Benji Backer
speaker
52 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Benji Backer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The solutions that the left has proposed, which is taking away energy, it's taking away people's cars and their livelihoods, is not the way to getting to solutions. It's innovating our way out of the problem and it's conservation, not preservation. We can get into that, but those are all values that conservatives hold and liberals should hold.
And together we could work towards real outcomes if we put the politics aside.
Well, look, first on your point, it's a great point. I would say that the loudest voices that are the most extreme are actually the minority, thankfully. Most Americans aren't extreme environmentalists.
The future of environmentalism cannot be dominated by Greta Thunberg and AOC and these radical voices because they actually don't speak for the majority of Americans, including left-leaning Americans. Most Americans want pragmatism on the environment. Most Americans want conservation and sensible measures to be taken. It's just not dominating in the media cycle that we have today.
What that looks like is, the leftist approach so far has been this preservation, don't touch anything. The environment is to be protected at all costs, which I'm the biggest environmentalist out there. But when you have this kind of hands off approach, which is what preservation is, then you have these intense wildfires like we've seen out in the West.
You have all these other problems that exist because you're not in there actively managing and making sure that ecosystems and biodiversity and humanity are all thriving at the same time.
When you allow local landowners and you allow local stakeholders to be involved in the process of taking care of the environment, you get the best results because local people know how to take care of their local environments best. Farmers, ranchers. Slow down.
Doesn't that make things better?
Well, that unknown EPA administrator, like the congresswoman was mentioning, that's 3,000 miles away from the problem, yes, does not know how to take care of the area better than the person who lives there does. And so you wonder why we have worsening wildfires. it's because we're not allowing local communities to take care of their forests.
The government's coming in saying you're not allowed to take care of your forests. And if you want to help fight forest fires... It's why we have homeless.
Yeah, look, I mean, when economies are strong and people's livelihoods are good, the environment ends up being protected because then we actually can go in there and protect it. I was touring a native tribe in Washington State a couple of years ago, and I asked the tribal member how they are so economically successful because this is one of the most economically successful tribes in the country.
And also how they helped restore the salmon population because they also helped do that. And they said those two things went hand in hand. The fact that we were economically successful allowed us to put the money into restoring the salmon population. It allowed us to conserve the salmon population because we weren't worried about taking care of our basic needs.
Humans interact with the environment every single day. Us being on this call takes up energy and takes up resources that takes from the environment. We have a role in protecting it, but that means we need to be involved in it. And that's why conservation is so much better than preservation.
Well, I think what I'm concerned about is that we allow the radical extremes to continue dominating this conversation, because right now it's an all-or-nothing approach. We either need the Green New Deal or we're not going to do anything. We're just going to overdevelop the country and not care about the environment whatsoever. I'm over-dramatizing that.
But that's kind of how the conversation is going. We're trying to drive a conversation that's right there, balanced in the middle. Like you said, it might not be the most sexy these days in the news cycle that we're in. But We've put together an amazing group of people.
We have the former head of the Sierra Club and former Trump cabinet members who are working closely with this administration on our board together. Because there's a lot of shared outcomes that we have at Nature is Nonpartisan that we believe Americans want on behalf of our environment in a sensible way.
And the AOCs of the world and the people who only critique the AOCs and don't provide their own agendas are the problem. And I would say the congressman probably understands that better than anyone because she's in Congress dealing with those sorts of realities every single day. There's no incentive to solve problems right now.
The incentive is to just oppose the other side's ideas and create fear-mongering. I saw the National Park Conservation Association say that Donald Trump was about to destroy, and it was the beginning of the end of the national park system in the United States because he's the president. When in reality, he signed the biggest national park bill
bill into law when he was president last time he doesn't want to destroy the national parks but they're dictating that message and americans are following so we have to take this issue out of that back and forth otherwise we're not going to get the results that we need and we're trying to pierce our way through that i'm assuming you guys are both working with the interior department and i would call doug bergham a friend i used to go to north dakota when he was governor and give presentations on various things on his behalf his wife's
Completely agree, and there's nobody that understands the role of balance and conservation than Doug Burgum. I mean, he's a passionate outdoorsman. He understands the importance of energy. He doesn't pick winners and losers when it comes to energy, and he cares deeply about protecting nature. our national wonders. Now, what he's done, the left is not going to give him credit for this.
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