BHA Podcast & Blast, Ep. 191: The Fight for Clean Water After the Kingston Disaster with Jared Sullivan
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
Release Date: 10/15/2024
BHA's NEW President & CEO Ryan Callaghan
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
BHA's new President & CEO Ryan Callaghan probably needs doesn't need an introduction. But you may be wondering what he and BHA are planning for the future, why now is such a critical moment in the history of public lands and waters, and how and why you should get involved with BHA. Here's your chance to learn the answers to those questions and a whole lot more as Cal sits down with Podcast & Blast host Hal Herring for a conversation you don't want to miss.
info_outline
Patriotism and Conservation with Braxton McCoy
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
During the 2025 fight against the mass sell-off of America’s public lands, Utah-born cowboy, big game guide, and U.S. Army veteran seemed to be everywhere, from his barrage of fiery commentary on X to the Tucker Carlson and Shawn Ryan podcasts, to addressing public meetings across the West. He was the most powerful and tenacious conservative voice of the pro-public lands movement. He hasn’t let up, and he never will. Join us for the story of a true American original, a soldier who suffered catastrophic injuries in a suicide bomb attack in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006, and fought successfully to...
info_outline
Controversy over Midwest Forest Management
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
A controversy over public lands’ management in Indiana’s 204,000-acre Hoosier National Forest turns out to be a microcosm of a burning (pun intended) national debate over using fire and targeted logging operations to create habitat for wildlife and a healthier, more diverse and more resilient forest. From the 1960s to 80s, The U.S. Forest Service, in the grip of the so-called “timber beast” style of management, clear-cut millions of acres of publicly owned forestland, leading to widespread loss of wildlife, sediment-filled streams, and a furious backlash from conservationists. A...
info_outline
The North American Pronghorn Foundation
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
The American pronghorn is North America’s most unique big game animal, a Great Plains living relic from the end of the Ice Age—a creature of speed, agility and beauty that once shared the landscape with the American cheetah, lions, dire wolves, steppe bison. The pronghorn has outlasted them all to become an icon of the wide open spaces and a species honored and beloved (if sometimes cursed in frustration) by anyone who has ever hunted them. But now, the pronghorn, like the American Great Plains ecosystem, needs our help. Beset by the disruption of migration corridors, the conversion of...
info_outline
Understanding the Roadless Rule. Take Action Today!
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking public comments on the proposal to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which affects 45 million acres of our national forests. Why is this such a big deal? Why are we throwing this baby out with the bathwater? Join Hal and Trout Unlimited President and CEO Chris Wood, who knows this subject inside and out and was working for the U.S. Forest Service in the late 1990s--when the Roadless Rule was created after decades of study, conflict, watershed failures, and the quest for both balance and fiscal responsibility in public lands’ management. You'll...
info_outline
Suppressors: Hearing Protection for Hunters with Silencer Central CEO Brandon Maddox
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
BHA’s Podcast and Blast is proud to be sponsored by Silencer Central, the nation’s largest clearinghouse for silencers. Motto: “Silencers Made Simple since 2005.” This episode features Brandon Maddox of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who founded Silencer Central 20 years ago from his home. He saw both the growing demand for silencers and the difficulty of navigating federal regulations. Today, Silencer Central handles it all—from expert guidance on the right fit to a step-by-step process (simple enough for even Hal, a self-proclaimed Luddite) that delivers a silencer directly to your...
info_outline
Home Range: Research, Resilience, and the Future of Wildlife
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
Join us for a conversation with Carmen Vanbianchi, Research Director and Co-founder of Home Range Wildlife Research, based in Winthrop, Washington, in the Methow Valley. Home Range’s mission is “to advance wildlife conservation by conducting high-quality research, educating aspiring biologists, and engaging local communities.” Carmen is a field biologist dedicated to the study of lynx and other carnivores, living a life as a tracker, skier, deep observer, and a student of winter weather and tough terrain. Part of her personal mission is to make sure that more people like herself,...
info_outline
Safeguarding the Northeast’s Hunting and Fishing Heritage
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
The Northeast is the most densely populated part of our country, and is rich in opportunities for hunting, fishing, hiking and camping, due to an extensive network of public lands and the massively successful wildlife restorations and legislation to clean up rivers and reclaim the industrial and mining mishaps of the past. None of our outdoor pursuits exist here by accident or by luck. The hunting and fishing, the habitat, the access that they depend upon, is the result of work inspired by a passion for making sure that something wonderful can go on and on, in the face of ever increasing...
info_outline
The Native Habitat Project with Kyle Lybarger
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
Kyle Lybarger, a native of Hartselle, Alabama, is a botanist and restoration ecologist and the founder of the Native Habitat Project. He’s also a father, a conservationist, a lifelong whitetail and turkey hunter, sauger and bass fisherman. Kyle is a man on a mission: to save or restore as much of the South’s native plants, grasslands, savannahs, limestone glades and open woodlands as he possibly can, and to start a movement of motivated Southerners to do the same, anywhere possible and on any scale, from a tiny corner in a suburban front yard or replacing the sterile turf around a new...
info_outline
Southern Folk Medicine with Phyllis Light
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
Come with us to Arab, Alabama, to meet Phyllis Light, herbalist, responsible forager, native plant conservation advocate, founder of the Appalachian Center for Natural Health, and author of Southern Folk Medicine: Healing Traditions from the Appalachian Fields and Forests. Phyliss Light was born on Brindlee Mountain, in this southwest extension of the Appalachian Mountains, into a family with Creek and Cherokee Indian roots. She learned herbalism from her grandmother, and spent long days of her childhood “gleaning” – harvesting wild foods and medicines, fishing and hunting, with her...
info_outlineEpisode 191 with Jared Sullivan, former editor of Field and Stream and Men’s Journal, on his new book, Valley So Low, about the 2008 coal ash disaster near Kingston, Tennessee, its catastrophic aftermath on the health of those who cleaned it up, and holding our federal agencies accountable.
In 2019, Tennessee native and former Field and Stream editor Jared Sullivan reported on the aftermath of massive coal ash spill from the TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant. That spill- at 1.1 billion gallons, the largest coal ash spill so far in history - flooded homes, obliterated a portion of the Emory River and sent poisons into the main Clinch River. It never should have happened- the coal ash pit was unlined, its dam was absurdly weak, the toxic ash should never have been stored there in the first place. But the real tragedy went far beyond the ruin of the rivers and lands.
The writing of the story introduced Jared to the many hardworking Tennesseans who worked in the multi-year effort to clean up the spill, and who were poisoned by the mercury, radium, arsenic and other heavy metals and chemicals present on the jobsite.
Jared’s new book Valley So Low is a legal thriller about a David vs. Goliath fight for justice, about federal agencies, lies, and lack of accountability, and the true human cost of treating our world like a dumping ground.
Any opinions expressed within this podcast do not necessarily represent those of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers.
___
BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.
Follow us:
Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org
Instagram: @backcountryhunters
Facebook: @backcountryhunters