Ep. 667: The Prairie Preacher and a Rant By Steve

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast – Episode 667: The Prairie Preacher and a Rant By Steve

Release Date: February 24, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 667 of The MeatEater Podcast, host Stephen Rinella welcomes Dr. Dwayne Estes, known as the Prairie Preacher, from Tennessee. Dr. Estes serves as the Executive Director of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute and brings expertise in biology and conservation to the conversation. The episode delves into pressing conservation issues, federal budget cuts affecting land management agencies, and the vital work of restoring southeastern grasslands.

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Federal Budget Cuts and Conservation Impact

Stephen Rinella initiates a critical discussion on the recent federal administration's budget cuts targeting various government agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

• Quote [04:45]: "Other agencies like USAID are being dismantled and folded into the State Department. The administration is not targeting land management agencies specifically but is engaged in a broader effort to reduce the federal workforce across the board."

Dr. Dwayne Estes emphasizes the broad scope of these cuts:

• Quote [24:24]: "These cuts are an assault on the federal workforce as a whole, not just the Forest Service or BLM. It's a ham-handed approach that disrupts critical conservation efforts."

Rinella further contextualizes the situation by comparing it to significant organizational changes elsewhere:

• Quote [26:00]: "They're using the same playbook that was used to break Twitter. I hope it goes better than that."

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Conservation Strategies and Organizational Roles

The conversation shifts to effective conservation strategies and the roles of various organizations:

• Rinella discusses the importance of working within the system to effect change, highlighting the role of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP).

• Quote [30:03]: "TRCP works by engaging directly with lawmakers, maintaining relationships across the political spectrum to advocate for conservation policies effectively."

Dr. Estes underscores the necessity of strategic engagement over disruptive protests:

• Quote [32:18]: "If you're serious about making change in conservation, you have to engage intellectually and strategically in Washington D.C., rather than just protesting."

The duo debates the effectiveness of different conservation approaches, balancing grassroots activism with policy-driven strategies.

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Restoration of Southeastern Grasslands

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to the restoration of southeastern grasslands, a critical yet often overlooked ecosystem:

Dr. Dwayne Estes elaborates on the historical significance and current challenges of restoring grasslands:

• Quote [56:43]: "The myth that the eastern United States was entirely forested has had a detrimental effect on biodiversity and conservation. We're now investing billions into restoring ecosystems that were once diverse grasslands."

Rinella connects historical land use with present-day conservation needs, emphasizing the loss of grasslands and the necessity of active restoration.

• Quote [65:58]: "Grasslands harbor half the biodiversity of temperate eastern North America, and their biodiversity is collapsing due to neglect and mismanagement."

Dr. Estes discusses practical restoration efforts, including seed collection from remaining grassland remnants and the complexities of managing invasive species without relying heavily on herbicides.

• Quote [103:09]: "If we can't use glyphosate, our entire conservation effort for grasslands could be derailed. We need scalable solutions to manage invasives effectively."

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Challenges in Grassland Restoration

The restoration process is fraught with challenges, particularly in managing invasive species and securing adequate funding:

Dr. Estes highlights the delicate balance required to restore native grasslands:

• Quote [86:04]: "Different types of grasslands require tailored restoration approaches. Coastal dune grasslands differ significantly from tallgrass prairies, necessitating specific strategies for each ecosystem."

He also addresses the issue of perpetual management:

• Quote [91:03]: "Grasslands are old-growth ecosystems requiring continuous management through fire and grazing to maintain their health and biodiversity."

Rinella and Dr. Estes discuss the importance of holistic and scalable restoration practices to ensure the sustainability of grassland ecosystems.

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Personal Reflections and Organizational Insights

Throughout the episode, personal anecdotes and reflections provide depth to the discussion:

• Dr. Estes shares his journey in founding the Southeastern Grasslands Institute and the support he receives from his family and philanthropic partners.

  • Quote [136:00]: "This organization wouldn't exist without the relentless support of my wife. Building from scratch to a team of 50 requires a strong foundation at home."

• Corinne and Randall, co-hosts, interject with lighter moments and personal insights, balancing the episode's intense discussions.

Dr. Estes expresses concern over the immediate threat to his organization's capacity due to ongoing federal budget freezes:

• Quote [129:08]: "If the freeze doesn't lift in the next three to six weeks, we risk losing 90% of our team. We're facing the reality of needing to raise $30 million in six months to continue our vital work."

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Call to Action and Future Initiatives

The episode concludes with a heartfelt call to action, urging listeners to support grassland restoration efforts:

• Dr. Estes invites listeners to engage with the Southeastern Grasslands Institute through their website and social media platforms to contribute to restoration projects.

  • Quote [126:34]: "Visit segrasslands.org and join us in restoring and protecting the remaining grasslands across 17 states."

Rinella reinforces the importance of awareness and involvement, encouraging the audience to take part in conservation efforts actively.

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Conclusion

Episode 667 of The MeatEater Podcast offers a compelling exploration of the critical state of southeastern grasslands, the impacts of federal budget cuts on conservation, and the innovative efforts underway to restore these vital ecosystems. Through insightful dialogue and expert perspectives, listeners gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and necessities of grassland conservation.

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For more information or to support the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, visit segrasslands.org and follow them on their social media platforms.

Transcript

[Stephen Rinella]

Hey, American history buffs. Hunting history buffs, listen up. We're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition, titled the Mountain Men 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Colter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the west represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times, violent conditions. We explain what started the Mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white tailed deer skin trade, which is titled the Long Hunters 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History The Mountain Men 1806-1840 by Stephen Rinella. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless, we hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

[Dwayne Estes]

You can't predict anything.

[Stephen Rinella]

The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out first light.com f I r s t l I t.com all right, everybody, we're joined today by the Prairie Preacher. He's in from Tennessee. I was excited about him coming on as a guest, but I'm not anymore because he was just trying to explain to me that Pennsylvania is the South. I told him parts of Pennsylvania. I told him that's not true because I because of my own maximum. If you can ice fish, it's not the South.

[Corinne]

Honestly, it's amazing sitting here.

[Stephen Rinella]

He tried to lay some ecological argument on me and didn't even try to tackle the ice fishing question.

[Randall]

I'll lay a sociological reason on you. It's true, man. Parts of southern Pennsylvania are the South.

[Dwayne Estes]

Man.

[Stephen Rinella]

We'll get into this in a minute. I wish we were talking about Ohio because I have such a great Ohio story I'd want to tell and I associate it with Pennsylvania because I had driven out of there into Ohio. And then the story happened, so it doesn't really fit. Follow me.

[Randall]

You're always starting stories and never finishing them.

[Stephen Rinella]

But this is all on hold because there's other stuff. Kryn's just got a root canal. She's all novocained up in disease granola bar. Say something. Does it sound slurred? I don't know.

[Dwayne Estes]

It's like in the front.

[Corinne]

I feel weird.

[Dwayne Estes]

I feel like a fat. I have a fat lip in the front.

[Randall]

Left side, right side.

[Stephen Rinella]

You don't look fat lipped.

[Dwayne Estes]

Okay.

[Stephen Rinella]

It's all in your head. Okay, so if Chris not as chatty as normal.

[Corinne]

If she's slurring her words a bit.

[Stephen Rinella]

Don'T be worried so much. Quick, I gotta get into some stuff I gotta address. We got, we got like a bucket of just terror. Like really people real fed up about last week's episode, which I'm gonna try to address for a while in a minute here. Why they're right and wrong to be mad. But, but back to our the prairie preacher, Dwayne Estes. Dr. Dwayne Estes. He's poor on geography, but strong on. Strong on ecology. Dwayne Estes serves as the executive director at the Southeastern Grasslands Institute. Full professor of biology director of the APSU Herbarium. Where is that? What is that apple?

[Dwayne Estes]

That's like a plant museum.

[Stephen Rinella]

But what is apsu?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. O State University, just outside Nashville.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. The herbarium principal investigator for the center of Excellence for Field biography biology. Sorry. January 2017. He co founded the Southeastern Grasslands Institute with colleague Theo Witzel.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's right.

[Stephen Rinella]

And we're going to talk about a lot of his work with Grasslands. And I got a boatload of questions for you. We got to do something. But then we're going to talk about the questions. And just to key up on the questions, one of my many questions is one already brought up. I'm going to allow you to retort about why Brody's a southerner.

[Dwayne Estes]

No, I'm not.

[Randall]

I, I, I'm a northern.

[Stephen Rinella]

Brody's. I'd be like, ah, Brody's a southerner.

[Randall]

Pennsylvania needs to be divided into several different states.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. Why Brody's a Southerner.

[Dwayne Estes]

All upset now.

[Stephen Rinella]

How Clay, Clay should call in because he's gonna be like just distraught that now Brody's the call. Brody's Southerner.

[Randall]

Yeah, I'm liking this.

[Stephen Rinella]

Now I got another question about this, and I want to get into this with you is like when reading about the Colonial American period, so late colonial American period, mid-1700s, that these long hunters would go into Present day Kentucky. And you see similar things from southern Indiana where they're like, can't see a tree. Like, how in the hell is that true? Don't answer me now, but just noodle on that. And then when they talk about going into cane breaks that are so big you can get lost in cane breaks, how the hell is that true? So noodle on that. Got it.

[Dwayne Estes]

Noodle on cane.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. How could that be true?

[Corinne]

How long does he have?

[Stephen Rinella]

He's got, I don't know, five minutes, ten minutes. You cool? Very much. All right. Make sure you're on that mic, Dwayne, when you're talking.

[Dwayne Estes]

Got it. Thank you.

[Stephen Rinella]

He is just people that didn't hear him. He is cool with that. There's. I got so many questions about this stuff, why things are different. And then like, is there any possibility of getting southeastern grasslands fixed back up again?

[Dwayne Estes]

Good question.

[Stephen Rinella]

Noodle on that. Okay, so lots of consternation about an episode we did last week where we do a State of the Union with. We did a State of the Union sort of State of the Conservation Union with Joel Peterson, who is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. And people just upset about how that conversation went. And I feel like I. I want to, like, without Joel in the room, not that I would have said anything different with him in the room. I want to contextualize a couple things and offer a few observations to people who really feel like the way that. The way that we've discussed the incoming administration's actions around conservation issues has been inadequate. But first, allow me to, like, explain a couple things from my position. One, Joel Peterson. Joel Peterson is the president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. And for people that weren't listening carefully, the theater Roosevelt Conservation Partnership is. They are a DC organization that works on federal policy. All right? This is not like. They're not like grassroots protest movements. They work on federal policy, meaning engaging with lawmakers about federal policy. As I tried to explain, this administration is here for four years. This administration might likely have a round two. Depending on how things go. They might have a round two where someone such as J.D. vance carries the MAGA mantle into another four years. If you worked in federal policy, ask yourself this. If you worked in federal conservation policy and you have a high likelihood, the way things look right now, I would say a high likelihood that you will need to be engaging with this administration for the next eight years. Are you telling me that it's unfair to say that you're trying to get the lay of the land trying to look at who's coming in, trying to look at how the decision making is going, and trying to take a somewhat slow, gradual process to engaging with the administration around conservation issues. Is that, does that really strike you as that, that irrational that you're waiting a second and watching and assessing how decisions are being made, what they care about, what they don't care about, in order to engage in a potentially eight year long dialogue about conservation? Now, Joel Peterson laid out when we sat down to talk with Joel Peterson, prior to Joel Peterson coming on the episode, Joel was already concerned. He's like, anything I say is going to become outdated by the time you post the episode. And before he came on, he wanted to clarify when is it coming out? I need to choose my words carefully about when it's coming out. I talked to Corinne Krin, said we'll be able to put it out the following Monday. We made a joke about how anything that happens today is already going to be obsolete by the time the episode releases on Monday. We release episodes on Monday. It's always driven me kind of crazy, but that's how we do it. There's a bunch of reasons, I'll explain some other day about why we keep a certain cadence and don't just drop instantly. Trust me, it, it makes 60%. It's 60% makes sense. So Joel Peterson comes on already concerned. Then, between Joel Peters, Joel Peterson's appearance on the show and the release of his episode the the Doge Boys, the administration, however you want to put it, axes, thousands of Forest Service positions, and at some point we get a lot of emails from people, again, not listening carefully, being like, well, how could you not bring that up? Well, that's why that didn't come up. That hadn't happened yet. In fact, this is the first time I've sat in front of a microphone since that did happen. But hold that thought for a minute and think about this before you get like, before you start talking about who really has the back of public lands people and who don't ask yourself this. Like, like Trump ran on the promise of having Elon Musk form a group called Doge and that Doge was going to go in and look for federal efficiencies and reduce the federal workforce. He ran on this and won on this. People that are running around saying it's a coup. It's like, that's an odd coup that you win in a, that you win a landslide election campaigning on the fact that you're going to have a specific individual do a specific thing if you win, then you win. The specific individual does the specific thing, and somehow people are mistaking what this is really all about. This isn't me saying what I think about it. But come on. Like, like, don't just start reading the news one day and not go read the news from the other days and start thinking you understand what's going on. Also, ask yourself this, and I'm going to get around to what I think about this in a minute. But ask yourself this. Do you think Elon Musk gives a. About the environment? I mean, this guy is already focused. This guy's already set sail for Mars. He's interested in Mars, which is a lifeless planet. So if you think, appealing to Doge on the fact of conservation and land access and biodiversity, he's interested in the mo and the least biodiverse place you can possibly think of, which is a place where life is inhospitable. That's where he'd like to go.

[Randall]

He's.

[Stephen Rinella]

He wears a colonized Mars shirt. So you think that coming to, to, to Doge and talking about access and biodiversity, they don't care. Like, they don't care. They don't care. As Trump pointed out. Trump, Don Jr. Is a hunter. Okay? Don Jr. Has at times, like Don Jr. Has at times in the past, not sure about currently, has at times in the past, supported different conservation groups, holds lifetime memberships with conservation groups. The guy likes wildlife, okay? He's not driving this. So for people to think that you might go that, like that for someone in federal policy to take on like a complaining tonality at this point right now might make Elon Musk and Doge reconsider cutting Forest Service jobs. It's like, get real. That is not how you're going to shape any kind of action within this, within this administration. You're so naive to think that that's what you're going to do here, Randall, butt in at any time.

[Corinne]

I don't disagree with you. I mean, I think, like, do you want me to butt in?

