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Rewilding Earth Podcast
Episode 131: The Growing Movement Toward 100 New US National Parks
00:40:14
About Michael Kellett, the co-founder and Executive Director of RESTORE: The North Woods, has over 35 years of experience in the land conservation movement. In 1994, he wrote the first white paper proposing a 3.
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- [00:00]
Jack
Foreign, raise your hand if you'd like. 100 new national parks. Today I speak again with Michael Kellett, the man with the plan to build a new powerful national parks movement which could lead to one or two new national parks in your area with your help. Learn more in this episode of the Rewilding Earth Podcast.
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Michael Kellett
Foreign.
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Jack
You'Re listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. Michael Kellett, the co founder and executive director of Restore the North woods, has over 35 years of experience in the land conservation movement. In 1994, he wrote his first white paper proposing a 3.2 million acre Maine Woods national park and Preserve and has been actively involved in efforts to restore endangered wildlife such as eastern wolf, Atlantic salmon and Canada links to protect federal and state public lands from unsustainable logging and development and to revive the national parks movement. Michael, welcome back to the podcast.
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Michael Kellett
Thank you. I'm glad to be back.
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Jack
I didn't think all the way Back to episode 36 when you were first on that when I invited you to come back, it would take this long. It's been a minute, so we have a lot to catch up on.
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Michael Kellett
Yeah, we have this hundred areas list. Actually there are a lot more, but focusing on 100 new national parks and I've done a deep dive on every one of them. And as you can imagine, it takes a long time to really, for each one to really flesh it out, decide does it make sense, talk to people who are there if you can and just weigh one against versus another, which are the top priorities. It's, it's taken a lot of time for just, for all that groundwork and.
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Jack
Just to remind everyone, it was episode 36 and we talked about establishing hundreds of new national parks. Is it really possible that there's a hundred really good candidates for national parks?
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Michael Kellett
Oh, yeah. Our list, which we've been working on for really about 15 years, there's at least one national park in every state, and including two in Puerto Rico in fact. And about three quarters of the land is already public land. That's what people don't understand, that we have so much public land and most of it is not well protected. And so our, the way we started this was to look before. People may have heard about the 30 by 30 concept and the half earth concept. 30% of the earth protected by 2030 and 50% by 2050. But there's really not been much progress on that. There's been international interest. The United nations and other IUCN have supported it, the IPCC because of climate change. But there's really not been much real progress. There's a lot of talk, but the reality is only about 13% of the US at best, and I think that's probably high meets the protection standards of true protection either like wilderness, national park, national wildlife refuge, other places that are really protected for biodiversity and not so called working forests and all that stuff which are not protected. And but before this even the 30 by 30 even was hatched, we were saying we need a lot more protected land. And so what can we do about it? And restore, as you may remember, proposed a 3.2 million acre national park in northern Maine back in 1994. And what happened is we ended up connecting with a lot of other groups and activists around the country who heard about our proposal and said, wow, that's really cool. We have areas in our backyard that maybe they could be national parks. And so pretty soon we were starting to add these areas to a list. And so now we got this global emergency with climate change, we got loss of biodiversity, and now we know that all of this has a huge impact on human health and well being. And what are we doing about it? What are we doing about it? We're not doing all that much, I think. And so national parks can be a big part of the solution to that. They automatically check all three of those boxes when you create a national park. And the other thing is that people love national parks and they're so they're politically one of the most viable conservation strategies. And as I mentioned, three quarters of the areas on our list of the lands are already public land. And a lot of the other land is land like corporate, like in northern Maine. These big corporations and investment trusts and whatever own a lot of this land. They would be happy to sell it if somebody came up with a billion or $2, which is not really very much money to today in the bigger picture. So it is, it's really possible to create these hundred areas that protect these hundred areas. Now that only gets us up to about 21% protected in the U.S. so we're still not there. But actually there's enough other public land and corporate lands and so forth that could be acquired by the public that we could get to. It would be harder and it would. And it's probably not likely to happen before 2030, but it could happen maybe by 2040, whatever. But getting us up to 21% would be a big step forward from where we are.
