Match My Mountains
In Match My Mountains, Luke Nathan Phillips follows current controversies in public lands politics, advocates for policy protecting and stewarding those lands, and explores the history of conservation and deeper political history beyond it.
Featuring journalists, activists, historians, former rangers, and colorful adventurers who know their stuff, the show will paint the American wilderness and American history in all their splendid colors, and show just why our forests and battlefields and mountains matter, and deserve to be protected—they literally forge our soul.
Match My Mountains
The Oikophilic Eco-Right with Andrew Sandstrom
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When two or three conservatives are gathered together, there too is a conversation about philosophy with them. Andrew Sandstrom and I are no different. Beyond philosophical bases for conservation, we talk about the pendulum of national politics screwing up carefully-crafted local consensuses on land management, the mindsets and arguments of Utah Republicans supporting land sales, and the nitty-gritty backdrop of personal relationships and donor psychology making for the public land news you see every day in your inbox. Andrew's deadpan is delightful, and you can hear it more at The Public Lands Policy Podcast-- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-public-lands-policy-podcast/id1778290787
You're listening to Match My Mountains hosted by Luke Nathan Phillips.
Hello and welcome to Match My Mountains, a podcast on conservation, history, conservation and history, the history of conservation, and everything in between. Which I like to think actually covers more issues than most people tend to think about. We are joined today by Andrew Sandström, who has been doing a lot of really good work. Um he's one of a few people on what is called the Eco Right, who has been thinking very seriously about public land and conservation specific things uh beyond energy and permitting reform. Andrew, welcome. Would you like to introduce yourself?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I I will say your listeners probably caught that eco-right is a terrible name, and everybody in the eco-right knows that. So please just email us and give us other ideas. We're we're stuck on this label. We don't know what to do with it, man. Yeah, I'm have a background in conservative politics, and in in college I got really interested in environmental work. I come from Utah, I grew up in Utah, I went to Brigham Young University, and while I was there, I uh was sort of captivated by environmental philosophy because I was studying political philosophy, studying political science, but most of my courses I was really interested in were the political philosophy courses. And there just seemed to be this huge hole in conservative political philosophy where environmental conservative political philosophy should be, and in environmental philosophy, I felt extremely morally dissatisfied with the arguments within environmental philosophy. And so that got me really interested in that field. And then because of my background in campaign politics after school, I worked for some environmental conservative campaigns, which I didn't know existed, but I found out about them right as I was graduating and became the Utah director for an organization called Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends that was doing environmental climate work and energy work. Now I work in a variety of advocacy projects. I founded an organization a year ago called Unleash Utah. I also advise on a number of organizations across the country. I'm an advisor for the American Energy Leadership Institute, and I do some policy work in a few other states as well. I actually don't live in Utah anymore, which uh I think everybody in Colorado accuses me of mentally living there. It's pretty fair to say I split my time now. So my family lives in Colorado. I have two kids, and all of their cousins are in Colorado Springs. So we ended up buying a house in the Springs, and I commute to Utah pretty regularly to run Unleash Utah and to navigate some of the policy there and do some legislative work. So a little bit of what I do is is legislative work. A lot of what I do is earned media and thought leadership and amplification and working with stakeholders to, you know, building coalitions around different projects. And all of that, like you said, and sort of the overlap between environmental policy and conservative policy, and now also the overlap with energy policy and reindustrialization. So that's my background.
SPEAKER_00We'll go into some of the deeper policy stuff, but I'm actually interested just to start off, what are some of the gaps that you see in environmental political philosophy?
SPEAKER_01So in the political philosophy world, there have been some conservative thinkers that have dedicated themselves to some environmental philosophy. Like Crunchy Cons comes to mind, Roger Scruton comes to mind. Um I see you smile. You you are also a Scruton fan, aren't you?
SPEAKER_00Actually, not really. Um I respect his work, but I don't think I would identify by it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I don't know if I identify by Scruton, but I am a fan of him grappling with it. And as an American conservative, Roger Scruton can sort of be refreshing because it's just such a different kind of conservative coming from across the pond.
SPEAKER_00You read him in an English accent and there's no other.
SPEAKER_01Yes, with in the Queen's English. You read him and nobody had the level of wit in a debate. If you've never watched a debate with Sir Roger Scruton, uh he has the ability to take people down with like wit, but also finesse that only the British could do, that just is totally foreign to us here. But but yeah, he comes at it from a more aesthetic perspective, right? And I don't agree with all of the ways that he addresses global environmental challenges, which he sort of sees as a threat or or there's a potential threat there to a regional focus because he wants a focus on the home. But I think I do like that. And I think most conservatives philosophers that talk about environmental philosophy, they tend to be butting up against sort of this idea of oichophilia, this idea of a deep love for where you're from. And I do think that animates a lot of my thinking with environmental policy. I'm not a bucket list recreation guy. I'm not a fan of, okay, I'm gonna climb this mountain, I'm gonna go visit this lake. That's not where I think the true spirit of connection to land comes from. I think that when I lived at BYU, going up Rock Canyon, going up Slide Canyon, up past the Y, which people from that area will recognize what I'm talking about, but you wouldn't, most people wouldn't. These aren't famous trails. These are sort of the local haunts of where you go to hike. And when you get into those areas and you figure out where people are less likely to go, where you're more likely to see wildlife, to meet that's what I think the real spirit of being connected to a landscape comes from. And so I do like that sort of thinking, and that's is more like the last 20 years, this idea of what Scruton would call oichophilia. If you read Front Porch Republic, right, or you read some of these guys that are that you can't really classify them, you can't really put them in a box on the right all the time. But when they're talking about land and water and air, they're talking about their land, water, and air. And then, of course, I won't say a flaw, but a vulnerability in that way of thinking is some of the areas where I sort of disagree with Scruton, where when you're looking at global systems, that kind of breaks down because as we see uh with a lot of mining projects and a lot of other stuff, those two things are not always like in the progressive thinking, there's an end of history, everything sort of everything becomes just and fair and works out and everybody's happy, there's no trade-offs, right? And that's just not how politics actually works out. There's always trade-offs. That's true in the environment too. Is sometimes if you want to get one environmental good, it comes at the cost of the other environmental good, and you have to make those decisions. And so I think a potential vulnerability in that ends up being how do you think about global systems if you're very focused on local systems? And I'm not saying I've got a good answer, but that that would be my my view on current conservative environmental thought.
