F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “the sign of a truly first-rate mind is the ability to handle two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time.” And actually a number of people, a number of thinkers and writers have actually written about the ability to handle two seemingly conflicting ideas at the same time.

Kaydee Barker: This is the Livable Future podcast and I’m co-creator Kaydee Barker. In today’s episode, Dr. Rick Knight, retired professor and long term conservationist at Colorado State University, sits down to talk with me about bridging the rural urban divide, and coming together to talk about conservation and other issues in America today. To begin, I would like to acknowledge that we are creating this podcast on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the EU Arapaho and Cheyenne nations. We acknowledge these people and their contribution to this region with respect. So Dr. Knight, to start, could you tell us about how you became a scientist, how you got here?

Dr. Rick Knight: I did end up here, very long and circuitous route that was not at all normal. I had trouble in college so I ended up in the Marine Corps for seven years, including Vietnam, but I finally finished my undergraduate degree. But I always knew I wanted to be a wildlife biologist. Anyhow, and I finished my bachelor’s, did my master’s work for the Washington State Department of Game, building a non-game wildlife program within a game department, so those were all the things that they didn’t shoot. I was responsible for those. So for, imagine songbirds and reptiles and amphibians, and non-fur-bearing or big game mammals and stuff like that. So anyhow after that I did my PhD and ended up at CSU, 33 going on 34 years ago and have been in wildlife conservation.

And it was just based on – so some people are heterozygous dominant for biophilia, which is just the love of nature, and I am – so yeah I have this. (Voice cracks.) Sorry about that. I do get emotional about a few things. But no, I have this love of nature. And if you love something – oh, that’s the other thing I get emotional about is land. So, if you love something, and then people are abusing it, you naturally are going to interfere. So, or intervene, and that’s what I did in wildlife conservation, both in educating and actually doing conservation work out on the land with plants, animals, water, soil. All my life I’ve been trying to work with other people trying to promote land health. And now I understand. Another reason to promote healthy landscapes, is that human health, whether we know it or not, is intertwined with healthy land plants, animals, soil and water.

Kaydee: Yeah, definitely. I think we are starting to understand just how much we are linked to the land we’re on, and how much we depend on it. So you spoke about intervening because of your love of nature. And in your long career you’ve worked with a lot of different types of people. So, how have you found a way to bridge the gap, and intervene in a way that’s effective with all these different types of people that you work with?

Rick: Yeah, so like so many young people have this love of nature. Then you grow up and you want to devote your career to conserving nature, and you think it’s all about saving wildlife, and I did. I never, I had 14 years of college in the Pacific Northwest the upper Midwest and the American South, and I have 14 years of college in natural resources, and I never had a professor explain if you want to save nature, you have to save people. Conservation that works has to work for people. Because if it’s just working for nature, people aren’t going to be engaged. They have to feel like they’re getting something out of this too. If you’re saving nature, and you’re affecting people’s economies, livelihoods… you’re guaranteed conflict, and they’re going to push back, so you’re going to be in perpetual conflict with people. And that was never part of my education, but I never gave up trying to figure out how to be more effective, because you only have so many years.

And so you want to be as strategic as you possibly can. In everything: the way you do conservation work, the way you teach, the way you interact with people beyond CSU and stuff like that. So it finally dawned on me conservation that works is conservation that works for both people and for the land. And the land, when I say land, I mean plants, animals, soil and water. So, things that benefit one of those two at the expense of the other is not conservation, it’s something else. So if the land benefits and people are hurt, that’s not conservation. That’s preservation. You’re denying people access to something. If the land hurts and people benefit, that’s not conservation, that’s exploitation.

The key to doing this is using natural resources in such a way that six generations from now people can still use those natural resources, because everything that we use came from this planet so we’re we’re using the planet – both living and nonliving things. There’s nothing in your smartphone that came through a Spaceport in New York City where there are shuttles every 15 minutes landing from Mars. Everything comes from this planet. So if humans have a future on this planet, we have to find out a way to sustainably use its living and nonliving (think of minerals, for example) natural resources. That’s the key. If you really want to engage. Otherwise it is going to be perpetual conflict, and you just have to realize that if you take that approach, save nature and people be damned, you are going to have a lifetime of perpetual conflict. And I have seen so many young people burn out, who thought they were in the business of saving nature, and they burn out because people disparage them, they don’t like them, they call them names, they don’t want to work with them, they don’t want to be friends. And so they get cynical, and eventually, you know, give up. In many cases, they give up so. So, the educational system has let down generations of natural resource practitioners, because it didn’t realize what Wendell Berry, who’s a writer and a farmer in Kentucky, once said: “to save the land, you have to save the people. To save either, you have to save both.”

