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- [00:00]
Podcast Host - Shady Rays Ad
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- [00:46]
Podcast Host - Public Investing Ad
Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors, llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available@public.com disclosures.
- [01:47]
Podcast Host - WeatherTech Ad
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- [02:16]
Dan Flores
Where the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Colorado Plateau and the southwestern deserts converge to create New Mexico, there is more ecological variety than in any interior western state. I'm Dan Flores and this is the American West. Understanding nature in a Southwestern state
- [02:59]
Randall
in
- [02:59]
Dan Flores
the first 15 years of the 2000s, I spent part of my time in
- [03:03]
Randall
Montana, part in New Mexico.
- [03:06]
Dan Flores
That experience drove home a fact of modern Western life I'd never considered, namely, how little inhabitants of any part of the west often know about the rest of their region. In a West settled relatively recently by Americans who came here from other places, I know this has something to do with the Western settlement patterns geographers have long studied. One of their insights is that as the west was settled in the 19th and 20th centuries, settlers almost always moved west along the same latitude lines where they had started. Texas and the Southwest were largely settled by people moving westward from the South. Colorado and Utah got peopled by Midwesterners from Missouri and Illinois and the northern west, the Dakotas across Montana, on to Oregon and Washington, by people who started out in New England or around the Great Lakes. When the Dust bowl of the 1930s launched millions of Oklahomans and Kansans on their migration west, their primary destination was, naturally enough, Southern California. Understanding the wider west obviously involves travel. It's a big place, but even tourist travel often follows those same latitude lines. Today, when Minnesotans travel west, they commonly go to Glacier national park or on to Washington State. Chicagoans travel to Yellowstone. Texans go to Santa Fe or Grand Canyon national park, or they golf in Arizona. Obviously, the snowbird phenomenon has changed that migration pattern, some bringing Midwesterners south to states like Arizona for the winters. But I think those classic latitudinal patterns explain at least some of the strange lack of familiarity with other parts of the West I found among both Southwesterners and residents of the Northern Rockies during my time in those two places. Told that I live part of the year outside Missoula, Montana, for example, West Texans and even New Mexicans were incredulous. How do you stand living all winter at 40 below zero? For Montanans, that work in perfect reverse. You go to Santa Fe for the summers. How can you stand that 125 degree heat? I never developed a good comeback about Montana, except to observe lamely that other Montanas often called Missoula and the Bitterroot Valley the Banana Belt. Over time, I did work out a fair one about Santa Fe, though. So Denver is the Mile High City and it snows there, right? Santa Fe sits even closer to the Rocky Mountains than Denver does, and it's a half mile higher up. You figure it out. The looks I got were still incomprehending, though, like I was arguing that the Sahara wasn't a desert. The Southwest struck me then, and still does, as the part of the west that seems most alien to Americans from elsewhere. Even other Westerners with reputations for their green forested mountains and ski weather. Winter snows, interior west states like Colorado and Utah, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho seem easy places to picture in the mind for most Americans living outside the West. But the Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada presents a different world to the national consciousness. The irresistible proclivity for national sports announcers to label any sporting event taking place in Arizona as being played down in the desert conveys to me at least a continuing national sentiment that the imagined Southwest still falls outside the American norm. So let me take a stab at familiarizing the American West's audience with the part of the Southwest I know best, the state of New Mexico and the story I've studied there, which is the discovery of the state's wildlife ecology. If you struggle to exactly place it. New Mexico is that slice of the west situated directly below mountainous Colorado. It's the western state, sandwiched between the flatlands of Texas and the arid Colorado Plateau and Saguaro deserts of Arizona. The Rocky Mountains extend down into New Mexico, and so do the slick rock canyons of the Colorado Plateau. The whole eastern third of New Mexico, though, lies in the Great Plains. And the entire southwestern quadrant of it is true desert, although a different desert and the Chihuahuan than the ones found in either Arizona or Nevada. And New Mexico happens to be the part of the west with the oldest continuous human history in Santa fe. Founded in 1610, it has the