DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, sitting in for Terry Gross.
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MUHAMMAD ALI: I'm experienced now, professional - jaws been broke, been lost, knocked down a couple of times. I'm bad - been chopping trees, I done something new for this fight. I done wrestle with an alligator.
(LAUGHTER)
ALI: That's right. I have wrestled with an alligator. I done tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail. That's bad. Only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick. I'm so mean I make medicine sick.
(LAUGHTER)
ALI: Yeah, fast, fast, fast - last night, I cut the light off in my bedroom, hit the switch, was in the bed before the room was dark.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Incredible.
ALI: Fast.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Incredible.
ALI: And you George Foreman, all you chumps are going to bow when I whoop him, all of you. I know you got him. I know you got him picked, but the man's in trouble. I'm going to show you how great I am.
BIANCULLI: That was Muhammad Ali in 1974, stealing the spotlight before his upcoming heavyweight title fight with George Foreman, billed as the Rumble in the Jungle. Today, the nation says goodbye to Ali as he's laid to rest in his hometown of Louisville. Today on FRESH AIR, we listen back to an interview with author David Remnick. His biography "King Of The World: Muhammad Ali And The Rise Of An American Hero," was honored as best non-fiction book of the year in 1998 by Time magazine. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1994 history "Lenin's Tomb" about the last days of the Soviet empire. This interview with Terry Gross is from 1998, when his biography of Ali was published and shortly before Remnick became editor of The New Yorker. He's also host of the podcast and radio program "The New Yorker Radio Hour."
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TERRY GROSS, HOST:
You say that Ali entered the world of boxing at a time when the expectation was that a black fighter would behave with absolute deference to white sensibilities. Give me an example of what you mean there.
DAVID REMNICK: The champion at the time when Muhammad Ali - then Cassius Clay - was in the Olympics - he was then a light heavyweight in the 1960 Rome Olympics - was Floyd Patterson. And Floyd Patterson was certainly no era-shaking fighter. He was not Joe Louis by any stretch of the imagination. But he imitated Joe Lewis as a social type for reasons of being accepted by the white world, by white columnists like Jimmy Cannon or Red Smith.
And Patterson was a champion for a very brief time before he was utterly destroyed in the ring twice by Sonny Liston, who was another - who was a different type, who was somebody who was a destroyer, who in his time was a fighter not unlike Mike Tyson and a personality not unlike Mike Tyson, an extremely scary figure to everyone. The NAACP endorsed Floyd Patterson before his fight with Sonny Liston because they were so terrified that Sonny Liston would come along and occupy this place in the American culture, which really only accepted black men as athletes, and it would be bad for the race, essentially. But lo and behold, Sonny Liston was the superior fighter and beat Floyd Patterson twice, both times in the first round.
GROSS: Well, Ali, when you interviewed him, told you that he wanted to be a new kind of black man when he became famous as a fighter. How do you see him fitting in as a new kind of black men in the world of boxing?
REMNICK: He was in a new and surprising way. He represented a generational shift that took whites and middle-class blacks as well by surprise. He was the forerunner to the black power movement. He was the forerunner to the draft resistance movement. He came along at a time when these sort of things were unknown to whites. His father was a fairly humble sign painter in Louisville, Ky. And his father was deeply influenced - as were many blacks throughout the country in the '20s, '30s and thereafter - by Marcus Garvey, black nationalism of a kind that whites had no clue about. Even before he was fighting, he was filled with this - this notion of what a black man, what a black woman, what anyone in segregated Louisville had to live through and suffer. And he would have none of it.
GROSS: Well, before he became politicized and before he joined the Nation of Islam, he became known for his really flamboyant style of showmanship and particularly for his great rhyming. And what insights did you get about how he developed that showmanship and the verbal flamboyance?
REMNICK: It began at the beginning. He had his first fight when he was 12 years old. Another kid had stolen his bicycle, and little Cassius Clay was very angry.
REMNICK: And he went down to a basem*nt gym run by a cop in town named Joe Martin. And Joe Martin said, stop being so angry and stop threatening to beat everybody up and why don't you learn how to fight? And so Cassius Clay learned how to fight and put on gigantic gloves - he was a little skinny kid. And he fought one of those sort of church basem*nt type fights. And he won a split decision, 12 years old, 98 pounds. And his reaction afterwards was, I am the greatest. I will be champion of the world. I am the greatest - the rhetoric that you would hear years and years later, and you would think he invented it last week. It came out of his mouth after a split decision against another 12-year-old.
