Archaeology, Texas History and Public Land

<v Speaker 1>Welcome to the crime page of bid and he doesn't podcast.
<v Speaker 1>I'm here with David Keller, West Texas historian and archaeologist,
<v Speaker 1>and we're going to talk about a couple things pertinent
<v Speaker 1>not just to West Texas but to the entire state.
<v Speaker 1>So David Keller, Hello, introduce yourself.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, thank you very much. Joy. Yeah. So I live
<v Speaker 2>in Alpine in Redford. So I've been in the Big
<v Speaker 2>Ben region for more than twenty years. Did archaeology to
<v Speaker 2>the Center for Big Ben's Studies for a lot of
<v Speaker 2>that time Big projects and Big Ben National Park and
<v Speaker 2>on private ranches across the region, also state park lands,
<v Speaker 2>and then over the course of years, ended up writing
<v Speaker 2>a few books on regional history and then kind of
<v Speaker 2>got into some historic preservation. So I do a lot
<v Speaker 2>of Adobe consulting.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, tell everybody about Center for Big Ben's Studies. What
<v Speaker 1>is it? It's associated with the College was seul it is.
<v Speaker 2>It's kind of a pseudo department. I think it's trying
<v Speaker 2>to become more of a department. But it was started
<v Speaker 2>in the eighties by a fellow that wanted to basically
<v Speaker 2>become a clearinghouse for history and archaeology indist cultural studies
<v Speaker 2>across the region earl Elm, and then over time it
<v Speaker 2>basically was passed on to Bob Maloof, who became the
<v Speaker 2>director shortly before I came on, and he was the
<v Speaker 2>state archaeologist for years, and so the center's focus shifted
<v Speaker 2>to primarily archaeology. They've always done publishing, so they have
<v Speaker 2>a newsletter, they have regular journals that they put out,
<v Speaker 2>and then occasional papers. And Bob, when he was director,
<v Speaker 2>had a program, a larger program that was partly devised
<v Speaker 2>as a fundraising mechanism, but it also parsed out different
<v Speaker 2>research areas that the center was active in. At that time,
<v Speaker 2>soul Ross offered an undergraduate degree in anthropology, and so
<v Speaker 2>we did teach some classes, but there was never a major, and.
<v Speaker 1>They don't do that anymore.
<v Speaker 2>I think, yeah, I think that at this point they
<v Speaker 2>are trying to develop it into a major, and so
<v Speaker 2>we'll see how that goes. You know, I'm not with
<v Speaker 2>sol Ross anymore. A year and a half moved on
<v Speaker 2>and so now I work for myself. It's Keller Consulting.
<v Speaker 2>They'll see so do the same things, but I just
<v Speaker 2>don't have to report to work anymore.
<v Speaker 1>So archaeos but it's all archaeology basically.
<v Speaker 2>Mostly, although you know, what I get hired to do
<v Speaker 2>mostly in the recent year and a half has been
<v Speaker 2>historical preservation consulting, so either private people with you know,
<v Speaker 2>who have bought a house that's an adobe or rock
<v Speaker 2>or whatever they wanted some idea of what to do
<v Speaker 2>with it, some guidance, but also do workshops. We did
<v Speaker 2>one at Fort Leeton about a year ago for Texas
<v Speaker 2>Parks and Wildlife staff, and then we did we're doing
<v Speaker 2>another one. We did one last year at Fort Davis.
<v Speaker 2>We're doing it again in October at Fort Davis for
<v Speaker 2>mostly for National Park staff.
<v Speaker 1>So what tell me about tell us about the human
<v Speaker 1>history of the region, Like what is I guess, how
<v Speaker 1>long have people been here starting with indigenous people and
<v Speaker 1>then when like Anglo settlement mostly happened when like eighteen
<v Speaker 1>hundreds eighteen eighties.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, pretty much. So you know, so we the
<v Speaker 2>full sweep of human occupation is is pretty much represented
<v Speaker 2>here for the most part. We'll say back to Clovis periods,
<v Speaker 2>so twelve thousand years yeah, more or less. We know
<v Speaker 2>now that there were people here much earlier. We don't
<v Speaker 2>know exactly keeps getting pushed back, right, I mean across
<v Speaker 2>North America.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, years, twenty years.
<v Speaker 2>Some people said there's been some some sites where they've
<v Speaker 2>found evidence I think as early as thirty five, but
<v Speaker 2>those contexts were questionable. Yeah, so those that's the you know,
<v Speaker 2>books still out. Jury's still out on that one. So
<v Speaker 2>we're continuing to learn more. But we know that people
<v Speaker 2>were here in the Big Ben region by at least
<v Speaker 2>twelve thousand years ago. The thing is that a lot
<v Speaker 2>of those early early sites we suspect were washed away
<v Speaker 2>during flood events, probably during the Alta thermal which was
<v Speaker 2>a hot, dry period, and so a lot of them
<v Speaker 2>were just erased. And so finding an intact paleo Indian
<v Speaker 2>side is difficult. We have a little bit better idea
<v Speaker 2>now kind of places that we might look to do that,
<v Speaker 2>but it's been historically difficult. And so the two sort
<v Speaker 2>of flagship paleo sites in the region were the day
<v Speaker 2>Charles Kelly's site and Big Ban National Park and the
<v Speaker 2>Chisos and then the Genevieve Likes Duncan site on the
<v Speaker 2>O two ranch. Where is that on the O two
<v Speaker 2>it's south of the Paisano Plateau. So if you're going
<v Speaker 2>south on one eighteen, it's just off to the right,
<v Speaker 2>it's the big expanse. Once you drop off the where
<v Speaker 2>one eighteen Highway one eighteen runs out of Alpine south
<v Speaker 2>towards Big Ben.
<v Speaker 1>Oh okay, yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And so you go through Turilingua, but between Alpine and
<v Speaker 2>Urilingua you pass Elephant Mountain. And then once you pass
<v Speaker 2>Elephant Mountain you get into a large flat desert expanse
<v Speaker 2>and that is pretty much the O two Ranch on
<v Speaker 2>both sides. And that's what elevation. That's lower elevation, it's
<v Speaker 2>lower elevation. It's mostly desert scrub country. They have a
<v Speaker 2>little bit of higher stuff along the edge of the
<v Speaker 2>flank of the escarpment, but most of its little desert scrub.
<v Speaker 1>So the people who were living there back then, I
<v Speaker 1>mean there's not even is there a name for the
<v Speaker 1>culture or what is the.
<v Speaker 2>Well, we pretty much sub divide cultures prehistorically. Of course,
<v Speaker 2>they didn't have we don't know, tribal names that they
<v Speaker 2>what they called themselves back in those days. So we
<v Speaker 2>refer to them in really broad terms like Paleo Indian
<v Speaker 2>or Early Archaic or Middle Archaic people late archic, late prehistoric,
<v Speaker 2>and these are just time periods subdivisions within that do
<v Speaker 2>exist in certain you know context, but they're often defined
<v Speaker 2>by technology. So point styles Clovis point versus a fulsome
<v Speaker 2>point versus the late Paleo indies.
<v Speaker 1>That's pretty reliable.
<v Speaker 2>Obviously, it is because those have been proven in dated contacts,
<v Speaker 2>meaning they were dated after carbon fourteen.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy. So just making an arrow point in this
<v Speaker 1>certain shape, it was right. Yeah, if I had a
<v Speaker 1>friend of mine, he's a long distance hiker, he was.
<v Speaker 1>He goes in Death Valley all the time, and he
<v Speaker 1>goes in these fucking mountains where like no one's probably
<v Speaker 1>been in a few centuries. And he's a tall, lanky guy.
<v Speaker 1>Just you know, fucking blows my mind. And he found
<v Speaker 1>a clothes point on the middle. He's found a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of new plant species doing that too, like just you know,
<v Speaker 1>rare plants with narrow distributions that aren't known to science yet. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>he just found a member of asta racy that that
<v Speaker 1>is like that. But he find a Clovis point somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>He doesn't take the ship either, which I think is cool.
<v Speaker 1>It takes a photo. GPS points that and puts it
<v Speaker 1>back there, because that's always it's a whack and people
<v Speaker 1>take it a little much like put in your mantle.
<v Speaker 2>Now, well, when you think about it deeply, you know
<v Speaker 2>it's clear that the right thing to do is to
<v Speaker 2>leave it there, and he did the right thing. That's
<v Speaker 2>the right thing. Take a picture, take a GPS location,
<v Speaker 2>leave it where it's where it is. You know, honestly
<v Speaker 2>as a scientist, as an archaeologist, if I had my drothers,
<v Speaker 2>that's what we would do. Also, we would leave the
<v Speaker 2>artifacts in place. Uh. The reason so we don't depends
<v Speaker 2>on the research design, but usually it's because we want
<v Speaker 2>to do some in house analysis. The other reason, main reason,
<v Speaker 2>compelling reason, i should say, is when the artifacts are
<v Speaker 2>at risk of being collected.
<v Speaker 1>Well, at least if you're taking if sciences are thinking
<v Speaker 1>that they're studying it, there's data collect there's something, it
<v Speaker 1>can be returned to the site. But if some jackass
<v Speaker 1>is just going to take it and put on his
<v Speaker 1>fucking man, it's like, man, fuck you.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's a significant difference. You know, we try to
<v Speaker 2>be understanding because everybody in their dog back in the
<v Speaker 2>day and even now, you know, artifact collecting was, you know,
<v Speaker 2>a state pastime. I mean even as a kid, that's
<v Speaker 2>one of the things.
<v Speaker 1>I did that happened. It's spiritized criminal. That's insane, right right, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>people just having straight up mummies in their homes. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So that site was one of a number of sites
<v Speaker 2>across the state which served for a while functioned as
<v Speaker 2>a while as a pay to dig You would pay
<v Speaker 2>money to go up there and dig in a rock shelter.
<v Speaker 2>And of course rock shelters, unlike open sites, which are
<v Speaker 2>pretty ubiquitous across the region, rock shelters are very significant because,
<v Speaker 2>for one thing, you have a very focused, intensive occupation
<v Speaker 2>inside those spaces, right, That's one thing. The second thing
<v Speaker 2>is that that rock shelters afford a level of preservation
<v Speaker 2>that we do not get on open sites. So perishables
<v Speaker 2>are able to you know, to remain intact for very
<v Speaker 2>long periods of time.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I was touching thirty thousand year old sloth ship.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, spirit eye.
<v Speaker 1>That was crazy. That was nuts, man, exactly. I'm glad
<v Speaker 1>I was able to get in there too. I think
<v Speaker 1>if the dude would have known who I was, maybe
<v Speaker 1>would have saidn't though, But anyway, yeah, yeah, So anyway, okay,
<v Speaker 1>so we okay, so that's a pretty reliable system of
<v Speaker 1>dating is the points, and there's Clovis points from this
<v Speaker 1>area that have been recovered.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, there have been, there have been you know, they're
<v Speaker 2>mostly fragmentary, but we have we have a few and
<v Speaker 2>mostly what we found what what the archaeology suggests that
<v Speaker 2>there was very very light occupation during that period, that
<v Speaker 2>the real human occupation sort of across the region didn't
<v Speaker 2>start to happen in an in you know, we're in
<v Speaker 2>place sort of adaptations started to happen until the late
<v Speaker 2>Paleoed period. So we're talking to maybe you know, eleven
<v Speaker 2>thousand years ago to about eighty five hundred years ago
<v Speaker 2>something like that.
<v Speaker 1>What was the climate like here?
<v Speaker 2>Very very much wetter, you know, so we're at the
<v Speaker 2>tail end of the Pleistocene, right. You know, the lower
<v Speaker 2>elevations would have had the pinions juniper that now have scrub,
<v Speaker 2>mesquite and creosot, that's one example. At the higher elevations
<v Speaker 2>you would have had you know, aspen and much more messic.
<v Speaker 1>Madrones, the drones two madrones out in Picos County, Man
<v Speaker 1>just growing in this little wash. I was like this
<v Speaker 1>shouldn't be here.
<v Speaker 2>This is crazy, right, So you know you do still
<v Speaker 2>find examples of relics.
<v Speaker 1>Old they were big drones.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I relict, I relict, you know, species, I relict individual.
<v Speaker 1>Do you see many of those? Many madrones are like
<v Speaker 1>around here and no in.
<v Speaker 2>The hills No, no, no there, I mean if you
<v Speaker 2>crawl into canyons you'll see them.
<v Speaker 1>Are there with drones in Big Bend in the Chiefs, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there are. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And there's some just right outside of Alpine too that
<v Speaker 2>I've I saw just a couple of weeks ago. So
<v Speaker 2>it can't Miter Peak, which which if you can go
<v Speaker 2>out there with a reservation, it's it's managed by the
<v Speaker 2>Girl Scouts of America, but it's kind of a little
<v Speaker 2>known and underutilized resources. It's north of town, well north
<v Speaker 2>west of town. It's right by Miter Peak.
<v Speaker 1>It gets some seeds.
<v Speaker 2>Man, it's beautiful out there.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So they have big madrones in that in that canyon
<v Speaker 2>up there, and there's a it's a naha and flowing water.