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Jack
What I like about it too is it's easy to understand for people who don't eat and breathe this stuff all day.
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Michael Kellett
When I do a talk with a group of people, I. I say, how many people have been to a national park? Everybody's been to a national park. Any is, are you familiar with Yellowstone? Everybody knows about Yellowstone. They love Yellowstone. So you say national park. They all, they have an image in their head of a big protected area. And so you already get past that part of it. And then the other part of it is that because national parks are popular. And an interesting factoid is I keep track of the Pew Research center, which does these. I think it's every two years. They do a survey and they ask people how favorable or unfavorable you are about various federal agencies and departments. And you can imagine the range of responses. Guess what? The top one, the top agency with 80% favorability, it was the National Park Service, right above the U.S. postal Service. And in the past, in the past, the Postal Service has beaten out the Park Service. But one of the both, one or the other has been the number one listed area. There was also a public opinion survey done in the, I think, center for Western Priorities. It was where they. They do a regular State of the Rockies report. And with Western states, same thing. The overwhelming number of people support parks and protect in wilderness and protected areas. These things are really popular. But people, number one, they don't understand that our public lands aren't already protected. They don't really know that national forests, except for wilderness areas, are not like a national park. They're logged, mined, grazed, fracked. And when people find out that they're not protected, they go, whoa, what can we do? And we say one solution is a national. Is national parks or wilderness areas or both, because you can designate wilderness in national parks, which is an extra layer of protection. So we. So the. And the other thing is because parks are so popular, that's the other thing people assume, especially look at this dysfunction in Congress and controversy and all these things. But the most recent national park areas were bipartisan designations. For example, the New River Gorge national park in West Virginia, which is one of the reddest states, that was just two that was designated. It was a former national river, but they upgraded it and slightly expanded it. So you had all these Republican members of Congress, the Republican governor, conservative local businesses, they all supported it because they. It was good for business and people wanted it. So you can go through the list of. Well, in the Katahdin woods and Waters National Monument was designated in 2016, and the area that we had restore, had proposed as a national, as a Maine Woods National Park, So it's within that area. And there was a lot of controversy, took a long time. And this is typical of national parks. As soon as the area was finally there was, there was enough public support that President Obama designated it as a national monument. As soon as it was designated, all the opposition just disappeared. There's nobody now saying, we want to get rid of that monument. That's terrible. In fact, all the local people are going, hey, actually this is not so bad. In fact, this is nice. We like to go there. And my property values went up in our, gee, my restaurant is doing better business. And the part of the political problem is people, they hear no. The first thing you do is you hear no from whatever special interest, if you propose a park, it always happens. And then they go, oh, I guess it was never going to happen, so I guess I'll give up. And they give up and walk away and it doesn't happen. And, but where you don't give up and you keep pushing, sometimes it only takes a few years, sometimes it takes a lot of years. But you can, you really can convince people, if it's really a worthy area, that this, hey, national park is, would make sense for this area.
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Jack
I really like the access issue as well, though. National parks are very popular. Like how many national parks are close to huge population centers east of the Mississippi? And the answer is not many. And, and they have to be a lot closer than you and I are willing to travel to them because, right, we'll make a pilgrimage. We can get there to practically anywhere, but most people can't. And then they don't have that touch with nature. Dave Foreman said, you got to get people out there. If they don't love it, they won't protect it, they won't want to save it, they won't understand it. And I think the idea of having new national parks, especially east of the Mississippi, is tantalizing.
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Michael Kellett
And yes, and in fact that was we, we had three main criteria for new parks. And one is climate, both carbon and, and climate stabilization of natural systems. Two is biodiversity, including biodiversity hotspots, but also large areas that can sustain complete ecosystems and connectivity. And then number three is people. Just exactly what you said, more parks near people. But also recognizing that now science says that nature is, is not just nice for people to access. It's good for your health, both mental and physical health. And to us, all three of those were important things. And so sometimes you would say, oh, this area is not a one giant 2 million acre area like Yellowstone, but maybe it's Smaller and it's close to a city. It's super important for that reason. But still you still have areas like the Maine woods, 3.2 million acres that's as big as Yellowstone and Yosemite together. There's virtually nobody living there in this entire it's just remote industrial timberlands which have been hammered. But if we, if we bought it tomorrow it could be the biggest national park in the lower 48, just slightly the second biggest next to Death Valley which doesn't have nearly as many trees.
