PBS’ America Outdoors: How Nature Connects With Culture

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, for a little adventure. Our next guest is encouraging everyone to reconnect with nature. Author and activist Baratunde Thurston is back with a new season of “America Outdoors.” Exploring how we interact with the world around us. And he’s joining Hari Sreenivasan to discuss his travels and the lessons he’s learned.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Baratunde Thurston, thanks so much for joining us. This is the second season of your program. What is “”America Outdoors”? What are you trying to do with it that, say, hasn’t been done?

BARATUNDE THURSTON, HOST, “AMERICA OUTDOORS”: “America Outdoors” is a show that explores our deep connection to nature. We spend time with a really diverse array of Americans who work in outdoors, who play in outdoors, who interact and have a deep relationship with nature, and it helps tell a story of who we are through the places we’re connected to. My name is Baratunde Thurston. I’m a writer, activist, sometimes comedian. And I’m all about telling a better story of us. This country is wild. And its natural landscapes are as diverse as its people.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you start this season in the Suwannee River, and I didn’t know until I was watching a preview of the program that, what is it, the longest running sort of — you had a phrase for it.

THURSTON: The watical (ph) wild river.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

THURSTON: Sometimes these rivers get wild, Hari, and we got to keep them that way. So, wild means it’s not damned. Its course hasn’t been altered. So, it is a truly old-school wild river. And a lot of people depend on it. A lot of fresh water for 10 million or so people. The way it starts up in the Okefenokee Swamp in Southeast Georgia. There’s people working to protect that swamp and not drain it to keep all the carbon that it sequesters naturally in place as opposed in our atmosphere where, you know, it warms things up. The river connected and guided our episode. We literally flowed down river from head to mouth in the language of that geography. And, you know, starting off with Reverend Nixon and being a part of a church service in what is probably the greatest church, right, is earth, it’s, you know, very reverend, very spiritual, a very powerful place, but he felt called to safeguard his home, to safeguard the natural resource. And to safeguard, in his words, God’s creation. And so, you have this overlap of religious conviction and climate action, which is not the common image of either community in this country. So, you have people who are doing science on this river to preserve the creatures in the land, you have people on the land trying to save climate, you have folks who are just playing and loving what it means to be in North Florida and what it means to be a part of this river and to see this river

(INAUDIBLE).

SREENIVASAN: Yes. You know, you get to go to a state that sort of makes you now, what? You’ve hit all 48 after you’ve hit Arkansas.

THURSTON: Yes. Arkansas this season, that was — I’ve been everywhere in the lower 48 except for Arkansas until filming season two of “American Outdoors.” So, I can complete the set.

SREENIVASAN: So, what was it — what was intriguing to you about the kinds of — the different kinds of experiences that you had? Because in one part of that episode, you were out there skeet shooting. Talk about how your relationship with guns has been very different than the people you are skeet shooting with?

THURSTON: If I’m going to experience the outdoor culture in Arkansas, I should experience the gun culture too. But I admit, that makes me uneasy. Guns are a big part of outdoor life in America. There’s no denying it. But they’re not a big part of my life. So, I’m going to need to keep an open mind. I mean, I grew up in the ’80s in Washington, D.C., when it wasn’t just the nation’s capital, it was the nation’s murder capital. My father was a victim of one of those gun murders. And so, I don’t have a lot of love intrinsically for firearms. I wouldn’t say a deep hate, but I would say I’m very distant from it. Because I live in the same country as you, and so we see the headlines and a lot of us live the reality of various forms of gun violence. So, it’s been largely a negative idea outside of some fun with some action movies. Watching, not starring in. And so, to be in Arkansas, to be with an Olympian who — for whom this is a sport, to be with hunters for whom this is a source of food and there are conservationist and it’s a family ritual and tradition, we got to spend time. This is the heart of the show, moments like this, where people who clearly come from different political, social, ideological perspectives can share common ground, who are standing on the same earth, we’re on the same plot the land and we’re in a relationship with each other because we’re also in a relationship with nature. And in that environment, that’s like a safe container to have some really thoughtful exchanges. And ones that get well beyond the talking point. So, I learned something in that exchange. The people I was shooting with learned something in that exchange. And I think we were, both sides, not on a separate side necessarily. We were human together. We were Americans together. We were laughing together.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

THURSTON: And I was shooting pretty good, which helped.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. Yes. So, you know, what was interesting to me was also that you shared that history about your father to the camera, to the audience. Why was that important?

