Episode 9 - Hal Herring on the Future of Conservation and the Fight for Public Lands

Summary

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Legends of the Wild: Hal Herring on Conservation, Storytelling & Public Lands

Podcast: Legends of the Wild, A Field & Stream Production
Host: Sam Soholt
Guest: Hal Herring
Date: October 8, 2025
Episode: 9 - Hal Herring on the Future of Conservation and the Fight for Public Lands

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Overview:

This episode delves deep into the intertwining paths of outdoor journalism, conservation, and the ongoing fight for America’s public lands. Host Sam Soholt sits down with Hal Herring—acclaimed outdoor journalist, Field & Stream contributor, and passionate public lands advocate—for a sprawling, candid conversation. Together, they trace Hal's rural Alabama roots, his circuitous journey to Montana, the realities of storytelling (and pack rats), landmark conservation fights, and the realities of protecting wild places for future generations. Both men reflect on personal setbacks, the rewards and frustrations of the outdoor lifestyle, and offer hard-earned optimism about fixing what’s broken.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Hal’s Outdoor Origins & Path to Journalism

• [02:12] Hal shares the inevitability of his outdoor path, growing up "eat up" with the woods, early reading, and mentorship in Alabama.
  • “I was just eat up with not just the romance of the books and stuff, but the reality of... spearing, like, buffalo during the floods on the Tennessee River. I mean I was like nine years old...” —Hal ([04:10])
• [05:03] Moving to Montana, adapting skills learned as a boy to the West, and supporting himself with rural work.
• [06:46] Writing roots: Starting with fiction and essays, $825 a month on a ranch, and yearning to articulate “the song people were singing” in conservation.

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2. Breaking in at Field & Stream and Early Conservation Fights

• [09:43-11:35] Hal’s break: Reporting on Montana’s “game farming” (captive shooting) controversy, meeting mentors like Jim Posewitz.
  • “I was meeting...what I consider the best people in the world. Like, I was like, holy smokes. You know, this is what I think. I've just never had it articulated.” —Hal ([10:14])
  • On Montana as the "church" of big game hunting ([11:27])
• [12:27] Early Field & Stream submission, technological hurdles (swapping a shotgun for an Apple II computer), and living hand-to-mouth in Montana.

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3. Pack Rats, Rural Reality & Storytelling

• [15:54-22:14] A detour on pack rats—first jamming the printer, then chaotic home invasions, and sharing tales of close encounters from both Sam and Hal.
  • “It's funny because you can't. As cool as they are, you can't really live with them.” —Hal ([20:43])
• [14:36] Vivid stories of rural barter, wildlife, and finding humor (and meaning) in hardship.

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4. Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), Reporting, & the Journalist’s Duty

• [22:42-27:07] The reality of chasing difficult stories: Chronic Wasting Disease, the ethics & economics of game farming, and the devastating loss of CWD pioneers Beth Williams and Tom Thorne.
  • “I loved researching and writing about stuff that was controversial and difficult.” —Hal ([27:39])
• [28:41] Conservation appeals because it’s “fixable”—unlike so many of society’s other crises.
  • “I have watched the Clean Water Act of 1972...watch things getting better all of my growing up days.” —Hal ([29:16])

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5. The Hard Choices of Conservation

• [30:37-33:42] Conservation is never “convenient”:
  • “Convenient is just a straight pipe, the sewage out to the creek behind your house.” —Hal ([30:47])
  • Quoting Pat Murray: “Easy choices make hard lives, and hard choices make easier lives.” ([32:11])
• [33:08] Discussing life “as a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms” and the importance of not letting go of what you love.

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6. The Outdoor Life as Practice & Sacrifice

• [34:53-41:34] Hal details a recent crisis: drought, digging a new well, missing favorite annual activities (range restoration, bird hunting, incredible pike fishing), and trading adventure for essential home work.
• Trading current outdoor seasons for family and health, the soul-searching that comes when life interrupts plans.
  • “Life making the hard choices, right?” —Hal ([37:04])

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7. Field & Stream, Changing Media, and the Role of Storytellers

• [44:05-47:56] The magazine era, reporting on bear poaching, “saying yes” to the Deepwater Horizon liveblog, and the bittersweet transition as Field & Stream (and conservation journalism) went digital.
• The power and pitfalls of the internet: reacting in real time, far-reaching activism, but the loss of big, immersive stories.

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8. Conservation Advocacy in the Digital Age

• [48:48-52:18] The rise of coordinated conservation action: TRCP, BHA, Trout Unlimited, and leveraging the Internet and social media to unite outdoor users against threats to public lands.
• The success of the public lands “battle,” the necessity of constant vigilance, and how these fights would be lost piecemeal without unity.
  • “We would have been fighting piecemeal battles for the rest of our lives to just try to hold on to this or that...” —Hal ([52:12])

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9. Maintaining Hope, Avoiding Burnout, & Passing It On

• [53:28-57:53] Advice for activists:
  • “Do what Ed Abbey always said, be a Half hearted fanatic...celebrate, take your kids, go fishing and hunting...but you got to think about the Clean Water Act at some point.” ([53:28])
• The necessity of “eternal vigilance,” celebrating victories, and remembering we are beneficiaries of hard-fought wins.

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10. Projects, Writing, Family, and “The Four Burner Stove”

• [60:31-65:47] Hal discusses current writing projects—books about public lands, their histories & his travels—balancing work, family, hunting/fishing, and health, and the importance of not letting any “burner” go cold.
  • “...you got family, you got work, you got hunting, fishing, and probably the fourth is your health. You've got to turn those burners on or off...balance that.” ([63:21])

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11. Why It Matters: Reality-Based Conservation

• [71:55-79:54] Hal’s final message:

  • “Let’s drag conservation...public lands...out in front of the politics. We're not playing that game anymore.” ([71:55])
  • Grassroots sportsmen/women’s groups had power—face-to-face local advocacy still matters.
  • Fixing pollution, floods, declining habitat is possible with political will and incentive structures; “hunters and fishermen are particularly good at this...reality-based decisions, not abstract.”

• On stewardship:

  • “I always say current stewards because it's just our turn.” —Sam ([79:29])
  • Citing Doug Duren: “It's not ours, it's just our turn.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On mentorship & learning to articulate conservation:

  • “I was meeting the...best people in the world...singing my tune I didn't know how to sing yet.” —Hal ([10:14])

• On conservation as permanent struggle:

  • “We are in a battle or even a long term war to protect the things that we truly believe in, that we have inherited, that we can't give up.” —Hal ([54:33])

• On hope and celebrating wins:

  • “You need to remember to write a few pieces that just celebrate what we love.” —Jim Posewitz, as recounted by Hal ([57:18])

• On reality-based advocacy:

  • “Reality based decisions. They're not about politics...It's cold or it's really hot. We should bring an extra quart of water for Junior...why is it flooding? Well, yeah.” —Hal ([78:41])

• On personal obligation:

  • “I feel I have an obligation to point out that things that are broken can be fixed in the environment and public lands and fish and wildlife, which makes people's life better.” —Hal ([29:50])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Time | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------| | Hal's childhood, Alabama, and early fascination with outdoors | 02:12+ | | Moving West, Montana rural life | 05:03+ | | Breaking into Field & Stream, early stories, importance of journalism | 09:43+ | | Captive game farm controversy, CWD reporting, meeting conservation icons | 10:56+ | | Pack rat stories & rural mishaps | 15:54+ | | Conservation as a solvable challenge, Clean Water Act, fixing the broken | 28:41+ | | “Hard choices, Easy lives”: philosophy of conservation work | 32:11+ | | Life disruptions, drought, balancing priorities | 34:53+ | | Changing Field & Stream, role of storytellers | 44:05+ | | Advocacy in the social media age: public lands battles | 48:48+ | | Avoiding burnout, celebrating wins, half-hearted fanaticism | 53:28+ | | Writing projects, family, the “four burner stove” philosophy | 60:31+ | | Grassroots power, fixing the system, what do we value? | 71:55+ | | The necessity of pragmatic, reality-based conservation | 78:11+ | | Closing thoughts and gratitude | 81:19+ |

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Final Thoughts & Takeaways

• Optimism with realism: The work is never done—but as Hal demonstrates with stories from decades of field experience, determined individuals, organized advocacy, and persistent storytelling can (and have) changed the future for wildlife, wild places, and people.
• The urgent value of public lands: They’re not only resources but the backbone of community, accountability, and the American conservation model.
• Personal engagement matters: Whether writing, legislating, or just taking kids outside, everyone has a role.
• Balance is hard but essential: Life’s a four-burner stove; don’t let any one burner grow cold.