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Jack
Yes, rewilders call national parks, especially national park wilderness areas cores and if you give us enough cores we're going to get to work like beavers on connectivity. We need a lot more cores.
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Michael Kellett
That's a right and it allows you to bootstrap as which is what you're alluding to. For example, if you have a national park number one people all of a sudden know about it and it's on their radar screen right now. There are a lot of the areas we're proposing for national parks. People don't even know about a lot of these areas and nobody goes there or a few, just very few people. And some people think oh that's great because then I know about it and no one else will go there. But the reality is the mining and timber and other companies, they know where all the resources are. They have satellites, they, you know, they're out there. They buy the information. They know exactly where they want to go and mine and drill and log. So it's not. There's no secret place anymore. So the best way to protect places is for people to want to protect it and not let these guys trash it. And so that's number one. Number two there's there are real live implications because number for one thing is if an area is say an in holding international park and especially in the east you've got a mix of public and private land. So it's not going to be like one big solid Yellowstone. There's a lot more interest in get in people providing funding to buy land in holdings private lands from landowners within a national park than out in the middle of nowhere which may be really important land. But what is that? It's just every could be anywhere. And the other thing is there's like an aura of protection that's in the region of a park. For example I'm sure you're aware of the there have been a couple examples for example for they were talking about several years ago where they wanted to drill on 80,000 acres of BLM land near Canyonlands in Arches national park in Utah. And these are lands that are theoretically open to that stuff. And so they thought, oh, okay. And there was a huge outcry saying, are you crazy? This is within 10 miles or something, 5, 10 miles away from these parks. And it was. There was such a backlash that they canceled the whole thing. Just recently they were. There was a proposal for a gold mine outside Yellowstone, and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and other groups were able to raise m millions of dollars and buy this, this greedy developer out and protect those lands. Now, if that were just in the middle of some national forest anywhere, they never would have been able to do that. Another recent one is on the. The south slope of the Grand Canyon where there was a uranium mine that was going to be revitalized and opened up again. And there was a huge outcry there. And the Congress has stepped in and President Biden created this national monument that is preventing that from happening. A lot of people say, oh, you can't just have these parks because they're isolated. As you say that they're not isolated because all of a sudden it opens up all these potential things for connecting and protecting lands around them. Expanding parks. A lot of national parks have been expanded over what they originally were over time.
- [15:51]
Jack
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. Did you know we also publish insightful and inspirational content from leading Rewilding scholars, poets, artists and organizers from around the world. You can visit rewilding.org and sign up for our weekly digest to receive brilliant, fresh insights on everything Rewilding. You'll find over a decade of articles and news from the front lines of wildlands protection and all kinds of restoration efforts. Check us out@rewilding.org and don't forget to share it with friends. So I'm going to be a stick in the mud. National parks are expensive. They're some of the most expensive land designations in this country, if not the most, in some cases. In terms of what a national park is and the resources that have to be allocated to a piece of land once it's been designated a national park, there are backlogs of work that have been underfunded purposely by Congress year after year that are in current parks, they're clamoring to get projects done. And some projects we wouldn't care if they never got done anyway. But yeah, there are other basic upkeeps and things. What do you say to people when you hear that argument? When you. And you are. If you're going to talk about national parks for Five minutes that argument's going to come up, right?