[Stephen Rinella]

Whenever you're ready. I just want you to know that you have the right to butt in. And Dwayne, Dwayne's probably sitting over there wondering what the hell we're talking about, because you didn't listen to the thing we're talking about. And you can comment on it, too, or you can just stick to what you want. This is something I have to do. Yeah, I'm not speaking for Dwayne at all. So here's the other part about this. Other agencies like to Understand these Forest Service cuts. I'm going to read a letter from a Forest Service guy in a minute, but let's back up. Other agencies are being axed, okay? USAID is being dismantled, enrolled in, under the State Department. Now ask yourself this question. To be honest, when you answer this, just promise me you're going to be honest with yourself. Did you know. Did you know that USAID was not under the State Department? Like, answer that in all honesty, okay? However, USAID is being dismantled to be put under the State Department. The administration ran on the idea of dismantling the Department of Education. They are closing doors, turning off email addresses and axing the place. The Justice Department is making huge cuts. The FBI is making huge cuts. The military is probably going to be making big cuts. They're already outlining cuts they're going to make within the military. So, point being, I don't applaud any of this. These are areas that I'm not even expert. An expert in, but I see this going on. So to see that the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management is going to make a bunch of cuts, I can't look at this. I can look at that and say, that really sucks. And I personally think that really sucks because they're cutting things that I care about. But I can't look at it and see that the administration is targeting land management agencies because they're dismantling non land management agencies. So in looking at the cuts to Forest Service and the cuts to blm, which are our big land management agencies, look at it in the context of a broader conversation about what is happening right now writ large across the federal government. Meaning if you're going to understand these cuts and talk about these cuts, look at them in the context. This is not meant to be at this point in time. This is not meant to be an assault on the Forest Service. It's meant to be an assault on the federal workforce, of which the Forest Service is part. If I had somehow, like, fiat power as some kind of dictator to come in and say, like, what ones are okay and what ones are not okay, believe me, I would probably wind up saying, I don't get usaid. A lot of it seems kind of ridiculous. Go ahead, Forest Service, don't touch it. In fact, take USAID's money and give it to the Forest Service, that would be my perspective. But that's not the position I'm in. And I don't really know that pointing out aspects that people are pointing out is going to reverse the situation. A lot of other People wrote in about this national debt question, like me having the audacity to talk about the impacts of the national debt. Now this is a kind of a little bit of situation where you can choose to play chess or you can choose to play checkers around spending the national debt. Like I'm going to keep this within, within a conversation of national, of natural resources management. Just to give you some perspective. Every year this country, we spend $800 billion to pay interest, to pay our interest on the national debt. Take a stab at what the BLM's annual budget is, which I bet you like. I'm guessing most people don't know. I had to look it up. Take a guess, Randall. Oh, the national interest on the national debt is 800 billion.

[Corinne]

The BLM, let's say 30 million.

[Stephen Rinella]

Way low.

[Corinne]

100 million billion.

[Randall]

Billion.

[Stephen Rinella]

Way low. Way low.

[Randall]

100 billion is low.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, no. Way high.

[Corinne]

Okay, we're getting somewhere now. 500 million.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, you know, it's a problem you're creating for me right now rhetorically is, you know, like, if you're saying like, like this block was huge, guess how big he was. And then you guess bigger.

[Corinne]

200.

[Stephen Rinella]

We've run this problem, I mean, countless times over the last six years. Then I got to go, well, no, it was 180.

[Dwayne Estes]

And then it sounds like.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, let's.

[Randall]

Back up 800 billion in interest. And then the BLM, this is not.

[Stephen Rinella]

This is not paying down the debt. Servicing the debt is $800 billion. The BLM's annual budget is $1.7 billion. So in any conversation about the long term, like way long term, health of natural resources in this country and where we're spending our money, I'm just saying, I'm saying, and I'm asking you to consider this. If we didn't have to factor in, in our budget, in our federal budget, if we weren't factoring in $800 billion in interest payments that don't pay down the debt, I have to think, I have to think that there would be more room than 1.7 billion for the BLM. I can't sit here and guarantee you that that's where it would go. But I think that the health of the country, and by meaning the health of the country, the parts I like about this country, the natural resources, the public lands, the wildlife, those things are going to continue to sacrifice if we have to continue to do this. So if I bring up like, even friends of mine get mad if I bring up the idea of the national debt meaning, like, oh, you would sell our prime, our main global, our national treasures in order to pay down the debt. I never said that, ever. I'm pointing out that if you're gonna. Like, a lot of times, we keep conservation conversations, like, very.

[Randall]

In a bubble.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. That's a great way to put it. Yeah. I have, over the years, in talking about conservation, I have oftentimes looked at it in a bubble, certain things in a bubble, and. And these in this conversation, as the administration goes along, we will wind up. I promise you, we will wind up with plenty of bubbles. So when I said. When I sat there and said waiting for. The people are like, oh, I can't believe you would say you're going to wait for the dust to settle or whatever the hell I said. Let me rephrase what I said, because you're right. I would be disappointed to hear someone say that, too. What I'm waiting for is. Is parts of this to bubbleize. But right now, it's hard to bubble it because I can't take, like, the Forest Service cuts. Those can't be bubbleized because they're rolled into, like, a wholesale reorganization of all of these federal agencies. So you're not going to be able to call your politician right now, like, I'm telling you, like, it doesn't work. You're not going to call your politician right now and say, hey, hey, I understand, like, the thousands. The tens of thousands of federal employees are getting cut across all of these administrations or organizations. That's all fine. What I would like you to do is put the Forest Service people back.

[Corinne]

Yeah.

[Randall]

You can't.

[Stephen Rinella]

It ain't going to happen.

[Randall]

Like, what's, like, top of mind and most concerning for us is not. It doesn't translate to the entirety of the federal government or, like, the people who voted for the people who are running the federal government. Right. Like, they're not necessarily cons. Their top concern is not conservation and land access and things like that.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Because they're not looking at. They're not looking at any bubbles. Yep. They're not looking at. At this point, no one is talking about any particulars. It will come, like, in, like, starting already. It'll start to take some clarity. But, like, right now, there's a little bit of, like, waiting to see what happened. And with the Forest Service cuts, like, yeah, I think it's. I think it's, like, catastrophic. I'm going to read a letter where someone puts it really well, but I'm inviting people to stop and. And, like, expand outside of the way that We've historically framed conservation questions and try to get a look at like, where the national mood is at right now with people in power. There is this thing called the, the national debt. And no, like, the debt's not going anywhere, but they're going to make a budget and within this budget they're going to try to find a way of how do you find the money to facilitate the interest payments on the debt and how do you fund some tax cuts which they ran on. Okay. And still balance the budget in some way or another. All of these questions about what we're going to do on real specific conservation issues outside of like, like how we're going to fight to keep mining interests out of the headwaters of the Boundary Waters. Okay. Or sorry, on the borders of the Boundary Waters. How are you gonna work on that? What are you gonna do about Ambler Road, what you're gonna do about Anwar, what you're gonna do about Pebble Mine? Like all of these things are going to get specific with specific players doing specific things. And like these little battles are going to play out non stop for a bunch of years. But right now, on, on the employee thing, it's part of a such. It's part of such a broader conversation that gets really hard to explain how to be like, tactful at this moment. It's dizzying. It's dizzying. I try to follow politics very closely. It's dizzying right now and it's like it's intentionally dizzying. That's a point people keep bringing up. It's like it's meant to be almost. It almost appears without any kind of broader goal in mind.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Corinne]

And I think that's. I mean, I don't know that people who want to shrink the federal government want to shrink it in the way that it's being done. Right, Correct. I think lost in all this is that these are just completely arbitrary decisions and that they've had to, you know, I saw the other day that they'd cut security people at nuclear facilities and then they realized they didn't have any more and so they're trying to get in touch with those people to bring them back. And the same for bird flu. I saw just the other day the USDA cut all the people working on the bird flu outbreak that's driving up the price of eggs. And now they need to figure out how to get in touch with those people to bring them back. So I think regardless of like, where you stand, I think like we can acknowledge that this is a very arbitrary and destructive way of doing it.

[Stephen Rinella]

It is. Yeah, it is. It's emerging that. And it's like. And parts of this are hitting at things I care about deeply, but I'm not succumbing to the temptation to look at it as being an assault on the things I care about deeply rather than an assault on like, like a kind of ham handed assault on the idea of, of the federal role.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

In American lives.

[Randall]

When I'm scrolling through the news and it's cuts here, cuts there, cuts there, cuts in the Forest Service or wherever, I've had to force myself not to like focus just on that one thing. Right. Because it's kind of unfair. It's, it's like unfair to think about it that way.

[Stephen Rinella]

It's thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And any person, I have a neighbor who's a school teacher. He's like, he could go on for a long time about what the Department of Education dismantling means for him. Meanwhile, I look at the Department of Education thing and I'm like, man, as long as I don't mess with the Forest Service blm, I'm cool. Do you know what I'm saying? It's, it's like, it's a very hard, like, for the conservation space right now, for the conservation movement right now, for the environmental movement right now. It's like a. This is going to require a radical reorientation of how we talk about things. They're using a playbook on the federal workforce that was used on, on. That was used on Twitter. Like breaking Twitter.

[Randall]

Move fast and break things.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, breaking Twitter is like, okay. I mean, it's already broken.

[Corinne]

And they.

[Stephen Rinella]

It's already broken. It'll always be broken.

[Corinne]

But they, they did break it. It became a wildly less, Wildly less effective company and lost a bunch of advertising and kind of sure took a dump.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yes. So I'm saying, like breaking the government. Taking the same approach to break the government. Like, I hope it goes better than it did when he broke Twitter.

[Corinne]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Hey, American history buffs. Hunting history buffs, listen up. We're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition, titled the Mountain Men 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellas like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith and John Colter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the west represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times Violent conditions. We explain what started the mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as. As our previous volume about the white tailed deer skin trade, which is titled the Long Hunters, 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History the Mountain Men 1806-1840 by Stephen R. To, to return to my main point, to somehow pin it on a person, to somehow suggest that an individual that works in federal policy and is needing to figure out who am I talking to? What are we talking about? Where are some areas we can succeed in the next four years or eight years, rather than saying, you know what? I don't like the way this is looking, I'm going home.

[Randall]

They have to work with who they have to work with. Right? They don't have a choice.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yes.

[Randall]

They've got to do what they can do.

[Stephen Rinella]

Imagine if he says, you know what? Okay, I'm not going to talk to anybody about federal conservation policy for the next four years. That'll stick them, that'll show them.

[Corinne]

And I think too, there's like a there. When you think about how a group like TRCP works, there are other groups out there that are going to be throwing bombs at the administration. There are other groups out there that are going to be like rallying the troops and, and taking shots. Right. But like if you're in D.C. and you're serious about trying to make change or trying to protect what we like, you know, you got to go to work every day.

[Stephen Rinella]

There's different groups with different roles and.

[Corinne]

The, and you're not going to. The biggest, the biggest advantage that you can have in D.C. is that someone takes your calls or that someone has a meeting with you.

[Randall]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but TRCP has like a very good working relationship with politicians on both sides of the aisle.

[Stephen Rinella]

Right. Like.

[Corinne]

Right.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's their program. Yes. That is what, that is what they are.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

That's how they get shit done.

[Corinne]

Yeah. And, and I mean that's, that's how the, how, that's how it works, you know, whether you like it or not. Like, it's, I mean, I think it's incredible that we have a group like that who's using the power, you know, like they're using the system in place because that's where the rubber hits the road in D.C. and it's, it's somebody going to take your. So you can't, you have to be the adult in the room sometimes and, and not throw bombs and not name call. So.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, and I, like, I've, like, as a board member at trcp, you know, I have, you know, I don't know, like, I have a voice in the room. And the part about having a board is you try to assemble a board with a bunch of disparate voices. So, sure, I have, you know, I have perspective on things where I talk to someone privately about what I think when Utah was trying to figure out a way to declare that public lands were effectively unconstitutional. I'm on the phone with TRCP knowing the other people are on the phone with TRCP and I'm giving my take on it. Then they're in the role of taking these different takes, shaping them, asking who they can speak with and then making some progress. But if you're just going to throw Molotov cocktails in for them. I'm not talking about me. Yeah, for them. If they're going to throw Molotov cocktails and then one day call up and be like, but seriously, the farm bill. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, how are we going to keep the CRP programs alive? Like, that still has to happen.

[Corinne]

Oh, yeah. And, and you need a seat at the table. You like. And it's very easy to lose your seat at the table if you, if you come out and start throwing punches.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. If you want to be like, like ask yourself. Like someone else said, oh, pretty rich that Steve said, get involved in the conservation movement after saying the blah, whatever he said to everyone else. I'll say this. If you want to get involved in the conservation movement and you want to do it in a way where you have a voice at the, you have a voice in a seat at the highest level of table. Right. The top table. You want a voice there. Get on board with an organization like trcp. That doesn't mean that people going out and protesting at their state capitol isn't effective. It's a, it's a way to show force. That's if that's where you're at. TRCP is not your group. If, if you like, if you are willing to be like patient and somewhat intellectual and strategic and play in Washington D.C. that's different. It's just different.

[Corinne]

And there's Room for both. And you can support both at the same time.

[Dwayne Estes]

Right.

[Corinne]

Like, I mean there's certainly, it's effective to go and let your elected officials know where you stand. And strongly worded calls to your elected officials do work, but there's also another model that's having like high stakes meetings with people who have the power and you're not going to get very far with them by calling them up and leaving a strongly worded voicemail.

[Stephen Rinella]

I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to give a little bit to, to explain myself a little bit with, with a, with a, with the, with a parallel thing that occurred to me one time. Like, like picture that you picture you're a kid growing up in America and movies come out and you just, and the movies come out and you become aware of movies. You see movies and then there's books that are in the bookstore, there's books in the library and they just are there because they're there. And the movies that get made, get made because they get made. That, that's how I grew up. I don't know. Just like movies came out and you went. Somebody never gave any thought to what happened right then as my career went along and I got into my 30s and I started going and having meetings with people that make TV shows and people that make books and people that make movies. And I understood like why they do what they do, how they do what they do, how it's financed, how the whole bigger project works. All of a sudden you go, all of a sudden it's like, you know, I, I, I never use like the whole like stupid red pill thing. You get red pilled. You're like, oh, that's how all this works. Do you know what I mean? And then you're like, oh, I get it now. That's why the books that are out are out. And that's why this, that, that's how this whole thing functions. And all of a sudden you understand the world in a different way. I, over time, being someone involved in wildlife conservation, have had, I've like undergone a sort of evolution. What's the opposite of evolution?

[Dwayne Estes]

Devolution.

[Stephen Rinella]

Do you know where opposite. Evolution. What is it?

[Dwayne Estes]

It's the evolution.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. Some might say, oh, he went through a de. Evolution. I don't know.

[Dwayne Estes]

To me it feels like evolve.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. I devolved. No, no, because I don't want to seem my, I, My picture of how things happen.

[Dwayne Estes]

There we go, Randall. Okay, thanks, doc.

[Stephen Rinella]

Point I'm trying to make.

[Corinne]

Took a little while.

[Stephen Rinella]

Point I'm trying To make here.

[Corinne]

Sip of coffee.