SPEAKER_00On that last thing, um, that actually is one of the one of the um the issues. I mean, there's like a horseshoe where you have like the human extinction people and you have the eco-fascists, and they both wind up at the same spot of a kind of like uh visceral attachment to the land that becomes almost murderous kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01Um, I sort of dismissed the idea of an eco-fascist, but could you maybe is this a thing that I should be aware of and and strive not to be? Like what are we looking at?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's really niche. And for what it's worth, it it emerges from fundamentally different uh philosophical assumptions about the human being than what you have and what I have and that all sane people have, right? Um but basically like the and I was looking into this because I was wondering myself if this was really a thing too. Basically, if you take every like right-wing crop uh quasi-racialist um movement in uh especially Western history, um, but I'm realizing the more I look into it that there's like little bits and pieces of this uh all over the place too, um, in conditions of modernity. It's basically like if you have this uh idea of a uh of a spiritual folk that's based on blood and race and ancestry.
SPEAKER_01Blood and soil.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then then not only does it say the people are attached to the land, which um that in itself is um not an inherently toxic thought. But when it says the people are attached to the land and uh that attachment is so strong that there is it is fundamentally illegitimate for any other institution, any other people, etc., um, to have that land and also uh put it down to a zero-sum uh kind of thing, that's the point when you start to get to um things that again seem vaguely genocidal. Um it's uh it's kind of like um if you take like the the baldest, dumbest idea of nationalism um uh that nobody in any real serious study of nationalism would say. But if you take the baldest, dumbest idea of it and you put the racial stuff with the eco stuff, um, that's what eco-fascism winds up being. And I mean there's like high-tech varieties, there's um, I guess, bronze age varieties. Uh it's weird. Don't worry, we're not in we're not in danger of it.
SPEAKER_01If if you're out there and you are seriously building your perspective on current American politics from like your view on Bronze Aid connection bronze age connections to the land, you need to log off for at least two weeks. I'm just that would be my advice.
SPEAKER_00Well, that means that there are various people who are three or four clicks away from our circles who need to log out for at least two or three weeks. And ideally, go touch that land.
SPEAKER_01I mean go touch the grass or the sand or the red rock or the water.
SPEAKER_00What you were saying earlier, and I hope you and me get a chance to visit some of those spots one of these days, Andrew, um, is uh uh something that was uh um I was actually thinking about that myself yesterday when I was um at a very uh not particularly well-known local spot here um in the National Park Service site uh that the National Park Service runs with George Washington Memorial Parkway. You go down to the cliffs at the base of that parkway, right on the lip of the Potomac River. Um the Potomac Heritage Trail runs through some mature growth sycamore and elm forests that's just absolutely beautiful. Um I see all kinds of undocumented immigrants down there having illegal campfires and fishing without permits all the time. Um, and then all these like very rich former government retiree trail runners with thousand dollar shoes. Um it's the kind of thing that like people who come to DC for tourism and even people who come to DC for business like almost never know about.
SPEAKER_01Um but it is again I've never known about that, and I've I go there about twice a year.
SPEAKER_00Let's go sometime. In fact, that would actually be there. It would probably be something interesting for people to.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna be there next week, Luke. I'm gonna be there next week.
SPEAKER_00If you want to, yeah, let's try to make some time. I can make some time for sure. Um honestly, it's the kind of thing where like a field trip with um people who are in town for this who are serious on land stuff, um, that could actually be interesting. I uh I hiked that with Ian Banks during a flood once, and it was a um nice little experience. But again, uh you were you were saying um how the things that people live nearby are a different kind of way of thinking about things than um a global perspe perspective, right? Um I go to Shenandoah National Park and hike up Old Rag Mountain probably once every two or three months. Um it's a sacred mountain to me. Uh whenever I'm in my old hometown of Stafford, I always go to Aqua Landing and then to a little spot off the Potomac where my cat's buried killed Jinglewood. Um both really nice little forest places, and not places that most people would think on. And so those are my land. They both happen to be public land, but those are kind of places that I feel at home. Whereas when you look at the environmental discourse for the most part, and I think um it's not just the kind of liberal climate people over the last 30 years who've done this, I think this thinking unfortunately pervades a lot of the eco-right as well, because of how like directly oppositional to the liberal climate movement it's been. Um, you get this kind of like uh these abstractions where you don't actually go touch the concrete stuff. And what is more concrete than nature, you know? Um so when you have these abstractions where it's like there's a global environment that we have to save, or there's this perfect preservation where we just have to get nature into its ideal form, and then the counter to that is well, there's this perfect anthropocentric thing where we can be the total gardeners and the total kind of manipulators of this. Um those are ideas that when you go into, I don't know, you went to a national forest.
