00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, vog bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, We're coming from Washington, d C, the nation's capital, and we're joined by a very special guest, Senator Martin Heinrich. But first, UM, I want to touch on something real quick. So the Mediator Podcast Live Tour. We're coming out to four different cities soon. We have Denver, Colorado, tempor Arizona, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Columbus, Ohio. If you want to check out about getting your tickets to come meet me, the Latvian Eagle are actual guests that will be announcing soon. You can go to www. Dot Mediator dot live and get all the info you need. I look forward to meeting you and you're how this is how far into you are on your on your So I'm five years into my first Senate term. I spent four years in the House before that. You guys like senators get a nice generous term compared to I would. I would agree. I think that the House term, the two year term, is part of the part of the problem. Um, it's really hard to do anything to do any long term thinking when you're in the House of Representatives, because you have a two year term. You have a two year term, you know, a year in and you're already completely consumed with your re election. So everyone's gonna be like a senator has even longer than the president. But then you guys, it's not as nice as the Supreme Court justice. Well you know, I guess everybody has there advantages and disadvantag just I like. The thing I like about the Senate is as soon as I moved over from the House, I was able to take on projects that would have a longer time horizon and to really think about more difficult, long term problems. And when you think about conservation, you know, we have a place, the Vice cald Ea in New Mexico that is now in public hands. It's a huge success story, but people started working on it a hundred years ago, in like nineteen sixt so you need to that's when the idea for a bill to do something to put that in public hands first took shape. And so it's it's good to have the room to think big um and you can do that in the Senate. You still have to deal with all the day to day stuff and the the things that are right in front of you, but you can also look out into the future and say, what are we going to do to get to where we want to be? I wanna, yeah, I want to get into some of that stuff. I want to get into some of the details with you about the thinking on long term conservation projects. But can we back up a little bit or back not a little bit, back way up? Can you walk me through sort of how how you're kind of how your career went and how you came to be, you know, sitting in the US Senate. So like when you became aware, when you became aware of that that would be a thing that was possible. I can do that. It won't seem particularly planned out or logical to you. Um. So, I'm an engineer by training, and if I had known that I was going to go into public service, I would have spent a lot less time taken differential equations and heat transfer classes because those who are hard. Um. But uh, you know, I got interested. I was always interested in politics. But there was a moment back in the nineties when I had settled down in Albuquerque after college, when I really first started thinking about running for office. Well, what was it that made you interested in nearing? I just like how things work, and I had an aptitude for math and science, and probably a high school guidance counselor said i've seen your scores, you should be an engineer. And didn't discover something along the way that that necessarily pulled me off that track until after I had the degree and settled in New Mexico. Did you start doing engineering work? I did right out of the gate. I was doing some work out at Air Force Research Labs and uh, working on directed energy, which is an area lasers and microwave stuff that I still work on today. From a policy point of view, Yeah, because you got into I know, you've got interested in renewables and being in New Mexico interested in solar Yeah. No, that that too. I mean that was something that grew out of my engineering days and the early nineties a group of us built a carbon five or solar car that we raced from Dallas to Minneapolis. And that's when I first started thinking that, you know, this stuff is scalable. Yea, So tell me what happened in Albuquerque? Then when you kind of had your political uh you know, awakening or you know, I UM, I decided that I would run for the city council. And before that, I worked on some campaigns to to get the sort of you know, to understand how stuff works. UM. And so I ran some campaigns. I ran a statewide land commissioner campaign that didn't work out. I ran I worked for the Speaker of the House trying to maintain his majority, and helped sort of man not day to day manage, but keep all of his candidates moving in the right direction. And that kind of gave me the skills to then take on a city council race. And that was as far as I was looking out towards the horizon. And uh, you know, once I was on the council, people started encouraging me to run for a congressional seat. Uh. It was a very contested seat. It had never been held by a Democrat in its history. Uh. And that was two thousand and eight. I won that seat, and then a few years three, a little over two years later, the senior senator retires, so another Senate seat opens up. So it was all sort of very very quick and not not something I planned out. I didn't I never planned to be an elected official, much less a United States Senator, When did you within that, like in your life, when did you become kind of aware of the natural world and become interested in I was an environmentalism conservation. I was hugely interested in the natural world as a child. We had a small sort of cow calf operation when I was a kid in Missouri, UM. And when we when we didn't have that, we were living at the sort of the edge of a small town where there were creeks and places. I would come home after school and I just disappeared into the outdoors. And Uh, I always had a strong interest in that. My parents really fostered that. They thought it was great. Uh. My mom didn't always appreciate, you know, snakes coming home into the house or uh the day that my dad brought a tarantula home and left it on the kitchen counter and a fish bowl and by the time she came home, it wasn't in the fish bowl anymore. But for the most part, But for the most part, they really fostered my interest in the outdoors. So did they come from an egg background. Yeah, my dad grew up interesting story. He immigrated here in the thirties from Germany as a young child. UM. But quickly learned to cowboy when he was just becoming a teenager and had years of history running feed lots and running cow calf operations, riding quarter horses. So he was a sort of a legit cowboy from Germany in the thirties. Yeah, got out when the gutting was good. Yeah, they did. They got out at the right time. I think they saw the riding on the wall. His his parents, um, you know, saw what was going on in lots of quarters and said we want a different deal. That's interesting. Yeah, so he kind of became a German American cowboy. Yeah, exactly right. And then you but did you grow up around um, did you grow up around hunting and fishing? Were those things you picked up around fishing? My dad was great about uh. He he enjoyed trout fishing. He enjoyed um fishing for you know, warm water fish, catfish and uh blue girl and stuff like that. But um, he was not a good hunting mentor. Uh. He had worked exploration I think in his twenties and thirties for Anacona copper and was really into geology and if you got him out on a hunt, he would want to look at rocks on the ground instead of being looking at at the horizon. Doesn't really lend itself to being a good mentor and on that kind that finds more arrowheads and exactly right, Yeah, yeah, I have I have the I have