[Stephen Rinella]

My understanding of how things happen and why the world looks like it does in wildlife conservation has changed as much as my understanding of why what shows get made and what books come out in print. It's like it's changed with education. It has changed. I have come to see more of the value of like backroom, high level conversations. There are other people who've come away with a very different opinion. If you really want to get into this, you could go read about what happened with why did the 60s fizzle? You could dig into Joan Didion. You can start watching things about the, the efficacy and evolution of Vietnam protesters. I don't know. There's different ways to engage in. In policy discussions. The civil rights movement was disruptive and very effective. Other movements have been disruptive and they faltered and haven't worked. What else? Oh, my Forest Service letter. I personally. Personally. Yeah, I'm going to say a couple more personal things here. I've always had a thing where I have a. I've tried to keep a brand promise where we stay out of issues that. That we stay out of issues that aren't directly relevant to hunters and anglers. Okay. So at times, this is where I'm in a little bit of a bind. At times I have expressed appreciation for some things, half. Some number of things that the current administration ran on and is doing. I have expressed appreciation for because it's just true. It's just true. I appreciate a bunch of the things. I would have to violate my pact with the audience to start talking about the things I appreciate. There's a thing called an apophysis. Randall knows what it is.

[Corinne]

I do.

[Stephen Rinella]

An apophysis is when you bring something up by saying you're not going to bring it up. So my example would be you're fighting with your wife. Your wife says, well, I'm not even going to bring up what you did on Friday. That's an apophysis. She's bringing it up by not bringing it up. So I'm going to do an apophysis. When I'm talking about this administration. I'm not going to bring up that. That I think that the country should have borders. Okay, I'm not going to bring that up. I'm not going to bring up that. I don't think people should have their livelihoods and careers destroyed because they fail to get on board with whatever new sloganism emerges in a given day. Like, I'm not going to bring that up. Okay, I'm not going to bring up things I think about with. With human biology and distinctions between males and females. Not going to bring it up. But when I've talked about things the administration has done, I'm talking about some things I'm not going to bring up that I think are pretty good. Do I then think that what they're. They're threatening to do what it seems like they're going to do to American wildlife and American wild places and public lands, do I think that that's acceptable? No, I don't. But I can hold two things in my hands at the same time that, like, there's things I like about the administration. There's also seems to be like some things that are going to be doing and are doing that are going to be catastrophic for public lands and wildlife. And it's part of my personal thing to sort out these two issues and find out where I'm going to land on it. But I can't sit here and tell you that every single thing Donald Trump does pisses me off, because that's not true. Like, it doesn't. Some of this stuff is absolutely going to. But I'm not gonna look at it like that. I'm gonna look at it like I'm gonna find the areas and weigh in on the areas that I think they're screwing up. And it's starting to look like there's gonna be quite a pile of them. Anything else? No.

[Corinne]

Where do I begin the letter?

[Stephen Rinella]

Put my spectacles on. My name is blank, and I am a Forest Service meal packer. As I write to you February 14th, I am still an employee of the US Forest Service. Today I lost many co workers that I call friends to the new administration's recent cutbacks on federal employees. For valid and invalid reasons, the new administration has decided to pick on the US Forest Service. I'm going to step in and editorialize here. I'm outside of the letter for a minute. People don't want to hear this, but I don't think the word choice is right. I don't think they've decided to pick on.

[Dwayne Estes]

They're picking on a lot of people.

[Stephen Rinella]

It'd be like if I went into a class. If I was a bully and went into a class and beat up all the kids in the class, they wouldn't say he was picking on Bobby. Right. Is that a good analog?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Throughout my career. I'm back to the letter. Throughout my career in the recreation and range departments, I have witnessed decrease in budgets every year, forcing us to do more with less. Last year, all seasonal non fire field workers were fired. That was last year under Biden. They left US Field going permanence. They left US Field going permanent employees feeling overwhelmed, to say the least, for the upcoming field season. But today, the new administration fired over 30 employees on the Beaverhead Deer Lodge National Forest. All but one of the wilderness rangers were let go on the Krassel Ranger District of the Frank Church river of no Return Wilderness. And all the trail crews of the Spotted Bear Ranger District in the Bob Marshall Wilderness were let go. The Wisdom Ranger District no longer has any trail crew to maintain the Anaconda Pintler Wilderness either. A dear friend was days away from graduating from probationary status. He was fired from the NRCS in Alaska, along with her entire tribal relations team. Out of all the wasteful spending in government, for this administration to pick on the hardest working, lowest paid and most dedicated workers makes me ill. This may be an honest, uneducated attempt to cut wasteful spending in government. Now this is. This is, like, why this particular letter resonated with me, because of this line. This may be an honest, uneducated attempt to cut wasteful spending in government. He says, in my off season, I work for different outfitters guiding elk hunts in multiple states. We rely on these trail systems to do our job and earn a modest living doing what we love. These layoffs are taking away access to our public lands. Over 120 years of blood and sweat by the American working class maintaining these trail systems will be lost. Those that making that make a living in these areas will suffer. But most importantly, the American people will lose their access to the last place they can escape the modernities we call progress in this world. And he ends with a plea. Use your voice to let the American public know what these government cutbacks are costing us a lot all across the board.

[Corinne]

Yeah, I mean, I think, like, just on the subject of people who are working in these jobs, like, beyond the in. And. And there's lots of people wondering how they're going to pay their mortgage this month or how they're going to pay their rent. And beyond that, like, immediate individual tragedy, like, there's a larger, I think, tragedy. And like, there's probably some talented young kids right now in college who are studying. They're trying to figure out what they're going to study and what career they're going to pursue. And if I was graduating from college right now, I probably wouldn't be thinking about trying to go work for the Forest Service, you know, or try and try to go work for The National Park Service. And those jobs require a ton of sacrifice year after year after year to get your foot in the door. And then the pay's not great and then you're probably transferring around to, you know, if you're in the park Service, bouncing from park to park or wherever you are. Like, I think we're going to see generational consequences from the past few weeks just on the types of people we can attract to those jobs. And that for me I think is like a pretty profound. Like even if they hired all these people back next week, like there's a chink in the armor that is hard to polish out at this point. And it's just like, yeah, I don't know, I mean when I was finishing college, I tried really hard to get my foot in the door at a public land management agency and couldn't do it.

[Stephen Rinella]

You had to settle for meat eater.

[Corinne]

I did, you know, and I'm lucky that things went the way they did. But yeah, it's just like these people love the resource and I never go out on our public lands and think, I wish there were fewer. I wish there were fewer guys working on roads, you know, I wish there were fewer interpretive rangers telling people what's great about this landscape or telling people about these animals we're looking at. Like I, I just, yeah, that obviously I'm having a hard time like putting my finger on it, but it's really hard to not sort of have your thoughts spiral when you think about the compounding consequences of this stuff that's being done by 20 year old kids that don't know anything about the government and.

[Randall]

The impact, like, like the real world impact to hunters and anglers and all kinds of outdoor recreation people. Like, it's going to take a while to see what actually happens, you know, with like trail access and boat ramps and like, who knows, like we don't know necessarily what we're going to be facing when the fall rolls around for hunting season.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, you don't. And to return to my analogy about the bully coming in and beating up everybody in the class, like the, like, like it's kind of not a great analogy, but not trying to equate the same thing, but you might look and be like, well, yeah, I mean a lot of those kids had it coming, but little Billy, why he's the nicest kid in the world. And so, yeah, like I don't think you're gonna find like you're not going to look at the Forest Service and the Rocky Mountain west and, and, and Doge and Musk aren't going to be like. And look at all the embarrassing. Look at all the embarrassing crazy expenditures they were making. It's not going to happen.

[Corinne]

Yeah, but here's where.

[Stephen Rinella]

Here's where a thing I do predict happening as this goes on. And again, this is all new news, but I can picture this. Do you remember when Dwayne. I'm sorry. Where I'm almost done. You could cause that bad moment.

[Corinne]

Do you want to come back?

[Stephen Rinella]

Do you remember when. When Trump floated the idea and I talked about this the other day. Like, I. I was. The other day I was explaining, if I get really mad at my kids about iPads and phones, I'll say something like, I'm about ready to take all those iPads out and run them over with my truck.

[Dwayne Estes]

I've used that one.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yep. Now they know I'm not going to run the iPads over the truck, but they also know he's going to do something. He's fed up. I was saying how. I was just joking around saying how when Trump said I got half of mine to empty out Gaza and make a big resort, he was kind of saying, I'm going to put all the iPads in the driveway and run them over my truck. Meaning people are like, he's not going to do that. But he's pissed. He's going to do something. Well, who's the guy who's the libertarian from Kentucky?

[Randall]

Oh, Paul. Rand Paul.

[Corinne]

Rand Paul.

[Stephen Rinella]

Right away, he now the Twitter's not Twitter. It's called X. When you tweet, what are you doing? Xing.

[Randall]

He still say tweeting.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. Just a horrible business decision. He tweets. Good thing he's running the government. Rand Paul tweets. I thought we voted for America first, right?

[Corinne]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Now, just to capture that sentiment, here's the thing that I do picture happening. Much of this conversation about the. The right and the left in this country has been framed over the previous years as a. As a rural people, interior people battling for the soul of the country against the coastal elites. Remember this?

[Corinne]

Mm.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. As Doge. If they do take a wrecking ball to the interests of rural people, to the people, to the people that were supporting Trump. He won overwhelmingly in this state. When you run for office in this state, you have to. I'm talking about Montana. If you're running for office of Montana, I don't care what you're doing. You have to pay lip service at least to being pro public lands. You have to say public lands in public lands. You have to do it or else you can't win. You have to do it. Just like you can't say at the federal level, I'm going to cut Social Security, you lose. If here you say, I want to sell off public lands, you lose now. So that's true of Montana. Montana. Trump the first time won Montana by 14 points. Right. They don't even need to campaign here. He's going to win. But what happens when. What happens when you start seeing an erosion of these things that the people I'm not in this state care a lot about, which is their public lands and public land access. You risk alienating your own support network.

[Randall]

You risk the pendulum swinging the other way.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

And people in a couple years when.

[Stephen Rinella]

The midterms come up and just like Rand Paul. Was it Rand Paul. Yeah. Said, I thought we were voting for America First. Someone might say, I thought I was voting for guys like me. This isn't serving my interests, you know. Excuse yourself. Randall, I'm.

[Corinne]

I'm really sorry.

[Stephen Rinella]

I'm keeping that in. That was incredible.

[Randall]

I was wondering where. You can't tell where it's coming from.

[Corinne]

I was just like, excuse me.

[Stephen Rinella]

That was only supposed to be fine.

[Corinne]

My mind was elsewhere at the moment.

[Stephen Rinella]

Is everyone good? Can I start interviewing Dwayne? About what? What's up? Yes, let's.

[Randall]

We should reintroduce him, cuz everyone probably forgot who he is by now.

[Stephen Rinella]

Terrible. Joining us today, Dr. Dwayne Estus, who I have heard about from a ton of people and has been. And Crim was very eager to have him on the prairie. Preacher co founder and executive dress director of Southeastern Grasslands Institute. I first have to say that everything I just said is me talking, not Dwayne talking. But I would like to invite if Dwayne, if you have any comments about anything about what we just said, because you're sort of now like. Like you're sort of affiliated with the conversation. You could either sit it out or you could give your some of your thoughts. You'd say, whatever hell you want, I don't care.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about it.

[Corinne]

Well, number one weighed in.

[Dwayne Estes]

Number one, there's a. There's a double meaning to apophysis.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, gee.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, yeah. It's the. It's the broad portion of a pine cone scale. Just. Just FYI from a little bit botanical. Yeah. Like you had a pine cone, right? You got the little. The prickle there. It's that broad triangular face that you see. That's the hypothesis.

[Stephen Rinella]

You shit me wild. Yeah, I love that. You know, thanks for joining today.

[Randall]

Dropped a little botanical knowledge on next week's show.

[Dwayne Estes]

No, you know, I find it fascinating, man, because we're all in this limbo right now. And as a founder and executive director of a conservation organization, we're like everybody else. You know, I talked to a good friend of mine who, former senator, and he said, he reminded me, he said, you know, I hear you. He says, it's not about you, it's, you know, there's worldwide ramifications of what's happening. And I think that helped to frame it in a context that made me kind of just sit back and try to chill and get through it and just say, you know, it's going to take a little while for us to kind of figure out what the road ahead looks like. You know, we're trying to go through planning right now to think about what are our options. You know, it could be that we get by unscathed. It could be that our organization fails in four weeks because of what, what we're currently faced with. So, yeah, it's scary, man. People's livelihoods are at stake. Good people, good hard working people doing habitat restoration work, you know, planting seeds, planting prairies, doing prescribed fire. People with babies and kids and elderly parents, farmers that we work with, seed producers, they're all, they're all uncertain right now and they're, you know, a little bit scared about what's coming. So to me, I found the fascination conversation to be very fascinating. I just was enjoying it, really.

[Stephen Rinella]

I wouldn't call it a conversation.

[Dwayne Estes]

It was more like a monologue. But it's okay.

[Randall]

Monologue verging on rant. But that's okay.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

It wasn't a rant. I know because it ran. You're pushing a thing. I was pushing a question mark.

[Randall]

Your face wasn't red and there wasn't like a blood vessel sticking out of your forehead.

[Stephen Rinella]

Thank you.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Let'S, let's set the stage for grasslands.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, no.

[Dwayne Estes]

Can we.

[Stephen Rinella]

Could we tackle this first? Explain how Brody's a southerner again.

[Dwayne Estes]

Okay, so Brody and any. Well, anybody in southern Ohio, southern Indiana, Illinois, Illinois, New Jersey.

[Randall]

Imagine that.

[Dwayne Estes]

You're in the south, man. Yeah, you're in the South. I'll draw you the South. I'm gonna tell it.

[Stephen Rinella]

I'm familiar with two ways of drawing this line. I'm familiar with the Mason Dixon Line.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

And I'm familiar with my thing about where it's a line of where you ice fish or not.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. And the Mason Dixon Line ain't got nothing to do with what I'm about to show you. So. I do like geography. I do like geography, by the way. By the way. You got to put the Chesapeake Bay in there, you know, you got to put the New Jersey in. There's your Long island right there. That's the. That's the northern extent of the south right there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Long Island? Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

No, man.

[Stephen Rinella]

Long. Really?

[Dwayne Estes]

Absolutely.

[Stephen Rinella]

They need to change how they talk.

[Dwayne Estes]

No, seriously, man, we could even make a case for southern Nova Scotia and Cape Cod, I'm telling you. All right, so then what we do is we draw that line coming across the southern two thirds of Pennsylvania.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Dwayne Estes]

Not that.

[Stephen Rinella]

Catch Brody or not?

[Dwayne Estes]

Nope. No, no, He's a Yankee. Yeah. Erie's out. You're in those glaciated plains.

[Stephen Rinella]

Is Seth Yankee?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yes.

[Randall]

Very close.

[Dwayne Estes]

All right, now. Now what you're going to do is bring it down.

[Stephen Rinella]

Infiltrator.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

You're going to pull in the edge of Appalachia country of Ohio. You do bring in Cincinnati. Yeah. Southern third of Indiana, southern Illinois. Cut right across south of the Columbia River.

[Stephen Rinella]

Hell of a US Map, Steve.

[Corinne]

This would be a shirt.

[Dwayne Estes]

The South. Yeah.