SPEAKER_01Um just in the UNTs last week, actually.
SPEAKER_00Then you know it, right? You see the uh okay, one of the things you guys have in Utah is there's this constant battle between preservationists on the one hand and ATV people on the other hand, right?
SPEAKER_01Um we like our four-wheelers, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, when I was so as you know, I mean I usually am not super pro-four-wheeler, but whenever I've been out there, I've just always noticed that like um the existence of dirt bike roads and the existence of barbed wire fences for some of the cattle stuff, and the existence of wilderness areas that those are somewhat adjacent to don't really ever actually seem to contradict each other. Like it's as if the landscape itself, um there's a kind of almost natural balance between those things that um that public land management and just human use of it in general kind of uh makes it makes the principles less b less stark.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, the the issue with those battles comes when you try to like the the ATV groups are gonna get upset when you try to take away ATV trails that are in use, right? That's when those battles flare up, right? I I don't know of a ton of battles happening in the West where there are trails that have been used exclusively for foot traffic for 60 years that want that they want to open up to now. Maybe there are people can write you and complain and say that I'm naive about some battles, but when I see it, it's usually management plans that are taking someplace where there's a popular trail, and then they're saying no, that's not gonna be ATV trails anymore. Um that's when those battles tend to flare up. But yeah, you go someplace like the UNTAs, you don't see a like I haven't experienced a lot of um conflict between usages in someplace like the UNA's. Uh now most people going to the UNs are going there for fishing or for backpacking. I I love it because it's so not crowded. I was there last week for, or I guess, yeah, Memorial Day weekend, so a little bit over a week ago. Um I took a friend of mine um from American Energy Leadership Institute out with me, and uh we didn't get a chance to fish that day. I fished with my dad the next day, but we went and saw some of the spots. It was really not like for for Memorial Day weekend, for the opening day of that seasonal road, there was like nobody there. And there were lakes that were still frozen, that's probably part of it. But yeah, I think that I think that there's a pretty good harmony in most of those areas. The place where you're gonna get where you're gonna find close to you know warfare happening is when you get down into Mo Moab, Grand County, San Juan County, over in Kane County, Washington County, the places where you have ag and extraction communities that have transitioned wholly or in part to tourist economies, that's where you're gonna get. That's where the guns are gonna come out, metaphorically, hopefully.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, hopefully. Um hopefully. Uh I mean to uh just to parallel this a little bit too, um, here in Virginia, George Washington National Forest, other side of the Shenandoah, um other side of the Blue Ridge, um is quite nice. Like whenever I'm up there, just go a couple miles in from the Shenandoah River, um, nobody really knows about it unless they're from there. Whereas Shenandoah National Park, um, which actually Shenandoah is not quite as crowded as you would think it would be, um, but any given weekend there's lines to get in. Uh the way you get around those lines is you start at the bottom of the Blue Ridge instead of trying to drive to the top of it. And if you hike into a park rather than drive into a park, you bypass a lot of stuff. But even so, still, right? Like the places with no names um are places where I think the true spirit of a lot of this comes out more. So well, okay, so there's uh there's other things we could discuss on this, but I'm just wondering to what degree, Andrew, you think that this is a discourse that actually happens, that this kind of thinking of the concrete defeating the abstract or the concrete putting the abstract in its true context, to what degree does that happen anywhere?
SPEAKER_01I haven't been super plugged into the academic side of that, which is the only place I think it would be happening right now. And so outside of academia, no, I don't think it's happening at all. Um I think a lot of that's the current political environment. So this was really some of these more philosophical, what does conservative mean, conversations are a lot more interesting when conservatives aren't in power because everybody's trying to get their coalition put together for the next, you know, you know, for the next charge. And when you have a president and you have a loaded deck in the House and the Senate for I mean it's narrow margins, but when you have um Republicans in power, I think that it's l a little less interesting right now to talk about anything that's not the current agenda. And so I haven't seen a ton of these conversations. I haven't had, honestly, Luke, I haven't had anybody ask me the questions you're asking me right now for probably four years. Um and this was stuff that I was writing papers on when I was doing my undergrad that I had just haven't just haven't been super interesting to people since. Not that they were super tantalizing to people back then, but um I think that when the, you know, when Bears Years was going down in 2018, I think that that was a little bit more interesting. People were more interested in in my perspective and an unconservative perspective on those things back then. But but yeah, so no, I don't think it's happening. And I think it's worthwhile to have because uh we're in this era of rebuilding America and build baby build, and you have to have you have to know your answers to some of these questions to figure out how you're going to grapple with situations. You know, data centers are a big flashpoint right now, and the right is not altogether on that stuff. There's a lot of fracturing. Um and you're gonna see that, you know, the like the boundary waters right now, that's not a big fracturing on the right because it's happening in Minnesota, which is a blue state. But if if that ha depending on where some of these projects happen, if you don't have your answers for how you look at these issues, I think it I think there are there end up being some political costs to that. But I think quite frankly, most people who are out there building, they're not super interested. By the way, I'm very pro-built, I'm a very pro-building guy. I'm just saying that a lot when we're in when we're in a attitude right now, if we've got a president that really wants to build, we're all going to be talking about building, and we're not gonna be having a ton of these conversations about what the ultimate vision is for conservation. It's just not very not very uh you know, issue de jour right now.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think that's uh that's a damn shame for a lot of reasons. As you know, um I am getting like increasingly and increasingly critical of our party these days over um not entirely just the building issues, because I think that's more complicated than most people realize it is, but over just like basic bread and butter um agency funding, agency staffing, uh land integrity, like where public lands and public hands, all that sort of uh stuff. Stuff that is mostly um stuff that liberals care about these days, right? Like I find myself being pushed further and further to the left on these. Um and then the further I get pushed left, the more I realize, oh, yeah, there's a reason I'm a Republican. Some of these people want to ban hunting and fishing everywhere on the public lands, you know.
