- Coming up on "This American Land."

- We have done an amazing job in the last few years of being more aware of being an occupied grizzly bear habitat.

- Want to keep bears and humans safe?

Give the bears their space, and give them a challenge.

- We're still going to do all the things that we're doing now to make sure that these bears are living into the future.

- Now, waters have different regulations on different sides of the state line.

- It was a devastating impact to people that care about small wetlands, small creeks.

It is going to be interesting to see what the ramifications of that decision will be in different areas of the country.

- Keeping a close watch on America's wetlands after a court decision muddies the waters.

Lucky for these ducks, a lot of farmers and bird lovers are on the same path to protect their favorite hangouts.

So grab a comfy spot.

"This American Land" starts now.

[dynamic music] ♪ ♪ - Funding for "This American Land" provided by... the Walton Family Foundation, the Horner Family Fund.

- Welcome to "This American Land."

I'm your host, Ed Arnett.

And on every show, we'll introduce you to people who dedicate their lives to conserving our natural resources, our landscapes, waters, and wildlife.

And they'll show you some of the solutions they've found when conflicts arise.

Our first story is a great example of turning around a conservation crisis.

In the 1980s, there were fewer than 200 grizzly bears in the West Yellowstone territory.

Today, there are more than 1,000.

Grizzlies are an endangered species success story, a story of hope.

But as outdoor journalist Kris Millgate explains, their future presents some challenges for us humans.

[soft upbeat music] - For those who come to visit the greater Yellowstone area, part of the allure is the complete wildness of it.

[bears growling] It's human nature to think we're the top of the food chain.

We're at-- here, we're not.

♪ ♪ - In the woods of the West, people are sharing space... With a deadly animal.

- The grizzly bear is something that is always on our mind because we know that they're here.

- But they weren't always here in noticeable numbers.

- A century ago, we were the worst threat to grizzly bears and reducing their population almost to extinction.

We are in a very good spot now, I think, compared to 100 years ago.

- 100 years ago, we fed grizzlies garbage in Yellowstone National Park.

It was the most popular tourist attraction for decades.

When that went away 50 years ago, so did the bears.

Grizzlies landed on the Endangered Species List in 1975.

Listing gives protected animals the space they need to develop instead of disappear.

And it worked.

Grizzlies recovered.

They learned to live among us.

- It's getting relatively unsafe.

- Now we have to learn to live with them.

That's where hope and hesitation collide.

- He's too close to get you near him.

- People are their biggest threat and their biggest opportunity.

[chuckles] - The bears are fine in the park itself.

However, ecologically speaking, that is not enough.

So when you look at a map, you see Yellowstone National Park.

It's a square.

You don't need to be a scientist to look at a square and go, well, that doesn't seem natural.

So these bears live in Yellowstone Park, but they also go outside of Yellowstone National Park, which is why this is called the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

- It's incredibly unique.

It's one of the last intact temperate zone ecosystems on the planet.

And it has all the native wildlife that have been here from before white settlement from grizzly bears to Yellowstone cutthroat trout.

Here, it's still pretty pristine and still has a lot of wild character to it.

It's a treasure and we have to remember that.

- That treasure is enjoyed by more than 4 million people annually.

Conflict is inevitable.

- There will certainly be conflicts.

But whose fault's that?

- Rich Paini survived a grizzly bear attack in 2011 while hunting elk with a bow in Island Park, Idaho.

- Hit some old game trails back there.

I walked through and I heard just an enormous crash.

Bear.

One, two, tackle.

Bear had me by this arm, which it ultimately broke.

And I had my recurve, wooden recurve in this hand.

And it bit into my bow.

There's some metal plates in here.

There's a lot of metal in there.

The truth of the matter is I'm sure I could go out there a million times and never see a bear again.

But no, I don't go back there.

- When bears get in trouble, some of them end up here at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, Montana.

- All our bears are here because people made some mistakes.

I coordinate with manufacturers who want to get their products certified as being bear-resistant.

A lot of people don't understand that a cooler, in order for it to be bear-resistant, has to have either padlocks on it or a bolt and a nut in the holes that are provided on the cooler.

They see the rubber latches and think that's going to keep a bear out.

A bear would rip those rubber latches off in seconds.

We want to make sure that the product passes the test to help those bears out in the wild so that they don't get in trouble.

Once a bear gets that easy food reward, they're going to come back time and time again.

And there is that saying that a fed bear is a dead bear and it really is true.

- Bins that pass a severe mauling by bear paws go into the field in places like Jackson, Wyoming, an iconic Western outpost neighboring Grand Teton National Park.

- We are surrounded by millions of acres of public land where bears can find food.

They don't need to come into town to do so.