oldest European town anywhere in the West. Turns out it's an easy thing to pick out. The human beginnings of understanding nature in New Mexico, a great many millennia before today's White Sands National Monument, down in the southern part of the state, ever existed. A young woman who sometimes carried a child on her hip walked barefoot along a muddy lakeshore among the white sand dunes and encountered a giant ground sloth, which reared back in alarm. We know this because the footprints from that ancient close encounter, excavated by a park service employee in 2019, had crushed grass seeds below them that radiocarbon dated to 23,000 years ago. That date is prior to the glacial maximum of the Wisconsin Ice Age, and it's the oldest evidence for humans anywhere in North America. The human and sloth prints weren't the extent of it either. Mammoths and dire wolves also crossed the tracks this young woman left. 10,000 years after that, the hunting culture we've named Clovis left their spear points in the remains of multiple now to us vanished mammoths near what would become one day New Mexico's high plains. Town carrying the Clovis name. There's believable evidence that the Clovis people had a significant effect on the Africa like wildlife that covered the west down to about 10,000 years ago, much of which went extinct by that time. In contrast to these Paleolithic hunters, however, subsequent native peoples in New Mexico affected a wildlife management of the area that preserved its biological diversity for 10 millennia down to the arrival of Old Worlders. When Spaniards and Americans did arrive. Travelers like Francisco Coronado, Albert Pike, George Ruxton, and Josiah Gregg, and especially William Emory of the Mexican Boundary Survey left us accounts of New Mexico when its mountains brimmed with flocks of bighorn sheep and beaver damp pools and its plains were a kind of American version of the Serengeti or Masai Mara, with grizzlies, wolf packs, spotted jaguars, and jackal like coyotes trailing vast herds of bison, elk, and pronghorns. During New Mexico's brief time as part of the Republic of Mexico, New Mexicans even tried to halt the eradication of of its beavers by American fur traders. The first real chance for the scientific study of the mammals, birds, and reptiles in New Mexico and the Southwest came after the Mexican War, when the far southwest became part of the United States. There were several expeditions led by explorers called the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, and there were also parties surveying routes for a railroad line to the Pacific coast. Some of the topographical engineers, like John Charles Fremont, for example, who became such a celebrity that in 1856 he got the new Republican party's nomination to be its first presidential candidate, became cultural stars in America from these expeditions. But as is the fate of most scientists, history has forgotten most of the naturalists who wrote about America's animals when they were novel to discovery. The most notable of these many expeditions was the Mexican Boundary Survey, which laid out a new U.S. boundary after the treaty ending the war forced Mexico to cede its northern territories to the United States. Exploring that line fell to William Emory. One of the founders of the American association for the Advancement of Science was a young New Yorker named Spencer Baird as his assistant, soon to be a naturalist of legendary proportion. Baird, as a teen had wanted to go west with Audubon, but his parents had demurred because of the dangers. Emory was himself an excellent field naturalist to send to the Southwest. During the war. He accompanied the American Army's push from New Mexico to California and had already added several species of desert cacti to science, including giant saguaros, along with visiting ruins like Chaco, whose antiquity he suspected went back into America's deep past. But this was the 1850s. Red whiskered emory was also a Maryland slaveholder whose closest boyhood friends friend was Jefferson Davis, soon to be president of the Confederacy. So when he got west this time, his time and background led him to an odd lack of appreciation about how Spanish settlers and local Indians had interacted with western wildlife. That wild animals were still abundant around towns in the Southwest appeared certain proof to Emory of his spirit Hispanic, what he called indolence and incapacity. Evidently it said something laudatory that back home, Americans would never suffer animals within reach to survive like that. A half century after Jefferson had aimed his second major exploration at the Southwest, Emory's survey from Texas to California at last got to illuminate the animals and birds of of the western deserts. This was an exotic part of North America with a mix of familiar creatures in combination with several Central American species at the northern limits of their ranges. White tailed deer inhabited the Southwest in vast numbers, and the mule deer Lewis and Clark had found also ranged widely across this region. Beavers yet dammed up the streams, and shy and comparatively rare desert bighorn sheep looked down from the canyon rims. Prairie