Andrew Mergen, faculty director of Harvard Law School's Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic and a 33-year veteran of public lands litigation at the Department of Justice, and Justin Pidot, a University of Arizona law professor and former general counsel of the...
Lynn Scarlett, former Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Department of the Interior and now Managing Director for Public Policy at The Nature Conservancy, and Matt Lee-Ashley, Executive Director of Ground Shift, discuss the initiative, sponsored...
Brooks Lamb, Special Advisor for Strategic Communications at American Farmland Trust and author of Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place, explains why more than 300 million acres of American farmland, roughly a third of the nation's agricultural...
Paul Hendricks, executive director of The Conservation Alliance; Jen McLaren, global brand president of Altra; and Dawn Mancini Moyer, regional sustainability manager at Fjällräven, join Bill and Anders for a live panel recorded at Switchback Spring 2026, the outdoor...
Meryl Harrell, former Deputy Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment at USDA and a leader at Friends of the Forest Service, and Lisa Ronald, Western Montana Associate Conservation Director at American Rivers and co-founder of the Wild and Scenic Rivers...
Dillon Osleger is a geologist, conservationist, and trail builder whose debut book, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands (Heyday, 2026), argues that trails are not neutral infrastructure but agreements between people and places, and...
Jaime Loucky, CEO of Washington Trails Association since 2022, traces the organization's six-decade history from Louise Marshall's 1966 kitchen-table newsletter, Signpost, to a nonprofit generating 160,000 volunteer trail hours a year. He explains WTA's "flywheel...
A once-in-a-generation chance to reimagine public lands protection from the ground up The federal lands fight has shifted since Tracy Stone-Manning last sat down with Bill and Anders in June 2025. The workforce cuts she warned about have arrived; the Roadless Rule is...
The hollowing out of agencies is not something that can be reversed quickly. John Leshy is an Emeritus Professor at UC Law San Francisco, former Solicitor of the Interior Department under President Clinton, and the author of Our Common Ground: A History of America’s...
In this special episode, The Wild Idea brings its recent public webinar directly to podcast listeners. Join a high-powered panel of scientists, attorneys, policy veterans, and conservation advocates to examine one of the most consequential federal land protection...