Dave Willms: Hey everybody and welcome back for another episode of the Your Mountain Podcast. I'm your host, David Wilms. With me as always, co-host Nephi Cole. How are you? El Nefi: What a wonderful day, Dave. Wonderful. Dave Willms: It is it's a wonderful day to be in Wyoming. I'll say that. El Nefi: It is. It's it's post primary election day and boy, what a interesting election it was. Dave Willms: It was a very interesting election. If for those that don't know El Nefi: Yeah, I can. Dave Willms: in Wyoming, the primary election is really the general election. Something like eighty percent of all yeah, like eighty percent of El Nefi: 'Cause there's no Democrats in the state. Yeah, it's crazy. Dave Willms: all elections are decided during the primary really. So there's the the the main competition. Yeah. El Nefi: Is it 80%? I bet it's more because here's the thing. I bet it's more. Cause you said 80%, but I think it's because you're trying to divide the state between Democrat and Republican. But the reality is if you're a D in one of the counties in Wyoming, so let's say Jackson and you're Democrat, you probably ran unopposed and you're a shoe in there too. Dave Willms: Yeah, no, I think that it it accounts for all of that. It it is the where they're uncontested races or you know, it the I think it's it's I can't remember the exactly how they do it. It's like uncontested races or uncompetitive races, like the ones El Nefi: huh. Dave Willms: that you know just aren't gonna be competitive. it's it's roughly 80%. So yesterday was our really our general election. We got a pretty good sense of who we're gonna s like what the legislature's gonna look like, who our governor's gonna be, all of our major elected officials. Pretty good sense of that. El Nefi: Yeah, lot of old friends, a lot of old friends coming back to the legislature, both folks who have been there and for folks and some folks that are returning. Eric Barlow making the move, of course, from the Senate over to the likely the prohibitive favorite now, the Republican nomination for governor. He's a great guy, veterinarian out of the middle of the Powder River Basin. Neat dude. Yeah. Dave Willms: And veteran. Veterinarian and veteran. Fourth generation rancher. just south of the earth, nicest guy you could ever meet. He's just a he cares a lot. El Nefi: Yeah, I think he's I have a lot of lot of confidence in his capacity to do a good job. We'll see how it all turns out, but I think that there's a you know, it's good gonna it's a great opportunity, great outlook. Dave Willms: Totally agree. And some of at least one of our old colleagues from our time with the the prior governor, and a former guest on this podcast. Just just Yeah, heck yeah, Jessica, way to go. Really proud of ya. El Nefi: Shout out Yeah, shout out to Jessica Crowder. Yeah. Yeah. Making us look really bad, you and I. Yeah, making us look Dave Willms: You you and I, because our former co host is a judge and a co worker is now in the legislature and El Nefi: Yeah. Legislature and we are hosting this podcast. Still. Dave Willms: It is, yeah. Yeah, there's a still there's a difference I guess, huh? El Nefi: Yeah. It's really very Al Bundy, isn't it? Like we're just here, you know, just hanging out, hosting the podcast. It's like it has Dave Willms: Yeah, but El Nefi: a very Saturday night live, Bill and Ted's excellent adventure feel to it. Dave Willms: Man, you just went to three different places. I was gonna try and make a four touchdowns in a single game joke, and then you went on to Saturday Night Live and and i and whatever the other one was, now I already forgot. Bill and Ted's excellent ventures. El Nefi: Bill and no, I said Bill and Ted's, but that's not it. It's no, it wasn't Bill and Ted's. Who's the Wayne's world? That's what I'm thinking about. See now I got a fourth. There we go. Dave Willms: That's what now yeah, okay, there you go. Now now you're in the right place. yeah, so we're doing that and all of our colleagues are going on and doing really incredible things. but anyway, huge shout out to Jessica. Really proud of her. she's she's a sharp, sharp woman. it was really great to work with back in our time at the governor's office. She's gonna do she's gonna do a great job. El Nefi: She is phenomenal. She's gonna do a great job. Yeah, and and the downside for our friends who are now judges and legislators is Dave and I can still say stupid things on the internet. And, you know, you can't. Yeah. Yeah. Dave Willms: With very little consequence. Yeah, with very little consequence. El Nefi: Good luck with that, Judge McGrady. Dave Willms: Yeah, that's right. We we have this this freedom to say stupid things. It's El Nefi: Yes. Dave Willms: and sometimes we use it and we might use it today. El Nefi: It's it's highly likely. Dave Willms: man, yeah, I'm a little bit I I want to transition into what we were talking and what we plan to talk about. our main let me just run through like our main topic is this you may have seen you may have seen a bunch of presser out in if you're if you are in the hunting community conservation world, you've might have seen emails already come in from the organizations you support about a proposal to rescind the 2001 roadless rule from the Forest Service. I want to talk about that in more detail, but let's first start with, you know, maybe a because I think that one's going to be more controversial. Let's start with something that's perhaps a little less controversial. Maybe like a something that is a universally a good thing, a good news item. and I and that would be that I think it was last week. We're and I'll timestamp this. We're we're recording this late on the on August nineteenth. So we're sitting here on a Wednesday recording this. I think it was last week that the US Fish and Wildlife Service finalized their hunt fish rule. And and we talked about this when it was in proposed form a number of months ago. about this proposed hunt fish rule. This is something that every administration does. Every year there's a new hunt fish rule that's proposed. And the I the hunt