So, once I realized that… I mean this was actually 20 years ago, a group of seven of us, so six other like-minded friends across the American West, we would meet at these Quivira Coalition Annual Meetings, and we would talk about, “is this the way the rest of our lives are going to be, we’re just going to be perpetually the bad guys wearing the black hats, we’re never going to be the good guys wearing the white hats, and we’re going to just be in this perpetual sense of losing. Just losing and losing and losing,” you know. And that, that is hard to take if you love something.

We started calling each other once a month, we had a person from the Nature Conservancy and she gave us – she was one of the seven, Kelly Cash – well she gave us this Nature Conservancy phone number and we could use it once a month for a conference call. And we would just talk about this thing, because we were all across the American West and none of us were close to each other, physically, and we started talking about these things. And we did that for at least a year, and then, well I’ll tell you something that happened. And this was the big breakthrough.

This is common knowledge today, but I guarantee you, 20 years ago it was not. Every four years, as you know we have a presidential election, and all the newspapers from your local newspaper to the New York Times, after it will have this map of America and they’ll have the states and the number of electoral college votes. And they’ll have it either red or blue, red means conservative/Republican and blue means more liberal/Democratic. And so they’d have these red/blue states. Well, we had a geographer in our group of seven, Nathan Sayre, who’s the department head of Geography at the University of California Berkeley. Nathan’s a geographer, so geographers are interested in landscapes and demographics. People on the land is what geographers are really keyed in on, and Nathan, at one of those calls he said, “you should look at the counties in the United States, and see how they voted, because counties are much smaller demographic units that than an entire state.” So Nathan, somehow or another found the results of the presidential election about 20 years ago, based on counties. And so it’d be red or blue.

And all of a sudden, Nathan being the geographer he is, he realized, oh my God, the red/Republican/conservative counties happened to be rural, and the blue/liberal/democratic counties happened to be urban or metropolitan. And it was amazing. All of a sudden we, oh my God, and that’s where we coined the “rural-urban divide.” The rural, which is red/Republican, urban which is blue/democratic divide, and that’s what we found out for the whole state, for the whole country. It was amazing. Now there’s some exceptions to that, there are some rural counties that actually vote Democratic and there’s some urban areas that vote Republican, as you might expect in some really conservative states. But as a generalization, safe enough that you could go to Vegas and bet some money on it. As a generalization, it was this rural-urban divide.

And so then we really had something to sink our teeth into. All of a sudden it wasn’t “this is fun getting together once a month,” like at a coffee clutch or something like that where anyhow you get together with friends and you talk about whatever – sports, politics, finance… And we realized, “oh my God, we’re onto something.” The media hadn’t picked this up, it was just red/blue states, red/blue states. So it was Utah versus Vermont or something or it was North Dakota versus California. A red or a blue state. It wasn’t that simple. It was actually rural and urban that were at loggerheads, that didn’t agree that didn’t view the political landscape the same way. And so we came up with this.

We had a rancher in this group of seven by the name of Bill McDonald who’s a MacArthur Genius. He ranches where my wife and I work on the Arizona Sonora/Mexico Border. He has a Sycamore Ranch down there. Anyhow, Bill McDonald was using this word, the Radical Center. He had helped form the Malpais Borderlands Group, and this is this million-acre collaborative effort by rural and urban people in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico to try to keep ranching as a viable land use some in the rural parts of Cochise and Hildalgo counties. And Bill says, “yeah it’s the Radical Center,” – and this was 20 years ago, we thought it was bad 20 years ago. It’s almost beyond words to trying to describe this polarization that’s wracking America today, and I never thought it would keep getting worse. But so we said, “let’s call it the Radical Center.”

And so all of a sudden, seven of us had this thing. And I tell you, it put a lot of responsibility on each of us, because all of a sudden we had to start thinking of the other side, historically that we weren’t particularly fond of. Like if I were Democratic, I might might not want to share a seat on a bus with somebody who was Republican, because they supported Bush and I supported Clinton or they supported Gore and I supported – who beat Gore – Bush Jr. So, we had to behave differently.