dogs and pronghorns populated the flats, and coyotes, Emory had already borrowed the southwestern name for them, became camp followers, stealing food and snatching gear. Grizzlies were present, but Emory couldn't decide if those in the interior were the same as the bears on the coast, which were much larger. There were two different wolves, the red Texan wolf, eastward and farther west, a gray wolf. This was a new animal, the Mexican wolf, but scientists wouldn't recognize that for another 50 years. The unfamiliar creatures were especially intriguing. Particularly impressive and numerous were the big cats. As Baird described it, a vast number of pumas and jaguars were preying on wildlife and on the immense herds of wild horses and wild cattle known to Spanish settlers as El Tigre and to most Americans as tigers or leopards. Jaguars hunted the jungles of the Americas as far south as Argentina, but their northern range clearly extended into open country in North America. Francisco Coronado's early 1540s exploration into the Southwest had mentioned leopards, and mountain man Rufus Sage claimed to have seen such an animal on the headwaters of the North Platte in today's Colorado. Jaguars apparently were common predators of deer and wild horses, and Comanches and other tribes even used jaguar hides decoratively. In Emory's report, jaguars were on the outskirts of Santa Fe. At some point as he worked on his survey, he discovered a literary source describing A frightening morning in 1825 and what he assumed was New Mexico's cat capital, a massive flood in the nearby Rio Bravo, the name for the Rio Grande, for many people had driven out wildlife. And on opening the church, a lay brother found himself face to face with a jaguar of very extraordinary size. The big cat killed four clerics before survivors drilled a hole through a church door large enough for a rifle barrel. Jaguars would turn up in the southern Rockies for decades to come, no question, so their presence in the area was not amiss. But the story, Emory included, actually referred to an incident in Santa Fe, Argentina. On the Rio Parana Bravo. Other creatures reflected a different west than Montana or even California. Emory's people saw swine like collared peccaries, the southwestern desert's native javelinas, another creature of the southern latitudes. At the northern limits of its range, they collected a bizarrely armored South American immigrant called the armadillo. Exclusive to the Americas and distantly related to anteaters and ground sloths, they reported a remarkable variety of reptiles, particularly snakes and lizards, of which the most impressive were chuckwallas. They acquired the first specimen and included an illustration in their report of the remarkable human Gila monster. Although taxonomists in Washington misidentified it and didn't realize it had a venomous bite, the bird life was prodigious. Among the more intriguing were what they call chaparral cocks, the big cuckoos, known as roadrunners. The fierce fleet roadrunner was a great enemy of the rattlesnake, they said, taking them in pitched battles. It usually won. And they found the so called Mexican eagle, the outsized falcon, known as the caracara, extremely numerous from the Rio Grande to the Sierra Madre. By the time all the identifications were in, the Mexican boundary survey added a total of 311 new mammals, birds and reptiles to America's list of native animal life. Another relatable time for early New Mexico's wildlife story is probably a century ago when Vernon Bay and his wife, Florence Miriam Bailey, began to analyze New Mexico's biological riches and ecologies. They were followed to New Mexico a few years later by another scientist, Aldo Leopold, who rearranged the furniture in all our heads with respect to wildlife. Joining those three was the popular wildlife author Ernest Thompson Seton. Writing from Santa Fe, Seaton penned heart rending stories of New Mexico animals such as Tito, the female coyote, who allegorically taught coyotes how to avoid extermination, and the Raton area wolf, Lobo, king of Karumpaw, who possessed one fatal flaw, his fidelity to his mate. It got him killed. Seton's literary theme, we and the Beasts are Kin, no doubt resonated with the native people of New Mexico. What Vernon and Florence Bailey, Aldo Leopold and Ernest Thompson Seton provided all of us living in the west since was simple but crucial, in effect, how to understand a state like New Mexico and its wildlife story.
- [20:17]
Podcast Host - Shady Rays Ad
You know that moment, the one when you realize you left your favorite sunglasses in the woods, or on the roof of your car, or at a gas station three states away? Well, I've been there too. But when I found Shady Rays, it changed the game. These sunglasses are made for real life. Good looking, polarized, durable and not stupidly expensive. And here's the wild part. If you lose or break them even on day one, Shady Rays will send you a brand new pair. No guilt trip, just replacements. That's pretty wild. Head to shadyrays.com and use code bear for 40% off two or more polarized sunglasses. Try for yourself The Shades rated 5 stars by over 300,000 people.