<v Speaker 2>So it's it's a it's tell everybody it's not. It's
<v Speaker 2>basically a natural uhank tank. Yeah, natural bowl that's typically
<v Speaker 2>in the rock in the bottom of a wash or
<v Speaker 2>maybe a solution cavity in limestone somewhere else. But basically
<v Speaker 2>it just allows water to accumulate holes water just like
<v Speaker 2>a bowl wood, whereas for a long periods of time
<v Speaker 2>after a rain, whereas you know, everywhere else, it washes
<v Speaker 2>off or soaks in. So where we have it's a
<v Speaker 2>naha sort of bearing bedrock. It's They're very significant for
<v Speaker 2>wildlife and they most likely almost certainly were prehistorically for
<v Speaker 2>people to as water resources.
<v Speaker 1>So the I guess the people were living here, like
<v Speaker 1>eleven dousand, any idea what they were doing. Was it
<v Speaker 1>mostly just hunt their gather. Was there any kind of
<v Speaker 1>like cultivation anything.
<v Speaker 2>Like that, Nothing that we've we know about. Of course,
<v Speaker 2>you know, agriculture came relatively late, but they were all
<v Speaker 2>hunter gatherers, and for the full sweep of human history
<v Speaker 2>in the Big Bend and as is most across most
<v Speaker 2>of the state of Texas, hunter gather was the predominant adaptation.
<v Speaker 2>In fact, farming in this region was the anomaly, and
<v Speaker 2>it happened very late. It happened in a very abbreviated fashion,
<v Speaker 2>and we can't really even call those people necessarily agriculturalists
<v Speaker 2>because they were they were probably so part time that
<v Speaker 2>it was it was kind of hinging on that on
<v Speaker 2>that border. Those are still open questions, a lot of
<v Speaker 2>research yet to be done down in that area. And
<v Speaker 2>that's what I'm talking about, is the area around Forsiitio Redford.
<v Speaker 2>Those are what we call the La Junta district culturally speaking,
<v Speaker 2>and that was the kind of southeasternmost extension of put
<v Speaker 2>blowing culture in the Americas. But what they were doing there,
<v Speaker 2>the majority of research happened in the nineteen thirties and
<v Speaker 2>forties and there's been very little since and so we
<v Speaker 2>have a lot of open questions and in fact, so
<v Speaker 2>I'm hoping that more research will get done in the
<v Speaker 2>near future. There's a lot of questions we have yet
<v Speaker 2>to answer.
<v Speaker 1>So it was still it was still dry, but it
<v Speaker 1>was wetter than it is now, and it was certainly
<v Speaker 1>the water table was a lot higher, and there were
<v Speaker 1>probably still like flowing springs.
<v Speaker 2>Yess, absolutely springs where they do not exist now. And
<v Speaker 2>that's pretty much true throughout most of prehistory, with one
<v Speaker 2>major exception, and that was what we call the Alta
<v Speaker 2>thermal which was about from eighty five to around forty
<v Speaker 2>five hundred years ago, a very long period of time
<v Speaker 2>four thousand years where it was, it got increasingly hotter
<v Speaker 2>and drier, probably even hotter and drier than it is today.
<v Speaker 2>And during that period there was a massive landscape changes,
<v Speaker 2>not just in the vegetation but also in because of erosion.
<v Speaker 2>Patterns changed, and so a lot of these higher landforms
<v Speaker 2>that had hosted a lot of vegetation and was able
<v Speaker 2>to develop soil when the alta thermal came and those
<v Speaker 2>plants died away and you get you know, massive flood events.
<v Speaker 2>All that settlement washed from those higher landforms down into
<v Speaker 2>lower valleys and redeposited, and in some cases those areas
<v Speaker 2>became pretty stable landforms over time, and they were used
<v Speaker 2>by prehistoric people as living surfaces. But yeah, so that
<v Speaker 2>period of time was very different from today. But then
<v Speaker 2>it started to revert back too much, way better wetter periods,
<v Speaker 2>And we've had a couple of pulses throughout time where
<v Speaker 2>it was significantly wetter and cooler than today.
<v Speaker 1>Most of the moisture was coming from where the south
<v Speaker 1>or the east, or where from do you know.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I'm not really not sure. The weather patterns
<v Speaker 2>probably were different, slightly different than today. You know. Now
<v Speaker 2>we're in a monsoonal pattern, and I think, you know,
<v Speaker 2>there are probably times in the past when maybe that
<v Speaker 2>wasn't the predominant weather pattern in terms of rainfall in
<v Speaker 2>this region, that it was more spread out across the seasons.
<v Speaker 2>The monsoonal pattern basically is where a high you know,
<v Speaker 2>a zone of high pressure is generally moves it migrates northward,
<v Speaker 2>allowing this region to sort of open up to moisture.
<v Speaker 2>It comes from the south, primarily a lot of its
<v Speaker 2>remnants from powerful hurricanes. They enter into Mexico and kind
<v Speaker 2>of get funneled up through here. So bigger canes are
<v Speaker 2>often really good news for this region because when we
<v Speaker 2>get remnants of that, it really that's when we get
<v Speaker 2>really good region wide rains. Otherwise they tend to be
<v Speaker 2>very very localized.
<v Speaker 1>How long What was the megafauna like back then? I mean,
<v Speaker 1>when did it really go out ten thousand years ago?
<v Speaker 1>Was it last a little bit longer or what?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, more of that. You know, during the late Plastocene,
<v Speaker 2>we started to lose a lot of these large mammals,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the willy mammoths, the giant bison, giant groundsloss sabertoothcats,
<v Speaker 2>those kinds of things started to die out in succession,
<v Speaker 2>and there's courts on a long debate about whether that
<v Speaker 2>was human caused or whether it was environment, or whether
<v Speaker 2>it was the interplay of both. Yeah, and most people
<v Speaker 2>think that that was really an interplay of both. But
<v Speaker 2>the argument for humans being a significant factor in there
<v Speaker 2>has really been bolstered, I guess in recent years. It's
<v Speaker 2>hard to deny that our culpability in that, yeah, man,
<v Speaker 2>And that that really opens up a really doubtable, much
<v Speaker 2>bigger conversation because you know, we've we've for many years
<v Speaker 2>looked towards Native Americans as sort of being the you know,
<v Speaker 2>sort of the guiding light for conservation.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there's somehow different from every other species of human primate,
<v Speaker 1>which I don't mean they were, and I think I
<v Speaker 1>think that's true to an extent, But I think they weren't.
<v Speaker 1>I think only with certain cultures obviously, And I think
<v Speaker 1>it was something that was learned, Like they probably learned
<v Speaker 1>from having catastrophic events that faced them and being like,
<v Speaker 1>we got to get our ship together because the way
<v Speaker 1>we're living isn't gonna work, which we would be good
<v Speaker 1>to do, but especially like the way the American left
<v Speaker 1>has embraced identitarianism and all this stupid you know, And
<v Speaker 1>I get it to an extent, because there's certainly a
<v Speaker 1>social context for oppression that's been there, but then conflating
<v Speaker 1>that with like, oh, because you're this, you're automatically going
<v Speaker 1>to know, because you're Native American, you're automatically going to
<v Speaker 1>know how to steward the land, and all this corny
<v Speaker 1>shit can get the fuck out of here. I'm sorry.
<v Speaker 1>There's there's, you know, pros and cons to both cultures.
<v Speaker 1>There's probably a lot of I'm always criticizing Anglo culture especially,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, I just don't buy that class draft. And
<v Speaker 1>it's funny too because I pointed that out, like, well,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like the MAJORI got the New Zealand and
<v Speaker 1>the most one extinct one hundred and two hundred years later,
<v Speaker 1>and some people are just like and none of them
<v Speaker 1>have any background in natural sciences of course to ever
<v Speaker 1>say this, but some people are just like, no, that's
<v Speaker 1>not true. That never happened. I'm like, wow, I'm fucking sorry,
<v Speaker 1>but it looks like it did. Yeah, you know, we're humans,
<v Speaker 1>a human that's what we do you know it's It
<v Speaker 1>doesn't mean we automatically have this enlightened state and self
<v Speaker 1>awareness about our place in the ecosystem just because you're.
<v Speaker 2>One, you know, melon, and we're just like any other
<v Speaker 2>animal on this planet, organism on this planet is it's
<v Speaker 2>it's you know, our intentions to reproduce and our and
<v Speaker 2>our goals are largely self interest. You know. That's just how.
<v Speaker 1>Funny to me how that stuff like triggers some people.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, look, man, this is probably what happened. I'm sorry,
<v Speaker 1>Like this is what Well.
<v Speaker 2>You know, those a lot of myths die hard, and
<v Speaker 2>that's that's one of them that a lot of us
<v Speaker 2>want to hang on to because we like it. It's
<v Speaker 2>very convenient. Uh and and you know, there's there's some
<v Speaker 2>merit to it. There's a lot of merit to it.
<v Speaker 2>We could we could go you know into that, but
<v Speaker 2>but the fact is that humans have been hard on
<v Speaker 2>the planet for a very long Well.
<v Speaker 1>There's merit that comparing different cultures.
<v Speaker 2>Absolutely absolutely, and a lot of that revolves around their
<v Speaker 2>belief systems, right, so you compare and contrast you know,
<v Speaker 2>Judeo Christian tradition to Native American you know, any number
<v Speaker 2>of Native American religions, and there are some really start yeah,
<v Speaker 2>stark differences. Uh. You know, when you get away from
<v Speaker 2>sort of this idea of monotheism and you get away
<v Speaker 2>from this idea that humans were created in the image
<v Speaker 2>of God, then it's you're looking at a very different lands.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's yeah, and I think it's what caused
<v Speaker 1>those societies in Europe before they even cross the ocean,
<v Speaker 1>they ex terminate all their nature you're worshiping people or
<v Speaker 1>you know, pagan whatever, and then and then start turning
<v Speaker 1>the whole society into this feudal stay where everything was
<v Speaker 1>controlled by a small minority, kind of similar we have today,
<v Speaker 1>and everyone else was just a surf and a peon.
<v Speaker 1>And then you know, more of that fuckery. And then
<v Speaker 1>what we see that came over the ocean was the
<v Speaker 1>result of a few centuries of that, you know, but
<v Speaker 1>it's still like in the grand context of human history,
<v Speaker 1>that's still a small amount of time. Like there was,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and I'm sure this ship has been going on,
<v Speaker 1>like mass killings and tribalism and all this ship and
<v Speaker 1>fighting over dumb ship, and it's been going on for
<v Speaker 1>thousands of years, like history is littered with mass graves, man,
<v Speaker 1>and we were signs of you look at chimps and
<v Speaker 1>that's what they do too. They're fucking nuts, you know,
<v Speaker 1>they're like, it's crazy. The bonobos are different, but we didn't.
<v Speaker 1>We didn't get too much of that. Yeah, that's similarity there.
<v Speaker 1>I wish we did. But but anyway, but but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the MegaFon of thing is just so crazy to me
<v Speaker 1>because it's like these things were here so recently and
<v Speaker 1>now they're gone. And like the plants, I deal with
<v Speaker 1>plants all the time that bear bear the scars, the
<v Speaker 1>evolutionary scars, if you want to call them that, of
<v Speaker 1>having evolved with these things. Like when I was in
<v Speaker 1>the Dominican Republic, I was seeing that. You know, you
<v Speaker 1>see these palms that produce these eight inch long spines
<v Speaker 1>on them, and you're like, man, what the hell? You know,
<v Speaker 1>like there's nothing here today like this didn't evolve for
<v Speaker 1>a goat, you know, or like any of the small
<v Speaker 1>deer like creatures like this was for a ground sloth.
<v Speaker 1>There's something bigger that's gone though. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's wild man. Same thing with like some of the
<v Speaker 1>cac din Chile and some of the columniar cac Dian
<v Speaker 1>Chile air like brown Nina. It just gets these foot
<v Speaker 1>long spines and then they stop being produced at like
<v Speaker 1>nine feet, which is like the height that a ground
<v Speaker 1>sloth could probably reach. Ye, yeah, it's cool, it's cool.
<v Speaker 1>It's cool stuff to think about. But in West Texas especially,
<v Speaker 1>it's yeah, the and the Are there any uh pac
<v Speaker 1>ret midden that.
<v Speaker 2>Have been investigated in the region.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, well, yeah, like in West Texas, Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>There are. And that's that's how you know, that's a
<v Speaker 2>lot of that's why we know a little bit about
<v Speaker 2>the natural environment in the past because of packrat midden studies.
<v Speaker 2>There were some really significant ones that were done from
<v Speaker 2>packrat middens collected around Real Grand Village. Uh, And but
<v Speaker 2>there's been a number of others and so by virtue
<v Speaker 2>of those packrat middens, which of course contained can contain
<v Speaker 2>very very old vegetation, uh, we're able to sort of
<v Speaker 2>reconstruct uh you know, vegetative history.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, what have they found, I mean, what what.