GROSS: What was Sonny Liston's reaction to Ali's kind of playful but also aggressive verbal showmanship before their first championship bout together?
REMNICK: Fury and confusion. Sonny Liston was a very simple man, intellectually limited, and this drove him crazy. He was a great and powerful fighter. He thought he would have no trouble with this guy who fought like Sugar Ray Robinson. He danced around the ring, which, you know, was a bit fey for a heavyweight, after all. And Cassius Clay, who was fearful of Sonny Liston in his heart because he knew how powerful he was - he had seen what he had done to Floyd Patterson - wanted to find a way to get to his mind, to unnerve him. To scare him. To make him second-guess. To think really, that he was crazy because the one thing that Sonny Liston couldn't deal with was somebody who was nuts. Always in prison - where Sonny Liston had spent some time - the person you never dealt with, the person you always avoided was the crazy man. That's what you avoided.
And so - and Cassius Clay knew that. I'm calling him Clay now, because that's who he was at the time. And Clay did things like, you know, drive his bus to Sonny Liston's house in the middle of the night, at 3 o'clock in the morning, run up to the door, and start pounding on the door screaming and yelling and acting like an insane person. And Sonny Liston would come out on the lawn in his shorty bathrobe not knowing what to make of this guy. And it really unnerved him. And Clay and then Ali did it over and over and over again. And the one thing Sonny Liston couldn't deal with was a madman. But for Clay, of course, it was all by design.
And the most famous instance of it was the weigh-in before the first fight. The weigh-in, Cassius Clay comes in and starts screaming and yelling. Usually these are routine performances in which you really don't do anything other than get weighed and flex your muscles and get the hell out of there. He's screaming and yelling - I'm going to destroy him - and he's jumping at Liston. It was the most amazing performance, and Sonny Liston went into that ring thinking he was dealing with a nut.
GROSS: Let's get to his actual championship fights with Sonny Liston - and you keep coming back to this through the book. Ali almost ended the first championship fight with Liston because his eyes were burning so much he couldn't even see. I guess there's always been the rumor that Sonny Liston may have juiced his gloves, meaning put some kind of substance on his gloves that would've ended up in Ali's eyes - a chemical of some sort.
REMNICK: My reporting tells me that's beyond rumor, that that really was the case.
GROSS: That it really was the case?
REMNICK: What had happened was, Sonny Liston got into this ring having trained for no more than a five-round fight. He really thought, in the way Mike Tyson dealing with Michael Spinks or some inferior fighter, that he would dispatch with this loud-mouthed kid very quickly and go out to dinner. First round happens, and this kid is faster than Sugar Ray Robinson. And he's sticking a jab in his face and welts are coming up and he cannot touch him. Liston cannot touch him. He's missing by not three inches but by two feet. Round two, same thing. And on and on it goes.
And all that is left to Sonny Liston, as he gets more and more tired, as his hands begin to sink to his side - boxing is an extraordinarily exhausting process, especially if you haven't trained - that he decides to cheat. And with the help of one of his corner men, he put some substance on his gloves. He puts some substances - whether it was Monsel's solution or some sort of liniment on the gloves - something he had done before, by the way - and he gets it in Clay's eyes. And Clay sits down in the corner and he tells Angelo Dundee, cut off the gloves, I can't see. I'm blind. Cut them off. He wants to quit. It's the one thing that he didn't know how to deal with - being blind.
I mean, he knew he was beating Sonny Liston to the punch every single step of the way. And Angelo Dundee quickly gets as much water into his eyes as possible - to his fighter's eyes - and tells him, baby, you ain't quitting. This is for the big one. This is for the title. No quitting now. Just go out, dance, yardstick him - which means keep your left out as far as you can - keep your distance. You have a slight reach thing. You've got the speed, and wait till it flushes out. Meanwhile, in the corner, the black Muslims are sitting there screaming and yelling that Angelo Dundee is a member of the mob and he's juiced the gloves, that it's Angelo Dundee who's responsible for this because, after all, he has an Italian name and the mob is still all over boxing at the time.