- [21:03]
Podcast Host - Public Investing Ad
Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete Disclosures available at public.comDisclosures owning a
- [22:04]
Podcast Host - HomeServe Ad / Gronk (Dude Wipes Ad)
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- [22:34]
Dan Flores
By virtue of its location on the continent, New Mexico is a western state that possesses a riot of diverse ecologies, with more native mammal species 151 than any other state except California. But a century ago, its diversity struck many observers as almost chaotic. The Baileys were essential in changing that perception. Vernon was a slight, owl eyed, chinless farm boy from Minnesota with seven years of education and churchy enough that until his 20s he'd never even heard of Charles Darwin. He was a teetotaler his entire life and a man, as other scientists marveled, who never let fly even a mild curse. But he was such a whiz at catching animals and preserving them as specimens that he became the right hand man to Clinton H. Merriam, who in the 1890s was establishing the new federal agency called the Biological Survey, which became the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Miriam's younger sister, Florence, seemed the unlikeliest imaginable partner for Bailey. She was a graduate of Smith College who'd originally planned a thesis on Darwinian evolution. But one of the environmental crises of a century ago was the destruction of birds for hats and fashion, and that diverted Florence towards writing about birds, their steep decline and preservation. By the start of the 20th century, she had also discovered Arizona and New Mexico, where, as she said, the climate is wonderful. Their pairing raised eyebrows, but Florence and Vernon bailey married in 1899, and in 1900 struck out on a camping trip across Texas and New Mexico for their honeymoon. It was a part of America that left an altogether different impression than the East. We felt everywhere in New Mexico that while to us the country was new, in fact this land of Poco Tiempo is an old, old land, she wrote, very perceptive of Florence. What Vernon was working on for New Mexico was a brand new idea designed to make some sense of wildlife distribution. Why were animals found in some locations but not others? Bailey and his boss, Sehart Merriam, believed they knew, and they pioneered a model called life zones. While Bailey is often remembered today for the role he played in designing and defending wolf eradication in the west, he left New Mexico a remarkable baseline record for wildlife in a territory where elevation ranged from 2,800ft to more than 13,000ft. Atop its highest point, Wheeler Peak, near Taos Bailey mapped out six life zones for plants and animals. He named them the Lower Sonoran, the Upper Sonoran, the Transition, the Canadian, the Hudsonian, and the Arctic alpine. In a 1913 monograph published in North American Fauna, he described the existing species compositions of all six of those zones in the brand new state of New Mexico and made its wildlife distribution newly intelligible. Taxonomists also credit him with realizing that our now endangered Mexican gray wolf was different from other wolves, which is why its Latin binomial carries Bailey's name. Florence Bailey's contribution was to fashion a similar baseline for New Mexico's birds. Her Birds of New Mexico was the first close study of the birds of an interior American state. Along with writing the first ever field guide for western birds in general, she added a whopping 94 new species of birds to the ornithological list for New Mexico and the Southwest. Seton and the Baileys were experiencing New Mexico at a time when market hunting excesses were destroying numerous species that had anciently evolved in America. An industrial hunt for hide leather eradicated bison on the southern plains in the 1870s, sacrificing millions of animals native peoples in New Mexico had depended on for 10,000 years. Hispanic New Mexicans, called ciboleros, had long made pilgrimages themselves to the plains from Santa Fe and Taos, and as expert horsemen, had hunted bison with lances, hauling the meat and pelts back to their Rio Grande towns and creaking two wheeled wooden carts. But by 1875, a decade before they disappeared from Montana, bison were extinguished in plains New Mexico. Their destruction had barely taken 10 years. And that was just the beginning. Exploring the Pecos river headwaters in the southern Rockies of New Mexico in 1882 and 83, naturalist Louis Dyche found no bighorn sheep left no elk in the country except a rare and occasional straggler, he wrote, and he neither saw wolves nor heard one howl. He did see what he called a herd of 11 grizzly bears traversing Hamilton Mesa in the high Rockies above Santa Fe. New Mexico made an effort to save some of these animals. But following inherited folk traditions from the old World, the state concerned itself largely with the ones called game birds and mammals people wanted to hunt. There was little appreciation for non game or even for native species that had evolved in the Southwest. New Mexico territory created its first bounty system for predators in 1893. That list of money for stories scouts included wolves, coyotes, bears, lions, and bobcats. State sponsored exotic species introductions of animals like ibex, oryx and aldads particularly became a specialty of the New Mexico Game Agency. At