<v Speaker 2>Have Well, basically one thing that they found is that
<v Speaker 2>that that the the Real Grand Village area was kind
<v Speaker 2>of a refugium for desert vegetation during during the wetter
<v Speaker 2>pulses that some of the like cacti and and maybe
<v Speaker 2>kreosote bush things like that sort of hunkered down in
<v Speaker 2>that area were still pretty hot and dry and spread
<v Speaker 2>out from there as conditions started to dry out and
<v Speaker 2>get hotter. But we also know, of course from other
<v Speaker 2>middens that that, like I said, the vegetation that we
<v Speaker 2>find now thousands of feet higher in elevation, we're down
<v Speaker 2>in the land flaws, right.
<v Speaker 1>So it's you can kind of I mean, I guess
<v Speaker 1>what trying to imagine what would look like, you would
<v Speaker 1>kind of imagine it more of like an Edwards Plateau. Yes,
<v Speaker 1>I think some more like the Edwards Plateau Big Bend Desert.
<v Speaker 2>And maybe some areas that were more savannah like. And
<v Speaker 2>it probably also depended on how much, you know, fire
<v Speaker 2>ecology played into the you know, into the local was fire.
<v Speaker 1>Was fire a part of the landscape here?
<v Speaker 2>Absolutely? You don't think that, but yeah it was, you know,
<v Speaker 2>you because now there's very few parts of the desert
<v Speaker 2>that can even carry fire. But what we found is that, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>a lot of significant portions of the desert burned on
<v Speaker 2>about twenty year intervals, and.
<v Speaker 1>So it must have been woodland then, damn well.
<v Speaker 2>And grasslands. Yeah, yeah, so those grasslands would have burned too,
<v Speaker 2>and some of those were a lot of them are
<v Speaker 2>of course natural lightning cause fires, but there were also
<v Speaker 2>a lot of anthropogenic fire back in the day. We
<v Speaker 2>don't have direct evidence of that here, but we know
<v Speaker 2>it was widespread practice and sure, so we're certain that
<v Speaker 2>that happened.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy, but that's so cool.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so you know, fire managed landscape.
<v Speaker 1>Was what about how important was let your gia a
<v Speaker 1>gob because that's a that's a huge food source. Once
<v Speaker 1>you get very significant spiny leaf blades.
<v Speaker 2>You got this massive heart of so agave is you know,
<v Speaker 2>generally we're just a really important food source prehistorically. Uh.
<v Speaker 2>And they were harvested and cooked in underground earth ovens
<v Speaker 2>for twenty four to forty eight hours to render them
<v Speaker 2>edible and then so they would dig them up and
<v Speaker 2>then they could eat them as is, or typically what
<v Speaker 2>they'd did is made them into cakes and they dry
<v Speaker 2>them out and they could be stored.
<v Speaker 1>They're so sweet. Do you ever eat like roasted a
<v Speaker 1>g that's been Oh my.
<v Speaker 2>God, it's crazy, really sweet and sugar exactly, And so
<v Speaker 2>one of the things that that we've that archaeologists have
<v Speaker 2>been interested in more recent years with a lot of
<v Speaker 2>research into earth ovens and burner rock middens, is that
<v Speaker 2>the suspicion is that a lot of these uh agaves
<v Speaker 2>that were being processed were actually ultimately intended for fermented beverages.
<v Speaker 2>Oh really, yeah, that this that they were going to
<v Speaker 2>be made into fermented drink.
<v Speaker 1>What what makes them think that?
<v Speaker 2>Well? Uh, it it relates to evidence that we found
<v Speaker 2>in areas like paku May Consas Grandes, where that was
<v Speaker 2>part of a much bigger trade network. But there at
<v Speaker 2>pacu May, we've they found earth ovens and very specific
<v Speaker 2>processing areas where they were clearly furmenting agave and making
<v Speaker 2>beer just in pots and yeah and in vats.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>So they've found that it was like a polk then, right, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>kind of like a poolque uh There's they've other areas
<v Speaker 2>like around the pueblos around Elpaso, they've found evidence of
<v Speaker 2>jars that have corrosion on the inside. They're pitted, and
<v Speaker 2>they they believe that a lot of that pitting was
<v Speaker 2>caused from the acidity of the fermentation process. So there's
<v Speaker 2>been increasing evidence to support that idea. Now, I think
<v Speaker 2>that that was probably limited to areas where there was
<v Speaker 2>more of a poll blowing presence, where there were you know,
<v Speaker 2>larger aggregations of people and pottery. Also, we didn't have
<v Speaker 2>that here except down at La Junta and there in
<v Speaker 2>an abbreviated way. So we have no evidence for that here.
<v Speaker 2>But we definitely have evidence of agave processing. So let's
<v Speaker 2>sget inother agaves were roasted in these pits that made
<v Speaker 2>that were basically earth ovens subterranean pressure cookers, if you will.
<v Speaker 2>That leave a very pronounced uh, you know, feature on
<v Speaker 2>the landscape.
<v Speaker 1>That stays for a while.
<v Speaker 2>It stays for They're very very persistent because they're made
<v Speaker 2>of rock. And if the if the oven was reused
<v Speaker 2>over many, many many years, or it was used very
<v Speaker 2>intensively in one episode, or was years used over one
<v Speaker 2>hundreds or even thousands of years, you find accumulations of
<v Speaker 2>burned rock around them that can be a meter two
<v Speaker 2>meters high.
<v Speaker 1>Especially when a rock splits from being heated.
<v Speaker 2>Exactly it is, yeah, And what would happen is they
<v Speaker 2>would reuse rocks when they could, but rocks when they
<v Speaker 2>were fired would break into smaller and smaller pieces. They
<v Speaker 2>would lose their density and they were lose their ability
<v Speaker 2>to hold heat, and so those were discarded. And as
<v Speaker 2>those were discarded, they were just thrown out of the pit,
<v Speaker 2>and over time those accumulated into huge mountains that we
<v Speaker 2>call burned rock middens. And so you find those in
<v Speaker 2>certain parts of the Big Bend. They're not as common
<v Speaker 2>here as other parts, but central Texas.
<v Speaker 1>They kind of expected where you will find them, like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>this looks like an ideal spot. It's got this certain
<v Speaker 1>carve out in the landscape. This makes sense that this
<v Speaker 1>would be.
<v Speaker 2>A yeah, if you know where to look.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I remember going when I went to someone
<v Speaker 1>with someone to spirit I Cave. I remember we stopped
<v Speaker 1>at a spot where there was one of those little
<v Speaker 1>midden areas and yeah, there were burned scars everywhere. Have
<v Speaker 1>you you been to spirit I Cave for right? Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>Is that what's the story with that? That was the
<v Speaker 1>place was getting looted in the fifties by people that
<v Speaker 1>were just start just come paid a dig and you
<v Speaker 1>can take whatever you find.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it was and that's that's been the case,
<v Speaker 2>you know, across across the state and elsewhere. Private land
<v Speaker 2>is you know, those resources are not protected and so
<v Speaker 2>ranchers can do anything they want. And in this case,
<v Speaker 2>that rancher chose to open it up as a pay
<v Speaker 2>to dig so people would.
<v Speaker 1>Come in because he owned the land and everything the land.
<v Speaker 2>And that's that's the thing. So if you own it,
<v Speaker 2>you can you can choose to uh to do that,
<v Speaker 2>and that that's what happened, and so a lot of
<v Speaker 2>the significant archaeological resources were taken out of that before
<v Speaker 2>scientists ever got a chance at it.
<v Speaker 1>That's so fucking crazy.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I mean, especially considering that they were taking mummies out,
<v Speaker 2>taking the two bodies out, dead dead people. You know
<v Speaker 2>that we had been interred there in a very respectful
<v Speaker 2>ceremonial way, and then these yahoo's are digging them up
<v Speaker 2>and putting them on display in their living room. Of
<v Speaker 2>course they end up in the closet and then they
<v Speaker 2>don't want to admit that they have it because it
<v Speaker 2>gets sticky.
<v Speaker 1>That's what happened, right there was one of those we're
<v Speaker 1>both tracked down, both of the mummies that were in there.
<v Speaker 2>I think one of them was tracked down. The other
<v Speaker 2>one's still out. We think they know where it probably is.
<v Speaker 2>But the guy who Uh. You know, I think part
<v Speaker 2>of it might just be embarrassment and having had it
<v Speaker 2>in the first place.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's well, the people who collected are dead obviously, right,
<v Speaker 1>Like they've got to be long they've got to be
<v Speaker 1>long dead. This was or maybe not.
<v Speaker 2>I don't well, I think yeah, no, I think that that.
<v Speaker 2>You know, some of them are still living. But even
<v Speaker 2>if they're not, you know, their descendants may have you know,
<v Speaker 2>inherited supposed to. I think. So if you've got a
<v Speaker 2>dead body, it's good to get rid of it as
<v Speaker 2>soon as possible.
<v Speaker 1>Move. Yeah, that's a dick move.
<v Speaker 2>You know. The right thing to do is you know.
<v Speaker 2>Ever since NACPRA, Uh, it's it's become kind of mandated
<v Speaker 2>and legislated to uh to address burials in a certain way.
<v Speaker 2>So tribal consultation is a big thing. Uh, and uh,
<v Speaker 2>it's become more of an issue. I don't like to
<v Speaker 2>mess with burials personally. There's an incredible amount of data
<v Speaker 2>that you can get from them. It's really useful, but
<v Speaker 2>it's such a sticky mess. And it also it's you know,
<v Speaker 2>there's an issue of respect that I prefer not to.
<v Speaker 1>Uh.
<v Speaker 2>You know, if I'm given given the option. And I'm
<v Speaker 2>also very good friends with a Native American man who's
<v Speaker 2>kind of sole purpose in life. His stated purpose in life,
<v Speaker 2>and his goal is to basically reinter a lot of
<v Speaker 2>these bodies that were taken. He wants to put them
<v Speaker 2>back in a respectful way.
<v Speaker 1>I think that stuff is worth studying, and it would
<v Speaker 1>probably the information you collect would probably be really appreciated
<v Speaker 1>by many modern data sentence. But if you're going to
<v Speaker 1>do that, I think you need to have someone who's
<v Speaker 1>a modern data sentate or you know which they can
<v Speaker 1>look at haplotypes and all that stuff figure out how,
<v Speaker 1>but you've got to have someone there to, you know,
<v Speaker 1>do It'd be the same thing if you're like digging
<v Speaker 1>up a stiff at a like a Catholic senate theory.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I'm sure they have the priests go out
<v Speaker 1>and they do whatever. You know, it's just protocols, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>the protocols, not just like, oh look at where we're fine,
<v Speaker 1>you know. Yeah, that's crazy though. Yeah. When what's his face?
<v Speaker 1>Told me about that that that mummified corpse in someone's closet,
<v Speaker 1>I was just like, I was just like it was
<v Speaker 1>one of those moments was like only in fucking Texas, man, Like,
<v Speaker 1>that's just totally fine, Like whatever, you know, big crazy man,
<v Speaker 1>that's crazy. Are they ever going to get that back?
<v Speaker 1>You think? Or is the or is that lady like no,
<v Speaker 1>it's mine?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I don't know. I mean I think I think
<v Speaker 2>the one hold out it. Maybe they're claiming they don't
<v Speaker 2>have it. Oh that was the last I heard, and
<v Speaker 2>I have not kept up with this, so it's it's
<v Speaker 2>an ongoing thing that you know, there's other people that
<v Speaker 2>probably could.
<v Speaker 1>Dude saw it and collected a tooth like they know
<v Speaker 1>maybe well.
<v Speaker 2>That was one that was at the at a museum
<v Speaker 2>I think up in Pecason. Oh yeah, he did, he
<v Speaker 2>did do that, and that was you know, a lot
<v Speaker 2>of people I guess took exception to that because maybe
<v Speaker 2>there was there were different there could have been a
<v Speaker 2>different way of going about that.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, but it was. What was interesting though, is that
<v Speaker 1>because of that they were able to get DNA right
<v Speaker 1>and we went out there there was a modern day descendant,
<v Speaker 1>this gentleman from ol Pastor Yeah, friend, yeah, totally, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>he came out with us and it was uh he
<v Speaker 1>was that was like his relative from ten Thoutary six
<v Speaker 1>not amazing. Yeah, that's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>He's a direct to send it.
<v Speaker 1>That's so cool. And so yeah, I said, he asked
<v Speaker 1>for photos I took, So I sent them a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of photos and stuff and yeah, he was like, it's cool.
<v Speaker 1>How you like all the plants here? And I was like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's all I It's like all I focused on. Man. Yeah. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, man, that's a special place. What is uh,
<v Speaker 1>but it's being taken care of, like at least the
<v Speaker 1>landowner is taking decent care of that.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, he's very respectful the modern landowner. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, he's he's really good.
<v Speaker 1>Uh.
<v Speaker 2>There's yeah really no extractive industry going on there. And
<v Speaker 2>he's certainly very in touch with the archaeology there.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>And he's not only you know, protecting it, he's very
<v Speaker 2>been very active in its discovery because he discovered hundreds
<v Speaker 2>of sites out there on his own. Oh really, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>him and his and his ranch helper discovered a lot
<v Speaker 2>of the sites because it's just became a passion of his.
<v Speaker 2>He's over the years.
<v Speaker 1>Who owned it before and what was it? Was it
<v Speaker 1>cattle or what were they doing out there?