The mob controlled Sonny Liston. So this is the drama going on in the space of 60 seconds. Angelo Dundee somehow convinces the referee not to come over to the corner and end the whole thing. Ali goes back out, eventually the stuff washes out of his eyes, and he finishes the job. He continues to frustrate Liston. And Liston finally just will not get off his stool to come out and fight the seventh round. End of story.
GROSS: So Ali becomes the heavyweight champion there and then there's a rematch, and the rematch is extraordinary 'cause Ali knocks him out so quickly.
REMNICK: Well, it's a bizarre fight. It's held in Lewiston, Maine, which is, you know, a textile town that's, you know, one strip joint and two restaurants and a hotel in Poland Springs. And all the sportswriters are whining, and, why are we here? And they come out, Ali does his thing. He's dancing around the ring, dancing around the ring. Liston is struggling to keep up. All of a sudden, Ali turns, pivots, hits Liston with the fastest punch that slow-motion has ever recorded. Down goes Liston.
The timekeeper loses all sense of how to do his job. The referee is Jersey Joe Walcott, who really - fine fighter, bad referee - confusion. End of fight. Probably the most ambiguous and strange heavyweight title fight of all time, at least since the Long Count of Dempsey long ago.
BIANCULLI: David Remnick speaking to Terry Gross in 1998. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
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BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's 1998 interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, author of "King Of The World," his notable 1998 biography of Muhammad Ali.
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GROSS: How was Ali introduced to Islam?
REMNICK: It's strange. We think he was influenced when he first went to down to Miami and basically met some street guys who were selling, you know, Nation of Islam newspapers. Not so. When he was an amateur fighter, still in high school, he would go in a station wagon with some other amateurs from Louisville and fight in regional fights, and one time he was up in Chicago. At that time, the Nation of Islam was completely centered in Chicago. Elijah Muhammad lived there. As a kid, he was wandering around on the street and he was given a copy of Muhammad Speaks. And he also bought a record album of Elijah Muhammad's sermons, essentially.
And he brought these home and he was completely taken up by it. Clearly, this was a searching kid. Not an intellectual powerhouse, not a, you know, master of his schoolwork, but a searching mind, someone deeply troubled by the segregated place where he grew up with, deeply troubled by the fact that his father was a sign painter who really believed he should've been an artist and was held down. For his senior paper in his senior year of high school, he wanted to write a paper on the Nation of Islam. Well, no one had hardly heard of the Nation of Islam in Louisville. And the teacher said, no, you can't write about this strange and ultimately threatening thing. So there was the seat of it. And then of course it blossomed when he became a professional fighter after the Olympics and started meeting with Muslims and Muslim teachers in Miami.
GROSS: You say that when he became a member of the Nation of Islam that Elijah Muhammad was ambivalent about Cassius Clay and ambivalent about boxing in general. What was that ambivalence about?
REMNICK: He was ambivalent about boxing because he thought - not unreasonably - that the history of boxing, in the United States especially, is rooted in slavery. It's rooted in the spectacle of strong black men made to fight each other for the amusem*nt of whites. And Elijah Muhammad was, for obvious reasons, all against that. On the other hand, although he saw Elijah Muhammad as the spiritual father of the movement, the person he was closest to was Malcolm X. Malcolm X was not bothered much by boxing. In fact, Malcolm X was a pretty good athlete growing up. He liked these things. And so he was able to sort of dance the dance for a while. And Malcolm X was extremely close with Clay and was down in Miami with him leading up to that first dramatic fight with Liston. They both stayed at the Hampton Court Hotel. And Malcolm was there as Clay's guest with his wife. And they became extremely close.
It was the formative relationship where politics and where religion was concerned prior to Cassius Clay becoming Muhammad Ali. Until then, by the way, no one really knew that Cassius Clay was, in effect, a member of the Nation of Islam. He knew very well, was very sophisticated about this, that if he announced that he was an adherent to the Nation of Islam before the title fight, the fight would never happen. And in fact the promoter of the fight, Bill McDonald, did find out because there were some press leaks. And he threatened to call the whole fight off, and Clay refused to renounce anything and they came to a compromise. In the compromise, he was - he would wait till after the fight to announce this. So in the course of 24 hours, in February 1964, Cassius Clay became heavyweight champion of the world to the shock of the entire sporting world, and the next morning announced to the shock of everyone that he was a new and different man, a member of the Nation of Islam.