fish rule is is really about on US Fish and Wildlife Service lands, what are you, as a hunter or an angler, what are we allowed to hunt and fish on those lands? And every refuge, every shoreline, every coastline, Anyway, any all of these different Fish and Wildlife Service owns, sorry, seashore, national seashores, all these Fish and Wildlife Service owned and managed lands have different purposes. They were established for different reasons. Right? And some of them have hunting opportunities on them and some of them don't. And and we go through this thing every year where the Fish and Wildlife Service puts out their hunt fish rule and says, here are the places that you can hunt this fall that are under the jurisdiction of the Fish and Wildlife Service. So that's what just happened. And it was the a a huge expansion in the number of species and places that you could hunt andor fish. And I think it ultimately opens opens up something like 95% of all fish and wildlife service managed lands to hunting or fishing of some kind. And they'll it'll be argued as it's the largest expansion ever. And I think technically that's true. I do want to provide a little nuance. We talked about the nuance later. We'll provide a little nuance in a minute on what this actually does and means and how they come up with these numbers of millions of acres added because there's there's some squishy math, but every single administration uses the exact same math. but anyway, I thought I'd start that off. That's a I think it's a universally good thing. to have these public lands that are open to more opportunities where they are compatible with the established purposes of the refuge. So what's your reaction to that announcement, Nephi? El Nefi: Yeah, pretty cool. You know, I think mm like you said, I it's it's something that ad administrations typically do. This administration I think went further than any other has in the past in terms of their commitment to it and their expansion. I think it sets up a great goalpost 'cause now I want to see the next administration top it. And so you know, I guess we ev everybody keeps adding on to it and I think that's that's exciting to, you know, see that this is continues to expand. It's great for sportsmen and I think it's really good for for all of us. Dave Willms: Yeah, I I think it will be a really hard thing to for the next administration to beat. It you gotta try, but it's gonna El Nefi: But you better try. Let's see what you can do. Dave Willms: be it's gonna be really hard. because now more than ninety-two million acres, ninety-five percent of National Wildlife Refuge land system are available for hunting. Ninety-five percent. So from an acreage standpoint, it's gonna be tough to increase the acreage. But let me explain how they do the acreage. And I know we've talked about it before, but I want to do it again because it's all really kind of interesting. So let's let's say we're hunting the the Nephi Coal Wildlife Refuge. Okay. I'm assuming at some point there will be a wildlife refuge named after El Nefi: It's my backyard. Yep. Dave Willms: Nephi. So we'll go with the Nephi Coal Wildlife Refuge. El Nefi: I really hope so. I think I've earned it. Dave Willms: And that refuge has ducks and it has geese and it has some whitetail and maybe some turkeys and even some squirrels El Nefi: Possums. Dave Willms: and rabbits and possums if you like that sort of thing, I guess. El Nefi: I do. Dave Willms: All right, you do. All right. That's a weird mix of wildlife. Anyway, it it's got all of these species. And let's say it was established for black-footed ferret habitat. Like it was established to be a refuge for ferrets. Not for any of these other but there's all this other stuff on it. So shortly after El Nefi: But there's all this other stuff on it because that's how ecosystems work. Dave Willms: Yeah. So shortly after it's established, Fish and Wildlife Service does a hunt fish rule and they say, you know, this year on the Nephi Coal Wildlife Refuge, which is one million acres, it's huge. I assume if there's gonna be something named after you, it's gonna be big. So the one million acre, you know, Nephi Coal Fish and Wildlife or Fi National Wildlife Refuge. And that first year they open up the whole thing to to duck hunting and goose hunting. Okay. So they've just let no actually let's just say duck hunting. They didn't even do goose hunting the first year. So it's one in their rule, they say one million acres of opportunity opened up, of hunting opportunity opened up. The next year people send in comments and say, hey, there's some good duck hunting opportunity or goose hunting opportunities here too. You should open that up. And so in year two, they look at it and say, you know what, you're right. We should open that up. And so in year two, they still are allowing the duck hunting, but now they add goose hunting. So now they've added an additional one million acres of hunting opportunity for the public. You see where I'm going with this, because the next year it's whitetail. And so now it's an additional million El Nefi: yeah, we can add another million acres. Dave Willms: acres. So now it's three million acres of hunting opportunity. Yeah. So so do that. And then and then replicate that on every wildlife refuge in the country. And that's how you get some of these big numbers. anyway, like this rule says one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight new hunting and fishing opportunities across thirty-two states. That's just saying we've identified a lot more species in a lot more places that we're gonna allow people to hunt andor fish. and so I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I think it's I think it's a great thing. I think it's a great thing. But El Nefi: For sure. Dave Willms: but there's always squishy math involved in this. But in this it really is legitimately a lot of the acres. El Nefi: Yeah, I'd rather I've decided I'd rather not have it named after me because the way I look at it, I don't know that I've done anything to really earn it. And so I think it would have to be