least the new national forest and other public lands the US Federal government was setting aside in New Mexico at the turn of the 20th century did continue to preserve wildlife habitat for future animal recoveries. When America's giant steppe lions and saber toothed cats had died out in the Pleistocene extinctions, jaguars had assumed the mantle of North America's most imposing big cat. With a range that stretched through most of South America, Jaguars were at the northernmost limits of their range in the southern US Leopard like in appearance, but heavier and more muscular, male jaguars can weigh more than 300 pounds. In the early 20th century, the great cats still had established territories and were breeding in New Mexico and Arizona. So this northern range was not merely a place the occasional male jaguar roamed into. Among more than 60 historical records of jaguars in the Southwest from 1880 to 1995, females and kittens are well represented. North American jaguars denned and hunted in deserts, Oak foothills, Pinyon juniper and ponderosa pine forests. Countries strikingly unlike their jungle habitats to the south. Such open terrain made them vulnerable to human eyes, though a strong especially the eyes of stock raisers and the bounty and government hunters employed to protect cows. In the early 20th century, aware that jaguars were declining, Vernon Bailey collected as many accounts of jaguars as he could find. From them, he concluded that the Black Range in the center of New Mexico had long been jaguar territory. A bounty hunter had killed jaguars in that range of choppy vertical ridges in 1900 and again in 1902, and Bailey collected several other accounts from there. Other New Mexico ranges, the Sangre de Cristos, the Southern Rockies, in other words, the Sacramentos and the San Andres also held jaguars, and into the 1920s ranchers were still shooting them. There were accounts of jaguars nearly to Colorado as well as out on the Great Plains. Arizona, where settlers reported jaguars from St. Gray's muggy on rim country to the Grand Canyon, had a similar jaguar record. The biological survey's first recorded jaguar kill was there. A federal hunter shot a jaguar in Arizona's Santa rita Mountains in 1918. The Bureau's operatives in Arizona had few doubts about the sources of the jaguar threat, as they called it. Its position was this, and I'm quoting all Lobo wolves and jaguars will be taken as fast as they enter this state from Mexico and New Mexico, as 100% of them live on livestock and game. The Bureau recorded five such renegades crossing into a supposedly jaguar free Arizona from 1924 to 1927. Two of those were females. All ended up killed. Jaguars were still dying at human hands even on the Gulf coast of Texas as late as the 1940s. In the first half of the 20th century, another legendary figure, ecologist Aldo Leopold, spent enough time in New Mexico to show future wildlife policy. Both there and more broadly stationed in the territory first to manage one of its new national forests, Leopold met his future wife, Estella Bergere in Santa Fe. He went on to study a new phenomenon called game eruptions. The unchecked growth, then spectacular crash of populations of mule deer, elk and other ungulates that followed America's and New Mexico's eradication of predators. On behalf of the livestock industry, Leopold found almost no record of eruptions before 1900, but he tracked a whopping 42 of them between 1900 and 1945. His work and the growing significance of ecological science slowly began to produce an appreciation for non game, even for wolves, lions and New Mexico's unofficial state animal, the Coyote. The 1976 listing of the Mexican gray wolf and its later recovery plan under the new Endangered Species act was an extension of Leopold's work in New Mexico. Ending coyote hunting contests on state lands in New Mexico was another. While Vernon Bailey's century old life zones model continues to have some relevance in understanding New Mexico wildlife, the science of ecology, with its emphasis today on interactive communities known as ecosystems and subsequent work in mapping ecoregions, has advanced our understanding of why diverse New Mexico once seemed chaotic. In a state split by the Continental Divide and where the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado Plateau and the southwestern deserts all converge, ecological diversity is enormous. At a fine grained level of mapping, the state features eight principal ecoregions, such as the southwestern Tablelands, for example, divided into an Absolutely astonishing 55 ecological subsets like the pinyon juniper woodlands. Add in the deep time historical dimension and the special qualities of a place like New Mexico stand evident. 20,000 years ago, the Wisconsin Ice Age brought northern species like sheep and marmots far south. Then massive heat events like the Alta thermal of alpha 8,000 to 5,000 years ago expanded southern and desert species northward. When Vernon Bailey was in New Mexico seeking out remnant bighorn sheep, he discovered that in New Mexico, jaguars at the extreme northern end of a range that stretched down through the Americas were hunting Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep at the southern end of an alpine habitat extreme extending far northward up the mountain chain to Alaska. Not many places on the continent can
- [36:16]
Randall
make a claim like that.