Garbage is one of the biggest attractants for grizzlies coming into residential or urban areas.

Hopefully, by making the cans more accessible to residents and community members, we can get a lot more places secured in the county and that will be one less attractant that we have.

Just knowing that there is this opportunity for bears to have conflicts with people and that we haven't done anything as a community to prevent that, it's shocking, I think, and disappointing.

Some of this stuff probably should have been done couple decades ago.

But now we have an opportunity to take care of the problem.

- Away from town, the conflict with grizzlies is different.

Garbage isn't out here... [cattle mooing] Cows are.

- I can't say I've lost a lot of cattle to grizzly bears, but I have lost three or four up on this permit.

Oh, you cuss and you wish you could get rid of the grizzly bear.

You carry a gun, you carry bear spray.

Yeah, it's changed.

I guess if we knew that they were trying to manage them that we'd be more gracious to having them here.

- Grizzlies toggle on and off the endangered list that federally protects at-risk animals.

When people argue over the future of Greater Yellowstone grizzlies, they're not really arguing over whether grizzlies should be listed, they're arguing over whether grizzlies should be hunted.

- Oh, they should be delisted and managed.

If it means killing and reducing the numbers, then they're going to have to do that.

- Absolutely stay on the list.

You can still have your livestock, grizzlies can still roam the landscape.

There's another way to do things.

- They basically are our brothers.

The more that they have an opportunity to have new life and new cubs and things, that means the power of the bear will be there.

And you feel that when they're around.

- They will never be hunted in Yellowstone because there is no hunting in Yellowstone National Park.

But maybe the surrounding states, Montana to the north, Idaho to the west, and then Wyoming to the south and to the east, maybe limited hunting on the periphery could work.

- I think our sportsmen today are more respectful to what they're killing.

- We're still going to do all the things that we're doing now to make sure that these bears are living into the future.

- The key about living with bears is you don't want to surprise a bear.

Bears travel on the same trails that we do, sort of a shared use.

I would recommend that anywhere you go in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming that you carry bear spray.

- That bear spray should be holstered on your hip, not shoved down in the bottom of your backpack.

And when you're in areas where the cover is thick and you can't see far, have it in your hand.

- We've done an amazing job in the last few years of being more aware of being an occupied grizzly bear habitat.

- [imitating spraying sound] - You see a lot more people carrying bear spray and you see a lot more people storing food securely.

The things that we could probably improve on is, like, do we need to be everywhere?

[soft dramatic music] - People can live near grizzlies...

It's just a matter of can we shift our values and really change and understand that it's going to take us to do something different?

♪ ♪ - With understanding being the difference between hope and hesitation.

- That we still have the grizzly bear on the landscape after all these years, after all of these pressures, they're not going to go extinct.

- To think about the species that will no longer have that habitat, to think about the potential pressure on our drinking water from that is just a--it's a... it's a terrifying moment.

- In many parts of the country, there is worry in the wetlands.

A Supreme Court ruling called the Sackett decision left significant areas of critical habitat unprotected.

Brad Hicks explains why states are now scrambling to avoid the damage.

He takes us to North Dakota to see what the impact will be in one of the most important wetland regions in North America.

- Where the Great Plains meet the Midwest, Denny Ova has big plans this day on his North Dakota farm.

- I'm going to probably be putting corn in here.

- But there's been a little rain lately.

- When it started raining, it just kept raining and raining.

- And for farmers like Denny, the ponds and puddles left behind are a huge problem.

- You got to go look.

You ain't never going to believe the water over here.

[soft dramatic music] ♪ ♪ - The ponds and puddles are more than just a nuisance he needs to plow around.

They are part of the most important waterfowl breeding habitat in the world.

- We don't really want them.

- Why do you have them if you don't want them?

- Because the good Lord left them here.

- We've come to Denny's farm to see how this wetlands ruling will impact his operations.

By all accounts, the new rules spelled out in the Sackett decision allow farmers like Denny to finally drain those pesky ponds and puddles.

But they're still here.

- Like I said, you got to go on top of the hill and you'll see how much water I got.

- Before we go up that hill to take a look, some background on the controversial ruling.

The case started when Michael and Chantell Sackett wanted to build a house in this North Idaho neighborhood.

The Environmental Protection Agency declared their lot contained wetlands, ordered them to stop immediately, and threatened fines of $40,000 a day.

Damien Schiff argued the case before the Supreme Court.

- Not only their building project was stopped, but it was stopped in a way that was particularly aggressive, we thought, because of the relatively benign aspect of what the Sacketts were doing in building just a single-family home in a residential lot.

- The case hinged on whether the Sacketts' lot was linked to a nearby lake, a lake protected by the Federal Clean Water Act.