like something like I'd have to die in some kind of, you know, crazy way to earn it. And I just I'm not ready for it. You can have it. No, you can have Dave Willms: I thought it would have been something No, I thought it would have been something like El Nefi: it. Dave Willms: No no, here's yeah I don't want it. It's it's gonna be you 'cause El Nefi: No, it's yours. Dave Willms: 'cause this refuge is gonna be like an old shooting range that you've that you're like help decommission this shooting range and turn it into wildlife refuge. El Nefi: I would never do such a thing. Dave Willms: But you'd still find a way to still allow recreational shooting on this wildlife refuge. Yeah. El Nefi: Course we would. Eighty percent of funding for Pittman Robertson dollars comes from non hunting related sports shooting. Yeah, we gotta let people know Dave Willms: I set you up for that. I set you up for that. El Nefi: that because you'd like what happens if you get rid of that? Well, just might as well just flush PR down the toilet. And I am not ready to do that because I like Pittman Robertson. Dave Willms: You know, I'm a pretty big fan of it too. Everybody should be a pretty big fan of Pittman Robertson. El Nefi: billion dollars a year. Dave Willms: Just over that is well, when you add in DJ and everything, it's it's like one point two or one point four now. I can't even remember the number. Yeah, El Nefi: Yeah, somebody fishes. Dave Willms: I mean I I know if it doesn't have a a primer on it, you're probably not gonna do it. but maybe there's sufficient you can do with a primer. El Nefi: My son loves to fish actually. My son Griffin, I think you knew this. I'm sorry, names. But man, that kid, he loves to tie his own flies. He he does his own fly rods now. Like he has a little group at school that they build fly rods. Man, kid loves to fish. Dave Willms: And do you learn that from the mailman? Schwansman. El Nefi: He didn't get it for me, that's for sure. the Schwann's man is joking yeah, it's g chicken cordon blue is delicious apparently. but yeah. Dave Willms: it a it arrived every day around the same time. El Nefi: It's perplexing but always very strange. Dave Willms: you know, speaking of which, not gonna say where well I think say where we were, but I'm not gonna say it. Your name your wife's name was thrown around a few times in a meeting we were at last week. And not just by you. El Nefi: Yeah, she's a pretty big deal. We're not gonna I don't know if it's comfortable saying I don't wanna say what she does. Dave Willms: No, I'm not saying I'm not gonna say anything about she what she does. I'm just saying a proud husband moment for you. She was she El Nefi: Yeah. Dave Willms: got some really good shout outs last week. El Nefi: She works in the she works in the I don't know if you want to call it the wildlife conservation space, but she works in the she's she's a really big deal. She's a big deal. So Dave Willms: I mean it was clear in that meeting that she was a bigger deal than you were. El Nefi: Yeah, well thanks a lot, Dave. Now Yep. So you Dave Willms: Yeah, you bet. El Nefi: won't see her on a podcast embarrassing herself nationally. She won't be doing that. Dave Willms: Yeah. Yeah. El Nefi: But yeah, we were at the American Wildlife Conservation Partnership meeting and it was a excellent meeting. It was at my museum, Dave. I hope you enjoyed it. Dave Willms: It I didn't even get a chance to spend any time in it, except for the meeting. But it was at an awesome El Nefi: Well well. Yeah, the Cody Dave Willms: I Buffalo Bill Cody Museum or Museum of the West. It's Yeah. Well, there's like El Nefi: Cody Fires Museum, yep. I'm on the board for that museum, that's why I say that. Dave Willms: four museums that are part of that complex, right? So you're on the board of the firearms museum. Yeah, El Nefi: Yeah, it's a large the best one, of course. Dave Willms: yeah. El Nefi: Yeah, the largest private firearms collection in the world. And so if you've never been there, check it out because we took a bunch of people to see Theodore Roosevelt's gun, to see all sorts of different guns. Like where else can you walk through and see like literally one of my favorite things? I know this is a sidetrack, but we have a a display right now that's for the 250th, it's the arms of the revolution. And my curator took some guys through with me so that we could talk through some of the different things that you can see. And they have literal firearms there from the Hessians and all sorts of folks that came over. And one of the things that we is in the collection in the museum right now was some musket balls. And he talked about these musket balls that were in the collection and they had come from the battlefield, the dang it, da the opening battle of the Revolutionary War, the skirmish, Lexington Concord. And so anyway, he was there and he he these are all behind glass, of course. Nobody could touch them. But when he'd he'd gone with the c the other curator to get these musket balls, some of them are flattened out, right? Where they'd hit stuff. And he he said this is one of the most he said this is the most impactful moment for me as a curator and working in history is when he'd gone to pick it up the other from the other location, the individual there said, I want you to think about something. And he said, What? Says the last time that a human hand touched this musket ball is when they loaded it into a rifle and fired it at the British. Dave Willms: Unless the British were doing this, holding their hands in front of their face and it went right through their hand. El Nefi: Yeah. And well, pretty cool, right? Like that's history. Yeah. Dave Willms: Yeah, that's really neat. That's really neat. Yeah, and it it's a it's a cool museum in a cool town. in a town that was filled with a lot of wildfire smoke, which is gonna be my segue into our next topic. El Nefi: Yeah. Dave Willms: I mean, it was we were choking on it. The the smoke in the West this year has been a lot. And it comes up in a lot of conversations, right? You hear it we've been you and I've