Wilderness meets Modern Society -- Seth Kantner Part II
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
Release Date: 02/04/2025
Conservation Cooperative, Ep. 2: Striped Bass
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
Today, the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers podcast is sharing the second episode of the Conservation Collective, where they're talking striped bass, the most sought after fish on the eastern seaboard. Often described as "everyman's fish" it's pursued by an extraordinarily wide range of anglers. Those anglers could be shorebound, or they could be on a million dollar center console. A lot of people also fish for stripers, NOAA estimates over 20 million trips a season, and so, the fishery has a significant cultural and economic impact up and down the coast. Once hailed as a conservation success...
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Conservation Cooperative, Ep. 1: Trails
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
While BHA's Podcast & Blast takes a moment to plan its next steps, we're sharing the first episode of our Conservation Cooperative podcast (recorded previously), which looks at a scenario playing out across North America -- one that the New England Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers (BHA) has been grappling with for a few years: the rapid development of recreation trails and their encroachment on wild places. We'll explore some of the factors that are driving trail development in the state of Vermont and how it impacts the conservation of our wildlands and wildlife. While we...
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Conservation Collective, Episode 1: Trails
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
While BHA's Podcast & Blast takes a moment to plan its next steps, we're sharing the first episode of our Conservation Cooperative podcast (recorded previously), which looks at a scenario playing out across North America -- one that the New England Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers (BHA) has been grappling with for a few years: the rapid development of recreation trails and their encroachment on wild places. We'll explore some of the factors that are driving trail development in the state of Vermont and how it impacts the conservation of our wildlands and wildlife. While we...
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Wearing Out a Pair of Boots
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
After nearly a decade behind the mic and more than 225 episodes digging into the people, places and fights that define our public lands and waters, Hal Herring is stepping away from BHA’s Podcast & Blast and onto his next adventure. For this final episode, we turn the microphone around. Hal joins former BHA Vice President of Communications and longtime Podcast & Blast producer Katie McKalip, along with BHA Brand and Editorial Manager Zack Williams, for a conversation about how the show came together, what made it matter and a few of the moments they’ll carry forward. What emerges...
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Public Water, Private Land: Utah’s Stream Access Fight
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
In this episode of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast, host Hal Herring speaks with investigative journalist Andrew Becker about the complex and increasingly contentious issue of stream access in Utah. Centered around Becker’s deep-dive reporting for The Drake, the conversation explores how a state that is roughly 75% public land can still have most of its fishable water flowing through private property. Becker traces the issue back to Western settlement, including the belief that water is a shared public resource. From the Equal Footing Doctrine and questions of navigability to...
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Songs from the Saddle with Jackson Holte
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
On this episode of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast, Hal Herring sits down at his home in Augusta, Montana, with singer-songwriter and wilderness mule packer . Jackson talks about how long days in the wilderness shape his music, how silence and hard work inform art, and why public lands and access matter so deeply to who we are and how we live. From packing strings in the Bob Marshall to writing songs that carry that landscape forward, this is a conversation about craft, heritage, and the freedom worth sustaining. The views and opinions expressed in the...
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Mining the Margins of Wilderness: an Update from the Boundary Waters
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
BREAKING: Since this interview was recorded, a new attempt to permit a copper-nickel mine upstream of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is underway. On Monday, Jan. 12, Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn) introduced , which would lift the federal moratorium on mining in the Rainy River Watershed, just upstream from the wilderness border. , and call your elected officials directly on the Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is a 1.1-million-acre expanse of lakes, rivers, and boreal forest—accessible only by paddle and portage—and...
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92 years in the Selway Wilderness with Jim Renshaw
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
It was the late spring of 1932 when Idaho outfitter Jim Renshaw first saw the upper Selway River from the back of a horse. The packstring was led by his father, Alvin, who had been working for the U.S. Forest Service since he was 13 and had bought the Pettibone Ranch, deep in the wilderness, where Bear Creek drops into the Selway River. Jim Renshaw was two months old at that time. For the next 16 years, he, his mother and father, and two sisters lived at the Pettibone Ranch, guiding hunters in the fall and fishermen and wilderness wanderers in the summer. Jim would become one of the most famed...
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The Forgotten Lands with Josh Jackson
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
On this episode of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast and Blast, host Hal Herring sits down with Josh Jackson, author of The Enduring Wild and founder of The Forgotten Lands Project. Jackson’s journey into California’s Bureau of Land Management landscapes reveals the forgotten backbone of conservation — the so-called leftover lands that belong to all of us, yet are loved by too few. Through photography, storytelling and hard-earned curiosity, this conversation explores why these places matter, why they’re vulnerable, and why building a broader coalition of people who know...
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The Congressional Review Act and Central Yukon RMP with Dr. Kevin Fraley
Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring
Hunters and anglers across the country may never set foot on Alaska’s Dalton Highway—but what’s unfolding there affects every American who cares about public land. In this episode, Hal Herring sits down with fisheries ecologist and writer Dr. Kevin Fraley to unpack a sweeping threat to some of the most accessible caribou and fishing country in the entire state. A new push in Congress aims to throw out the Central Yukon Resource Management Plan—a plan built over a decade with input from hunters, anglers and local stakeholders—and potentially reopen millions of acres around the Dalton...
info_outlineWilderness meets Modern Society -- Seth Kantner Part II
Alaska’s Seth Kantner is back with us, as promised, for part two.
Seth was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River in the 1960s and has been hunting, trapping, fishing, and making a life on the land there ever since. He is the author of the novel Ordinary Wolves, considered one of the most powerful, gritty, and true-to-life Alaska books ever written. His non-fiction books, Shopping for Porcupine, Swallowed by the Great Land, and A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou, illustrated with the photos that have made him a world-renowned wildlife photographer, chronicle a life, a people and a landscape tangled in the conflict between the oldest powers of nature, wildlife and wilderness and the storm of changes wrought by the modern Anthropocene. Through it all, he’s maintained his profound sense of wonder, and his equally profound sense of humor. He even found time to write a children’s book (Pup and Pokey) about the mishaps and adventures of a wolf pup and a porcupine surviving on the tundra.
Join us for a freeform conversation with one of the most unique voices of our time.
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The Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is brought you by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and presented by Silencer Central, with additional support from Decked, Dometic, and Filson.
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