The Wild Idea Podcast
Explore All Our Episodes
Fitz Cahall: The Million-Signature Push to Save Public Lands
Fitz Cahall, longtime host of The Dirtbag Diaries, has spent two decades telling other people’s outdoor stories. Now he’s stepping into the fight himself, leading Save Public Lands, a coalition effort to gather one million signatures against public land sell-offs, backroom deals, and giveaways before National Public Lands Day.
Jim Klug, Hal Herring & Alex Leone: River Access Is Not a Spectator Sport
Jim Klug of Yellow Dog Fly Fishing, journalist and podcaster Hal Herring, and Alex Leone of the Public Land/Water Access Association join Bill and Anders to trace how Montana’s 1985 Stream Access Law came to exist, the landowners who fought it in court for decades, and why they say the fight is never permanently won. The conversation closes on the Montana Stream Access Rally, a September 17 gathering in Bozeman meant to remind lawmakers that Montanans are still paying attention.
Christian Hunt & Kelly Cox: Can Wildlife Corridors Cross DC’s Political Divide?
Christian Hunt, director of Defenders of Wildlife’s National Wildlife Refuges and Parks Program, and Kelly Cox, the program’s senior policy and planning specialist, join Bill and Anders to break down the Wildlife Corridors and Habitat Connectivity Conservation Act of 2026, a bipartisan bill that would create the first legal framework for connecting fragmented wildlife habitat across federal lands. The conversation also turns to Defenders’ campaign at Cumberland Island National Seashore, where a National Park Service land exchange plan is raising questions about transparency and the seashore’s mandate to remain in a primitive state.
Adam Cramer: How Outdoor Recreation Became a Conservation Coalition
Adam Cramer, founding CEO of the Outdoor Alliance, traces the coalition’s start in a DC parking lot to its current fight to protect the Roadless Rule, why he believes a single public comment still carries weight even when agencies ignore it, and how outdoor recreation could become one of the few public lands issues with support across the political spectrum.
Dan Puskar: DC’s Own National Park
Dan Puskar, executive director of the Rock Creek Conservancy, takes us into Rock Creek Park, the 1,754-acre national park that shares an 1890 birthday with Sequoia and Yosemite but gets none of their name recognition or funding. He explains how a nonprofit partner and thousands of volunteers fill the gap left by two decades of flat federal budgets, and previews the reopening of the Carter Barron Amphitheater, dark for a decade, for three nights of live music this week.
Ryan Johnston: Building Cast Hope Through the Sport of Fly Fishing
Fly fishing guide, author, and Cast Hope founder Ryan Johnston takes us behind the oars for stories from more than two decades guiding the South Fork of the Snake River and Montana’s Flathead Valley, the origin of his youth mentorship nonprofit, and a candid look at who controls access to some of the West’s most sought-after rivers.
Andy Mergen & Justin Pidot: How Do We Make Public Lands More Public?
Andy Mergen, faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and Justin Pidot, a University of Arizona law professor and former general counsel of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, join Bill and Anders to ask a deceptively simple question: are America’s public lands becoming more public, or less? The conversation ranges from the 1872 Mining Law and a proposed new Public Land Law Review Commission to tribal co-management, land reacquisition, and a closing lightning round on the administration’s rollback of Endangered Species Act habitat protections and a fresh round of cuts to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Lynn Scarlett & Matt Lee-Ashley: Can We Rewrite the Rules of Public Lands Policy?
Lynn Scarlett, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, and Matt Lee-Ashley, Executive Director of Ground Shift, join Bill and Anders to talk about the crowdsourced initiative asking what America’s public lands and waters should look like decades from now. The conversation covers essays testing long-held conservation assumptions, the case for a modern Public Land Law Review Commission, and why deep disruption at federal land agencies might be the opening this conversation has needed.
Brooks Lamb: Land, Legacy, and Who Comes Next
Brooks Lamb of American Farmland Trust joins Bill and Anders live at the Old Salt Festival on the Mannix Ranch to unpack the succession crisis facing American agriculture: who inherits the land, who gets pushed out, and what it will take to keep family farms farming.
Heather Hansman: Fierce Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild
Journalist Heather Hansman joins The Wild Idea to talk about her new book, Fierce Country, which tells the story of three women, a Grand Canyon river guide, an Adirondack wilderness biologist, and a backcountry ski philosopher, whose work shaped modern conservation and outdoor recreation but whose names rarely made it into the history books.
Find us on these podcast players and more:
What is The Wild Idea?
Humans have been part of Earth’s natural cycle for 300,000 years, with brains much the same as ours for the past 100,000 or so. What’s evolved isn’t our biology but how we understand our place in the natural world. As small populations grew into communities and then into societies, we created cultural, religious, and legal frameworks to help explain and define our connection to the rest of life on Earth.