SPEAKER_01Um I was pretty upset about staffing with so I think uh you know, my my initial response to what you know what was happening with Doge is well, great, look at like let's reevaluate. But the way it was done, and you know, I had um uh Nephi Cole on my podcast who had really good insights into um some of the stuff like the systems that could have been used if we wanted to trim the budget in things like the Forest Service. And those were completely bypassed, and people were basically randomly selected to get booted off the island. It was just a terrible way, it's just terrible execution. At the time, is trimming the fat a good idea? Yeah, sure, but then we put a blindfold on and just started swinging on ice at the at the cow, right? It's just that was not the way to do it, and there there are real world consequences to that that are not great. So I think that I'd be more enthusiastic for what our party's doing. I like what we're and and you you also like a lot of the stuff that's getting built now. But I think that I there's a bipartisan criticism that you don't see a ton from the politicians because of political reasons, and they want to get their bills passed and they don't want the president mad at them, and they don't want other people in the party mad at them. I do think, though, that there's been there's some bipartisan frustration with how the land management agencies in particular were handled during you know some of those budget trims. Because man, if you could just call up, you literally just could have asked managers, hey, you've got five people in your office, choose one, and they have objective criteria for who's performing, but no, we just sort of fired off emails and said, hey, you're out, you're out, you know, you're the weakest link, goodbye.
SPEAKER_00And where do you hear that criticism and see that criticism coming from uh Republicans? Is it mostly in the states where this is behind the scenes?
SPEAKER_01I I mean I know that uh I can think of a couple of members of Congress that said things publicly that I won't out right now because I don't want to do that in this moment in time.
SPEAKER_00Well, they're all gonna lose their re-elections, unfortunately, already.
SPEAKER_01No, they're not not in Utah. They're not.
SPEAKER_00Oh, there's others. Ah, okay. So I've known about the blue state guys. I haven't known that there were red state guys, too. Yeah, so you're keeping them secret, that's good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, Utah is is like people highly underestimate that state's uniqueness. I will like being from there. People uh there's there's no sh small amount of money paid on out-of-state consultants who come in and just don't understand how Utah works. And uh you like sometimes people tell me, well, hey, you're really good at working with MAGA in Utah. How do you? I'm like, there's not no one identifies as MAGA in Utah, guys. Very few people. If they do, they're being cheeky. Like, it's a different kind of there are people who you might label as very right or far right. They're very different, though. They're different makeups. And so I do think that affects how that how that works in the state. Now, Utah's not an environmentalist's favorite state. Um, I think that in some ways, some of the Some some of it's we get a bad rap, and some of it like there's there's other strains there. But no, I don't think anyone's gonna lose their re-election. And maybe in other places in the way, West, right? You've got Montana. Some of these places, some of these guys' re-election depends on being conservationists if you're in Montana or um uh if you're in some of these western states.
SPEAKER_00So well, I think that also is one of the spots where I personally find attention. Um my ideal for the Republican Party in like the 10, 15-year term, Andrew, uh, is is that like you would have a block of like five or ten senators. And I think for what it's worth, the senators in the Senate stewardship caucus right now are not anywhere near what this should look like. And then meantime, you have a cluster of like 30, 35 members of the House of Representatives, and then they have a backbone of a couple governors and a couple state legislatures that is intrinsically for general integrity of the land system, general integrity of the agencies, and general respect for the principle of multiple use sustained yield with a significant preservation kind of aspect to it. Like um, I think that that is actually something that is eminently compatible with uh conservative philosophy and conservative thinking um in ways that include uh what you and I were talking about with um local respect for land, but also even just more general, like the American heritage stuff. I've been shocked to see the use of terminology about American heritage and um the lack of substance on it, including in um National Park Service on the one hand, but also land issues more generally. That's another subject entirely. But um I I want there to be a version of our party, um, and it doesn't have to be the whole party, like it just has to be a loud faction of the party.
SPEAKER_01Um just need ten good men. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Precisely. And they have to be both Western Republicans like you, who do this stuff uh with ranchers all the time and with uh the the people who live right there on the time, and Eastern Republicans like me who uh work to temper the kind of more extreme environmentalist views, but like bring the Eastern mainstream into um land protection for its own sake, right? I don't think that's a crazy idea. I think that's existed in the past.
SPEAKER_01Um you need guys like Senator John Curtis who are obsessively local in the way they do politics. Um and people don't see that in the national discourse, but having had John as my mayor when I lived in Provo and then as my congressman, and then knowing him as a senator, like no, you know, seeing what his office and knowing people in his office, the way that he does politics, and the reason that he gets the traction that he gets, um, even though he's often maligned as kind of a rhino, is because when he was running for the Senate, his campaign manager told me, she said, I tell people, call any county official in the third district, and they'll tell you to vote for John. And that kind of politics, I'd also say Celeste Malloy from Utah, and I know that this is very you making this very Utah-centric, but she also does politics that way. That's how she was able to defeat um some challengers after she won a special election, just coming to an election. That kind of on-the-groundness is what I like to call it. Like, on-the-groundness is really vital for doing any work in this terribly unforgiving world of land politics. Like, yeah, you need guy you need guys and gals like that that'll get on the ground and then go to DC and then advocate, and then are also willing to meet people where they're at and have conversations with people. I would say that's that's the ten people you need for what you're envisioning.