the looking out far away that we're looking at the ground tendency. So I tried to teach myself when I was twelve. Um, didn't have a lot of success. And then when I got into my twenties, really took it back up again, found some people who were good mentors. Was really getting into wanting to control my own food. We were growing a lot of food at home. Uh. And it just fit into that in a way that Um, you know, I think your show really appeals to a different demographic of young hunters. And I saw this when you are in New Mexico for the New Mexico Game and Fish their annual fundraiser and spoke to that crowd. Uh. It was interesting to me to see the sort of new hunter old hunter group groupings in that crowd and how demographically different there's this younger generation of backcountry hunters with their trucker hats and a real focus on food. Um and uh, and that that all of that really appealed to me in my twenties and thirties, and it's been a kind of adult onset. Honey, do you in this atmosphere that you're in when you're like in your professional life as a senator in Washington, d C. How unusual is it? Um? How unusual is it to have the background and interest that you have, the outdoor background interest, Like when you're talking to your colleagues, do you find there's a real disconnect when you're speaking about conservation issues? There were people like that? Do they that that's part of the challenges I think in our country's history. You look back at you know, the founding fathers, You look at people like Jefferson, they prided themselves and being naturalists. Um that that doesn't exist so much anymore. They're a handful of people who you know, Dean Heller hunts from horseback on public land. Uh. You know, he's got a real interest in it. But there aren't a lot of us. They're a handful that that are real passionate about ducks. Uh. Senator Booseman from Arkansas, for example. Um, but boy, it's it is not you know, I think it used to be something that really ran through both parties and was much more baked into who people are. And that's why I think it's so hard to get things done today. I mean, I sit on the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission. We met this morning. You know that that whole effort to use duck stamps to buy habitat, which has been going on since I don't know whenever we passed the original Migratory Bird Conservation Act. It's still functions, but we can't even get KNOCKER reauthorized. And um explain the uh the KNOCKER program that does so huch habitat work. It Most of these bills expire at a certain time, and in the past you would have such a focus on the importance of these things. And you know, hunting and fishing doesn't happen without habitat, and the people who wrote these bills knew that. And that's why we have duck stamps, and that's why we have a North American Waterfowl Conservation Act KNOCKER program that invests in maintaining and improving that habitat in our wildlife refugees and in other places across the country. And basic things like that just don't have the same resonance, particularly among leadership. I think that they used to have for this body, And that's one of the things that really worries me. Do you think it's because people have it too good right now? Not too I don't want to say too good. But do you think it's because people don't feel like things are quite on fire the way they might have felt in the thirties, or anybody who who actually experienced the time in this country where you know, elk were extirpated from New Mexico right we had zero point out often when I give talks, you know, so your home state there was down to zero elk and I'm sure like you could pick a particular year on the Carson National Forest and see how many mule deer were harvested, and you'd probably counted on a hand or two or maybe two hands and a foot, like not a lot of big game, undulate wildlife left in the state. And anybody who's experienced that, I think has that sense of urgency. But I also think there's a disconnection now, uh that is not that is not helpful, and uh, you know, getting people reconnected to the outdoors, finding ways for folks who are completely plugged into their their iPhone and living in a more urban environment to understand what actually pays for some of this conservation and create a sense of urgency is a challenge. One of the things I want to jump back to the real equipment is just the thing that I'd like to mention that really kind of made me interested in you when we first met, was that you had It just seems like so kind of strange that that is sitting us senator would apply for a muzzle loader elk tag in the Healand National Forest and then go and do the trip, because I just have in my mind for most of our history it's been the other way around. But I just have in my mind that, like I was like, oh, if the Senator, my hunting would be at some like some duck club. But that's you know, that is how New Mexicans um for for people who rely on that. It's such a part of who we are that those public lands are. I would put that experience up again any ranch tag anywhere in the country, um, you know, to have Plus it's it's a challenge to hunt pressured elk too. I mean it's like, as you know, they behave very differently than the ones who like file into the alfalfa field at five thirty uh in the afternoon and uh and I enjoy that that that's that's the time of of my life that really resets me to who I am, and it keeps me much more centered here. I think that that, like, I think that's kind of what that that centered nous is what I'm still referring without imagine. Like when hearing that, I was like, well, here's a person who presumably has a lot of connections and you know, points of access, but to just kind of be in there, I also like to know and not be you know, just be one of the guys and not be trying to roll like quote unquote US Senator, it's really good to go out and just you know, bump into people in the National Forest here doing the same thing you are. And you're out on the lands that you know, our owned, our that are owned by the people and manage at the federal level, which you're involved in, and and you need that feedback to to to get through some of the rhetoric back here, I mean, people are saying things that are working art there in the opposite so staying very much at the ground level in touch with that I think is really important. And then I have a follow up question because I'm sure everybody's gonna want to know were you successful on your on that? So I should I should step back, And it was actually the ce Bowl and National Forests in particular out um. But you know, if you can pull a tag on the heel that you're doing great, um, and I was. I I it was. I got a great bowl that year. It was a really hard hunt and did not get a lot of opportunities and um, finally found a water hole where this really old bowl had been uh coming in late at night and I got him right before last shooting light. Scheduling has to be hard. Well, that's actually why it was a muscle looader hunt. So here's the deal. Here's how this works. And in uh, you know, we get a calendar usually comes out early in the year. Leadership sets it, and my hunts are based around is there a week when we're at home in October, September, November that we're not working and we can be in state. That's those are the tags I apply for. So it can be a bow tag, it can be a rifle tag, it can be a muzzle loader tag that gets determined by my schedule, and so you just try to try to overlay the timing that works in this job with what's available in the proclamation and and hope it matches up. Would you mind walking us through real quick the story of the Sabinolsa? Am I saying that right? Sabinolsa know so is uh is a juniper tree? Can you can you talk about what happened there? This is something that I've I've explained a number of times. I'd like to hear it from you because I know that you were involved in it from from the ground up, and