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Michael Kellett
A couple answers to that. Number one is that most of that backlog is for infrastructure for roads and buildings and stuff like that. And I'm not against having those things, but they're mainly in a few of the older parks that have Yellowstone and Yosemite and whatever. And it's true. I think getting people out in parks is a good thing. So I'm not against funding those things. However, grizzly bears don't care if there are potholes in the roads in Yellowstone. Wolves don't care if the restrooms are falling apart. That doesn't mean that's good. But the reality is one of the top priority for national parks should be protecting the ecosystem in wildlife and the climate and biodiversity. And if you can't take care of recreationists as well as you'd like to, that's not good. But that's no reason to not protect nature and the natural system. And in fact, there are a couple interesting anecdotes. Is the National Park Service, at one point when they were more energy, they were talking about having mothball parks where they would just buy or draw land around a line around lands and just. And not have any money to manage it. Just, it would just be protected from exploitation until they did have money.
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Jack
Sounds awesome.
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Michael Kellett
In fact, there's an interesting anecdote that David Brower, in one of David Brower's books, and he was talking about how he and other Sierra Club people had a meeting with Newton Drury, who is the. He had been the head of the, say, the Redwoods League and then he became the director of the head of the Park Service. This was like, I think 1948. They met with Newton Drury and they said they were complaining because there wasn't enough money for the national parks. And Newton Drew, he said, yeah, you're right, there isn't. And we never seem to have enough money, but we have no money, we can do no harm. And so that, to me, that's really the key is that the priority should be protecting these places. The second priority is to have facilities and stuff for people to enjoy them. And in fact, if it's a wilderness park, some of the parks in Alaska have virtually no infrastructure and the budgets are really low because what are they, they don't have to pay for roads and, and bridges and all that stuff. And the other thing is that newer parks don't have all that infrastructure. None of the new, newer national parks that were created add a. Have added a bunch of new infrastructure.
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Jack
Is it Not a requirement somewhere. Or maybe that's just propaganda that somebody continues to spread. And that's why it's still in my mind that if you designate something national park, it has to come budget to do all of the things that make something whatever they think a national park should be. In terms of facilities and spending. Is that actually then it sounds like it's not a requirement.
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Michael Kellett
No, it's not at all a requirement. Then Congress can do whatever it wants and it can create, for example, Voyagers national park in Minnesota, which was designated in, I think, 1976. And it's one of the newer, sadly, it's one of the newer, completely new parks that didn't have some other kind of national park system designation. Upgrading from a national river to a park. And there are hardly any developments there. There's a visitor center which is right at the edge when you first go in. There's a couple of campgrounds which are very low tech, and that's about it. They're backcountry campsites, but it's mainly a de facto wilderness. And Great Basin national park in Nevada, which was designated in, I think it was 1984 and it was former national forest land, most of it there was Lehman Caves National Monument was absorbed into that. So Lehman Cave had a visitor center and they had a little store and whatever. So they kept that and they got rid of most of the roads that the Forest Service had. So there are actually fewer roads now. And they didn't add any major infrastructure at all. So it's really people, what they're doing is they're thinking about Yellowstone and Yosemite and Glacier and Mount Rainier. Those are all vintage parks. Back in the day when they thought that the goal was to get a bunch of people in with cars and stuff and build all this infrastructure. But that's no longer the model. And so that's a much more expensive model than wildland parks. Our. Our vision for, for a Maine was national park is that most of it would be wilderness and you would. You really would just enter from the periphery and there would be no major facilities, except there would be campgrounds, but they wouldn't be super developed. And interestingly, the Katahdin woods and Waters National Monument, which is within, as I say, within this proposed park, they are. They have a. The visitor center for that is out at the very edge of the park. They've got a couple campgrounds that are pretty low tech. And that's about it. It's going to basically be just a backcountry park when People are perfectly happy with that.
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Jack
So when Congressman so and so says we can't afford it, this is the argument everyone can make, right? We don't want a bunch of money. We don't imagine there's just some little things that need to be done, like just protection, somebody to patrol whatever is patrollable. And a lot of these guys are going to have to be young and on foot in some places to do that. But other than that, we're not asking for lodges or roads or.
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Michael Kellett
Right.
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Jack
So everybody could use that argument. And you're going to give them a chance to do so probably close to where they live.
