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Rewilding Earth Podcast
Episode 136: How To Save Greater Yellowstone From Runaway Sprawl
00:47:09
Leon Kolankiewicz is Scientific Director of NumbersUSA and Vice-President of Scientists and Environmentalists for Population Stabilization. His career as a wildlife/fisheries biologist and environmental scientist spans more than 30 years, 40 states,
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Leon Kalankiewicz
Foreign.
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Todd Wilkinson
We're at another inflection moment. We have this incredible complex. You can listen to wolves howl and see grizzlies and bison that are descended from genocide. And we have all of these animals here. It's this rich trove. And all is not lost. We have this incredible miracle that exists before us, and it just really comes down to whether we can step up in the same way that others, other conservationists, did before. And every American citizen has an important role to play in saving this place.
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Jack
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast.
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Host
The Greater Yellowstone region is under threat from sprawl. A new study shows plainly how development is encroaching on the world's first national park, cutting off off migration routes and throwing species into turmoil. My guests today are Todd Wilkinson and Leon Kalankiewicz. They're here to talk about the study, the impacts of trophy homes and other development on Greater Yellowstone and what we can do to protect the region from additional sprawl. Todd, welcome to the Rewilding Earth podcast. Leon, welcome back to the Rewilding Earth podcast.
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Leon Kalankiewicz
Thank you, Jack. It's been two or three or four years.
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Host
I think it's been a minute. And, Todd, it's really great to meet you.
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Todd Wilkinson
Yeah, back at you. It's a great pleasure to be here, and your reputation precedes you, so it's my honor. Thank you. For people who are familiar and even those who are not, the Greater Yellowstone area historically is really regarded as the cradle of wildlife conservation in America. And of course, the US approach to wildlife conservation is one that has been readily adopted around the world. So when we think about the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, the basics are that it's found at the intersection of three states, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. It has Yellowstone national park, the first national park in the world, at its geographic heart. And next door is Grand Teton national park and the famous Teton Range. And it has five national forests and national wildlife refuges, and the Wind River Indian Reservation, which is equal in size to Yellowstone at 2 million acres. So it's this incredible complex of wildlands, about 24 million acres in all, and 18 million acres of that are mostly federal public lands. And then there's 6 million acres of private land, so about a quarter of it. And people should think about that private land within the context of. It's really like connective tissue, like muscle in the human body, in that it connects the public lands together largely through the river valleys that were settled and have been privatized. And until recently, most of those valleys were rural they had ranches or undeveloped property on them, and wildlife could move. So what really sets Greater Yellowstone apart, The ability of animals are able to migrate. So it has the longest pronghorn migration in existence. It has the longest recorded mule deer migrations that seasonally go up to 4 to 500 miles of these incredible migrations. And then it has elk migrations and roughly 10 herds of elk that converge upon Yellowstone national park in the summer and spring and then go out again. And what that does is it supports predator populations. And before we turn it over to Leon, why Greater Yellowstone is the pantheon is that it has all of its major species that were on the landscape in 1491, before Europeans arrived, and they're all able to move freely, largely self willed, with the exception of bison. And we can talk about that. But it is this incredible place and for good reason. It's our version of the Serengeti in the lower 48 states.
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Host
And you know that there's a but here, or at least an and, because nobody came on to report that everything's okay. Leon, do you want to do the honors?