<v Speaker 2>Cattle, sheep and goats And there were multiple owners. But
<v Speaker 2>you know, Donald Judd was one of them.
<v Speaker 1>See that is insane to me, Like, why would you
<v Speaker 1>try to graze cattle out in the desert man.
<v Speaker 2>Because it's cheap land and you can.
<v Speaker 1>It's just you're gonna fuck the land into a commas.
<v Speaker 2>I don't care. There's nothing well, I mean, you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's uh, there's multiple reasons why. But I mean maybe
<v Speaker 2>because you just don't have the option of doing anything
<v Speaker 2>else you are poor, or it's you don't care about
<v Speaker 2>the land, especially when you're leasing it and it's not
<v Speaker 2>even your own asset. I mean, typically the story has
<v Speaker 2>been that if that land is not watched carefully or
<v Speaker 2>you don't have a specific lease agreement, they're gonna overgraze it.
<v Speaker 2>It's just gonna happen. It certainly happened in Pensil Canyon.
<v Speaker 2>We still see the evidence of that. I mean it's everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>The evidence of what cattle grazing has done to this
<v Speaker 2>region is very evident to anybody who has a cursory
<v Speaker 2>understanding of of a biology of plants, you know, of
<v Speaker 2>how the landscape's supposed to look.
<v Speaker 1>What is cool, at least is that I don't see
<v Speaker 1>any of the nasty invasive grasses we have down in
<v Speaker 1>South Texas. It's like buffalo grass or grass we have it.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, buffal grass is a big problem.
<v Speaker 1>I've never seen it here. Well it's frost tolerant though.
<v Speaker 2>No it's not. So it's the main problems we have
<v Speaker 2>with it or down on the river corridor where you
<v Speaker 2>can't get rid of it. It's just like you know,
<v Speaker 2>giant cain. Now, Tamarisk is another story. Now that's an
<v Speaker 2>interesting little success story is still ongoing. You know, the
<v Speaker 2>beetle release has been extremely effective and I don't know
<v Speaker 2>how many. I don't know a bio control. Uh, there
<v Speaker 2>was some released years ago around Candelar area, and I
<v Speaker 2>don't know how many more releases there were there were
<v Speaker 2>after that, but that the beetle has has become almost
<v Speaker 2>region wide down there, and so now.
<v Speaker 1>It was invasive too, but it only bothers tamar.
<v Speaker 2>That's the supposition. We hope that the case. But right now,
<v Speaker 2>so there are at tamarisk dying down around Redford now,
<v Speaker 2>like there's a big die off happening and so it's
<v Speaker 2>very visually evident. So it's really changing things great, which
<v Speaker 2>is good, you know, you think, but then also there's
<v Speaker 2>other invasives that that are just taken right over, you know,
<v Speaker 2>or others they're just increases. You know.
<v Speaker 1>There's so many wonderful native grasses here though, it's crazy,
<v Speaker 1>like the boutry of cloas and they all show up
<v Speaker 1>or like just they're still volunteering. Yeah, they're cool. That's
<v Speaker 1>cool to see. It is cool to see tons of
<v Speaker 1>buda lua and yeah, just fucking really dope grasses. Yeah, yeah, Well,
<v Speaker 1>I think that's a good segue into the public versus
<v Speaker 1>private land issue, which I wanted to talk to you about,
<v Speaker 1>because ninety six percent of the state is private land,
<v Speaker 1>I think, and you know, you talk about this. I
<v Speaker 1>made a post on this on social media, and I
<v Speaker 1>got this. I felt like the same, like fucking dim
<v Speaker 1>wit was common thing on everyone because you go to
<v Speaker 1>the pay as just an Anglo dude, you know, double
<v Speaker 1>digit IQ pictures all the same. It's like these guys
<v Speaker 1>were all the same clone of each other, which they
<v Speaker 1>probably are because we're conformist herd species of primate. That's
<v Speaker 1>what we do. There's very few original thinkers in the group,
<v Speaker 1>you know, but and they would all they would all
<v Speaker 1>say the same shit. They're like, you know, like it
<v Speaker 1>goes somewhere else, like, well, you know, I like to
<v Speaker 1>I like it here. I like the you know, I
<v Speaker 1>moved here for family reasons. I like the geology and
<v Speaker 1>the plants here. And so you think people shouldn't be
<v Speaker 1>able to own private property. It's like, holy shit. That
<v Speaker 1>that's when I realized, Like this motherfucker's never left the state,
<v Speaker 1>Like he doesn't realize this isn't about owning private property.
<v Speaker 1>This isn't about like you shouldn't be able to own
<v Speaker 1>a few acres of land. That's about living in a
<v Speaker 1>state where the public, the vast majority of the public,
<v Speaker 1>has absolutely no access to any of it except for
<v Speaker 1>a few crumbs which are paid to access and ridden
<v Speaker 1>with regulations through Texas Parks and Wildlife. I like this.
<v Speaker 1>You know, where's literally every state west of here, you've
<v Speaker 1>got at least forty to sixty percent, in some cases
<v Speaker 1>much more than that, like in the state case of
<v Speaker 1>Nevada public land. And having experienced that, like growing up,
<v Speaker 1>you know, when I was getting into botany, like that
<v Speaker 1>was where I mean, I would go to fucking Utah.
<v Speaker 1>I would follow my hobby does it all the way
<v Speaker 1>to southwestern Utah where it ends to go up to
<v Speaker 1>Nevada to Idaho and there's it's public land everywhere, Like,
<v Speaker 1>where are we going to sleep? Then? I know that's coool.
<v Speaker 1>How about that mountain? Then we can go check out
<v Speaker 1>the other side of that mountain and see what's growing there.
<v Speaker 1>You know, in the morning we wake up and these
<v Speaker 1>dudes have never experienced that, and that's why they're so
<v Speaker 1>triggered by Well, first off, you know, Texas has kind
<v Speaker 1>of got the I mean a lot of places do
<v Speaker 1>in metroanity of Texas, but the arrogance thing, you know,
<v Speaker 1>that's real, like Texas Texas pride, right exactly. Yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>like they've but they've never there's just like no intellect.
<v Speaker 1>They're like they're not they don't realize that this is
<v Speaker 1>the anomaly. This is not normal, Like most of the
<v Speaker 1>Western United States is publicly accessible.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, Unfortunately, Texans aren't known for being really broad thinkers.
<v Speaker 2>There's there's a lot of exceptions, but I mean, culturally speaking,
<v Speaker 2>you know, there's some badass people here, really wonderful people, sure,
<v Speaker 2>but there's.
<v Speaker 1>But the culture itself, the dominant culture, is not an
<v Speaker 1>intellectual They.
<v Speaker 2>Traveled, no, no they're kind of anti intellectual.
<v Speaker 1>Right, proudly anti intellectual.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, and it's it's a it's just interesting you know,
<v Speaker 2>redneck Texas as well and alive. Yeah, it's crazy, man.
<v Speaker 2>That's how you know Trump got in office, right, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>because we're We've got a lot of those guys. And
<v Speaker 2>they're not limited to Texas, of course, they're all over.
<v Speaker 1>I think that's one of the And I'm not a
<v Speaker 1>big I don't I haven't smoked weed in like three years.
<v Speaker 1>But I think that's one of the reasons that they're
<v Speaker 1>so against legalizing pot here too. It's because they want
<v Speaker 1>people drunk, because that's a good way to numb and dumb.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you have to end up dealing with your ship. Ever.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you don't never like think because I mean
<v Speaker 1>a lot of stoners will just sit there gate mouth.
<v Speaker 1>But I certainly sometimes I like, I'll smoke weed and
<v Speaker 1>it'll boom put me into it. I'm like, oh my god,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm seeing myself in a new way, and I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>oh cool, all right, I want to change my behavior.
<v Speaker 1>I want to be like weed can be mildly psychedelic
<v Speaker 1>like that. Think that's probably a large reason why people
<v Speaker 1>like Ken Paxton are so against legalizing Maybe.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, I don't think Ken or most of those
<v Speaker 2>guys know anything about weed.
<v Speaker 1>No, I would love to fucking do them with good time.
<v Speaker 2>I think if they knew a little more, they'd probably
<v Speaker 2>be more relaxed about it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, this guy's love rules.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, totally, totally. And I don't advocate weed either either.
<v Speaker 1>Like I said, I think it can really I've watched
<v Speaker 1>a lot. I mean, it's not going to ruin your life,
<v Speaker 1>like you know, aiast their alcohol, but it's it does.
<v Speaker 1>You can get a lot of nothing done on it,
<v Speaker 1>you go. I know the people who are exceptions, but
<v Speaker 1>I know a lot of people who get loopings. But
<v Speaker 1>the point is it's just you know, it's this, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>this culture here is weird, man, it's like this repression too.
<v Speaker 1>It's like this really and me being like a loud
<v Speaker 1>daego who's like, you know, traveled all over and been
<v Speaker 1>all over. It's weird. Like I say, it's directly evident
<v Speaker 1>to me. I'm like, man, people are afraid of like
<v Speaker 1>voice and opinion sometimes or it's or like say anything
<v Speaker 1>or go against the grain, or the most people are
<v Speaker 1>this is of course a generalization, but it's a there's
<v Speaker 1>like an enforced social order just like any place, but
<v Speaker 1>especially here. Yeah, but it's a weird thing. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>but so how do we get to this public this
<v Speaker 1>private land? This goes back almost two hundred years?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so as the contingencies of history, you know, so Texas,
<v Speaker 2>as we all know, has a really unique history. We
<v Speaker 2>were part of Mexico. I mean we're part of Spain
<v Speaker 2>and before that, and then you know, people from the South,
<v Speaker 2>from the United States started culinating colonizing Texas even when
<v Speaker 2>it was still part of Spain and then turned over
<v Speaker 2>to Mexico and it was part of Mexico. But anyway,
<v Speaker 2>what happened was essentially when the United States, I mean
<v Speaker 2>when Texas joined the Union, they i would say were
<v Speaker 2>allowed they they kind of had to cut a special deal.
<v Speaker 2>What Texas wanted to do was what all the other
<v Speaker 2>Western states did, was they would give up their public
<v Speaker 2>lane sort of to the Feds when they joined the Union.
<v Speaker 2>But Texas, but Texas wanted to do that also. But
<v Speaker 2>they also wanted the US to pay off their war debt.
<v Speaker 2>So they had this warring with Mexico. So they had
<v Speaker 2>this ten million dollar war debt, and they have had
<v Speaker 2>one hundred million acres of land, and they were saying,
<v Speaker 2>so you'll take the land pay off our debt. You said, no,
<v Speaker 2>no way. But it turned out five years later with
<v Speaker 2>the Compromise Agreement of eighteen fifty. Yeah. So yeah, continuing absolutely,
<v Speaker 2>you know, So the question is why does Texas have
<v Speaker 2>no public land to speak of? You know where Nevada's
<v Speaker 2>what fifty five million acres, We've got less than three.
<v Speaker 2>So what happened? Every other state has massive amounts of
<v Speaker 2>public land BLM for a service, you know, other other
<v Speaker 2>kinds of federal land, and we just don't except for primarily,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the national parks and some smaller national grasslands.
<v Speaker 2>And it was because basically, when Texas joined the Union,
<v Speaker 2>they Texas was allowed to keep all of its public
<v Speaker 2>land instead of reverting to federal control.
<v Speaker 1>And why is that they worked.
<v Speaker 2>The kind of it It was part of the Compromise
<v Speaker 2>of eighteen fifty. It was because it was mainly because
<v Speaker 2>Texas had a large war debt. And so what originally
<v Speaker 2>they wanted the US to pay that off in exchange.
<v Speaker 1>For oh didn't want to buy it.
<v Speaker 2>They didn't want to buy it.
<v Speaker 1>So they were like, all right, well let us keep
<v Speaker 1>it and we'll sell it ourselves. Yeah. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>But so what happened in eighteen fifty, that was eighteen
<v Speaker 2>forty five when they joined They say, you keep the
<v Speaker 2>debt and you keep your land. In eighteen fifty, part
<v Speaker 2>of the compromise that chopped a bunch of Texas off
<v Speaker 2>all of New Mexico, the part that is now New
<v Speaker 2>Mexico was chopped off of Texas. And so the agreement was,
<v Speaker 2>we're going to reduce the size of Texas and in
<v Speaker 2>exchange for that, we'll pay off your debt. You still
<v Speaker 2>get to keep your land, the rest of your land.
<v Speaker 1>And so why didn't they want to just buy the
<v Speaker 1>land outright? Why didn't the Feds want to just buy
<v Speaker 1>the land outright?
<v Speaker 2>You know, uh, you know, they had plenty of land.
<v Speaker 2>It was not a scarce commodity.
<v Speaker 1>Uh huh.
<v Speaker 2>And they you know, they didn't just you know, money,
<v Speaker 2>they didn't want they don't want to pay for it,
<v Speaker 2>it's too hard to.
<v Speaker 1>But they would buy New Mexico and these other.
<v Speaker 2>Well they know that was just given so another every
<v Speaker 2>other state. When those states joined the Union, all the
<v Speaker 2>unsold land reverted to Federals.