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Michael Kellett
One other thing on money, while we're on money is the other part of the cost issue is that again, as I mentioned, most of these, about three quarters of these proposed park lands are already public lands, most of them National Forest or Bureau of Land Management. And those lands already have a budget. And in fact national forests, as you probably know, almost all the logging in national forests is below cost. It's actually subsidized. Taxpayers are subsidizing that logging. And so The national, the U.S. forest Service has a huge budget. And so you, if you transferred the budget. So for example, the White Mountain National Forest in New England, in New Hampshire and Maine, it's about 800,000 acres. So it's about the size of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It's a national forest. They're logging, they're, they, they have logging roads to keep the logging system going. That's where most of their money goes. And I looked at the budget for that national forest and I compared it with, with national parks. It has a bigger budget than similar national parks in size and visitation.
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Jack
So we can afford it.
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Michael Kellett
We can afford it. We, in fact, instead of spending the money to mow down the forest, we would be spending money to protect the forest and to have rangers and education programs and so forth rather than spending the money on logging and other, in roads, logging roads. And that's the case in most of the places we're talking about. It would be cheaper to have a national park than the current multiple use management that we're doing.
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Jack
Wow, great ammunition for everybody listening. Pass it on. I'll remind everyone that you have a bigger list of 500, don't you, that are proposed. But these are the most studied the hundred.
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Michael Kellett
These are areas that are either urgent or uniquely important for various reasons or number of them have been proposed before as national parks and even studied by the National Park Service. But they didn't happen because of, as I was mentioning there was opposition. And Mount Hood in Oregon has been proposed as a national park over and over again since the early 1900s. And anybody you talk to who is not a logging fan, it's a no brainer if you say gee would that should that be a national park? And a lot of people think it is. Yet here they are, they're still logging and building logging roads and so forth. So a lot of them are really no brainers. It's just that there was there for whatever reason there has not been an organized push recently at least to designate it. Other places though, people have weren't thinking about a national park. And that's part of the advantage of being at 50,000 foot level for me is I can dive into an area and I don't know what the politics are when I first look at it, but I can say wow, this would be an amazing national park. And so then what will happen is we reach out to people who are there and sometimes there's nobody working on the area at all because not because they don't care, but they either they've given up or they've been beaten back to the point where they, they're tired or there aren't enough of them, but they're. For example, the Hoosier National Forest in Indiana. There's a. An amazing grassroots that movement trying to stop this horrible logging that they're. They want to do on the, on the Hoosier National Forest. That's one of one of the areas on our list. We've talked to those folks. They are, they're interested in looking at national park as a possibility. Land between the lakes in Kentucky and Tennessee is being hammered. It's under the U.S. forest Service mismanages it. That's on our national park list. I just talked to, I just did a talk for folks up in the Upper peninsula of Michigan. I'm from Michigan originally And back in 30 years ago I was working on designating the wilderness the small wilderness areas in Michigan that are beautiful but small. And I always thought, wow, we could take the Ottawa National Forest which is in the western up, it's about 900,000 acres and then take in some their state forest lands adjacent that should be a national park, a Northwoods national park. But also it's right across the border from the Chequamegon and Nicolet national forests in Wisconsin. You could create a 2 1/2 million acre national park up there. And nobody's been thinking of that. Nobody. I talked to people who are doing a yeoman's work Fighting a mine that they want to build right next to Porcupine Mountain State park, which some people may know. This was an area that was proposed 60,000 acres as a national park back in the 1940s. Although Leopold championed this area because it's the largest tract of old growth, uncut hardwood, northern hardwood forest left in the US and they went, so they want to build a mine right next to it on private land. And I said if we drew a line around the state parks right next to the national forest, I said let's draw a line around this whole thing and propose it as a national park. Do you think that would put a little more political pressure on these guys to not mine it? I think so. And so there it would make it.
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Jack
A lot less appealing because they go for low hanging fruit. If it becomes apparent that this is going to be a much more expensive fight, they start looking at their other options pretty darn quick. And that's pretty well established as in history. That's a tactic. Yeah. We want this as a national park, actually.