I think it's something that would uh help listeners sort of understand how you can you know, how someone in your position who's thinking about these things can help sort of shape a conversation around a conservation issue. I think that's very you know, it's it's recent and very relevant. So the Savoyo So is an area in north eastern New Mexico. It's Bureau of Land Management land. It was a wilderness study area for a long time, and the BLM recommended against it because it was too hard to get to try to wrap your head around. That recommended again against it being wilderness because it was too hard to get to. Now the reality was we had lost access to it. So it's an area of canyons and Mesa's really kind of almost red Rock Utah Mountain Lion kind of country, UH, really steep uh and and canyons and Masa tops all jumbled together. Uh. At one point, I'm sure you could get into it legally, but at some point, you know, private property changed hands and there was no legal access to it anymore, not by trail, not by road, not any way, shape or form. And in two thousand nine it was elevated to a an actual wilderness area in the Omnibus Public Lands Act of two thousand nine. Uh I had been working for a number of years trying to identify access into it by purchasing and eastment or purchasing land, trying to figure out a way to get the public in there. Because um I had had a chance to go horseback riding in there with um then Congressman you'd all, now, Senator you'd all, And it's just an amazing piece of ground and it's public lands, so it should be open to the public. We hadn't had a lot of success in that, and this would be something that you would look into using private or public funds. At when I first started, I was it was I was, I think access chair for the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. So we were just looking for a way to do that. We were talking to game and fish, we were looking at various programs that might be able to provide funding for eastments, uh, you know, talking to land owners, trying to identify a way to get in there, and found some property. It turned out some of the eastments didn't didn't actually vet through the legal process um. And so there were lots of tries over the years, and the Wilderness Land Trust stepped up when there was a opportunity for one of the surrounding properties to change hands. And it's one of the most rugged properties. It's about you know, it's about four thousand acres of large, one big deep canyon um. But it was it had a legitimate easement to a graded public road, had a place where people could actually park and then get into all of the rest of this this Bureau of Land Management area. And how many acres roughly is the is the chunk of land that was marooned seventeen thousand Maybe I'd have to vet that but that's the number that sticks in my head. Uh. Yeah, that's that's what the google was for, right. Um. So the Wilderness Land Trust actually bought a property there and offered it up to the Bureau of Land Management, with enormous encouragement from myself, Senator, you do all, Congressman Luhan of Northern New Mexico, I mean, the the the sportsman and public land enthusiasts, and that part of the state had wanted to get in there forever and ever. So we were very enthusiastically supportive. Um, all of that move forward, but it kind of ran out the clock at the end of the last administration, and so it rolled over into a new administration. But I don't want to spend too much time on it. But why is it? Why does that take work? Sometimes I scratched my head on that too. I I this was a gift to the American people. It's like a willing seller, a willing private buyer. And the willing private buyer says, I'm giving it to the federal government. Yes, but the Secretary of Interior at the end of the day has to accept that gift. Do we got we have acreage? Um? And and so you know I met with Secretary Zinky before hearing. He was not sold on the idea. Um, can you he didn't want to add wilderness acreage. I think it's the perspective. I mean, to be fair, you should ask him to his perspective on that. But he was concerned that, uh, you know, you wouldn't want uh, that this had been a quote unquote ranch and that it was going to be wilderness now and you wouldn't want to ranch to become wilderness. And I'm purely projecting now. I don't want to speak for Secretary Zincy at all, but I think maybe he had a picture in his mind of Montana, where wilderness is something up in the mountains and ranch front country is sort of grassland down below and more developed and roaded and all those kinds of things. We had a back and forth and committee. It was not going well. It was pretty sort of head to head, and I just took a step back and said, wait a minute. You know, we're arguing about this in Washington, d C. What might help is if you and I go out there and we ride a couple of horses, and we go into this country and look at it together, and we can figure it out. Uh, and that was kind of a turning point. The secretary ended up coming out to New Mexico heard you know, there were lots of enthusiastic sportsman at the for there for his visit who were like, we are chomping at a bit, we'd really like to see this place opened by Mulitier season. Um. So after that he changed his position, said this is a great conservation opportunity and accepted. We put together a deal where you know, they made sure that you could get motorized access to a parking area and that if they had to get something into fight fires, you can do that under the Wilderness Act and uh, and they ended up accepting the gift. And it's you know, there are some very enthusiastic sportsman in New Mexico of enjoyed their access to the Sabino so as a result, so now with the easement and the actual wilderness area, you can add twenty thousand acres are people camp, uh, bird watch whatever whatever you like to do. You know, you couldn't do it on your land up until that moment. And it's a special place. It's there's some permanent water in there, which in New Mexico you you pour three gallons of water on the ground, if it doesn't soak away, you're gonna have wildlife, right, You're gonna have ducks in places you'd never think to have ducks. When we were in there, there was a big flock of turkeys. Um. You know, there's there's mule deer that use that area. They're a handful of barbary sheep I think still in the area. I mean, they're not native, but they're also not They're exotic more than they are invasive. So they are definitely sort of on the game menu in New Mexico. Some people have, I think, particularly in the east or wetter areas, have a hard time picture in that thirst for water. And you're honest. You know, the guys used to he used to guide elk counters with. They would sometimes take a water jug. This is down Arizona and Arizona. Yeah, they would dump a water jug. Uh yeah, we got it there in south of the rim to Um. But I think this was when this story takes place, was unit nine. But uh yeah, the Fellows just driving down a dirt road and was just like crossing kind of a wet, muddy spot that might have had water in a few days earlier and noticed that possibly an l could rolled in there, and so he just happened. Everybody's packing around whatever, fifty gallons of water in the back of their truck, right, so he dumped out like whatever five ten gallons and basically created a wallow, stuck a trail camp up in the tree branch above. It. Came back two days later and there's all kinds of l hitting. It just smelled that little bit, right, You get that dirt wet and they can smell it a long way away. It's kind of amazing, like how dry some of the places are. Can I feel like that that the story we just talked about leads into uh, the Hunt Act. Yeah, absolutely, you talked about that a little bit, and this was you know, Savyosa was really the impetus for the Hunt act. Um. I was concerned that there are places, uh in this country now and I've seen this, you know, ran Ne Newburgh