- [36:26]
Dan Flores
Today. Mexican wolves, which we reduced to such tiny numbers that they now struggle with sufficient genetic diversity to survive, are the Southwest's most famous endangered animals. But a state as varied as New Mexico has many more, 64 of them in all. If New Mexico hopes to preserve the full suite of the animals that were originally here, it will have to save Mexican spotted owls, Northern Aplomato falcons, Southwestern willow flycatchers, Gila trout, Black footed ferrets, meadow jumping mice and ridge nosed rattlesnakes, among many others. The state today is working on all that. New Mexico's State Wildlife Action Plan is designing strategies now to conserve what it calls species of greatest conservation need along with their habitats to confront human caused climate change that threatens to make an already arid state a drier and hotter version of itself. Anticipating and protecting connectivity corridors so that species able to relocate can to new habitats is part of that plan. So is preserving as much genetic diversity as we can. The state's fixed pole star is, and it ought to be, a future where we return as many of those original New Mexico species to the state as possible. And that includes jaguars. Not officially listed as a US endangered species until 1997, Jaguars only acquired a recovery plan in the United States in 2018. As with Gray wolves, jaguar recovery depends on the nations bordering the US Having preserved the big animals better than we have. The truth is that the fish and Wildlife's 2018 plan offers pretty faint hope for the return of El tigre. Encouraged that seven male jaguars have ventured into the US since 1996, the architects of the recovery plan didn't envision a hard release of captive jaguars as we
- [38:35]
Randall
have done with gray wolves.
- [38:38]
Dan Flores
Their hope instead was that the cats will reoccupy their former range via two different corridors that could connect populations in Mexico to Arizona and New Mexico. The problem is that those jaguar migration corridors reached the US exactly where our country has been erecting its border wall against human migrants. The 2018 Jaguar Recovery proposal is a 40 year proposition with delisting happening only in the event that a breeding population of female cats arrives here. But if we really want to restore jaguars, we're going to have to revisit that plan. And two prominent environmental groups have already done so. The center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife have counter proposed a 329,000 square mile recovery area in New Mexico and Arizona that significantly overlaps the Mexican wolf recovery zone. What they call for is a hard
- [39:41]
Randall
release of a dozen jaguars, as we've
- [39:44]
Dan Flores
done with gray wolves in Yellowstone, New Mexico and Arizona and now Colorado, to
- [39:49]
Randall
begin recovery in an area that could
- [39:51]
Dan Flores
eventually support 100 to 150 of the Southwest original big felines.
- [39:57]
Randall
As for me, I'll Admit I want
- [40:00]
Dan Flores
to see muscular Jaguars once again pursuing
- [40:04]
Randall
bighorn sheep in the New Mexico Rockies.
- [40:06]
Dan Flores
And if I don't get to see it, I at least want to look up at the snow capped peaks out my front door and imagine that such a spectacle will play out in the future. Arizona accepted. No other western state than New Mexico is likely to see that kind of natural marvel.
- [40:26]
Randall
Foreign.
- [40:32]
Podcast Host - Shady Rays Ad
You know that moment, the one when you realize you left your favorite sunglasses in the woods or on the roof of your car or at a gas station three states away? Well, I've been there too. But when I found Shady Rays, it changed the game. These sunglasses are made for real life. Good looking, polarized, durable and not stupidly expensive. And here's the wild part. If you lose or break them even on day one, Shady Rays will send you a brand new pair. No guilt trip, just replacements. That's pretty wild. Head to shadyrays.com and use code bear for 40% off two or more polarized sunglasses. Try for yourself The Shades rated 5 stars by over 300,000 people.
- [41:18]
Podcast Host - Public Investing Ad
Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated Assets assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete Disclosures available@public.com Disclosures if you've been
- [42:19]
Podcast Host - Wix Harmony Ad
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- [42:49]
Randall
all
- [42:50]
Interviewer
right, Dan, in this episode, I think you begin at some point by talking about how most Americans imaginations sort of fail to fully comprehend the diversity of landscape and culture that is New Mexico.