<v Speaker 1>So when Texas joined the Union, it still had a.
<v Speaker 2>War debt, yes, oh yes, a big war debt.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>And so that had to be resolved and ultimately the US,
<v Speaker 2>I believe, did pay that off and tech but Texas
<v Speaker 2>got to keep its public land. And so what Texas
<v Speaker 2>then proceeded to do was to to sell it or
<v Speaker 2>give it away. And some of it was given landscript
<v Speaker 2>for you know, veterans, but they also gave a huge amount,
<v Speaker 2>about a third of it away to the railroads as
<v Speaker 2>an inducement to build more tracks. So for every mile
<v Speaker 2>of track that was laid, they got sixteen sections of land.
<v Speaker 1>Jesus, but what is a section? How many acres?
<v Speaker 2>So it was six hundred and forty acres?
<v Speaker 1>Oh wow.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. So they became the biggest landholders state by far.
<v Speaker 2>But the catch was they had to sell it within
<v Speaker 2>twelve years, which flooded the market. And what Texas had
<v Speaker 2>wanted to do was to encourage homesteading and just to
<v Speaker 2>be you know, this very democratic sort of agricultural society
<v Speaker 2>where people were out on the landscape. But in effect
<v Speaker 2>it consolidated control because well, for one thing out here,
<v Speaker 2>you can't have a small ranch. It's not viable. You
<v Speaker 2>have to have a lot of country to run a
<v Speaker 2>viable operation. That was true even back then, and so
<v Speaker 2>land became consolidated anyway of Texas' best effort not to
<v Speaker 2>do that. But yeah, Texas, I wouldn't say squandered its
<v Speaker 2>public land, but it certainly wasn't certainly really careful with it.
<v Speaker 2>It basically liquidated a lot of.
<v Speaker 1>It within like a certain amount how many decades, within
<v Speaker 1>how many decades after joining the Union.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I think the majority of it was gone by
<v Speaker 2>eighteen ninety.
<v Speaker 1>Compromise of eighteen fifty applied specifically to Texas. That's like
<v Speaker 1>a Texas thing or what is that exactly?
<v Speaker 2>I think it was involved to other states and there
<v Speaker 2>were other components of it. It was a component of
<v Speaker 2>the Agreement of eighteen fifty, the compromise, So that was
<v Speaker 2>just a piece of it. But Texas lost a lot
<v Speaker 2>of territory there. But they were able to resolve their
<v Speaker 2>debt and they also got to hold on to all
<v Speaker 2>the rest of their public land. Texas did retain about
<v Speaker 2>a third of what they had left for the public
<v Speaker 2>school system, and some of that is still owned by
<v Speaker 2>the state, but all the rest but anyway, that's the
<v Speaker 2>gist of it, and that's why we don't have BLM
<v Speaker 2>land and national forests and things that have been right
<v Speaker 2>next door in New Mexico and Colorado. So if you're
<v Speaker 2>used to the public lands West, if that's what you're
<v Speaker 2>used to, or if that's what you've been exposed to
<v Speaker 2>it at some point in your life, like you have,
<v Speaker 2>and like I have, because I spent a lot of
<v Speaker 2>time in New Mexico and then lived in Montana, you
<v Speaker 2>sort of becoming accustomed to a whole different, you know,
<v Speaker 2>degree of access to land that we just don't have Intoa, and.
<v Speaker 1>You think nothing of crossing a barberie or fence, right,
<v Speaker 1>these are just here to keep the cattle instead. Doesn't
<v Speaker 1>mean I can't go there.
<v Speaker 2>Exactly, And that's that's true on our national forest lands
<v Speaker 2>because those areas are leased out to ranchers that can
<v Speaker 2>graze their cattle or whatever whatever kind of livestock they have.
<v Speaker 2>But it's still public access, so yes, you can still
<v Speaker 2>go out there. Obviously, that's not the case in Texas.
<v Speaker 1>Now.
<v Speaker 2>If you're born and raised in Texas and you don't
<v Speaker 2>get out of the state much, that's just something you
<v Speaker 2>come to understand and accept. But if you've gone away
<v Speaker 2>and you get used to being out and recreating and
<v Speaker 2>experiencing the larger American lands West, and you come back
<v Speaker 2>to Texas, you can feel really confined really quickly. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and it's it's it's kind of startling. So it's given
<v Speaker 2>me that, like yourself, that broader perspective, and it's it
<v Speaker 2>begs the question, why is this like this here?
<v Speaker 1>What's amazing to me is that friends who grew up
<v Speaker 1>here and it's like they were if they go to
<v Speaker 1>other states and I've been with them, Like if friends
<v Speaker 1>who were from Texas we go to other states and
<v Speaker 1>I'm just walking wherever I see a fence, I jump
<v Speaker 1>over it because it's public land, They're like, what what
<v Speaker 1>are you doing? Like it's they're they're afraid. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's holy shit.
<v Speaker 2>Well, because yeah, the mantra is if you cross that fence,
<v Speaker 2>you well may get shot killed.
<v Speaker 1>Right point till you get rested right.
<v Speaker 2>Right or whatever. But so it's you know, trespassing on
<v Speaker 2>private land in Texas is something that you know, a
<v Speaker 2>private land land is sacrificanct.
<v Speaker 1>Hey, it's just so stupid, it's so creepy too, and
<v Speaker 1>I get it to an extent because if like you know,
<v Speaker 1>we have a conservation property, if I saw dudes lurking
<v Speaker 1>around it, I'd want to know what they were doing.
<v Speaker 1>But the way some of these landowners roll up on
<v Speaker 1>you when you're not even on their property, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and they're like what are you doing? It's like I'm
<v Speaker 1>looking at stuff like I've got a like it's obvious
<v Speaker 1>what I'm doing. Like I'm not doing anything nefarious. You know,
<v Speaker 1>I'll be I mean, i'll be nicer than that, you know,
<v Speaker 1>But this is my train of thought. I mean, I've
<v Speaker 1>got this whole thing. I like wave and smile and
<v Speaker 1>talk to people, chat them up and whatever. You know,
<v Speaker 1>I always do that. But it's just so it's like
<v Speaker 1>just settle down, man, you know, like there's nothing you
<v Speaker 1>don't there's nothing here, Like I'm not I'm not at
<v Speaker 1>your house. It's a it's a there's a vastness, there's nothing,
<v Speaker 1>there's no buildings in sight, there's nothing that could be
<v Speaker 1>stolen or tampered with or like what are you?
<v Speaker 2>But if you're on their land, they take it as
<v Speaker 2>often as a personal frame.
<v Speaker 1>It's a personal they're.
<v Speaker 2>Very and they yeah, they don't want to there. They
<v Speaker 2>if you haven't asked permission and you suddenly are there,
<v Speaker 2>they're offended.
<v Speaker 1>Have you found that many landowners who own large parcels
<v Speaker 1>of land will be receptive if you ask?
<v Speaker 2>It can be It depends. I mean, if you're ask
<v Speaker 2>is for purely recreational reasons, that chances are you're going
<v Speaker 2>to get a negative right and say no. The way
<v Speaker 2>I've been able to personally, and one of the things
<v Speaker 2>I've been able to do to circumvent this problem access
<v Speaker 2>is being in a very fortunate position to be able
<v Speaker 2>to offer a service to landowners. That has allowed me
<v Speaker 2>access to vast amounts of private land that other people
<v Speaker 2>just simply don't have. That's helped me out. It doesn't
<v Speaker 2>help anyone else out doing surveys. But during surveys, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>so doing archaeological surveys or if I'm doing historic preservation,
<v Speaker 2>whatever it is, they of course they allow you on
<v Speaker 2>for those purposes. But you're there to work, you know,
<v Speaker 2>and if you recreate a little bit, that's a side thing.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, if you just ask, can I hike on
<v Speaker 2>your property or go camping on your property, I'd be
<v Speaker 2>surprised if you find a sick.
<v Speaker 1>Can I do a plant survey and I'll pull you
<v Speaker 1>out a list of what.
<v Speaker 2>I'm maybe that although they do get us, they get
<v Speaker 2>really sketched out about plants well, because of the Endangered
<v Speaker 2>Species Act.
<v Speaker 1>But that doesn't affect plants in Texas.
<v Speaker 2>They don't know that, and they are always afraid that
<v Speaker 2>you're going to find something that's endangered and that their
<v Speaker 2>land's going to be taken away. And it is such
<v Speaker 2>an entrenched mantra that they even if it's proven untrue,
<v Speaker 2>you can show them all the evidence, they're not going
<v Speaker 2>to believe you. We have organizations that are pretty much
<v Speaker 2>dedicated to doubling down on these kind of ideas. One
<v Speaker 2>is the Davis Mountains Heritage Association, which is based out
<v Speaker 2>of Alpine here, and so that that would be an
<v Speaker 2>interesting conversation to have with some of those guys. They say, well,
<v Speaker 2>they're private property rights. It's private property rights group, and
<v Speaker 2>so they they sort of defend that against any threat.
<v Speaker 2>And one of those threats and the reason that it
<v Speaker 2>started was because there was a push I think it's
<v Speaker 2>twenty years ago, thirty years ago to make part of
<v Speaker 2>the Davis Mountains a national park. And that just created
<v Speaker 2>a firestorm of opposition.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>Really Yeah, yep, it's an interesting story that no one
<v Speaker 2>has for.
<v Speaker 1>The economy there too.
<v Speaker 2>That's crazy, Well, it is, but it's very Again, it's
<v Speaker 2>you're you're touching on something that's really sensitive to landowners
<v Speaker 2>and they feel that even if it's not their land,
<v Speaker 2>it's the ranch next door becomes part of a national
<v Speaker 2>park that is just deeply offensive to them. Wow, on
<v Speaker 2>some levels that I can't quite explain myself, but it's
<v Speaker 2>really bizarre. I will say that, in spite of whatever
<v Speaker 2>views I have on public land and access, I have
<v Speaker 2>cer times in my life worked alongside with private landowners.
<v Speaker 2>We really reached across the aisle where we had a
<v Speaker 2>common cause, and I found myself in the weird position
<v Speaker 2>of defending private property rights. But what I was defending
<v Speaker 2>it from was not folks like you and me. I
<v Speaker 2>was defending it from what should have been an illegal
<v Speaker 2>taking eminent domain for private gain. In that case, it
<v Speaker 2>was the Transpacos pipeline, which was taking land from private
<v Speaker 2>landowners under eminent domain, but it was not intended to
<v Speaker 2>serve the public good.
<v Speaker 1>So you can't form a national park where you can
<v Speaker 1>build a pipeline. The exact state is all kinds of
<v Speaker 1>fucked up. Man. Oh yeah, wow, So what happened with that?
<v Speaker 1>We lost?
<v Speaker 2>We lost after you know, an in battled fight. We lost,
<v Speaker 2>and what we found out kind of way towards the end.
<v Speaker 2>It shouldn't have been this way, but there was a
<v Speaker 2>very little known piece of legislation that had been passed,
<v Speaker 2>I guess quietly years before that handed the power of
<v Speaker 2>eminent domain to any natural gas carrier, regardless of what
<v Speaker 2>the project.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>So this is a level of insanity that you have
<v Speaker 2>a hard time wrapping your head around. But it's on
<v Speaker 2>the books and that's what allowed Transpagos pipeline and all
<v Speaker 2>these other smaller pipelines that are being pushed through to Mexico. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that's crazy.
<v Speaker 1>Where So where does trans Pago's pipeline run from?
<v Speaker 2>Runs from the Waha hub, which is up in the
<v Speaker 2>Permian near uh, what's the town there, Quinosa? From there
<v Speaker 2>to down through it runs right to outside of Alpine, Uh,
<v Speaker 2>you know, through the Pysona Pass uh, and then east
<v Speaker 2>of Marfa down to border crossing, which is actually west
<v Speaker 2>of Presidio M H and so, and then continues on
<v Speaker 2>into Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, that's nuts.
<v Speaker 2>It was. Yeah, it was a very destructive act in
<v Speaker 2>a process. Of course, we were five not just because
<v Speaker 2>we wanted to have something to fight against. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>there were certainly people maybe that were involved that that
<v Speaker 2>was what their intent was. But mine was to stop
<v Speaker 2>the damn thing because really a lot of people here
<v Speaker 2>and myself included, love the Big Ben for its natural
<v Speaker 2>qualities and we fear anything that's any thing that's going
<v Speaker 2>to destroy that, and so fighting against the industrialization of
<v Speaker 2>the last best place in Texas, that was basically what
<v Speaker 2>we were doing. But we didn't stand a chance, and
<v Speaker 2>so we didn't know that. I think the only good
<v Speaker 2>that came out of it was an enduring organization, which
<v Speaker 2>is the Big Ben Conservation Alliance, which still exists. And secondly,
<v Speaker 2>you know, I think we did two things which I'm
<v Speaker 2>proud of. One is that we elevated the region in
<v Speaker 2>a way that maybe it hadn't been before in recognition
<v Speaker 2>of its natural resources. And the other thing was sort
<v Speaker 2>of saying, hey, it's the whole region that's significant, not
<v Speaker 2>just Big Ben National Park State Park. It's the whole thing, right,
<v Speaker 2>because you can't you know, those those ecological and cultural
<v Speaker 2>significance does not stop at the fence boundary, right, It's
<v Speaker 2>the whole thing, and it's all important. So we because
<v Speaker 2>it all did across private lands, we reached out to
<v Speaker 2>and worked with private landowners ranchers.