[Corinne]

So you're drawing a map of basically what, right there, what wasn't covered by.

[Randall]

Down through the middle of Texas.

[Dwayne Estes]

You want to hold that up for.

[Stephen Rinella]

The camera when you're done, Dwayne, I can't believe you just did that without having a reference, man.

[Dwayne Estes]

I've been studying maps since I was wearing a diaper, bro. Yeah, that's the south right there. The SGI focal region.

[Stephen Rinella]

I'm still Yankee, 24 states.

[Dwayne Estes]

It all gets down to biogeography, Steve.

[Stephen Rinella]

So you're. You're. You're a Johnny Reb now. There you go.

[Corinne]

Yep. Yeah, just south of the. South of the hills there.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Look away, Dixieland. Explain that to me. What's going on within that map?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. So pretty much when you look at this region, again, this is not the cultural South. Right. That kind of stuff.

[Stephen Rinella]

We're talking ecology.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. If you're talking about plants and animals, there is a high level of endemism here. So lots of species that occur within this region that don't occur anywhere else on Earth. So there's lots of these clusters of endemic species, and they all are really clustered like in the Southern Appalachians or in the. We call the Interior Plateau or parts of Florida, East Texas. And many of those species are really narrowly distributed, you know, but then you also have wide ranging species. That's the ones we look at like, look at post oak trees, for example. Post oaks grow all the way out to the cross timbers of Texas. They grow up into southern Illinois. They go all the way up to Long island or so they don't go any farther north. So what you have then is this perpetual pattern of species that reach the northern range limits and their western range limits because of climatic barriers. So here you get in the Boreal Northeast, you get into the true, you know, the tall grass prairie of the Midwest and the Great Plains, and then the arid, basically Chihuahua desert margin right here in south Texas. So that means then everything in this region is kind of temperate. It's got seasonality with the exception of south Florida, which is subtropical. It's mostly, you know, people think of it as a deciduous forest region. That drives me bonkers.

[Stephen Rinella]

You don't like that term?

[Dwayne Estes]

No, I don't, actually. It's a huge misnomer. And it's not based in science or history.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can you tell what it means and why you don't like it?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, because what it does is it extrapolates all parts of the east as being. People think, well, it all used to be forest. Right. There's this, what we call the myth of the squirrel.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can I tell you the squirrel myth?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

I was raised on this.

[Dwayne Estes]

Good. Okay. What?

[Stephen Rinella]

Tell me that a squirrel could go from blank to blank and never touch the ground. A squirrel could go from Kentucky to Michigan, from Florida to New Jersey.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's right.

[Stephen Rinella]

Whatever. And never touch the ground.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. I heard it as my sixth grade teacher, Tommy Johns, who also paddled me 13 times for talking too much.

[Corinne]

Did he invent the surgery?

[Dwayne Estes]

He told me, no, I don't know.

[Corinne]

Tommy John surgery.

[Dwayne Estes]

No. This is probably smarter than his teacher. I call it Tommy Johns and the fabled squirrel.

[Stephen Rinella]

You know, we still got wolf when I was a kid.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, I'm 46. Yeah, I got. I got 13 of them in 1990.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Mr. Bricken.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, man, he called me down with me one time, but he told me, he said, look, a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi river without ever touching the ground.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's what I heard.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's it.

[Stephen Rinella]

I was screwing the whole thing up. That's what my dad would like to tell me.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. And you know it.

[Stephen Rinella]

Really?

[Dwayne Estes]

No, I don't buy it at all. And it has its origins. The origin is kind of complex. I wrote to the pretty well known author Stephen J. Pine. I said, you know, do you know where that originated? And we both have been sort of scratching our heads over the True origins of that myth are a little bit hard to put to nail down, but what's easily provable is that it's not true. Yeah, all you gotta do is go back into the annals of American history, the days of Boone and his contemporaries, or you can look at multiple lines of scientific evidence at many different places across that and say, oh, there were vast prairies there, there were cane breaks there, non forested ecosystems. So for us to take this mantra that it was all forested has had a deleterious effect for biodiversity and conservation. Think about it. We've invested billions of dollars in the eastern United States into forests. When we go buy land for protection, we create public new state parks or new national parks. It's all the mountainous, forested or big swampy bottomlands that get all the attention. Nobody thinks about the open spaces. When you do prioritization for conservation action, all the places that get the conservation focus. And I'm talking about terrestrial ecosystems, not streams and rivers at this point. But, you know, it's, it's big river floodplains, it's big swampy intact forest, it's big mountain systems that are still forested. Nobody gives a shit about pasture lands and crop fields. But those are the areas that used to be grassland and, and they know they no longer are in most places.

[Stephen Rinella]

Is it, is it safe to say that those went first because you could grow corn, a crop of corn on them without needing to girdle all the trees and so it just, everything got gobbled up?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, absolutely. And we're beginning to sort of lay a fact trail of evidentiary information that proves that exact point. You know, you got people in the 1870s who are writing back about conditions in, say the 1840s in Tennessee. And they'll say, you know, the earliest waves of settlers, for example, who went from middle Tennessee into West Tennessee when that land was purchased by Andrew Jackson from the Chickasaw Nation, they settled in the already open lands first because, quote, it opened, you know, a crop of corn and cotton very quickly. And so you can look again and again in places throughout the east. And. But we, what we have begun to advance is what we call this push pull hypothesis. You know, it's the same thing that was driving Boone to Daniel Boone to want to kind of move, move around. And he didn't like the pressure of a neighbor being 10 miles away from him. Right. So this, he was being sort of pushed by this ever increasing population density factor. What we like to say though is look at the pool.

[Stephen Rinella]

Sure.

[Dwayne Estes]

Right. Why was Boone being attracted to the Kentucky Bluegrass or the Nashville Basin, the Cumberland River Valley. He certainly wouldn't go on hunt in a big, vast, extensive forest. He was going to hunt the meadowlands, the canebrake margins, the savannas. That's what people were attracted by, like these early land surveyors and land speculators. They wanted good land that was going to open up settlement opportunities for incoming westward migrating settlers and colonists. So that's what was pulling America's migration patterns in the 1600s and 1700s. It was the availability of open space. That story has never been told in American history, but we're telling it.

[Stephen Rinella]

Speaking of history, you know, the. I don't know if you know Randall's specialty.

[Dwayne Estes]

Tell me about it. Randall?

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, he doesn't know.

[Corinne]

Yeah, I was waiting to hear you.

[Stephen Rinella]

Randall has been formally trained to your thing about, where did that squirrel thing come from? He's been formally trained to find that kind of stuff. Wow. He's a PhD in history.

[Dwayne Estes]

Dude, that's what we need, man. We need it. We need to figure it out.

[Corinne]

This is the first time I've ever heard that.

[Stephen Rinella]

He's busy right now.

[Corinne]

We need more PhDs.

[Stephen Rinella]

But if you put Randall on that, he'd probably come in after a couple weeks, he'd come tell you where that first appeared.

[Corinne]

Okay, well, I don't know about that. I mean, that stuff's so hard to pin down, but. Yeah, like.

[Stephen Rinella]

Never mind.

[Dwayne Estes]

Well. Well, I will say this.

[Corinne]

It's a great compliment. I really. I feel like I'm sitting up straighter in my chair now. But, yeah, I think you're probably doing the Stephen Pine as well. Doing the. As much as can be done on that.

[Stephen Rinella]

What I wish I had. I wish I had compiled more specific examples, but places, Randall, this will jog your memory. Places where.

[Dwayne Estes]

I don't.

[Stephen Rinella]

I don't necessarily from Boone's descriptions, but places where guys around 1770, whatever are describing, could be north of the Ohio, in some places, mostly south. The Ohio river are saying that, like, not a tree in sight.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

I mean, where in the world is that happening?

[Corinne]

I thought that was. When you're reading all those accounts. I mean, they're describing savannas and the Barrens. The Barrens is this region that they talk about all the time. And in my mind, having grown up in Ohio and driven interstates, you know, up and down to the. You know, to the south and throughout sort of Tennessee, Kentucky, all this. I picture every. It's trees on the hills and farms in the bottom. And you read these descriptions from that time period of all this open country. And for me it was just like I didn't have a visual reference in my imagination for what that looks like.

[Dwayne Estes]

I kind of think about the land, as I told a friend this recently, and she kind of looked at me like she didn't believe me. I said, imagine if you were to go into like the i81 corridor, which takes you from Pennsylvania down, you know, into Tennessee. The Great Valley as it's called. You know, it's. The bottom of the valley is relatively open today. I think the vast majority of Americans would look at that valley and say, oh, at some point in our past it's been cleared, right? You know, it's been deforested.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, I would think it was open anthropogenically.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, exactly. You know, and I would maintain that many sections of eastern United States are relatively about the same in terms of the approximate closure of the landscape versus openness as it was to pre settlement time. So that, you know, those open cattle pastures you see down in there in western Virginia today, or cornfields or valley bottom hay meadows, those were probably mostly always open. Sure, there are blocks that were deforested, yes. But the relative balance of land open to close I think is relatively the same. It's just what happened to the land the forest went through, the mountainsides, some of them were cleared and logged and grew back up into secondary and tertiary forests. Those valley lands though, those were part of that, that pull factor that attractant for people moving out of Chesapeake Bay and stuff and tidewater Virginia. When they moved into that, they moved and stayed forever, right? They converted those meadowlands and those savannas into the first cornfields and croplands and plantations. And when those got exhausted, then sometimes they let them go back into, go fallow into pasture lands or they went into pasture lands from the beginning. And many of our grasslands too, especially the savanna types, they've always had trees. And that's one of the big hallmarks of what we call southern grasslands is not all of them had trees. There are certainly many examples that were essentially treeless that we can point to and we can talk about where they were and why. But 80%, at least, of southern grasslands had somewhere between probably 10 and 50% tree cover. And so many of our friends say, well, hell, why don't you just call that a forest and be done with it? Well, you could, you could call it an open forest, you can call it a woodland. We don't really give a shit what you call it. The fact of the matter is we need to understand what its structure needs to be right. What does it need to be to be healthy and flourishing for both native plants and native wildlife? It needs to be something other than what it is today. We have deviated from the natural condition so profoundly that people in the east are just unaware of that deviation.

[Stephen Rinella]

Go ahead.

[Corinne]

Well, this is a non sequitur.

[Dwayne Estes]

I don't even know what that means.

[Corinne]

It's not going to follow what you just said. I wasn't sure what we were walking into today. And I love profanity, but you've said the word shit a few times, which is not something that I expected from the prairie preacher. Now I'm understanding sort of the.

[Dwayne Estes]

I heard it from you guys, the gospel.

[Corinne]

Oh, please.

[Stephen Rinella]

I mean, you thought he was a preacher.

[Corinne]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

From the prairie.

[Corinne]

No, I mean, I read that. I was like, I wonder sort of where the preacher comes from. And now I'm getting, you know, you've got your own gospel here of what the east used to look like. But, yeah, I don't know. That's just my thought. I don't really have a question.

[Stephen Rinella]

Thank you. Back to you. Yeah. How much of your work is about. Where do you split your work and your worldview from trying to capture what things looked like? I'll add a little bit on that because, Randall, I have experienced this as well, is in some of our research about market hunting that we've been doing lately, where we're sort of taking the first far west, meaning Appalachia, Kentucky, Tennessee, south, the Ohio river, and looking at the source material that explains what that looked like, who was there, what it looked like, what are the first experiences that Euro Americans had there? The source material for that versus the source material for the Rocky Mountains. The source material for the Rocky Mountains is just relatively vast. I mean, you can't. In a lifetime, you can't get through all the firsthand accounts of what a quote unquote, untouched west looked like. Like what it looked like in the Native America state. You can't read it all if you're trying to find accounts of what this, what we're talking about, looked like in an untouched state. It's like a paucity of material. The people that were talking and describing weren't describing that. So, like, how much of your focus is understanding what that was? Because it's so mysterious what it looked like, how it functioned, what it did, and how much of your work is about, well, what do we do now? Like, knowing that, what do we do now?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, Yeah. I would say we're equally split. It took us, you know, for our first eight years, we, we've been around since 2017. You know, we really kind of grew first out of this desire to know what it was and document and substantiate how we know what it was. Right. Getting back to that original source material, educate the public and the masses to the extent we could about what it looked like giving someone a visual reference for ecosystems that are nearly extinct. So we really were heavily research based and sort of into the documentation up until now, and we still are. That's one big branch of what we do as an organization. And then the other thing that we've grown into really in the past three to four years is the restoration. It's like, what do we do about it? You know, so we have these remnant grasslands or we have these areas that a private landowner wants to restore or the National Park Service wants to restore. We've been rapidly building our team up until the big freeze, I have to say, we've been rapidly building our team up and we were just poised to really begin to do some really impactful on the ground habitat restoration work. Those are the two equal halves of our organization. And yeah, I'm excited by, you know, one is I listened to the audible version of the Long Hunter book that you.

[Stephen Rinella]

The only version there is.

[Dwayne Estes]

I love it, man. You know, I love the complementarity. Is that a word between your and Clay's Southern accent?

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. I thought that played off real well together, man.

[Stephen Rinella]

But like one of these guys is obviously, you know, man of the people.

[Dwayne Estes]

But. But I love the book and you know, what I found is that you found. You talk about the paucity of those records. You found some of them, you found some of the few. You know, like you mentioned the Casper, Mansker and the Bledsoe. I always forget if it's Isaac or Anthony. You know, they were brothers. Two.

[Corinne]

Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, yeah. And I can't remember which one was with Mansker when they encountered the lick in what is modern day Sumner County, Tennessee. And you know, the first time they came, as you. You alluded to in your book, they were on horseback and they shot a deer. It was in the middle of this giant herd of bison, right? And they couldn't get off their, their horses for fear of being trampled to death. But as long as they stayed on their horses, they were good. You know, there were hundreds, possibly, you know, a few thousand buffalo in. Into that particular lick that they were in. And you found that reference to that. There's a couple more to that exact Same. Same place, though that has always stuck with me. For example, when they came back the following year, and I think you may have referenced this, too, all those bison had been exterminated, but French. Yeah, the French hunters, like Timothy de Monbryen and his cronies were all kind of hunting around in that area. So you've stumbled upon one of the very few references to what I would say is a reference that alludes to the savannas around the Nashville area. Some regions, you know, have really well documented grasslands, like the Black Belt Prairie region of Mississippi and Alabama. It goes all the way back to, like, 1701, you know, when that was French territory. You had French generals and stuff. Like, they were based in New Orleans. They and their armies were crisscrossing northern Mississippi. Those are all recorded in the French archives. And I've got a colleague, Dr. John Barone, who's published and pulled that stuff out. But part of the challenge of the south and the east in general is that many of these areas were settled so rapidly and hectically and chaotically that the original landscape, we always say they were gone before the camera was invented. They were gone before people who could write about them visited. In some cases, they were transformed before they could be recorded. And oftentimes they were gone before the first artist came through, you know, so the record has to be sort of pieced back together, like Humpty Dumpty. And that's one of the things that we're actively doing, is piecing back where they were, what they look like. One of our great friends, and you got to have him on your show. He's amazing. He's. He's the best oil painter you'll ever meet.

