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

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Who gets to be a native resident of any place is always up for debate, But for the past half century, two movements, bioregionalism and rewilding have offered a new possibility. I’m Dan Flores, and this is the American West becoming natives of place in the American West. We’ve all seen them everywhere in the West, those bumper stickers on the nether end of a towering ram or ford one pickup proclaiming the driver is a native. As to where the attachment applies, it’s almost always to a state Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Idaho that’s barely existed much more than a century. Nativity in these cases is usually intended to give the newcomers to understand that the pickup driver has ken who got to Idaho or Wyoming two or three generations before you did, so both truck and driver are due special privileges and a part of America where people have resided for twenty three thousand years. That’s maybe not the most convincing claim of nativity out there, but it is one version all of us will probably agree from life experiences, if nothing else, that attachment to place is a fundamental of human life. Some of our earliest century. Perceptions of the living world around us are of place based queues.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: The geographer Yfu.

00:01:56
Speaker 1: Twan’s famous aphorism space plus culture equals place distills the whole equation. If you assume that space means the surrounding natural world, and culture represents all the human creations we bring to bear economics, technological ability, philosophies of meaning, language, and social life, you can quickly see how specific places come to be. In episode twenty five of The American West, I offered up a deep time history of the Southern high Plains to show how over time these factors could produce a succession of different places, and that example, across thirteen thousand years, the same piece of ground featured a place characterized by mammoth and giant bison hunters and another of vast irrigated cotton fields. Both kinds of place based life have been possible on the Southern Eide planes. Applying an exercise like that is an intriguing way to look at places, a way to grasp what the possibilities are. But let’s face it, we live out our daily lives in the twenty first century. Even so, for all the similarities that the Internet, and advertising and popular culture lay down on every place. Everywhere, all of us are driving nearly identical automobiles and shopping in the same box stores. No matter where we live plays based life in the modern American West is actually quite distinctive from spot to spot. My stepdaughter, who grew up on the Wassatch Front in Utah goes to college and Flagstaff, Arizona. Oden and Flagstaff are within a day’s drive of one another, yet both nature and culture have made them into mind bendingly different places. Churchy versus hippie, Great Salt Lake versus one.

00:04:08
Speaker 2: Hundred foot tall Ponderosa Pines. That’s the West.

00:04:13
Speaker 1: It’s Seattle and Phoenix, Aspen and Rapid City, Los Angeles and Cody and at Yifu. Twan’s level of natural space. It’s the Central Coast and the high Plains, the Tetons and the Terry Badlands, the Sonoran Desert and the Redwood rainforest. Even when we’re attached to places and think of ourselves as natives are as coming from somewhere, modern life doesn’t ask us to think very hard about just what it is we’re attached to. For most of us, the affiliation, perhaps the name we offer when someone asks us where we’re from is to a purely cultural construction a state or a city, maybe the residents of a sports team we follow, But especially in the West, our states are often just boundary lines of boxes superimposed on the ground, like an ancient Peruvian earthworks design. Inside those boxes are much richer topographies featuring natural boundaries like river courses or mountain ranges or exposed geology. And inside that topography are many distinctive ecological settings. As I pointed out in episode twenty eight of this podcast, New Mexico, a state bounded pretty much as a classic Western rectangle, features within that rectangle eight principal ecoregions that at fine grain mapping map into an astonishing fifty five different ecological subsets. What many of us have referred to since the nineteen eighties as bioregions. What I’ve been preparing to say, then, is that natural settings like bioregions actually have a long history themselves as human places, and one way to become a resident of place in the West or anywhere else is to immerse yourself in the history and ecology of your local bioregion. That makes at least as much sense as an affiliation with the Denver Broncos fan viewership. When I was thirty five, I was a professor at a university in a city a friend referred to pretty memorably, I thought, with the line, my god ghastly place. Nonetheless, it seemed the right time for acquiring my first house. The dwelling in question was an unf finished two story tar paper shack outside the city. It had a well and electricity, but beyond a tin roof, possessed no exterior surface except for plywood covered by faded black tarpaper. Inside was exposed framing, wiring, and plumbing, with no insulation in the walls. Downstairs was a shower and a jahn minimally enclosed in sheet rock. There was no heat beyond a kitchen oven, and no cooling unless she factored in the very considerable West Texas wind. Needless to say, no bank would mortgage such a structure. What existed of this house was the work of a founding musician of a somewhat famous Texas band called the Flatlanders, but the house had become a pawn in the musician’s failed marriage. His ex wife got the building and the twelve acres out of a former cattle ranch that stood on She decided owner financing was the only way she could sell it, and I bought it from her. Then chased nesting kestrels out of the upstairs, squashed centipedes and scorpions fleeing across the floors, and it disturbingly frequent intervals coaxed West Texas rattlesnakes off the front porch. I had no idea how to complete a house like this beyond stapling on fresh tarpaper, and I wasn’t always a success at that, and I’d bought a house that needed a lot of completion.