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Leon Kalankiewicz
Yeah, I, I'll do that, Jack. Everything isn't okay. There is trouble and paradise, if we can call it that, one of the great paradises in North America, if not the world, when it comes to wildlife. And that is that it's, it's a very attractive place to live. The scenery, the wildlife, the low crime. I, I presume it has been attracting people for decades to the point where by the year our study ended in 2017, I think the population had come up of the 20 counties in this Greater Yellowstone ecosystem that Todd was referencing came up to about half a million and projected to grow by many hundreds of thousands of more if present trends continue over the coming decades to say, 2060. What Todd and I have collaborated on is one in a long series now of studies on urban sprawl in the United States that I have been conducting on behalf of Numbers USA and National NGO since about the year 2000. We've looked at sprawl in a number of states, including California, Florida, Texas, some of the biggies regions like the Southern Piedmont of southern Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. And we are concerned about that sprawl because it is converting open space, slash rural lands, slash wildlife habitat, slash farmland, ranch land into developed lands and fracturing landscapes, fracturing habitats. Habitat fragmentation, of course, is a major problem for wildlife in the United States and around the world. And by permanently developing those areas, you're removing them from their productive potential in terms of Living ecosystems. I think We've done like 16 studies now over a period of nearly a quarter century. And the most recent one which has just now been released this fall 2024 is on the 20 counties, specifically the private lands or non federal lands of the 20 counties in the three state Greater Yellowstone ecosystem that Todd was describing. And we saw that between the years of 1982 to 2017, 35 year study period in 2017 are the most recent data available. There should be some coming out from the Natural Resources Conservation Service nrcs of USDA in the coming year or two, but those are the most recent data available. Over that period of time, the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem lost something like 240 square miles. 240 square miles of rural lands, all of which are either wildlife habitat and or farmland which has some value, especially in the wintertime for the, the large ungulates and some of the predators. In Greater Yellowstone, 240 square miles is a large chunk of land. And if trends continue, development and population trends continue, then by the year 2060, if land use patterns remain the same as they are now, with the projected population growth for these 20 counties, there would be a loss of some 360 plus more square miles. And as Todd was pointing out earlier, these tend to be lower elevation places that are really critical for traditional migratory routes of large mammals, the ungulates and some of the carnivores that depend on them.
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Todd Wilkinson
That was a great synopsis, Leon. What I would add is that, and this is something that Jack and your audience knows well is that when we talk about ecosystems, we're talking about transcendence of invisible human boundaries. Wildlife does not recognize human cartography. And what's so poignant about this, and it really, I think the sprawl study is a wake up call, is that the major public land issue in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem is what's happening on private lands. Traditionally, the movement has pointed its finger at resource extraction, be it mining, logging, livestock grazing. And indeed those are still issues, but not so much as they used to be. And so the impact of sprawl on private land, particularly in these strategic places, is, has a profound negative ripple effect on wildlife that lives on both public and private land. 80% of the species in Greater Yellowstone spend a significant amount of time on private land. And if you take that out, remember those statistics that Leon just said about what's already been lost and what's projected to be lost, that's not just impacts proper on the 240 square miles that have been lost, those have ripple effects so if, for example, you are a mule deer commuting 200 miles seasonally to habitat, and then you go back again, you are facing this labyrinth. And what we know is that when animals can't migrate, they have fewer options to survive and they become localized. And as you know so well, Jack, that island populations of species wink out at a much faster rate. So this, I. I think it is really a way. This study is really a way to rethink the way that we're thinking about conservation. And, and we're going to have to up our game with the way we think about what's happening to private lands, because if we lose the ecological integrity of private lands, it is going to be a death blow to the functionality of. Of public lands.
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Host
I'm a little bit out of my element here. I think a lot of conservationists listening to this right now would agree, too, that we know how to stop a mine. We know how to advocate for a wilderness area, we know how to advocate for better wildlife management or building overpasses, which is a relatively new thing in the conservation movement. We've gotten pretty darn good at. We're getting better every day. I can't begin to even understand what we're talking about here in terms of what do you do? Like, how in the world do we get into this new. What it feels like to me is a new realm, or is it of conservation? Because we've had wildlands, philanthropy and things like that. And I imagine that probably does come into some part of this, but I feel like that might be the only thing closest to this that most of us are aware of. What are we talking about in terms of getting good at combating this?
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Leon Kalankiewicz
Todd, why don't you have the first stab at that?
