S4E39: Ideology vs. Wildlife Science: A Conversation with Mandy Culbertson

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host Chris Clark, and I think you're going to like this episode. We are going to be talking to Mandy Culbertson, who's communications director of the group Wildlife for All, which is a nationwide group working on protection of wildlife and strengthening those protections, as well as undermining the parts of law and policy that work against wildlife protection.

0:01:11 - (Chris Clarke): It's a really illuminating interview. I learned a lot and I think you will too. Before that, this is usually where I thank people who donated to our podcast and to the Desert Advocacy Media Network since the last episode came out, and we don't have any new donors since the last episode came out. So if you would like to hear your name and a list of thank yous, go to nine zero miles from needles.com donate and make a selection of an amount and a frequency that makes sense to you.

0:01:41 - (Chris Clarke): If you don't want to hear your name on the podcast, but you want to give us money anyway, just let us know in the notes. This episode's coming out on the 17th of October in 2025 and if you are listening to it on the day it comes out, then I hope you are planning tomorrow, Saturday the 18th to find the closest no Kings rally to you. There are so many of them happening in the desert and I thought about reading off the list of desert towns and cities in which there are planned no Kings events, and there are 50 such events in Arizona alone.

0:02:14 - (Chris Clarke): So I'm not going to read them all. I'm just going to suggest that you go to nokings.org n o k I n g s.org and there will be an interactive map with a bunch of dots on it. Click on those dots and you will see information about demonstrations on the 18th that are near you. There are some vigils that are listed, including one that's going to be in Joshua tree at Highway 62 and Park Boulevard right downtown in Joshua Tree.

0:02:42 - (Chris Clarke): And if you're local I will see you there.

0:02:45 - (Chris Clarke): There will be car caravans in some.

0:02:47 - (Chris Clarke): Places and marches and lots of different ways to express your opposition to the collapse of American democracy, such as it was not just Los Angeles and Portland and Chicago that are going to be hosting these demonstrations. We're talking about Winslow, Arizona. People are going to be standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, complaining about the threats to American democracy and working to restore that democracy.

0:03:13 - (Chris Clarke): It's just a really impressive list of events. And given that late night shows are advertising nokings.org on their own shows, I think it's going to be pretty remarkable. Organizers are projecting that it's going to be the largest peaceful demonstration of opposition to the government in American history. And if you're at one of those demonstrations in the desert and you have a way to record some audio and you want to provide a little bit of local color and represent your town on this podcast, we would be very interested in hearing what you send us. Be sure and let us know where you are.

0:03:48 - (Chris Clarke): You can use your first name or.

0:03:50 - (Chris Clarke): No name at all.

0:03:51 - (Chris Clarke): The smaller the town and bigger the demonstration, the more fun that is. But we want to hear from you too. Vegas and Phoenix and Salt Lake City, Palm Springs, Tucson. So stay safe, have a good time. And that said, let's go to our conversation with Mandy Culbertson of Wildlife for All.

0:04:35 - (Chris Clarke): I am very excited to welcome Mandy Culbertson to our podcast. Mandy is the communications Director of Wildlife for all, about which we will learn a significant amount very shortly. Mandy, thank you for taking the time to talk to us here at 90 miles from Needles.

0:04:50 - (Mandy Culbertson): Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I'm really excited to dive into the state of wildlife of public lands in the Southwest. This is a region of incredible biodiversity, but it's also facing a perfect storm of ecological, political and social pressures that are threatening both animals and human communities.

0:05:05 - (Chris Clarke): Yep, can't wait. And the biodiversity aspect of things is near and dear to my heart. A lot of people don't realize that the first use of the term according to Google Scholar was in a scientific paper about the Sonoran Desert.

0:05:19 - (Mandy Culbertson): Wow.

0:05:20 - (Chris Clarke): Biodiversity was born here. Can you tell us, just to start out, what is Wildlife for All and how you came to be involved?

0:05:27 - (Mandy Culbertson): Yeah, thanks for that opportunity. It's a great segue to when we talk about biodiversity. So Wildlife for All. We're a national nonprofit working to reform state wildlife governance across the United States because we believe that protecting biodiversity and restoring healthy ecosystems requires a more ethical and democratic and just approach to wildlife policy, one that really includes all voices and not just a narrow set of interests. One of our main critiques is that the system of state wildlife governance has been captured by extractive uses for a very long time.

0:06:00 - (Mandy Culbertson): Our work is Trying to connect local advocacy, public education, and policy reform to build a movement that is going to reform these systems to defend both democratic input and, frankly, biodiversity, ecosystems, and life itself in this country.

0:06:16 - (Chris Clarke): How did you end up working for Wildlife for All?

0:06:19 - (Mandy Culbertson): My background is in advocacy and narrative strategy, and I have worked in nonprofit and government work for a long time. Started in water quality, actually, and moved to wildlife work and met Michelle Lute, the executive director of Wildlife for All, when we worked together at Project Coyote, advocating for carnivore conservation. I like to focus on connecting the dots between democracy, justice, and what communications can bring to that. So I live and work in the West.