been in Around this stuff forever. We hear about it all the time. These people talk about the fires in the West and just how atrocious they've been, and they seem to be getting bigger and more frequent. And they attribute that to a whole host of things. And my my the funny part to me is always it's you have people that they just have decided this is the reason. It's this thing is the reason why we have more fire. And they latch onto one thing, right? Yeah. Well, you have El Nefi: Yeah, it's climate change. Right. Dave Willms: you have some that are like, it's climate change, that's why we have more fire. Or We we're not logging enough. That's why you have more fire. Not not grazing enough. That's why we have more fire. then there's the the El Nefi: And and many things can be true at once and some not at all. Dave Willms: I mean, yeah, all of them can be true in some con in some way. Like everything can contribute in some way. The the point in is there's not one thing that you can say, with one exception. I'm gonna make one exception to that rule, which is in some places, and I think in the Great Basin and Nevada's a great example, and I think parts of Idaho and even Utah are really and eastern Oregon and Washington. In some of those sagebrush areas, you can pretty easily say the reason why we have increased fire frequency and intensity there is because of cheatgrass, invasive species. Like that is the driving force. now there might be some other th contributors of like you know, ancillary contributors, but if you got rid of cheatgrass, the landscape would the fire regime would look a whole lot different in Some of those places. El Nefi: Yeah, the frequency would go way down, the intensity would change. Which Dave Willms: Yeah. El Nefi: is a common thing throughout the West in other in other in other ecosystems as well, in other fire regime, you know, areas. There's going to be discussion from intelligent individuals who are far smarter than us, who have a much better understanding of those different forest ecologies and communities about what our management decisions are doing to the forests. So one of the things that, you know, I I one of the things that one of my favorite professors, you know, years ago, always said, was when we talk about, you know, wilderness and we talk about Yellowstone, or we talk about, you know, people with a hands-off approach, he said, like, you know matter what you think, whatever decision we make on management is always still a decision. And those decisions have impacts. And so it's kind of foolish for us to think that there's like a right or a wrong. Nature doesn't care what about a right or wrong. There's not a this is not something where there's a morality to it. It's just the decision. And so you decide with these different management regimes and how you control fire or how you don't, and what you cut or what you don't, you're making decisions about what a landscape is going to look like and what it's going to look like in 10 years. And then because of that, what it's going to look like in 20 years. And these are all choices that we make based on management. Dave Willms: That's right. And one of the choices that we that we made as a country about twenty-six years ago was we looked at okay, so we have all these designations of land. Let's let's focus on the Forest Service for a second, on Forest Service lands. We have all of these national forests across the country, totaling tens of millions of acres. And within that national forest, we have management priorities, right? We have Multiple use sustainable yield act, we have the National Forest Management Act. We have things that Congress has passed that says here's how you should manage forests. And they're managed for a lot of different things. They're managed for timber production. They're managed for food production through, you know, grazing allotments. They're managed for wildlife and recreation. they're managed for wilderness characteristics. They're managed for watershed health and and production. There's all of these different management pieces that fold into what we would call like a multi multi-use landscape. And I I argue frequently multi-use doesn't mean multiple use doesn't mean all use is everywhere. It means there's a lot of uses. and s and in some places there might be 10 things that are compatible with with a certain part of the landscape. And in other places it might be two and you have to you have this menu and you figure out how to best apply it. And we do things like Congress will come in and say This area we want to designate as a wilderness area where there's no motorized or mechanized use and we want to set this area aside. And in some areas we might say this is a high timber, you know, productive use area, and we might have a lot of timber sales. There like there are there are a lot of ways to manage the forest. Well, in 2001, we had the the Clinton administration, end of the Clinton administration. El Nefi: Right, the end of the Clinton administration. Dave Willms: you know, signed this rule called just called the roadless rule, but it was the two thousand one roadless rule that set aside that that inventoried all of the roadless areas in the national forest system. Areas that didn't have roads in in there's so much so much nuance to this and I'm not a an expert in the area, so I wanna I'm gonna stay a little bit high level. but it's you know you're right you do the draw these polygons. They don't have They typically don't have roads running through them. Although I should be clear, just because it was a roadless area doesn't mean there's not a road there. There are some identified roadless areas that actually have roads there. So that's a little bit of a misnomer to say that there are no roads. But generally speaking, it's an area that don't have maintained forest service maintained roads in them. And so this was they were inventoried and this rule was adopted saying. We want to keep them in this status. Right. We want to keep them generally roadless with s and with and with some limited exceptions. And that it was a