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Episode closes with plans for more hunting stories, the hope of meeting in a duck blind, and a shared sense of gratitude for a life lived outdoors and in service to wild places.

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Transcript

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[Sam (Host)]

This is Legends of the Wild presented by Field and Stream. Let's get into it. Well, hey, everybody. Welcome back. We are on another episode of the Legends of the Wild podcast. And today I am joined by a very special guest. This is a guy that I've admired for a long time. Welcome to the show, Hal. This is Hal Herring, everybody.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Thanks, Sam. Good to be here, man. I'm here in the darkness as the rain comes down for the first time in two months in Augusta, Montana.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, this, this is great because. So this will be a video podcast as well. It'll go out on YouTube and we look like the yin and yang symbol right now, where I'm like fully, fully lit up and you're sitting there in the dark.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It's good if I turn the lights out of this office, it's this huge glare behind me.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so the other day I, we, we did an interview. An interview. And it was, I think it was 7:00 in the morning. It's not even light. It's barely light here, you know, and I looked like I was emerging from like some kind of a vampire like in Transylvania.

[Sam (Host)]

Well, just, you know, for everybody listening and honestly, for me, myself, I've, you know, followed you for a long time now and, and really respect what you've done with both podcasts and journalism and, you know, kind of everything you've done in the industry because ob, our passions align quite a bit. But why don't you just run people through kind of like where you grew up, how you got into this whole crazy chaos that is like hunting, industry, public lands, conservation, all that stuff?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Sure. Well, I probably. I was going to say that it Was kind of inevitable that I would. I would end up here. Yeah. But I. I grew up in north Alabama and my parents were from south Alabama, but everybody had gone to. Around Huntsville. And when I was 11 they really wanted out of town and so they bought this property out, this older farm, mostly timber, out in a place about. It's called Gurley, Alabama. It's really growing up now. It's like, like. Like pro. Really subdivisions and stuff like that. But at the time it was out in the country and the mountains are still there. And so I kind of got turned loose at age 11 on everything that I wanted, that I had wanted up to that point. Reading, you know, the Spirit of the Border and all these books. I was always into reading and James Fenimore Cooper and stuff like that as a little kid and Field and Stream and Sports a. Field and. And you know, Outdoor Life and Fur Fish and Game and I'm trying to think of. And you know, and I had a subscription to like Full Cry, you know, the Mouth, the magazine of hounds and hunting and fishing Facts, which was a weird like walleye base, which I had no concept of what that was. Anyway, so I was a. Died in the war early, you know, and I had three. I had mentors that taught me to hunt when I was about nine down in the Tennessee river bottoms. And I really. I was real amateur herpetologist and stuff like that. And I just was. I was just eat up with not just the. The romance of the books and stuff, but the reality of trying to catch gar and spearing. Spearing like buffalo during the floods on the Tennessee River. I mean I was like nine years old and. Making your own spear, you know.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so anyway, we ended up living out in. In Southern Cumberlands there and it was kind of everything. It was. It was all it was cracked up to be. Right. Like in life that doesn't happen that often.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Yeah, for sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And. And so maybe it was inevitable, you know, that, that I would. I would come to this writing about it later, but that was a long trip. I moved to Montana in 88.89and was a manager of a little kind of hobby ranch property. Well, we paid our salary with the hay crop and the only reason I knew how to do all that was that my parents had bought that place and moved me out there when I was 11, so I knew how to run farm equipment. And I was. I was about a quarter ass of a sawyer because we saw. We cut all our own firewood and stuff, you know. So when I got to Montana. It was pretty easy, like, to fit in and kind of just drop in. Kind of like key into a keyhole. I had that job running that place for a couple years, and it was. My wife had a job at a little restaurant and at a nursery. It was. I mean, you know, if you didn't want a lot of stuff other than being outside doing stuff, it was really good and that. And, you know, for 39 years later or something.

[Sam (Host)]

Still there.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah, still here. Still kind of doing the same thing.

[Sam (Host)]

So, I mean, from. I mean, obviously, like a lot of us, you know, me, like, grew up doing all this stuff. People listen to this, like, they're ate up with it, you know, kind of. You know, a lot of them grew up doing this at a young age. But, you know, most of us don't end up going into, like, the journalism side of it and like, telling these stories. So where did. Where did that start?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Okay, so I had a. I wrote fiction in my 20s.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I published some. And I published a couple of essays. And I won a short story contest judged by the writer Peter Matthewson, who is one of my heroes. And this was. I was. Think I was 26 or so. And. Let me shut that email off. And so at the time, I was making $825 a month.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Working on this. This ranch, this hay. Hay property. And it was a. It was a horse property. And I was publishing some essays and I ended up.

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[Sam (Host)]

Experian.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

One of the essays paid like 600 bucks. And I remember the Peter Matthiessen short story Contest award was $500 and my truck had just Broken down. And I was like, you know, 825amonth, $500 for a week's worth of writing. And that went on for a long time. So I was working in. I went from that ranch, I got a job sawing. And I was working in the woods. This is before trails. And I was just sawing thin and timber fire line and all stuff. It was really, really wonderful. I mean, it was really hard. And you lived outside, which I liked, but the money was okay. But you're making a hundred bucks a day, providing your own transportation and gas and oil and two saws. And I sold a couple of stories. I sold one to High Country News. This was in 1998. And what was going on then was the game farming industry was making a move to kind of really take over in Montana.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Like, like, like it was super controversial.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I got to meet people like Jim Posewitz, who was one of my all time heroes who passed away in his late 80s. I got to be friends with Jim, but I was meeting these people and they were, they were these conservation leaders and they were. Say that I just, I mean, I, I just loved what they had to say. They were, they were singing my tune that I didn't know how to sing yet.

[Sam (Host)]

Right, right. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I've, I've said this before in interviews and stuff, but I, I was meeting the. What I consider the best people in the world. Like, I was like, holy smokes. You know, this is what I think. I've just never had it articulated.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so that game farming story is what led me to Field and Stream. And it was the controversy over game farming in Montana. And they passed a ballot initiative to outlaw captive shooting. I think it was 99, some initiative. 99. And that was very controversial because there are private property rights issues.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so one of the things that people said was, we don't care what you do with your livestock. You could shoot them if you want. Animal cruelty laws or whatever, you might apply. But, but in, in this place. And Jim Posewitz used to say this wonderful thing. This is kind of, kind of crude, I guess, but he would say, well, a brothel might be a wonderful thing down in Texas on the border, but you don't build a brothel inside the church.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And, and yeah. And Montana was the church of big game hunting at that time and still kind of is.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, it's definitely a jewel as far as like the opportunity, you know, like, I can see where the. He was trying to make that analogy because it is such a Special place.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. And I. And I've. I've always. I've lived. I've lived by that idea, you know, that it was the church. But so those. That story led me to Field and Stream. And I. I wrote a letter to the editor was Mike Toth at the time and to New York City. And he said, like, give it a try, you know, Write this up.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I did it and they published it. And this is all, you know, snail mail, whatever. And cold. Cold over the transom letter.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And everything takes a long time. And that story, I think, was about fifteen hundred dollars.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And at that time I was sawing and I was making $100 a day and 1500, 15 days. And you weren't usually, if they were consecutive days, you had to take three days off to rest, you know.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So that's what. That's how I got into it. Yeah, it's right there.

[Sam (Host)]

That's. I mean, that's pretty amazing. Like, you know, in this day and age, like, with how easy it is to like, write something up on social media or whatever and just send that off. People don't think about this. You know, you sit down. Was it handwritten when you mailed it in? Or did you type it out like typewriter or.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Except. So there's. That's. That's interesting too. Where I live now, there was a writers conference up here at Pine Butte. The Nature Conservancy owns this old property north of me. They had Richard Ford. Have you ever read Richard Ford at all?

[Sam (Host)]

No.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So he's a novelist primarily, but he had published this book of short stories which I could recommend to anybody called Rock Springs. And it was the. At the time, it was. It was beyond. He was. He was a protege of Raymond Carver and all these great short story writers or Tom McGuain. But Rock Springs was one of the greatest books of short stories about set in the west ever written. And I wanted to just. I wanted to hear what Richard Ford had to say. So I drove up here and I had a Browning, a 5:20 gauge. And I thought I was going to be a gentleman bird hunter shooting a 20 gauge. And I shot it one waterfowl season. And I just did terribly. I had a dog and everything. And I was like, I got to get back to a 12 gauge, you know. So there was a guy up here at the Richard Ford thing who wanted to trade an Apple II computer for that, A five for his wife.