0:06:49 - (Mandy Culbertson): I've spent my career helping people understand that the way we govern right now isn't just a technical issue. If you want to be an American citizen, you have to be an advanced citizen, right? How power is distributed in this country, how people participate, isn't easy, and you have to take the time to understand it. For me, the intersection of communications, advocacy, and justice is important because I think that lasting change requires shifting both narratives and the systems we have.

0:07:19 - (Chris Clarke): That's great.

0:07:20 - (Chris Clarke): So what is the deal with states in the Southwest? How are states managing their wildlife charges and their responsibilities there?

0:07:29 - (Mandy Culbertson): Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm going to answer broadly and then shift to the Southwest because there's a lot to cover. But largely, I think the general public, folks who care about wildlife, seeing birds or mammals or other things in their backyard, maybe they like to fish, whatever their use is, hiking, etc. Most folks don't realize that state agencies, state wildlife agencies, are responsible for the vast majority of wildlife management in this country.

0:07:56 - (Mandy Culbertson): If you are not a migratory bird, a marine mammal, or a threatened or endangered species, the federal government actually doesn't have much to do with you and most of the policy decision making about your habitat, your life, whether or not you'll be hunted as a species, all of that is up to the states. And so wildlife for all, that's one of the things we really want to raise awareness around, is that state management is so important to become involved in if you care about wildlife conservation, public lands management.

0:08:23 - (Mandy Culbertson): In terms of the Southwest, it's a biodiversity hotspot, home to species like jaguars, Mexican gray wolves. But it's also one of the most fragile regions in the country. Drought, habitat fragmentation, climate change, ongoing pressures with increasing development and the largely increasing human populations and urbanization. So we have these landscapes that are really fragmented, that are deeply affected by our activities, and we have wildlife struggling to survive within that.

0:08:53 - (Chris Clarke): The States are all very different from each other in the Southwest. I'm most familiar with California based on my career as a journalist focusing on California environmental issues. While there's plenty to complain about in California's wildlife policy, overall, it does a pretty good job. We have our own version of the federal Endangered Species Act. California Endangered Species act, which has gotten a lot of use in the desert. We have a fairly forward-looking Fish and wildlife department and a couple of environmentalists on Fish and Game Commission. That is a citizen oversight of fish and wildlife.

0:09:29 - (Chris Clarke): I know for sure that other states in the Southwest don't have that range of tools available on the state level. How are other states in the Southwest looking that way?

0:09:41 - (Mandy Culbertson): Yeah, that's a great question. So you're right to celebrate some of California's really important protections that are in place. And also I think great reform efforts that have happened in that state driven by nonprofit entities as well as public pressure. People out there have really weighed in and said, this is what we care about and this is what we want to protect. When we look at other states in the Southwest, Arizona, for instance, is one that Wildlife for All just worked on. A campaign to end the use of hounding.

0:10:07 - (Mandy Culbertson): So chasing animals with dogs. Right. This work was really driven by a great coalition of groups. The activities of these hound hunters were actually deeply affecting endangered species and threatened species, things like jaguars, Mexican gray wolves. And we were trying to get the state to take action. What was wild to me was that not only was the commission resistant to hearing this petition, but we actually had state lawmakers trying to take the authority of decision making away from the commission in the course of the state legislative session because they were so afraid of this petition we brought forward saying, hey, maybe hound hunting for recreation isn't the greatest thing for all species.

0:10:48 - (Mandy Culbertson): And there was a commissioner that actually went and supported that. He actually went to the legislature and testified and said, yes, please take my authority to make this decision away. It's a really interesting system. Conversely, when we look at New Mexico, a great coalition came together this year and won the passage of a bill that we had been working on for more than a decade. It was called Senate Bill 5.

0:11:12 - (Mandy Culbertson): And it basically changed the way the state wildlife commission worked. It took away a little bit of authority from the governor because commissioners were being fired without warning for not a lot of reason. And the state really struggled with actually having a quorum a lot of the time, so decision making couldn't happen. And this really rebalanced the state commission to include scientific representations to give indigenous Tribes their own representation, and to make sure that there was a nomination committee that was putting forward good candidates to the governor and basically trying to make this more of a public accountability measure. Because let me back up one step and just say one thing I think most people don't know about how state wildlife management works is that the state wildlife agencies are full of scientists and policymakers and folks that are really working day in and day out on the different species.

0:12:02 - (Mandy Culbertson): But most of the time, the level of authority does vary by state. They report up to the state wildlife commission, and these commissions are appointed boards generally appointed by the governor a lot of times without even having to be reviewed by the state senate. It's literally just this kind of singular board that reports to the governor, is appointed by them, and really isn't accountable to the public at all. There's no elections, no retention voting.

0:12:28 - (Mandy Culbertson): There's no real recourse if you don't like someone who is appointed, if they don't represent you, or if you don't like their decision making. They're just these entities and these islands unto themselves.