pretty significant land total. I mean, we're talking about tens of millions of acres of the forest sir forest system that was identified as see it was well no What was it, fifty-eight and a half million acres of inventory roadless areas? And it that so that rule generally prohibited the construction of roads and road reconstruction and timber harvesting in that area with limited, again, limited exceptions. And as you might guess, something like that that addresses an area that's that many acres over something like 10 states is going to create controversy. And it did. And it was litigated. Four years it was litigated before finally a court established that yes, there was authority, the president had the authority to issue this rule. And it was in place, with a couple of exceptions. Idaho and Colorado petitioned to have their own specific. roadless rule to apply to their states. So they negotiated a roadless rule that was different than this two thousand one rule to apply to their states. So they have this rule, their own rules. So fast forward to about a year ago, we talked about go ahead. Yeah. Sure. El Nefi: Before you before you fast forward, I think it's important to note that the road is sort of what it didn't do. And so there's some discussion about, you know, did it the the roadrust rule did not close any roads. It prevented new buildings, stopped the creation of new roads, left existing roads open primarily. It didn't target decommissioning legally, it didn't block legally established roads. It did place some logging limitations on timber cutting with with some exceptions. And so it's important to note those things as we move forward because there because there are other, you know, there are during this time period, there have been efforts, right, to decommission roads where forests have gone in and said, We don't need this road anymore. They've removed it. They've cut down on, they've changed travel plans. That's not that's not necessarily because of the roadless rule and that needs to be said. Dave Willms: Good point. Really good point. That's right. In fact, some some very specific roads that I know about that were decommissioned in in the early 2000s were not in inventoried roadless areas. They were decommissioned for other reasons. You know, and they were viewed as causing some some resource damage, some sedimentation in in streams, causing some some issues. And they were so they were decommissioned. And I think we've talked about it before, but I had actually fought the closing of a number of those roads because it was in areas that I I liked to hunt and I felt like it was gonna make access a lot harder, particularly for the older generation. fast forward twenty years, it actually turns out that decommissioning those roads has made hunting in that area for me so much better. Like it's it's actually really improved it. So there are there will be comments in somewhere in the record out there of me opposing closing of some of these roads and In hindsight, I'd look back and say, maybe, maybe they were on to something on those particular ones. But it wasn't in it an inventory roadless area. so not all decommissioned. Yeah, I thought your your point is spot on in worth saying. yeah, so fast forward to now, or to a year ago, I guess. And the the the Forest Service put out a request. It was sort of a scoping. They put out a request for comments for information as they were contemplating whether or not to repeal that. two thousand one rule. And in that process, they received something like two hundred and almost a quarter million comments from people. El Nefi: It was well I think it was one of the largest commented to date, like in terms of of comment I it's I've got it someplace, but it was one of the largest in terms of public feedback, one of the largest feedback efforts they'd ever received for a rule or proposed rule. Dave Willms: And most most of the comments were in opposition to repealing the rule. Not all. Definitely not all. There were plenty that supported it. But it was, it stirred up a lot of passion from folks that like, don't repeal this rule, right? so they took that information and fast forward to now. And as as of today, we're probably recording this one day too early, frankly, but our schedules just didn't line up, and this is the only time that we could really make it work. so There's a there's a notice in what's called the reading room for the Federal Register today where they kind of outline they being the forest service kind outlines what they're intending to do. But the the draft environmental impact statement and the full analysis won't be published until tomorrow. So we haven't seen everything. But what we do know is that the proposal there there will be a range of alternatives. there will be at least there'll be Three alternatives, or there's a preferred alternative, and then I believe three additional alternatives is what it looks like. And the preferred alternative identified by the Forest Service as this is what we would like to do, is to repeal in its entirety the 2001 roadless rule. but everywhere except obviously Colorado and Idaho, because they have separate roadless rules, they don't operate under that 2001 rule. So every place else it would repeal that roadless rule. And it will be This will be open for public comment through I think it's September 21st is when the comment period will close at 11:59 PM. You can go to Federal Register dot gov and search it up. You can just type in in the search bar roadless rule, it'll pull it up, and there's an easy way portal there you can click on to submit your own comments. Public should submit comments. we'll talk a little bit about the detail, but I got to get into the the legal wonkiness thing here. It's important you're gonna get emails from if you're if you're on any mailing list for any conservation organizations, you're gonna get an email about this. And you're probably gonna get one that says sign this action alert, sign this, fill your name in, and it'll get sent in as a comment to oppose the rescission of the roadless rule. Okay. And you can do