Welcome to Sierra magazine's new podcast, The Overstory! Our very first episode features in-depth feature story from the embattled Bears Ears National Monument, a radio diary from two members of North Carolina’s Lumbee Tribe, a conversation about heirloom ciders, and sustainable-living advice from our columnist, Mr. Green.

Transcript

In our introduction episode, the editor of Sierra Magazine Jason Mark, Sierra's advice columnist Bob Schildgen aka Mr. Green, and members of North Carolina's Lumbee Tribe. The episode focuses on one of the most disputed lands in the country - Bears Ears National Monument in Utah - and how craft cider is bringing back biodiversity.

(1:17) Bears Ears National Monument

David Gessner: The sound you are hearing right now is the sound of me securing a fence. It is also the sound of controversy.

Jason Mark: Almost a year ago now, back in December of 2017, President Donald Trump moved to radically downsize the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments in Utah. The reductions, or so Trump claimed, would give control to "the communities that know the land best and cherish the lands best." But this way of thinking misses a key point. Public lands belong to all Americans, not just those who live closest to them. Journalist and author David Gessner got the story.

David Gessner: But it's sad there is a gate here at all because this is public land. Not only is it public land but it's the most disputed, most controversial public land in the country, if not the world right now.

So when I scrambled up to the Redrock I was shocked to find that the fence was following me. That it, in fact, ran right to the point where barbed wire married Redrock at the base of Bears Ears. Individual ranchers who lay claim to this vast territory inheritance that we consider our own. It's really a testament to the not-so-wild west. So now when I walk back I can see the white tent where the five tribes are camped out for the weekend to celebrate what's left of Bears Ears and to fight to reclaim the original acreage that was given by Obama. We're here to celebrate, and it is beautiful, sublime and slightly scary.

Kenneth Maryboy: Chief Manuelito – In his young age he made a commitment...

David Gessner: Kenneth Maryboy is standing in the middle of a large white tent that marks the social center for this weekend's Fourth Annual Bears Ears Summer Gathering, where tribes and others come together to celebrate Native culture. Maryboy is telling a story about Chief Manuelito, who fought the relocation of his tribe back in the 1800s.

Kenneth Maryboy: ...There is going to be a day that some enemy is going to kill me.

David Gessner: Perhaps Maryboy, a Navajo who is the current Democratic nominee for one of the three county commissioner seats in San Juan County, is in a fighting mood. He just won the primary for a commissioner seat over incumbent Rebecca Benally.

Rebecca Benally: ...Monument. Bothers and sisters, I stand here before you as a Native American woman. My constituents do not want a National Monument in San Juan County because there's just another federal overreach with empty promises.

David Gessner: Benally stood next to President Trump when he announced the Bears Ears reduction in Salt Lake City last February.

Donald Trump: These actions will modify the National Monument's designations of both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante.

David Gessner: The Trump administration proposed reducing the size of the monument by 85 percent.

Donald Trump: ...To reverse federal overreach and restore the rights of this land to your citizens.

David Gessner: His promise to return the land to its citizens is striking, as this federal monument is already public. Native American Nations and environmental groups are now trying to stop that attempted reduction through the courts.

Kenneth Maryboy: ...But you know what, I'm not going to go quietly. I'm going to take as many of the enemies as I can with me before I die.

David Gessner: This quote from Chief Manuelito is over a hundred years old, and yet it still resonates today. But it's one of only a few aggressive notes in an otherwise celebratory gathering.

The theme is, ‘Bears Ears is healing.’ A couple hundred of us are camping here. Each morning a group of Native veterans raises the American Flag. We then greet the sunset by a bear totem pole, donated by the Lumee Nation of Washington State. All three days the weather has been perfect and violet morning light plays off of Bears Ears with it's rich, almost edible, red-orange colors, shining out from below the green of pines and firs. Mountain blue birds and swallows shoot from tree to tree in the meadow below the Ears. But for me the peaceful scene is overshadowed by the reception we got from some of the ranchers here.

On the day of our arrival, ranchers moved the signs to Bears Ears so that those coming to celebrate would get lost. And they moved the final ribbon signifying that this was the campsite, so that the porta-potties were delivered to the wrong place.

Willie Grayeyes: They did that to us and we just ignored them and reestablished our path and kept going forward. That's the only way to do it.

David Gessner: Willie Grayeyes, the board chairman of the Utah Diné Bikéyah and one of the original leaders in the fight for Bears Ears, tells me that the lack of local hospitality is nothing new.

Willie Grayeyes: These are public lands, federal public lands. It's open to everybody.

David Gessner: So the weekend continues peacefully, including prayer, medicinal plant walks, programs for kids, the dedication of the bear totem, a 5K race, and more mutton than I've ever eaten in my life. We’re reminded of what was gained, what still is, and what might be again. A possibility’s not lost.