- [43:08]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [43:08]
Interviewer
And I'm wondering if that's a branding problem. We didn't go with Southern Colorado or Eastern California, you know, people just for whatever reason, people, New Mexico. It just brings to mind a certain image and that's it. This is obviously not a serious question, but.
- [43:27]
Randall
Well, yeah, I think there are parts of the west that are readily accessible to people. I mean, Yellowstone comes to mind. Yosemite national park in California, you know, Glacier. There are places that large numbers of people have been that appear in calendar photographs, that appear in documentaries that you see on television. And so you know about those. I think that there are very definitely places like you mentioned, Eastern California. You know, hardly anybody knows much about that part of the world unless you travel through it. I mean, I would say eastern Washington and eastern Oregon almost fall into that same category because what everybody knows about when they imagine Oregon or Washington state, they always imagine the coastal parts. They imagine Seattle and Portland and Eugene and all the wetter, greener part that's
- [44:30]
Dan Flores
closer to the Pacific. I think New Mexico.
- [44:34]
Randall
And I sort of feel this about the whole Southwest. It plays a kind of an exotic role in American life because that part of the country is so unlike much of the rest, even of the West. I think we can people who grew up in New England or in the Great Lakes country, you know, you can imagine Yellowstone, the Montana Rockies, the Grand Tetons. You can imagine all that because it's not hugely dissimilar from the green and better watered world that you're familiar with. But that really arid desert like country in the Southwest, I think is, you know, and I one of the things I've laughed about a lot in watching sports is the inevitable use of the term. Okay, this game is going to be
- [45:30]
Dan Flores
played down in the desert. And it's nobody ever says that we're
- [45:35]
Randall
going to be playing, you know, up in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. We're not going to do that with the Denver Broncos because that's a more familiar place. But anything that happens down in the Southwest is always prefaced by this is going to take place down in the desert.
- [45:52]
Dan Flores
Yeah,
- [45:55]
Interviewer
I think one of the big takeaways from this piece is just how layered New Mexico's history and culture and landscape are.
- [46:06]
Randall
Yeah, that's a good.
- [46:08]
Interviewer
And one of the things that I think became apparent to me just thinking about the script is these are. They're all interrelated. And you think about how long people have been on the ground in New Mexico. Some of our oldest evidence of human occupation in the Americas is in New Mexico. And it's a place where these different types of landscapes come together. And for me, I was thinking about sort of transitional habitats and how these places where two different types of landscapes or biomes where they intersect, that's a good place for animals to be, right?
- [46:52]
Randall
Yeah, it is. Ecotones.
- [46:54]
Interviewer
Yeah. And so I think about, the thought was occurring to me as I was reading this of just like how interrelated its history and its landscape are and the interplay between those two things.
- [47:05]
Randall
I think it's that combination of all those of so many of the big ecological zones of the west in New Mexico. I mean, as I said in the script, it's the place where the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, the Colorado Plateau canyon country and the true deserts of the Southwest all converge in that one spot. And I have a sneaking feeling that one of the reasons we have so many early human sites from the North American story in New Mexico, I mean, it's not just the Clovis site that's there and the Folsom site that's there, the original of both of those are in New Mexico. But also this recent discovery in 2019 of 23,000 year old footprints down in the southern part of the state is that that combination of settings, plains, Rocky Mountains, Colorado Plateau canyons, and southwestern deserts, I think must have drawn people. I mean, the climate is amenable for one thing. You get off the end of the Southern Rockies and the climate is not one you have to suffer through, really to get through, especially say 15,000 years or so ago when it was colder than it is now.
- [48:22]
Dan Flores
And so that country probably attracted people
- [48:25]
Randall
for that reason, but I think it was that diversity of landscapes that also did it. And that's the reason we have so many of these early sites for humans in North America that occur in that particular part of the West.
- [48:39]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [48:39]
Interviewer
And you speaking of sort of this bleed over of different regions, you talk in this article a lot about the jaguar.
- [48:48]
Randall
Yeah.
- [48:49]
Interviewer
And it's sort of the embodiment of ecological connections between North America, Central America, South America, and it, it comes up into New Mexico and there's something, I don't know, there's something about that not only are jaguars Interesting to me, just as an animal, but sort of what that represents as far as the connection across continents is interesting.