that. If you sup if you support opposing the rescission of the Rhodes rule. And you can do that. But I'm gonna tell you something here. Nephi knows this, you know this, but I'm gonna tell you all something. Some of you may know, some of you may not. El Nefi: So how how worthless your comment is if you just pile on and submit the exact Dave Willms: Yeah. El Nefi: same comment as everybody else with the by using the copy paste button. Dave Willms: If you do that, there will be El Nefi: Then somebody like me or Dave, sitting in an office somewhere, will run a query using AI and they'll find all the ones that are exactly the same and they'll read them exactly once. And they'll say, Dave Willms: They they're yeah. El Nefi: Yeah, and then they'll just they'll treat it like a comment, not like a thousand comments. Dave Willms: They are batched together and they are one comment. They're required to respond to every comment, especially if you have substance to it. So they'd be required to respond to that one comment. El Nefi: Yeah, but they'll respond to it by I mean, they're gonna say that we had eight thousand of the exact same comment. Here's the response. It's one response to the comment that you all made that was exactly the same. And Dave Willms: That's right. El Nefi: so you just get the same response. Dave Willms: Yeah. So if you're gonna send something in, take a little bit of time and send something unique. Send your a a unique comment rather than a form comment. a lot of those comments generators, like the the the organization sending all that stuff out, like what they want to use that for is to be able it's it's a it's a PR thing partially, right? They wanna say X number of people oppose this. And that's fine. That's well and good. That's fine. But as far as on the substance, on the merits, on the the agency responsiveness to the comment. Be as specific as you can, be as you you you unique as you can, provide your own comment rather than a form letter. But if you can't, if if all you got the time for is the El Nefi: Yeah. I'd say Dave Willms: form letter, send it. But if you have a little bit of time to personalize something, personalize it. El Nefi: Yeah. And I'm gonna say don't send it if you don't have time to do something personal. Here's why I'm gonna say that. It's my personal opinion, but here's my opinion. There's some arguments that are made about this rule disruption and they don't apply the same everywhere. And so that's one of the things that like this is an you know, this issue when we this is another one of those big ticket issues where if we take it and you just take it at face value, you're gonna have both sides be able to argue something for why this is a good idea or a bad idea. I guarantee you that the the reasons that the governor of Montana says that he wants to be able that That this rule needs to go away. Like he's going to make a good argument. And so are you going to be arguing about that or are you going to be arguing about the Tongas? Because these are different things. And when you're looking at how we deal with preserving American rainforests in Alaska, that's a totally different world than trying to figure out how you manage overgrown forests right outside of Denver. These are different things, and if your comment pretends that they're the same. you've just degraded the quality of your content. You've just made it more difficult for your argument to gain traction. And you see this all the time where people take an argument and there's some really good, you know, cogent things to argue. And then, you know, then then they give up on it and then just go to the top of the mountain with something. And you're way better off to look at those little specific things that are valuable and need to be addressed and to talk through those things. Because You're going to find that both sides of this are going to have arguments that hold some water. And so what do you want to do? Do you want to are you going to go all in on getting nothing? Or are you going to try and parse out, okay, where's the argument here that I think needs to be made about the specifics of this? In my personal opinion, if you really understand what precision of the roadless rule does, because you've taken the time, that's different than. Right? You know, if if if I if Dave comes to me, if I come to you and say, if I were to say, like, yeah, I want you to pick one side of this argument and I give you one paragraph with the just the meat and potatoes argument for my side of the argument, and that's all anybody gets, you're like, you've probably you may lose the argument. You may lose the argument because you're not making anybody talk to or, you know, you're not addressing the little issues that The opposite side is going to have that are valid. So I just tell you, I think if you want to comment on it, learn enough about it to have a strong argument about the nuance. That's what I think. Dave Willms: I mean, you're not wrong at all. And at the same time, like if you feel passionate about something, yeah. Frankly, there's you know it. The the f the form look, the f the yeah, but you El Nefi: If you feel passionate about something, know about it. Know about it, Dave. Know about it. Dave Willms: but you know the form letter, the form letter, it's gonna be treated as one common, it's gonna be responded. You just know that going in. Just know that going in. That's what it's gonna be. El Nefi: And if you feel passionate enough to throw your work away, then do that. But if you feel passionate enough to say, like, I actually want to be considered, then know that if you actually want to be considered, you've got to have a deeper conversation. You can't be like, this is so important to me that I whacked return, you know, that I that I pressed my mouse button. That's how important it was. It was important enough Dave Willms: Yeah. El Nefi: for me to get active on my mouse button. That'll get some. Dave Willms: I mean you w El Nefi: I mean, you'll get numbers. Dave Willms: Yeah and El Nefi: But you won't get results. Dave Willms: Right. If one of the