It’s like Ed Marston, who was the publisher of High Country News for a long, long time. Ed Marston was one of the seven, and he would say “Rick, you got to take it from the right, you got to take it from the left, you get slapped on both cheeks. It’s just like in the Bible, you turn the other cheek.” When somebody hits you on one side of your head and then somebody comes up and hits you on the other side of your head, you can’t lash out at either of them. You have to try to find the common ground that these two people that personally dislike you might have in common so that you could go forward.

So that was the Radical Center. And then what we did, we said well we need to share this this idea about this rural-urban divide, because again like I said, the newspapers and the pundants were just talking about red/blue states they weren’t actually talking about rural and urban landscapes, populated by people. And so we invited it to a much larger group, and in that case we actually invited some people from beyond the American West. Like we invited Paul Johnson, who is an Iowa farmer and head of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. But anyhow and it was, I think it was about 45 people. We invited them all to come to Albuquerque, New Mexico for 48 hours, and we would share insights and then we’d just leave it wide open. We’d stay in that hotel in downtown Albuquerque for Saturday and Sunday and see what came out of it. We didn’t have any expectations. And we did meet, they all came, just an amazing eclectic group of people, of, you know writers, thinkers, ranchers, farmers. Actually I was, no there were two academics, myself and Dan Kemmis from the University of Montana, but even Dan was not really an academic, he was a former Montana legislature so a politician. But anyhow, we came together, and we loved each other’s company, and we talked about this thing. And some people were dreaming, were seeing stars, they were so excited about we were going to carry this around the world, and other people were real modest, and had modest expectations. Anyhow at the end of it all, we decided hubris is not a virtue, and we said let’s have modest expectations. And so what we did instead is we wrote an invitation to join the Radical Center. And you can go to Quivira Coalition, that’s this organization, a not-for-profit of people that care about the American West and would rather work collaboratively. You can go to Quivira coalition, and you’ll find the invitation to join the Radical Center, so you’ll read the document. So that was the story of the Radical Center.

Kaydee: Wow, and what an amazing story. So since then, what have you found that it means to work in the Radical Center?

Rick: So the Radical Center is basically if you believe in community-based conservation, or watershed-based conservation, or collaborative conservation – it’s not federally mandated, this thing of people working together for the good of people and land – but if you believe in any of those things, you’re already working in the Radical Center. If you’re conscious of empathy, then you’re working in the Radical Center. So empathy is just the ability, I mean it’s as old fashioned as that saying, “walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes.” If you’re capable of working with people whose values would normally separate you from each other, by practicing empathy, define the things that – because you’re human, and Americans in this case, define the things you have in common, and then you just focus on those going forward.

And it’s amazing, over time, you might even start to admire certain things about the person naturally you would dislike. It changes your whole way of living, completely. When you work in the Radical Center, before you think of conflict and armed conflict, the worst of possibilities, you think of, “well, let me go, you know, ask that person questions and try to practice empathy.” You know, ask the person questions, listen to what they say and try to find something we might have in common, and focus on that because it’s positive. So everything I’ve done since the Radical Center has been affected. I don’t write the way I used to write. I don’t teach the way I used to teach. I don’t practice conservation on the land the way I used to practice it. I may have a narrower circle of friends but I have a much wider group of acquaintances.

So it really, it really does change the lens, you look through, because now… I mean, historically, before embracing the Radical Center, I would have tried to stereotype somebody. “That person’s a Republican who voted for Trump, but that person’s Democrat that voted for Biden,” or “that person cares more about an endangered species than they care about peoples’ jobs,” or “that person wouldn’t even blink an eye if a species went extinct. In other words, they would ask of it, ‘what good are you, who needs you, endangered species?’” So it just, it totally changes. And if you still want to be hopeful, if you still want to be positive going forward, if you want to avoid becoming cynical, which is to me, is almost like a pronouncement of death, because you’ve just lost all the joy out of life – it is the best way to live in these really troubled times.

Kaydee: So it’s really a way of life, the Radical Center.

Rick: Yeah, it is. In everything. In everything you do, and I’m not saying it’s easy, because we’re human, so we’re imperfect. And so I definitely fall off the Radical Center from time to time, and find myself (saying) “oh I hate that person, how can they believe that,” you know. But I tell you, you can re-equilibrate yourself, and the longer you work at it, the easier it is to get back into the center.

Kaydee: So how does that translate in the things that you’ve done in conservation, bringing people to the table to get on the same page?