- [49:19]
Randall
Yeah, no kidding. Because, I mean, the jaguar we think of. I mean, it's found all the way down to Argentina and so up and down the South American continent, through Central America. And we think of jaguars as being kind of jungle animals, sort of like tigers are. And yet its northern range was in the American Southwest and what is now New Mexico and Arizona. And to me, one of the exciting things when I was working on this particular story in the beginning was encountering this idea. And it's an idea that I think that really still resonates in my mind, that as a result of the climate history, you know, pulling these species up from South America and Central America into what is now the United States, like jaguars, like collard peccaries, javelinas, like armadillos. And then from a different set of influences extending along the crest of the Rocky Mountains from Alaska, these species that like bighorn sheep that you think of as being very northerly kind of animals all the way down into what is now New Mexico.
- [50:39]
Dan Flores
And having those two jaguars be hunting
- [50:43]
Randall
bighorn sheep, I mean, that's just, to me, kind of a remarkable convergence of things that I still like to play with in my mind. And. And what I'm hoping for, if we manage to recover jaguars, is having something like that happen again. Because that seems to be a pretty magical kind of convergence of species across the continents in the Americas.
- [51:07]
Interviewer
And sort of along those same lines in terms of convergence. New Mexico is such a unique place for how visible the Spanish and indigenous. And not only, I mean to say indigenous is, to oversimplify it, very different across a long span of time. Indigenous cultures, then the Spanish, then sort of the Anglo influence from the United States. I think of all the states in the West, New Mexico probably maybe wears that most proudly.
- [51:47]
Randall
I think it does. And I think, you know, I mean, I. And I quoted Florence Miriam Bailey in this particular script too, when she was in New Mexico, said, you know, unlike anywhere else I've been, I mean, to us, to her and her husband, Vernon Bailey, on their honeymoon, this was a brand new place. But it was clear that it was a very old place. And that's one of the things you can't miss in a place like New Mexico that you often can in other parts of the west, and that is the lingering presence on the landscape of prior occupations, prior inhabitations. Chaco Canyon national park, for example, which was a going enterprise in the Southwest a thousand years ago, has Left ruins that. I mean, this now a national park, of course, and a visitor designation or destination for people from all over the world.
- [52:44]
Dan Flores
But it kind of leaves you with
- [52:46]
Randall
the sense of, wow, we are late
- [52:49]
Dan Flores
comers to this part of the world.
- [52:51]
Randall
This thing has been playing out, this human story has been playing out in this part of the world for a long time. And those. Those kind of physical. That physical evidence of occupation going way back into the past is more present in the Southwest, in Arizona and New Mexico than it is anywhere else in the West. So it kind of drives home to you, wow, this is. We didn't. We're not starting something brand new here. This is a very old place.
- [53:22]
Interviewer
Yeah. The phrase that kept popping into my mind as I was thinking about this more and more was one that I remember from elementary school history, which is cradle of civilization.
- [53:35]
Randall
Yeah.
- [53:35]
Interviewer
Which is a term that's referred to. Used to refer to certain parts of the globe that have that sort of ancient gravitas.
- [53:42]
Randall
Yeah.
- [53:44]
Interviewer
And I wonder if you think of New Mexico in those. In those terms.
- [53:48]
Randall
I. I particularly think of the Chacoan area in northwestern New Mexico as a kind of a. An American version of the Tigris, Euphrates river valleys in the Middle east, which, when people talk about the cradle of civilization, that's often what they're referring to. And, yeah, I think northwestern New Mexico really gives you that sense. And if you're in Chaco Canyon National Historic park, all you have to do is walk among those ruins and. And you get a powerful sense of. This is kind of where North America began, you know, and there are. There are certainly older places. I mean, we have evidence of the Clovis and the Folsom people in New Mexico as well. But, boy, Chaco is really. It really raises the hair on the back of your neck when you're there.
- [54:41]
Interviewer
Yeah, well, I need to make it down at some point.
- [54:43]
Randall
Yeah, you do.
- [54:44]
Dan Flores
All right.
- [54:45]
Interviewer
Thanks, Dan.
- [54:45]
Randall
You bet, Randall. Thanks.
- [55:05]
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