0:12:39 - (Chris Clarke): Right.

0:12:40 - (Mandy Culbertson): So that makes a passage of a bill like SB5 really important. Right. Because this is what the start of making this governance more democratic really looks like. And it's a model we'd like to see put forward in more states so that we don't have these wildlife systems that are politically captured and scientifically compromised.

0:12:57 - (Chris Clarke): Do you have a sense of ranking among the states? Which states are better for wildlife or not so much?

0:13:04 - (Mandy Culbertson): Oh, that's a great question. If we start thinking about which states are doing better at protecting wildlife and which aren't, there are states that I think really have done the work to put forward science, informed decision making, to have commissions that are truly representative. And we see some of that happening. Maryland is a great example, actually. They've done some things like ban led ammunition and made some really great decisions around ending trapping on state lands. Right. Cause we know that trapping is a really outdated and cruel practice that frankly doesn't need to happen for recreation in this day and age.

0:13:42 - (Mandy Culbertson): And that's a great state example. Colorado is a good one to point to. A lot of the time the commission there is truly representative, has lots of different folks who represent both public interests in terms of like recreational usage as well as scientific knowledge and specific communities like outfitters, anglers or hunting. And I think there's one slick at, I would have told you, Washington state, but unfortunately political machinations there have eroded that commission.

0:14:10 - (Mandy Culbertson): That commission was working towards balancing user interests and Getting a mix of folks under the previous governor, Jay Inslee. When this new Governor Ferguson came on, he undid some appointments that had been an agreement, kind of a handshake deal between him and the previous governor and took away some appointments that were really being looked forward to and celebrated by the wildlife community, including somebody who probably could have been the best person to save the southern resident orca population.

0:14:38 - (Mandy Culbertson): It's really disappointing to see that. I'm not sure what happened, whether it was some sort of campaign promise, but these laudable appointments in Washington were rolled back pretty abruptly. So I think New Mexico is going to be a state to watch as we start to see this commission change based on this new legislation and based on this coalition that came together. This was a coalition of everybody from animal rights groups to hunters and anglers, to hikers, to bird watchers, to traditional wildlife advocacy groups like us.

0:15:09 - (Mandy Culbertson): Everybody came together and said, you know what? This needs to happen. And I think that's a really cool message with some of those groups. We've been on opposite sides of legislation or issues before, and it's nice to see that when something's really important, we can all work together to say, you know what, this has to happen for the improvement of ecosystems, for biodiversity, for wildlife in the state.

0:15:29 - (Chris Clarke): So on the other end of the spectrum, let's avoid using words like worst, but which state? If you were in HR running all the states, which state would get a performance improvement plan with regard to wildlife management?

0:15:42 - (Mandy Culbertson): States that are really egregious in the political and ideologically forward decision making. That really isn't including public voices, looking at the public trust, looking at best available science, the Northern Rockies states, if you're talking about wolves, are pretty egregious, right? So we look at Montana, we look at Wyoming, we look at Idaho, and basically a campaign of extermination for wolves.

0:16:08 - (Mandy Culbertson): Montana is an interesting example, just to give you the most brief rundown of this situation. In 2021, lawmakers passed a directing the state agency to reduce the wolf population without regard to science, just there are too many wolves, take the population down. The state agency has been setting extremely high quotas for hunting and basically opening up all sorts of tactics like night hunting, like almost unlimited trapping with no setbacks for protection. You think about people and dogs and using trails like, there's almost no protection for those folks.

0:16:43 - (Mandy Culbertson): We're seeing endangered species like bears and lynx caught in grizzly bears, excuse me, caught in these traps, which is really wide open, free for all, killing, candidly. And even the state's own data is showing that if these quotas continue, the wolf population won't be viable in five to seven years. And some lawmakers, one of whom was a sponsor of this 2021 bill, just sued in state court last week to try to force the agency to increase the quota this year.

0:17:11 - (Mandy Culbertson): They think that maybe there's 700 to 800 wolves in the state. Like actual peer reviewed science, not the state models. The state models are deeply overinflated and they're trying to kill about 500 this year. These lawmakers are suing to say no, you should actually kill more. So we call that adherence to teams, to sides, to political ideology and not really to what is responsible management at a very minimum, much less what's ethical or moral or what we should be considering for ecosystem health, for species management, for biodiversity protection.

0:17:41 - (Mandy Culbertson): I'd also point to Florida. Florida's wildlife commission has basically been captured by real estate developers. There aren't any members of hunting and angling communities, wildlife management, scientific representation like it is all developers running that commission, seven members. And they dictated against the agency staffers own recommendations, a black bear hunt this year. The agency said no, we're still trying to conduct population studies. We'd like to do that and then we can recommend a hunt or not based on the updated population count. Is right.