Rick: Oh God, now that’s something, oh my gosh, so – to include human communities in conservation work is so much… so when I worked for the Washington Department of Game, building the non-game Wildlife Program, a lot of the work I was doing was on threatened and endangered species I was on the bald eagle recovery team for five years, and one of the big species in those days in the state of Washington were bald eagles, and they were federally threatened up there in the Pacific Northwest. They were endangered elsewhere. And so I was dealing with bald eagles all the time. And I also went to Game Warden School, so I had a badge and the Game Wardens taught us what’s called “jaw jacking.” And jaw jacking is, they taught us the art of verbal intimidation. So I found myself constantly trying to save bald eagles by going up to private landowners and jaw jacking, verbally intimidating them with the weight of the Endangered Species Act, The American Eagle Act, which protects both bald and golden eagles – imprisonment, fines, and all these things.

So I was trying to save bald eagles with no empathy at all for the private landowner that was trying to cut Douglas fir, which just one of those big trees just happened to have a bald eagle nested in it type of thing. So that’s the way we used to work. Then at the end of my five years in the Game Department, when I went back and got my PhD, I realized I wasn’t proud of what I did. But that’s how I was educated in those days. That’s the way we educated wildlife biologists. You draw a line in the sand, and you stand on that line and you defend all those wildlife creatures that can’t defend themselves standing behind you.

So working in the Radical Center is harder, because you have to bring people, and you have to find common ground with people and their livelihoods, their economies, and of course those differ, particularly along the urban rural divide. So it’s harder, it takes longer, but the results are much longer lasting. And you’ll know it, because at the end of it, though, in a sense it doesn’t end, the results are going to be so much more satisfying to you. And we did this in this valley I live in north of Fort Collins. We have a federally threatened species – and it’s on our place too, and we worked with our neighbors, who are primarily ranchers, and with the Fish and Wildlife Service that administers the Endangered Species Act, and we worked with urban allies for seven years to get this habitat conservation plan written and approved by the Fish and Wildlife Service. And the end result is that the ranchers can continue to control weeds, continue to irrigate their hay fields, and continue to run cows, and there’s peace in the Livermore Valley. But historically, there would have been conflict, because we would have fought over this mouse, this federally threatened subspecies of mouse.

And so it took us seven years though, and that’s hard. A lot of people don’t have seven years of patience that they’re willing to put on the line, and also spend seven years with people that on the face of it you have very little in common with. But I would much rather have done that, taken that approach. I’m sugarcoating this, making it seem like it’s always going to work and that you feel really good about yourself. It’s not all coffee and donuts, you guys, it’s not. It’s like everything else that is hard, but considering the alternatives, and if anybody’s paying attention to what’s taking place today in America, you have to think the alternatives are increasingly scary. So we need more people that want to meet in the middle and find common ground, instead of dig their trenches, deeper and deeper and arm themselves more and more.

Kaydee: So do you think that that’s maybe a way forward for conservation and conservation policy, to simply invite all of the players to the table on the local level?

Rick: So the more people that want to work together as opposed to want to fight, at every level, so, city, county, state, federal – at every level, you will start to see those types of approaches bearing fruit. But I think it can work at any level. You know, we need people. We need more people, just plain, ordinary people. I think a lot of us right now aren’t seeing that sort of inspiring leadership of our elected officials. There’s a Paul Hawken quote, (voice cracks) oh boy, I have a hard time saying this quote, but it’s basically “if you look at the condition of the planet today, and you’re not pessimistic, you are not looking at the data. But if you look at what people are doing in this great unnamed movement and are not hopeful, you don’t have a heart.” And what he was talking about in, in my state alone, Kaydee’s state of Colorado, we have 200 collaborative conservation groups. We have an endowed Center for Collaborative Conservation at CSU. It’s in the Warner College of Natural Resources, and it prepared an atlas of Colorado collaboration. And my wife has created this Western Collaborative Conservation Network that is a West-wide network of collaborative conservation efforts. And like I said, in Colorado we have about 200 collaborative conservation groups. And so this is what Paul Hawken meant, this great unnamed movement. People are doing this!

Kaydee: Thanks for tuning in to the Livable Future podcast. If you’d like to know more about the Radical Center, The Western Collaborative Conservation Network, and other resources mentioned in this episode, go on to our website where you can find episode resources and transcripts for all of our episodes. Thanks, and we hope you’ll join us again soon!