00:08:32
Speaker 2: I was going to have to get better at that kind of thing.

00:08:36
Speaker 1: The real reason I’d bought an unfinished tarpaper shack was because of its location and because of what my instinct led me to do with its setting. The house was on ground nearly impossible to find where I was living in the nineteen eighties. That ghastly city was Lubbock, Texas, a town with the irony of having somehow produced Buddy Holly amidst an almost unmatchable Bible belt pread. Lubbock in the nineteen eighties wasn’t even three quarters of a century old. It had been incorporated as a city in nineteen twelve, in the midst of an agricultural remaking of the Southern High Plains. A young Georgia O’Keeffe arrived on the Texas Plains about the time Lubbock emerged and utterly fell in love with this horizontal world, the biggest thing she had ever seen, she claimed. But this soon famous American artist was on the scene before the agricultural assault nearly entirely banished nature in West Texas. I’m not sure to which Lubbock particulars my friend had directed her ghastly descriptor, but erasing an ancient ecology of bison, pronghorns, prairie dogs, wild horses, and gray wolves overnight and replacing it with an ocean of cotton plants and nodding pumpjacks struck me as a strong candidate.

00:10:09
Speaker 2: In Lubbock County.

00:10:10
Speaker 1: The ground where the tar paper shack stood was a singularity, a piece of barely surviving nature in a region that had all but excommunicated the natural. The house was in a small canyon called Yellow House that, in a now pretty abused form, sliced down through the vast plateau where Lubbock and its endless cotton fields stood. A few miles outside town, The little Canyon became the mile wide setting of cattle ranches, some started back in the eighteen eighties. Although most of the original wildlife in Yellow House was gone, those ranches and the canyon’s topography had at least saved its prairie grasslands, the only three percent of ground in all of Lubbock County still harboring natural vegetation. As for the shack I bought, it was attractively sighted. It stood on a slope below Yellow House Canyon’s south rim. A hemispheric rim rock loomed behind it, while on the eastern border of the acreage was an upswept mesa snagged in geologic time like a frozen wave, providing a graceful profile against morning sunrises. In the Louisiana Woods where I had grown up, my buddies and I had thrown up inexpertly built cabins.

00:11:37
Speaker 2: Since I was a ten year old.

00:11:39
Speaker 1: Much of my adult life I had longed to escape city life for nature. For me, finishing that house and homesteading in West Texas’s Yellow House Canyon was the dream of youth finally realized. I tell this story because of several points I want to make in this episode about residing in bioregional places. The experiences I had across fifteen years of living in this place, in this canyon, It’s true, did sate the childhood hopes I’d long had for emulating Henry David Thorow, an ecologist, Aldo Leopold, artist, Georgia O’Keefe, writers like Zane Gray and Wallace Stegner by living with nature out my doors and windows as opposed to city streets.

00:12:29
Speaker 2: But that was only part of the effect.

00:12:32
Speaker 1: Equally important, living there never really had me thinking of myself as a resident of Lubbock, or Lubbock County, or even.

00:12:39
Speaker 2: The state of Texas.

00:12:40
Speaker 1: I already knew when I bought that piece of canyon, that yellow house was part of a newly recognized bioregion on the Texas Plains, a two hundred mile long setting of sixteen canyons entrenched into the eastern escarpment of the High Plains Plateau. The canyon had of the Colorado Brazas and red rivers.

00:13:04
Speaker 2: So in the fifteen years.

00:13:05
Speaker 1: I spent finishing that house and rewilding my twelve acres as much as was possible. The place I inhabited, researched, and felt allegiance to was the cap Rock Canyon Lands bioregion.

00:13:18
Speaker 2: That was my place.