0:18:13 - (Mandy Culbertson): They at the December 2024 meeting actually directed this hunt. There has been a huge public outcry. All of that was ignored over several meetings. This politically driven decision has moved forward and what's really concerning about that is preliminary data has come in about black bear abundance in one management unit because the state again is still conducting their population counts and that one management unit is showing a two thirds decline.

0:18:40 - (Chris Clarke): Wow.

0:18:41 - (Mandy Culbertson): But the hunt is proceeding.

0:18:43 - (Chris Clarke): That's nuts.

0:18:45 - (Mandy Culbertson): It is. This is about. We have to shift this decision making. Right. Because this is about building systems that are rooted in public participation, in democratic input, in best available science. And right now it is really just in a lot of states, a core group of extractive kind of power hungry special interests making decisions devoid of input or frankly counter to public input. And they just don't seem to care.

0:19:15 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I think our listeners in Texas are probably breathing a small sigh of relief that they didn't make the short list of bad states. Or maybe they disagree and are angry we're letting Texas off the hook, but who knows? I was just in Texas actually did a quick tour along the border between Yuma and El Paso, spent a little time in Tucson and a lot of people were talking about the border Wall going up in the San Rafael Valley.

0:19:43 - (Chris Clarke): There's a lot of energy around wildlife and the border. Are you folks involved in that? What have you been seeing?

0:19:50 - (Mandy Culbertson): Well, thank you for raising this. The US Mexico borderlands are some of the most biodiverse landscapes in North America. We're talking home to jaguars, to ocelots, to black bears, mountain lions, pronghorns, hundreds of bird species. It's on the migratory path for monarch butterflies. And we know the western monarch is in deep trouble. This increase in border militarization is fragmenting this habitat while it is worsening under the current administration.

0:20:15 - (Mandy Culbertson): It didn't start here.

0:20:16 - (Chris Clarke): No.

0:20:16 - (Mandy Culbertson): This has been happening for years and was not halted under previous administrations. There was a study just released by the University of Arizona that recorded 21,000, I think, wildlife videos from 85 trail cams. Their findings were really sobering, showing that large mammals are avoiding the border region entirely due to this increased wall and road infrastructure. And basically it's fragmenting the habitat for large cats, for jaguars and pumas. They're not finding them in certain areas because they can't move forward, only the really adaptable species that are truly comfortable with human presence.

0:20:53 - (Mandy Culbertson): You think like a coyote or a bobcat. And so when you bring up the San Rafael Valley, it's one of the last intact grasslands in the west. And it's being ripped apart by this wall const. Despite the fact that 90% of the border crossings in that area have actually gone away. If you're trying to talk about this, and we can talk a little bit about the ethics of this, trying to control human migration in the way that we're doing it, if you really wanted to make the case for safety, this isn't even a hotspot for crossings.

0:21:20 - (Mandy Culbertson): They're reducing and there's still ongoing litigation to try to prevent this wall. The current administration is pushing it forward despite several lawsuits pointing at like 30 different laws this is violating.

0:21:31 - (Chris Clarke): Mm.

0:21:32 - (Mandy Culbertson): It's deeply concerning. And I do want to also name that there's a little known policy directive that most people don't know about right now that's making this even worse. The current administration signed a policy directive called NSPM 4 that essentially handed over a large portion, I think it's 170 square miles of the Texas and New Mexico border to the military to administer. And this is a really concerning precedent because we don't need the military conducting law enforcement actions along the border.

0:22:07 - (Mandy Culbertson): In wildlife for all's opinion. This is a manufactured crisis of demonizing a population of people who should be Receiving all the humanitarian care and attention we can give them, not calling them criminals and illegals and forcing them to risk their lives in unsafe manners. Right, right.

0:22:25 - (Chris Clarke): And.

0:22:25 - (Mandy Culbertson): And then on top of that, when you look at this, one thing I like to say about wildlife issues is people try to put it in a silo. Right. Or a lot of times it's thought of that way. But like, every fight is interconnected. Right. So just like, you know, these human folks who are coming to seek asylum, like these animals we're concerned about, they don't recognize walls or checkpoints. A border is just a line on a map.

0:22:43 - (Mandy Culbertson): But what we're talking about in terms of harm is a living ecosystem. Right. And militarization is making that harder and putting both animals and human communities at risk.

0:22:53 - (Chris Clarke): Mm. Yeah, this is a hot topic for this podcast and for me personally, just given that I've never met anybody that's come into the country without documentation that I wouldn't want to have as a neighbor.

0:23:07 - (Mandy Culbertson): Yeah.

0:23:08 - (Chris Clarke): That's the kind of people we want in this country is people that are willing to undergo hardship in order to support their families or make their families safer. I'm pretty sure that the best way to look at human issues and wildlife issues is that humans are wildlife.

0:23:24 - (Mandy Culbertson): I absolutely agree with that because I think the war on wildlife isn't separate from the crisis of democracy that we're seeing right now. It's a symptom of the same disease. When power consolidates and violence replaces governance, we have to all take action. Recognizing that jaguars are roaming where their ancestors did long before lines were drawn. But also migration is a function of our existence as well. I really liked your point about that. And so to pretend as though some people aren't doing it the way or they're not allowed to be here, we are funneling them directly into deadly desert terrain and not allowing them to come into this country legally.

