00:00:05 Speaker 1: I don't picture running out of roads. I don't picture running out of towns. I don't picture running out of places to go shopping. I picture running out of wilderness. 00:00:17 Speaker 2: The term American wilderness is evocative to me, pulling forth a collage of emotions, imagery, and ideals. Oddly, I'd draw from it a sense of personal identity, even though I live most of my life inside the confines of modern civilization. I'd like to think I came up with all of this on my own, or I would have got to the same place if I was the first and only human to ever set foot in North America. But I don't think I would have. I'm in search of the unique journey that built American ideals on wild lands or wilderness, and even more foundational than that, to defy what wilderness is. 00:01:02 Speaker 3: It's ironic. 00:01:04 Speaker 2: This is a big and complex story, and I think it should be in the survival kit of basic knowledge of every American, because every one of us has a doctrine on it. For this challenging pilgrimage, I've recruited the health of a worthy group of authors. Good authors doctor Dan Flores, doctor Sarah Dant, Stephen Ranella, and Hal Herring. This story is about why wilderness is still here in modern times, how we interact with it, and how the land formed American identity. Let me warn you that this is going to be a lot of workfolks, and let it be known that the Bear Grease Academy of Backwoodsmanship, Philosophy and Culture is now in session. You may be able to find a buckscrape, or use your phone to find hunting land, or even catch a catfish on a trotline. 00:02:00 Speaker 3: But if you don't know the deep history. 00:02:02 Speaker 2: Of your own passion, you ain't no backwoodsman. This is gonna be good, and I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one. 00:02:12 Speaker 4: Romantics and environmentalists in particular have elevated it to almost a sacred word. It has a kind of a meaning as an idea that I'm not sure other parts of the world other cultures completely share. 00:02:38 Speaker 2: My name is Klay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear American Made Purpose built and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place. 00:03:04 Speaker 3: As we explore. What range of mountains is this over here? 00:03:17 Speaker 4: That's the Hamus Range. This is the Orties Mountains. Okay, of course, the range behind Santa Fe is the song grays, the sungread of Cristo, which means blood of Christ. The Spanish colonizers named it that because at sunset, the alp and glow made the mountains look like they were bloody, covering blood on the snowfields. 00:03:42 Speaker 2: You may recognize this man's voice. This is author and historian doctor Dan Flores. I'm in New Mexico on his back porch. The song grade di Cristo start in Poncha Pass in central Colorado, with ten peaks over fourteenth thousand feet. They pushed two hundred and forty two miles south, ending at Glorieta Pass near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The landscape closer to us between here and these blood colored mountains is a less intimidating stretch of arid high desert. 00:04:18 Speaker 3: I want to describe to you what it looks like. 00:04:20 Speaker 2: Imagine the rosette pattern of the jaguar spots, but it's set on the brilliant tan of an American mountain lion. The rolling hills are tinted beige by the dead winter grasses and bleached soil, but littered with dark juniper clumps. Doctor Flores wants to read me a quote. 00:04:42 Speaker 4: You understand, this isn't the third place I've had wonderful I have done this, so I'll read you this. J. Frank Dobe was a very famous folklorist and author of the wild but I thought i'd bring you up. He just stand in this spot and read what he says. The greatest happiness possible to a man is to become civilized, to know the pageant of the past, to love the beautiful, and then retaining his animal instincts and appetites to live in a wilderness. 00:05:23 Speaker 3: That's that's powerful, isn't it. Yeah, that's what we want to do. 00:05:26 Speaker 2: We want to be able to have We want to live in civilization. 00:05:30 Speaker 4: Yeah, you want to be civilized. You want to have access to the world, right, But it's it's so it's the thorough thing. Threau had this comment once about you know, I like to live with one foot in civilization and one foot in wilderness. And the question is always which one do you rest on? Which foot do you rest on? What I've always liked to do is to rest on the the wilderness foot, and then town's only twenty minutes away. 00:05:58 Speaker 2: J Frank, Dobie, Henry, David Threaux, and doctor Flores had and have a refined doctrine on dealing with wilderness. Doctrine just means the way that you live, and truthfully, we all have a doctrine on wild places. If you live near one or have never been to one, you have a doctrine. You can't be doctrine less. I'm in search of America's wilderness doctrine and how I got mine. I think a good starting place in this conversation is to define wilderness, which will learn is tricky. I asked Stephen Ranella about his definition. 