SPEAKER_00Um Utah Republicans, as you know, get a very bad rap among the rest of the public lands community. Um, I think that's justified, but tell me why I should be thinking that Utah has a unique history with public lands.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And uh, you know, your listeners probably already know a little bit about Utah's sort of home of land transferists, right? And wanting to I will say there there's kind of two aspects to that. There are the people that um for a long time I fell into this camp who want land transfer, but they want public land. Like they want it to be publicly owned, they just want to be owned by the state. And that comes out of a out of a bad relationship with the federal government that really is not because of the good men and women working in the Forest Service and the BLM. It's because of how driven that is by national politics through the executive branch, starting with Bill Clinton, right? I mean it starts before that, but what it really heated up was with Bill Clinton with Escalani, right? Um, which is the I believe the correct way, if you're in southern Utah, to say uh Escalante. Uh the other term is Grand Staircase. Yeah, well you know why those two are paired, right?
SPEAKER_00Uh no, actually.
SPEAKER_01Because of the town of Escalani and and the administration, the Clinton, the Clinton administration thought, oh, if we add the name of the town to the monument, then they'll like it. And if I'm sorry, but no matter how much you love that, that that whole process was done so poorly, it was done frankly, it was done very blatantly to re-elect um President Clinton and had not and and had I mean there were county and state officials who basically found out when the public did. And then he announced it in Arizona because he knew that he would have gotten picketed out of Utah anywhere that he tried to announce it in Utah. So, you know, um I mean it's better than Obama who uh I I uh someone will have to correct me, but I think it was from like a golf course in Hawaii or something. Like he didn't even really try when he announced bears ears. He was a he was a lame duck. He's like, hey, environmentalists wanted me to, you know, they wanted me to draw the circle around the spot and make it a monument. Just it happened, guys. You happy, you know, there wasn't even there wasn't a coming to Salt Lake. I mean, he did send his his uh interior secretary out. He did a lot more of the work that Clinton didn't do. I want to give him credit for that. But those sorts of things where they felt that if in the case of Clinton just totally left out, in the case of Obama, heard, but heard in the way that like your junior high school English teacher hears your criticism of the piece she really likes, where it's like, that's nice, but we're gonna do it the way that the smart people we actually like told us to do it. Like that sort of nominal involvement in the process, those sorts of trust issues is what leads Utah to just say, like, no, give us the land, we'll do a better job of it. But then there's the institutional side, which is you talk to guys who do public lands management or public lands coordination for the state of Utah, and they'll talk about fire management.
SPEAKER_00They're really upset that they lost control over fire management in Bears Ears because um there's some controversy over um June um um pinion juniper forests and how to manage um Are you talking about in the aftermath of the reorganization of the wildland fire service, or is this the longer running question?
SPEAKER_01Um I'm talking about leading up to like around Bears Ears National Monument 2017-2018, there were fire management plans in place that had to sort of be thrown out that they and they knew that and so if you ask those guys, now you might d agree or disagree with their assumption their assessment, but they'll tell you, hey, that place is gonna burn down someday, and we weren't able to stop it, right? So I think there that people I think that what you have to give Utah credit for is that there is a lot of this stuff that looks very anti-public lands, isn't anti-public lands, it's anti-washington control of public lands. Now, I think that I was naive for a long time to the level to which people were involved in that movement that do actually want development. And so when people ask me how do you feel about land transfer, what I usually say is put a constitutional amendment in the Utah Constitution that creates a public trust doc doctrine for the lands we receive, and I'm all for it.