[Stephen Rinella]

And careful now, because my wife's taking oil.

[Dwayne Estes]

But he goes back and he tours. Like when William Bartram was an explorer in the south in the 1770s. He goes back to where William Bartram was in Montgomery, Alabama. And he uses Bartram's words and his ability to look at the modern landscape to put back the scene that Bartram would have seen. And it's a vast prairie that looks like the Flint Hills of East Kansas.

[Randall]

You were talking about bison. Do you guys suspect that they played a role in maintaining these. These grasslands?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Now, bison in the east, as you guys, I'm sure know, is very complicated. You know, I've read Ted Balloo's book. I love it. It's one of my favorite of all.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's great. This whole thing is a great story.

[Dwayne Estes]

Got it in my backpack, but. But you Know, there's some. There's some new evidence emerging on bison in the East. There's some archeology and paleo paleontology work that's been done. You know, we thought that bison had kind of reemerged in the south in, like, the middle 1500s, early 1500s, after the depopulation of Native Americans from some of the different pandemic diseases that they came back in from the Great Plains. I think that the supporting evidence suggests that is true. Right. But if you'd asked most people, okay, so bison came back into the south because, you know, they were definitely here in the. In the south in Ice Age times, we had multiple species of bison, but most people kind of considered that in states like North Carolina, Georgia, you know, Tennessee, that bison had essentially been gone for, you know, since 15,000 years ago, up until about the year 1550 or so. And so then you get into saying, well, wait a minute, does that mean there were no big animals grazing southern grasslands 3,000 years ago, 5,000, 9,000 years ago? That was kind of the. I think, the consensus. But this.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can I wedge in if you.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, wedge in, please.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, I just want some of the things people have looked at describing that, that I've read about is like, that the Spanish and the French would come through places in the early 1600s, and they describe everything right down to possums. No mention of buffalo.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

You go to the effigy mounds, like the Mound Builders, the Mississippian cultures along the Ohio, Mississippi River. They carve and have things every snake, turtle, deer, bear. They don't have buffalo effigies. And I think that that, like, that kind. When we're talking about evidence, like that kind of evidence, it's almost like a omission. I'm gonna try. Like, omission equals absence. I'm familiar with that kind of evidence. Like, well, if they were there, they would have talked about them, so they must not have been there. I've encountered a lot of that logic. Right.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. And I think that's generally. It seems like there's wide agreement that there generally were few to no bison in the east and Southeast before the early 1500s. You know, when you get to the French explorers of the 1680s through, you know, the 1720s, ample. Ample discussion of bison. Just. Just. It's. It's everywhere. You know, when you get to the 1760s and 1770s, everybody who goes out is talking about bison in every valley in West Virginia and every big, you know, whatever.

[Stephen Rinella]

Isn't that crazy?

[Dwayne Estes]

It's crazy. You know, but and so many place names, too. But here's the challenge. We thought they essentially had disappeared at the end of the Ice Age. But I think his name is Dr. Gary Moore. He's an archaeologist from East Carolina State University. Was doing some work at a archaeological site in the piedmont of South Carolina. And using a technique where they looked at these spear points, these stone projectile tools, right. They were able to go into, you know, you guys have seen those flint knappers, right? And you're sitting there making it. Making a project.

[Stephen Rinella]

You sat in that chair. You're in.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. There you go. Well, those, those stone tools have little micro fractures in them that through capillary action, you know, draws in blood and other types of material when you. When you kill an animal. And what Dr. Moore's work is shown is that they can actually extract not the DNA, but they can extract the protein residues of animals that were killed with these stone tools.

[Stephen Rinella]

Is that reliable?

[Dwayne Estes]

Well, I know I keep hearing.

[Stephen Rinella]

Cause I keep being like, really?

[Dwayne Estes]

I've heard mixed opinions on it too. But if it's true, let's just say if it is, and, you know, it's gone through peer review, publication and that kind of stuff. But what his work shows is that there's a continuous record of bison in South Carolina from the late Ice age. So probably 15,000 years ago all the way up until 7,000 years ago.

[Stephen Rinella]

Hmm.

[Dwayne Estes]

So that's a totally different story. If you got bison in South Carolina at 7,000 years ago, you probably had them in Tennessee, Kentucky, you may have had them even farther, you know, to the west and south. So then that means that the window without bison is actually much narrower than we suspect.

[Stephen Rinella]

I got you.

[Dwayne Estes]

So it's that kind of. That kind of emerging evidence which adds to and somewhat, you know, clouds the. The whole picture of southeastern grassland ecosystems.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can you speak to the impact of Native American burning like this. This was. I can't remember what year it was, but this became a very fashionable idea, that open country, that all this open lands was a result of slash and burn agriculture. Or there are accounts, I believe there's French accounts, where they were using fire and game drives. Yeah, I mean, they would encircle big areas, get some hunters staked up and just burned a place to push out deer. And so for a while, it seemed like everybody was really hip on this idea that all that open country was. Was that was anthropogenic and not natural, you know, like, like not whatever the hell the opposite anthropogenic is.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, I think. I think I'm reading The book Forgotten Fires right now. Right. And they talk about, you know, it's written by an anthropologist, so it relies heavily on that perspective in sort of the science of anthropology. There's no question when you go back into the earliest 1700s and 1600s and maybe slightly beyond that, there are just ample documentary evidences and observations of Native Americans burning the landscape for, you know, setting large, you know, circular fires on the land. And that's really well documented. I think, though, there's a slippery slope and it's just too far to go. It's too big of an extrapolation to say with surety that Native Americans created open ecosystems of the South. And I think what that does is it makes a bunch of assumptions one of the ways, I think. And my colleague, who's our Chief Science Advisor, Dr. Reid Nosson, he wrote a book in 2013 called Forgotten Grasslands of the South. And it really was a game changer in terms of messaging around southern ecosystems. There's one very clear line of evidence as to why it doesn't make sense that Native Americans created these landscapes. They probably moved into them and found them already largely open. They may have expanded some of the smaller ones to make them larger, but the clear line of evidence that they did not create most of them is in the presence of endemic species. When you have plants and animals that have, through the process of evolution, it just takes time. Most of the species that evolve on this planet, they require tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Some of them require millions of years to evolve. If we have conclusively had people in the south for, say, 13, 14,000 years, most of these modern species likely originated prior to the arrival of man into the southeastern United States. Grassland species, they're grassland obligate species. That's the biggest testament to that longevity factor. Now here's the other one. Very rich fossil evidence for grasslands and grassland endemic species in the South. And so if you know, you say, okay, well, what if it's true that Native Americans came into and created these? Again, I am not in any way trying to take away the importance of indigenous management. I think that is a exceptionally important component to this. But you can go back to the fossil record in Florida and east Tennessee and various places and find a rich wealth of some of the biggest grassland dependent megafauna and carnivores you can imagine. There's a recent discovery of the American cheetah in the, in the Appalachians of southwest Virginia.

[Stephen Rinella]

Seriously?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, no joke. Yeah.

[Randall]

I was reading there was caribou in Alabama, Georgia.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, yeah. You Know big longhorn bison. And by the way, that. That cheetah was found within the county adjacent to Cumberland Gap.

[Stephen Rinella]

No kidding.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. I know, you know, I know you love Cumberland Gap.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh.

[Dwayne Estes]

So there's a, there's a wealth. I mean, the endemic species alone, man, that is the biggest piece of evidence.

[Stephen Rinella]

I remember when I was a little kid, man. Do you remember what. Do you guys remember what the. I don't know if it's still around the Epcot Center. What the hell was that? Oh, yeah, like Disneyland.

[Corinne]

Very much still.

[Stephen Rinella]

Hop in here.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Randall]

Isn't it the giant time for me?

[Dwayne Estes]

I'll. I love Epcot.

[Corinne]

It's a big glass. It's like a big glass.

[Randall]

It's like a giant golf ball.

[Corinne]

Fill us in. I went there, fill us in.

[Stephen Rinella]

When I was just a youngster, I went down. I remember my. We went down there to. We fished. We watched them shoot a space shuttle off and we went to the Epcot center and they did this thing where you were like cruising at very low altitude. Like, it's like a planetarium experience where it's like you're cruising very fast at very low altitude over the country. I know there's like some budget problems. Has. Have you guys tried, like any kind of wide scale visual representation of, of what a flyover, like, you know, I mean, like what a flyover of the area you mapped out looked like in 1492.

[Dwayne Estes]

That sounds like a good collaboration with Meat Eater, if you want me to tell you about it. But no. What, what we have, what we have embarked on is the creation of a web platform we call Grasslandia. It sounds kind of fanciful, right? Come with me to the Grasslandia, the world of Grasslandia. And no, I think that needs to happen. We need to have that sort of visual flyover reenactment so people could see it, because nobody can see it and understand it today. And if you can't see it, you can't visualize it. Or the largest remnant you have left is the footprint of this building, you know, or a quarter of an acre. How are you going to inspire people to go back in and care about those landscapes and rebuild them and reconstruct them so we can prevent the continued collapse of our wildlife and biodiversity, which is all around us.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. Tell us about some of those patches you found. Yeah, well, like native patches of like.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Historic grassland and how small they are.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, well, the. Probably the best patch that we have left in Tennessee, where I'm from, is called May Prairie. And you Know, the story is back in the 60s, a couple professors from the University of Tennessee were sitting in a cafe across the street on Highway 41, you know, which like goes from Chicago to Florida. And they're sitting at this restaurant, it's called the Prairie Cafe. And they look over to the lady and said, miss, ma'am, why is this called the Prairie Cafe? She said, you see that line of trees over there across the highway? Well, look through there. You see how it kind of looks open and sunny? There's a prairie in there. And these were two botanists, right? Like I am. So they get. They finish up their meal and they go out across the road to walk in and they find May Prairie, which is 11 acres. And it still to this day is 11 acres. May Prairie is the most biodiverse single 11 acres in the eastern interior United States.

[Stephen Rinella]

No way.

[Dwayne Estes]

Really? Kid you not so crazy. Totally separate side story. In 2008, I was part of the Natural Areas conference that came to Tennessee. It was in Nashville. And they asked me, said, will you lead a grass identification hike down to May Prairie for the conference? I said, sure, I will. I go down there and I'm walking through this prairie, It's October of 2008, and I see this plant and I look down and I said, man, this is weird. This is the type of little member of the sunflower family. I said, this is not anything currently known from Tennessee. And a buddy of mine says, how do you know? I said, just trust me. I know. I know the floor of Tennessee. There's nothing else like it. I don't know what it is. So I get back and later, that email. I sent an email to the national, the international expert on that particular group of plants who happened to be in Waterloo, Canada. And he wrote back and he said, congratulations, you have discovered a completely new species. And not only did it prove to be new, but it's endemic to that single prairie and nowhere else on earth.

[Stephen Rinella]

You're kidding me.

[Corinne]

Did you get to name it?

[Dwayne Estes]

He actually named it for me.

[Randall]

So by noon he named it for you.

[Stephen Rinella]

I thought you couldn't do that anymore.

[Dwayne Estes]

No, I can't name it for myself.

[Randall]

So by new, it was actually old? Like, is that what you're saying? Like it was endemic to probably all.

[Stephen Rinella]

Over the damn place once upon a time.

[Dwayne Estes]

Endemic in the sense that it probably was more widely distributed because that area had about a million acres of grassland. Historically, that's one of the last fragments left, but yeah, and old in the sense it probably took tens of thousands of years to Evolve as a species.

[Stephen Rinella]

Right.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. The name is Symphyotricum estesia. Not the sexiest name around.

[Randall]

Like, we've got prairie out here and it's, it's, you know, obviously it's diverse and there's different kind of plants and animals and stuff. But, like, what would like a. A patch of that prairie that size of this table look like that? You're talking like, is it a bunch of different flowers and plants and grass and.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, I mean, it's going to look like your tall grass prairie in like parts of Missouri or Iowa. Very similar. It's just oftentimes it is going to have a bit more tree cover. You know, it's gonna.

[Randall]

What would those be? Conifers or hardwoods or both.

[Dwayne Estes]

Mostly hardwoods. So, like in, in lots of the Upper south, you'll have post oak, blackjack oak, those those. Or bur oak, those. In my, you know, my way of thinking, especially for our region, are essentially grassland trees, which is kind of a weird concept for people. Like, blackjack oak won't even reproduce anymore. Like, its acorns just never germinate. Because most blackjack oaks today are shrouded in forest that is unnaturally forested, where the forest is overtaken grassland. So you've got an oak that essentially can no longer germinate and reproduce itself.

[Stephen Rinella]

Like he's dropping his acorn in a place that.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Or, excuse me, his acorn.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's right.

[Stephen Rinella]

In a place where it doesn't do any good.

[Dwayne Estes]

And he's on his way out. You know, in another generation or two, those oaks will die and they will never replace themselves without things like fire and buffalo and those kinds of things. But. But, you know. Yeah, visually very similar to what you'd see with the eastern tall grass prairie. That's essentially what ours were. They were sort of eastern outliers of. But they were very different in terms of the plants. They had their own species, their own composition. They were unique. And now they're mostly gone.

[Stephen Rinella]

What's it look like subsurface in that May prairie?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, that particular prairie does have, you know, it's, it's an intact system. So it's, it's. The underground is intact too, and it's prairie soils and stuff. But that's. That's a big misnomer, big misconception a lot of people have is that prairie is always associated with a given soil type. You know, in the Midwest, a lot of your prairies are these black prairie soils they call molasols. But in the south, we get prairies on every soil type imaginable, you know, so that really doesn't hold much water for us with. With the actual soil type.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. What is the history of how that may prairie, how did it stay intact just because something didn't happen?

[Dwayne Estes]

Well, that's the sort of the case that we see with a lot of our eastern grasslands is the thing that caused them to survive 400 years of, you know, Euro American settlement was oftentimes they're too wet or too rocky or maybe they're on a natural edge. So in this case, it has. It's a. We'll call hard pan prairie. So if you dig down about a foot, it actually has a clay hard pan that restricts tree growth and actually favors grasses and wildflowers and those kind of things. So it's naturally predisposed to being. Being grassy, but it's also really, really wet in the wintertime. You can't really develop there. It's not a good. Good for cropping. Soils are highly acidic. So that's one of the reasons why it's kind of, you know, persisted to the modern day. But a lot of these other sites, you know, if they're rocky, that will preclude development or if they're in a. Like a power line corridor. We see a lot of our best grasslands in power lines and on roadsides.

[Stephen Rinella]

Really?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, but strangely, you know, or not strangely, I guess, but. But especially in the past 25 years, those are the hardest hit, you know, from the usage of herbicides to kind of manage those environments. So they were the last to remain, and now they're the sort of. The. Those little last scraps are being devastated and. And those remnants are key to rebuilding efforts. You know, if you want to rebuild prairie, if you want to rebuild savannas, it's important to know where those remnants are.