00:06:39 Speaker 1: I'll tell you I think when I hear the word American wilderness, my working present day twenty twenty four definition of American wilderness. My usage is relative. There are landscapes where I would go, as an example, the north slope of the Brooks in Alaska. I would say that's wilderness because relative to everything else that is wild. 00:07:13 Speaker 3: If we put. 00:07:13 Speaker 1: Wildness on a one to ten, a one being Manhattan, and then we had to find a ten. When I say wildness natural ecosystem, I'm gonna use another controversial term, and I'm gonna say absence of man Okay, absence of man. If Manhattan is a one, we need a ten. The north sorp of the Brooks Range is the ten. It's wilderness. And then let me say that if we imagine that framework that scale one to ten, I would say, I suppose wilderness starts at around eight. Here's another I'm gonna add another thing that's gonna trip some people out. That's gonna trip some philosophers and academics out. They're most they most closely resemble relative to everything else. This landscape looked like upon European contact with one important caveat Those places were sparsely inhabited by individuals at that time, potentially with great absences that any given spot might oh ten years, twenty years, thirty years without seeing it person, and there were people on the landscape. That's my sort of working definition that it like I can't ever look at it in isolation. 00:08:24 Speaker 3: I have to look at it. 00:08:24 Speaker 1: Like compared to what so I'm like, it's wilderness compared to everything that's not. You're not going to find two people that are going to give you the same definition of this. 00:08:36 Speaker 2: On the Ranella scale of wildness, the wild O meter, wilderness starts at eight out of ten. The spectrum swings from Manhattan to the Alaskan Brooks Range. That's a helpful analogy, but shows the subjective nature of the term. Will learn that there are more concrete ways to define it. The word wilderness was first used in the thirteenth century the twelve hundreds, but gain steam in the thirteen hundreds when John Wycliffe's English translation of the Bible use the new word to describe the uninhabited land that's spoken of all throughout the Old book. The deep etymology of the word stems from the Norse languages, and its root is the word will, as in self willed or wilful. From willed comes the word wild, which is also connected to the Old Swedish word for boiling water, meaning unruly, chaotic, or confused. The second part of the word wilderness, the dur will durness, is the Old English word for animal diordeo r. Put this together with this new word wild and you get wild dore. And then you add a ness and you can see the word wild door ness, which essentially means self willed or uncontrollable land of wild beasts. Holy smokes, I like the sound of that. It kind of makes me quiver a little bit. But this word needs more definition. Doctor Sarah Dant is a professor and author and she works at Weber College in Utah. She just published a book called Losing Eden. I asked her to define wilderness. 00:10:29 Speaker 5: So wilderness, I think can be many things. It kind of depends on who you ask. If we went into a bar and asked fifteen different people what's wilderness, we'd get fifteen different ideas and probably a small bar fight in the process. So you know, if we think about it just as a kind of an emotional reaction to it, it is this place that we go where there aren't other people, right, It's the place that we go and get to be much more one on one with nature. I think fundamentally, for a lot of people, that's wilderness. But that's not what the political definition is that creates boundaries and puts up signs and creates management plans. That's a very different idea about wilderness. In that case, it's the law says basically it's an area that has been untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain. And so it's this idea that it's it's a place that a lot of people would probably use the word christine. But I think those kinds of ideas, how do we talk about places that are not developed? How do we talk about places that don't have roads and motor vehicles and houses? Those places have real value in part now because they're so scarce. 00:11:51 Speaker 2: Doctor Dant brought up two important components of our conversation. Number one, there is a legal definition of wilderness, as in federally regulated wilderness with a capital W. 00:12:03 Speaker 3: Will get to it. 00:12:04 Speaker 2: Secondly, and most importantly, wilderness, the self willed land of wild beasts, has value because of its scarcity. 00:12:13 Speaker 3: Will come back to this. 00:12:16 Speaker 2: I want to introduce you to another fella, but don't let the Alabama gravel in his voice fool you. Hal Harring is a lifelong writer and spokesperson for wild Lands who's lived most of his adult life in Montana, but he was born and raised in Alabama. I asked him to define wilderness. 00:12:37 Speaker 6: Well when I was younger and living in Alabama, when I was a kid, I didn't really have a definition of it. And then when I was older and started traveling, like in Montana at Wyoming, it was beyond the legal definition or the federal you know, regulation type definition, the designation. I think think it was a feeling that there were these places left on this earth that you could enter. I mean, I mean the language in the Wilderness Act is that where it will remain untrammeled, where man is a visitory, does it remain all that? And that's true, that was required maybe to hold on to this feeling. But it's the feeling of you're now entered a place that's ruled by something other than the endeavors of human beings, and it's a place that's ruled still by older laws. Nature's time, the world's time, not yours. But to me it was freedom. Freedom was the first thing. 