SPEAKER_00Um I know there was the uh what was it, the shared stewardship agreement between the Forest Service and the state of Utah recently. Um I looked into so I wasn't really familiar with shared stewardship agreement history before that. Um turns out most states have them. Um and turns out that for the most part, those basically just tack on extra memorandums to existing policies for doing um land management plans in the Forest Service and resource management plans or sorry, land management plans in the yeah, Forest Service and then resource management plans in the BLM. Um I'm wondering to what degree like the idea of re-jiggering the existing system to have deeper, um, deeper coordination among the existing land agencies uh and the state level agencies and other managers. I'm wondering to what degree that has ever helped with this, or do you think the kind of I think it helps tremendously? Yeah, but the pendulum of national politics is the thing that's the problem, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because what happens is when you get a politicized management plan. That's what happens. It happens when and look, the Sierra Club, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, I'll call these guys out. Like they they'll get in bed with a Democratic president and they'll write the rules for what they want, and they won't get everything they want. But these are people who are operating often from outside the state of Utah or at least outside the county, and this I'm talking about Utah because that's where a lot of these flash points are. But this happens in Idaho, this happens in Wyoming, this happens in Montana, um, happens in Colorado, Dolores Canyon um National Monument almost happened with Biden, right? Uh where the it you f you don't feel anymore, because here's the thing people will point to um when Utah became a state, that Utah very knowingly, and all these Western states very knowingly gave up their land, and that's true. But the social contract of what the government was going to do with those lands was very different in the 19th century than it is now. And so when you change that contract, you can do that, but you have to take the other side of the contract with you on that journey. And sometimes there's some prodding and there's some pulling, and Teddy Roosevelt did a lot of pulling, and we're all, I don't know, you know, I don't know if I do it the same way he did, but I'm awful grateful he did most of the time, right? Like there's there, I mean, most people are because we're like, oh well, maybe maybe we wouldn't have, you know, uh pushed to the limits that way that he did with executive power if we don't like executive power, but we're so grateful for the forest, right? And so um but you have to get buy-in and and you have to move the other party along with those changes. And I think that some of these flashpoints, some of the managed like travel management plans, uh, monument management plans, um, species management plans, like some of these things, there's the feeling that we were taking a step beyond where the local parties were willing to go. And I think you have to give more most people in the environmental movement could give more credit to where locals are willing to go. Because look at a group like um the property and um environmental research center Park, and look at the work they've done getting ranchers to take down fences and do uh virtual fences and share land with elk. Most people don't realize that elk and cows, like I I love forest service, so Forest Service people love to say that elk are just cows on stilts, right? They're competitors, and so when you have these rangelands where you're trying to negotiate between hunters and conservationists who want more elk populations, and then you want the ranchers want that for their cows. Perks done amazing work to try to get that contract to where the elk can do better without violating the rancher's property rights, which is not their property all the time. Some oftentimes it is, they'll they'll do it on private property. And also a use, you know, if you ask any landowner that has a public lands permit, they'll tell you, hey, that permit's a form of property right, and I think they've got a good point. So, like honoring those rights will also bring them along. Even look at like the Nature Conservancy, so which is not a conservative organization. And in when I was in San Juan County in 2018 with a group from BYU, uh one of the county commissioners was telling us about all these environmental groups, and he said, Oh, but the nature conservancy, you can work with them, they want to work with you. And he had a positive impression of them because they do that work. So I think it's the national, it's it's the pendulum of politics swinging, but really when the pendulum swings, there's human agency involved, right? And when it swings over, um, environmental groups involved could, if they wanted to, follow the good examples of their friends at these other organizations and go get their boots dirty and figure out like why do ranchers in this area hate me. But instead, I think you have such polarization in that field of individuals. Or also there's a money issue, so like the Center for Biological Diversity. Like, what's their business model? Their business business model is is is the it's the cave people model, the citizens against virtually everything, right? They they sue they've sued a solar project, they they sued a forest restoration project in the UNA National Forest, which really ticks me off. Um and they just get these projects shut down and then they raise money off of it. It's a lot easier to raise money off of protection than it is on nuanced conservation. It just is. It's a easier story to sell. Um so there's also a money issue, and then there's a human agency issue. All of those things make it so that when the pendulum swings over to Democrat, that relationship gets messed up. But what I'm saying is for any people who would be influential in those democratic administrations, it is absolutely not um it's not a guarantee that that's gonna happen. There's a lot of steps involved where you could where you could save yourself. And then of course, if we'd all work together, we could do some things through Congress and get consistency, and then we don't have to worry about the darn pendulum.
SPEAKER_00Well, and on that note, too, um there's plenty of precedent for there being relatively bipartisan, not necessarily bipartisan consensus all the time, but like a bipartisan uh framework of where uh of of what the acceptable discourse is. And when you have that, like when you push towards the edges of the discourse, at least you're still in the same kind of thing. I consider myself actually, I no longer consider myself on the eco right. I think it's closer to say that I'm probably on the furthest right part of the eco center, if that makes sense. And um I don't Sagan? We're cousins. We're cousins, yeah. And and I want there to be like more overlap between our worlds because I think there's um there's some genuine stuff there, not least to counter the like very, very radical anti-management stuff that happens in the mainstream of the environmental movement, because the mainstream of the environmental movement doesn't have a lot of people who are for multiple use sustain yield um in all of its places. So um I think at some level, uh one of the um one of the big things that uh that the the movement suffers from right now, and and for what it's worth, the thing that I like most about the EcoRight, despite all of my criticisms, is that it takes very seriously exactly what you were saying with PERC and with the Nature Conservancy, the idea of bottom-up and local input-based management. Um that's something that uh the particularly after the 1960s and 70s, the mainstream conservation movement has never done very well. Um and has in fact actively moved further and further away from despite all of this kind of uh small, progressive, crunchy liberal stuff about um small communities and whatever. Uh so the fact that the eco-right is probably leading on most of those in ways that are actually palatable to a lot of uh mainstreamers too, is something that there should not be so much of a discord, right? Um and I don't know. I mean, you know me. My basic take is like, well, guys just come out against the land sales bills and the ranger firings, and if you do that, it will build a lot of trust.
SPEAKER_01I was in support of Celeste Malloy's land sales bill. Okay. I was very much against Mike Lee's land sales bill. I think there's a big difference.
SPEAKER_00Actually, talk about that. This is interesting.
SPEAKER_01So, and and I've told you this before. The problem with land sales is we don't have a good principle, like we don't have a good set of principles to say when should we sell land and when should we not, because we don't want to deplete it, right?01% of something, you don't get that 0.01% back, and we want to keep it. We don't, you know, God is not currently making more land. I I leave it open to him in the future to do that.
SPEAKER_00But uh We have to defeat climate change so the sea levels will go back down and then we'll have more lands.
SPEAKER_01Um and so when you're when you're looking at bills like that, and I've heard it said, like I've I've I won't say who, but somebody from like the hunting conservation world and hunters know land sales. Like you could have a block of BLM land in the dead center of New York City, and they will pull you so there's like one deer that lives there. That's very unfair, by the way. I am a hunter. I'm not trying to dig on hunting, I'm just trying to set up for people not familiar with the situation. I'm gonna get in a lot of trouble for that line.