[Sam (Host)]

Wow. Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it shot. I think. I think it was capable of shooting a 3 inch. I love the gun.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It was just. I was not waterfowling very well with it.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so I drove it up here and I swapped him that a 5 for the Apple II computer and I wrote all that early field of Stream stuff in a dot mate with a dot matrix printer.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I came home from a work trip. I was still working in the woods and a pack rat and the cat had gotten in a fight in that printer. And there was all this blood and hair and stuff and it jammed up that. That matrix dot matrix printer. And the pack rat actually prevailed. The cat was like. The cat was, was it, was it. It was like they had gone to different corners of the arena. They were not fighting anymore. But that's. I mean that's kind of life we were living. We were living in a house then that we were taking care of mules in return for rent.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You know, there was never a lot of money coming in the door.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But the lifestyle was good.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, absolutely. But the fact that you had a. That you had a cat pack rat fight that jammed up your printers, that's incredible.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And yeah. There's also. I won't go on with the packrat story, but I hate.

[Sam (Host)]

Please do. That's great.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Well, so I. I had a chance. I had a Colt 22 Diamondback and I bought some rat shot for it. And me and that thing were going to have it out, you know.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, of course.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I got up one night and it was. It was this crazy noise, this banging. And what it was doing was, by the way, this pack rat had gotten in my Subaru, my camp rig from my woods camp where I was working in the woods and driven home in the car. There was no pack rat in the house until I parked that car too close the house and it moved into the house and started just committing mayhem like you couldn't live with it. So it was attempting to pull up the electric eye on the stove.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

To get something that it wanted under there. Right.

[Sam (Host)]

For sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it was just sitting there and so. But I couldn't shoot it there because it was the only stove we had. It was a right kind of a rental house that we didn't pay rent for. And so it ran off and my wife caught it and I have a heart trap. This is a true story. And she and this little boy down from the, from the area. It was kind of a rural place. Calf Creek Game Range is where this was in the Bitterroot. And she and this little boy, he came over. He. He kind of hovered at our house, hoping for extra food. He lived. They. They lived hard.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And he was with her. And they went to release this pack rat. She didn't want to kill it. Yeah, they're really cool looking like. They look like a giant.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So she was gonna. She was gonna release it in this coulee off the calf Creek game range. And it went crazy. And it broke out of the. Have a hard trap and galloped into an old house that was behind ours. And we didn't think anything about it. And the guy that lived there was really prone to binge drinking and stuff.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And about a month later, I was at home, and he would come by all jacked up, you know, and want to visit. And he said. He said, you ain't going to believe this. And I said, what's up now? And he said, there's this something in my house. It's, like, torn up all my clothes. It's in the groceries. He said. He said that it got in the cupboard and knocked everything out. He said, I don't even know what this thing is. And my wife was sitting on the porch, and we both looked. You know, we just don't know what that could be. I said, I. I hope it works out for you, you know, maybe you should buy some of this rat shot. Yeah, right. Oh, man.

[Sam (Host)]

You know, the only run in. I've had two run ins with pack rats. One, I was hunting mule deer out west, and I had bought a topper that didn't match the truck. And. But the topper, I had just wired it, it had a tail light on it. And I was like, oh, you know, I thought I was pretty handy. So I wired it up so it. When the. Push the brakes, the tail light came on, I was like, sweet. I had just got that done, went on a hunting trip, and my brother and I were driving. We had left camp, and we were like, we're gonna go hunt a new area. We had driven like 80 miles or something like that. And I look in the rear view mirror, and I see something just fall down, like, from the top of the. Like, just fall down. I was like, what is in the back of my truck? Yeah, well, pack. A pack rat had crawled in, had climbed up and had eaten the wiring in. Half of the wiring I had just rewired. And so then, you know, let the pack rat go 80 miles from his home.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Right. So he'll probably be okay. Like.

[Sam (Host)]

Like be just fine.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I mean, I've never known. I have a friend, by the way, in the yak. Jeremy o'. Day. And he proposed to me that we gather up pack rat stories like yours.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And put them in a. Just. Just like. Like everybody's got this story about these. These kind of diabolical but very interesting animals.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. And I. You know, a couple years ago, I was filming a sheep hunt in northern Northwest Territories, and I don't know if there's pack rats up there, but it was a package pack rat like creature.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

And we had. We had laid on this sheet for, like, 34 hours or something like that. Hadn't gone to sleep. And so I'd fallen asleep on the side of the mountain, and the guy, Dustin Rowe, has a video of this pack rat looking, you know, marmot thing. Run down. Jumped up on my legs. Ran down and was standing on top of my boots while I was sleeping. And then he was gonna just let it sit there and kind of take some photos, but then it started chewing on the leather on my boot, and so he, you know.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Right. Got rid of. It's funny because you can't. As cool as they are, you can't really live with them.

[Sam (Host)]

No, definitely not.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Like, they. They have no sense of boundary. Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Hard to train those pack rats.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. Hard to train. And they don't really consider that you're like that one pulling that stove up that you could kill it.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it didn't. And it didn't get killed. Right. Like. Like, it's. It's. It's bet paid off.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

True, true. So I. We had one in Alabama once that it would stash all kind of stuff, like a little. Like little shiny wrenches.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it carried. My father pointed this out to me. It carried a light bulb up a ladder, and the light bulb was too big to fit in its mouth.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so we've pondered this for years is how the.

[Sam (Host)]

How did it get that thing up there?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. And they were putting it in a, you know, a piece of flex pipe that you take off of a. Off of a gutter drain.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

To put water somewhere else. Right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It had packed all of its stuff in that flex pipe.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

There were. There were beechnuts and acorns and the.

[Sam (Host)]

Light bulb and the wrenches.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And like a set of small wrenches. Box and wrenches.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you ever. If you have. If. If you or anybody else ever writes that story, I'm happy to add my little nails in there.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And why they eat the wiring on the one thing that you need.

[Sam (Host)]

Always. Yeah. It must be something. Whatever is in that Petroleum based.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

You know, rubber coating or whatever that they just, you know, crave or something. It's like, it's like bears chewing on everything.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Plastic, you know, anything that. Yeah, just checking it out, Kyle.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so now you.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

All right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. So now we're back. You've mailed this. You got this first story published in Field and Stream. So this is 1999. And then did you become a pretty consistent contributor to Field and Stream then following that?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I did, sort of out of, out of dire necessity at that point. Yeah, sure. But I think the second piece I published, which was. It turned out it was in, in 2000, was called no Place Whatsoever. And it was about the effort to privatize public lands.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And there was a time later than that that I got these short pieces and we were doing short pieces, turning them over and over and over. Really, really good times.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Anything like, like anything that you could pitch. But this was a, a short lived time before the Internet. But no place whatsoever is a piece that I still stand by. The game farming story, dude. I mean, right after I wrote that, the Kessler Farm, Game Farm down in Phillipsburg, Montana showed up with cwd. And so I was launched on a cover in CWD when it very first appeared.

[Sam (Host)]

Right, right. Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And that ended up being a big part of my work at Field and Stream for years. But I was at. I was here in Montana when the CWD appeared in Phillipsburg and they brought the Air Curtain incinerators and they burned the elk and they were trying to, you know, figure out how. They didn't. The prion theory wasn't out yet.

[Sam (Host)]

Right, right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And they were trying to figure out how this disease was. Was going to affect everything. And the game farming industry was. It was booming at the time they were trading these infected elk.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

This was before it showed up in the whitetails.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But after it showed up in the mule deer down at Fort Collins. So they knew what it was.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And they were asking the game farm industry to stop trading animals until they could figure this out.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. For sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And buddy, they just tripled down on trading animals. Like it was just wild.

[Sam (Host)]

It seems like a wild thing if you're trying to protect your investment, you know, like.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. I don't know whether they didn't believe in the science or I think that it was spear based in that. That for sure this would crash the industry at some point. So you better get it while you're getting good.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure. Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I remember the western slope of Colorado. They were asking them Please not to trade animals there.