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Todd Wilkinson
Okay, so a couple of things is. First of all, we need to stop being unconscious. We think that growth is just going to happen to us and that it's inevitable, and it doesn't. We make choices in our daily life, and in fact, most of us every day live with plans. In the 20 counties, there is no cohesive bioregional plan. Some people know of the plan for managing Chesapeake Bay and protecting water quality. They also know about the Columbia Gorge. We do not have a bioregional plan that includes private lands. In Greater Yellowstone, the land management agencies, various government entities come together, but there is no, no coordination happening really in the 20 counties on private lands. Secondly, and this is perhaps most important, and it's where fiscal policy converges with ecological thinking, and that is that the most conservative approach to protecting Greater Yellowstone is to prevent sprawl. What's happening in Greater Yellowstone is the public unknowingly is subsidizing the very kind of destruction that it doesn't want. There have been a variety of polls, at least six very significant polls that have been done just within the last few years. And they all talk about public sentiment being opposed to the rapid transformation that's happening on these lands. But what most citizens don't realize is that they're subsidizing the profits of developers who are building out in the most remote corners of counties. And taxes are going up, the cost of services are going up. And so what really is necessary is one, planning and enforceable zoning. And it can be done with incentives, which, ironically, would also keep rural people on the land. But the second thing is an honest assessment of the costs of this because we are destroying the land and we're paying for it at the same time.
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Host
That actually sounds very familiar to me because we've been doing that on Forest service and BLM land for many decades, paying for our own destruction.
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Leon Kalankiewicz
Well, ironically, yeah. Those are public lands where development, logging, for example, that doesn't pay its way, have been subsidized by the taxpayers. A means of keeping a given, say, sawmill or pulp mill open and the people who work there employed. I was going to say that. But numbers both in the case of the Greater Yellowstone study and other sprawl studies we've done. When we come to policy considerations or implications, we like to be a bit binary here and talk about measures that are local and or state, and then measures that are at the national level. Right. So Todd has already alluded to some of the tools that can be used locally. And I have a list here I'll just rattle off. Some of them come right from him in his most recent book on Yellowstone, and some of them he mentioned right now. But smart growth and growth management tools, land use zoning, transfer of development rights, new funding sources for land protection, urban growth boundaries, open space bonds and local land trusts, compact development and incentives to encourage that. And these are all tried and true techniques that have been used in a number of different places. There is moderate support for them politically within the three states that tend to be politically conservative and suspicious of government control over the economy. Right. Moderate. Over 50%, that is support or employing measures like these. And with regard to the sorts of subsidies, often hidden subsidies, that Todd was referring to, there is adamant opposition to that. Of course, not just in this place, but at a number of different places. At any rate, all of these different Measures require a level of political support, cooperation and coordination at local, municipal, county, regional and state levels that isn't always there. And that's why, in spite of how important and special Yellowstone is, not just for the people of the United States, but for the people of the whole world, I been on my bucket list for many years. But I hadn't been to Greater Yellowstone, in spite of having lived in places like British Columbia decades ago, never made it there, but it had been on my bucket list. So I've made it there twice now in the last four or five months. And one of the things that I found astonishing and touching, at least in the two national parks, was how many international visitors these places are. These places have international recognition and they mean a lot to the people of the world. I mentioned some of the local tools or techniques that might be used. However, and this is Numbers USA's forte or emphasis, is the idea that we have to think about population growth in the country as a whole. Now, a lot of your listeners, Jack, may know that at the time of the first earth day in 1970, there was a lot of concern and talk about overpopulation from the founder of Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson, right on down. That doesn't mean that everybody in the environmental community, as it was then emerging, embraced that. It was a bit controversial even back then, but at least there was acknowledgement that population size and growth rates were a very important factor in environmental quality and an impediment to environmental sustainability, or in this case, sustaining these remarkable wildlife populations. So right now in the US we are living in a country that three decades ago grew by 33 million. In the decade of the 1990s, 33 million additional consumers slash. Residents who need places to live, need land to live on. For all of the different urbanized land uses as a whole, the average American consumes about a third of an acre of developed land. So do the math there, right? A third of an acre of developed land per person on average. And it's a lot more than just the house or apartment you live on, right? Everyone has a lot more urbanized land uses that take up space and land area that they depend on. 33 million in the 90s, 28 million in the first decade of this new millennium. Those are the two highest decades of growth in the history of the United States at a time when one would have hoped, based on the message of that first Earth Day, that we would be close to stabilizing our population. We're about as far from it as we've ever been. 340 million Americans now, and at current rates of growth, we would be approaching something like 650 million, approximately a doubling by the year 2100. Now, even if a lot of that growth will be taking in places that are already overdeveloped, overcrowded, over congested, there will be spillover effects into places, wonderful places like Greater Yellowstone. And I think Todd has seen this. But I took a photograph when I was in Bozeman on one of these recent trips at the motel I was staying at that referred to Bozeman, Montana is the last best place. In a sense, this is advertising for your and inviting your own destruction. But on the other hand, there's a certain pride of place there and a recognition that this is a special place. But if things continue the way they have been both nationally and in this region over recent decades and projecting decades into the future, it's not going to stay the last best place, either for its human residents or for the wildlife populations that have been there immeasurably longer than the human population has.