[Stephen Rinella]

If. Can those remnants, if you rate the right conditions, do those remnants want to grow or do they want to shrink based on what's on the edge of them?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, they do not grow. They don't have a natural predisposition to being able to move easily as a. As a vegetation type.

[Stephen Rinella]

So it's not like a BlackBerry patch.

[Dwayne Estes]

No, no. In fact, that. That's one of the things that's really hard for a lot of people to understand. You know, in the wildlife biology arena, the term early successional habitat is. Is like rampant, right? That's actually one of the terms that's least helpful to us because I think people have always looked at grasslands as early successional habitat. That's true of some types. But what we're talking about are grasslands in some cases that have survived hundreds or thousands of years. They are old growth ecosystems. So, you know, a lot of effort to recognize old growth forests, almost no effort to recognize old growth grasslands. That's what may prairie is. And if people could visualize them like that, I think that would maybe add to the appreciation that people have for them. But it's really hard for people to get by seeing just a grassy patch or just an old field. It's hard to. It's not like an old growth forest where it's immediately clear to all why it's old growth.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, go ahead.

[Randall]

What is. I mean, you're probably going to get to this. But what, what would restoration look like? Is it cutting down trees and replanting stuff or is it because you said it won't grow on its own? Right. So you've got to step in at some point.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's first important to kind of understand what type of grassland you're dealing with. Right. So like in our work for this entire southeastern geography, we've identified 118 major types of grasslands. Grasslands, those can be further subdivided into probably 600 types. So you're dealing with a vast number. First of all, you know, Coastal dune grasslands vs. Lonely pine savannah grasslands vs. Tall grass prairie type grasslands vs. A meadow in West Virginia. They all are going to require different starting points for healing and restoring and rebuilding those landscapes. That's kind of the first thing. So, you know, if we go into, let's say, an area that used to be prairie in central Kentucky, we first want to know, is there any remnant potential left? Most times it's no it. We have a landowner says, yeah, I want to build prairie out here. Tell me if it's a good site. You know, we don't want to necessarily rebuild a prairie that naturally should be in a forested landscape. Yeah, you're fighting a losing battle there. So we try to use our knowledge of the local history, we try to use our knowledge of biodiversity to, you know, constructively and very thoughtfully suggest what should be there to begin with. That's all based in science.

[Stephen Rinella]

Real quick, let's say you had a. This hypothetical landowner.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

In central Kentucky on what you. Let's say we're in a spot where, you know, categorically like, you know, that this was prairie. Is it possible that a guy comes forward and he's got 1,000 acres and you go look and there's none?

[Dwayne Estes]

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. It's just Gone.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. We're working on a 5,000 acre farm right now just south of the Kentucky line. It was founded by George Washington's cousin, and it was the second largest tobacco plantation on Earth in the decades before the Civil War. There's nothing left. There's no prairie.

[Stephen Rinella]

There are bison and you know that it was prairie. Now there's none, right?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. And there's none left. And so, you know, the three states essentially you can think of is that those areas with really fertile, agriculturally productive soils, in all cases in the east, all of them have been decimated by 99.99%. That's not hyperbole. That's demonstrated loss. The second group is what were formerly, like, less fertile, but they were meadowlands. Shenandoah Valley of Northern Virginia comes to mind. The New river settlements that I know you and I have read a lot about the New River Valley. All these areas, they were really fertile, but not like, good for planting crops. They were fertile for grazing lands. Well, those got overgrazed in the early periods of American history. Then they got improved by planting tall fescue and, you know, Scottish grass and all these other kinds of invasive species. And today they're like 99.99% pasture lands dominated by Eurasian grasses. And then the third category, like, you're more rolling, sandy, sort of rocky grasslands with trees. Those are savannas. Those really depended on fire. You know, places like Tall Timbers in South Georgia, for example, you take fire out of the equation, you take big animals out of the equation, those grow up and become forest.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Dwayne Estes]

So the, you know, vast swaths of our public lands today in the south piney woods of East Texas, big game lands in Central Virginia in the Piedmont, big lands in the Florida Panhandle that are today densely, densely forested and dry. Used to be open savannas.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Dwayne Estes]

And we've lost it. But that's the. Actually the greatest potential for recovery. And so, you know, back to your question, Brody's, how do you. How do you rebuild these? Well, again, starting. Starting with knowing what they were. But, you know, what you do to recover a savannah is very different what you do to plant a prairie. So savannas are probably the trickiest. They're the easiest to restore. You have the most potential right now as a nation to restore millions of acres of savannah that are just suppressed under artificially forested conditions. It's not going to be popular because you're going to have to cut trees.

[Randall]

That's what I was kind of getting at. People don't like that.

[Dwayne Estes]

And unfortunately, the Biggest.

[Stephen Rinella]

It comes from a good place.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

It comes from reading low racks and all that. Like it comes from a good.

[Corinne]

Well, to circle back to the earlier point, I mean when I growing up, when if someone said they're going to restore something, I thought, oh, you're going to plant trees there just more trees is restoration.

[Stephen Rinella]

I found myself trying to explain to someone the other day that we're talking about conservation and I was talking about it's so region specific, like what that means. And I'm saying that there's a perception among the general populace of well meaning people that conservation means not doing anything.

[Corinne]

Yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

And I was trying to explain the concept of active land management that if not doing anything doesn't give you what in some places not doing anything doesn't deliver what you want.

[Dwayne Estes]

Oh, absolutely. And in the case of grasslands, which they either require most grasslands, not all, but most require either some combination of big animals, bison, elk, especially fire, again, not all types. The bluegrass of Savannah was. The bluegrass of Kentucky, for example, was probably a bison elk dependent ecosystem, not a fire dependent ecosystem.

[Stephen Rinella]

Is that right?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. But you take those two combinations, it factors out and you then interject conversion to cropland or overgrazing. That's how you lose what we had. But if they're done well, they almost always require people to be involved in the process. I think that's part of the success story is the people who love land and conservation and hunting. There's a great opportunity and it's enjoyable. I mean I think about the farms that we work with, one of the best is this 11,000 acre farm in Alabama. This farm's nine miles wide. And this family, it's been in their farm since 1918. They've never needed the federal government or the state government or anybody to tell them what to do with it. And they just, they've managed it perfectly in 100 years. And it's like stepping back into a time capsule to about the 18 teens in west central Alabama. It's amazing.

[Randall]

You mentioned herbicides having a big impact on killing all this stuff. In order to combat all those Eurasian invasive grass species, do you have to whatever, hold hands with the devil and use that stuff also?

[Dwayne Estes]

Absolutely. Yeah. And boy, that's a big hot button issue for us because you know, right now the, the technology and the know how to take something from a field of Johnson grass, which is this nasty invasive from, from Africa. For us to, to do something better than Johnson grass, we have to nuke it.

[Randall]

Yep.

[Dwayne Estes]

Like six times. You know, and we don't Want to do that. But guess what? Once we take care of the johnsongrass problem, like we're doing a project right now with Google and you know, we are treating a site and preparing it, but once we get it planted with the most diverse species mix that's ever been planted in central Tennessee, you know, except for coming back in and just with our volunteers and spot treating, a couple of problem areas will never again have to use that stuff there. And you know, we got American bumblebees coming back, we got grasshopper sparrows, got northern harriers, we got otters coming in from the creek bank. So hopefully, yeah, that's a big problem here. I mean, I have some really high profile clients that say, no, this is a certified organic farm and we don't want to give up on doing it organically. It's just really right now very challenging to do it at scale. You could do it at one to two acres, but, but the how are you going to do it at 100 acres, you know, or even 10 acres is very challenging right now.

[Corinne]

That's got to take a lot because.

[Dwayne Estes]

You'Re throwing off the balance in the soil as well. So you probably need a. Yeah, a lot of layers deep. It's very complicated. I mean, we've had to turn around, turn away some, you know, high profile clients that said, hey, this is, this is a certified organic farm. You won't be using that stuff on my place.

[Stephen Rinella]

And there's just nothing you can do then.

[Dwayne Estes]

No. And then they actually did plant before we came in. They tried to plant and it fails. Because if you don't take care of the invasives, all it takes is about three years to get on top of it. I know that's a lot, but if you can, if you can manage the invasives well for three years to make sure that you are planting into something that is very, you know, receptible to all these species of grasses and wildflowers that you need for healthy wildlife habitat. It's just a three year quick sacrifice.

[Randall]

And once it's established, it can kind of hold that stuff at bay.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, it can now, it may, depending on the severity, infestation. You know, again, what we're trying to do is build a team of young men and women who come in and we stay on top of it. Right. And that's the thing, is that you can't just build a prairie and walk away. That's one of the reasons why it's exceptionally hard to get a lot of people on board with this idea of eastern grasslands is because it does require perpetual management.

[Stephen Rinella]

How many years of management? Or do you mean perpetual?

[Dwayne Estes]

Perpetual, Yeah, I think perpetual, you know, and you know, it's going to need, most of them are going to need fire, you know, some of them would benefit from grazing, you know. So where we have the greatest success is working on, you know, nothing's guaranteed. But we're right now we're having the greatest successes, probably some of the private lands where people are still young and active and they're like, my kids are into this and it's all hands on deck otherwise. It takes a fairly steep monetary investment to get into some of this. And right now we're trying to, what we're trying to basically inform the American public on is that we can't afford not to because so much of our eastern biodiversity, northern bobwhite, countless songbirds, pollinators, you know, they're in freefall collapse in the eastern part of the United States, we would argue largely in part because we're not doing what we need for our habitat.

[Stephen Rinella]

Do you think that's what, that's what is ultimately has happened to the bobwhite quail?

[Dwayne Estes]

A thousand percent, yeah. And I, you know, I enjoy the episode that you guys had on quail recently. Not everyone did well, you know, I enjoyed it but. And I learned a lot about our parasites, you know, but, but I was thinking the time, the whole time I watched it. Well, when you take an ecosystem or a collection of open, brushy, grassy ecosystems that offered quail everything they needed and then you take away 95% of that, what the hell do you expect? What do you expect? And even, even I'm not even just talking about pre settlement landscapes. As a boy growing up in southern middle Tennessee in the 80s and 90s, every hillside for miles around was just broom sedge fields, you know, golden broom sedge, Andropogon virginicus, standing through the winter.

[Stephen Rinella]

What is that?

[Dwayne Estes]

It's a type of bluestem, native bluestem grass. It's shit for forage, so farmers don't really like it.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Dwayne Estes]

And it's often a sign of beat up pastures and stuff. But you know what? Quail, quail loved it. And we had BlackBerry patches everywhere. I mean, this is, this is not your ideal pristine, high quality habitat. It was a very much an agricultural beat up, brushy pasture land on somewhat poor farms that I grew up on. But the thing is, it was everywhere. And, but then by the latest 90s, everybody, everybody and their mama started mowing religiously and roadsides started getting sprayed and fence Rows started getting taken out. And I think what, what we hear a lot of times is I've heard some, some colleagues push back and say, well, yeah, but you know, quail, they really made a big spike in, in this sort of era of land disturbance and clearance and this agricultural revolution. I think that most people saying that don't really have a grasp on what we just lost. They're working from this 1950s mindset that it was all eastern citrus forest.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

They got opened up into brushy, scrubby, great quail habitat. They're not even stopping to consider the 3.7 million acres of prairie lost from central Kentucky. The barrens, the big barrens as it was called that today less than 100th of a percent remains.

[Stephen Rinella]

And that was quail country.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's quail country. Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

You know what's kind of funny is my buddy Kevin Murphy, I was down hunting with him in Kentucky where's he's not, is he? Paducah? Yeah, I think it's Paduka. Anyways, he gets permission on a Amish farm, gets real excited because that's where the game's at. And he was right. Only quail I ever seen walking around the Kevin Murphy. They grew up on quail. The only quail I've ever seen walk around with Kevin Murphy. One day he got permission on an Amish farm. And I'm like, why is that just different? He's like different practices.

[Dwayne Estes]

Fence.

[Stephen Rinella]

The fence rows. Right. But again, highly disturbed, Highly disturbed landscape. But he had, he had said a couple things. Hell on predators, not cutting fence rows.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Dirtier areas meaning like, you know, like big areas, full old equipment that kind of grew up in cover. So you start to associate quail today. You associate quail with man made ecosystems that somehow give them what they need. But then you got to try to remember that. But that's not what they came from. They use it as refugia. But it wasn't like the main thing.

[Corinne]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

The main thing was like grasslands.

[Corinne]

Otherwise white tailed deer, you just think they came from tracked homes in suburbia. Right, exactly right.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. Like you drive around.

[Randall]

Exactly what they need.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. You see a big bucket.

[Corinne]

What did they do before all this?

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. What they do before that neighborhood? Well, you know that big buck live.

[Dwayne Estes]

And in the archeological record we've got, you know, we've got records of quail going back, you know, 10,000 years ago in north Alabama. There's a cave called Dust Cave near Florence, Alabama. And Dust Cave is one of these sites where these academics that study These sites basically detailed all that the Native Americans were utilizing from the landscape that they could find in the remains of those cave sediments. Right. They put together like a list of 100 animal species. It's crazy. At least dozens. Every kind of duck and waterfowl and thing you could imagine being in the backwaters of the Tennessee river. They were utilizing it. Every kind of turtle, every kind of major fish species. They had fragments of it. Rattlesnakes, boom, they got it. But they also had quail and greater prairie chickens, you know, and we see greater prairie chickens, which is often thought of as this classic sort of midwestern species. But you know, John James Audubon, when he painted in his original paintings of the species, Hardin County, Kentucky, you know, just south of Louisville.

[Stephen Rinella]

Greater prairie chickens.

[Dwayne Estes]

Greater prairie chickens. And before we end today, and I hope it's not right now, but when it is, I need to tell you one of my favorite quotes. I'll tell you right now.

[Stephen Rinella]

Tell me.

[Dwayne Estes]

I need you guys close your eyes.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Dwayne Estes]

We're going to do a little prayer preaching right here. Okay.

[Stephen Rinella]

Bower my eyes. Just laugh. Okay, I'm ready.

[Dwayne Estes]

We're going to ask Wanda to come up and play on the organ. We're going to have an altar call. Phil, where's the music drop? It would be difficult to imagine anything more beautiful. For as far as the eye could reach, they seemed one vast deep green meadow adorned with countless numbers. Bright flowers springing up in all directions. Only a solitary tree now and then, a scattered post oak were to be seen. It was here where the wild strawberries grew in such profusion as to stain the horses hooves a deep red color. It was here that I afterwards met with the prairie bird or the barren hen as we called it, which I afterward met with in such vast numbers on the great prairies of illinois. Reuben Ross, 1812.

[Stephen Rinella]

Amen.

[Corinne]

Hallelujah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Where was he?

[Dwayne Estes]

This is right on the Kentucky Tennessee line. Just about an hour southwest of Bowling Green, near, well, my town, Clarksville, Tennessee, where we're, where we're based.

[Stephen Rinella]

That'd be a sweet deer hunting permission.