00:13:21
Speaker 1: Life sent me to other places over the decades after that, So taking small pieces of the Western landscape and homesteading and rewilding them, much as I’d done in West Texas, and feeling an attachment primarily to bioregions is something I’ve done twice more. All my places have been in the West, but ecologically and culturally they’ve been like different planets beyond a Western zip code. The Bitterroot Valley in the Montana Rockies had little in common with Yellow House Canyon, the third and current of my outback places, on the south rim of New Mexico’s g Galistado River Valley south of Santa Fe and the Southern Rockies, is thoroughly distinctive from the other two. I did, to be sure, feel an allegiance to Montana and to Missoula, where my university was located, and I still do. And I love New Mexico and am proud to be associated with a city as beautiful and inspiring as Santa Fe. But as a resident of place in Texas, I was a resident of the cap Rock Canyonlands bioregion for nineteen years. After that I was a bitter roover, and since then I have been an inhabitant first and foremost of the Galisteo Valley bioregion. In modern form, this way of thinking about the places you occupy dates to the nineteen seventies, but in the West it’s actually a much older idea. In eighteen seventy eight, explorer and er Western bureaucrat John Wesley Powell laid before Congress a complete rethinking of Western settlement. He titled the Lands of the Arid Region.

00:15:19
Speaker 2: It was the first.

00:15:20
Speaker 1: Time Powell proposed tossing aside the cadastril or grid system of survey in a West that he found to be so unlike the East, but it wasn’t the last. In eighteen ninety, Powell passed out to members of Congress a remarkable colored map of the West, mapping out twenty four major natural provinces subdivided into one hundred and forty candidates. He proposed as commonwealths based on water courses and topographical cohesion. Facing a Chile rest exception, in Washington. Powell tried his best to persuade the territorial legislature in Montana to adopt his commonwealths for governing the soon to be stated, But by then America had been using the survey grids of range, township and section for more than a century. However, inappropriate imposing a grid on diverse Western ecologies. Tradition and momentum were just too strong for designating Western bioregional places. Powell’s Commonwealth’s map was brilliant. Today it’s just the pretty signposts of a road not taken, but however faded the sign or dim the road. A few decades back, there were Westerners who found that Powell trail and took it. Before Google, before the World Wide Web, there was the Whole Earth Catalog, half the size of a coffee table. The Whole Earth Catalog was the brainchild of a Californian named Stuart Brand. Interviewed recently in The New York Times, Brand explained his famous book this Way. For various reasons, a whole lot of people in college in the early sixties and on through into the early seventies thought they needed to reinvent civilization. So sometimes, as I would put it in communes, sometimes occupying abandoned mining towns, sometimes buying small acreages to homestead on. They relocated to rural America, including many places in the West. As Brand put it, these were college dropouts who didn’t know how anything worked. They had not been raised on a farm or a ranch. So that was what the Whole Earth Catalog was. It turned out out what it really did is what YouTube does now it conferred agency. In a famous commencement speech at Stanford, Apple founder Steve Jobs said Brand’s book was, as he put it, sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty five years before Google came. Along with its discussions of building and tools and solar panels and composting toilets, the Whole Earth Catalog made a twentieth century version of living on the Western landscape possible. Unlike Western homesteaders in the decades after the Civil War, though, people like me had no need or particular desire to call on pieces of American earth to make them money, which had been a primary function of America homesteads throughout our history. Not that there weren’t plenty of people who wanted to be self sufficient off the grid to garden and raise chickens and ducks and goats, or have horses, and if they were couples, maybe engaged in a kind of proto tradwifism on their modern version of a Western homestead. But there was also a different way of doing things, which is how bioregional place living came to be. Bioregionalism was part of the Whole Earth philosophy from the first but as an idea for living it had its genesis in the early nineteen seventies with the writings of a Canadian named Alan van Nuker. Various bioregional prophets, many of them Californians, like the fame poet Gary Snyder, and academics such as Raymond Dassman and Stephanie Mills, were regular speakers on campuses like the University of Monte in the early two thousands. In their various publications and a couple of journals, one called Coevolution Quarterly from nineteen seventy four to nineteen eighty four published essays on living sustainably on the land. While raised the stakes was the voice of a San Francisco group called the Planet Drum Foundation. In these journals, a bioregion was a geographic idea defined by natural characteristics, including watersheds, landforms, soils, geological qualities, native plants and animals, climate and weather. That and this is a quote from the Bioregional Profits includes human beings as a species in the interplay of these natural characteristics.

00:20:51
Speaker 2: As raised the Stakes editor Peter Berg described it, bioregional living was a kind.

00:20:57
Speaker 1: Of spiritual identification with a partieecular kind of country and its wild nature. That’s the basis for the kind of land care the world.

00:21:07
Speaker 2: So definitely needs.

