off a few species, or we could go kind of prior to um the Euro-American arrival in North America 500 years ago.
00:36:21
Speaker
Have you thought about these these issues of kind of what a ah target baseline should be? Yeah, I have, because i'm I'm kind of tinkering around with rewilding on ah on a more personal level, too. and And that raises the same question. Well, rewild to what?
00:36:39
Speaker
What point do you pick in time? And so there have to be some, you know, some good thinkers about how to do that and what point in time you pick. And the other thing to me is that it's going to be ah one thing to say, release woolly mammoths in somewhere in the Arctic, you know, in a mammoth, a Siberian national park or something like that.
00:37:08
Speaker
ah But to me, what we kind of really need are are more complete ecologies than just the animal itself. And so you really kind of need the predators to be on hand, else you have to artificially cull the population and You know, that begins to raise the question of, OK, so are we actually ready for saber tooth cats again?
00:37:35
Speaker
Are we actually ready for the predators that might prey on something like a mammoth?
Public Lands and Rewilding Efforts
00:37:41
Speaker
Those are all issues that are right now unresolved science, as far as I can tell.
00:38:31
Speaker
I'd like to read some stats to you. I wrote a book a couple of years ago um about the right to roam. And um I looked at, I may be the only person who's ever assembled these stats, how much land each state ah has that's publicly owned versus privately privately owned. So I figured out how much state park and state forest and national park and BLM and national forest land is within each state. So I'm going to read off a few states to here to you, Dan.
00:39:05
Speaker
Kansas and Iowa, they are about 1% publicly owned, meaning 99% privately owned. Nebraska, 1.5% publicly owned. nebraska one point one point five percent publicly owned Texas and Oklahoma and Illinois, 2% public.
00:39:22
Speaker
Indiana, 2.3. I'm going to skip over a few states. North and South Dakota, under 6% publicly owned. Do you see where I'm going with all this, Dan?
00:39:34
Speaker
our Our great plain states, the American Serengeti, um is almost entirely owned by individuals and corporations.
00:39:45
Speaker
um One of the most fascinating things about American Serengeti is you talk about old plans for a Great Plains National Park, which really didn't happen. We just have kind of tiny little ones scattered across.
00:39:59
Speaker
Do you think we'll ever see ah Great Plains National Park or something like it? Well, in the the present political moment, and this kind of political moment with respect to the federal government setting aside something like National Parks has been with us actually for a while, ah you'd have to say realistically, no, there's there's no chance of that happening.
00:40:24
Speaker
um Because we have, we've sort of, in America at least, we've concluded that Capitalism and private land, and those those are our shibboleths that we worship.
00:40:36
Speaker
And so public lands, you know, that's some form of socialism that, you know, somebody else maybe does, but we shouldn't do. I mean, um I'm worried, frankly, for the existing public lands in the Rocky Mountain West, you know, which are considerably higher than the figures you just laid out for the Great Plains.
00:40:58
Speaker
Because i don't know what exactly is going to happen with this present administration in terms of, and they were trying, they're already trying to sell off government owned buildings around the country. saw that. and so, yeah, it wouldn't surprise me to, you know, to hear that, okay, we're going just, you know, we're put up ah the Boise Cascade National Forest for sale. yeah you know, carve it up into homesteads or into something that Elon Musk would love to, you know, play in and let him buy it.
00:41:31
Speaker
I'm really frankly worried about that kind of thing and and sort of think that The federal strategy, which has done so many great things for the existence of habitat and public lands in America, doesn't have, you know, it has no momentum these days.
00:41:49
Speaker
On the other hand, I would say that, you know, I'm, I'm, inspired by organizations like american prairie in central montana which is as you know an organization that is attempting in a spot on the missouri river where there are two large public land ah areas, a national wildlife refuge and a national monument that are separated from one another by about 60 or 70 miles.
00:42:17
Speaker
American Prairie is attempting to buy up as they come for sale on the market, all the ranches in between those with the idea of ultimately creating some sort of three or 4,000 million acre restored American Serengeti with bison and even grizzlies and wolves and all that.
00:42:34
Speaker
That's the probably the most exciting possibility at the moment for doing something like visionaries dream of. And I will say I'm actually a visionary. i want I would like to see you know that kind of West. I feel like I got robbed.
00:42:53
Speaker
that I didn't get to see that kind of West. mean, I wrote in Wild New World, my grandparents were still alive when passenger pigeons were flying through the skies of Louisiana. And of course, I've never seen a passenger pigeon except in a museum, a stuffed one.
00:43:08
Speaker
So it's that Henry Thoreau idea. You know, i I seek to know an entire heaven and an entire earth. And it's hard to hard to fashion a strategy to do that. But I think American Prairie, at least for the Great Plains, is right now our best bet.
00:43:25
Speaker
I once read this. ah biography on the Wright brothers, the aviation pioneers by i think David McCullough. And um they they did their, you know, their initial flight in North Carolina, then they went up to Ohio.
00:43:41
Speaker
And that's when they really started to take off, they started to be up there longer and to do tricks. And, you know, they just kind of um started to perfect the aircrafts that they were working with.
00:43:53
Speaker
And there was a ah little newspaper in town. And guess what? They didn't cover any of that. They didn't go out to see any of those test flights. That should have been like dispatched. Those news stories should have been dispatched across the world.
00:44:05
Speaker
This is how I think of the American Prairie Reserve. I feel like something amazing is happening there. but no one is paying any attention to it. Like this is the recreation of the American Serengeti. Do you get that impression too, that nobody's really noticing that something kind of amazing is happening out in Montana?