THURSTON: I love breaking expectations. And I love the idea of taking what could be a show about nature and making it a show about people. This is America. Long pause. Outdoors. And when we invest in that relationship with nature and with each other on that shared foundation of nature we can find a bit more America. We can find a bit more in common. We’re still going to be disagreeing, but for me to share that part of myself felt very important because it helps me connect with the people, I’m in the field with and ultimately, the people who don’t get to travel around all these states with all these resources and all these safety like I do.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. Yes.

THURSTON: You know, it’s a really privileged position to be able to drop in to some of the most beautiful, most ancient, most indigenous, most joyful, most regenerative, like all kinds of scenes that I’ve been able to be a part of communities that have let me in with trust. So, they’re going to trust something with me, I’m going to trust, you know, something with them, and we’re trusting ourselves in that case.

SREENIVASAN: You were sleeping out under the stars one night, waiting for the sun to rise, and it looks like a spectacular setting. Tell us a little bit about these moments that you had in New Mexico.

THURSTON: Yow, New Mexico is so much more than I thought it was. A lot of the show was just me saying, whoa, like a lot. It was just like the whole show with Baratunde. But I was in place called Chaco Canyon. This is very old place that was occupied by people who were here before the European colonizers arrived, the (INAUDIBLE). And they’ve designed their city in this region in perfect alignment with the stars. They were attuned to the universe. And I reflected in New Mexico, time means something. It’s a very, very old place. We think of America as a young country, and it is a young construct, but it’s old land. And there’s people who have been here for far longer than our constitutional modern version would have you believe. So, to sit under the stars, to look up at the Milky Way that we’re also inside of is mind- blowing, humbling.

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the things that happened in I think the episode in Oregon where you were literally climbing up a tree on a rope with an expert, and you had an intense moment and then you kind of let the camera and the audience in on it when you got back down. And that was kind of an even bigger moment for people watching the show. Tell us a little bit about that and why it was important for you to just be open and honest at that moment.

THURSTON: Yes. There — it can be — it would be easy to make a postcard show, where we celebrate natural features and beautiful animals and majestic creatures. It would be easy to make a celebratory show where everything about the outdoors is great, nature is great, camping is great, campfire is all just wonderful.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

THURSTON: But that would not be a true show. And the truth is there’s more to nature than landscapes and animals. We’re part of it. The truth is that nature sometimes hurt. It hurts. It’s been used to hurt. And so, you have people who’ve had accidents in nature. Taken terrible falls. Broken parts of themselves or their identities. You’ve had people who have been forced to work and been tortured and murdered and slaughtered in nature. That’s the history of a big group of us in this country.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

THURSTON: So, to just be like, yes, let’s go out to the forest. I mean, the forest is the scene of the crime as well. And the exclusion that many people have experienced in the outdoors makes it — can make it a troubling, unsafe, unwelcomed, nonjoyful place. I was climbing this tree. It’s 80-foot-tall maple. When you climb a tree that big, you’re not actually climbing the tree, you’re climbing a rope parallel to the tree that’s looped on a high branch. And I was with this beautiful man, Dustin Marcello (ph). And he really held a great space for him because about halfway up, I just had to stop. And it wasn’t merely the height. The height had a little something to do with it. That was higher than I’ve ever climbed anything —

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

THURSTON: — but more on that, it was kind of memory and a recognition of the setting of being a black American, being a black man in a tree with a rope and not wanting to go any further. Just acknowledging history, pain, trauma and really feeling it. And I wasn’t able to understand it as it happened. I just thought, I’m tired, I’m hurting, there’s some psychological emotional block, I don’t know what it is, but I’m not pushing myself beyond this point. And so, what I end up sharing in this episode and people really should watch this, I won’t repeat it because it was for the moment, I shared with you everything I was feeling and going through. And that felt important to do.

SREENIVASAN: So, Dustin, the man you were with, in that tree, when you guys started walking around in the forest, what was interesting was that you started to see the outdoors as a place for healing. And it’s kind of through line that I saw in so many different episodes that you had, whether it’s, you know, teaching foster children how to fly fish in a stream or it’s, you know, people dealing with substance abuse issues, snowy shoeing in Maine or you and the other folks that were just literally inhaling the forest, that there is kind of a — and it’s been something that civilizations and societies have known for so long, that there is a healing capacity to nature, but to actually see it at work is something different.