There was no visible connection, but the EPA said because the lot was near a ditch that drained into a creek that entered the lake, it was connected and thus protected.

In May 2023, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously it was not.

And in the majority opinion, the court then narrowed the law so only streams and wetlands that are linked by a continuous surface connection to a body of water that is federally protected share that full protection.

That ruled out many streams and wetlands that had previously been covered.

- It was a devastating impact to people that care about small wetlands, small creeks.

It is going to be interesting to see what the ramifications of that decision will be in different areas of the country.

- All of our students are working on mapping wetlands.

Andy Robertson and his geospatial services team at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota are trying to sort out that puzzle.

They were already mapping how different interpretations of the Clean Water Act could impact wetlands in different regions of the country before the Sackett case.

Their findings were submitted to the Supreme Court.

- We created a set of models that demonstrated what would be connected and what wouldn't be connected under various interpretations of the language that's used in the Sackett case.

[soft dramatic music] - But because the ruling leave key terms in the Clean Water Act up for interpretation, the future for wetlands is as muddy as pond water.

And each state will decide what and how wetlands are protected.

In that, Kristine Oblak with the Clean Water For All Coalition, sees trouble on the horizon.

- Now waters have different regulations on different sides of the state line.

- Some states such as California have such robust rules already, the federal changes from Sackett will have little impact.

And other states, Colorado and Illinois, for example, quickly propped up their state protections.

- But none of the states that have worked to restore protections have gotten to parity with what we had at the federal level.

- And what about the wetlands in the most important waterfowl habitat in the world?

The Prairie Pothole Region extends across five states and southern Canada.

The so-called potholes are those ponds and puddles Denny Ova dodges that temporarily pop up after snowmelt and rainfall.

- That's why you need to go drive over top of the hill.

- We're going to do it right now.

- There are hundreds of thousands of them on farms across the region, divots in the landscape left behind by the retreating glaciers after the Ice Age.

- That is really what catalyzes the whole breeding effort for ducks.

Those are really shallow wetlands.

They warm incredibly quickly, which then creates a bloom of invertebrate production, which nesting females use to develop their clutch of eggs.

- Because people looking at that would say, "It's just a a big puddle."

- It's a puddle.

It's just a puddle.

- In a farm field.

- Right.

- Why is that important?

- Why is it important is because that is the engine that drives the duck factory.

[ducks calling] [soft dramatic music] - In addition to a buffet of high-quality protein from the invertebrates, the small potholes also provide a better habitat.

- Ducks are territorial, so you have way more ducks on a bunch of little ponds than you have on one big pond.

- But with the changes from the Sackett decision combined with Denny's dislike of the ponds, you might think this waterfowl utopia is doomed.

It turns out... - Sackett really won't have any impact on the majority of prairie pothole wetlands.

- Because the prairie potholes never qualified for federal protection under the Clean Water Act in the first place.

- They're isolated.

They aren't connected to the surface hydrography.

- So why hasn't Denny just drained them?

Because Denny has a deal with the ducks.

- You got to save some of that stuff for the animals.

- John Devney and his team at Delta Waterfowl changed Denny's mind.

- We're here to make ducks for duck hunters.

- Instead of programs that penalize farmers for removing wetlands, Delta Waterfowl developed a plan to incentivize farmers to keep them.

Denny's farm was part of the pilot program.

Under the Working Wetlands program, farmers get paid a per-acre rent that matches the cash they could get if they rented the land.

- So you guys come out, basically conduct a survey of how much of his acreage is-- - Is temporary and seasonal wetlands and small.

The program only protects the ones up to two acres in size because those are the most vulnerable to drainage.

- And the most important for the ducks.

- And most important for the ducks.

And they're the ones Denny is the most frustrated with.

♪ ♪ - The program is working so well, Delta Waterfowl is strategizing with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to scale it up.

And Denny can focus on planting his corn... - We farm what we can farm.

- Knowing he's doing a good thing for the ducks.

♪ ♪ - New Mexico's Pecos Wilderness is a sanctuary for nearby residents and visitors.

Outdoor recreation in the region near Santa Fe is a driver for the local economy and the source of thousands of jobs.

The land around this protected area is also rich in minerals.

In the 1990s, runoff from the closed Tererro Mine polluted the Pecos River and the surrounding ecosystem with zinc and aluminum.

The contamination led to a large and costly fish kill downstream.

Now, a coalition of businesses, hikers, anglers, and tribal leaders are working to stop any new mining claims.

The Pecos Watershed Protection Act would ban mining development on nearly 160,000 acres of federal land.

It would also designate nearly 12,000 acres in the national forest as the Thompson Peak Wilderness Area, adding the highest level of federal protection.

Let's take you to Northern New Mexico to meet some of the people going to great heights to support the Pecos River and its watershed.