[Sam (Host)]

And then Fort Collins area. So my brother lives down on the Front Range there and I just listening to, lived with him for a while and worked with him at his archery shop. And just hearing biologists that had been around at the time and people that were working for Colorado Game and Parks totally talk about that issue and what they like did and like they, you know, more or less wiped out the entire herd, you know, and I was there in 2012, 2000, early 2013, and it was still like the repercussions of that, like what they had done was still like part of the Front Range. And people still talked about it all the time.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I kept warning people that the solution to this thing could be unpalatable.

[Sam (Host)]

Yes. Yeah. Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

For sure. So at that time, Dr. Mike Miller was the vet down at DOW at Colorado.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And he was really, really good guy. So Beth Williams was the lead researcher down in Laramie. And Beth owned, was a mule deer hunter. And her husband was Tom Thorne. He worked for Wyoming Fish and Game. And she was the. Okay, I'll wrap this up. But she was the lead investigator of CWD at the time. And she and Tom both got killed at the same time, I think on Highway 80. They ran up under a semi in a big blizzard.

[Sam (Host)]

Oh, man.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And, and an enormous amount of knowledge. Although the USDA in Ames, our. They, they picked up the research very well. They, they did a lot. But, but Beth and Tom died at the same time. And they were both very, they were kind of like the encyclopedia of CWD at the MO at that moment.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So it was a huge loss.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And we won't go into cwd. But I, I rode, I rode that horse for a long time. And I was in, I, I met some great friends at. Became friends forever in Mount Horrible, Wisconsin, covering CWD there. Four Field and Stream. And here's the thing. So I found what I was looking for right there because I loved researching and writing about stuff that was controversial and difficult.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I just had this revelation, by the way, as you were, as we were talking those, the game farming thing, the CWD thing. And then I could, I could drop, I could go off the side and write a story about guns. And so kind of all of my passions were brought into one box when I started working at Field and Stream.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I was still working for other folks. Right. It wasn't a full time gig, never has been. But a lot of the things that interested me most in my life I could pursue by, by working with filmstream yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

No, that's pretty amazing. I was actually going to ask you. I mean, just you've done such a long standing, kind of consistent message when it comes to conservation, public lands, you know, really educating people on how that goes. I was going to ask you where your motivation comes from. And it seems like you just figured that out.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It did. I did. And here's the other one. So I wrote a couple of dog stories. I wrote a book about guns, historical firearms in 2008 called famous firearms of the Old West. All of that. But conservation, environment, wildlife, fish, you can fix those things.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

For sure. Like, I don't know how you fix health care to us. I don't know how you fix the sense of existential dread when you have to draw up a loan to put a new well in.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But I do know you can fix things.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I have watched the Clean water Act of 1972. I'm just old enough to have watched the Tennessee river get cleaner and cleaner until recently.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I have watched wetlands protection increase in my life so that there were better duck hunting. Mm. And cleaner water and less floods. And then until recently. Right. We're, we're, we're, we're losing, we're losing the thread. There's no doubt.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But I watch things getting better all of my growing up days.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I do. I feel I have an obligation to point out that things that are broken can be fixed in the environment and public lands and fish and wildlife, which makes people's life better.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's very important to point out because in this timeframe that we're living in, there's a lot of division that has been sowed. But it's important to listen to people like you who have done this for a long, long time where you have watched things that were broken get fixed. It creates a better, like, outcome.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

That's right.

[Sam (Host)]

So, like, there's almost nothing, especially when it comes to this stuff. There's almost nothing that we can't figure out and make it better. Yeah. It's going to take, you know, there's going to be some discomfort. It's going to take a lot of that to move it forward.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Well, what Randy Newberg always says is you have to face the fact that conservation is not convenient.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Convenient is just a straight pipe, the sewage out to the creek behind your house.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And your neighbors downstream might object to that. Right?

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Just a little bit.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. But convenient is to, is to dump the solvent on the outside, the county shed up above My aquifer.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep. Right. Exactly.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So people are always. Some people are always going to be going for convenience instead of whatever the other thing is.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And we are always going to be confronted with those people.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yep. For sure. You know, I saw a video the other day. It was just somebody that. They're like, I'm forming this theory, and I've just come to the conclusion that convenience is a scam. Like, as things get easier in life, like the comfort, creature comforts of life, like, and, you know, including stuff like this, the convenient thing typically leads to a worse outcome. Like, you spend money faster, the problems get bigger. Like, all of these things simply because it was convenient in the moment where he just didn't do it the right way.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. I was fishing with Pat Murray. He's the head of the CCA Coastal Conservation association in Texas. And he said we should face it. There's a cliche here, but we should face it. Easy choices make hard lives, and hard choices make easier lives.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's. It makes complete sense. I mean, like, it's pondered that a lot. Yeah. You know, and it. And it kind of sucks that that's the case because.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Well, yeah, I mean, it sucks to get up early and go work and pay off your debts, and it sucks. I don't find it hard to work out and. And train to go hunt elk, you know?

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But a lot of people do.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, but.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But if you get up and you. And you do some exercise and you run a little bit, then you get to go elk hunting and, you know, without having a heart attack.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Yeah. Well, there's a. The other adage, too. It's always like, all of it's hard. Right. You just have to choose which hard you want it to be.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Right. That's right.

[Sam (Host)]

Like you said, like, working out is hard, but it makes the end goal easier. Right. You know, not working out is easy, but, boy, it's hard to be in the elk woods if you're not in shape, and then.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And then you probably don't do it.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so that part of, like, like Jim Harrison, the writer, said, you know, we have to worry about if your life becomes a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms.

[Sam (Host)]

I love that lie.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. You don't want that, right?

[Sam (Host)]

No, not at all.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You can focus on enthusiasms like elk hunting or catfishing or something that you really want to focus on. That's one thing. But you don't want to let. You don't want to just be such a slob that you Let things go. That meant something to you for sure.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. That's just a good life lesson right there.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

No, it's a big. Yeah, I think I knew that one. I must have had some mentorship with that one.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, I think people who, you know, continue down this road and in this life or like people that are always just trying to get better at what, you know, be better than they were the day before. Yeah, I think. I think you seek people out that have done that through their lives.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

That's right.

[Sam (Host)]

And it's good to have mentors. I mean, I've got several. I've got several in this industry that have helped me a lot along the way. And, you know, all of them kind of say the same thing that we're talking about. It's just, you're doing the hard thing. You're doing the right thing. You're learning from, you know, things that you've been doing, and just all you're trying to do is be better than the man you were the day before.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

That's right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And. And there is a satisfaction in that. That allows you to sleep well.

[Sam (Host)]

That's right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Sometimes.

[Sam (Host)]

Sometimes, Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Speaking of. Speaking of sleeping well, so you were. Before we start. Hit the record button. We were talking about how sometimes life just intervenes with your plans, and that happens more often than not. But, like, as we've been trying to schedule this, every time you were shooting a text or an email back, it was like, well, I'm chopping firewood today. I'm digging another well today. What do you got going on right now?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. So what happened was my wife is stay staying with her mother, who's. Who's elderly, and our well went dry as our. As we're in this donut hole drought here in this part of Montana.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And we're in the rain shadow of the Rockies. Anyway, like. Like. Like if we were Blackfeet back in the day.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

We would roll up the teepee and be gone, get the dogs or the horses, and we'd head for the Mariahs River. Right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But we're not that. And we have these settled built houses with wells, and they've been going dry hard here.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And mine was really old sandpoint, and it just quit. So what I didn't understand was that that well was buried under my deck and behind the deer fence, which the only access is through my garden, which is all raised beds, which we've built up over 25 years.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So there's been Quite a deconstruction going on. And, and I do have a drilled well now and I've had some guys helping me where I'm not a carpenter. So they rebuilt my deck and I rebuilt the fences and all that stuff. But then all this happened in September while which, thank the Lord it didn't happen in January.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so really. But it's been a full on full thing and I, I'm still. I finished firewood, which you got to finish here because my road closes for big game security. My firewood road in the national forest here.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You know, at the opening of big game season and you gotta have all your firewood that you permit for from the fire service. You gotta have it all out before that. So there's this kind of rush. And so one of the things it did, I, I do a job every year for the Mule Deer foundation on range restoration, planting sage bitter brush. And I'm, I'm can't go on that this year. I have too much on the home front and I passed up two major bird hunting trips and you see like life making the hard choices. Right?

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But. And, and the, the best pike and, and walleye fishing of the year for me on the Missouri is now.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. And all that kind of stuff where you have to miss out on these things that you look forward to the rest of the year. That's just hard on a guy's soul.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It is. And the older you get, the harder it gets because you're, you're going like, well, how many, how many more of these seasons have actually got.