has done some great episodes where he's had to take a helicopter and airplane in the you know, hunt on public land in Montana, right. We have this in New Mexico with Savino. So so so some other places like the Alamo wacos that were completely land locked. And I realized that the agencies especially want to interrupting montecles people understand, uh, when we talk about landlocked, just just anytime into it, because I just want to make sure people understand what we're talking abou we're talking about landlocked. So you think about you gotta you've got a little tiny mountain chain in the middle desert that comes up off the desert floor, and that mountain chain is public land, it's Bureau of Land Management land, but uh, it is surrounded by private land. And there is no road or trail that has a legal eastment that actually gets into it. So that's your land. And um, you know, if you could get there, you could do all kinds of things on it, but you can't. You can't legally get into it. And I started to realize that this was not a one off. It was not that there are millions of acres spread across the West who can't that that are you know, our public birthright that we can't use? And how can we change that? And so I wrote a bill to make the agency's do a review and figure out, like where are these places? How much do we have? And start to prioritize and do something about it. So let's spend some of those Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars on purely on being able to get the easements to be able to get in and utilize those places again. And for me, that's access. Now. For for Chairman Bishop, I think it means being able to drive anywhere. And that's a problem if you like to hunt big elk, because elk don't like to live on a road. You know my experiences. If you want the big, gnarly old bull elk, you know, you look for the blank spot on the map, not the place with lots of motorized access. Yeah, there are the exceptions, and I'm just gonna bring this up to play Devil's advocate a little bit. But where we just were talking about in Arizona, Unit nine, it's a very routed up place. It's also very heavily managed for you know, trophy potential elk zone And it takes how many years? Yeah, they were they were guiding hunters who's been waiting, buying preference points every year, years of preference points. Yeah. So, and God bless us hunters for you know, putting all that. You know that that costs a lot of money over time and that gets plowed back into habitats. So that's that's that's a great thing. But for me, UM, I do understand what you mean about the conversation, and we spoke with Chairman Bishop about this. Uh is people, I think sportsmen hear the word access and it just has very everyone agrees like, no one would agree that we No one would say like there should be less access. Everyone's like, yes, I agree with more access. But I think that people take the idea that that that that the idea of access is popular and enjoys widespread support, and then you can kind of take what your particular vision is and make it seem like access. So if your particular vision is is UM increasing vehicular access and opening up more stuff for h v use UM, and you build that as as a definition of access, do you find that you're gonna like pick up some support that maybe coming from people who if they knew the details of what your vision was, their enthusiasms were damp in a little bit if they knew that you wanted to turn it into a quad runner race way right, or access for mineral development or something else that's going to impact that habitat long term. Yeah, so I've now become when I hear in certain quarters, when I hear or like increase access, I found myself saying, well, okay, what kind of access we tombolaks? When I think it access, I don't think about opening up places that were previously literally not accessible. Exactly right. That's what the Hunt Act was was written to do. And um, it's it was. It's been popular enough that we've been able to get it into the Sportsman's Package, which is something we've negotiated sort of with both um Lisa Murkowski, Senator from Alaska. So you guys have done it work on a handful projects that work well together. Um, you know, we have our differences, but man, she's a pro, and we've put a sportsman's package together that is very bipartisan. And that's just one of the pieces in it. Um, what will happen there with something like that, Like how do you picture something like that? Like how is it received? How do you get it where it gets the proper attention that it doesn't get drowned out by all the other things you have to deal with, Like do you have to kind of have a calendar reminder the constant Twitter. Yeah, dynamic do you have to have a daily calendar reminder that tells you what it was you were wanting to do in the first place? As you as you kind of sometimes I wonder about that. There is a dynamic in this town of you have to be paying attention to so many different issues that your attention spans becomes a very short term attention span. And for me, Um, I you know, if I had my brothers, I would love to do this job from Taos, New Mexico or Albuquerque here, you know, someplace at home where I was is more my natural habitat and that feeds my soul on a daily basis. Uh So it is. It is focusing on these things long term, which uh you know, gives me sort of long term vision and cuts through the constant social media and television media circus around here. But that's that's it's probably my personal passion for these things that allows me to keep that thread going um when it would be very easy for it to get lost in the clutter. And for another member who doesn't have that personal connection, it probably does get lost in the clutter. I mean it has to only and I'm saying that only because it's not like you're saying, like, if you're watching the news cycle, you're not I don't use I don't use mainstream news cycle in a derogatory way. But when you're watching sort of the national news cycle, you're just not being bombarded by conservation stories. That's exactly right. So it's almost like you, I imagine, politically, you could run the risk of seeing like sort of a fringe person or a person who's like wondering and thinking about things that are maybe kind of long term or kind of like, uh, you know, maybe provincial or something. I mean, do you ever get that sense when when you're speaking about conservation on the national level that people that that that that colleagues or other people in the political sphere would feel like it was like a fringe issue or not a Yeah, no, I I get what you're saying now, Yeah, that it's that you're saying, I want to I want to open up access to federal lands. People like what you want to? What you know, it's funny and it's like, if you just talk about sportsmen and their impact on conservation and wildlife habitat, we are not a huge percentage of the population anymore, right, so I'm sure there are members who who look at it that way, but I also think it's a it's a way to connect with people that you're not necessarily politically aligned with on a whole series of other issues. Um, you get two members of Congress and a duck blind, they'll actually talk to each other and learn about each other. So you know, there there are huge advan manages to it as well, and there there is a desire among a lot of members to still keep this as bipartisan as we possibly can, which is a hard thing to do in a very divided country these days. Speaking about divisions. Can can you can you talk a little bit about your thoughts on public land divestor public land seizure? Yeah? You bet? Like what what that what that movement looks like? You know that whether it is a movement, it's not a I don't think it's a legitimate movement. It's not a grassroot. What worries me about the current dynamic is that it's not that it's got a lot of money behind it, and and we've seen that in the last few years, and you can't really try it's