SPEAKER_00Um I also Hey, um, don't worry, uh for what it's worth, uh there was an audio issue, so I didn't actually hear that line, so you won't get in trouble for it.
SPEAKER_01Set it that whole part out, Luke. But but look, um, hunters will oppose any land sales. And uh the reason, I think they have a really good reason. It's that we're not making more land, and uh we don't have a good principle to know when there's an exception to that. But I think that in a lot of the cases of what the Utah delegation was looking at in these really high growth areas in the desert, uh they were looking at particular transfers and then in Nevada as well, next to Vegas. Like some of these areas, uh I'm I'm a little bit I'm I'm okay with that. I'm okay with taking some targeted land sales. And but personally, I think that though we don't have a great set of principles to know when the exceptions are, I think that being able to get it through Congress is a pretty good barometer for and I think that had that been taken up by the Senate as written, those lands would now have been transferred. I think that would have come through because there was opposition, but not nearly what we got in the Senate. And I say we, I mean like that. I'm not on board with the Mike Lee's yet. I don't want to give that idea. Like that ended up, and I know a lot of guys. I actually went to um went to lunch with a guy in Colorado Springs, so I said, Oh, why in town? He said, Oh, I'm fundraising off of Mike Lee's land transfer bill. I'm like, oh, that's cool. Yeah, there were six and seven figures in some of these organizations all across the board, conservative to the most liberal, that raised money off of that controversy. What that means, guys, is that we now, if you want a couple acres in a town in southeastern Colorado transferred so we can build a school, guess what? That's never gonna happen now because every environmental adjacent group in America just fundraised very big numbers off of making sure it never happens because they have a mandate for that now. So I was very against the way that that um so telling every land management agency, hey, except for Montana, because I don't want to tick off Steve Dain's, in every other area, choose a part of it, like a certain percentage of it, I can't remember it was like 0.125 or something, a very small percentage, but and sell it off. Luke, you and I both probably have places where we go regularly that would have been eligible for sale, right? And I hate when you say that, and then somebody says back to you, Oh, but it's not a national park. And I'm like, by you saying that, I now know you never use public lands. Right? So um I think that most of the multiple use community of which I'm a part of is opposed to any sales. I am much more um I'm open to some very targeted through Congress. Now, the one pushback I've gotten that I mentioned earlier was from a hunter friend who's very embedded in that world. He said, I'm I would have he said I would have supported that had it not been through reconciliation. I think that's a very good point. And um so that maybe the idea that it was being done through reconciliation. Uh so yeah, I I would prefer, I was still liked it because I want those communities to be able to get some of these land transfers have been on the table for decades and sort of needed to happen. And and then another area is well, if we can't get that done, you know, Senator Hatch and now Senator Curtis, and before that and Senator Romney, they all did these amazing um land um land swaps where they'd swap Sitla land with uh with federal land, and those were negotiated out beautifully. And um both I say it was in order, hatch to Romney to Curtis, because these are these take a long time to develop. You know, if you get some politicians that are willing to make those difficult long-term plays for the good of their constituents, like I'm telling any politicians out there, I know this isn't in vogue right now, but try being a really good politician and like good things happen, right? If you do that, um then you can also sort of bypass some of the controversies of divesting the public trust by there's basically a net, you know, it's a net zero land loss, right?
SPEAKER_00So well, for what it's worth, um everything that you're talking about is land sales, Andrew, uh is stuff that I tend to lump into the land swaps tradition, actually, um in the sense that there's two long-standing practices by the Forest Service and the BLM. Um and for what it's worth, actually, even the National Park Service, like the National Park Service trades bits and pieces on the edges of different national parks all the time. It's just nobody hears about it. Um and so basically one of those It's probably good.
SPEAKER_01It's probably good that nobody hears about it.
SPEAKER_00I'm I'm going to Harper's Ferry in a couple of weeks. And um there was recently a kind of thing where they opened up a lot more of Harper's Ferry land, Harper's Ferry's land for access because they were able to swap um for a piece of private land that had been blocking that access in exchange for some parts that they were having a hard time conserving anyway, right? But basically, so you have the land swaps where it's like um an acre for an acre of equally valuable land or like three acres of less valuable land for one acre of more valuable land. Um that's something that can be that can be abused. Um I'm not a fan of the one that just happened in Montana where like there was that ski resort that um is now whole, but there's a lot of parts of the crazy mountains that you have to go another 80 miles around to get to. I think it can be abused. But in general, like as a principle, um value for value, acre for acre is a good thing. It hits that uh you don't want to get rid of 0.1% um consistently over the next 10 years because if you do that, then you've lost 1%. Uh if you keep re adding another 0.1%, then then you keep the general integrity of the system alive. But then additionally, there is one method of land sales that actually works out very well, which is the money goes into the the money from the sales goes into a fund that's like adjacent to the land and water conservation fund that is specifically to buy up new parts of the public land, either for the entire system, but more often for that specific unit of the Forest Service or the BLM. Right. So these are things that, again, um to go back to the kind of UR theme that we're talking about here, do not have to be mass questions of principle. These are things that can be really solid, concrete, local, what you're calling ecumenue based kinds of things. I do think there is a kind of level of principle that is important to like at the very least try to maintain, which is that um preservation, wise use, different kinds of recreation are valid things that you have to give some due respect to each of those. And if you were to put everything under one of those uses you would be destroying a lot of what is good about the system. But in general these don't have to be things where there's a massive federal policy over. I think in general like um if the people in Manty LaSalle National Forest for example were working with uh the city of Moab for the sake of making sure that people actually have access to Tukunavits and stuff. That is something that most preservationists themselves actually would probably be for if they knew what was actually at stake. And for the most part people on my side the very very anti-sales people never really know at stake uh what's at stake. And actually you know um you know I would be interested in this one of the other guys I interviewed um recently is a friend of mine named Wes Seiler who is a very very uh um staunchly like uh pro keep everything under as much preservation as you can but he's still in multiple use right um he's one of a few people uh who are like very very um for the lands who um or sorry very very for like the classic public lands and public hands narrative who is intensely critical of the environmental left for their making things harder for the movement by freaking out intensively whenever a small relatively unable to see on your last episode on episode that was him yeah that was the guy I haven't listened to that yet uh I hope that that episode for it I saw your description I saw the episode description I hope you both uh both are enraged by it and also enjoy it because like I felt that in my window and I hope people are picking up from your podcast which is a fantastic podcast by the way um I've only listened to the first episode but uh I turned it off and I might have told my wife I told somebody I'm like that was ridiculously good like as somebody does podcast I was like that was a you know I've listened to podcast for friends before but yours is a really really good podcast and it's even better now that I'm on Luke. No I was gonna say I think you just increased the quality another 30 or 40% so that's yeah that first no your solo episode though I you didn't even need any help.