00:21:09
Speaker 1: In the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties, the field of geography was particularly taken with the movement and what one geographer described as its remarkably sensitive, literate group of adherents, who were the architects of a new, popular, grassroots geography of living on the land. In the West, bioregionalism became famous for inspiring a management map of the Yellowstone Plateau’s natural boundaries, what we now called the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, as opposed to the rectangular block of the park. But as the back to the land movement began to wane by the turn of the twenty first cent bioregionalism faded into the background of new issues.

00:22:05
Speaker 2: Like the Battle over Wolf recovery.

00:22:07
Speaker 1: Still, if you don’t care one way or another whether you’re part of a movement, the ideas and attachments of bioregionalism are yet out there. For one, there’s absolutely no reason you can’t live in a city and still think of yourself as a native of a surrounding bioregion. I have a friend in la who identifies as a citizen of the Los Angeles River, which barely exists as an expression of nature anymore. Nonetheless, residing out in the natural world amplifies the bioregional possibilities. As I’ll explain, finding a piece of ground that appeals to you, building a house on it, and providing it with power and water and all the connections to the larger world. This is a fundamental dream for a large share of humanity.

00:22:56
Speaker 2: In fact, it’s always been so.

00:22:59
Speaker 1: Greek and Rome Roman elites commonly had country estates they could retire to. Navajos in the American Southwest famously live separated from one another in the Four Corners High Desert. These desires were the very core of homesteading, which from the early sixteen hundreds to the nineteen thirties enabled Old worlders to settle America and the West, but modern urban life means that the majority of us never come close to such an experience now.

00:23:31
Speaker 2: Jobs and intertwined.

00:23:33
Speaker 1: Social connectivity keep us in cities, so to.

00:23:37
Speaker 2: Having and raising children.

00:23:39
Speaker 1: Living rurally may be cheaper than living in the city, but in twenty first century America, it’s way less convenient for those who hang onto their dream of life away from cities, and many of us do. Actually living such a life most often takes on the form of a second place, a cabin on the lake or in the woods, or it awaits retirement when children are gone and no one has to worry about access to local schools, the quality of their teachers, or whether roads are PLoud enough for you to make it to work. Or it means foregoing children and working from home, both of which happen to be far more possible in the twenty first century than they’ve ever been before.

00:24:31
Speaker 2: Don’t get me.

00:24:32
Speaker 1: Wrong, I hold no animus against cities. I love their sports and music venues, bookstore events, car shows, restaurants and fine dining. I always thought the Row hit on a near epiphany when he wrote that the happiest humans are those who lived with one foot in civilization and one foot in nature. The question is which foot do you rest on? The foot in nature has long been my choice. It’s not a choice for everyone, nor is it even possible for most, But without children and unmarried for most of my life, I could do it.

00:25:12
Speaker 2: And I never hesitated.

00:25:20
Speaker 1: Drive rural roads anywhere in the West, and there’s this ready insight country life is highly individualistic. That’s not so much the case if you’re in a community governed by a homeowners association, which will keep your neighbors from doing anything crazy but also limits how crazy you get to be Among normal city people. There’s a deep suspicion that some folks are living in the country to avoid the restrictions of ordinary social life.

00:25:49
Speaker 2: And to escape the gaze of others.

00:25:52
Speaker 1: Given the number of posting signs decorated with portrayals of Smith and Wesson revolvers along rural roads, probably some truth in that. There are also enough tradwife influencers online these days that it’s obvious there’s a whole subculture in the countryside that’s trying to emulate the lives of nineteenth century homesteaders and historical reality a pretty brutal existence, especially for women, and in a base reversal from HOA settlements, there’s also what I’ve long thought of as the country vomitorium, a place that’s erected shrines to the Industrial Revolution by vomiting onto their property. Broken travel trailers, rusting pickups on blocks, stacks of tin roofing, and every failed refrigerator or well pumped their first cousins have no room for a vomitatorium does create ecological habitat all, right, but mostly for rodents and snakes, and as a toe hole for every invasive plant Eurasia has ever offered America. For those of us inspired by bioregionalism, by the natural history of the natural West, there’s another possibility. In two thousand and three, former ed Abbey acolyte Dave Foreman founded the Rewilding Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank established to fight the American extinction crisis and return predators and other native species to landscapes at every scale, most particularly to large Western wildlands. Over the quarter century since, the term rewilding and the movement itself have gone global. When Dave Foreman imagined rewilding. He imagined bears, wolves, big cats, and the ecologies associated with them to landscapes on a grand scale.