00:13:41 Speaker 2: Wilderness is a feeling a place not governed by man's laws. Now, that's interesting, and the legal definition of wilderness was designed to preserve a feeling. That's even more interesting. How Aldo Leopold, who's considered the father of modern American wildern Us will get more to him later to find wilderness as quote a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two week's pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, and other works of man. 00:14:21 Speaker 3: End of quote. 00:14:23 Speaker 2: That's really functional, But his description of absorbing a two week pack trip probably delivers the most understandable definition to this day. And I did think it was cute that he used the word cottages. I have a question for Steve Ranella, what does the word wilderness do for you at an emotional level? 00:14:46 Speaker 4: Like? 00:14:46 Speaker 2: What does does it make you feel warm and fuzzy inside? Does it make you fearful? Does it make you want to go there? Does it make you not want to go there? What does what does that term do for you? 00:14:56 Speaker 1: Makes me want to go there, but I don't need to go there to love it being there. I have that I have a fear of running out of it. I don't picture running out of roads. I don't picture running out of towns. I don't picture running out of places to go shopping. I don't picture running out of airports. I don't picture running out of subdivisions. I don't picture running out of golf courses. I picture running out of wilderness. 00:15:27 Speaker 3: Because you don't. 00:15:27 Speaker 1: Get it back. We've never gotten. You don't get any of it back. Once it's gone, it's gone. Man, It's like when you lay some concrete over it. 00:15:37 Speaker 3: It's gone. Gone. 00:15:42 Speaker 2: Everybody we've heard from so far values wilderness. They like it, which is a very new idea to mankind, well sort of. In his book Wilderness in the American Mind, Roderick Nash states that all ancient culture had an idea of paradise as a garden, which is actually the antithesis of wilderness. A garden is ordered and protected, delivering resources and security. It's controllable, it's manipulated by man. Considering that primitive man's number one concern was simply survival, and lack of control was a dangerous variable. Man's greatest good was to live a life that rose out of this self willed land. This has been a roadmap to man's journey over the last ten thousand years. Rising out of wilderness and the rudimentary mechanism of man's control over nature were number one. Fire initially used to beat back the vegetation and make clearings that offered visibility and safety. Yeah, it's like super primitive number two, the domestication of wild animals to secure meat so horses, and number three domesticating wild plants and cultivating land to create predictable food sources through crops. These things congregated people, increased birth rates, and probably most importantly, joined human minds in greater numbers into collaboration on what it meant to be human, of which a primary definition became humans overcome wilderness and bring it into control. I am very aware that this is a very general summation of human history that does not include modern hunter gatherer tribes that are still functioning at some level even today. The word wilderness is used two hundred and forty five times in the Old Testament of the Bible and thirty five times in the New Testament. The garden of Eden was the antithesis of wilderness. In God's first punishment of man was to cast him out of. 00:18:02 Speaker 3: The garden into it. 00:18:04 Speaker 2: Later, the Israelites would wander in the wilderness for forty years as a judgment and a time of testing and tribulation. In the New Testament, Jesus met Satan himself in the wilderness in the Temptation of Christ. The wilderness was a dangerous place. The wilderness is where you went to die. A first century Roman poet named Cheris criticized the earth as greedily possessed by mountains in the forests of wild beasts. In Greek mythology, a half goat half man creature named pan was the lord of the woods, and the English word panic stems from the striking fear one feels when in the woods and you hear strange, unexplainable sounds. It's clear that wilderness cuts deep into our culture. It's also important not to confuse the Old World's a preciation of rural pastoral settings with wilderness. Art, folk tales, and music celebrating livestock and farming were very real and popular, but that's not wilderness. To this day, Western culture often views disassembling wilderness and making it productive as a moral obligation. Roderick Nash wrote this intellectual legacy of the Old World to the New not only helped determine initial responses, but left a lasting imprint on American thought. When Europeans got here, we thought it was our moral obligation to tame what we perceived as wilderness. 00:19:45 Speaker 3: The word wilderness. 00:19:46 Speaker 2: Has forces behind it that may not be evident and on these ideas form the basis of understanding of modern wilderness, and it's evident that our current situation on Earth, comparing it to early man, has massively shifted. Once civilized areas were scarce and the greedy wild lands filled with awful beasts dominated this place. But this last epic of man's journey has turned the tables, and now from the dominating platform of civilization, we're trying to save an artifact of wild lands. The contrast between the old world's ideas about wilderness and many ideas today are vastly different. Here's doctor Flores breaking down what wilderness is, which will lead us into a broader picture of America's wild ometer. 