so easy to have dark money in politics now that it's very hard to see who is financing what. But you know, you look back at earlier iterations of the quote unquote stage brush rebellion and other efforts to say a you know, let's either give these public lands to the states or let's sell them off for what's you know, which you're basically two speeds of doing the same thing. Because most Western states have sold off huge amounts of their state land. We have millions of acres in New Mexico that used to be open to the public that is not today because a land commissioner chose to sell them off at some point. Yeah, some states have sold off. Well, many states have sold off the majority of the state lands they originally and so you can go back to those places now and see no trespassing sign. I think it's worth noting that like in New Mexico, you can't camp on state land, so there are at all there. They have now made a few little places where you can camp designated areas. But if you have a place like the Louetta Mountains that are really remote where you would have to go in and backpack in and and bivvy out to be able to hunt effectively in the middle of that range, um, you can't do that because you you have to ask the permit tea whether you can do that. A few years ago, I think the permit tea was from Texas maybe UM. Like just functionally, you're you're never going to be able to hunt most of that because it's so hard and you can't just camp in those areas. So that's a very different experience than Bureau of Land Management land BLM land or for service land UM. So I think it's a beautiful thing to have that land that the federal government manages, but the public owns that the public can go and fight over how it should be managed and fight for it and camp on it and and hunting fish on it. UM. And what worries me about this movement is that it seems to be better funded than in the past. And you see the American Lands Council, and you see groups like ALEC that have huge corporate funders that are not always transfer usually not transparent, aren't and if they're involved, then you know you have to take it seriously. And and to their credit, I think the sportsman community has gotten much more serious about UM meeting this challenge in the last five years. When you say that the funding seems, the money available seems outside of the public sentiment. Do you mean that that they the groups will still that that have money, will still try to have their like their goals sort of masquerade as a grassroots exactly. AstroTurf is one way to put it, right, AstroTurf like than so you can look at it and say that there's there's money coming from somewhere that's not particularly clear, and and it's pretty clear it's not coming in you know, member checks of some little local group that must be tough. Sorry, um, because they have sounds like they have more money now and the federal government has less money to manage that. And that's like a constant. Uh. Well, that's something that really bothers me, is that this dynamic of starving the federal land management agencies of any sort of budget to be able to manage lands and then condemning them for not managing those lands and saying we have to we have to give them to someone else. I mean, that dynamic I think is just dark. Yeah, it's been a lot of dwelling on that issue. And and if if you're serious about them doing a better job, we need to fund them to do that we need to fund law enforcement for those agencies to be able to make sure that those places are are secure. Um. And we need to be able to fund the thinning projects, the habitat management, all the other things that a good land manager can do. Yeah. And I think too that they've recently taken some steps right to sort of address the fire the wildfire issue, which is huge progress, I will say. You know, so you're feeling optimistic about that. That was you know a lot of us who were engaged in that have been working on it for six seven years UM. And it was truly bipartisan. You had people like Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mike Crapo of Idaho working together. UM. Having that fixed in the recently passed on the Best Spending Bill is a huge step forward because what we were doing is not managing our forests effectively and spending all the money we should have been doing on forest restoration and uh UM stewardship contracts. It was all getting sucked into the fire budget, and so we were never able to get ahead of those fires and create the kind of forest that's more resilient where it can burn. You know, Ponderosa Pine is supposed to burn every five ten years. That's its fire cycle. Um, but you don't want it so overstocked that when that fire happens, you lose cent of your trees and you can't get ahead of that without fixing the fire borrowing that was going on. And the entire budget of the forest surface was just getting swallowed by fighting fires. Yeah, and then not having any funds to do anything proactive to prevent future exactly catastrophic fires. And where we've you know, we have seen these stewardship contracts. I've done a lot of work with Jeff Flake of Arizona on four service stewardship contracts that sort of combine habitat management with small scale timber management, all together with travel. And at the end of these projects, you have something that's good for Turkey habitat, you have something that's good for Elk habitat, you have something that is providing uh jobs at the local level, and uh, you know those we should be putting money into those kinds of projects, but it was all getting sucked into the fire budget for years. You mentioned Jeff Flake, what's been your experience when you sort, you know, as people say, working across the aisle right, Like, what's been your experience on conservation issues you worked with Lisa Murkowski. You gotta find you gotta find people you can trust. Trust is bigger than anything else. And you know, Jeff and I did that crazy reality TV show a few years ago where they dropped us off in the South Pacific together, uh, and we proved that you know, when when death is the alternative. Republicans and Democrats work together. But because of that experience of spending a week together, we trust each other. So we're worlds apart politically on a lot of issues, but we can pick up the phone and figure out very quickly if if a particular project is something we want to work on together, and if we're gonna work on it, neither one of us is trying to pull a political fast one on the other. So you gotta That's that's what trust is. Yeah, you gotta find people you can trust and then figure out where the overlap is where you agree and and just go all in and are you able to have candid conversations about that kind of stuff. You can only have candid conversations if you have trust. And so much of the breakdown around here is that people don't know their colleagues. Well, they don't spend enough time with their colleagues. Um. You know, Jeff and I really tried to get the two sides to start having bipartisan lunches. We forced the issue enough that it happened for a while, and then you know, people fall back into their old ways of all the Democrats meet for a lunch and all the Republicans meet for a lunch. Um. So if you're dedicated to those ideas, you can you can find space and and push forward, uh, and get some things done. And that's that's what keeps me going. As challenging as it is to get things done around here. I had a conservation bill, uh called flip foots, the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act. It's a mouthful, but being a real public and working on that for ten years and we got it done this year. You know. So, Uh, you have to be patient, you have to be dogged. And it's one of those places where even Chairman Bishop and I agree, and so you know, I needed people on the House side who would push for that. Yeah. Uh, tell me about stream access sort of your your vision on it. In a handful of examples