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Michael Kellett
Yeah. Right.
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Jack
I'm getting out of this.
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Michael Kellett
Yeah. They try to convince people whenever they want to build a mine or clear cut or whatever, oh, this is not worth anything anyway. It's all degraded. It's nothing special. That's what they always tell people. And these people, welcome to the game. Yeah, yeah. And the people in the western up, they know that it is special, but no one else knows. So I happened to, when I saw that they were doing this, I knew that I knew this area. So I knew it was special. But most people don't. But that's one example. In the Greenmont National Forest in, in Vermont to go back to New England. The U.S. forest Service is ramping up. They're logging on all of these eastern national forests and that's one of them. And people in Vermont thought that the Green Mountains were safe. This is a 400,000 acre national forest. So it's twice as big as Shenandoah national park and it's beautiful. And there are some wilderness areas but most of it is not protected. And so there's a movement now to fight these logging sales. And we're talking to those folks about let's go for a national monument or a national park in that area and, and in to move down to Massachusetts. Most people would never think that you could create national parks in Massachusetts. But actually we're proposing three. And in fact. No, I take that back. If you talk about partially in Massachusetts, there are five. And that's because southern New England and Connecticut, parts of Connecticut, Rhode island. These are areas that they were the earliest settled areas in the, in New England and they were cleared. Most of the landscape was open and farmland and so forth. But the people, but people moved to the west from there and abandoned a lot of the farms. And for the last hundred years or so, large tracts of forest in New England have recovered. And so now the timber industry has, is smelling money and they want to get these forests. But right now if we protect these areas, there are some amazing places that, like the Quabbin Reservoir, which serves two and a half million people in the Boston area. It's in central Mass with the reservoir in the land. It's about almost a hundred thousand acres of public land in southern New England in one big chunk. And this area could be a national park. In fact, the Quabbin Reservoir is about the same size as Jackson Lake, which is in Grand Teton National Park. There's even a precedent that we're. So we're trying to get people in Boston really fired up. And we've got Sierra Club and other groups are saying let's. They're logging in this watershed. It's crazy. Another one is the Berkshires where there's a lot of state forest land that has been bought up over the, over the last, since the early 1900s. And that also can. Goes down into Connecticut. Connecticut has no major national park areas. Cape Cod, we're talking about expanding Cape Cod National Seashore, making it a national park. But also there are state lands and some threatened private lands adjacent to the current park. And then you can include Stellwagen bank, which is a national marine sanctuary right off the coast. And there are state marine reserves off the coast. So you could have a huge marine and terrestrial park there. Another one is Last Green Valley, which no one's heard of except the locals. But this is the. If you look at a map of the US and you look at the whole northeast corridor from New York for even northern New Jersey up to Boston, it's almost solid at night, it's almost solid lights. But there's this one area along the coast near the coast where it's this little pie shaped thing with not very much light. And it's this last Green Valley, which is very rural, there's a lot of forest, it's low population density. It's a National heritage Area, which is a federal recognition. But there's enough public. The Nature Conservancy has identified this area as the most intact tract of forest along the east coast between New York and Boston that could be a small national 60, 70,000 acre national park which is bigger than a lot of existing national parks. And another one is Walden Woods. Why isn't Walden a national or an international park? This is the place where Thoreau basically invented the conservation movement. And he. And civil disobedience and civil rights, champion for civil rights and native rights. And he. This is a symbol, global symbol. People around the world know about this place. It should be a national park. And most of it is actually in some kind of conservation land. But it's, but there's, it's, there are portions that could be developed and really ruined.
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Jack
I'm getting dizzy. I'm looking feverishly on the Internet for a map, a resource of all the stuff that's in your head, which I think, by the way, if Howie and Dave were doing a second version of the Big Outside, I think you'd be one of the first people they would have to call with your encyclopedic knowledge of potential. And just across the country, is there any place people can go where they can find out more and get involved and hear more from you?