00:20:39 Speaker 4: I think I would have to say that wilderness is both a reality and an idea, and there's certainly overlap between the two. But one of the fascinating parts of the whole wilderness concept, and especially the role that wilderness has played in America, where environmentalists, romantics and environmentalists in particular have elevated it to almost a sacred word. It has a kind of a meaning as an idea that I'm not sure other parts of the world, other cultures completely share. It's probably more important to us as a people, to Americans, to Americans than it has been to anyone else around the globe. And that has to do with the peculiarities of American history. 00:21:35 Speaker 2: The peculiarities of American history. I'm very interested in this, doctor Flores, But like a load of unfolded laundry sitting on the table before the company shows up, we've got some work to do before we can talk about that. He said, it's an overlapping reality and an idea. We've been talking about the idea of wilderness, but the reality is the actual federal designation of public land called wilderness areas. The Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty four instituted this, but the idea of wilderness can be experienced outside of these areas. This is going to be the most boring part of this podcast, but we've got to do it because you're enrolled in the Bear Grease Academy. Here is an excerpt from the Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty four. It's ridiculously boring, but this is modern man's attempt to preserve wildness. I'm kidding, it's really not that bad. 00:22:37 Speaker 3: Here goes. 00:22:40 Speaker 2: In order to assure that an increasing population accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition. It is hereby to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people, the present and future generations, the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness. For this purpose, there is hereby established a National Wilderness Preservation System to be composed of federally owned areas designated by Congress as wilderness areas, and these shall be administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness. A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this act an area of undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence without permanent improvements or human habitation which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions, and which generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable. It has outstanding opportunities for solitude, or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation, has at least five thousand acres of land, or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition, and may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historic value. 00:24:52 Speaker 3: We're done. 00:24:53 Speaker 2: Steve Vernella probably could have jazzed that writen up a little bit, but that's pretty descriptive, but whole smokes. As There been some controversy around the definition of wilderness in the last one hundred years. 00:25:07 Speaker 3: We'll get to it. 00:25:08 Speaker 2: But wilderness with the capitol W is the strictest, most conservative land USIC designation in America. Today, there are eight hundred and six federal wilderness areas that encompass over one hundred and eleven million acres of land. That's larger than the state of California. Wilderness encompasses about seventeen percent of all public land, and about five percent of all American land. 00:25:38 Speaker 3: Is federal wilderness. That's a lot of land. 00:25:47 Speaker 2: I now want to redirect the conversation back to the deep human history with wild lands. 00:25:55 Speaker 3: This is a transition. 00:25:56 Speaker 2: So here's doctor Flores talking about the time time before these Greek poets, before agriculture and civilization, and when humans were hunter gatherers. 00:26:08 Speaker 4: I think that wilderness is a very recent idea in history. 00:26:14 Speaker 3: Frankly, wait a minute, what we just said. 00:26:19 Speaker 2: Wild lands are ancient, But what we now call wilderness, raw land uninfluenced by man, is the oldest natural thing there is. Yes, but the idea of designating it out as something different, in calling it wilderness, is new. 00:26:37 Speaker 4: Carry on, doc, I mean, I've spent a good deal of time writing about why people migrated around the world twenty five thirty thousand years ago, ultimately finding the Americas, the last of the great continents on Earth that we found and the reason we left Africa, went to Europe, then went to Asia, and finally found our way into North America and South America was essentially a search for what the modern idea of wilderness implies we were looking for places without prior human presence. And the reason we were looking for places without prior human presence is because of the ability of those places to harbor big animals with no prior experience with humans as predators, and that made them easy to hunt and to take down. And so that search for a place out there in the world where you were not finding human footprints, you weren't finding campfires, you didn't see smoke from an encampment on the horizon, but the world appeared to be pristine. That was a very compelling thing that drew people around the world. And so this whole idea of this without humans present, it's probably a really ancient thing that goes back to that sort of search for places with animals. 