GROSS: Ali told you when you were talking with him that one of his greatest regrets was basically having abandoned Malcolm in favor of Elijah Muhammad.
REMNICK: When I went up to visit Muhammad Ali in Berrien Springs, Mich., where he lives on a farm, one of the first things he did was take an 8-by-10 glossy out of his briefcase and show it to me. The picture was of him and Malcolm X, and it was very moving, the way of showing me - you know, he wasn't taking a picture out of Elijah Muhammad or some other fight. It was this relationship that he was deeply proud of. After he became champion, Malcolm X went up to New York with Clay, soon to become Ali. They were great friends. They went to the U.N. They hung out at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem and all the rest.
But then Elijah Muhammad put his foot down and demanded that he choose - the fighter choose - between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. And he did. He chose. And he rejected Malcolm X severely and immediately and completely, so much so that on a subsequent trip to Africa some weeks later, they literally - Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali - bumped into each other in a hotel lobby. Malcolm X tried to approach him in the friendliest way possible, and Muhammad Ali simply mocked him, made fun of him. And that was the end of it. And of course a year later, Malcolm X was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom uptown in Manhattan.
GROSS: Ali's showmanship certainly helped sell tickets for his fights. What about his membership in the Nation of Islam? A lot of white people saw the Nation as being an anti-white group and were very alienated by Ali's conversion. How did that affect who showed up at his fights?
REMNICK: Well, at first it was a great threat. And, as you know, in the second Liston fight, first of all, they could barely get a venue. They could barely find a place to fight. There was the threat of the mob. There was also the specter of the Nation of Islam. And they - a championship fight was held in a small town in Maine in front of just a few thousand people - 3,000, 4,000 people. I mean, this is unimaginable. This is when boxing, by the way, was still big. And you can be sure that it had its effect. And certainly when he refused the draft, this sense of alienation, this sense of division between Ali and his public only deepened. And he certainly...
GROSS: Well, for some people it deepened, and for others - like, for you, for instance - it kind of strengthened the connection to him because there were so many young people who were alienated.
REMNICK: Later, later.
GROSS: That's true. That's true. Right.
REMNICK: Remember, this is us thinking backward. Also, I was a kid at the time. Certainly if you were 19 years old and against the war, you thought this was a pretty amazing thing that this fighter would step away from the heavyweight championship, quite likely never to fight again, to give up probably tens of millions of dollars, giving up the one thing he could do - fight - and you saw this is an enormous bravery at a time when the anti-war movement was still in its infancy. This is early 1967. The level of avoiding the draft was nothing like it would be two years later.
GROSS: You know, I think early on when Ali became a member of the Nation of Islam and then became anti-war, I think some people just saw that as a sign of his eccentricity as opposed to as a sign of his deep commitment to certain beliefs.
REMNICK: Well, you know, what always saved Ali - what always saved him from becoming alienated from certain publics, whether it was the bragging or the politics or the religion, there was always a sense of humor about him. He was always funny, hilarious. And finally, with time, he won over almost everybody - I mean, a few racists here and there, a few people who really felt that his stand on Vietnam was deeply, deeply wrong, a few people that, you know, still yearned for Joe Louis model of behavior, fine. But for the most part, he won over the world so that at the 1996 Olympics, he gets up and lights this torch in the most unexpected, dramatic and moving and beautiful way. And no one's presence on this globe would've moved us more.
BIANCULLI: David Remnick, speaking to Terry Gross in 1998 about his biography of Muhammad Ali, "King Of The World." Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker and the host of "The New Yorker Radio Hour."
DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, in for Terry Gross. Summer is upon us. And if you're making vacation plans that include a visit to a national park, specifically, Yellowstone, you might want to listen closely to what our next guest has to say.
David Quammen is a contributing writer to National Geographic Magazine and is the author of 15 books, including "The Reluctant Mr. Darwin," "Ebola" and "The Chimp And The River." National Geographic devoted its entire May issue to his article on Yellowstone and the battle for the American West. It's about the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, one of the last unspoiled temperate ecosystems on Earth. Animals that once were threatened, like grizzly bears and bison, now thrive there. And millions of people visit each year. The needs of the wild animals and the needs and safety of the visitors are often in conflict. And that's just one of the many conflicts in the Yellowstone ecosystem. Terry Gross interviewed Quammen last April.