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Michael Kellett
We are feverishly working to get, Speaking of fevers, we're to get a website, new national parks.org or I'm sorry, newparks.org it's a new national parks website, but it's. The URL is newparks.org and if people go there now it says coming Soon National Parks website. So we're going to have, we have a map of the hundred areas. We're going to have a thumbnail sketch of each area. We're going to have for the ones where there are groups working on the area and there are a number of these places where there are organizations. We started the North Woods. We're a little group. We can't do this by ourselves. We're just raising the flag.
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Jack
This requires a mass mobilization and it's so easy compared to some of the other issues that we work on. This is so easy to fire people up about if they can only hear about it.
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Michael Kellett
And our website is restore.org and there's a national parks page which is very minimal. But it will. When we have our new. We're going to have a separate new national parks website and it will take you there when you go. You can click on it when you go to our restore.org website. And we have, you can get on our list on the website. We're a membership organization so if you want to donate, we can use. We're, we don't have a lot of money. So anything you donate, it helps us keep doing this. As you say, it needs a mass movement. And yet people would be amazed at how many people and groups out there are thinking about this idea. And when I reach out to them, I hear about, for example, there's a range of light proposed national monument in the Sierra Nevada mountains between Yosemite national park and in Kings Canyon National Park. And I got a hold of the amazing people who are working on that. They didn't know about our national parks campaign and they said, wow, we should work together. And we said, absolutely, your area is on our list.
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Jack
Yeah.
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Michael Kellett
So I've already talked to dozens of groups and people out there. They're just waiting to coalesce into a movement. We're going to create a coalition of groups and to raise this issue. So it raises all the boats. The rising seas tide is going to raise a lot of these boats where people are fighting to protect these areas. And I think it's going to give them heart and it's going to get, it's going to connect them with other groups that, that can help them and it's going to make it much more politically something that needs to be dealt with. If people see this as a national thing, not just some, oh, we can ignore it because this little group locally, who cares what they think?
- [36:58]
Jack
No, we got muscle on our side when we get together. This is just so many. The boats rising thing is really a big deal. This is something that every organization that we know of and some that we don't probably can get behind just like it's a bipartisan issue for the most part of a national park designation. It's also easy for any group to get involved in this stuff. So I imagine the coalition that's formed out of this or continues to form through restore.org it's just going to grow and grow because it's just a no brainer and it gets us a lot of things. It's like a charismatic megafauna of issues because you know, if you do parks like you said, it branches off into so many other things and becomes an interest, special interest of little organizations with more focused missions of particular things. Everybody can find a place in this, right?
- [37:53]
Michael Kellett
Yep. And it's gonna come, it's gotta be from the grassroots up. We, you can't have a top down thing saying, okay, this is a part, they're gonna be a park here and a park there or whatever, that will never happen. But if it provides a focus and a rallying cry for groups who are already these are places people care about already. There are people for all these areas. There are people who really care about these areas and want to protect them. And they're a lot of times they're fighting against terrible odds and they want help. And they can also teach other groups how they did it, the ones who succeed. So it's basically we put all of our heads together and our hearts together and we can really build a huge movement.
- [38:33]
Jack
You can find out more information about this in the extra credit section on this episode@rewilding.org pod and I imagine this is one of those living pages. This is a moving target. This is something that's growing and going as you saw today. There's a new site that just says coming soon. And it will. And you'll hear about it first when you join the list@restore.org Michael, thanks as always. This is really. You started going through that list and I just got more and more excited. Here's another place and here's another. And. And you're not just making stuff up. It's like really legitimate places that you scratch your head going, why isn't that already a national park? Or why has already been proposed.
- [39:16]
Michael Kellett
Yeah. And I've fallen in love with every one of these places. As I. When you learn about a place like this, you realize this is each one of these is super special thanks for.
- [39:27]
Jack
All your work and everybody that works with you. We're going to do everything in our power to help you. You're going to have to come back and try to make it not a hundred episodes later, if possible.
- [39:39]
Michael Kellett
All right, I will do that. Thanks, Jack.
- [39:41]
Jack
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