Regina Lopez: Seeing 85 percent of that — original boundaries — reduced to two small pieces of land leaves us with a memory that we've already gone through.

David Gessner: This is Regina Lopez Whiteskunk, who is the head councilwoman of the Ute Mountain Ute Nation during the years long campaign to establish Bears Ears as a National Monument.

Regina Lopez: And one of the things that elders have told us is, this is nothing new. The feeling we're feeling now is the same feeling that we felt generations ago. We just have to adapt.

David Gessner: To understand what has been lost by reducing Bears Ears, you must first understand what was gained. It began when the Navajo started mapping this area of southeast Utah. They produced a study of the region which contains over 100,000 Native American sites. Once this initial work was done, they invited other tribes to join in a proposal for the national monument. But the five nations that would eventually make up the Bears Ears Inter-tribal Coalition were not exactly on the best of terms.

Regina Lopez: That was the first starting point, was the five tribes basically reconciling their own differences and being able to heal that relationship to reach for a common goal.

David Gessner: The coalition proceeded slowly and with careful, detail-oriented intensity.

Regina Lopez: We all want preservation. We want continued access. We want to be able to be in these public spaces whether it's recreationally, whether it's ceremonially, whether it's to harvest what the land provides for us. It's all the same.

David Gessner: Finally they appealed to then President Obama who used The Antiquities Act to create the Bears Ears National Monument right before he left office. The tribes worked closely with the Obama Administration.

Regina Lopez: We were in and out of the White House to where it felt like that was my house to sit down and be taken seriously. So many times Indigenous people get talked to and decisions are made in the best interest of them. But when we had the ability to stand up and say, "in the best interest of my people, I can be a part of this process and empower others to feel inspired enough to raise their voices to share their Indigenous knowledge."

David Gessner: For the five nations that have struggled to protect Bears Ears, this land is a place of origin, of stories, of history, of culture. For others, it is a place of beauty, a place to connect with the natural world.

Regina Lopez: At the end of the day we are all the same. We are all utilizing the spaces in the same manner. So now it's not just ‘a Tribal People.’ It's all the United States citizens whom all public lands belong to. We all have a say in that, and so the pain is shared.

David Gessner: It is about a dream of the confluence of ideals, a flowing together of Native respect for the land. With the ideals, however sometimes flawed in practice, that created the National Parks, National Monuments and other public lands. And it is about the belief itself, the notion that there are still things worth caring about; large and great and hard to express things, in a world grown increasingly crass, and petty, and small.

For The Overstory, I'm David Gessner.

Jason Mark: David Gessner's most recent book is called All The Wild That Remains. It is a dual biography of Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. Gessner's currently at work at a book about Teddy Roosevelt who set aside over 200,000,000 acres of public land a century ago. I'm told David can do a mean Roosevelt impression, but that's for another podcast.

(11:30) Mr. Green Answers Your Questions

Jason Mark: Bob Schildgen a.k.a. Mr. Green has been writing his Ask Mr. Green column for Sierra Magazine for over a decade, and now here we are bringing it to the podcast.

Every episode we'll ask one listener to call in, ask Bob and question, maybe even stump him, and he'll give us all some wisdom on how to live a little bit greener.

(11:52) But before we get to his first listener question, I had a couple questions for Bob.

Jason Mark: Bob, I got a question for you, you're always getting questions from other people. How many years have you been writing this column for Sierra Magazine?

Bob Schildgen: I started this column in 2005, in the February issue of Sierra Magazine and I figured it would last a couple years. And here we are some 14 years later now.

Jason Mark: So how many questions do you think you've done, over the years?

Bob Schildgen: Hundreds.

Jason Mark: Have you ever been stumped?

Bob Schildgen: Oh many times but when I'm stumped I don't publish it.

Jason Mark: So you just give up? You say, I can't find the answer.

Bob Schildgen: I surrender, but I never admit that.

Jason Mark: What's a takeaway, for you, from this 13, 14 years of doing this column? Really, how difficult is it for folks to find a way to walk with a lighter ecological footprint?

Bob Schildgen: I think it's very difficult because of our culture, which is based in waste and based on selling things to people that they don't necessarily need.

Jason Mark: It is, but hopefully you're helping them care.

Bob Schildgen: Well I hope so, yeah. I hope that I've informed at least a few people.

Jason Mark: That's the idea.

(13:00) Now we've got Kathy from San Anselmo, California, on the line to ask Mr. Green about cellphones verses landlines.

Kathy: I recently updated my iPhone and I'm finding that it uses whole lot more battery power. And meanwhile we're about to get rid of our landline because we rarely use it. And I was wondering what's better for the planet in the long run: the smartphone or the landline?