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TERRY GROSS, HOST:
David Quammen, welcome to FRESH AIR. In your article, there are many times you're not referring to Yellowstone National Park; you're referring to the Yellowstone Ecosystem.
DAVID QUAMMEN: That's right. We call it the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It is this huge body of mostly wild landscape that amounts to about 22 million acres, and it includes Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, portions of five national forests, several wildlife refuges, including the National Elk Refuge, Bureau of Land Management land - that's federal land - private land, some big private ranches, a portion of the Wind River Indian Reservation - all of those things, contiguous and mostly wild landscape in the area of Yellowstone Park. It's a huge amoeba within which Yellowstone Park is a rectangle that constitutes about a tenth of the total area.
And it's very important - we argue, we think - to the American public, to American history, to modern America - that there is this huge, intact, contiguous ecosystem in the heart of the American West within which live, for instance, all of the original big predator species, all the original great carnivores - the grizzly bear, the black bear, the wolf, the mountain lion, the coyote. They're all there interacting with their prey species, interacting with the landscape. It's part of what makes the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem so special.
GROSS: There's a lot of environmental debates that are kind of crystallized around Yellowstone National Park. And one of those debates has to do with, how do you handle the needs of the wild animals and the needs of the people who are visiting the park? The people coming to the park don't want to be mauled. At the same time, it's part of the goal of the park to have wild grizzlies there. So can you kind of crystallize that debate for us or that conflict between...
QUAMMEN: Yes, yes.
GROSS: ...Having a park that's great for the animals and having a park that's great for the humans who visit the park?
QUAMMEN: Yeah. Well, it is a complicated situation. It's what I call - in the issue I call it the paradox of the cultivated wild. It's paradoxical because we're taking a place and we're saying we want this place to continue to be wild. But in order for it to seem wild, to appear wild, to give people the experience of what the wild in the Northern Rockies is, we've got to do some tinkering. We've got to do some management. We have to have some rules and some boundaries. And that goes back to the beginning, the founding of Yellowstone National Park back in 1872. It was founded originally as - because it was a great tourist destination for people who wanted to see geysers and canyons. And then gradually we realized that part of the importance of this place was as a great wildlife refuge.
GROSS: Well, let's look at grizzly bears. I mean, they're really an object of fascination, I think, for most people. What makes grizzly bears extraordinary?
QUAMMEN: Well, they are the largest, most ferocious, most magnificent carnivore in North America. They lived throughout the Western U.S. a hundred years ago and before. And now because they are so ferocious and so uncompromising and so magnificent and needy in terms of privacy and space and prey, they have disappeared throughout the American West and exist only in a very few places. Glacier National Park - there's a population of grizzly bear up on the Canadian - the Montana-Canadian border. A few places in the northern Pacific Northwest, there are a few grizzlies. And in Yellowstone, there is this big population of grizzlies because there is so much habitat, there is so much space.
They were nearly eradicated from Yellowstone back in the late '60s, early '70s. The population for reasons I could explain went down to about 140 or fewer grizzly bears. They were put on the endangered species list as threatened in 1975, and gradually the population has been brought back by careful management of the causes of grizzly bear mortality. So now there are more than 700 in the ecosystem.
GROSS: There was a period where the bears were feeding on garbage dumps with, like, human garbage - you know, leftovers from the campfire, from dinner - and that became, like, the steady diet of a lot of grizzly bears.
QUAMMEN: That's right.
GROSS: And it also made them into a big tourist attraction 'cause you could go to the dump and see the bears. But that didn't work out well for anybody. Would you tell that story?
QUAMMEN: Yes. And that goes back to the early 20th century. There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright. And he became superintendent, which is the boss of Yellowstone Park, in 1919 - from 1919 to 1929. Later, he was director of the park service itself. Albright embraced the idea that in order for the national parks - and Yellowstone in particular - to have support from the American people and from politicians, there needed to be wildlife as spectacle. Wildlife needs to be abundant and tame. And so he sanctioned the idea that grizzly bears would be fed handouts from cars and would be allowed to eat garbage - essentially human food garbage from the various hotels within Yellowstone National Park.