0:24:05 - (Mandy Culbertson): That's just intimidation and fear tactics, frankly, propaganda. And I think a brave and right response to state sanctioned violence is for all of us to be pushing back right now. Whether it's people in masks disappearing our neighbors, or it's handing over a portion of the wall to the military for unnamed reasons in the guise of, quote, safety. Or it's watching our human neighbors and our wildlife neighbors be affected by these policies.

0:24:30 - (Mandy Culbertson): We have to dismantle all these systems that are harming all of us. I don't think this land was made for walls. I think this land was made for us to connect and care about one another, regardless of species.

0:24:41 - (Chris Clarke): We need bridges across the canyons sometimes, but no walls.

0:24:45 - (Mandy Culbertson): I like that.

0:24:46 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away. We'll be right back.

0:24:50 - (Chris Clarke): This is a lot of data all at once. And so let's let that settle in before we finish the conversation with Mandy Culbertson by listening to this recording by Fred Bell of the Red Rock National Conservation Area near Las Vegas, Nevada. I heard of Bewicks and Cactus Wren, both an indigo bunting and a blue gray gnatcatcher. But maybe you'll hear something in addition to that. Let's listen it.

0:26:30 - (Joe): You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. Don't step on the cryptobiotic soil crust.

0:26:39 - (Chris Clarke): So we're recording on the 10th. So it's possible that this may have changed, though I don't think it's really likely. But the shutdown has been going on for a little more than a week at this point. Has that affected the work that you folks are doing?

0:26:55 - (Mandy Culbertson): Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you asked that. The shutdown is concerning because every administration in a shutdown gets to decide what is essential services and what isn't. The choices this administration is making around what's essential is very telling. Right. And it's very much connected to their focus on dismantling basically every federal level protection that they can for wildlife, the environment, clean air and water.

0:27:18 - (Mandy Culbertson): So we're seeing things like money in the US Forest Service taken away for public lands management, except for logging. Right. Logging is still moving forward. Logging projects, or we're seeing that all of the Department of Interior funding is halted except for new oil and gas leasing that can still go forward. So it's a deeply concerning trend that's happening right now. And in addition, if you talk about the effects on wildlife, one of the things we're most concerned about is this ideological war happening around wolves. You see it a lot with wolves in the Northern Rockies and the Colorado reintroduction conversation.

0:27:57 - (Mandy Culbertson): But Mexican gray wolves are being demonized by local communities. Poaching is rampant. There are communities building like wooden like bus shelters to protect children, claiming that their children are unsafe from Mexican gray wolves, which is one of the most wild and ridiculous claims we've ever seen. When you talk about 286 Mexican gray wolves across hundreds of thousands of acres in those two states, it's a pretty absurd claim.

0:28:22 - (Mandy Culbertson): Right. And also we know that from wolf behavior, wolves are deeply avoidant of humans, prefer not to get into conflict. And you can count the number of times a wolf has attacked a human in the North American Continent on one hand. So this is just hysteria and fear mongering. But going back to the government shutdown, Department of Interior funding, which includes U.S. fish and Wildlife Service, has been frozen. So there is nobody managing Mexican gray wool recovery right now.

0:28:49 - (Mandy Culbertson): There is a small amount of a stipend I think available to run one of the recovery reintroduction units in New Mexico where there are some wolves that are housed that the federal government is directly responsible for as they're either working through a captive breeding program or being prepared for release. But outside of that, there is no management happening for these wolves. And we're seeing really concerning trends about the loss of genetic diversity for this population, about management decisions.

0:29:17 - (Mandy Culbertson): I'm not sure how much you're, you're aware of some of this, but some of this goes back to like I was like a 2021 or 2022 article that the Intercept broke about the political machinations and the capture of decision making around Mexican gray wolf, both predation reports and then also some of the decisions about removing packs or lethal control and how political that all became between USDA Wildlife Services and the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service. This isn't new, but it's really concerning that the little safeguards they have. There's nobody watching right now and we're seeing just this ramp up, right?

0:29:53 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. I hadn't seen that piece in the Intercept. I'm going to have to go look for it and I will put the link in the show notes for folks.

0:30:01 - (Chris Clarke): After we spoke, I did go and read the article on the Intercept which Mandy thoughtfully provided me a link to. It was written by Spencer Robertson and published in May 2022. There's a link in the show notes and it's definitely worth a read. It describes what basically looks like collusion and fraud committed by ranchers in New Mexico and the USDA's Wildlife Services division, which is quite likely my least favorite federal agency. It's responsible for killing millions of wild animals, sometimes for reasons that are understandable otherwise, just as a subsidy to public lands ranchers.