Bob Schildgen: Uh huh, well, that's a tough question because it's depends on how many cell phones you throw away. When I was a kid we had the old crank phones that hung on the wall. They would last for 50, 60, 70 years. The same old instrument. If you're typically, you'll probably get rid of your cell phone once every two years or less. And that's a lot of raw material that's being tossed away, in the form of cell phones.

In this country alone, we are now disposing of 150 million cell phones each year. Half the population throws away a phone and only about 15 percent of this waste is being recycled. A million cell phones alone contain 35,000 pounds of copper, 20 pounds of the rare material palladium, 770 pounds of silver, and 75 pounds of gold per million phones. Multiply that by 150 million and you have a fairly staggering amount of raw material there. So, how to do get people to dispose of these phones properly so that the material in them gets recycled? One of the biggest problems is people don't know what to do with a used up phone. One thing you can do, there is a website called E-stewards that's e-stewards.org and they will route you to, what they consider to be, a responsible recycler.

It's been good talking to you, and I hope this helps you confront the environmental realities of cellphones.

Kathy: Thank you so much.

Bob Schildgen: You're welcome.

Jason Mark: That was Bob Schildgen with Ask Mr. Green, our advice column for sustainable living. If you've got a question you want answered, all you got to do is go online sierramagazine.org, look for Mr. Green at the top of the page, click on it, send us a question, and if you're real lucky he'll have you on the show to answer it.

The Flooding of Lumber River

(15:47) Kim Pevia: As I just inhale, you know, let Mother Nature in--

Jason Mark: Kim Pevia and Jessica Clark, belong to North Carolina's Lumbee Tribe, who's members mostly live near the Lumber River on the state’s flat costal plane. The river is also known as The Lumbee River, for it's cultural significance to the tribe. It's been the site of two major recent floods. The result of this year's Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Matthew which battered North Carolina in 2016. We talked to them on the banks of the river where they had just taken a canoe ride. Just a note, this interview took place before Hurricane Florence hit the state.

Kim Pevia: So we're under-- is this an Oak Tree?

Jessica Clark: Sweet Gum.

Kim Pevia: Sweet Gum tree, near Cypress Trees and around the bend of the river, and you hear the children playing in it, just outside the heart of Pembroke North Carolina, home of the Lumbees. Yeah, hearing the spirit of the tree and the river move. My name is Kim Pevia and I'm really delighted and honored to be joined by my dear friend.

Jessica Clark: Jessica Clark. I'm a local artist and educator.

Kim Pevia: I don't know what I am. Maybe a practicing elder and community organizer.

Jessica Clark: I'm from here, I grew up three miles down the road. This is the second time I've been on the river. I didn't grow up canoeing and kayaking down the river, we would fish but it was always from the banks. I enjoy it because it can be peaceful and I think you hear the ancestors.

Kim Pevia: Our people have always been on this land, there's a real connection to my most recent relatives, and then all the ancestors who moved through here. So yeah, home in medicine. But it does take slowing down and not being in the colonized world of rush, rush, rush, rush because when you come out and you have this experience and it gets in you, it's hard then to think of the river as anything other than sacred. There's just a sense of resonance with the land and the air itself, the currents of the river, the look of the river, the smell of the river. But the natural order of things is being changed.

As folks who live of the land here, we typically know when it’s berry season, and it can actually even be followed by the moons in many instances. And those things have all shifted. The berry seasons have either truncated or come earlier, and it's like, "Oh". So now we're seeing it in the foods. This is a real natural thing of how much sun we need verses coolness and heat to produce the very food that we need. It's terrifying to me, I feel like Mother Earth is crying out all the time. We've never had as much craziness in nature as we've had lately.

Jessica Clark: I think when the hurricane came through the issue was water drainage. They drained all this water off this land and built roads and towns and nobody thought about, where's it going to go? If a flood happens, where is that water going to go? I just want to shake people and say, "Why can't you see what's happening? Do you honestly think you're going to drill in the earth and extract all this and there's not going to be consequences?"

Craft Cider is Helping Apple Biodiversity

(19:15) Jason Mark: Now, for something a little bit sweeter. Reporter Stacey McKenna sat down recently with our Adventure and Lifestyle Editor, Katie O'Riley to talk about the countries craft cider revival, which, it turns out is a throw back to the agricultural roots of the United States.

(19:31) Is it true, Stacey that until prohibition, Americans, especially Americans who worked on farms and that sort of thing, drink cider on a daily basis?

Stacey McKenna: Yes. One, it was a safe way to get liquid into you when water sources weren't always clean. Turning things into alcohol makes water drinkable, when it's not otherwise.

(19:54) Is hard cider becoming more popular? I feel like I see it, I see way more of it.

Stacey McKenna: It is one of the fastest growing alcoholic subgroups in the U.S. And what we've really been seeing in the last few years, more and more of these small cider makers popping up who are really, really invested in the types of apples that they're using.