where it's being discussed and hashed out, and well, I think we've seen a lot of changes in New Mexico over the years on stream access, and I think it is not something that you've seen groups like background country hunters and anglersh really step up on that issue. We've seen some great leadership at the local level in New Mexico with the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, but it is it is not sort of created the national concert conservation uh conversation that we've seen around some other hot button issues. And I would love to see more of that because I think we are losing stream access at a faster rate then we're losing access to public lands. I want to I want to just step in real quick and bring people up to up to speed. I just a you can add that Suppoially want to give people a general understanding what we're talking about. We're talking about stream access. UM. If you've ever gone put a canoe or raft or inner tube into a river and floated down a stream or river and on either bank is private land, Uh, you're doing something. You're you're utilizing your state's stream access laws. It's it's what allows you to be on a river when it allows you to publicly access a river when the banks of the river are privately owned. And you know, of course these you know, large main stem rivers in America are are not contested. Like, no, when you're floating down the Mississippi, no landowners gonna come out and yell at you that you're on their property. But as streams and rivers get smaller and smaller, they enter into these contested areas. Being that a mad that there's a drainage ditch flowing through someone's egg field. You're not gonna be able to walk up that drainage ditch and say, well, I'm in the water, I'm not in your land. And so the battle gets fought over what constitutes a public stream. Um. Some states have clarified it using great, very precise language. Um, if it was used for commerce, if it has a historic record of being used for commerce, it's a publicly accessible stream. So if you can go back on the historic record, and states will do this, and they'll find that a guy floated a load of logs down the river in eighteen twenty two, a mill or or ferry to bushel of wheat down that thing that was open for commerce. It was historically used for commerce. It's open for commerce and transport today. Another issue on stream access would be um that where if let's say there's a drought in the river level goes down, um in your walking on land that is generally covered by water, but it's not covered by Now are you legal so that you could be in an area where you have to be in the water. You could be in an area in Wyoming, right, or is it Colorado where you can be in a boat on a river but you can't set an anchor and you can't get out of your boat because because the bottom you know, both both those states are like that. Yeah, So there they say, and this is where it gets like confusing, as they'll say, Oh, the water is public, but if you put your foot out and hit the gravel on the bottom of the river, you're trespassing. So there's all these you know, there's all of these different variations on that you can be anywhere below the high water mark that um that you can be you can only be in areas that are above mean stream flow or average flow. And it tends to me a state issue, and that that's the legal fabric, but there's also a historical fabric of it used to be that if you were respectful of private land, there are lot of streams that you could just weigh up in New Mexico that had historic access acts. Waters access is actually written into our state's constitution. And yet we had a bill passed UH largely driven, I believe by out of state interests who want to be able to come in and buy their chunk of the Chama River, their chunk of the Los Pinos River, their chunk of the Pacos River, and be able to control that in its entirety. And right, and then here comes some joe blow wander and by fishing. Right, Yeah, and you're like, what, so that that tension has is very real. Today the balance has shifted, and I think there's going to be a showdown eventually in the courts over which one of whether that law is even constitutional given uh New Mexico's history. So, so can you explain kind of can you give me a little more detail about like what's being debated or what's at stake in New Mexico? Is it is it that new things might open up, or things that are open now might become Things that have been historically open are more and more closed. So we're seeing just less access to some of these rivers, and what would the showdown look like. I think it'll I think it will end up in court. We're but we're also seeing a lot of political spending by the same folks who are buying up those those trophy properties and saying I want to be able to have guided clients come in and and fish my stretch of river, right and I don't want them to see other anglers. UM. They are putting a lot of money into the political system, and I think that's why part of why you saw a law passed in a in a state that historically UM has been more on the access side of the equation. Is there any area in federal where where federal politics influence stream access? I think largely just in being able to utilize UM things like the Land and Water Conservation Fund legislation like the Hunt Act to be able to UH to secure new access points to make sure those things can't happen river access points UM, and you know, and spending UM those federal gaming fish dollars too, and the recreation dollars on things like boat ramps and other things that can sort of formalize that in partnership with local Game and Fish. I was very surprised to hear not long ago that every county in the United States has utilized land and water conservation funds. Not amazing. I mean, this is a program that is created open up so much quality habitat in the West, but it's also created thousands of soccer field And think like that little park that you know, that neighborhood that didn't have a park suddenly has a neighborhood park. Well, that's a huge quality of life issue for some You know, if you have kids plan in a park, they're going to be healthier. Yeah, that's the thing that like, until you have little kids, you could give a ship less and then like all of a sudden, you find yourself living in a neighborhood that the parks either a half a block or ten blocks away, and you realize, yeah, it's a game changer because you're there all the time for the next five years of your life. Having children definitely opened me up to the to that idea, an awareness of green space and parks because you know, as a grown up with no kids just jumping and d but when you're dealing with this, like people need to take naps and have snacks all the time. You start like, you start becoming very aware of sort of like immediately available places to get your kids outside. Absolutely, because they think from their perspective, they are on the wilderness, you know, when you're two ft tall. Absolutely, and and that's a that's a kids are healthier when they're when they're exposed to that, whether it's a neighborhood park. Uh. And then maybe the neighborhood park leads to other things. And we created, ah, we're in the process of creating an urban wildlife refuge in very close to downtown Albuquerque. It's out of town, but it's in an area where there's lots of resident residential property as well along the Rio Grand where you know, fourth graders can come and learn about about nature and about ripe parian areas and about wildlife and about flyways and um. You know, I've been working with Lamar Alexander on taking that every Kid in the Park thing that the Obama administration did for fourth graders, where they said you can come and and you can get free access as a fourth grader to any of your public lands or any of your national parks. And we're trying to formalize that for all public lands, realizing that all out of these families have never actually, you