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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 wildland's protection and all kinds of restoration efforts. Check us out@rewilding.org and don't forget to share it with friends.
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Host
Yeah, I want. Well, first I want to just say it feels like a really great opportunity. Now somebody coming into something out of his element is always going to overgeneralize stuff. So here I am doing that. I'm sure it's not this cut and dry, but doesn't it seem like we'd have some unusual bedfellows and campaigns to have zoning laws and things put into place to make sure that sprawl is is not getting out of control as it is now, people that we wouldn't normally work with. There's a whole bunch of NIMBY here, it seems to me. And there are a lot of people who like in Bozeman with their advertisements, they're bragging about what they have and they understand what sprawl would do to that brag. And these are people we would definitely not usually work with. It seems like the opportunity for a really big coalition of people to make an impact. And it feels also to overgeneralize as a newbie to this, I'm starting to feel like there's not. I think it's a very powerful opposition, but it's not. It doesn't seem to me outside of developers and real estate people that there's that many more people that we're fighting against. It really just seems to be a small coalition of people that are special interests for sure that are having an outsized effect on what happens on all of this land with people who would rather it stay rural or rather it stay rural and wildlife friendly. I feel like we've got them outnumbered here. Am I being uber naive?
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Leon Kalankiewicz
Todd, why don't you take that?
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Todd Wilkinson
I think you're spot on. I would say the biggest obstacle to our thinking in an economic way that jibes with ecology is that we're dealing with so many mythologies that inform really bad public policy. And I'll give you an example. We all know the effects of manifest destiny that rolled across the country resulted in the the near extinction of many wildlife species and conservation brought those animals back. And we know the value of protected spaces. And we know also know that national parks, even the big ones due to research by Bill Newmark and others, are not big enough to support healthy rearranging wildlife populations. And if you think about this, no place that is nature rich has ever been protected through the laissez faire free market approach. And we keep telling ourselves that just through wishful thinking that if we just let the market forces dominate without any sort of sideboard rules that we will be able to save this place. And that's of course proven to be patently false. If you look at the front range of the Colorado Rockies or you look at the Wasatch or the west side of the Sierras, those places have lost species due to intensity of various human pressures and those animals ain't ever coming back. And so we look at Greater Yellowstone as this place that on the one hand is marvel and a miracle. And on the other hand what we're really looking in the eye is the possibility of dewilding. And I want to just mention the migration stuff people, immigration for a second. It's really interesting because for years it was a partisan issue the border. And even recently in political races the Democrats are talking about the need to secure the border in a place like Greater Yellowstone. What we're really talking about is not migration coming in internationally, we're talking about intra migration within the country itself. You don't have to have millions upon millions of people to move to Greater Yellowstone to have A profound negative impact. You only need a few hundred thousand people building in the wrong places on the land to be able to for example sever a migration corridor for ungulates, deer, elk, pronghorn moose. And if you do that, you're also impairing the predator guild. We have grizzly bears and black bears and mountain lions and wolves and wolverines and coyotes. We have this full concentration of predator and prey prey and they really depend on the ability of animals to move. So what numbers does with its specialty in looking at not only migration and immigration in the the bigger picture, but looking at demographic shifts that really involve lifestyle pilgrims who are pouring into Greater Yellowstone. And the problem is that the counties are ill equipped to handle the inward migration. Even though conservative business people know that the key to success is the ability to plan ahead. That's how you operate with economic efficiency. And the rural counties refuse to deal with this. We're living with a pretty backward paradigm here of just believing that people should be able to exec exert their freedom and liberty. And what happens is you pander to the lowest common denominator. And unfortunately those lowest common denominators of developers are a lot of money pouring in to develop the place and or people who just don't care about ecology. So we have the worst possible things happening. And yet we have from a wildland perspective that's still intact. We have probably the most at stake here for a terrestrial ecosystem.