results you want is to slow down a process, the more unique comments that come in, the longer it takes to respond to them. It you know, I'm just saying. Like it's a there are only so many people in the Forest Service, and actually there's a lot fewer of them this year than there were last year, you know, to be able to respond to to this and be able to follow the the legal requirements in this notice comment period. But let me really quickly, and we don't have a ton of time. I'm sorry, this can be a shorter episode. but really quickly, just do a quick rundown of of some of the the when when you said know the details of the different places and so forth, let me just run down a couple of the you know arguments from both sides on this, right? Just just so it's out there. Yeah, on so one of the reasons that the administration is proposing to do this is they say. And you'll hear this response from a number of Western governors to supporting this interpretation, which is these forests impact people in the communities around them disproportionately more than they impact people from other parts of the country. And so these local communities and and stakeholders should have a strong say in what happens in those places. And that by getting rid of a blanket rule that applies the same everywhere. And and then requiring or leaving determinations on what to do with those roadless areas to the local planning, like the the regional offices, for example, of the Forest Service. You will get better outcomes for the people on the ground. That's the b biggest overarching our argument. And then there are other arguments under that of we we need to be able to respond to fire, we need to be able to respond to we need to be able to increase you know timber production. We need to to deal with you know issues at the urban-rural interface, you know, where where you have the likelihood of far more catastrophic structure fires, and we need to have some flexibility to do things there. And then there's the recreation piece, and it's sort of interesting reading through the the proposal that it's it's saying, yeah, we actually want to see more roads in these places, and we think at some point there will be a recreation. a road-based recreation economy that'll benefit local communities there. And yes, there's an acknowledgement of yes, having more people tends to equal more fire. But we need we also need to address, you know, disease and you know and density and other things that are contributing to increased fire. And so there are those are some of the arguments on that side, right? And I'm not going to say that Those are invalid. I think I think you'd find people that say, El Nefi: Because they're valid. Dave Willms: because there's some validity to them, you're gonna find some people that say, Yeah, we need to have some more flexibility near communities to be able to to deal with this stuff. Then you know, and so the flip side of it is you have some folks saying, look, a lot of this stuff doesn't have high timber value anyway. Why would we why would we force something out of a place that doesn't have great value to begin with? But then there's also and and you know. This one resonates me with me a little bit. Of there's a lot of data that says things like elk, species like elk are really sensitive to road density. And that the more roads you have, the farther away from you they will be. and so if you want to decrease opportunity for hunters on public lands, build more roads because it'll just push elk. out of those public lands and onto private lands or someplace where they can have refuge. I think and then there's arguments about watershed health and you know right your riparian areas and watershed health and the benefits of having for for cold water fisheries of having roadless areas. I think those are all valid arguments as well, El Nefi: Also valid. Dave Willms: right? which is why I you know As I sit here, I think Idaho and and Colorado may have been onto something. El Nefi: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, Idaho and Colorado did exactly what this argument is saying that you know some of the other government governors are arguing. They're arguing they're arguing for they're arguing about the knowledge problem, right? The knowledge problem that says that the people who probably know the most about a problem in a given forest, they're the people who are on the ground living with and working with that forest. And if you empower those people in the decision making process more, then you're gonna get better outcomes. Here's one of the problems with the argument, the blanket undoing, right? Is because in many cases, we've had those local discussions. And so that makes this really unique. It makes it a really challenging thing. Because if you just blanket say, like, hey, this rule that was in place since 2001, we're going to get rid of it, right? Well, you have a lot of plans where this is built in, this is baked in. This is something that has been part of the management thought process and regime. So when you look at other roads, When you look at connectors, when you look at how they have identified where a roadless area is and how they work around that with trail systems and things like that, that's actually baked into this process. And that's one of the real challenges about rolling it back in its entirety. It's why I'm anxious and I don't know enough, but it's why I'm interested in seeing the alternatives and seeing what the different proposals are for how you deal with this. Because once again, we're in this situation where. you know, it's hard for me to say if it was too much or too little at the beginning, other than I love that Idaho and Colorado give themselves the flexibility to be able to work through it. And so now if we go just go backwards and we get rid of it, well then what do you do when you have twenty five years of people figuring out how to, you know, how to make it work now? It's just it's you know, it's not simple. I'm not saying there's a right or wrong to it, but it is Definitely not simple. Dave Willms: I'm gonna