[Sam (Host)]

Right? Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

And when you, and, and when you measure years like in opening days and closing days, it's. You realize how fast those all go, isn't it? So when you miss one or it's like, oh man, like I. Last year I, you know, silver linings, right. There's always good and bad. But last year in June, I fully ruptured my Achilles and so just snapped and so I had to have surgery and it's, you know, it's about a year long recovery process which sucked because I was like, well there's, you know, that's most of my season. Like I ended up getting out and hunting in a walking boot and whatever. But the only good thing, the only good thing of the timing of that was I also had my first child at the right at the end of summer last year. And so it was one of those things that was like, this is going to force you to like pump the brakes a little bit, stay home Be a dad. And, but, and then now like I am like I'm chomping at the bit so bad just to like hit it hard this season. So it's going to be fun, but it's just sometimes those things pop up and all of a sudden you're like, I got to cancel multiple plans that I have.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And usually there is a silver lining in that. And not just being with present for the, the new baby and your wife and your family, which is the core of your whole existence.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Exactly.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It's not just that. It's. It's. There's a soul searching part. Like, like this, this thing that I've been in here, I make a check. I make a checklist in the morning and I check the boxes. Bam, bam, bam, bam. And, and that's really good for me because I'm a disorganized person to the maximum.

[Sam (Host)]

Same.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I have a very short attention span.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And. And it's. I find myself doing stuff like finishing the shovel work.

[Sam (Host)]

Yes.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Right. Like, like there's a big pile of dirt. It is in the way.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it needs to be shoveled out of the way. Yeah. And if that takes two and a half hours of shoveling, that's what it takes. And you don't want to stop and go look at your phone.

[Sam (Host)]

No.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Or, or cook some fancy lunch that you've invented because you don't want to shovel.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. It's. It's amazing.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Typically my, my, my procrastination is like organizing and so typically when I have a big project to do. Whatever. My garage has never been more organized. Right. Or my desk is like spotless.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You bet.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Because I'm just like, God, I just don't want to sit down and do that right now. So I'm the same way. I have to make a list and then just churn through it.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So did you recover? Did that Achilles recover? Is it 190?

[Sam (Host)]

I'd say, I'd say 90. The. Yeah. The biggest thing now is, and they told me this too is like the, the biggest thing is the, the tendon will heal really well, but the strength in the calf and the muscle stuff like will take a long time. So it's, it's definitely getting there. But it. And you know another. I'd say six, eight months of hiking around the hills and stuff. Like I'll be, I'll be good.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. That's cool. And that, that's a practice too. I could tell you when you're older you get hurt a lot if you're doing the things that you want to do, you know, and. And my son is a horse guy, cowboy, and like, they. They're hurt a lot. Right. And you. If you pay attention and fix stuff mindfully.

[Sam (Host)]

Yes.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You can. You can go for a really long time.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep. Yeah. It's just that the daily maintenance helps a lot.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It is. Right. We had this conversation, like, with old cowboys in the old days, if they had, like, done physical therapy, if they had, like, would. Would they have been so stove up at like, 50, 60?

[Sam (Host)]

I mean, probably not.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Right? Probably not. Yeah. Like. Like, you think about, like, knees that are dislocated, you know, say buck and horse.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Well, back then they didn't know how to use a thera band. Right, right, right. Or they didn't have a place to tie one of those, you know, elastic bands to. To work your inner. Inner. Inner. The muscles that tie your leg, your knee together.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. And they weren't taking, like, collagen and peptides to, like, help regrow those tendons and stuff.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Right. No. Ibuprofen for the loading dose when you first get hurt.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I feel, you know, like, I think about this quite a bit, you know, like, there's. There's good and bad at any time you live. Right. And you just take the hand that you're dealt with, the time that you're given on the earth. But like, man, do I feel fortunate to live in a time of modern healthcare.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Right.

[Sam (Host)]

Because the things that they can do and like, the different things that they have now that, like, help you get back on your feet, I mean, it's so fast compared to what it used to be. No wonder everyone died at 45.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. And probably you died, so I think about 40. Dying at 45 is because you had to do something required you to move very quickly and you didn't. Your Achilles never fixed or your knee was out. So you didn't move quickly that day. So whatever was ran over you smashed, you fell.

[Sam (Host)]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Shot you.

[Sam (Host)]

Right, right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I was. Yeah, I think there's a lot. One of the things I always think about is, like, modern dentistry.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I had this great book called, I think it's five years with Quantrill by this guy named McCorkle. And they fought in the Missouri border wars, you know.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

On the side of the South. They were the ones that massacred everybody. They were. They were, like, supposed to be the worst people in the world.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

They. And it is told from his point of view. Right. It's his it's his. It's a first person story. But Quantrill was always galloping off to Texas to try to get his teeth fixed.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And he would have been done way more atrocities if he had modern dentistry. But he lived this, like, miserable. Like he really had terrible trouble with his teeth. And that was the famous, you know, border. Border warlord Quantrill.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And they said that he would disappear. Like just his teeth would get so bad he would have to. And he couldn't go to the dentist anywhere around Missouri or Kansas because the dentist would kill him. Right. It would turn him into those feds.

[Sam (Host)]

So he had to go. Had to travel all the way to Texas to get his teeth.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

All the way to Texas to try.

[Sam (Host)]

To get his teeth fixed. And if he wouldn't have had problems like that, he would have been. Spent a lot more time doing what he was doing.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. Doing terrible things to everybody.

[Sam (Host)]

Oh, man, that's crazy. So, so what was it like? I mean, Field and Stream's been around for a long time, but what's it been like? You know, writing for the magazine and then kind of. I mean, honestly, like watching it kind of like fall off, you know, when it. It went full digital and then basically got sold off. But like now this like revamp to bring it all back and build it back up. What's it been like to go through that roller coaster with the brand?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Well, it's. So it was definitely a zen, like, acceptance that eventually, like, like we were still doing pretty big stories for the magazine, the print magazine in 048, all the way through 8.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I remember we did a bear poaching story and they were still like sending you places. Like I went to California and stayed in Bakersfield and Oldale a bear poaching story. That was super fun. And was that.

[Sam (Host)]

Was that back when they were trying to. They were poaching them to take gallbladders and stuff.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So these, these folks had gotten tangentially into the gallbladder trade. They were really just obsessed bear hunters.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And. And somebody goes, you know, you can go to San Francisco or this guy will come out and buy this gallbladder. And so there was a gallbladder trade.

[Sam (Host)]

Connection, but it was a byproduct of.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It was a byproduct of. Of the just really kind of obsessive pursuit of bears. I'll never forget all the, like, I met so many great people on those trips, you know, and just so much fun, like riding with the game wardens and listening to the stories. And so we were still doing that. So in 2010, again, Mike Toth, he called me. Here I was sitting in this same office. I've been in here for 24 years. And he said, hey, do you want to go down and live blog the oil spill? This is the Deepwater Horizon spilling. And, you know, here's another thing, is like, if you read Nietzsche and does spake Zarathustra, he said, I am a yea sayer. Right. The Superman. The Nietzsche and Superman. He always says yes. Right. Like. Like. And there's a million reasons not to do anything.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it was May. It was like early May. Here I was. I was shooting gophers, like, with the kids.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I was having this kind of easy life. And. And I got this call, and they said, you want to go live blog the oil spill? I didn't know how to lab blog anything. I was interested in that, though, and had been, as a journalist, interested in what was then called a vlog. Yep, a vlog. And I had. I had all kind of plans to do a vlog back in the day, but I didn't have the technological capacity myself. So anyway, I went. I said yes. I was working on my Nietzsche.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep. Yeah, let's do it.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And off we went. Off I went. And I met Tim Romano, who's a great, incredible photographer and very techno. Techno savvy. And we live blogged the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And those things are gone now. But at the time, it was a big success. It really was cool. And I was writing at night in New Orleans, and I had gone to college in New Orleans, so I knew the place. And I had fished the Biloxi Marsh, so I knew the place. Tim did, too. Tim knew it better than I did.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Tim was the linchpin here. He was the key. And he did such an incredible professional job setting us up with people. I didn't have a smartphone, and. And, yeah, without Tim, it couldn't. It couldn't. Tim Romano was the hero of this story. But we. It was very successful, and that launched what became the conservationist blog or column.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I did that for, I don't know, 10 years. Seven or eight. Nine. 10 years. Yeah. Until that fell off. Right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But never paid very much. But it was a. It was a chance to address, like, all the major conservation challenges of the moment.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