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Host
I still see ranchers and it's always the people. We were here first, which is hilarious because none of us were here first. But right once somebody moves to a place it's their place and they don't want anybody else coming in after them. Everybody's run into that thing especially in small communities that pride themselves on look at all the stuff around us, which is basically to a developer, empty space with no value whatsoever unless we put them all on it. To them it's the exact opposite. And so it's all of these people on one hand and it's a very small group relative to that size of stakeholders on the other hand, how can we not beat these guys? And it also just blows my mind that there's not a plan in place already. There's plans everywhere. And I would have thought by now that the recognition of the huge natural heritage that surrounds all these places that make them wonderful to live in and work the land on with so much to protect that they have no plan. That just seems crazy in 2024.
- [29:51]
Leon Kalankiewicz
Todd, I think you've written and spoken about this quite A bit the potential for unlikely bedfellows to be allies in this. Could you speak to that a bit?
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Todd Wilkinson
So one of the things that this audience of listeners will be really familiar with is the debate over ranching and cattle grazing. And what I will say within the picture of Greater Yellowstone is that the notion that cows are better than condos is truly accurate here. And we need to keep rural people on the land because rural people are modifying their practices and their interactions with species like wolves and grizzlies, and we can push for better coexistence. But when you have condos dispersed, you have this huge displacement of species that impairs biodiversity in ways that it will never recover because you bring in roads, you bring in yard lights, you bring in human footprint, you bring in barking roving dogs, you bring in invasive species. And what you do is you create these giant blobs of displacement and those have huge cumulative effects. And I'm going to stop here because I want Leon to jump in here from a conservation biology perspective, when you gather so many people and structures on a landscape, as opposed to keeping a land base that is fairly fluid and malleable if you keep it in rural hands on a ranch or a farm or even undeveloped of the difference qualitatively in that and the polling suggests that even ranchers and farmers are alarmed by what's happening with our sprawl here.
- [31:42]
Leon Kalankiewicz
Yeah, I, to Todd's point, I did study under the developer of the ecological footprint concept, which is a bit different in that it's looking at one's impact as a human consumer on all sorts of wild ecosystems and even agricultural ones around the world. But I also. So that makes me kind of a systems ecologist, but I'm also a conservation biologist, and I am who's done a lot of work, both as an employee formerly of the fish and wild U.S. fish and Wildlife Service, and then later on a consultant to them at close to 50 national wildlife refuges around the country. So I've done a lot of conservation planning over the decades now. And certainly the presence and the distribution or placement or configuration of human populations and land uses around protected conserved areas has a very important bearing on the extent to which they're going to be able to maintain their values, or even to get to the point of the Rewilding Institute, improve or enhance or restore some of those values to what we've lost. Sometimes it's not just a question of letting the land go, but actually manipulating it, such as with prescribed fire and the presence of to bring back species that are dependent on fire and ecosystems that are also fire dependent. And the presence of large numbers of residents nearby really ties the hands of wildland fire managers. And that that's just one example of how a heavy human footprint in a landscape can inhibit or stymie management tools that are good for the wildlands and the critters that live on them.
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Todd Wilkinson
I just would like to throw a tangible example out. And again, this is something that Jack, you're keenly familiar with. We know from federal lands there's a federal law called the National Environmental Policy act, better known as nepa. And if the three of us were, say, a mining company proposing to mine gold on say, forest land, there would be, we would, it would undergo significant environmental review through an environmental impact statement, which interestingly enough, Leon has been the author of several. So it that looks at the cumulative effects. It also allows the public to comment on the proposal and to weigh in favor or weigh against. And then that factors into whether the agency grants approval or not in grant.