00:28:08 Speaker 2: And I think it's even our experience inside of our DNA somewhere to search something like that out. 00:28:14 Speaker 3: Yeah, is that a romantic stretch. 00:28:17 Speaker 4: Well, it could be a romantic stretch to say it's part of our genetic makeup, but I'm enough of romantic to actually say that. I think if this is probably intrinsic to who we are, that we instinctively find a kind of a satisfaction and sometimes even a euphoria in places that seem to harbor no signs of other people. And it's a very ancient thing. 00:28:46 Speaker 2: Well, when you think about humans today, not in wilderness business people are looking for unexploited parts of society. Sure there's something that you feel. You know, My good buddy James Lawrence always says found a bird nest on the ground, meaning like, wow, this is an incredible opportunity. I mean, really, that's what humans have been looking for forever. 00:29:08 Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a wonderful study somebody did in Io Wilson's book The Biophilia Hypothesis about landscape art around the world, and landscape art around the world tends to portray and we tend to the observers of landscape art tend to react most positively to representations of places that show trees that don't appear to have been stripped of fruit, or branches of undisturbed herds of animals that don't seem to be reacting in alarm. And the argument in that particular essay was that this is a replication of what we were looking for as we were migrating around the planet. We were looking for places that had evidence of us being the first there, and it's that kind of sense. I think that that powers this instinctive reaction about wilderness. 00:30:11 Speaker 2: Designating wilderness is a new idea on planet Earth, but it's an artifact from deep human history and doctor Fluores's book Wild New World. He argues that a major factor in early human migration was to find blank spots on the map with unmolested animals easier to hunt. We were biologically rewarded for finding the most humanless landscapes possible, and that's been translated into our epigenetics. I had to google what that term meant, but it's a change in the way our genes work as influenced by our behaviors and environments. So interaction with wild places didn't change our genes, but it changes the way our body reads DNA sequences. We developed a taste for places without humans, and we're biologically rewarded for it. I cannot say if it's nature or nurture, but I have felt that reward for most of my life. I want to go to the wildest places. Did Gary believernucom teach me that? And I adopted the doctrine that was part of it? But then who taught him? It's like looking in a mirror with a mirror behind you. Here's doctor Flores on some info on Indigenous ideas on wilderness. 00:31:35 Speaker 4: To be sure indigenous people occupying landscapes. So, for example, in North America, after the pleacescene extinctions, after that first fifteen thousand years of the human presence, once all the many of the big charismatic animals are gone, there's this ten thousand year period which I refer to in well in the world as Native America, when people go for ten thousand years in North America and managed to preserve most of the biological diversity of the continent. By the time Europeans arrived, that diversity is still present, still exists. 00:32:14 Speaker 3: But I don't think, at least. 00:32:16 Speaker 4: There's not any evidence from any of their cultures, their traditions, or their stories that they looked on parts of North America as wilderness places. I mean, they certainly would, for example, go and seek out a particular butte or a mesa in order to do a vision quest experience to look for something that was that would direct their future actions, or some ally in the world a wolf and elk or something like that. But they didn't seek out what many Europeans in the last five hundred years sought out when they were trying to find wilderness. So that means to me that wilderness is a relatively recent and unique phenomenon, and it probably does come about as a result of a reaction to emerging civilization. As civilization begans to particularly spread across the Middle East and Western Europe and Asia, there comes to be as so often as the case in human affairs and appreciation for what's being lost, and what's being lost are those lands where the human imprint is not nearly as impressive. 00:33:36 Speaker 2: Native Americans didn't have a word equivalent to the English word wilderness. However, it's hard not to imagine that they knew when they were in places far away from home, a place they wouldn't stay, a place that was more absent of human existence. Their worldview was vastly different from the Europeans, but I still think they probably had that fee that how Herring spoke about earlier. Doctor Flores also said scarcity produces value. That's very important to the modern conversation about wilderness. Here's doctor Sarah Dant. 00:34:16 Speaker 5: So let me see if I can kind of put this together in a way that makes sense. So one of the things that we as almost as a species, we're almost hardwired to find value in things that are rare. And when we look first at the colonial experience, there's a lot of wilderness and not much, you know, controlled land. Certainly, you know, I don't want to use that word civilized is pretty loaded, but you know, farming land, raising land, managed lands, and so wilderness isn't valued, it's feared. But as we transition from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, there becomes this growing awareness that wait a minute, we're about to cut all the trees down on build houses in the last places. 