00:44:25
Speaker
Yeah, I do get that impression. And, you know, I think for some people, it's they sort of write it off because, well, it's been underway for more than 20 years now, you know, and they they've certainly bought a whole bunch of ranches, but they haven't managed to do the entire thing. And so it's going to be such a long term project that there are people who think, well, you know, I mean, I'm not going to pay any attention to it until I finally manage to stitch together all the private land in between.
00:44:54
Speaker
But I think in another way, a lot of Americans, they don't remember anything about the American Serengeti. I mean, you know, there's a kind of a cocktail party conversation memory that, oh, yeah, one time there was a whole bunch of buffalo and then there were hardly any of them.
00:45:14
Speaker
And that's kind of the extent of it for a lot of people. And, you know, i when I was writing Wildly Whirl, I kind of had the idea that, okay, Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s was certainly very aware of what was going on around him.
00:45:29
Speaker
But most of the people I i live around in the 21st century, they don't look at the world and say, wow, where are the Carolina parakeets? Where are the passenger pigeons? Where are all these species?
00:45:43
Speaker
They sort of just asc assume that everything is just fine. This is the way it's supposed to be. It's all fine. You know, why would you? And it's even made me wonder, OK, 200 years from now, planet maybe, you know, six degrees hotter.
00:45:56
Speaker
And who yeah the hell knows what that's going to do? And people 200 years from now may say the same thing. What? It's fine, isn't it? Everything is just normal. This the way it's supposed to be. I mean, it's almost kind of an adaptive human strategy for, OK, I'm not going to worry about stuff like that. I'm going to I've got day to day things to do and to think about. so Yeah, everything is everything is great.
00:46:21
Speaker
I think it's called a shifting baseline syndrome. And we have a lot of that over here in Britain because this is the land of Peter Rabbit and a bunch of sheep. When if you were to go back a thousand years ago or so, there'd be wolves, there'd be bears, go back wild boars, go back even further. And there'd be even more amazing charismatic species. But yeah, it's it's very hard to kind of rewild over here.
00:46:47
Speaker
So, Dan, what are you working on now? Do you have another book in the works? Well, I just sold a new book or the proposal for it about two or three weeks ago.
00:47:00
Speaker
It's going to be published by my same publisher with Wild New World, which is W.W. Norton. And I'm Right now, the working title of it is Homestead, Building a Green Life in the Modern American Countryside.
00:47:16
Speaker
And what it's basically about, three times in my adult life, I have settled on a piece of ground outside town, one in West Texas, one in Montana, one in now in New Mexico, and they're all between 12 and 25 acres or so.
00:47:32
Speaker
And what I've done with them is to kind of try to do the reverse of classic homesteading where people took, you know, divvied up Indian lands, Indian managed lands, and tried to make them into money making propositions and tie them into the global market economy.
00:47:52
Speaker
I'm trying to take places that have been influenced by that and return them to a kind of a rewilded native managed condition.
Recommended Reading and Conclusion
00:48:04
Speaker
I mean, it's a little bit like, you know, in in Britain, Isabella Trees work on her farms where she writes about this core sort of small, you know, property kind of rewilding and restoration.
00:48:18
Speaker
And of course, it happens on much larger scale, too, like American Prairie, for instance. instance But i'm I'm trying to write a book sort of about, you know, the ah smaller opportunity to do that with the kind of properties that people actually live on. There are presently 16 million people who live on small ah urban wildlands interface properties.
00:48:40
Speaker
in the American West. And so there's a lot of opportunity at least maybe influence how people do it. In contrast to what my wife and I often refer to as the country vomitorium, where somebody buys a piece of ground, 15 20 acres, and they invite all of their second, third and fourth cousins to dump whatever refrigerators and old cars that don't start and, you know, and just cover the landscape.
00:49:05
Speaker
Well, I mean, that probably produces some habitat, but it's mostly habitat for weeds and snakes and things like that. So I'm trying to, trying to make a case for this kind of thing on a kind of a private small scale i'm sure we'll get an anecdote or two about a raven hopefully perching on your shoulder that no doubt about it yeah i i asked you before if you have any kind of recommendations for the audience and it's something cultural anything anything you're reading or watching whatever You know, the the most interesting thing I have read recently, and it's because I was invited to write a blurb for the back cover of it, is a book called Lone Wolf by a British writer named Adam Weymouth.
00:49:50
Speaker
And um this is not his first book. He's written at least one before, maybe a couple. But what he does, and I think he did this in ah in ah at least one previous book, he's a walker.
00:50:03
Speaker
He walks across Europe. And in this particular instance, what he's doing is following a particular wolf out of Slovenia, who is going in a northwesterly direction towards Austria and towards the northern parts of Italy.
00:50:22
Speaker
And he's the wolf has done this two or three years before, but they have radio tracking information. So know exactly where the wolf spent the night and all that stuff. that sort of thing. And Adam is is doing that. And he's, what I think has inspired me about it is that he's giving me a sense of how old world people, because he's stopping and interviewing all kinds of people along the way, how people in Europe develop their attitudes about wolves and then brought them to America, just transplanted them into America.
00:51:00
Speaker
And at the same time, he's also telling me, which I did not know, there are more wolves in Western Europe these days than there are in the lower 48 of the U.S. Shame on us.
00:51:13
Speaker
Yeah, I found that very exciting. I actually have his book on my, I have an advanced copy of his book on his i'm on my shelf. I hope to have him on the podcast as well. um Well, Dan, you've been so generous with your time. I'm ah im a huge fan. i look forward to all your books. I'll put everything you've done on the show notes. So I'll let you go there, Dan.
00:51:34
Speaker
Thank you so much for everything. Oh, you bet. My pleasure, Ken. Good to talk to you. Take care.
00:51:54
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis. Original music by Duncan Barrett.