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Leon Kalankiewicz
A point Todd has made is that isn't applied on private lands. In the case of nepa, the National Environmental Policy act and environmental Assessments or environmental impact statements, EAs and EISs, there has to be, quote, unquote, a federal nexus where the federal agency is pursuing the action, permitting the action or funding the action. And sometimes, a lot of times, private land development is really only in the hands of being reviewed by understaffed municipalities, understaffed and folks who aren't particularly well versed or deep experts. A lot of these things, especially something as fuzzy but important or nebulous but important, as I should have said, as cumulative impacts, the long term mix of impacts of this action combined with all others taking place, either brought about by the action in question or that are happening anyway. That's a very important part of a NEPA analysis and it's pretty much overlooked, I suspect, at the local level there in the Greater Yellowstone region.
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Todd Wilkinson
Let me throw this example to make it a little more acute. Many people are familiar with ski resorts. There's a ski resort destination called Big sky that started fairly quaint and has ballooned in size over the years. And the background for all of this is that in the 20 counties of Greater Yellowstone, again, 20 counties cumulatively covering an area that would cover much of New England, there is not a single staff ecologist within the payroll of any of those counties that focuses on ecological impacts. And the counties are the agencies that review significant, that would otherwise review significant development. So seldom are the ecological impacts considered in toto and so Big sky is southwest of Bozeman. It's in the Madison Mountain Range. It basically has resulted in the decapitation from an ecological function standpoint of this north to south mountain range that really, given its location near the core of Greater Yellowstone, is really important for migratory animals. In addition, there have been pollution issues with algae blooms in the Blue Ribbon Gallatin River. It's the place that served as a backdrop for the movie version of A River Runs Through It. Big sky today is at 60% build out and there are massive spillover effects that affect everything from elk and moose to grizzly bears and wolverine. And that kind of development. We're at a hard rock mine. There would be not only intensive tense scrutiny, but the conservation movement there would be all over it and probably fundraising to stop it or at least to minimize it. Today in Greater Yellowstone, and I say this as a journalist who's been at this for nearly 40 years, there is not any major scrutiny applied by conservation organizations to try and minimize the footprint of Big Sky. And when Leon came out, I as a reporter wanted to take him up to Big Sky. And we're this resort in the Colorado Rockies in a amid a complex of other ski resorts. It might not be a big deal, but in Greater Yellowstone, in the middle of this place that is analogous to the American Serengeti, it has huge effects. And Leon can speak to what you saw there, Leon, and maybe share with listeners here of what something like that represents in terms of an ecosystem like this.
- [38:39]
Leon Kalankiewicz
Yeah, you again, taking it back to cumulative impacts. There's the Big sky resort itself. But what that has triggered basically resulted in or even caused, to use a stronger word, is a lot of tentacles of development affecting a much larger area than just the ski runs or the ski resort itself. And this would be a classic example of cumulative impacts. I don't know enough about it, Todd, to say why it wouldn't have been subjected to nepa. I suppose it wasn't on federal lands. If that had been U.S. forest Service land, then that would have had even 20 or 30 or 40 years ago when it was first developed, an EIS conducted on it or for any major change in, say it's a special use permit or something like that. But yeah, it, as you say, it decapitates this important Madison Range. And in is an example of the type of habitat development and fragmentation that has very adverse effects on important unvillied populations.
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Host
I'm tempted to say I've heard enough. I know that you guys both have studied and worked and reported on this area. And regions around the country like it, although there's nothing like it to go on and on about all of this, all of the different attacks on nature in these places. But I know also that our listeners are right now tapping their feet, going, what do we do? What's the call to action? Are we ready for the next stage of making proposals as to what we do? What do conservationists do individually who are living in this region or around this region? And what do organizations do?