00:28:00
Speaker 2: I’ve done previous episodes.

00:28:01
Speaker 1: Of the American West describing the classic large scale rewilding projects set in motion by American Prairie in Montana and the Southern Plains Land Trust in Colorado. When I bought my piece of Yellow House Canyon in the early nineteen eighties, rewilding as an idea was still two decades in the future. Nonetheless, my instincts, along with an immersion in the history of the West Texas Canyonlands Country, led me in a direction with my twelve acres no one else I knew then was attempting and a classic of Western expansion. My piece of ground had clearly suffered ecologically from prior owners various efforts to make the canyon pay off on my subsequent place in Montana and the one in New Mexico as well. In Montana, on twenty four acres in the foothills of the Sapphire Mountains on the east side of the Bitterroot Valley, and later on the eleven acres I own on the south rim of the Galileo Valley in New Mexico. The same processes had played out in all these places. Market hunters, wolfers, cattlemen, sheep and goat herders, wheat farmers, and laggers had manipulated and transformed the ground in their quests to make money. Then fire suppression policies had made all their dismantlings and destructions even worse. On pieces of ground of ten to fifteen to twenty five acres, I wasn’t going to be able to reintroduce bison or pronghorns or see wolves impost top down ecological change. But I could affect what I’ve come to think of as reverse homesteading, turning back clock on a piece of land towards some earlier, healthier version of itself. So, in three American places, on the kinds of rural personal home acreages, some sixteen million of us in the West now live on, employing fire, restorative forestry, and a massive removal of exotic weeds.

00:30:24
Speaker 2: I’ve restored my pieces.

00:30:26
Speaker 1: Of ground to make them familiar and welcoming to the original wildlife. According to the Global Rewilding Alliance and the Rewilding Institute, this is called rewilding, and a country has recently settled and altered as the American West. Though I’ve come to a different conclusion about restoration like this, It seems more accurate to me to say that I’m trying to return small pieces of the Western landscape to the form thousands of years of native manages gave them. Restoration like this has a bioregional dimension. One of the arguments about being a citizen of a bioregion is that you should endeavor to understand your place. Learn something about the local geology, about how the landforms you see around you came to be, what was the climate in the past, and how has it changed over time. Immerse yourself in the natural history and ecology of the place, what wild creatures have played dominant roles in the bioregional landscape.

00:31:35
Speaker 2: Then dig deeply.

00:31:36
Speaker 1: Enough into the local human history to be able to track its sequence of inhabitants through time, with a view towards figuring out how they manage the place, or how they altered it by their presence, maybe even how art, photography, and literature have captured the spirit of your local place. There’s a name for this kind of place based study. It’s called bio regional history. My own regional history shows that the three very different Western places I’ve built and lived on were inhabited by Native people who were not that similar to one another, but who seemed to have managed the places I inherited for generally the same ends. The Kiowas, Comanches and plains Apaches, who, for centuries before me camped in Yellow House Canyon, used fire to beat back mesquite shrubbery and maintain the high plains canyons as a country of grasses and forbes for bison and pronghorns. Before I took on the onerous task on my bitter Root Valley place of thinning thickets of young Ponderosa pines and eradicating an exotic plant, spotted knapweed that was suffocating my bunch grasses for two thousand years before me, the Bitterroot sailors had fired the valley to produce an open parkland of widely spaced podses and to maintain those bunch grasses for elk, buffalo and horses. On my Galistale Valley place in New Mexico, starting eight hundred years ago, Pueblo people built eight towns up and down the valley, not abandoning the last of them till two hundred years ago village based farmers who located on the tributaries of the Galistale River. They seem to have left my piece of upland grassland of scattered pinions and juniverse a commons for hunting mule, deer, pronghorns, and elk as had happened on my Texas and Montana places. Their successful management also meant a healthy presence of wolves, bears, coyotes.

00:33:46
Speaker 2: And cats of all kinds.