0:30:37 - (Chris Clarke): And there is a program that the USDA runs for ranchers that lose livestock to, among other things, alleged attacks by species that have been reintroduced into the wild by the federal government. It is called the Livestock Indemnity Program. And if you're a rancher who claims your animal was killed by a Mexican wolf, if Wildlife Services approves your claim, that brings you about a thousand bucks. A lot of times the ranchers will say that a full-grown cow or bull was taken down by a Mexican wolf.

0:31:12 - (Chris Clarke): A Mexican wolf is about the same size as your run of the mill German shepherd. If you have a little bit of trouble picturing one or two or four German shepherds taking down an angry bull, you're not alone.

0:31:25 - (Mandy Culbertson): It's worth a read. Wildlife for all is currently trying to work with some more journalists to get more attention on this issue because the mix of these emergency decl happening in counties and I can give you a list of them. It's a fairly lengthy list, but a lot of it's Catron County, New Mexico, of course. Yeah. The same ones who had a government rebellion for how many years? And there's a few other counties joining it. Cochise in Arizona, namely this. It's a fear mongering tactic driven by the livestock industry.

0:31:51 - (Mandy Culbertson): If you have caught recent headlines about this, there's a big website being paid for by livestock industry dollars. It's a slick campaign of fear mongering and misinformation. A New Mexico wildlife commissioner was just fired by the governor because she was connected to this project and didn't disclose it. And did communications work for this misinformation again, about a threatened and endangered species.

0:32:16 - (Chris Clarke): That's kind of good news.

0:32:18 - (Mandy Culbertson): It is. Like the one time we're like, yes, please go ahead and fire a commissioner.

0:32:23 - (Chris Clarke): We've been talking a lot about the states and we got into the federal government with the shutdown a little bit. But how does that relationship between the feds and the states play out with regards to the work that you folks are doing?

0:32:35 - (Mandy Culbertson): Thanks for asking that question. Again, like I talked about earlier. Right. So many people just think about like the Endangered Species act when they think about wildlife protections from the federal government. And we'd like to advocate for more participation at the state level because we think that states should actually be the front line of biodiversity protection, of fighting climate change, of protecting ecosystems and making sure that decision making works for both wildlife and human communities.

0:32:59 - (Mandy Culbertson): We also think states should be a backstop for the federal harm that's coming. And you've seen a little bit of that. I can give you a couple positive examples. But when we talk about the attempted public land sell off. Right. By Mike Lee. A huge outpouring of people opposed. Right. Or if you followed the comments around the roadless rule.

0:33:15 - (Chris Clarke): Right.

0:33:16 - (Mandy Culbertson): The Trump administration tried to rescind the roadless rule. They're still evaluating it, but 625,000 people commented on that. 99% of those comments were opposed to rolling back the roadless rule, according to center for Western Priorities. At the same time, we're seeing attacks on the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, right? The endangerment finding around climate change and methane gas. With the Clean Air act, if you haven't looked into it, the Permission to Pollute act is basically what it's called or the Permit Act.

0:33:44 - (Mandy Culbertson): It's a package of about 15 bills attacking the Clean Water act and opening up industry and polluters to do what they want.

0:33:51 - (Chris Clarke): Just a quick side note, the bill Mandy's referring to is HR 3898, sponsored by Georgia Republican Mike Collins in the House. HR 3898 would, among other things, exempt both ephemeral watercourses and groundwater from the Clean Water Act. It also exempts converted cropland, and it gives the US Army Corps of Engineers the power to decide just arbitrarily that other kinds of wetlands and bodies of water are exempt from the Clean Water act as well. As in the desert, most of our watercourses are ephemeral.

0:34:27 - (Chris Clarke): Very few rivers flow year-round. 247, 365. In the words of the bill, ephemeral features that flow only in direct response to precipitation are stripped of protection under the Clean Water Act. Bad idea.

0:34:42 - (Mandy Culbertson): We're seeing attacks on nepa, right? One of the strongest protections we have in terms of protecting both human communities from pollution and development, as well as wildlife and ecosystems. We talk about trying to have correct evaluations and do informed decision making before projects or development moves forward. There's lots of attempts right now to undermine the esa, the Endangered Species act, and to try to make it not the bedrock of really important protection that it is.

0:35:10 - (Mandy Culbertson): There's a ton going on. And the last one I want to bring up is there's still an open public comment period that people can get involved in because the Trump administration is also trying to change the public lands rule. That's essentially the declaration that hunting, angling, recreation, wildlife watching, hiking, etc. Are equal to other uses of public lands, such as oil and gas exploration, mining, logging, etc.

0:35:34 - (Mandy Culbertson): Basically, the administration is trying to remove that provision to say these public lands are actually just open for exploitation. So if people want to get involved, there is an open public comment period through November 10th that would be really important to hear lots of voices and.

0:35:49 - (Chris Clarke): Again, link in the show notes. I just remember being surprised and largely thrilled when the Biden administration came up with that public lands rule. I mean, I know there was a lot of hard work that went into. It was in the context of the 30 by 30 idea coming out of the feds. And it really made a lot of sense. It doesn't surprise me a bit that the Trump administration would put it in the crosshairs.