- [40:16]
Todd Wilkinson
We recognize that Greater Yellowstone is one of our magnificent natural national treasures. That's the first thing. And so regardless of where somebody is listening in from to this podcast, it belongs to them. This is part of our shared natural heritage here. That's the first thing. Greater Yellowstone is as important as the alas, as Anwar in Alaska. It's as important as any World Heritage site. It belongs to us. And it's really important that we speak up and we say we want to protect this. That's the first thing. The second thing is we really need to reflect upon where and how we live. One of the There's a bumper sticker in Greater Yellowstone that says, if you love the Wild west, live in town. And so one of the most important decisions each of us is going to make in our lives is where and how we live. And I don't mean to be preachy with this, but we need to consider our impacts. If we're moving into a wild neighborhood, we should know more about that wild neighborhood and we can make better choices on where we live in in wild country or choose not to live in wild country or choose to cluster our development rather than being scattershot across it. Because again, what happens on private lands has ser can have serious consequences for the public land that belongs to all of us. So we really need to become more aware about how we're living. Leon, what do you have to say?
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Leon Kalankiewicz
Todd, you pretty much speak for me. I just wanted to give everybody the website that they can access our study@yellowstonesprawl.com if you would actually like to see the study itself and read Todd's very compelling forward to it.
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Todd Wilkinson
I if I may, here I founded a nonprofit conservation journalism site where people can learn more and we'll have lots of coverage about Greater Yellowstone if it would be great if people would follow it. It's yellowstonian.org and the stories are free and it's a way for people to continuously learn more and it will serve as a portal to the good work of Leon and others.
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Host
Excellent. So we have a campfire a couple of campfires around which we can gather to learn more, learn how we can be of service, how we can exert some energy in the direction of the greater Yellowstone area and make changes here. That seem to me still, after all you've said and the complications that are already very apparent from what you have, we've talked about today, which I think is probably the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure. It just doesn't seem like this should be a very big deal. It doesn't seem. Should have a hard time. And I'm thinking because of campaigns that we have done in the past that seemed impossible, the Wilderness act itself, just the crazy stuff that we've been able to do. And you looking at it at the beginning of such campaigns and it looks like you're looking straight up the face of a mountain and you have no climbing gear and you have no idea how you're going to get there. This doesn't seem like that to me. And I know I'm a newbie to sprawl and everything, so I probably am oversimplifying it, but I don't know, I just feel like people just needed to hear from you guys today and they need to continue to hear from you so that they understand the issues better. And I feel like we did accomplish that today.
- [44:10]
Todd Wilkinson
Jack, that. That's a great point. I'm hopeful, actually. If we were here in 1880, thinking about the west that was depopulated of its wildlife, there would have been a lot of reason to have given up. But a Yellowstone was created. It was the start of this radical idea to preserve nature. It's been carried on by you and, and the listeners here. And similarly, we're at another inflection moment. We have this incredible complex. You can listen to wolves howl and see grizzlies and bison that are descended from genocide. And we have all of these animals here. It's this rich trove and all is not lost. We have this incredible miracle that exists before us. And it just really comes down to whether we can step up in the same way that others, other conservationists did before. And every American citizen has an important role to play in saving this place. It transcends every boundary of human in this country. And this is all something that, that is there, the prize is there and it's something that we can pass on. So to your point, I'm hopeful, but we've got to step up.
- [45:40]
Host
If everybody wants to go to rewilding.org pod and you can look up this episode, there will be tons of extra credit. I'm going to make sure that Leon and Todd provide me with every link they can possibly give me to fill us in on everything we weren't able to get to today so that everybody can get up to speed on how to be effective in the fight to come. This seems doable, but it's only doable if everybody gets aware and involved. Leon and Todd, thank you so much. The work that you do is often very thankless, tons and tons of hours which the compensation is very poor for. You're really big time heroes in my book and I thank you very much for all the work you continue to do.
- [46:20]
Leon Kalankiewicz
Thanks for this opportunity. Jack and Todd, thank you for such an eloquent, perfect summation there at the end, which captured my sentiments exactly.
- [46:30]
Todd Wilkinson
It's great. And Jack, the work you do is really important. I stand in awe. So thank you.
- [46:37]
Jack
Thanks for listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. We do what we do because of you. This podcast is supported by listeners like you who long to live in a wilder world. Please consider donating@rewilding.org and subscribe to our weekly News and article digest while you're there to go the extra mile, you can follow and share Rewilding Earth on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Bonus points for sharing this podcast with your friends. To listen to past episodes, go to rewilding.org pod that's rewilding.org pod.