That's the beauty of the Internet. Right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You don't get the big bear story, bear poaching story in the magazine, but you can address things in real time.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Which is pretty Amazing.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Pretty amazing.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. Because, I mean, nothing can slip through anymore, which is pretty great.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. And so that column was responsible, really. You know, I connected with, like, the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Backcountry hunters and anglers, Trout Unlimited. I was. I was counting on all the conservation kind of world to. To. To tell me what I would say. Feed me. Because I didn't. I could do whatever I wanted. Right. We had autonomy, and so I wasn't being fed these stories. But you could pick and choose from this huge base of people who are paying attention.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

What was obviously going to be very important to American hunting and fishing.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And what people would be interested in.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. What you need. I mean. Cause, like, being just one person, you can't kick tabs on every facet of the industry.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

No.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

At that time, trcp, Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, was doing these media summits, and they were a clearinghouse. Outdoor Writers association of America was another. POMA Professional Outdoor Media association was another. But the TRCP was doing these media summits where they were literally bringing together some of the best minds in conservation and you could just go around and meet them.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, yeah. Which is, I mean, pretty incredible. And like, even. Even now, still, like all of these organizations that have a newsletter that, you know, basically, you know, pumping out the information you need to know, like, on the day that it's happening.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

I feel very lucky to have that because I can go, you know, I've got one email inbox set up where I've subscribed to all these newsletters and I can go through and just, you know, kind of see what's happening out there in the world and, you know, whether that's. Need to make a post about it or call somebody about it or to podcast about it, you know, so it's. Yeah, it's pretty cool to have that. The technology where you can kind of just have the Internet scrape it for you and pull all that in and then go talk about it.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. And like, what you and Travis hall are doing, like that public lands battle, you know, against Senator Mike Lee's part of the big beautiful bill.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I mean, that wouldn't. Could have happened without this whole ecosystem of people paying attention.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And for the first time, it was people who were outside of hunting and fishing too.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Joining in.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. And that was the big thing.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It was. Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Across. I mean, regardless of what public land pursuit people were doing, the. The fact that everybody stepped up on the same side. And I was just talking to this about somebody. It's like, okay, if you, if you think about, if anybody's watched marketing videos or anything, there's. It's what's called a click funnel. Right. So social media is the top of the funnel. And what this latest fight did is you have the biggest opening of that funnel was social media. And it, it funneled all these people into one spot. And then eventually it got down to where people actually took action, where, whether that be through the action center of bha, where you're, you know, send an email to your representatives or you're picking up the phone and making that phone call. But without this giant, you know, casting net of social media, I think the response would have been. I mean, not anywhere close.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

No, I think it would have gone through.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And then the endless battles to try to save pieces of the public lands would have. Would have. Would have commenced.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It would have been an enormous shift in the weather overnight. All of us who do, who believe in the public lands and who rely on. I mean, I've built my whole life around access to public lands.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And. And I talked to Travis hall about this too. Like, my, My family was raised here because of the Lewis and Clark National Forest and, And the BLM lands, the Missouri breaks and.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So for those of us, we would have. We would have been fighting piecemeal battles for the rest of our lives.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

To just try to hold on to this or that. That some incredibly wealthy person somewhere on the globe had either targeted or just didn't want.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I mean, I mean, it's just. I was so amazed at the audacity of that. Takeover attempt. Attempted takeover.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. I was just reading your article in the latest edition of Field and Stream. And, you know, it talks about the, the battle that we just won, but it also talks about how we can't really just sit back on our heels now because, you know, like you wrote about in the article, like, this fight has. Is not. It's nothing new. This was probably the, the most bold and in your face, like, attempt that we've seen in our generation. Or at least in my generation, for sure. But what, I mean, what would you say to people who are listening to this? They're like, okay, how do you stay involved and not get worn out on all this stuff? Because it's easy. Like, I love this. I'm passionate about it, but even I, like you, start to get worn down on the same message over and over. What do people need to be looking for?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

One is, you have to do what Ed Abby always said, be a Half hearted fanatic. You know, first, first go and enjoy and celebrate and take your kids or the neighbor's kids and yourself and go fishing and hunting and wandering, paying attention and to what we have in our country and go to the river, you know, and think. But you got to think about the Clean Water act at some point.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

At 1972. And, and the fact that all these, the 1970s was the decade of environmental protection and we live as the beneficiaries of that time. Those hard fought battles. And I think we've kind of forgotten that. But let's go back to your question. It's an unpleasant answer actually. I think you have to understand that we are in a battle or even a long term war to protect the things that we truly believe in, that we have inherited, that we can't give up.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so you gotta imagine being in a, in the military in a way. And you're very tired of the fight. But. But you believe in it and it's still there. It's outside and, and it's not. I mean eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. Yeah, that's true.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And this freedom to hunt fish, swim in the river, go across the Bankhead National Forest in Alabama. I was down there, I just finished a chapter. We can talk about that later. About the Bankhead National Forest book I'm working on. And I met so many people in there. This is not hunting. This is just wandering in March and April. They're from Coleman, Alabama. They're from Birmingham, Alabama. They're from small towns, Ren, Alabama. And they're in the Sipsy Wilderness. First wilderness east of the Mississippi. Established, fought for like, like people are like, that's stupid. We're not doing that. You know. And back in the 70s and 80s. Right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so many battles over public lands were fought in that Bankhead National Forest.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it's not the biggest national forest in the east. It's. But people love it.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And these are very. I'm sure they're coming from very conservative political backgrounds. And there they are going down Thompson Creek. This, you know, the headwaters of what is now Smith Lake. Right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Not coincidentally the cleanest lake in Alabama and one of the cleanest of its size anywhere.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Because its headwaters are protected in the Bankhead National Forest.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And its headwaters are in the Sipsy Fork of the Black Warrior river and which is home to two species that don't live. A flattened lust turtle and an Elabelle water dog that don't live anywhere else in the world.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You know, I mean. I mean, we have these success stories and we have people who love them, and we inherited this from the battles that people fought. And so, you know, what are we gonna do? Like, like, like get all wrapped around the axle of politics and let this stuff go?

[Sam (Host)]

I don't think so.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

You can't do it. Yeah. And I think that maybe that's one thing that, you know, people like me and need to do a better job of is talking about these success stories. Because it's, you know, typically when you need people to speak up is when there's a real rough thing that's happening, and it's not like. No. Because of this. This happened. You know, start educating people on, like, how good this can be.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. I guess if you. Jim Posowitz taught me that, and he had. He had written with rifle in hand. It was a book about how hunters saved America. And Jim told me one time, he said, man, you're. You're. You're right in this litany of disaster. He said, you're covering all these environmental problems. And he said. He said, you don't. You need to. You need to remember to write a few pieces that just celebrate what we love.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And, boy, I took that to heart. Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Well, it would be very easy to get incredibly jaded if you're only writing about the bad things that are going on.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And. And I mean, it's not that we're going to ignore the bad things, you know, or. Or ignore the. The. The bad stuff that we've done and has been done in the past. You don't ignore anything.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You know, I mean, we. We.

[Sam (Host)]

But.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But you definitely want to go like, boy, that was one hell of a day. You know what I mean?

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, definitely.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I'm work. I'm actually working on a field and stream piece about. I won't go into it much of. Just about a spectacular day.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It's just one day where it all came together.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And that wouldn't be spectacular if it all came together every time.

[Sam (Host)]

No, I mean, that's what makes it the best. Uh, you know, growing up, did a lot of waterfowl hunting and.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

You know, now I remember all of the good hunts. Right. But you don't tend. You tend not to remember the ones where you, like. You put in a lot of work and. And shot two or, you know, whatever.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. Or nothing.

[Sam (Host)]

But we. My. My. You know, my brother really instilled this into me. He's four years older than I am, and he. He always Said like every time you hunt, you're one closer to the good one. Like.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

So regardless of what happens that day, like, it's all about time and pressure and energy put into the pursuit. And, you know, especially when it came to waterfowl hunting, it's like, okay, well, we had six crappy hunts in a row and then you just have one absolute banger where you catch the migration. Right. Mallards are dropping in from the jet stream and it's like, yep, this is why we did all this. This is, you know, like every single time you're out is one step closer.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So to that day. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I think about in Montana is funny because a lot of times it'll freeze up hard before the duck season even gets going.