<v Speaker 1>And they didn't want it either.
<v Speaker 2>They did not, A lot of them did not. A
<v Speaker 2>lot of them didn't want it, but didn't want to
<v Speaker 2>fight it because they felt like they were going to
<v Speaker 2>get a better deal in the end and they didn't
<v Speaker 2>have a chance. And so that was the majority of
<v Speaker 2>landowners we're in that.
<v Speaker 1>Like the same thing with the border wall.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was an eminent domain thing. So yeah,
<v Speaker 2>most of them didn't want it, but some of them
<v Speaker 2>just sucked it up trying to get a better deal.
<v Speaker 2>But those who didn't had to take it to court
<v Speaker 2>and then ended up, you know, getting usually a much
<v Speaker 2>poorer settlement in the end, but still had the pipeline
<v Speaker 2>through them anyway. And one of the stands that we
<v Speaker 2>made was at an archaeological site near Hovey on the
<v Speaker 2>east side of the Davis Mountains up here, and it
<v Speaker 2>was a really significant archaeological site that they were going
<v Speaker 2>to plow right through, and so we were saying, hey,
<v Speaker 2>you know, at least in this case, can you go
<v Speaker 2>around it, let's save this site, and didn't do it.
<v Speaker 1>God, that's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, So we were there to witness the destruction when
<v Speaker 2>when it actually happened, and it was well, it was
<v Speaker 2>the site. You know, it was a multi component site
<v Speaker 2>with a lot of time depth. We don't even know
<v Speaker 2>how much, but at least four thousand years based on
<v Speaker 2>the point types that we were finding. It's a very
<v Speaker 2>large site that had different site components in its different
<v Speaker 2>areas based through it was sort of functionally around a spring,
<v Speaker 2>but they basically plowed through what we would consider a
<v Speaker 2>prehistoric kitchen an area with a bunch of bedrock mortars
<v Speaker 2>and earth ovens.
<v Speaker 1>That's fucking crazy.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, just disregarded that because they didn't have to. The
<v Speaker 2>interesting thing was that they did hire an archaeological survey
<v Speaker 2>done under their own dime. They didn't have to do that.
<v Speaker 1>Why'd they do it just to make them look good.
<v Speaker 2>Apparently, because obviously they weren't following the guidelines of their
<v Speaker 2>own archaeologists. So it was it was interesting and eye opening,
<v Speaker 2>but in the end it was just depressing.
<v Speaker 1>Where was that up?
<v Speaker 2>It's north of Alpine. It's about, you know, twenty miles
<v Speaker 2>north of Alpine, a on a private ranch just east
<v Speaker 2>of the Davis Mountains. It was probably the site may
<v Speaker 2>have been the site that Mendoza came to, you know,
<v Speaker 2>back in the in the eighteen I'm sorry, what was
<v Speaker 2>his Sorry, I can't remember that.
<v Speaker 1>The date No.
<v Speaker 2>Sixteen, sixteen eighty five, I think, wow, holy yeah, so
<v Speaker 2>very early on. Anyway, it was it was part of
<v Speaker 2>a natural trail corridor through there. It was one of
<v Speaker 2>the stops along. There was just a spring just like
<v Speaker 2>Alpine was on that same trail system. And the spring
<v Speaker 2>here at Alpine was another stopping point, uh, throughout history,
<v Speaker 2>throughout prehistory.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, there was. It's they're all dried up now.
<v Speaker 2>Right, some of them still have as a flow trickle trickle, wow.
<v Speaker 2>But but it was a it's a really important side
<v Speaker 2>and it was unfortunate to lose that.
<v Speaker 1>But how deep is the limestone beneath alpined? You know,
<v Speaker 1>because there's limestone everywhere, but there's this all this volcanic
<v Speaker 1>on top of it, right.
<v Speaker 2>There's volcands. I don't know, I don't know the answer
<v Speaker 2>to that. You know, that would be a probably looking
<v Speaker 2>at some well logs, you know, water well logs.
<v Speaker 1>Or yeah, that would be able to deeps the water
<v Speaker 1>table here five hundred feet or something.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I mean, now really, I mean there's the wells
<v Speaker 2>here in town are really shallow, really it wells like
<v Speaker 2>twenty thirty feet.
<v Speaker 1>Wow.
<v Speaker 2>It just depends on where you're at in town. But
<v Speaker 2>there's there's shallow wells. The wells that we operate of
<v Speaker 2>off of now are deep wells, but there's water much
<v Speaker 2>closer to the surface.
<v Speaker 1>But generally it's drier now here than it was twenty
<v Speaker 1>or thirty years ago, right, your old timers talking about
<v Speaker 1>every every afternoon it used to rain here. Yeah, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>that's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>It is. Yeah, I mean that's global climate change in action,
<v Speaker 2>you know. So it's we're seeing it and we're seeing
<v Speaker 2>it come harder and faster than anybody ever predicted, except
<v Speaker 2>the you know, the worst predictions. And that should be
<v Speaker 2>eye opening, and it should it should be reason for
<v Speaker 2>us all to you know, kind of have a come
<v Speaker 2>to Jesus moment and change our actions and change the
<v Speaker 2>way we vote and change the way we live. And
<v Speaker 2>then we're not doing that. And of course what that
<v Speaker 2>means is that we're doing. We're doomed. Were two ways
<v Speaker 2>about it.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, there's so much oil company propaganda out there too,
<v Speaker 1>of course, it's just.
<v Speaker 2>I mean they have all the money, all the attorneys.
<v Speaker 2>You know, you can't fight that. They can put any
<v Speaker 2>spin on that they want, and there's enough global people
<v Speaker 2>out there to wrap it up that, you know, our
<v Speaker 2>fate is kind of sealed. I hate to say that,
<v Speaker 2>but you know, but.
<v Speaker 1>The propaganda is just the dumbing down of America bills.
<v Speaker 1>I've got this guy coming out on the podcast on
<v Speaker 1>Tuesday who's done all these videos. He does a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of videos teaching people shit look organic chemistry and like
<v Speaker 1>YouTube videos. But then he's got all these videos attacking
<v Speaker 1>people like Joe Rogan, not attacking but criticizing them for
<v Speaker 1>just the fucking charlatans that they kind of are, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like the pseudoscientists, and that dude has like climate and
<v Speaker 1>I ares on his podcast left and Right, and they're
<v Speaker 1>just like this whole cult and you know this like
<v Speaker 1>with a far reach, this whole cult of like idiocracy
<v Speaker 1>you just see hitting America, and it's got to be
<v Speaker 1>funded by special interests and wealth and you know, powerful
<v Speaker 1>interests from way up. But it just blows my mind. Man,
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, damn, this is like, this is exactly what
<v Speaker 1>Carl Sagan was talking about, you know, forty years ago
<v Speaker 1>when he wrote the book, you know, the demon haunted
<v Speaker 1>World Science is a candle in the dark. You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's like he's like that whole quote, like I foresee
<v Speaker 1>in America and either my children's future or their children's
<v Speaker 1>future where and then he just starts listing everything that's
<v Speaker 1>happening today. It's like the dumbing down. It's like ignorance
<v Speaker 1>mixed with arrogance, and then this anti intellectualism too. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>It's very pronounced, especially in Texas especially, you know, and
<v Speaker 2>it's it's yeah runs deep and uh you know, but
<v Speaker 2>that also means, you know, where you have something that strong,
<v Speaker 2>you also have a kind of equal and opposite reaction
<v Speaker 2>to that. And that means people like myself and I
<v Speaker 2>guess you and otherre's a lot of whom are native
<v Speaker 2>to Texas, but they don't share those views.
<v Speaker 1>No, there's a bunch of there's some pretty great people here, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>on top of on top of their ship. But it's
<v Speaker 1>just uh, it's just getting away from that dominant culture. Man,
<v Speaker 1>it really is. We're apes, We're tribal apes. You look
<v Speaker 1>at chimps there in groups, were in groups like how
<v Speaker 1>do I feel? How's my buddy? If they just we
<v Speaker 1>do what's around us. You know, we do whatever a little,
<v Speaker 1>whether it's part of the big group or a little group.
<v Speaker 1>We just it's just conformity, you know. And it's the
<v Speaker 1>But the people who are like fuck that, I'm not
<v Speaker 1>gonna do that. I'm gonna do my own ship. I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna this is you know, those are the people I
<v Speaker 1>want to be around. That's those are the gems. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and I don't fall people for being conformist. It's I
<v Speaker 1>think it's in our DNA. That's our social behavior can't erase. However,
<v Speaker 1>many millions of years of that is coded in us.
<v Speaker 1>But man, we got the power to be different, you.
<v Speaker 2>Know, we do have the power to be different. And
<v Speaker 2>that's I guess that's where the disappointment comes in in
<v Speaker 2>my book, is that humanity has the opportunity, has a capability.
<v Speaker 2>It's so much good, you know, and do so many
<v Speaker 2>great things, and we fail and.
<v Speaker 1>It's all dependent them cultural teachings though, and what culture
<v Speaker 1>you're a part of.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, but but you know, we just, yeah, we can't
<v Speaker 2>ever get on the same page, even even within our
<v Speaker 2>own state, within our own political party, much less our
<v Speaker 2>own country, much less the globe, and so you know,
<v Speaker 2>and these rise of dictators and it's a it's a mess.
<v Speaker 1>It's that kind of last forever though. It can't. It'll it'll,
<v Speaker 1>it'll break wall.
<v Speaker 2>It's we're very close, very close to that wall. You know,
<v Speaker 2>America is not the United States is not going to
<v Speaker 2>be in the end. I mean, it's certainly can't maintain
<v Speaker 2>its position as a global superpower forever.
<v Speaker 1>No, No, we're.
<v Speaker 2>Kind of at the end of that story. And whether
<v Speaker 2>you know, whether it's a hostile takeover or we're bombed
<v Speaker 2>to smotherings or what, I don't who knows what's going
<v Speaker 2>to happen.
<v Speaker 1>Or we just kind of become I mean, I think
<v Speaker 1>it's already happened. We're just kind of becoming irrelevant to
<v Speaker 1>a lot of other nations. I think, Yeah, our culture
<v Speaker 1>is just, man, it's crazy. I don't know. You know,
<v Speaker 1>we export some of the biggest, most entitled asshole behavior
<v Speaker 1>and you talk to other people from other countries, it's
<v Speaker 1>what they mean, it's a joke. It's a the American
<v Speaker 1>you know, prototype is kind of a joke.
<v Speaker 2>It is it is.
<v Speaker 1>Just thinks it's the best, but has no experience to
<v Speaker 1>think that it hasn't traveled at all, like this this
<v Speaker 1>unearned arrogance. But it's yeah, it's a shame though, and
<v Speaker 1>no humility and no compassion or gratitude and.
<v Speaker 2>Just you know, certainly not in our leaders. It's just
<v Speaker 2>not in their DNA, it's not their different kind of
<v Speaker 2>animal and our political system I've been sick created then
<v Speaker 2>they've always existed, but it empowers them. And unfortunately those people,
<v Speaker 2>as most as a lot of people know, are not
<v Speaker 2>the best leaders. They're well, actually the worst.
<v Speaker 1>There's that George Carlin bit where he's like, yeah, people
<v Speaker 1>always talk about politicians suck. Oh yeah, they suck. Well,
<v Speaker 1>where do you think they come from? They come from
<v Speaker 1>American universities and American schools and American churches, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>I would say the public sucks. You know, it's and
<v Speaker 1>it's like it gets dark, and he got dark in
<v Speaker 1>the lafter years. He's like, the public sucks. Fuck hope,
<v Speaker 1>but he just goes off about it. He's like if
<v Speaker 1>you have shitty, entitled, arrogant citizens, are gonna have shitty, arrogant,
<v Speaker 1>entitled leaders. That's what we get.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you know, we don't seem to have mechanisms, you know,
<v Speaker 2>to to bring people into the system that do you know,
<v Speaker 2>have insight and compassion, probably because they're smart enough to
<v Speaker 2>know they don't want.
<v Speaker 1>To, right. I would never want to do that in
<v Speaker 1>no way, man. But also it's it's all culture teachings
<v Speaker 1>and this ship. We don't have a national culture anymore.
<v Speaker 1>Our national culture is Chick fil A and consumerism and
<v Speaker 1>driving everywhere and being trapped in a car in the
<v Speaker 1>parking lot and the fucking lawn in front of the
<v Speaker 1>cul de Sac house. That everyone that's like means you've
<v Speaker 1>made it if you've got that. Like, we don't have
<v Speaker 1>a natural culture anymore, a national culture. We don't have
<v Speaker 1>like a or anything worth respecting as a national culture.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's consumerism and that's become everything. Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, we have this incredible freedom in the United States.
<v Speaker 2>It's the freedom to buy any goddamn thing we want. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>because if you look at our other freedoms, they're they're
<v Speaker 2>not quite as fleshed out.