[Randall]

Strawberries got me excited.

[Dwayne Estes]

Strawberries. And I butchered that quote a little bit. The strawberries actually come at the end.

[Stephen Rinella]

But you know, if you, you use a term earlier. Tertiary. What's that mean? Tertiary forest?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, it's like the, the third, you know, it's, you know, secondary tertiary quaternary.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. I've been so much more familiar with the west and my adult life. But like, let's say you have a. Let's say you go 20 miles from here in the mountains, okay, and something burns. I mean it burns down to the rocks, let's say like that kind of fire, right? It's like dirt and rocks are done. It's hard to picture, but I would say to my kids, like, it'll go through a bunch of steps and if nothing happens from people or whatever, it'll, it's hard to picture. It'll wind up just like it was when it burnt. It'll, you know, a lot of these forests that'll wind up being that it winds up being like it'll be big lodge poles and it'll be those little knick knick berries growing on the ground or whatever, you know, I mean, it'll like find its way back to that. Is that not. Does that wind up not being true in the east because of non native plants? Meaning if you had gone and 1400 and you would put roundup on a patch of this prairie, you put round up on it till it put round up on it till it put round up on it till it and just till it's good and dead and left by 1500, whatever the hell, it probably would have been back to being. Right.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, yeah. What you're describing, it would have been.

[Stephen Rinella]

Back to being prairie.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, I mean, well, there's a couple things there. One is you're describing that pioneer process, right? That's primary succession. So when you take something back to, you know, just bare subsoil, right? The things that are first going to colonize that are the weeds, you know, so broom sedge, which I mentioned earlier, is a type of native grass, but it's a weedy native grass. It has a very low what we call conservatism value. It's like a 1 or a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, something that's a 1, 2, 3 can just move right on in. It tends to persist for a little while as other things then invade and stabilize that ecosystem over time. And some natural communities are really adapted to long term stability, you know, like meaning, like not just complete disruption. You know, prairies are pretty stable, you know, but then, but most of your native prairie grasses are not pioneer species. That's why I don't call them early successional. You know, you go open up a new cornfield, you let it go fallow and let's say you got a prairie next to it, you can hope and wish all damn day, but those prairie species are not going to move into your cornfield. Yeah, they don't do that. They don't behave that way. It takes a long time for these natural communities to assemble, what's called assembly time. And in the case of Dr. Joseph Veldman at Texas A and M has published a paper a few years ago, 2015 or so, that talked about old growth grasslands. They require thousands of years to assemble. That's got it, man. Nobody's thinking about that stuff.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, that's the term you're using is helpful, assemble.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Because it's not like how you're going to have fireweed, but then all of a sudden immediately you're going to have all these little lodgepole pine things and then pretty soon lodgepole pine is going to win out.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

And you're talking about two things coming together.

[Dwayne Estes]

Right.

[Stephen Rinella]

Which would be like dwarf whortleberry, lodgepole pine, whatever. Two things you're talking about. How do you get these perhaps dozens.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, well and you also were asking about invasive species. Yeah. Now that's the factor that gets in the way. Right. You've got a site that is going through this early phase of disturbance. Invasives are going to move in and sort of suspend that natural successional pathway. And that complicates things for us out there in the, in the habitat restoration world big time. You know, but you're always going to have weeds, you know where, where you would have had this weedy flora in the east, let's say 3,000 years ago, would have been around a Mississippian. Well, probably a thousand years ago, Mississippian, Native American village, you know, a lot of corn fields and stuff where they were disturbing. You would have expected native weeds to be all in and around their settlements.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Dwayne Estes]

Or you had a bison wallow. You know, 300 years ago the weeds would have been around that bison wallow. But your more ecosystems that are not, especially when it comes to soil disturbance, that's the big thing that they like the weeds like. But your other forms of disturbance, like you know, grazing pressure or fire, they don't, they don't have the same kind of detrimental resetting effect that like plow until and wallowing have.

[Randall]

Is there like in your eyes, is there an acceptable like approximation of the original as far as restoration? You're like where it's like that's good question. Not perfect, but it's close enough that like it's pretty damn good.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. What we do is we look to remnants where they exist. You know I mentioned Long island earlier, right. There was 60,000 acres of prairie up until about 1905, 1910, that prairie lasted longer than the prairies near my home at 4 Campbell Army Base or in middle Tennessee, Kentucky.

[Stephen Rinella]

Did they have that moor hen out.

[Dwayne Estes]

There where they had the. What they call the heathen? You're right. And it went extinct a decade or two later. But today, out of that former 60,000 acre landscape, there's only 24 acres left adjacent to Nassau Community College.

[Stephen Rinella]

What?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. So if you want to rebuild a grassland on Long island one, you gotta. Where are you gonna do it?

[Randall]

Right.

[Dwayne Estes]

But then you could go look at that last surviving remnant, harvest the seeds from it, learn how to then structurally attempt to rebuild it across the road. That's the approach we're using all across our region now. We go look at the last surviving remnants on army bases or someone's private ranch or farm.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

And then those we collect seeds from and we work with seed farmers like Roundstone. Native seed out of Kentucky or native seed out of Pennsylvania. We buy the seed from them and then we rebuild those ecosystems to the very best that we can.

[Stephen Rinella]

And what's like to Brody's point, to put a finer answer on it, like, what is. What's his. Close as we could get to good enough? I think 50%, 60% of the species biodiversity. Like, like, when do you go like, sweet, let's go find a new spot.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's a great question. I think I'll give you just, I'll just give you a real scattershot of what people have been doing.

[Stephen Rinella]

Right.

[Dwayne Estes]

So, you know, in the 90s and 2000s, we have a saying back where I'm from, where native warm season grasses, everybody planted native warm season grasses like 20 years ago, and they would use three species, big bluestem, Indian grass and little bluestem. Sometimes they'd add a fourth switchgrass. That's not cutting it. You're not adding.

[Stephen Rinella]

So three ain't enough.

[Dwayne Estes]

Three ain't enough. You're not adding what we call groceries on the ground. You don't have the seeds, the nectar, the COVID the structural diversity needed to support a diverse array of wildlife, including pollinators and songbirds. You need the whole package. So then about 10 years ago, people were stepping up because a big limitation is where are you going to get the seeds? If you don't have farmers producing seed, you're shit out of luck.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

So, you know, because that little 11.

[Stephen Rinella]

Acre patch isn't going to. Right.

[Dwayne Estes]

And you. Yeah. And you would exhaust those patches too. Right. They need their seeds to rain back down on that site to some extent. So you do need these native seed producers, these private companies mostly to go and buy the seed from. And so 10 years ago, most people were just barely able to get like a mix of like 10, 15, 20 species. And it wasn't really that cost effective to be able to. You couldn't really afford to do a lot more even if they did exist. But in the last 10 years, as five years, those same companies now are offering to 300 species. So what our project with Google when we planted it and 2020, we use 77 species in our mix. That was the most. At that time we just planted a 89 species mix on a private farm in Tennessee. So you know, we're trying to get our mixes up.

[Stephen Rinella]

89.

[Dwayne Estes]

89, yeah. Now that's not for everybody, you know, but I would say you need to be somewhere rich for my blood, but you need to be somewhere in that 20 to 40 range is, is the sweet spot.

[Randall]

Well, let's say someone has a whatever hundred acre farm and They've got a 20 acre pasture that's like ideal for restoring. They restore it, can they then use that as a pasture? Or is it like hands off now because the animals might graze somewhere else and then bring an invasive. Or it just can't handle the.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, you can. It depends on the kind of grassland. Right. Some are really conducive to being great for grazing. You do need to pay attention to like what you put in your forage mix. You know, for example, horses. Horses can't tolerate certain types of grasses that maybe cattle can, for example.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, like you might have a toxic plant.

[Dwayne Estes]

You could have a toxic plant. Or you could have a plant with bristles on the spikelets of the grass that get into the mouth parts. So those are all considerations and we try to be real mindful of those kind of things. But now this same farm is called the Wessington Plantation north of Nashville. You know, we're putting 89 species in that mix, but we're absolutely going to be lightly grazing that. That site's really cool. It's got a two documented buffalo fords just down in the valley. And you can still go and see the impressions where the bison would across the street. Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

[Stephen Rinella]

Hey, I got a tactics question for you. You were talking earlier, used the expression nuke in the ground.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

To get it ready. I appreciate the term.

[Dwayne Estes]

We hate to do it.

[Stephen Rinella]

I'm assuming you're talking about glyphosate.

[Dwayne Estes]

Glyphosate and a few others. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

That winds up. You know, earlier we were talking about political complexities. To return to the beginning of the return to grant political compliance.

[Corinne]

Way back in there.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, I'm not going back in there. Just bringing up like we had a feller sitting in that seat one time that is very adversarial to Roundup. Right. How do you, like, is there another emerging technology that gives you what you need? If the tide against Roundup turns with like the class action lawsuits and stuff, if Roundup becomes like, can't get it.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can't put it on the ground, do you then have to be like, oh, shit, this whole thing's over, or is there. Is there a plan B?

[Dwayne Estes]

Well, yeah, that's a great thing to consider. And it is something we worry about, you know, because right now it's just the knowledge and the, the technology and the cost. Right. Of doing other options. And people could say, well, it's about the cost. No, it's not about the cost. It's about. Some of the top experts that I've been able to talk to on this issue have not found a way to do it above one to two acres at a time. And if we're tackling one or two acres at a time, damn it, we're not doing enough. We have to think about scaling this. And, you know, right now we've got six big anchor grasslands that we're just been funded to begin restoring. And some of these are in very bad shape. They're going to require two full years of getting on top of the weeds so that we can have something better. If we were presented with an option to where you can't use it, it would completely derail conservation efforts for grasslands.

[Stephen Rinella]

Now, Randall, do you remember how many acres of Dan Flores do by hand?

[Corinne]

Oh, I think that was. I think that was 20 or 40 acres.

[Stephen Rinella]

It was like a arid grassland. Okay. But he had, I think he did spotted napweed and leafy spurge years. Any spare moment.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Corinne]

So what is the, what is the current footprint of your organization look like in terms of on the ground, been here, done that, or under, underway?

[Dwayne Estes]

Let me just answer one last thing that Steve brought up, which is we are about to experiment with using a flame scorcher to do probably somewhere between five. It's a propane fuel, flame scorcher. So, you know, hot. And even for those, you know, then that gets into like fuel consumption and carbon emissions kind of territory. Either. Either way you go, you don't have a good approach.

[Stephen Rinella]

Like, you could get that shit so hot that you wind up with the equal.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, you'd have to do it several times. I mean, otherwise you're looking at solarization. You'd have to put black plastic down. Can you imagine trying to cover black plastic on 100 acres? It's not feasible.

[Stephen Rinella]

And everybody's all mad at plastic now.

[Dwayne Estes]

Right. You know, and that's just gonna break down.

[Corinne]

Just can't win these days.

[Stephen Rinella]

Put solar panels, you could, you could.

[Dwayne Estes]

Disc the hell out of it. But that don't work on a slope where you're subject subjected.

[Stephen Rinella]

Then you got the erosion people after.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. And then the last one that comes to mind is you could graze the hell out of it for a long, long time with a bunch of goats.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, that's.

[Dwayne Estes]

But then you, there's all these come with complexity.

[Stephen Rinella]

Sure.

[Dwayne Estes]

The quickest and most efficient is the approach we use. But it does have its, you know, it comes with its drawbacks for sure.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

It's a complicated world.

[Dwayne Estes]

Complicated, yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

The world, it's annoying. This world.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, it's. And around. You asked me what's our footprint? Yeah.

[Corinne]

Like, like how, how many acres are you working on now? How many acres have you worked on? What's, how's the scaling been?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. So the region is 24 states. We're actively working in or contracted before the freeze to work in 17 states. We just this year, with the funding that, the projects that we've already started and what we've been funded to do, we would be able to begin our first 10,000 acres of restoration. So that's a big accomplishment for us because just a year and a half ago we had sort of reached our first thousand acres. I mean, you know, as an organization where you're starting from scratch to build what is now a 50 person team. You know, eight years ago, first no one really knew about southeastern grasslands as a thing.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

So we had to educate why they're here. Then, you know, we had to just build the team organically, you know, administrative assistance, communications team on the ground, representation, fundraising, all that stuff. And it took us a good eight years to reach our first thousand acres.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. But you're, you're using as inspiration 10 acre patches.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's right.

[Corinne]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

When you, when you put it in that, like when you consider that that's makes it more, all the more extraordinary.

[Dwayne Estes]

And it's so, it's so difficult so to go from a thousand acres in 20, 23 to now. 10,000 acres.

[Corinne]

Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

But our ability to do that, you know, is, is currently in limbo with the freeze that we're currently facing. We were super excited at the beginning of this year. We had just Received major funding from a few major federal agencies to begin working on 40 US national parks from Mississippi to Vermont to do a few thousand acres of much needed eastern grasslands focused representation. And I'm talking about some of the most iconic landscapes that we have, like Gettysburg Battlefield. People don't realize that southeast Pennsylvania was home to grasslands before 1720. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Cades Cove, you know, these are places that are really well known. It's Tennessee.

[Stephen Rinella]

These are all Republican states. They might still get it.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, they might get it. You know, they might get it.

[Stephen Rinella]

So Sweden, Pennsylvania is a battleground state. They need to keep them happy. They might send some of that money over there, hopefully assuming they're going to use that money and strategically until like.

[Dwayne Estes]

I'm gonna be positive, I'm gonna hope it's gonna clear up and go through, but I think if it's gotta be nerve wracking. If things don't clear up in a three to four week, five, six week process, we risk losing 90% of our team is there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Seriously?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Randall]

And there's no hope to like working directly with state agencies. There's just not the money out there.

[Dwayne Estes]

We've been cultivating what we've built for eight years. And I had a farmer, I don't wanna say his name or get into his business, but you know, when we got the agreements in place to work with the US National Park Service, you know, and these are mostly funded through the Inflation Reduction act and the Bipartisan infrastructure Bill, you know, those, those took two and a half to three years of discussions to get in place. We signed them all well ahead of the past several months. And those have been all obligated, right? Those are obligated.

[Stephen Rinella]

They've been congressionally approved.