SPEAKER_01It was amazing. And um so uh I haven't listened to that second episode yet but you're really really enjoyed your first episode. But what I will say is I hope people pick up from listening to your podcast and I'm so glad you're doing this in this space because you're not being I in your mind you probably can see yourself as being categorized in this world but to most people who don't aren't familiar with how nuanced the conservation preservation multiple use all those the land management world is like it's a very nuanced not boxed into environmentalist or you know extraction you know camp. And so I hope people see that most of us in this space that disagree with each other can actually could work together more. Like there's more space to work together. And the people in Washington who figure that out um get stuff done and it ends up being sometimes not everybody's happy but sometimes really great deals happen like some of the land swaps that have that have happened in the in the past you know those sorts of deals happen and then you end up with it's better for the land it's better for the wildlife it's better for the hunters it's better for the locals it's better for tourism better for everybody that can only happen if you're willing to sort of get out of your like Sierra Club newsletter which I'm on by the way that's a long story how I got on that newsletter. But like some of these ridiculous narratives of us versus them if you get into the room and at the table with people a lot of work can be done.
SPEAKER_00I uh I enjoy um reading both the Public Lands Council's stuff and the uh club yeah well also the Coalition for the Protection of America's national parks like those two things are just like totally um opposite but again that's the point and maybe this is something we should be thinking on more that's what American democracy is right that's the history of American government American pluralism um I hate to be trite but like e pluribus unum right uh there's many different interests none of them should destroy each other all of them should work for a bigger common thing and what is the greatest metaphor of that American way of life and American way of government but the management of the public lands that belong to all people and have all of them you know and I'm grateful to have somebody like you to be mulling with this as well as we go on. We are just about out of time and we did not talk about the data centers and the uranium mines and other stuff that we should at some point Andrew but I will get back together.
SPEAKER_01Yeah are there any data center stuff happening in Utah is that a thing I don't know if I've heard anything in the I'm j I'm joking obviously for those not listening to this like in real time the about what was that a few weeks ago the Kevin O'Leary uh the data center I've probably got a there's there's a whole other episode on that someday Luke. We should we should yeah so just just full disclosure there's a I was deer hunting by the way right next to where that deer data center was about uh about last October. Ah interesting okay private land before anybody says oh there's no public no it was on private land I I went deer hunting and uh anyways I will save people can just wonder what I think about that data center until until next time.
SPEAKER_00That sounds good to me uh we have a lot of those here in northern Virginia too so um I'm sure you and I will spar pretty hard on that but we'll we'll be it will be good. Uh thank you for being on uh can you tell everybody real quick about the podcast that you have run in the past and that we are and excited for the time that it will run in the future.
SPEAKER_01Yeah so it's it's called the it's a very subtle name it's the Public Lands Policy Podcast and you can look it up on wherever you get your podcasts. I haven't recorded in in about a year but uh there's some great you know the the very first episode with uh Hannah Downey from Park about wildfires is going is about to become very relevant and everyone should listen to it and we need some permitting reform on wildfire management in America. But there you know I have some my goal with that podcast was to get voices on that were not in the mainstream usually I mean some of them are very influential in their spheres but people I was trying to decode some of the more you know niche stuff for a general audience to try to break apart like I said this polarization and get people talking about some of these perspectives that have been left out. So yeah that's my public lands policy podcast uh you can find us on any of the audio services for podcasts.
SPEAKER_00We'll put that link in the uh in the video description here as well too and um andrew not only thank you for being on the show but thank you for helping restore a little bit more of my faith in the eco right and in Republicans of good faith on this too. I think that's something important for both of us something very important for all of us and I hope that we can make some good fruit on it in the coming years.
SPEAKER_01Thanks so much for having me Luke.
SPEAKER_00Everybody thank you for listening and uh you'll be hearing this sometime soon uh make sure to take a look at Andrew's work and uh we will be continuing to explore these and many other issues in all the months and years to come. Uh with that may you never run out of mountains and I'll see you on the trail.