00:33:48
Speaker 1: In New Mexico, the project for recovering the Pueblo version of a healthy habitat has meant reversing the effects of centuries of overgrazing by Spanish and American settlers who unleash millions of cattle, sheep, and goats onto this fragile high desert environment. The only way to get that Pueblo landscape back is by annually hand pulling thousands of the classic invading plants of a disturbed West. The infamous tumbleweed are Russian thistle being the primary one. Now, though needle and thread and blue Grama, grasses and forbes like winterfat are once again becoming a lure on my place for jack, rabbits and mule deer and the canids and cats that go with them. My thermostat may be turned a few degrees more towards nature romance than most, but I do experience a form of blue stepping out my door into landscapes restored to natural, maybe inspired by thoro are simply by being on the scene and observing the miracle of change. I follow the progressions of the seasons and the timing of migrations. I note when leaves and flowers appear and recede, when certain birds arrive or leave. I’ve had the thrill of lying on my bed beneath a skylight crank open to the morning and listening to elk bugle, and at night hearing the how of wolves returning to the west for the first time in my lifetime. I regularly hear the scream of red tail hawks soaring overhead, and glimpse coyotes trotting by my windows with a sharp, quick eyed look. My nights are brilliant with jittering stars, the steady glow of traveler planets, and the occasional light that flies. Living out I pretty much always know the location of the moon and the stage it’s in, and where the planets are in their pursuit of one another through the ecliptic. I register the movements of sunrises and sunsets along the horizon from solstice to equinox to solstice. In fact, in all three of my western places, I’ve laid out a rock circle with spokes marking the points on the horizon where the sun rises at solstices and equinoxes, an ancient analog chart of a repeating linkage between Sun and Earth. That kind of reveal of place through observed life, but also from knowing the history and science of my places gets me at least closer to the greatest story ever told narrative than any other way of knowing I’ve come across. Although we don’t think of ourselves as such, we are, after all, just another species of animal out of our planet’s evolutionary river. But we’re an animal whose primary difference from the rest is that we have a shot at understanding who we are and maybe why place is so.

00:37:13
Speaker 3: Important to us. Dan, It’s always good to chat with you, absolutely Randall. Today we are discussing the year episode on place and identity and bioregionalism, and I really liked where you started this episode with the bumper sticker that says native Montana. And it’s funny because I’ve lived here for sev sixteen years. Seventeen years I’ve lived in the state of Montana, and if someone asks me, where are you from, I still don’t feel comfortable saying I’m from Montana.

00:38:14
Speaker 2: Say I live in Montana. I’m from Ohio.

00:38:16
Speaker 3: And I don’t know if other parts of the country are as prickly about claiming your identity in this particular state, but man, it’s a real it’s a real thing in the West.

00:38:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a real thing, particularly and I’ve seen it most visibly in the two of the states that I’ve lived in, and in the case of New Mexico, still live in New Mexico, and Montana seem to have that more than anywhere else. And New Mexico I’ve always thought, Okay, so, you know, I asked a guy recently from the you know, old Spanish colonization line, so how long has you your family been in New Mexico? He said sixteen generations? And so I’ve kind of felt like, okay, I mean sixteen generations, that might, you know, And so certainly for the Pueblo people who are still there, still in their pueblos that they’ve been in for a thousand years. I mean absolutely, I think you get to, you know, put native on your bumper sticker. Montana is a little bit different to me because, I mean, this place has barely been a state more than a century and so, you know, and people didn’t really start getting out here until the mining strikes in the eighteen sixties. At least the you know, the people who tend to put those bumper stickers on their on their ram pickups and their Ford f one fifties. So at most, I mean it’s maybe you know, four generations or something. And then you’ve got Native people around who have been in America for twenty three thousand years. So it’s an interesting phenomenon. But as I say that that script, this particular script, it’s, uh, you know, it’s one way of doing it. It’s you know, it’s just another way of of assuming that you are a resident, an inhabitant, and that you have roots in a particular place. And so I’m not going to you know, throw a beer can out the window at some truck that has a Native on the bumper sticker. I mean, for one thing, you’d probably get run over. But for another thing, it’s that’s fine with me, but there are different ways of doing it. And that’s kind of what I was wanting to write about in this particular episode.

00:40:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a I want to I want to go from the bumper stickers we’re seeing on the trucks around town here today back to another thing that tickles me, which is John Wesley Powell’s vision for how to organize, Yeah, the United.

00:40:58
Speaker 2: The West, and you describe in his.

00:41:03
Speaker 3: You describe in this episode his vision of organizing politically organizing the Western United States, according to Watershed, And it’s one of those notions that it never occurred to me, and I think it probably I encountered it in one of your classes, but it makes so much sense, and yet it’s just sort of one of those It was a blip. It was a blip in sort of the discussion. And we continued on with the grid system and all that talk a little bit about where he got that idea and where its roots are and sort of what ultimately killed that idea.