know, in Albuquerque, have never maybe been to the top of the Sandy As just a few miles away. And there's a story like that in every state, in every county around the around the country. And our kids are so plugged into these devices that we have got to find ways to um get them in touch with reality. Yeah, I've heard you mentioned a couple of times to talk about the We can't expect people to get invested in conservation and wildlife habitat if they just don't even know what those things mean, or that they don't know that the treasures that are out there for them to utilize, like they're not gonna care about preserving them. It's fantastic that you can you can turn on PBS or watch BBC Nature and see amazing things. But nothing gets people more in gauge than than personal experience. And that's why I mean, we've got these hundreds of millions of acres of public land. We need to make sure that people know it's theirs and are are out using it. That will create a whole new generation conservationists. What do you think is gonna happen with the Land and Water Conservation fonly what needs to happen. What do you think will happen? Well, it expires again in the authorization for it expires at the in September of this year. Why is it always expiring? Why is it? Is it or is it just my perception of it that it's always like imperiled somehow? Now you're right, because there are many of us who have tried tried to say, this is such a successful program. It's actually the poster child of a federal program that works. So let's just extend it in perpetuity, because we always extend it. Right at the end of the day, people love this program for some period of time people, but there has been for those people who want to change that program, change its direction, move it away from habitat and public lands. And and say, you know, you were talking with German bishop, and I think he represented that not much of this goes to the states. Well about half of it goes to state side. Um, it is a good balance right now of state and federal priorities and of urban and rural Uh. And I think we just need to extend it to a permanent reauthorization rather than try and say, oh, this this program, this is what we're going to use to fix the infrastructure problem that we have, uh for all of these agencies. That's not why Land and Water was created. It was to say we were going to have a balance. We we lease offshore oil revenues and some of that should go into habitat and balancing that out. And it's worked amazingly well. I mean I talked about the virus Caldera that that we've is a national preserve in New Mexico that all of us used to drive on this one little highway through and look out and just salivate at what it's New Mexico's Yellowstone. It's this high, uh high elevation, meadows, reverse tree line, surrounded by volcanic peaks, covered in timber, huge herd of elk, and none of us. Thirty years ago it was private property. You know. You everybody dreamed about being able to ski in there or hunt in there, or fish in there, and today we can't because of the Land and Water Conservation fund UM. And that's what it was created for. So that's what we should do with it. We should extend it in perpetuity. And we should figure out what the right dollar amount is and make that permanent as well. Do you think that that will happen? I think it will be extended. Uh. I think whether or not it gets extended in perpetuity will kind of depend on who the chairman and are in the relevant committees. UM. I don't think it would happen to a chairman, bishop and in charge. No, he's pretty skeptical program. Absolutely, And you know this idea that the thing that bothers me too is this idea that people are somehow out there making a living off the Land and Water Conservation Fund. That there are special interests. I'm using air quotes right now for our listeners that are uh spun up using this program for their own devices. For these special interests, the Rocky Mountain ELK Foundation. I mean when you look at the projects in your state, I mean these are I don't consider Rocky Mountain ELK to be a special interest. Um. There are there are these groups that that do this work, which is hard where you're interfacing with a a private landowner who maybe has an in holding in some really important habitat and you're able to use Land and Water Conservation Fund moneys to secure an easement or fee simple acquisition of that to protect an elk herd's wintering range or their calving grounds. That's not special interest anything. That's that's that's a good conservation. Yeah, yeah, Chairman, we didn't have time to get into it into the details this but but you don't even need to respond to this. But UM Chairman Rob Bishop had explained or his view was that people, specially interests, will by land UM and then turn profits by then getting it absorbed through Land and Water Conservation Fund moneys. All I can say from New Mexico's perspective is that that's not been our perspective and that's not been our experience, and that's why we have appraisals, right like you should. You have to have guardrails on any program, and we do UM. You know, land gets appraised and you figure out what the actual value is. We have this place, this place called Ute Mountain that's in Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, that used to be private land and it's it is now not only in the public hands, but it's one of the most important chunks of habitat up there and in an area that is absolutely critical for herds of Elka mule dear that we share with Colorado. UM, and you just couldn't. We could have never done that project without the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and nobody made money off of it. Do you have You've been very generous with your time. Do you have time for one more? Yeah? I do. Can you can you talk a little bit about your perspective on the Antiquities Act, particularly with how it's related to some of the debates, the national debates you've been having about monuments. You bet. Uh. New Mexico has a long history with anti antiquities because we have this historical figure I think his name is egger Lee Hewitt who UM was sort of in the ear of Congressman Lacey who drafted it and exactly right, Yeah, as Congressman Lacey of Iowa as well as UM you know President Roosevelt, and he was really interested in protecting some areas in New Mexico that now you would think of as Bandalia National Monument and Chaco Canyon. Uh. And he helped draft the the Antiquities Act. And I think some of the misinformation you hear as things like, oh, this was only designed to protect a postage stamp around a particular archaeological site. Well, I think the first thing out of the gate that it was used for was Devil's Tower, which is not a postage stamp and not it has huge cultural significance, but as a large UH geologic feature, and it has language written right into it that says scientific features can be protected with this. T R used it to protect Roosevelt Elk as an object under the Antiquities Act when he created the Mount Olympus National Monument. So there's this long history that that right out of the gate by the people who created and and signed this in the law counters the language you hear today that is really more about catering to specific vested UH financial interests. And you see that embarrass ears um. You know Congressman Bishop was very much against the two monuments in New Mexico. Well, if he had gone and done a public hearing the way that Secretary Salazar did, he'd know that in Tao, it's not a not a single person stood up and opposed the creation of that monument. You think about anything you could find today where you actually have unanimity of thought that is unheard of in our political context and yet it existed there, and to have to fight for this stuff that really grew out of the grassroots community level, that was supported by mayors and city councilors and and land grant heirs and hunters and fishermen and