So there were these dumps near the big hotels at the lake and at Old Faithful and elsewhere in Yellowstone National Park. And the food garbage each day was put out there on these dumps and the grizzly bears were allowed - invited, essentially - to come and feed at the dumps. And they put up stands like bleachers, and you would go out to the dump and you'd sit in bleachers and you would watch 12, 15, 18 grizzly bears - adult, dangerous, male, females with cubs, grizzly bears - feeding on garbage. And then eventually in the 1960s, ideas changed about the dumps, and it was decided that these dumps should be closed and that it was unseemly. It was unnatural. It was not right for people to watch grizzly bears eating garbage, so the dumps should be closed. They were closed in the late '60s and early '70s, and then the grizzly bears were desperate for a few years, searching for substitutes for all of this high-calorie human garbage that they had been eating.
GROSS: They were used to things like hamburgers and stuff, like leftover hamburgers?
QUAMMEN: Yeah, hamburgers...
GROSS: And now they had to forage and they didn't really know how?
QUAMMEN: That's right. Now, grizzlies are omnivores.
GROSS: Or hunt - I guess - yeah, forage and hunt, right.
QUAMMEN: Forage and hunt - they're hunter-gatherers. They're omnivores. They eat a lot of vegetable, plant foods. They eat various kinds of insects. They eat earthworms. They eat tubers of wildflowers. They eat fish when they can get fish. And they eat meat when they can get meat. They eat elk calves. They eat winter-kill bison, bison carcasses left over from the winter. They eat virtually everything, very diverse diets. But they scramble to get the calories that they need from a limited number of high-caloric foods. And garbage had been one of those until the early '70s, and suddenly it was gone. And this was a crisis for the grizzly bear population in the Yellowstone ecosystem.
GROSS: So how did it change human and grizzly interactions?
QUAMMEN: Well, it made it more dangerous for everybody. Closing the dumps brought on this crisis and made things more dangerous. So in the years following the closure of the last dump, there was high mortality of grizzly bears. Why? Because they were frantic. As I say in the geographic piece, they were dazed and confused and desperate and hungry. And so they came into campgrounds more. They tried to take food off of picnic tables. They tried to take food out of tents. They went places where they shouldn't go and did things that they shouldn't do. And they got in trouble. And quite a number of them got killed, and some people got hurt, too.
And so in 1975, the grizzly bear was put on, as I said - on the endangered species list as threatened. And new measures were taken, for instance, bear-proofing garbage, creating new regulations to - essentially to try and keep people and people's food away from the bears, let the bears adjust to eating the abundant wild food that's available in Yellowstone and allow them to be more wild, to be independent of humans as sources of foods for the good of both sides. And that has been quite successful.
GROSS: Why don't we take a short break here? If you're just joining us, my guest is David Quammen. He wrote all the text for the May edition of National Geographic. It's a special edition devoted to Yellowstone National Park on this centennial of the National Park Service. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is writer David Quammen. And he wrote the text for the May edition of the National Geographic, which is a special edition in celebration of the National Park Service's centennial anniversary. And the edition is devoted to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which includes Yellowstone National Park. So we were talking about grizzly bears and the dilemmas that the National Park Service faces about how to deal with grizzlies and how to prevent people from being eaten by grizzlies (laughter). Let's talk about the elk. There's a problem that the National Park Service has in dealing with the elk. The elk go through migrations, but part of their migratory patterns are blocked. What's blocking them?
QUAMMEN: Private land development threatens to block more and more of their migrations. Elk don't respect linear boundaries drawn on a map. The elk of Yellowstone National Park spend their summers in the high country of Yellowstone feeding on the high grasses that remain green through the summer. But in the winter, those high places become brutally cold. And so the elk move down - they move down to what we call winter range. They move down off the Yellowstone Plateau, where Yellowstone Park is, to lower elevations in the surrounding lands onto national forests, and in some cases onto large private ranches. They have to go down to find places where they can survive and eat during the hard months of the Montana, Wyoming, Idaho winter.
