BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 185: ALDO LEOPOLD AND AMERICA'S 1ST WILDERNESS

Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

Zack Williams

Outdoors, Wilderness, Sports, Fishing, Outdoor, Hunting, Sports & Recreation

4.6 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2024

⏱️ 111 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Wilderness Act was passed by Congress in 1964, and has protected over 109 million acres of American public lands (53% of them in Alaska) since then. But the idea was born in 1924, with the vision of none other than Aldo Leopold, who was then the Supervisor of the Carson National Forest, and had spent almost fifteen years working on and exploring the wild public lands of New Mexico. Leopold argued that among the resources the Forest Service was mandated to safeguard for the American people were open spaces for hunting, fishing and real adventure. He argued, eloquently, that these values existed in abundance on the unpeopled lands of the Gila National Forest, that they were becoming more and more rare across America, and that the US Forest Service could choose to protect them for future generations.

This year, we celebrate the 100^th Anniversary of the Gila Wilderness. The Gila was America’s first public lands’ wilderness, and the ideas and arguments that created it provided the template for all that we understand as federally designated wilderness today. How did this come to be? Join us- Hal, Karl Malcolm, US Forest Service ecologist, hunter and wanderer of the Gila, and Curt Meine, conservation biologist and author of Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work, and Senior Fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

A wilderness area, Leopold wrote, was “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We are ecosystems too. We are part of that, right? And we have this tendency to always be like, well people and nature and we can't have people without nature, but even the folks living in the most urbanized setting on the face of this
0:16.1	planet are living in an ecosystem that still is dependent upon these same processes.
0:21.6	Like dark skies and other things of value, you don't know what you got until it's gone, right?
0:27.0	And, you know, that's what was happening a hundred years ago.
0:30.0	What the equivalent back then was the loss of large chunks of unroaded
0:37.3	country basically. I've spent most of the last 40 years like wandering around different seeking out different wilderness
0:44.7	areas to wander around in and have a more visceral experience of it in connection to eons of human experience. experience
0:55.0	not filtered through any lens either standing by the river or some creek where I know somebody stood
1:02.0	5,000 years ago,
1:03.6	and there's no giant lit up building in front of me to obscure that connection.
1:10.3	Hey everybody, are you ready for getaway on the water? Fishing some of the best
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1:48.0	And the best part of this, the winners will be joined by members of the Meat Eater crew.
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1:58.1	while being led by world-class fishing guides.
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	...

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