<v Speaker 1>Art science, intellect. That's all fallen off. We've been defunding
<v Speaker 1>that for the last fifty years.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, that's not use since.
<v Speaker 1>Reagan, so forty years, I guess. But anyway, well man,
<v Speaker 1>thanks a lot for being down to come on. It's
<v Speaker 1>I could talk to you for another hour, two, we
<v Speaker 1>could talk forever.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there's there's plenty of fodder out there, plenty of
<v Speaker 2>things to talk about. But you know, glad you're here.
<v Speaker 2>This is an incredible region. And just at any point
<v Speaker 2>that I'm allowed an opportunity to speak, I just urge
<v Speaker 2>people to be respectful of the land and each other,
<v Speaker 2>you know, just that's all it is. It's pretty simple,
<v Speaker 2>because I just see an inordinate amount of disrespect everywhere.
<v Speaker 2>We run disrespectful, and it's painful. So for some of us,
<v Speaker 2>for a lot of people, it doesn't, you know, it's
<v Speaker 2>just it is what is. It doesn't mean anything to them.
<v Speaker 2>But for people who like myself where you know, I
<v Speaker 2>look at a landscape and I see a holistic thing.
<v Speaker 2>It's I don't even see the fences. I see a landscape,
<v Speaker 2>and when I see insults to that, it hurts. It hurts,
<v Speaker 2>really like a physical pain. When I see that pipeline
<v Speaker 2>scar when I see someone blading a new road, when
<v Speaker 2>I see them tearing down a mountain, what John is
<v Speaker 2>doing up here on a mountain is an absolute travesty.
<v Speaker 2>Oh so John Shootvega. He owns with his wife Blue
<v Speaker 2>Water Natural Foods, which is a great asset in Alpine
<v Speaker 2>because it's our only natural food store here. A lot
<v Speaker 2>of us like to go there. Unfortunately, he also owns
<v Speaker 2>a bunch of a mountain and he likes to play
<v Speaker 2>with heavy machinery, and so he's been tearing up that
<v Speaker 2>mountain for several years now. Originally he wanted to make
<v Speaker 2>it into a subdivision, but I think the thing was
<v Speaker 2>he couldn't get the city to agree to give water
<v Speaker 2>and the infrastructure he needed. So he's made it, making
<v Speaker 2>it into an RV park. In the meantime, he's blasting
<v Speaker 2>out pads, and not blasting, he's hammering out pads and
<v Speaker 2>moving a lot of rock up there. I mean, you
<v Speaker 2>can hear his one of those hammer drills, power drills
<v Speaker 2>going when he's doing it anywhere intown and you assume, well,
<v Speaker 2>that's some public works thing, highway department. Maybe, No, it's
<v Speaker 2>some dude up there with a big machine trying to play.
<v Speaker 1>That's crazy too. That's because that's what that's the argument.
<v Speaker 1>You hear people saying in Texas for private land, well,
<v Speaker 1>the private landowner can take care of it. Fuck no, no,
<v Speaker 1>I've seen the private landowner can fuck the land into
<v Speaker 1>a coma and totally scrape it barren and doesn't have
<v Speaker 1>anybody to answer to. You can't do that on federal land.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of federal lands have been turned into solar
<v Speaker 1>farms whatever, but even that's an extensive process. They have
<v Speaker 1>to pay for it. It's it still sucks. That shouldn't
<v Speaker 1>be legal either, but you know it's no private landowners
<v Speaker 1>can do anything. I've seen private landowners multiple times, like
<v Speaker 1>repeatedly just destroy and you know, some rich guy gets
<v Speaker 1>a hair up his ass, thanks he knows what he's doing,
<v Speaker 1>and he just starts destroying shit, and it's sending everything
<v Speaker 1>that lives there running for cover, you know.
<v Speaker 2>So it's unfortunately it's more the rule than the.
<v Speaker 1>Fucking idiots just blasting shit around, like drive drunk and
<v Speaker 1>driving a fucking skid steer around. That's such a thing.
<v Speaker 2>If you have a skitser, you suddenly or bulldozer, you
<v Speaker 2>suddenly really look, you need some dirt to push around,
<v Speaker 2>you need something to do with it, right.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's just yeah, you're exactly right. You've got this toy.
<v Speaker 1>You need to go use it somehow. Absolutely.
<v Speaker 2>And so John's got some big toys and he's using them.
<v Speaker 2>So next time you get a chance, take a look
<v Speaker 2>up there, because that's that's his legacy. That's his legacy
<v Speaker 2>to alphine it. And to me it feels like, you know,
<v Speaker 2>he's just up there kind of giving us the bird.
<v Speaker 1>You could do so much like if man, if you've
<v Speaker 1>got someone who had had even like the slightest inkling
<v Speaker 1>of like restoration or conservation, they could be turning that into.
<v Speaker 2>Nature trails, yeah, or something something beautiful, an asset for
<v Speaker 2>the community.
<v Speaker 1>For like these three hundred pounds to take ships and.
<v Speaker 2>Fucking ostensibly, what he's doing is giving these our veers
<v Speaker 2>a great view of the town. But the cost of
<v Speaker 2>that is he's diminishing the view of the rest of
<v Speaker 2>the people of Alpine. So the community, it's a net loss.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of stuff lives up there too. Yeah, there's
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of I think the there's supposed to be
<v Speaker 1>a fran of stomach population up there. Yeah, someone's telling
<v Speaker 1>me about a bunch of cool I mean, it's crazy.
<v Speaker 2>It's a real disservice, you know. But on that note,
<v Speaker 2>I will say this and any private property rights guy,
<v Speaker 2>this is the first thing they're going to say, and
<v Speaker 2>I want to acknowledge this at the outset, and that
<v Speaker 2>is that there are a lot of private landowners who
<v Speaker 2>do great things. Jeff Fort's a good example. But there's
<v Speaker 2>dozens of them, hundreds thousands way, you know, across the state,
<v Speaker 2>who are respectful, who do good things with the land,
<v Speaker 2>who you know, take care of their wildlife, who are
<v Speaker 2>mindful of the cultural resources, put them into conservation easements,
<v Speaker 2>donate the land to you know, public land.
<v Speaker 1>And in that case the land looks out but it
<v Speaker 1>really does.
<v Speaker 2>But unfortunately that's more the exception than the rule.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's luck of the draw and it's not common.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and being a private landowner, you have the right
<v Speaker 2>to do anything you want on your land.
<v Speaker 1>Well, most people too are just so disconnected from quote
<v Speaker 1>nature or conservation. They have no clue. The don't want
<v Speaker 1>people know corporate logos than you know, three native plants
<v Speaker 1>that go.
<v Speaker 2>Around, right, And so people become landowners, they don't have
<v Speaker 2>really any understanding of the land in an ecologic sense,
<v Speaker 2>and so they don't even know what they're destroying, and
<v Speaker 2>that to me is the big rub. And that was
<v Speaker 2>definitely one of the mantras that we repeated with the pipeline,
<v Speaker 2>because they were putting this pipeline through and we did
<v Speaker 2>not even know the variety of things that they were
<v Speaker 2>destroying the process of that, and until we know. You know,
<v Speaker 2>people hate property rights, people hate the Endangered Species Act,
<v Speaker 2>hate NIPA, hate you know, this idea of environmental review.
<v Speaker 2>But in my mind, every single thing, every road, every
<v Speaker 2>stop sign should have to go through some kind of
<v Speaker 2>review process to say, what is the larger impact of
<v Speaker 2>this taking, how is this going to affect the landscape,
<v Speaker 2>How's it going to affect the wildlife?
<v Speaker 1>Controversial plays like California, it's i mean, people still get
<v Speaker 1>away with shit because you know, but they plays like California,
<v Speaker 1>you have to do ers. Yeah, you got to do
<v Speaker 1>environmental impact reviews and all this. It's mandatory, right, And.
<v Speaker 2>Of course you know that is the case with public
<v Speaker 2>land and also in private land where public funds are used,
<v Speaker 2>but those are pretty isolated cases, and so the mass
<v Speaker 2>majority of Texas is privately owned, and so that means
<v Speaker 2>the vast majority of Texas is at risk of being damaged.
<v Speaker 2>And of course that ship sale, most of it has
<v Speaker 2>been torn up. The worst example locally is the Permian Basin.
<v Speaker 2>They've destroyed whatever good yeah, chicken pok with oil wells.
<v Speaker 2>And of course all that was economically driven, and it
<v Speaker 2>would have been hard to replay that in any version
<v Speaker 2>without the same kind of the same outcome. But bugs
<v Speaker 2>me because they are a different culture. That extractive industry
<v Speaker 2>sort of creates a different culture.
<v Speaker 1>It just is.
<v Speaker 2>Whereas Big ben we had the luck of not having
<v Speaker 2>massive oil reserves.
<v Speaker 1>Just luck.
<v Speaker 2>But so most of our sort of cultural heritage comes
<v Speaker 2>from big ranches and it's a very different culture and
<v Speaker 2>it's a very different mindset, uh. And it's one that
<v Speaker 2>I have much more of a connection to because they
<v Speaker 2>do have much more, much higher awareness of land issues.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, because if you think about it, a lot
<v Speaker 2>of ranchers really consider themselves grass farmers because the grass
<v Speaker 2>is what is the is their primary resource, and so
<v Speaker 2>they have to take care of the land to some
<v Speaker 2>extent or they're screwing themselves. And of course some have
<v Speaker 2>been much better than others and doing that and executing it,
<v Speaker 2>and then you've got other factors that they can't control,
<v Speaker 2>for market and climate. In my books that I've written
<v Speaker 2>about in this area, the Two Ranch History and the
<v Speaker 2>Pentol Canyon book, I deal with that a lot. I
<v Speaker 2>talk about that a lot because it's it's just a
<v Speaker 2>significant factor.
<v Speaker 1>What was going on in Pentho Canyon.
<v Speaker 2>Uh, you know, the Pentol Canyon was what I found there.
<v Speaker 2>It was just a really good little microcosm of early
<v Speaker 2>sort of homesteading. There was a bunch of little ranches,
<v Speaker 2>little homesteads that occurred in that canyon back in the
<v Speaker 2>day when when homesteading was occurring in the eighteen eighties
<v Speaker 2>and nineties. That of course, that was all were consolidated
<v Speaker 2>over time and then became, you know, one big ranch
<v Speaker 2>by the end. But it was a story of those
<v Speaker 2>small beginnings that I that I tell there, and it
<v Speaker 2>was it was they had their own schoolhouse. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>all these ranchers knew each other, There were friends, they
<v Speaker 2>helped each other out.
<v Speaker 1>How long ago was twenty years? Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>Was there? You know? These that school was was in
<v Speaker 2>the nineteen teens, was there? There's still remnants of it.
<v Speaker 2>If you drive through you can si live out here.
<v Speaker 1>Then the railroad was running through here.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, so you know, all these all these settlements were
<v Speaker 2>depending on the railroad. Very little existed before the railroad came,
<v Speaker 2>so it was all after eighteen eighty two.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, like roads, were there any long distance highways.
<v Speaker 2>No highways, you know, there were dirt dirt roads that
<v Speaker 2>were at that point. Most of them had been built
<v Speaker 2>by the military. Other than that, there were just trails
<v Speaker 2>that had had kind of been used through time. So
<v Speaker 2>there was very little out here before the railroads came,
<v Speaker 2>and that was kind of the enabling infrastructure that allowed
<v Speaker 2>this area to be settled. And of course Alpine didn't
<v Speaker 2>even exist, that was the very end of their of
<v Speaker 2>their reign, but they were still here in the in
<v Speaker 2>the eighteen eighties and that's why you know, Fort Davis
<v Speaker 2>was established, was to protect the mail route and people
<v Speaker 2>passing through to California and settlers from Indian raids. But
<v Speaker 2>but yeah, you know, it was just, uh, it's an
<v Speaker 2>interesting history, but you look back at it, we were
<v Speaker 2>stealing that land. We stole all of it, the entire
<v Speaker 2>continent for people who are who were already here, and
<v Speaker 2>so we have these deep seated American values that that
<v Speaker 2>you know, that equal rights and all these things, but
<v Speaker 2>we cannot forget this sort of major, you know, like transgression.
<v Speaker 1>That we did em Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Now, if it wasn't us, it would have been someone else.
<v Speaker 2>That's all true, you know, the more powerful forces going over.
<v Speaker 1>But it doesn't make it.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it doesn't make it right.
<v Speaker 1>Especially the way that this, this civilization, this culture is
<v Speaker 1>treated the land is terrible. It's just fucking you know,
<v Speaker 1>God put it here for us, we can do whatever
<v Speaker 1>we want with it. There's just no respect for the land.
<v Speaker 1>There's no respect for the things that live on it.
<v Speaker 1>There's no perspective of place in it. Those are the
<v Speaker 1>things I like about indigenous cultures, and so they had
<v Speaker 1>a place for that. But again I think they arrived
<v Speaker 1>there as a result of making mistakes, absolutely, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and seeing population crashes and that kind of thing.
<v Speaker 2>But you know, instilled in them a degree of humility,
<v Speaker 2>in the right and gratitude.