Now, there are biologists that I talked to in the course of researching this issue who told me, you know, there a lot of problems facing the Yellowstone ecosystem. But the one most crucial problem, if you're going to point to one, is private lands development. It's not hunting; it's not even climate change, which is an issue. These are all tangled together. But private lands development around the periphery of the parks - Grand Teton and Yellowstone - is a crucial issue because if those private lands are transformed from open pastures, meadow, forest land to suburbs, to little ranchettes, to shopping malls, to roads, to Starbucks - if those places are all settled for the benefit of humans, then the elk are not going to be able to migrate in and out of Yellowstone Park anymore. And if the elk can't migrate into the park, then that creates problems for the wolves, for the grizzlies, for a lot of other creatures. These things all fit together. The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.
GROSS: You've been to African safari parks.
QUAMMEN: Yes.
GROSS: What's the difference between how visitors are treated at the American national parks like Yellowstone versus the African safari parks when it comes to seeing or interacting with wild animals?
QUAMMEN: Right. Well, we have retained in this country, in Yellowstone Park and other places, the idea that people should be free to walk around amidst these animals, amidst even these big predators. In Africa, as you say, it's very different. If you're Maasai Mara National Park in Kenya, if you're in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, you don't get out of your vehicle and go walking around amid the lions and the leopards. You stay in your Land Rover. You stay in your safari van, and you look out the windows or you look out the pop top at these animals. I know by experience how badly that can work out if you violate those guidelines. I've been out on foot with an elephant researcher in northern Kenya. And we got charged by an elephant because we were hiking in a place where we probably shouldn't have been. And we ran and were chased. And he was picked up and thrown by this female elephant and nearly killed.
GROSS: Wow, I feel like I've only seen that in the movies. And I've seen that - when I was growing up, I saw that in a lot of movies. That really happened.
QUAMMEN: That happened. A fellow named Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a famous elephant researcher. And I was doing a story on him. And at one point, he said at the end of a day shall we go out for a game drive, meaning should we drive around and look at some animals? And I said we could we please go for a walk? And so he and I and a Samburu African young man working as an employee of his camp - the three of us went out and started walking. And this female elephant, this big cow elephant saw us. She had a calf, and she threw out her ears and bugled and charged. And we started running. And then Iain stopped, threw out his arms, hollered (imitating shouting) and waved his hands because this had worked in the past, stopping an elephant charge - didn't work with her. She kept coming.
So now he turned around and started running again. Now I have the advantage. I'm 20 yards ahead of him. And I run around a big acacia bush and stop and look. And Iain runs around the big acacia bush and the elephant runs around the big acacia bush and she catches up with him, picks him up with her trunk. I hear him say in a sort of calm declarative voice help. She throws him through the air. He lands in tall grass. She takes about three steps forward and jams her tusks into the dirt right where he is. And I'm standing 50 feet away thinking oh, my God. I've just gotten Iain Douglas-Hamilton killed. She backs off. I go running up and his glasses are broken. His sandals are gone. His watch is gone. And there are two tusk holes in the clay right where he was. She either missed him to the side or she went one Tusk on each side of his body. And he didn't have a scratch on him. And so we got out of there quickly.
GROSS: Oh, my gosh, what a harrowing story. You must have felt so responsible.
QUAMMEN: I did. I thought I've made a really bad mistake. I pushed him to bend the rules, and we walked in a place where we shouldn't have walked.
GROSS: So this a great illustration of the difference between the African safari parks and American National Parks - theoretically, you should've been...
QUAMMEN: That's right.
GROSS: ...In a car there, where in America it's perfectly acceptable to walk around even though you can get mauled...
QUAMMEN: That's right.
GROSS: ...By a bear. But...
QUAMMEN: You can hike into the Yellowstone backcountry. You can camp in the Yellowstone backcountry. You can take food into the Yellowstone backcountry, and you're surrounded by grizzly bears. And it's - it's a very, very thrilling, peculiar situation. Every sound that you hear in the night, you wonder is this a grizzly bear coming to tear into my tent? You do things - you do sensible things to protect yourself. You hoist your food up into a tree with a rope. You camp - you sleep somewhere a hundred yards away from where you've hoisted your food. You eat nonaromatic food. You have bear spray beside you at every moment. And there's still no guarantee.
GROSS: Well, David, congratulations on this National Geographic issue, and thank you so much for talking with us.
QUAMMEN: Thank you, Terry. Great to talk with you.
BIANCULLI: David Quammen wrote the text for the May issue of National Geographic about the Yellowstone National Park ecosystem. It's available now on the National Geographic website.
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