00:41:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think what killed it was inertia and momentum of the grid system. We’ve been using for survey since the seventeen eighties, just posing from like space grid of sect townships and sections and so forth on the landscape. No matter what the landscape beneath the grid looked like. I mean, it could be the tops of the Teetons, it could be the Great Plains, it could be the Pacific coastline. We were just going to impose a grid on it and do this very methodical, kind of very rational way of surveying and offering for sale Western landscape. What Powell realized when he started going west in the eighteen sixties, and particularly after he became the director of the United States Geological Survey and went west every year, was that the West was different from the country where grid survey had been pioneered. I mean, grid survey doesn’t work particularly well in lots of the East, but he concluded that in the West, especially, it did not work at all because the most important item for settlement was water in an arid country and the part of the world that he was interested in, and he wrote a government report in eighteen seventy eight called the Lands of the Arid Region. He realized that you had to somehow conform your political ideals around the availability of water. I mean what this ultimately leads to, and it’s always kind of intrigued me that Powell was not necessarily a champion for it. It came from other minds, but it ultimately led to the rocky mountains in the Sierra Nevadas and the Cascades being set aside as forest reserves and what became the National Forest in order to protect the one place where the water fell. It fell as snow on the peaks, so we’re going to protect that, and that of course becomes the the origin of the public lands in the West. But what Powell ultimately came up with was the idea of damming rivers that flowed out of the mountains, and as head of the Irrigation Survey, he basically did maps that set up most of our twentieth century reservoirs.

00:44:16
Speaker 2: In the West.

00:44:17
Speaker 1: But what he realized that led him to the map we’re talking about, which was submitted to Congress in eighteen ninety, was that rather than imposing this kind of rectangular state size grid as territories and states, what we ought to really be doing in an arid landscape is managing the countryside based on.

00:44:41
Speaker 2: Where water was available.

00:44:43
Speaker 1: And so he put together this remarkable map. It’s still one of the most beautiful creations of the nineteenth century ideas about settlement in the West, with all of what are essentially these little bioregions that are built around streams. And he did it as a color map, and so it’s all beautifully variegated in terms of color. And he drew the the arid line, the isothermal line for aridity around the borders of it, and so the Pacific Coast is kind of excluded because it’s wetter. And then down through the Great Plains, he basically follows the one hundredth meridian, and he says, east of that you can continue to use the grid system, but in this area, I of outline we should base our settlement patterns and our political ideals around these all these little scores of small bioregions. Basically, Congress took a look at that and said, pretty map. Let’s go on to the next issue. And so all we really have is the map and the idea of those bioregions.

00:45:54
Speaker 2: But of course that re emerges a century later.

00:45:59
Speaker 3: You have it’s interesting you point out that the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and I guess I hadn’t really made those connections explicitly in my mind. But the greater Yellowstone ecosystem is sort of a manifestation in some ways of Powell’s vision for the West, even though it’s they’re not necessarily hard political boundaries, but in terms of administrative management of public lands and things like that, it sort of brings to life a vision of what sort of could have been.

00:46:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, So the bioregional idea, I mean had a second life. As I recount in this episode, it was sort of reborn in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, first as an idea by a Canadian and then in a group of kind of former hippies who had been involved in going out during the sixties and seventies and sort of part of the so called back to Land movement when that was happening, you know, inspired by the Whole Earth catalogs and Stuart Brand, which is I say in that this episode.

00:47:15
Speaker 2: You know, it’s the.

00:47:17
Speaker 1: That’s the Google of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies for all.

00:47:21
Speaker 3: Those people who want to do it. Another really unexpected parallel for me.

00:47:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s the Google of that time period. And if you flip through those things, I mean, that’s exactly what it is. You can today YouTube, Okay, I want to set up a composting toilet, or you can open up your Whole Earth catalog and look in the index composting toilets how to set them up, and there’s the page with and it’s also includes all the places you can buy one. And yeah, and I mean, it’s just this marvelous coffee table almost sized book that covers every dimension of moving onto the landscape and building a house and setting up a septic system and setting up solar panels and everything. You can imagine what sort of animals if you want to have animals, you know how.

00:48:13
Speaker 2: To try to restore nature.