[Sam (Host)]

Oh, yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Like, like before anybody shows up. Right. You're right. And I've sat in this one place for I could probably more mornings and nothing ever came. There was no, there were no birds in the, in the system, you know, and I do. And then, then, then there'd be that banger. A day where everything shows up and it's all happening.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

My kids don't waterfowl hunt much. They tell me that I ruined it with my intensity.

[Sam (Host)]

It's. You're going to do that to your kids every once in a while?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I'm afraid so. Yeah. You just. It wasn't any fun. They were just too intense.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. So what do you got? What big projects are you working on right now?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Um, so I'm, I'm. I'm writing for the, the print magazine. It feels Dream right now. And I've got a lot going on with the roadless rule stuff. And part of the research that I'm doing for the Roadless Rule, I. I had to dig up Field and stream pieces from 2011 when this roadless rule thing came up.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I got them. I, I found them on the Internet off this, the Wayback Machine and in any way. So I'm finishing two book manuscripts that have been. This has been a five year project and we did a movie called Public trust back in 2019 and that was about public lands. And I kind of got. I didn't get the book from that. I was already actually working on it, which is why we did the movie. But I've got two manuscripts. There's one kind of a history of how we got public lands and what might the future be, and the other one is simply a travel book and it's, it's profiles of national forests and trips and Stuff like that.

[Sam (Host)]

Oh, cool.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so I'm, I'm bringing those in. They're both over words.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Like 115,000 plus. And they've been. I'm really looking forward to doing. Bringing those in.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And really walking away when I, I want to hunt and fish more.

[Sam (Host)]

For sure. Yeah. And because that's why we do all this stuff. It allows us to spend more time doing, you know, then we can talk about it later.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

That's right. It does. Definitely. Projects like this have taken a toll on. Well, they gave me incredible experiences wandering the United States of America. Going to like the Pisgah National Forest, the Bankhead, the Tuskegee in Alabama, the Apalachicola in Florida.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And then. But the, but the writing of it. Yeah. Requires putting your ass in a chair.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And. And the Shoshone National Forest. I made a huge trip. It's been five years. Exactly. There. One of the greatest trips of my life. But wasn't hunting. It was, it was a research trip and all. And my son said to me the other day, he goes, well, if you're going to get my, my daughter wants to get an elk this year. Yeah. And he said, well, dad, you're going to have to take off. You know, you're going to have to spend the time scouting if you want any percentage of success on that venture.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And that's true.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it's going to be, it's going to be a balancing act this year.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Again, not just.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

I was going to say between digging wells and finishing books and.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You want to try to work that. I always think of it as a four burner stove. Right. And you got family, you got work, you got hunting, fishing, and probably the fourth is your health. Right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Like physical fitness and stuff. And you've got to, you've got to turn those burners on or off. You don't want to turn them all the way off. Right. But you got to balance that. Those four burners.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I didn't come up with this. This is something somebody told me.

[Sam (Host)]

I like the analogy. That's great.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. But you can't have them all running, running 100% all the time.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And you, and you can't really afford to cut any of them off completely. So.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it's a balance. And I really. My son talking about that. He's right about that. I've to, I've. If I want percentage of success, I don't want to just frustratedly go out at 3am and hide to the Top.

[Sam (Host)]

Of this ridge and hope it's going to work.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And hope it's going to work. It's, you know, their percentage is. No, look.

[Sam (Host)]

That's right. Yep. That's right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I haven't killed a bull in about four years.

[Sam (Host)]

Well, you're doing daughter.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah, my daughter's never killed a bull.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that'll be. That'll be a fun trip. I know. I'm. I'm getting ready to go out on a scouting mission myself. I've. I've got this. I've had this project in mind for a long time. I've wanted to do like a whitetail hunt, a rifle whitetail hunt in a western setting. And so I'm doing that this year, which I'm excited about. Cool. I'll go out and scout for three and a half days and hang some cameras and, you know, just kind of COVID the ground. And then I'll go back out in November and see if I can. See if I can find one.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But can you say what state this is?

[Sam (Host)]

I've tried not to.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Okay.

[Sam (Host)]

Just. Yeah. I, you know, I've. One thing I've learned about whitetails, they're kind of everywhere and so. But I'm gonna just be hunting. Hunting a river system where you would think to find a whitetail. But it's gonna. It's gonna be fun. I, you know, just something. I was gonna do it last year and then I blew up my leg. And then I've been thinking about it for three years. So it's just like I'm chomping at the bit to go. Just put eyes on all the country.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Cool.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And you're looking for a big one. Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Trying to hopefully.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Or you know, like I'm. I'm typically one if I'm chasing deer on public land, like something mature, you know, like it doesn't have to, you know, I don't need to shoot 170 inch deer, but if I can find a. A big old burly rutted up buck that, you know, gets my. Gets my blood pumping. I'm gonna.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

I'm gonna, you know, punch my tag.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. Cool.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

That's a. Yeah. That's a worthy endeavor too. That's a western whitetail would like that. That's Prescott.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. It's gonna be fun for sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

What else have. Do you. Where, where are you based right now?

[Sam (Host)]

So I'm based in North Dakota right now. Yeah. We moved back. Like I went to college here at North Dakota State and then My wife and I moved back. She got a job at the hospital as an occupational therapist here, so. And for what I do most time, it doesn't really matter where I live. I can travel out and hunt. It's a. It's a good state. There's lots of opportunity for.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Oh, man.

[Sam (Host)]

Kind of everything. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I've had.

[Sam (Host)]

I've had this idea. I was like, I should, like, come up with, like, the North Dakota decathlon, you know, and it's like, catch a limit of walleyes, shoot a limited. Ducks, pheasants, grouse, you know, shoot a deer. Like, you know, whatever. Whatever. Like the, you know, trapper, raccoon or a coyote. Like, kind of come up with this list of 10 things to do in a year and document that was the.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Single best day of dove hunting. And I grew up in Alabama. Dove hunting was sunflower field hunting in North Dakota.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And, I mean, we had so much fun. It was just like. You couldn't believe it.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. Some of those fields are. It's silly how many birds are flying around.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It was incredible. And I was. I was posted up against this old, like, abandoned farmstead.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And this is probably dates back around when they created Lake Sakakawea. And they had an old boat like. Like these. These folks, they were living pretty minimal, like, the house minimalist and everything, but they had this whole boat stuck in the weeds.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You know, before they had given up and.

[Sam (Host)]

Sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And left. And I was walking around that farmstead. I. I got this incredible vision of how these folks had lived. And. And it was just part of the dove hunt. Right. But, yeah, it was so. It was so cool. And. And they had. They had, like, scratched together the cash to get this boat right. For. For the lake. For sure. At the time. Probably new, Right? Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I just. I love that the. That in people, like, they wanted to go fishing, man.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Yeah. Wanted to go. Spend time on the water.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's one thing you get to, you know, living in the center of the country, you get to see a lot of these old farmsteads, abandoned farmsteads and stuff. And when I was. I was probably only like 8 or 9 years old, we were driving past an old farmstead. My dad said. He's like, I always look at these places, and I wonder if they were more full of laughter or sadness. He's like, I can't help but think that. I can't help but think, like, what kind of life did they live? Like in these crazy old places. So now every time I go buy one, I have the exact same thought. I'm like, I wonder what. What was that life like, you know? Yep. And before they ended up leaving that property or moving off or passing away or whatever. So you get to see a lot of that out here, though. It's good. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And some of them were great. Some of them were hard Scrabble, like. Like farmers.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And some of them were like philosophy people, man. Like. Like it. What people forget in America in the 20s and before everybody. Farming. Everybody was farming, right?

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And people were coming from Norway. And, you know, there's an incredible book by Jonathan Ray Ban called Badlands. You've ever read or read that?

[Sam (Host)]

No. I'm going to need to, though.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. Definitely read that. And yeah, it's. It's about like when it's eastern Montana and western North Dakota.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But it's about all the people who are in those farmsteads. And some of them just got off the train with this weird soil manual that the railroads had published that was absolute hokum. I didn't have any basis in reality whatsoever. And they went to work and some of them made it.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But he had this. There's a book that he found in all these abandoned homestead. It was the soil manual and this other book, something about the Limberlost. It was a novel.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And the kids, mostly the teenage girls, loved this novel at the time and the parents had got. Gotten it for them. Right.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And it really is a glimpse into people's lives. Not just hard, not just hardship either.