say, gonna go this far. I'm gonna say I think this this approach of a full rescision is a missed opportunity. And by that I mean I think you'd find some very rational actors out there that work in the hunting community, the conservation community that would say, Look, that rule was in 2001, we've got 25 years of experience operating under it. There are things that we can probably learn from and do better. And we and maybe there's an opportunity to sit down around the table. Like the reason I say it's a missed opportunity is some of these land management things are so divisive that when you actually have an opportunity to bring people together and come up with a solution that that can move the the ball forward and and actually nobody's gonna be a hundred percent happy, but everybody's gonna be a little bit happier than they were when this started, rather than completely alienating some people to give a a victory to a total victory to some people. Like I think it's a missed opportunity. to move past some of the divisiveness that we've got going on and actually do something really positive for land health and conservation. And and the last thing I'd point out is like and I I just have to throw the number out there. There are over a quarter million miles of roads that exist in the national forest system right now. A quarter million and they The Forest Service does not have the there's a like a ten billion dollar backlog, maintenance backlog to be able to do upkeep on the infrastructure they already have. So talking about, you know, trying to push more road building and generation when you can't maintain what you've got and and what you've got is a quarter million miles. I think there's a conversation that is necessary around that. two before you throw out all of the bathwater and the baby in there with it. So again, that's just my point is I I do believe that both sides of this argument, there are some meritorious pieces in it, which is why it's kind of frustrating to see that the the route that's being chosen is the most aggressive route rather than recognizing hey there's there's an opportunity here to to like maybe even bring some people together and and and make this better for lots of folks. El Nefi: Yeah. I don't think that I'm not advocating for the aggressive route, but I'm gonna say it's we are where we are because of a history too. And I would say that I don't think it's a positive Dave Willms: that's true. El Nefi: thing. And the and the and the reason I'm gonna say it's not a positive thing is like we are in the situation where people have decided in the past, there have been decisions made, and it's not just on this, it's on lots of policy position positions where the no compromise has been what we've You know, that's been the that's been the pro the, you know, look at ESA, look at all sorts of different things where they've said, like, no, we're not gonna talk to you about it. Well, you have an administration now that's aggressive enough that they've just said, Okay, well, that's the way you're gonna be. All right. We're gonna give you the we're gonna give you a hundred percent then. You know, you don't like you don't want to talk and and I think that we've we need to remember, and I would say this is a, you know, something for us to try and get out of the cycle of is the cycle of no, I'm not gonna compromise. I'm gonna start from a position of no compromise because if we're always there, then you know, sometimes we end up in a place like this. Dave Willms: Yeah, this is this is my final thought on it. to build off what you said. There are eras of conservation in the history of North America. And conservation biologists have kind of laid this out chronologically in like five different eras. And it started with the era of abundance, era of exploitation when we were killing everything, era of protection, when we're like, oops, we should stop killing everything, era of game management. And then the era of environmental management, which is really what we had been in. And I I've a part of me is like, we're maybe entering this mini era of the era of haymakers. Right. It's just the this era, right? The haymaker era. El Nefi: I like that. The haymakery. It's just like everybody's about to fall over on the mat, so they're just every time they can, they just load up one giant punch and throw it. Dave Willms: That's what it feels like right now. And so it's I totally understand why the administration is doing this in response to actions that have happened before, right? It's the equal and opposite reaction effect. but I do think it perpetuates the haymaker era. And at some point w w we need you know, people to come into the room and say, you know, calmer minds prevail and says we gotta stop throwing haymakers. You know, we like like we gotta sit down and work this out. El Nefi: Pragmatism is a lo is it was Dave Willms: pragmatism, the area maybe that can be the next era that we work towards. El Nefi: Yeah, you know, in and just to recap our entire episode, congratulations, Eric Barlow. Looking forward to you yeah Dave Willms: Yeah. El Nefi: in the the halls of Wyoming's capital. Dave Willms: Yeah, I'll second that. I got nothing else except that I really have to run. You got do you you have anything else? sweet. Sweet. All right. El Nefi: I got it, Dave. Go get your go get your stuff done, old man. Dave Willms: Well, I I got a kid going to college and we got a lot of things to get done. which makes me feel real old. But anyway, appreciate everybody listening. I know it's been a month or more since we've done one of these. so appreciate you sticking around and checking this one out. Reminder, if you want to get a hold of us, our new email address. Don't even have the old one anymore. If just sending it there, it's just a black box. New email address, your mountainpodcast at gmail.com. That's your mountainpodcast at gmail.com. Do not send it to the old one because we are done with that. It's gone. I can't even access it anymore. And find us on Instagram or Facebook or or YouTube. 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