00:35:04 Speaker 2: Thank you, doctor Dant, and I'd like to officially transition and call this next section the introduction to early American doctrine on wilderness that produced our modern ideas about wilderness that flows right off the tongue. Will now embark on understanding on a more specific level, the flow that produced the American worldview on wilderness. The seventeen and eighteen hundreds were a romantic era in America in regards to wilderness. Society had begun to move beyond the long standing fear of desolate places, and it started to become trendy to like them and guess where it all started in the cities where literature and art were being digested. In seventeen fifty seven, Edmun Burke wrote a peace Call, the Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Roderick Nash would write that Burke expressed the idea that terror and horror in regard to nature stemmed from the exaltation all in delight, rather from dread and loathing. 00:36:20 Speaker 3: This was a shift. 00:36:21 Speaker 2: In the seventeen seventies, botanist and writer William Bartram would take Burke's words sublime and use it extensively to describe wild places. He'd write that God's wisdom and power were manifested in wilderness. And Bartram was also the founding father of Romantic primitivism, stating that man was content and at his best in his primitive state inside of wilderness. 00:36:44 Speaker 3: This was really trendy. 00:36:46 Speaker 2: Man had fought to separate himself from wilderness for thousands of years, and now that civilization had begun to conquer it on a massive scale, we were going back to it, but in smaller. 00:36:58 Speaker 3: Doses, because we could still live in civilization. 00:37:01 Speaker 2: Daniel Boone's first hand account of hunting in Kentucky in seventeen eighty four, written by John Filson, was wildly philosophical about the pleasures of wilderness and man's harmony in nature. 00:37:14 Speaker 3: This was a new idea. 00:37:15 Speaker 2: In eighteen eighteen, Estwick Evans wrote, how great are the advantages of solitude? How sublime is the silence of nature's ever acting energies. There is something in the very name of wilderness which charms the ear and soothes the spirit of man. 00:37:32 Speaker 3: There is religion in it. End of quote. 00:37:37 Speaker 2: We're beginning to hear strong spiritual vibes in the narrative. 00:37:41 Speaker 3: And I know this is kind of boring. It's really not as fascinating. 00:37:45 Speaker 2: But we're in the bear grease academy, folks, so sucking up buttercup. 00:37:50 Speaker 3: So we move on. 00:37:52 Speaker 2: But I haven't told you the whole story of how the Bible viewed wilderness. It was a howling, dangerous place, a place you went to die, but it was also the place that you might find God. Moses encountered the burning bush and God's direct speaking in the wilderness. Elijah heard the still small voice of God in the wilderness and was fed by Ravens Jesus retreated to the wilderness to pray, it's dangerous there but has potential of great reward. American writers and thinkers began to focus on this. By the eighteen forties, wilderness was very popular in literature, and Roderick Nash would write the capacity to appreciate wilderness was, in fact deemed one of the qualities of a gentleman. Enjoyment of wilderness for them was a function of gentility. I now want to go back to doctor Flores. 00:38:52 Speaker 4: I would argue that one of the reasons, you know, so, we start with the idea of wilderness very early. Then the Romantic aid, which is when Thoreau is writing Walden and writing in his journals and writing about, you know, in wildness lies the preservation of the world, as he writes it. I think early misapprehension of what North America was, which downplayed the Indian presence. And then the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century, which lasts from the eighteen twenties to the eighteen eighties or so, which doesn't just produce people like Threroaw, I mean, it produces many of our great early American painters of wild lance Albert Berstett, Thomas Moran, the Hudson Bay painters of State New York. Their conception of what they were portraying in wild country was you were getting to see the face of God. They were all influenced by Christianity still, and their notion was wild country was the last best expression of God's handiwork. And so when you stood before a wh old landscape with soaring mountain peaks or a waterfall, you were standing in the presence. 00:40:07 Speaker 3: Of the divine. 00:40:09 Speaker 4: And that's one of the things that began to give wilderness a kind of a sacred feeling, and almost began to turn it into a kind of a religious pilgrimage to particular places that preserve this idea of that God's last great handiwork. And we're looking at this mountain range, we're looking at the face of God. I mean, it's the idea of what the Romantic is called the sublime, and the sublime is a landscape that as you're standing in front of it and looking at it, you're so moved emotionally that you feel a kind of a religious almost. 00:40:46 Speaker 2: A flight for the natural and the spiritual kind of overlap. 