(20:17) How exactly does the proliferation of cider's popularity contribute to the biodiversity of apples?

Stacey McKenna: So apples are this crazy fruit. You can have five seeds in an apple, and if you planted five trees from those five seeds, you would end up with five different apple trees. Even if you were to graft a tree, which is the way that you can guarantee that you're getting a certain type of apple, if you did it in Colorado and Tennessee, you would get two really different fruits.

Katie O'Riley: Wow, so cider really has that terrior that wine does.

Stacey McKenna: Yes, exactly. In part, because of the size of this county and it's diversity of it's landscapes, ciders really do reflect the landscapes that they come from when the makers are using local apples.

(21:11) We've got a few here right now, should we try some cider?

Stacey McKenna: Yeah.

Katie O'Riley: Okay, Tuesday afternoon, let's do this.

Stacey McKenna: Why don't we start with the Angry Orchard — the Walden Hollow. That's one that's probably going to be the easiest for people to find, since it's Angry Orchard. But they've got this heirloom cider that's just amazing and it really showcases these old fruits.

Katie O'Riley: It's a nice color. It's kind of that really golden hue. Great, well cheers.

Stacey McKenna: Cheers.

Katie O'Riley: Oh that's really nice.

Stacey McKenna: It tastes like an apple, to me. It tastes like biting into fall.

Katie O'Riley: It does, like a nice tart apple. Like Granny Smith or something like that, although I'm sure it is a much less basic apple than a Granny Smith that went into this.

Stacey McKenna: This one has Newtown Pippin, Golden Russet, and Rhode Island Greening as some of the ones that show up in it.

Katie O'Riley: Much, much more evocative than Red Delicious and Pink Lady and Granny Smith. And I hear that Angry Orchard has a research orchard in New York's Hudson Valley where they are doing more and more R&D into various types of apples and figuring out how they can contribute to different types of more nuanced and interesting types of ciders.

Stacey McKenna: Yep. And it's exciting to see a big-scale producer so invested in that side of it.

Katie O'Riley Yeah, it's kind of like if Budweiser was all of a sudden making really, really interesting saisons, right?

Stacey McKenna: Yeah, exactly.

Katie O'Riley: Do you have any other ones that you'd like to try today Stacey?

Stacey McKenna: AeppelTreow, I think is how you say this one. They're based in Wisconsin and their cider Americana is a still variety.

Katie O'Riley: It looks a lot like a rosé or kind of a goldish-white wine.

Stacey McKenna: And they started growing-- they added cider specific apples, which are the really tannic, they're called spitters sometimes. You wouldn't want to eat them. You would just spit them out. They added some of those into their orchard in 2004.

Katie O'Riley: Well let's see what these Spitters taste like...Oh. It's kind of like savory, but still refreshing.

Stacey McKenna: To me, it's closer to a wine. And not having the carbonation. The fact that it's actually still, it just feels different in your mouth than something that's sparkling.

Katie O'Riley: In the course of all this research and all this writing you did, Stacey, what surprised you the most about hard cider?

Stacey McKenna: I think, the apples themselves. The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project, Jude, one of the founders, he told me that cider is really made from the goodness of the orchard. And I felt like that was the most beautiful way to put it because that's ultimately what it is. It's taking these good qualities, maybe you've got some sweet apples, some acidic, some tannic and you put them all together and that's where you get this special thing in a glass.

Jason Mark: That was Stacey McKenna talking with Katie O'Riley, Sierra's Adventure and Lifestyle Editor.

Notes and Thanks

We're going to close things out today with a special segment from our friend Bernie Krause. Krause is a musician, he's a soundscape recordist, he's a bioacoustician. Google the Moog and you'll find out a lot more about Bernie. For the past 50, some odd years, he's traveled the globe recording the natural world with one pretty simple goal in mind: to help us all listen a little bit better to wild nature. We'll talk with Bernie on an upcoming episode of The Overstory, but for this episode let's just close out with a soundscape at Bears Ears in Utah, all the way back in the 1980s. 

The Overstory is produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects Media. Our theme is by Jeff Bradsky. Special thanks to Alison Kagel, Katie O'Riley, Meredith Turk, Najeeb Amine, Topher at the Berkeley J School Studios and Danielle and Nancy for their delicious ciders. If you want to read more of Stacey's reporting on hard ciders and how they're reviving the heirloom apple industry, check out her article at sierramagazine.org, she also wrote about it on mic.com. To read more of David Gessner's writing about Bears Ears, head to our website sierramagazine.org.

What's Next?

Next time on The Overstory, we go to the most remote place in the country which is currently facing the threat of new oil drilling. And we talk about why the whole white dude outdoors man is a thing of the past.