0:36:13 - (Mandy Culbertson): If you look at their playbook in Project 2025, like, it's all there. They want to undo 30 by 30. They just announced they're opening up. I can't even remember how many more wildlife refuges and acres of federal land for development and exploitation. They're trying to give a section of the boundary Waters in Minnesota over to an international company's copper mine. If you've ever been to the Boundary Waters, they're so beautiful.

0:36:35 - (Mandy Culbertson): It's a ton of interconnected lakes and wetlands. And the runoff from this copper mining will destroy those. The Biden administration basically said this is bad policy. We're not going to forward with this mine. They're trying to undo all of that. It's a big giveaway to billionaires, to polluters, to corporations, and it's at the expense of the public, the lands that we all care about, and the wildlife that depend on them.

0:36:57 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. So this is a lot of information and it's been really illuminating. And I suspect that readers hearing this will be motivated to find out how they can take part. How do people find wildlife for all? Where are you online? Where are you elsewhere?

0:37:18 - (Mandy Culbertson): Thanks for asking that. I think it's important to talk about the harms that are happening and the state of these systems and also to say that there's hope. Right. So wildlife for all. If folks want to find us, we're on the Internet@wildlifeforall.us and we also have presences on social media. You can grab us there and see what we're doing. But essentially, even if you don't want to to get involved with wildlife for all, I would just say that there are ways to make a real difference. One thing the public lands fight has shown us is that when we all come together, people power still works.

0:37:52 - (Mandy Culbertson): Public pressure matters. These state wildlife commission meetings are a great place to get involved. We advise advocates all the time. Get involved even more locally because there is policymaking happening for wildlife at the city council level, the planning commission in your own community that may be swayed by just a couple people showing up and saying something different. Right? Hey, prairie dogs matter.

0:38:13 - (Mandy Culbertson): So relocate. Locate them instead of poison them. I'm working with an advocate in Colorado on that. Or there's. I'm working with other folks who are trying to protect a river corridor from a high-density development and the developer literally didn't do their due diligence. On any sort of hydrology study nor a biological survey. And so there's really easy things that folks can do just in your own backyard, right?

0:38:34 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:38:35 - (Mandy Culbertson): Showing up at state Wildlife Commission meetings, attending and commenting. Find grassroots organizations like Wildlife for All or like others that are trying to make some of these changes. Because while we need to focus on those federal fights and the litigation that supports those protections, we are behind in our ground game of protecting wildlife in every state, in every community. Just showing up to speak for them.

0:38:57 - (Mandy Culbertson): Anything folks can do in terms of getting more involved is really important. And if you don't know how to start the last plug, I'll give you my shameless self promotion. We have guides on our website. We have a whole advocacy toolkit that walks you through state wildlife decision making, how to get involved, how to public comment, how to show up and make those informed decisions more accountable to the public. We have process explainers for different things. We didn't cover this, and I won't belabor the point, but a lot of work in protecting state species happens in the State Wildlife Action Plan, which are revised every 10 years.

0:39:34 - (Mandy Culbertson): I want to say, like 32 states are doing theirs this year. Not all of them are on the same schedule, but a bunch of them are advocating for funding for all species, advocating for protecting or researching different species. We talked about the decline of once abundant species a little bit earlier, but we're seeing that insects are disappearing at a rapid rate. We're seeing that most bird species, especially the ones that we think of as deeply abundant.

0:40:02 - (Mandy Culbertson): Scrub jays come to mind in the Southwest, are not as abundant as they used to be because of the decision making happening around habitat fragmentation, because of climate change pressures, because of human uses. Right. Of the landscape. And anything that you can do to get more involved in helping your agency focus on those species. Right. And not just the traditional species that we focus on for game management.

0:40:26 - (Mandy Culbertson): Right. That's really important.

0:40:28 - (Chris Clarke): It makes me think that we need to do an episode on California's bobcat trapping band, which is a really good example of the people out in the world finding out something, getting pissed off about it and making changes on the state level.

0:40:43 - (Mandy Culbertson): Absolutely. And we could talk a lot about that because we have a great ban in New Mexico on trapping on public lands. There's a big push around that sort of change in implementation, but those are fights that are on the scale of decades. Folks need to be prepared that these are entrenched systems.

0:40:58 - (Chris Clarke): Right.

0:40:58 - (Mandy Culbertson): We have to get involved. We're behind in getting started. Your voice matters. But Change isn't going to be fast.

0:41:04 - (Chris Clarke): Okay, last question. And this is inspired by my visit to El Paso, where I spent about eight hours sitting 100ft away from a group of peninsular pronghorn, which is a species that I had never thought I was going to get to see. And they were in a zoo, but they were there and they were alive and they were running around and having a good time. Is there preferably desert, but it doesn't need to be desert. Is there a species that's like that for you that you either got to see and you never thought you would, or one that you have on your bucket list, but you just haven't gotten to it yet?