00:40:50 Speaker 4: I over absolutely overlap and so the painters like Beerstott and Moran and the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole and people like that. That's why they were trying to portray. They were trying to portray God's hand in nature. And the people who sought out those places, like Threau climbing Mount Todden in Maine and getting to the top and saying contact, contact, I've finally come face to face with it. That's what they're doing with this whole kind of pilgrimage to wild places. 00:41:27 Speaker 2: In the early eighteen hundreds, American artists began to paint wilderness, which became a symbol of national identity. We didn't have beautiful architecture in thousands of years of history like Europe, but we had wild places. Wild Lands were becoming our calling card, our Instagram bio. Hi, my name is America, and we have wild places. Henry David Threau was born in eighteen seventeen and inherited the momentum of Romantic primitivism. By the age teen fifties, he was rocking and rolling as one of America's leading voices for wilderness. But his message cut deeper into the heart of humanity than did this nationalism and primitivism. At a public speech in New England in eighteen fifty one, he said, I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, and he ended the speech by saying in wildness is the preservation of the world. He was a transcendentalist and believe man's connection to nature to essentially be the salvation of his soul. 00:42:40 Speaker 3: Man. 00:42:40 Speaker 2: That was a lot of work, a lot of talking. This is the Bear Grease Academy. We don't take weeks off for pleasure and leisure. I'm the David Goggins of the backwoods discipline of learning. 00:42:52 Speaker 3: Who we are. 00:42:53 Speaker 2: I'm interested in why I think what I think. I just popped out of the womb in Montgomery County, Arkansas and found myself immersed in a culture. And as Americans, we value independence, but I think that's often deceptive for how original our ideas actually are. 00:43:12 Speaker 3: I wanted to ask. 00:43:14 Speaker 2: Steve Ranella a question and it quickly turned into a total train wreck. Here goes So throw was the original guy in America that started talking about this stuff? Yeah, okay, so okay, you may have answered my question with your cynicism right there. He really was. He was he was the architect in America. Oh, he had this deep do wilderness effect on thought. You just said the same thing as him. 00:43:45 Speaker 3: But what I'm asking going my question is as Steve. 00:43:52 Speaker 1: His pond by his Miles house was not what I would call wilderness. 00:43:57 Speaker 3: Okay, how much? How much would would he have affected you? And you not even know it? None? I find that really hard. 00:44:07 Speaker 1: I could have fell from I could have fell from outer space with my brain the way it came out of my mother's womb. I could have fallen from outer space, and I would have walked around the planet and mosied around the planet, and I would have wound up saying I like the north slope of the Brooks Range better than that. 00:44:25 Speaker 3: Town over Yonder. I just would have ye, yes, I listen. 00:44:30 Speaker 1: Had I never ever heard of throw and I'd be just I almost wish that that was the case. Would not change my view of whether or not I appreciate wild animals in wild places. 00:44:45 Speaker 3: I don't. At the most simple level, his thank. 00:44:49 Speaker 2: You like crotchety old, I don't care, No, no, no, I'm not. 00:44:53 Speaker 3: It's that you would come and tell. 00:44:54 Speaker 1: Me that I feel the way I do about wilderness because I had to read throw and like freshman. 00:44:59 Speaker 2: Year, I think, is you feel the way you do about wilderness in part because you're an American man? 00:45:06 Speaker 3: That escalated quickly. Two things. 00:45:09 Speaker 2: Number One, it was a very ill worded question. I shouldn't have even brought up the row. The roau arose as an influential prophet for wilderness, but really what I was trying to ask Stevie boy was how much has been an American influenced your ideas on wilderness. Secondly, I didn't know that the roau was such an emotional trigger word for. 00:45:34 Speaker 3: My distinguished guests. But let's carry on. 00:45:38 Speaker 2: We're gonna start back with my ending statement from the last clip. 00:45:42 Speaker 3: This is embarrassing for both of us. 00:45:44 Speaker 2: Is you feel the way you do about wilderness in part because you're an American? 00:45:49 Speaker 1: Because if you were, it is, oh yeah, you know, I know those Canadians sure hate the stuff. Come on, well, I feel the way I do about wilderness because I'm like a hunter and trapper and fisher, and I'm a student of wildlife. 00:46:02 Speaker 2: What I'm saying is other countries in the East, other countries all over the globe, in different hemispheres and on different continents, do not have a deep core foundational appreciation of wild places like Americans do. 00:46:19 Speaker 3: They don't. 00:46:19 Speaker 1: They might not, they might not have access to them. Well they perhaps there's a little bit of a different perhaps there's a different cultural history, and that that's it. You could you could find a lot of literary figures. You can find a lot of literary figures and historical figures that greatly predate your body. Throw who I'm not. I'm not even who appreciated wildlife of wild places. 00:46:43 Speaker 3: No doubt, huge mistake to have brought up th Row. 00:46:47 Speaker 2: Clearly he was not the architect I thought I was being interviewed. 