The Wild Idea Podcast
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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.
Paul Hendricks, Jen McLaren & Dawn Mancini Moyer: Why Outdoor Brands Are Speaking Up for Public Lands
Paul Hendricks of The Conservation Alliance, Jen McLaren of Altra, and Dawn Mancini Moyer of Fjällräven join Bill and Anders for a live panel recorded at Switchback Spring 2026, on the risk and reward calculus behind outdoor brands speaking out for threatened public lands, from Boundary Waters to Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Meryl Harrell & Lisa Ronald: The future of stewarding our shared wild places
Wilderness visitation surged 75% during the pandemic and hasn’t let back down. In this conversation recorded for the National Wilderness Skills Institute, Meryl Harrell of Friends of the Forest Service and Lisa Ronald of American Rivers take honest stock of the stewardship capacity gaps that have opened up, the tools and technologies reshaping the work, and the community-led models that are starting to fill the space.
Fault Lines: Exploring Wilderness Climbing Management
For decades, whether fixed anchors (the bolts, pitons, and slings climbers use to navigate vertical terrain) are appropriate in wilderness was a question each park superintendent answered differently. The Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act settled it in law. Now the federal guidelines that law required are open for public comment, and Erik Murdock of the Access Fund joins the Fault Lines series to explain what’s at stake and how to weigh in.
Dillon Osleger: The Hidden Histories Beneath America’s Trails
Geologist and conservationist Dillon Osleger spent years building and restoring trails before writing about what they mean. In Trail Work, he argues that trails are agreements between people and place, and that neglecting those agreements erases far more than footpaths. In this conversation, he traces how maps reflect the priorities of those who draw them, why trail stewardship creates rare common ground across political divides, and what we risk losing if we stop paying attention to the paths beneath our feet.
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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.