0:41:38 - (Mandy Culbertson): Yeah, no. Thank you for asking that. At the top of my bucket list would be a jaguar, but I did have an experience earlier this year that cross went off for me. I had to see him in captivity. Wildlife for all had a theory of change retreat at one of Ted Turner's ranches. And one of those actually hosts part of the captive breeding population for Mexican gray wolves. And we used a spotting scope. We were very responsible. Like, even with these captive wolves, right, you still have to be so sensitive to your human pressure.

0:42:07 - (Mandy Culbertson): And so we're across a ridge, thousands of feet away, watching them on a spotting scope, but I got to see a Mexican gray wolf, which is not something I ever thought I'd see in my lifetime. It was wonderful. And if I can add, I don't know how much you're familiar with some of the pressure of the packs, but I actually think it was the Caldera pack and Asha. So she's one that she's been captured a few times for crossing the artificial boundary of I40.

0:42:30 - (Mandy Culbertson): Her most recent pack was captured and just released again due to public pressure. U.S. fish and Wildlife received more than 17,000 emails based on the small group of advocacy organizations that really advocate for lobos. We pushed comments. We said this pack needs to be released because she had new puppies about 7 months old right now, and they were released in the last couple weeks. And we were worried if they weren't released that they were going to become too habituated to be able to hunt effectively for her, to be able to teach them, her and her mate.

0:42:59 - (Mandy Culbertson): And so that pack was released, but I'm pretty sure that's the pack we got to see.

0:43:03 - (Chris Clarke): Nice.

0:43:04 - (Mandy Culbertson): Yeah, it was wonderful.

0:43:06 - (Chris Clarke): Mandy mentioned an I40 boundary for Mexican wolves, and if you're wondering what that's about, we actually have an entire episode that talks about it. We released it in November of Last year episode 34 of season 3 entitled Hope the Mexican A Tale of Survival and Loss in Northern Arizona, in which we talk with Greta Anderson from Western Watersheds Project and we discussed why the US Fish and Wildlife Service has kind of arbitrarily picked Interstate 40 as a boundary past which no Mexican wolves will be allowed to migrate northward.

0:43:40 - (Chris Clarke): And it's a ridiculous policy. And that's what's happening with I40 and Mexican wolves.

0:43:47 - (Chris Clarke): Mandy Culbertson, it's been absolutely wonderful to talk to you. I'm just really enjoyed this conversation and very thankful to you for for taking the time to talk to me and to our listeners.

0:43:59 - (Mandy Culbertson): Thank you so much for the invitation. I am always happy to share what's going on and talk to other folks who are ready to affect change. Thank you.

0:44:43 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you to Mandy Culbertson for that illuminating conversation. It was just so wonderful. Wildlifeforall.us if you want to learn more or check out our show notes, there's going to be a bunch of links there. I also want to thank Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover guy, Martin Mancha, who created our podcast artwork, and Fred Bell, our Nature Sounds recordist. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio.

0:45:08 - (Chris Clarke): Other music in this episode is by Premium Beat. New donors to the show this week include nobody at all, but you can fix that by going to 90 miles from needles.com donate and making a donation of whatever size and frequency you think is appropriate. I had a little bit of an instructive encounter today as I was starting to try and record pieces of this episode, and there was a small fly in the studio where I record, which is not unusual for the desert, but this fly would just not leave me alone.

0:45:42 - (Chris Clarke): It was flying in my eyes, flying next to my ears, trying to walk around on my lips. I tried swatting at it, tried waving at it. I tried opening the door and turning on the mini split to blow it out. I even got a little butterfly net, tried to catch it. None of those things worked. Even my half hearted attempts to swap the thing when it was on my thigh or the desk or whatever were doomed to failure.

0:46:07 - (Chris Clarke): This fly just was not gonna cooperate. It was gonna land on me and do its fly thing and eventually I just kind of gave up. And I waited until the fly landed on my arm. I let it be there for a little bit and I very slowly and calmly walked it outside. I waved my hand a little bit when I got outside and it took off into the great outdoors and I was able to record Unbothered by Flies, the barking pit bull was a different story, but we'll get into that later.

0:46:39 - (Chris Clarke): Anyway, it's kind of a Zen thing, I think, or maybe it's kind of a Sun Tzu thing, but basically I was playing against the fly's strengths. Fly is a lot more agile than me. It had a lot more to lose and so it was utterly committed while I was just annoyed. And instead what worked was me forgetting about combating the fly on its own terms and just surprising it with an approach it didn't expect. And it worked out to both of our benefits.

0:47:10 - (Chris Clarke): This is a tactical lesson that I need to learn over and over and over again. Anyway, I hope you have good constructive fun at the No Kings demonstrations this weekend. And if you're listening to this, after the weekend has passed, there will be more. Nokings.org in the meantime, stay safe, take care of each other. The desert needs us all, and we'll talk to you next week. Bye now.

0:47:39 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.