00:46:51 Speaker 3: Go ahead. 00:46:52 Speaker 2: Where I was going with the question was are the fundamental truths of wilderness so strong that you would have come to these conclusions on your own, which you've emphatically said yes you have, And I agree with that. 00:47:07 Speaker 3: Like you you pop out of the womb and you know EO. 00:47:10 Speaker 2: Wilson's biophelia, like we have this innate love of life, love of things that are alive, and this curiosity, and that's part of what makes us so unique in our humanness, is that we're interested in other stuff. But I think there's a big component of the way that we think about wild places that's deeply American. That's that is not replicated in other places. I mean, we were the first place on planet Earth that demarketed wilderness Federal Wilderness Area. 00:47:38 Speaker 1: Sure, I'm a very very American person, even though I was just saying if I fell from outer space, that I came from my mother's womb and then fell from outer space. Of course I can't go in and unravel what parts of me are American. But I think that you're getting a little narrow to say that appreciation for wilderness is an American phenomenon. 00:48:02 Speaker 2: To Sha, doctor Ranella, to sha great point, and I agree with you. Americans do not have the market on appreciation of or living in wild lands. That's the birthright of mankind. However, that peculiarity of American history that doctor Flores talked about produced something that was unique in the world for how we manage and think about wild places. 00:48:28 Speaker 3: And I'm probably. 00:48:29 Speaker 2: Gonna name my next pack of squirrel dogs Henry, David and Thoreau just to aggravate Steve Ranella. 00:48:38 Speaker 3: I'm sorry, but there's more. 00:48:41 Speaker 1: I think that you will find among many cultures an insistence on wilderness. How can you say it's American? How can you look at people who live in the headwaters of the Amazon and tell me that an appreciation for wilderness is American. Now they would say, they would say they have an appreciation for their home. But I don't want to get overly cute about these definitions. 00:49:10 Speaker 2: Well, all I'm saying is that it appears that we have a unique perspective on wilderness. 00:49:16 Speaker 3: Right or wrong. 00:49:17 Speaker 1: I mean again, you are saying that because I don't know if you like watching nature documentaries, but you'll find that when when you're watching those, you're not hearing a lot of American accents. 00:49:31 Speaker 3: You're hearing a. 00:49:31 Speaker 1: Lot of Brits. Why do they so much? They love it because they killed all of theirs, so they. 00:49:39 Speaker 3: Look at it. It's very exactly, it's very other to them. 00:49:42 Speaker 1: Right. 00:49:43 Speaker 3: Well, I mean that that's just you've proved what I'm saying. 00:49:46 Speaker 1: No, I disprove what you're saying. You said it's American to like wilderness. I think that that's not true. 00:49:52 Speaker 2: What I what Clay said in the question was Americans have a unique perspective on wilderness that has produced something. And so you saying the English killed off all their animals. Is exactly my point. Are our ideas and philosophy on wilderness have allowed it to be preserved at a high level as compared to much of planet Earth. I agree with that, and I mean that's something that's something to be proud of. As Steve always says, cynicism is the chastity of the intellect, and his contribution to this conversation is noted, No, Americans aren't the only people who love wilderness, but America has forged a pragmatic approach to wilderness that came from our peculiar history. I want to end by asking how Herring why we love wilderness, why I love wilderness, and how much we've been influenced by our history. 00:50:52 Speaker 3: Here's what he said. 00:50:56 Speaker 6: First, I would say that you probably value wilderness harshly by cultural for cultural reasons, but also you value wilderness because you're an autonomous hunter and a person who values individual sovereignty and freedom, and so the feeling that you get there is probably independent of any kind of cultural preparation you have. I think certain people, just like in the old days, it would have been like somebody like Jim Bridge, or you know, like Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone. Certain people simply respond to the freedom of wilderness. They always have and they probably always will. 00:51:40 Speaker 3: I like it. 00:51:41 Speaker 2: How that's an answer we can all understand. What we'll hear next time is how the last fifty years of the eighteen hundreds set us up for the conservation movement of the twentieth century. Don't worry, The Bear Grease Academy of Backwoodsmanship, philosopher feet, and culture will start right where we've left off. I'm grateful for our heritage, and I'm interested in how when I arose to consciousness in this mortal realm in nineteen seventy nine, that wild beasts and wild places still existed and were still accessible to the common man like meat. I'm grateful for a father and a culture who took me to them and taught me to value them. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Come on down to the Black Bear Bonanza in Bentonville, Arkansas, on March ninth, twenty twenty four, and. 00:52:37 Speaker 3: See Brent and I. 00:52:39 Speaker 2: Thanks for sharing Bear Grease with your pals, leaving us a review on iTunes, and I look forward to talking with the folks on the Render next week,