[Dwayne Estes]

All congressionally approved. And so then we spent all of last year staffing up to get ready for that. So we hired almost 25 employees. Endless rounds of going through, searches and interviews, et cetera. We had then build up our partnership base on the East Coast. And so we reached out to a couple private companies and said, do you guys have the capacity to join us with this effort? One major seed producer said, you know, I need about two or three weeks to deliberate as this is a big, big opportunity for our small business. You know, they employ about 40 people. They said, need some time to think about it. They came back two or three weeks later, they said, we're in, we're going to work with you to help make sure you got all the seeds that you need to better restore these lands, restore this wildlife habitat. And when the freeze took effect, it now puts that farmer, that small business, those 40 people employed in that business at risk. My friend had to go out and take a $1 million business loan to be able to have the to staff up and have the capacity needed to meet this federally obligated project. And I'm not trying to bitch about our situation because again, everybody's in the same boat. Yeah, but you said it. When it starts coming back and biting people in the ass who are just everyday Americans trying to have kids and babies and care for their elder aging parents and go out and hunt on some good lands, I don't know, you know, and so as the leader of our organization and the co founder and I'm deeply worried about what the next three weeks. I just talked to a good friend of mine and a philanthropist and an advisor. I mean, I'm looking at the reality of needing to go raise $30 million in six months. I got friends that tell me it's physically impossible. I got this mighty man attitude that says I can do it. I really don't know where to go, but I know I don't want to face the reality of letting my entire team go. And we were, we were standing at the world's highest point three and a half weeks ago. It just feels like we got our damn teeth kicked in.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

And so many of my friends are going through the same situation both sides of the aisle. It's the bipartisan, you know, effort.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yep. That feels pretty America first to me.

[Dwayne Estes]

It does.

[Stephen Rinella]

Getting the grasslands.

[Dwayne Estes]

It does. Yeah. And we're telling talking untold story, brother. Yeah, man, this is America.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, Put that first, is there maga? Make America grassy again, man.

[Dwayne Estes]

I've heard that somebody's mentioned that before.

[Randall]

Is there any way for like if someone own land and they wanted to like try to do some of this on their own, like could they contact you and get advice or is there like a handbook for so to speak for doing this or is it something that needs to be done on such a larger scale that it's not?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, I mean there's definitely lots of people doing it, you know, on their own properties and stuff. I think you guys are going to talk to my good friend Kyle Ibarger coming up in a while, you know, with the Native Habitat Project. You know, Kyle does this kind of work, you know, he came up about five, six years ago, started this kind of work. You know, increasingly we're beginning to see a lot more attention. All we ever wanted was to give Eastern Grasslands an equal seat at the conservation table. I went to a conference recently, and I got right with these people. You ever been right with somebody, Steve?

[Stephen Rinella]

I don't know, man. Better tell me what that means.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's when you start throwing out a couple of by gods. Oh, yeah, he tries. Yeah. So I went in this gathering of about 100 people, and I said, by God, it is past time for y'all to start having a damn conservation conference in the southeastern United States. There better not ever be another conservation conference where grasslands don't get an equal seat at the damn table. I said, you can have forests and you talk about wetlands and you talk about coastal ecosystems, and you talk about climate change. Grasslands harbor half the biodiversity of temperate eastern North America, and their biodiversity is collapsing. You got to do something about it. So I had a by God moment. I do apologize for getting.

[Stephen Rinella]

Did they hear you?

[Dwayne Estes]

Well, I don't know. I think they're hearing. I think we're witnessing the explosion of interest in this topic.

[Stephen Rinella]

It.

[Dwayne Estes]

But we ain't got it far enough yet, Steve.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, I'll tell you, this is. I'm new to the whole conversation. You know what? The whole thing, I even started thinking about it. I would never even become aware of it had I not had such an interest in this particular era. And these early accounts of people rolling into these spots and describing them for the first time. If I hadn't encountered that, I would never even have thought about it. Still telling everybody about the squirrel running from, you know, wherever.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's one of my.

[Stephen Rinella]

To the Mississippi and never hitting the ground.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. The long hunters are one of my gateways into this and. But I do need to apologize. I just committed blasphemy.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, we can beat it out. No, no, I appreciate that people know what was said.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, God darn. Well, not even that.

[Stephen Rinella]

I think you should bleep it out, Phil.

[Dwayne Estes]

All right.

[Stephen Rinella]

Bleep it out.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, BLEEP it out.

[Corinne]

Get that burp I had earlier?

[Stephen Rinella]

No, actually, I'm gonna make that louder. That could be the new BLEEP we use.

[Dwayne Estes]

And my terrible.

[Corinne]

My terrible guess at the BLM's annual budget. I'd like that one stricken from the record as well.

[Stephen Rinella]

Anytime, Randall. Yeah, he has something. Regrettably. He says just put his belch in there. Hey, I keep meaning to ask, what's up with that wedding ring you got on there, huh?

[Dwayne Estes]

Dude, I tell you what, you've been married almost 25 years.

[Stephen Rinella]

What?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, man. Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

You got married at 5 or you're just a.

[Corinne]

You age gracefully.

[Dwayne Estes]

It's probably 22, 23. Yeah, my wife and I've been together since like what, 2002. That's when we got married. Been together since 97. Yeah, long time. First girlfriend ever.

[Stephen Rinella]

Good for you.

[Dwayne Estes]

First girlfriend turned into my wife. Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

You guys got kids?

[Dwayne Estes]

We do got three kids.

[Stephen Rinella]

What's your wife's name?

[Dwayne Estes]

Shauna. I got a 18 year old, 16 year old and a 10 year old named Boone.

[Stephen Rinella]

You guys got right to it.

[Dwayne Estes]

I'm right, bro.

[Stephen Rinella]

See, that was a good move. My buddy Clayton, the same thing. Got right to it young. Yeah, like I keep thinking about, you know, like the kind of being the kind of old dude where you go get your grandkids because your kids don't want to hang out anymore. But I'm so far away from that happening, man. Yeah, like picking up your grandkids, take them turkey hunting.

[Dwayne Estes]

You back? You back. Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

You're right on the cusp.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

[Stephen Rinella]

You still be able to walk around? I'll be rolling up in a wheelchair, if at all. Huh. Give me a piece of marriage advice.

[Dwayne Estes]

Oh, gosh, man. My wife's always right. That's for one. Yeah, and.

[Stephen Rinella]

You'Re not telling me that she is. You're just saying you pretend.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, pretending. I got lucky, man. Man, I got lucky. I'll tell you this, I will say this. All credit to there. You know, there's a reasons why the Southeastern Grasslands Institute exists.

[Stephen Rinella]

Are we off marriage?

[Dwayne Estes]

No, no, no. I was going to say this is going to roll.

[Stephen Rinella]

This is going to bring up. This is going to bring up.

[Dwayne Estes]

This is coming full circle.

[Corinne]

I'm with you, strong one.

[Dwayne Estes]

It wouldn't exist if a philanthropist from New York City hadn't discovered us and said, I want you guys to dream big, think programmatically and create something special. But it also wouldn't exist without the relentless support of my wife. Because, man, this. To grow a new organization from nothing to a team of 50, soon to be 65. Man, I had to have a strong woman in my life. And all credit to her. When I had to work sometimes 30 hours straight, got no sleep, day in, day out, she made sure I had what I needed to keep running. And I'm deeply appreciative to her for that.

[Stephen Rinella]

It's great, you know, to quote my friend told me, what's that? Behind every successful man is a woman who thinks he's an idiot because it pushes you out, it keeps you awake and gets you up in the morning.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's right.

[Stephen Rinella]

I'm not that bad. Come on, I'm going to get to it.

[Randall]

Dwayne, are you guys. Are you guys, like a nonprofit that people can donate money to?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. So, you know, we are housed out of a university because I've been a professor for 18 years. Right. We currently function in sort of two capacities. We function as a nonprofit. Part of the university is our fiscal sponsors, what we call it, and then we function very much like an academic department out of our. Our university. And that. That really gives us a lot of amplitude and flexibility. This year, we are going to be creating our own, you know, nonprofit, still affiliated with the university.

[Stephen Rinella]

We'll run like a foundation.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. Right. So we'll, you know, we'll have our own board of directors. We're going to be assembling that this year, and I think that's going to help us, you know, get to a point where we need to be as part of our business plan already.

[Stephen Rinella]

Anyway, tell me the university you're out of.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, it's called Austin P, P, E A Y. And our motto is let's go pee. And.

[Stephen Rinella]

You guys.

[Randall]

You guys are occasionally do well in the. In the March Madness.

[Corinne]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

You know, basketball.

[Randall]

How I know that name?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. And a lot of people say PA or PA or whatever you call it, but it's just Austin P. Name for one of our former former governors. Yeah. It's good school.

[Randall]

So at some point, people will be able to jump on a website and donate some cash.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, I hope they do. Check it out at, you know, our website, southeastern grasslands institute, segrasslands.org and, of course, we're on, you know, Facebook and Substack and, you know, all that stuff.

[Stephen Rinella]

And if you're sitting there and you got a big property within yourself, the Dwayne South.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

And you're just wading through piles of money and you're thinking about how you want to do something good for your land, because as Doug Duran says, it's not ours, it's just our turn.

[Dwayne Estes]

That's right.

[Stephen Rinella]

And you want to do something right by your land. Maybe go check these guys out.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah. And I would like to. There's. There's three things in particular I'd love for your listeners to kind of help us think through, and you guys, too. One is, we got so much existing public land and private land, it just needs to be managed in a better, different direction.

[Stephen Rinella]

Right.

[Dwayne Estes]

Our organization, through this web portal that's been funded by the USDA called Grasslandia, is designed. Once we roll that out next year in partnership with esri, is designed to Be that decision support tool that both public land managers and private landowners can come to Grasslandia. And you'll better go into that world and see maps of where the grasslands used to be. See the quotes from the early historians who followed the long hunters work or Native Americans and have that at your fingertips along with information. The photos, what they look like and the information of how to restore the seed mixes the fire regime that you need. So we need to do a lot better with the land we already have. But the second key points, one is that we have remnants left on the landscape that are clinging to existence. They need us to recognize them for what they are. They need our help and that's a hard thing to do. But we can't forget those remnants of places like May Prairie. They're critical as the building blocks to build back from seeds or to protect them because they're oftentimes they need to be protected and managed because they're the last of their kind.

[Stephen Rinella]

It's the model, right?

[Dwayne Estes]

It's the, it's the model. And then the third is I fear that people in the east especially have given up on this idea of big scale conservation. And we're not giving up. So our vision is, in my lifetime is to create two dozen large scale grasslands again in the East. Now, large scale is relative. You know, that's the eastern version of large, right? So there's no reason why we can't build an 11,000 acre prairie in parts of Alabama, Mississippi that connects to and integrates farms and you know, just all the different kinds of efforts, grazing, etc. That needs to happen at a large scale. Now imagine if we did big scale grassland here in central North Carolina and western Kentucky. I think people have given up on that as a possibility. Sgi, the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, that's, that's where we're heading. That's our future. That's our next big thing. And what we want is to attract people to come join us on that bold big vision. That's the future of eastern conservation right there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Amen.

[Corinne]

I'm a convert.

[Dwayne Estes]

Come on down. And I have been told to extend a, I've been saved a hunting invitation to, to have you guys come on down.

[Stephen Rinella]

They'll bleep. It's all out.

[Dwayne Estes]

Some turkeys.

[Stephen Rinella]

There's gonna be a long, long belt.

[Dwayne Estes]

I tell y'all. Well, yeah, I want you guys to come on down, see that bison trail at the, at the Wessington farm and.

[Stephen Rinella]

I would love to see that come.

[Dwayne Estes]

Down, see the bison traces. You can hunt in our Newly restored grasslands down there. Really got some amazing turkey deer. Come on down.

[Stephen Rinella]

Love to have you like songs that.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

You know what book you might like to read, man?

[Dwayne Estes]

Tell me. I'm looking for some good ones.

[Stephen Rinella]

Have you read the Landbreakers?

[Dwayne Estes]

No.

[Stephen Rinella]

It's from the 60s.

[Dwayne Estes]

No.

[Stephen Rinella]

So the other day, I had dinner with my editor and my publisher at Random House, and I was talking about. They were. Asked me if I'd seen something that's out right now that everybody's watching. And I was saying I have a hard time with stuff like that because I'll see something that isn't accurate, historically accurate, and I'll forget all about what I'm watching and I'll just be real annoyed about that. So I can't watch it.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yep.

[Stephen Rinella]

Which led us to a conversation of who gets it right. And I was making the case that. I was making the case that Corinth McCarthy gets his stuff. Right. Like other writers. Alan Eckert gets his stuff right. They're just good. Which led someone to say, have you read the landbreakers from the 6 19? I think it was from 64. And I hadn't. But the Landbreakers, as you can imagine, it's like 1780. Right. And it's new people moving in to break the land. It's so well done.

[Dwayne Estes]

Is this kind of like the Lula Moore's the Sackett series? Sort of similar.

[Stephen Rinella]

Dude, I don't want to hack on Louis the more.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

How do I put this? I've read Louis the more Dirt is Big Louie. Dirt's always reading Louis the more. I know how to say this in general way.

[Dwayne Estes]

Just go for it.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, I mean, I think.

[Randall]

I think that's not your cup of tea.

[Corinne]

That's an hypothesis. That's.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, it is unbelievable.

[Dwayne Estes]

Wow.

[Stephen Rinella]

It is like. Like how that dude knows what he knows. And I've gone and checked a little bit to be like, what. Yeah. Including this. But I mean, the stuff about trees and plants is unbelievable. Like, he's done a lot of work. He later got involved in politics as an advisor.

[Dwayne Estes]

I can't wait to read it, man.

[Stephen Rinella]

The Landbreakers.

[Dwayne Estes]

I'll read it.

[Stephen Rinella]

Unbelievable. Anyhow, I learned in there, and I went and looked, and this is true. When you're making leather wang for, like, leather stitching Groundhog.

[Dwayne Estes]

Whoa.

[Stephen Rinella]

Strongest out there.

[Dwayne Estes]

Wow.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. But no, I think it, like. I think you'd really appreciate that novel, the Land Breakers.

[Dwayne Estes]

I'll check it out. Absolutely.

[Stephen Rinella]

I got nothing to gain from this. Well, in fact, I take that back. You should go Check out meters. American History. Thanks for coming on.

[Dwayne Estes]

Hey, it's a tremendous honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

[Stephen Rinella]

Is. Is how. How best to come find you if people want to find you? Go to where?

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, check us out on social media and come to our website. There's an email link there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Say the website.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Segrasslands.org Segrasslands.org and on social.

[Dwayne Estes]

What are you on Facebook and Instagram? At Instagram, it's se Grassland without the.

[Stephen Rinella]

S. Yeah, I like Grasslandia.

[Dwayne Estes]

Grasslandia is gonna be cool, man.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dwayne Estes]

And it's gonna be cool for any research that you need for your book projects. So hit us up.

[Stephen Rinella]

Excellent. We're kind of moving westward on our book projects, but we'll come back.

[Dwayne Estes]

Come back.

[Stephen Rinella]

We'll double back.

[Dwayne Estes]

Come back, man.

[Stephen Rinella]

We'll go so far west, we'll wind up back east.

[Dwayne Estes]

Yeah, right. Just do a whole thing on the sound. Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

All right. Thanks for coming on, dude.

[Corinne]

Appreciate it.

[Dwayne Estes]

Appreciate you guys.

[Stephen Rinella]

Thank you. Foreign history buffs, Hunting history buffs. Listen up. We're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition, titled the Mountain Men 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the west represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and, at times, violent conditions. We explain what started the mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interact with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white tailed deer skin trade, which is titled the Long Hunters, 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History the Mountain Men, 1806-1840 by Stephen Rinella.