00:48:15
Speaker 1: And it becomes this kind of guide for what is a rediscovery really of Powell’s bioregional vision from eighteen ninety and so for about three decades really and basically up until the time when the Battle over Wolf recovery sort of steps on everything else. But through the nineteen seventies, the nineteen eighties, the nineteen nineties, when I was first at the University of Montana in the nineteen nineties, bioregional speakers were showing up like two or three times a semester. I mean I went to hear Gary Schneider speaking the Wilma Theater in about nineteen ninety five, and it was an absolute overflow crowd of people, people standing in the aisles in the Wilma upstairs and downstairs to hear Gary Schnyder talk about bioregionalism and settling the land. And then in the early twentieth century it kind of dwindles away over new battles in the West. But as I point out in this episode, we now have sixteen million people who are living the way you and I do. I mean you live this way too. Not off the grid, although I did that for a while, but in these rural places where you’re down a dirt road and you have neighbors maybe in view, and most of them actually are pretty far away, and you have a piece of land of five ten, fifteen, twenty thirty acres and you’re deciding how to settle on it. And so the bioregional idea is to, as it’s been resurrected, is to think of yourself in terms of being a native, not necessarily as I’m from. I’m a native of Montana, I’m a native of Wyoming, but in your case, I’m a native of the Paradise Valley and the Yellowstone River Corridor, and so what I talk about in the episode obviously is the three places where I’ve done that same thing.

00:50:29
Speaker 3: Yeah. The one big distinction I’d like to draw between where I live and where you’ve lived is that you’ve gotten your weeds under control. And that’s an uphill battle for us. But that always struck me as like I couldn’t describe your place in the bitter to someone without talking about.

00:50:50
Speaker 2: The knap Weight Association. Yeah.

00:50:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a battle of many years. But I did manage to get that place. I had twenty four acres in the Bitter Root, and I mean all the surrounding countryside, of course, was infested with knapweed, and so was my place, and I managed to get it under control.

00:51:13
Speaker 2: But it took me years and years to do it.

00:51:15
Speaker 1: But what I discovered when I did that, and this has been the case in New Mexico too, where what previous settlement, I mean what I described in this and this, by the way, this episode is kind of the topic of the next book I’m doing, which is called Homestead. And in all these places in West Texas and the Bitterroot Valley in Montana and in New Mexico. What you’re kind of battling are the mistakes that people who owned the land before you made, and in a lot of instances, you know, not to single out a particular economic activity, but the truth is it’s been grazing and overgrazing that has allowed weeds to spread. In New Mexico, the battle against weeds is it’s against the tumbleweed. You know, the Russian thistle.

00:52:11
Speaker 2: That I’m very familiar.

00:52:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean, and it’s a battle. I mean, my wife Sarah and I have for years pulled up tumbleweeds by hand. But what I’ve realized both in in all three places, really West Texas, the Bitter Root and the Galasal Valley in New Mexico in particular, is that if you can get the weeds removed, the original vegetation is there. It’s underneath the weed cover and it’s just strangled. Especially when I managed to clear spotted nap weed off my place in the bitter Root, I mean that beautiful bunch grass prairie just began to bloom and blossom underneath it.

00:52:54
Speaker 2: But it took removing the napweed to get it to come through.

00:52:57
Speaker 1: And that.

00:53:00
Speaker 2: What you’re doing there is not just.

00:53:03
Speaker 3: Property management, like there’s a there’s an element to that work that for you has a higher meaning, right, yeah.

00:53:12
Speaker 2: It does.

00:53:12
Speaker 1: And what you know, so what we generally call that is rewilding. I mean you you know, which Dave Foreman sort of launched in the early twentieth or twenty first century, and of course it’s all over the world now there are international rewilding associations and we’re kind of American prairie and Montana is doing that. The Southern Plains Land Trust on a ranch they on in Colorado is rewilding, and it you know, it refers usually to returning the predators and the big ungulates and and so on twelve acres of land or twenty five acres of land. You know, you can’t I can’t really reintroduce a grizzly bear or a wolf or a buffalo. But what I can do is try to get the land back to the health a healthier version that it was once in and as I’ve been doing it on and did it first in West Texas and Yellow House Canyon and then in the Bitter Root Valley and now in the Galasale Valley in New Mexico. What I’ve realized I’ve really been doing is I’m trying to return the land under my management to the way it was managed by the prior inhabitants. Not the New Mexican sheep herders who brought in the tumbleweed, not the cattleman in the bitter Root, who are the bee keepers who spread spotted napweed across the entire valley, But I’m talking about the native people who had it, And so I’m really trying to replicate Native management in New Mexico of what the Pueblo people did with that country in the bitter Root, it was the bitter Root Salish and the sort of landscape they managed and created. In West Texas, it was all those plains people like the Comanches and the Caiowas and the southern Cheyennes.

00:55:00
Speaker 3: Well, Dan, always a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you, Randall. It’s been great fun doing this.

00:55:09
Speaker 1: M