<v Speaker 1>That we just do not know. This culture has never
<v Speaker 1>had that. We have a fucking out.
<v Speaker 2>We've really lost it. But some people have come have
<v Speaker 2>come around to it. I guess you and I are
<v Speaker 2>probably some of those we have a tribe between the
<v Speaker 2>dominant cult The dominant culture is not it's not you know,
<v Speaker 2>and they're who are they? Well, turn on the TV.
<v Speaker 1>The dominant cultures pigs. It's like chick fil a and
<v Speaker 1>McDonald's and just you know, this is what's in it
<v Speaker 1>for me. And that's just there's nothing to pay attention
<v Speaker 1>to anywhere else. It's just it's got to be a
<v Speaker 1>lonely world to living in. That Like if I had
<v Speaker 1>never found quote nature or plants, I'd be so fucking
<v Speaker 1>miserable man too.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, it's everything to.
<v Speaker 1>Me, geology, any of that, any like context for an ecosystem,
<v Speaker 1>because all you know is the human world. Then that's
<v Speaker 1>the only thing you've got. That's all you've got, and
<v Speaker 1>that's what people think of me and successful or exactly.
<v Speaker 2>That's your that's your entire costs.
<v Speaker 1>The proper existence it is, no matter what, no no
<v Speaker 1>way around it. That's not just like a matter of opinion.
<v Speaker 1>That's it.
<v Speaker 2>The proper existence, I think, oh absolutely. And most people
<v Speaker 2>are so caught up in that they don't even see it.
<v Speaker 1>Or they just yeah, or they're completely severed from the land.
<v Speaker 1>They never get the opportunity of.
<v Speaker 2>Experience and it so this, you know, the nature deficit
<v Speaker 2>disorder rampant, and we don't even know how deep seated
<v Speaker 2>those effects are, but they're studies that have been done
<v Speaker 2>so that there's it's very significant. So, you know, lots
<v Speaker 2>of people that live in New York have never gotten
<v Speaker 2>out of the city. I mean Central Park.
<v Speaker 1>Is it?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And uh, you know, most urbanites really are just
<v Speaker 2>so disconnected from the natural world that, uh, they you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's almost like they live on a different planet.
<v Speaker 1>But I see a lot in cities like that, in
<v Speaker 1>cities like New York and in Chicago, it said, I
<v Speaker 1>see like much more reverence for land than I almost
<v Speaker 1>see in a rural area. Yeah, they want, they want
<v Speaker 1>to get out to see it. They know, they know
<v Speaker 1>they're from it.
<v Speaker 2>They see the value.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Like they would see someone bulldozing a patch of
<v Speaker 1>ranch and I'd be like, oh my god, what are
<v Speaker 1>you doing? Like we don't have that where I come from,
<v Speaker 1>whereas here it's just it's abundant. Just fucking get rid
<v Speaker 1>of it. That's the thing they do in stuff, because
<v Speaker 1>they clear land before they sell it. Dumbest shit imagine
<v Speaker 1>of course, like what it's it's like one hundred and
<v Speaker 1>five degreasier for six months? Why are you clearing that land?
<v Speaker 1>That land is keeping everything else cool? What it is?
<v Speaker 1>It is what they do. It's it's so what they
<v Speaker 1>do and be just profoundly stupid. That's the thing that
<v Speaker 1>drives me. That's why I'm like, damn, is it like
<v Speaker 1>letting the water supply when they're doing this or something?
<v Speaker 1>Or how the fuck does you know? You got to think, like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, you bill yourself as supposedly I'm a ranch
<v Speaker 1>and I'm working the land. Well, then you would know
<v Speaker 1>that having vegetative cover over barren rock is going to
<v Speaker 1>cool the whole landscape, whereas if it's just the rocket
<v Speaker 1>and eat it up by the sun, you're creating a
<v Speaker 1>heat island, you.
<v Speaker 2>Know, right, and it's going to cause erosion. And it's
<v Speaker 2>you know, two plus two equals three. Man.
<v Speaker 1>It's just you know, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>It's almost like it's almost like asserting control and dominance.
<v Speaker 1>It is it is.
<v Speaker 2>It's like, okay, we've dominated this is this has been transformed.
<v Speaker 2>It's open and I've.
<v Speaker 1>Been a ranchers down there like that which is my land.
<v Speaker 1>I'm working it like it's illegal. Then I see these dudes,
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, holy fuck you, like sixty years of unaddressed
<v Speaker 1>mental trauma, mental and emotional trauma, you've never gone to therapy.
<v Speaker 1>You probably think going to therapy makes you a pussy.
<v Speaker 1>Like you're a fucking wreck, man, no offense. I could
<v Speaker 1>see it though. You know, I've like traveled and I've
<v Speaker 1>met enough people like that. I worked with dudes like
<v Speaker 1>that at the railroad, Like you're a fucking wreck, you know, like,
<v Speaker 1>oh my god, I feel bad, but you like get
<v Speaker 1>some help, you know, before you crack. But it's a shah,
<v Speaker 1>it's a shame. Man. Well what do you think is
<v Speaker 1>in the what do you think is in the future
<v Speaker 1>for this reason for West Texas.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I don't know, man, that's a good question because
<v Speaker 2>I I just have no idea.
<v Speaker 1>Where the continent starts to dry out as you move west.
<v Speaker 1>It's like the first big patch of air Atlanta as
<v Speaker 1>he moved west. It is.
<v Speaker 2>You know, I think we're due for some major transformations here.
<v Speaker 1>Uh.
<v Speaker 2>You know, COVID had a big impact just because we've
<v Speaker 2>had a lot of people move in and a lot
<v Speaker 2>of first time records, you know, people that had never
<v Speaker 2>been here before. Were coming out and recreating and and
<v Speaker 2>didn't have a clue about what to do and how
<v Speaker 2>to bang.
<v Speaker 1>I remember the first time I went there at twenty fourteen.
<v Speaker 1>It was desolate. There was nobody there. And I've tried
<v Speaker 1>going there two years ago. Yeah, it was just a
<v Speaker 1>fucking mess. That was like no way man.
<v Speaker 2>So that's that's changed the landscape, you know, and it
<v Speaker 2>not so much affected you know, Marfa Alpine and Marathon.
<v Speaker 2>It's mostly down into Lingua.
<v Speaker 1>But getting I mean everything's getting more. Marathons had a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of development in the last few years I've noticed,
<v Speaker 1>which is cool in some ways, but it just is. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>there's more population coming here. I just hope it means
<v Speaker 1>it means the land. Yeah, there's more, there's more people. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so that's happening. You know, there's so those and those
<v Speaker 1>people bring different values, good or bad. And then of
<v Speaker 1>course we've got dealing with global climate change, and because
<v Speaker 1>we're situated where we are, we stand to be, you know,
<v Speaker 1>significantly affected by that. We don't know how or in
<v Speaker 1>what direction, most likely by drying out, hotter and drier.
<v Speaker 1>But we've also witnessed more intense storm of it. So
<v Speaker 1>down in Redford, where I spent a lot of time.
<v Speaker 1>We've gotten almost no rain in the last two years,
<v Speaker 1>with two exceptions. And those two exceptions was a two
<v Speaker 1>and a three inch rainfall that happened within the first
<v Speaker 1>one within about an hour, and the second one with
<v Speaker 1>over a period of four or five hours. Wow, massive
<v Speaker 1>rainfall events that basically blows out, you know, irrigation works
<v Speaker 1>blows out, Yeah, all the rain at once in the
<v Speaker 1>desert where there's no vegetative.
<v Speaker 2>Covered a whole water. It flooded out a friend of
<v Speaker 2>mine that it reworks the the drainages, it blows out,
<v Speaker 2>you know, all kinds of dams and things like that.
<v Speaker 2>They're meant to contain water, slow it down. Even on
<v Speaker 2>my own property where I've made all these little, you know,
<v Speaker 2>burms and basins to catch the rain. Water they're meant for,
<v Speaker 2>you know, they're kind of built for a one or
<v Speaker 2>may maybe a two inch rain. They can't take more
<v Speaker 2>than that. It just the volume just blows them out.
<v Speaker 2>So I end up, you know, rebuilding those and then
<v Speaker 2>we're looking at them dry out in the sweltering heat
<v Speaker 2>for the next nine months. There's no brain and so
<v Speaker 2>I'm walking around with the water hose until we get
<v Speaker 2>the next you know, to lose.
<v Speaker 1>Where is Redford exactly?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it's about twenty miles east of Presidio. Oh wow,
<v Speaker 2>right on the river. It's basically the last sort of
<v Speaker 2>Mexican village on the US side that's still intact, meaning
<v Speaker 2>it's got most of its you know, the original families,
<v Speaker 2>the descendants of the original families are still there, which
<v Speaker 2>is cool and significant because the same was true for
<v Speaker 2>Candelaria ridosa. But they've those populations love along since left
<v Speaker 2>and it's there, don't They don't resemble anything of their
<v Speaker 2>former cells. And that was true because you know, the
<v Speaker 2>elephant Butte Dam, Yeah, impounded the water, and so the
<v Speaker 2>water in that portion of the Rio Grande minute to
<v Speaker 2>such an extent that farming was no longer viable. Because
<v Speaker 2>the Rio Grands are replenished by the real conscious which
<v Speaker 2>comes out of Mexico at Prosidio, everything downstream from there
<v Speaker 2>still gets a flow. And so that means that the
<v Speaker 2>farms in the Redford Bolsama in Redford and Mulatto on
<v Speaker 2>the Mexican side still exist. You know, there's still limited
<v Speaker 2>farming on the US side, but they still farm all
<v Speaker 2>the fields in Mexico, they're still pulling water from the
<v Speaker 2>rio and so, you know, that makes it interesting, you know,
<v Speaker 2>kind of culturally, and I appreciate that aspect down there.
<v Speaker 2>But the main thing I love about it, and I'll
<v Speaker 2>have to admit, is that we're surrounded by the nash
<v Speaker 2>by the state park down there, and so I can
<v Speaker 2>be hiking within you know, very short drive and I'm
<v Speaker 2>hiking you know, out in the open desert, or I
<v Speaker 2>can be on the river in twenty minutes. And that's
<v Speaker 2>where it's at for me. You know, I really need
<v Speaker 2>for my own self, I need access to big lands.
<v Speaker 2>And maybe it was Montana that spoiled me, but I
<v Speaker 2>think it was way before that. I just, you know,
<v Speaker 2>I realized at a very young age that the earth,
<v Speaker 2>the natural world, was probably the most important thing in
<v Speaker 2>my life to me, and and so I've always you know,
<v Speaker 2>fought for the right to be in it, to protect it.
<v Speaker 2>It's just it's every it's everything to me. So being
<v Speaker 2>down there is it's just kind of a dream, really,
<v Speaker 2>it really is.
<v Speaker 1>Big ben Rats is something else that's that's an amazing.
<v Speaker 2>Is amazing, it's a very it's an underutilized resource. I'm
<v Speaker 2>glad it's underutilized. I hope it doesn't get overrun. Has
<v Speaker 2>very little infrastructure compared to the national part, and I
<v Speaker 2>think that, you know, their intent is to keep it
<v Speaker 2>that way, and it really does help kind of thin
<v Speaker 2>out the population, uh, because it's it's kind of harder
<v Speaker 2>to get into and we like it that way. I
<v Speaker 2>really hope it stays. It's an incredible asset down there,
<v Speaker 2>both of those parks.
<v Speaker 1>How was that I went to the Solitario I think
<v Speaker 1>the southwest side of it to get to give photos
<v Speaker 1>of Quarcus Hinkley I have may It was a year
<v Speaker 1>and a half ago. Yeah, that was something else that's crazy.
<v Speaker 1>There's that one rock shelter there with the hands.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah yeah, Prince, Yeah, it's it's incredible and all kinds
<v Speaker 2>of archaeology. Good buddy Tim who actually the guy who
<v Speaker 2>called me on the phone, you know, twenty five years
<v Speaker 2>ago about that job at the center. He is now
<v Speaker 2>the park archaeologist down there, so I get regular updates
<v Speaker 2>on stuff he's finding, and I get to volunteer and
<v Speaker 2>help him out down there on some of his projects.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>It's it's really great, but an incredible place. And of
<v Speaker 2>course the River Road when seventy runs along the real
<v Speaker 2>ground there and there's a bunch of great campsites and
<v Speaker 2>put ins and takeouts on the river there that you
<v Speaker 2>you really don't have the same access in the National
<v Speaker 2>Park that you do in the State Park. Yeah, it's
<v Speaker 2>a lot easier to get to subscribe.
<v Speaker 1>Man, that's cool. Man, thanks a lot for being down
<v Speaker 1>to come on this.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I really appreciate you asking me, and hopefully I
<v Speaker 2>have been helpful, but no, it's been great man. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I want.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, that's all. That's There's a lot of ship
<v Speaker 1>to talk about in West Texas. We keep going, but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we'll have to do another one sometimes. Yeah. Man, Well,
<v Speaker 1>thanks a lot, appreciate it, right, everybody else, have a
<v Speaker 1>graciate day. Go fuck you somebody,