[Sam (Host)]

It was called Badlands.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Who wrote that? Badland? Jonathan Ray Ban. Jonathan Ray Ban passed away, but he was an Englishman who came to. To North Dakota, eastern Montana, and got fascinated by the bigness of it all, you know? And he gets one thing wrong in that book. He thinks that the BLM also helps manage private land.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so he's an Englishman. Right. He gets one thing wrong. He gets two. And then there's a Rogers Pass is south of me. And he interviews a woman who's. I think she's still alive. She lives north of me.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And she was one of the people in the books.

[Sam (Host)]

Like crazy.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

That's awesome.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

She points out that he got wrong Rogers Pass because the road wasn't paved over Rogers Pass when all this was happening.

[Sam (Host)]

Okay.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And they were going out the highway, too. Anyway, the book is awesome.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to have to read that.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It's definitely about. It's super funny and and yes, it chronicles like super hard times, but they're having it. They're having a good time too, man.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, for sure.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Those people are so glad to be out of Poland or some kind of famine that happened in Finland. You know, like the 80. 80 mile an hour wind and 12 below in the sod house. It might be tough, but it ain't. They're happy.

[Sam (Host)]

It's not a fan.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

They're also. Yeah. They're like, yahoo.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, we got food.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah, we got food for now.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Oh, that's really cool. Well, before we wrap this up, is there anything that you think people need to know about where we're at in this landscape of, of conservation and public lands they should be paying attention to?

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. Let's drag pollen, let's, let's drag conservation and the things that we believe in public lands. Let's drag them out in front of the politics.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

We're not, we're not playing that game anymore. You know, where somebody tells you vote for me.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And then, and then they turn around on you. Try to sell off your national forest or.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Get rid of your clean water act.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I mean, I mean we, we have to have. I wrote a piece for feeling the stream a long time ago that I don't think people liked it very much, but it was called what do you really believe in?

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And I would like it if people would just. If you really love to fish and hunt, if you really love being outside and seeing wildlife or not. Not even that. Just, just love to fish and hunt and want to pass that on. Just like what is it really important to us?

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You know, and, and what is locally important to us? When I first moved to Montana89 there was a Ravalli County Fish and wildlife was a sportsman's group in the Bitterroot and Great Falls had one Russell Country Sportsman. And these groups, they, they were already getting kind of old by the time I was. I found them. Right. I found them because of the game farming debate everybody was, was fighting over. And, and those sportsman's groups at their time were the most effective conservation Right. Movement ever. And, and they, they have mostly disappeared. Tailgate hunters and anglers are still holding on and was not holding on. They're thriving in Missoula.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But I would love it if people would get back to that. But you can use the Internet. But face to face over a cup of coffee or having a beer or, or telling hunting and fishing stories with like minded folks in your community. Yeah, man, we could, we could move.

[Sam (Host)]

Some needles yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Just like you said, having that face to face conversation is a big thing.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Even back then the politics were hot. Like this was 90s.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And people didn't agree. You don't have to agree about stuff.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You just agree on the goal.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think that's what makes us, you know, American. Right. It's. It's okay. It's okay to have different viewpoints.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Please have different viewpoints.

[Sam (Host)]

Exactly. Yeah. But it doesn't have to be all one thing or the other. It's okay. You know, it's okay to have. Have big disagreements, but then like you said, still have a common goal and fight towards that. Right. You start to fight towards that common goal. It's like all that other stuff kind of just melts away pretty fast, at least in the moment.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah, it is. It's. If we look at Iowa, for instance, in the water quality problem, the water pollution is really a disaster.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It's totally fixable.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And. And protecting wetlands might give you more ducks to shoot. And I always say that the fish and hunting are the interest on the principle of doing the right thing by your land.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

They're not that. They're not the basic. They're. They're the cream on that rises on the top.

[Sam (Host)]

That's right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But dude, you could fix that so easily by giving farmers a break on taxes on floodplains. The federal government has to be involved though, because it has to be. The cost of. It has to be spread out over the nation the same way the public lands. You're funding public lands. Public lands exist because they were lands that were not claimed by homesteaders.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Because they didn't make any money.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So if you're going to manage those lands, you're going to manage them. You might have an ecosystem positive, but you're going to have a financial burden to some extent.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You're going to pay for it. Do you want a thin timber that's not worth the money to cut it? You got to pay me to go out there with a chainsaw and cut.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So the federal government has to be involved. You have to have a functioning federal government that spreads the cost of these very positive projects. And we could. Dude, there is no we could. We know how to fix this stuff. Like.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Like the floodplain issue alone. If you buffered those creeks and, and you worked with private landowners to incentivize them to not drain wetlands. And we're all getting a benefit, not just duck hunting, but it's not Flooding. It's not. The water isn't toxic in Des Moines, Right?

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. And we're not good across the board.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. And Grant, remember when Grand Forks got flooded?

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

I don't know. That was the 90s, right?

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

96 that stuff. Floods are going to happen. But floods are made worse by draining wetlands, right?

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Floods are made worse by draining prairie potholes.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

The same potholes that produce your ducks.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So. And those are very productive lands. So they're not public lands, they're private. So we create a place. What do we believe in? Right. We believe in that the land and the water is the basis of all economy. And that's just irrefutable. I don't care if you live in a city somewhere. There's some topsoil growing, some food that, that you got to eat before you go to Wall street and trade, you know, pork bellies or whatever. They trade bootleg. I don't know what they do, you know.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

But so what? I just, I just wish that people, hunters and fishermen are particularly good at this.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It's freaking cold, man. I'm going to put on my jacket. I'm not going out without a fire kit. We're not going to take the boat out without a sump pump. Right. Without a bilge pump.

[Sam (Host)]

Right. Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Which is something that happened to us in Florida this year and we had a disaster. So the bilge pump has got to work right. Before we go across Fort Peck Reservoir because it's windy. All right. So these are reality based decisions. They're not abstract.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

They're not about politics or things. They're, it's cold or it's really hot.

[Sam (Host)]

Yep.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

We should bring an extra quart of water for Junior.

[Sam (Host)]

Right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Reality based decisions. Right. Why is it flooding? Well, yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

We don't have anything to stop the water.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

That's right. And, and so I always, I like to finish up. I, I, we can, you can't have, maybe not all. You can have it. You can make it so much better.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And so much bang for so little buck.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Yeah. But it's just going to take funding like the proper agencies to actually, like you said, incentivize this because it is going to have to be done on private lands. But incentivizing this. And so it makes sense for the people who are stewards of the current stewards of that land. And I always, I always say current stewards because it's just our turn.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

It's just our turn. That's that Doug Duran thing. Share the lamb yeah. He goes, it's not ours. It's just our turn.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yes. That's. Thank you.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. And so figuring out how to make. I mean, figure out how to educate people that it is worthwhile for everyone. You know, we do this giant project surrounding the duck stamp every year with my brother and I through public land tees, and right now we're giving away duck stamps with orders because we raised, you know, so far as of recording this, we've raised $17,000 to buy Duck stamps. But when we talk about the reason we do this, it's because, yes, it's good for the ducks, but it is good for water quality, soil erosion, flooding, air quality, like, and go down the list, and it's like there are 700 species that rely on wetlands, including humans.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

So.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. And so it's just, you know, it's important to, you know, these are the things that need to be talked about more broadly. And I love it. I love that that's the direction you went with, what you wanted to lead people with.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah. And it's what, you know, what's real, man? You know, real is. Is. Is for me, it's catfishing on the Missouri in May, and the water's coming up, and. And that river, I mean, they dumped all this smelter waste into it back in the. In the 1920s, before we had laws to control that. The federal government had to make those laws. I just want to get back to a united America based on reality. A federal government of we the people, by the people, for the people. And what do you want it to do? Because you're going to have a government. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You could be a libertarian or an anarchist or whatever you want.

[Sam (Host)]

You're still going to have a government.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You're going to have a government.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

And what do you want it to do?

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Well, Hal, thanks so much for hopping on and talking about all this stuff. I had a blast. I, you know, I hope everybody listening to this did, too, because this, you know, this was a really fun conversation, and at some point, you and I are going to have to actually go, like, sit in a duck blind and maybe not shoot any ducks, but.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah, well, I'm always up. I love North Dakota. And we're not. We're on the same side of the Rockies.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah, that's right.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

Yeah.

[Sam (Host)]

Yeah. Well, we'll stay in touch. We'll get in the field. But again, just thanks for hopping on and spending an hour and a half talking about all this stuff.

[Hal Herring (Guest)]

You got it, Sam. Thanks a lot, man. Great to talk with you.