THURSTON: We know so much already. Our intuition is pretty good. But we forget. And so, this show has helped me remember things that I have known and helped me find people who’ve remembered things that they’ve known, which is that nature can be very healing. Louie Hina (ph), I was with this brother in New Mexico rafting down the Rio Grande. He’s a member of two different indigenous groups. And he’s pointing out the features of nature and he’s like, it’s my pantry, it’s my altar, it’s my classroom, it’s my medicine cabinet. He’s not seeing trees, just as trees. He’s seeing how we relate to them and what they offer us, you know, which is to breathe on our behalf beyond the lungs in our own bodies. And so, to tap into the healing power of nature, whether it’s a cold plunge in Maine or the forest bathing in Oregon, or the collective trauma that we explored in the Arkansas episode around the site of a very large race massacre in U.S. history, but he way that town is trying to move forward with this current leadership is to use access to nature to write a different story.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I had no idea until I watched the episode about a race massacre in Elaine, Arkansas. I mean, it just really never showed up in any of my history books. Tell me a little bit about that conversation with the mayor.

THURSTON: We’ve been a very, very sneaky show, Hari, you know. Come and watch our nature show, and they get hit with indigenous land rights and histories that are not documented in formal education, about race massacres and people who are in recovery from substance abuse and the foster child system.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

THURSTON: Because it’s just people. And so, part of the relationship that we as Americans have with this land is a traumatic one. And it is hardly clearer than in place like Elaine, Arkansas, in the Mississippi River Delta, which in the summer of 1919 was the place of one of many race massacres. Let me be clear, when I say race massacres, I mean, white Americans descending on black communities and destroying the property and murdering the people Tulsa is one of the more famous ones. And what happened in Elaine was literally an order of magnitude greater in terms of number of people killed. And I’d never heard of it. And race is my whole thing. I mean, I wrote a book on “How to Be Black.” I know a thing or two about race. I never heard about this part of the story until making a nature show. And so, that history was buried purposefully, deflected purposefully. The mayor, first black mayor, first woman mayor, she didn’t know about it.

LISA GILBERT, MAYOR OF ELAINE, ARKANSAS: I only learned about it 15 years ago. And I only learned about it when researching online and I came home and asked my grandmother about it —

THURSTON: Yes.

GILBERT: — and she confirmed the stories were true. And I spent the next five to six years getting old stories out of her about the Elaine massacre.

THURSTON: So, she’s taken the opportunity that has come with her own status as mayor with her own status as a decedent of the victims of this massacre, and with the status as Elaine sitting on the Delta Heritage Trail. This rails to trail bike path.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I grew up — I was fortunate to grow up, probably middle school, high school camping and backpacking in the Pacific Northwest and it definitely changed my relationship with the outdoors. And one of the things though I still remember vividly was that there just weren’t that many people of color out there, much less on camera hosting programs about the outdoors. But I wonder how you have navigated these spaces where you might not be who somebody expects when they get a call, hey, there’s a program out, this host is going to come out to you?

THURSTON: I navigate it with joy and with curiosity. I grew up with a good amount of outdoor access, and I was with my mother, you know, the only two brown folks in the southern neck of the woods, like literally, some neck of the woods, and it’s just us and maybe my friend, Reggie, you know, and whoever else was going camping with us. So, I — it’s familiar to feel unfamiliar in these spaces. I found that as we’ve made the show, especially the more we’ve made the show, folks have a sense of who I am and then, what I’m trying to do with this show, with public media. This is all of our show, to some degree. We’re trying to select us back to us with beautiful respectably — respectful and interesting way. And so, I felt welcomed by everybody who we’ve had on the show. As we moved through some of these spaces, folks who were not part of the show, they’re not always the most welcoming. That’s humans, that’s people. There’s folks who want to take issue or make some assumptions, and I’ve had the benefit, you know, of being able to travel with others. And so, you know, to be one of the few or the only does sometimes come with actual risk, you know, physical risk, certainly, psychological risk. I’ve been able to be shielded from some of the negatives of that. I’ve definitely enjoyed the benefit of multiple types of people’s open minds. And I’ve gotten the respect for the folks who don’t get to travel with the film crew and have some challenges that are not of their making, because other people, you know, have insecurity about their identity.

SREENIVASAN: The show is called “America Outdoors” on PBS stations around the country. Check your local listings. Baratunde Thurston, thank so much for joining us.

THURSTON: Hari, it’s so good to see you again. Thank you. And my best to Christiane.