and guides and like it bothers me that that is under attack when we have these incredible examples of why it's so important and this personally, I used to guide up in what is today Bear series. I used to run a outdoor education uh nonprofit called Cotton with Gulch Expeditions, and I can tell you that country. There's a reason why it's so important to the tribes, and I've represented a number of those tribes and they've been very explicit with me about that connection. But it's also a world class resource and an amazing place to hunt. I mean that the elk herd up there today. I was up there with my family a little over a year ago during spring break, and um, the deer, the turkey, the bear resource on Cedar masis absolutely incredible, and so we need to realize that those things come under threat when you unprotect a big swath of this as well. I think that that the argument you started out with is something that would be helpful, um like, as we engage with this and as you have to debate points of it, that idea like tackling it from the originalism perspective, because I think oftentimes people will take things like Land and Water Conservation Fund, they'll take things like the Antiquities Act, and they'll people who are generally opposed to how those things are used will generally go back to, well, this is what it was supposed to do. Let's let's debate what it was supposed to do originally and sort of pull it out of its contemporary context, even though things like change all the time, and our and our needs changed and our desires change, right, and when we were always like kind of trying to interpret old pieces of legislation or older ideas and interpret like, what is the meaning of it? How can we apply it to today? But it's really interesting that you brought up those points about that you're comfortable talking about original the Antiquities Act because you don't think that it's you don't think that's inconsistent with our state was right at the heart of that. So and we've got these amazing examples of how it's been used over time, whether that's white sands or bandalier because the thing you here is like the landscape scale use. But it's interesting that some of those early places were in fact bigger than one little the Grand Canyon one little antiquity. Yeah, the Grand Canyon, like that was not one little antiquity. If you've ever seen a picture of it, or you've been at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, you know, I mean that was one of the earliest use uses of the Antiquities Act. No one probably feels comfortable debating those, know. I think a big question that comes up a lot is like, what if you can't explain it quickly, what's the main difference between when something's protected by the Antiquities Act and let's just say if it's run by the BLM or if it's National forest. With the Antiquities Act, typically what happens is the President rights a proclamation, uh, and you can have you can have national monuments under any agencies designation. Right, So you can have a monument that is Park Service, that is Bureau of Land Management, that is US Fish and Wildlife Service, that is Forced Service. There's a way to to sort of fit it to the agency. And we have for Service monuments. We have BLM monuments that are managed very differently than Park Service man monuments, especially especially with respect to hunting and fishing. Um, I'm sorry, Johnnie, what were saying. I don't know you were you were getting at it. Yeah, but just the like, the difference and how and how it's managed. Like from just the like or someone coming up to when we wrote the proclamation for the President to sign for the Oregon Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument in New Mexico or the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument UH in New Mexico, we wrote in to make sure that we protected those things, and you manage it in a certain way. You have a lot of control within the confines of that proclamation to say, here are the objects we are seeking to protect and and here's how we want you to now manage this. That is in contrast to full scale multiple use where anything goes and so you're gonna have areas where the dominant land use on BLM land is producing oil and gas. Um, there are places where the habitat values or the cultural values or what you're seeking to protect should trump that kind of intensive development. And that's what you can write into a proclamation and keep from happening. So typically you do not have a new open pit mine or oil and gas development, a new highway transmission lines being built on those monuments. UH protected it under the Antiquities Act. Got it, And all that sort of stuff could be a possibility under regular BLM happens the time people get the right lease and and sometimes even under current law you have pieces of public land which get spun off into private ownership through a planning process. So none of that can happen once a place is protected and reserved under the Antiquities Act. I think what you're getting as an important thing I think that hunters and anglers need to realize about monuments is not all monuments are created equal, and I think that people view them as a monument is a slippery slope to national park where the hunters and anglers aren't welcome, and it's really not the case. You really when when when we're talking about monuments, you have to look at each individual place and look at what the mandate is and the intent is. Because these like BLM monuments, there's not a conversation on these about and when you see like the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument has a big horn sheep hunt now that did not exist when it was just blm land. Uh. The trophy big horns coming out of there. The buddy of mine's UH guide up in Taos fishing guide. He got a great bowl elk in the monument a couple of years ago. I've seen monster mule e's harvested in that in that monument. So because that community, that sportsman's community there in Taos County was in at the ground floor saying we want a monument, but we want it to be managed for wildlife and open to hunting and fishing and got it written and they got it. Yeah, do you have any I'm gonna leave it open ended for you to um add any kind of thoughts or anything you want to make sure people understand or whatever you want to do. UM. Once you feel like you just said it all, yeah, you know, I would just say this is this stuff may not get talked about on on CNN every night or pick your cable news show, but it's the stuff that makes America truly unique in the world. UM. So you know, if you're passionate about it, find uh, find like minded people and UH and make a difference for these things that we care about. Yes, get final thoughts, um. I was just thinking about uh access, and I hope we have to have a conversation. It's probably might not be in our lifetimes. Maybe it will be, but where we do have so many users and so many lovers of all this stuff that we might actually have to talk about limiting it because you can love a place to death, you know, but that would be like a good comment, that would be good goal is that you know, so many people want to be in the mountains that we have to talk about, you know, drawing permits, which we have a little bit across there's places Smith River usually about just plenty of them. Three miles into a roadless area gets a little thinner. But come spend some time in New Mexico. We we don't have the crowded trails that other states have and it's such an amazing I mean, to be able to go out and backpacking the HeLa. I did a fifty three mile backpack in the HeLa a few years ago and gosh, I ran into almost no one on that handful of people. People use the term campaign trail. Do you ever campaign on the trail? That's where I decided. That was where I decided to run for public office. Is the Heilo Wilderness on a backpack. So Senator Martin Heinrich from New Mexico, thank you for joining us. Great to be here.