[engine revving] - Flying over the gorge and the mountains of New Mexico is so dramatic and beautiful.

It's kind of breathtaking, actually.

There's just an expanse of space in all directions.

And once you're up there, you don't feel limited by any roads or fences or property lines.

It just stretches on in one expansive beauty.

With my photography, what I really look for is a sight that moves me, something that makes me say, "Wow, that is amazing," and it moves something inside of me.

And when that happens, I know that I'm looking at something that needs to be captured and shared with the world.

[soft dramatic music] - The Pecos Wilderness is an area in north central New Mexico that was created under the 1964 Wilderness Act.

It is a major watershed for New Mexico, southern New Mexico, and southern Texas.

♪ ♪ 30 million people come into New Mexico each year.

They generate about $8 billion in annual business sales and creates more than 80,000 jobs for New Mexicans.

♪ ♪ There's several roadless areas that are on the boundaries of the Pecos.

These have the characteristics of wilderness in them.

There's an act of Congress that needs to take place in order to protect these landscapes as true wilderness.

♪ ♪ - These lands are inventoried roadless lands because they are prime watersheds.

They were created to protect the watersheds and the wildlife and recreation.

We are proposing the special management areas to recognize existing recreational use, such as mountain biking, which is not allowed in wilderness, but would be allowed in the special management areas.

♪ ♪ - Pecos Wilderness means freedom, and I enjoy riding my mountain bike here in the Santa Fe National Forest on these roads.

There are thousands of miles of these roads that I can ride on.

It's OK with me that the wilderness areas are kept pristine for the wildlife and the watersheds.

I've still got plenty of miles to ride on and I can hike in those wilderness areas, so that's fine by me.

♪ ♪ - I'm the sixth generation here in San Miguel County.

And our family has used this land for wood, fishing, hunting.

And we're a part of it.

It's very special to us.

♪ ♪ I'm pretty sure that at the county level, we have a consensus to protect the Pecos Wilderness and to protect our water and to protect our land and particularly the watershed.

The water is our most precious asset here.

We don't have very much of it.

So it's incumbent upon us to make sure that this wilderness is protected.

If we are able to incorporate the roadless areas into the Pecos Wilderness, we will have 150,000 protected acres that provide us with fresh water, fresh air, up to five counties here in northern New Mexico.

♪ ♪ - We've been here over 700 years.

And the Pecos Wilderness was easy access to the plains for buffalo hunts.

There are times when we migrate into the Pecos Wilderness to gather herbs, to visit the springs, to hunt bighorns, to gather what Mother Earth has provided for us so we can make that livelihood and fulfill that spiritual cycle.

We have to protect it because that's where our livelihood begins.

- It's so important to me that I've spent a lot of time knocking on business doors, asking people to support it because I just think that right now is a critical time to really recognize the importance of nature and wilderness.

We've seen elk coming out of the woods in the winter with the breath of the elk and the frost on their muzzles.

And that was awesome and amazing.

♪ ♪ - There's not many places that you can go in the country that you can call this land yours.

You know, we're stewards of this land.

It belongs to all of us.

And if we don't protect these waterways, we're going to be in big trouble.

For instance, look at what happened to the moly mine up in Questa.

Yeah, it was a great economics for the community, but now it's no longer, but the scars are there.

We're not asking for the whole world.

You know, it's just a little section.

And we can keep this pristine forever.

♪ ♪ - My favorite part of the landscape in the Pecos Wilderness is the Truchas Peaks.

They rise to over 13,000 feet, jagged on all sides, and just majestic as anything there is in New Mexico.

- We have a very diverse coalition, all of them supporting the idea that wilderness is more important in the 21st century than ever before.

We have 2% of New Mexico which is wilderness, and that 2% is the smallest in the entire West.

♪ ♪ - Our coalition also includes [speaking Spanish].

These are irrigation canals that feed our traditional farmers.

These traditional communities depend on the watershed from the Pecos Wilderness.

It feeds their croplands, their livestock, and their crops down below in the valleys.

♪ ♪ If we can get these landscapes, these roadless areas into true wilderness, it would take that off the table for any future development.

For me, the Pecos Wilderness is a church, it's a sanctuary, it is God's country, and we just need to take care of it.

We're the stewards of the land.

- Now, a look at some stories in our next show.

- They get very confident about what they're doing and they get very excited.

- Who knew young people could have such a good time with gearboxes and wind turbines?

The National KidWind Challenge will blow you away.

- They were like, "OK, let's have a theme.

What screams sustainable to you and green?"

So we made some green leaves.

- They get to create something which is so empowering... [fan blades whirring] And then be able to test it and see what energy is being made.

- Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time with more stories about the people conserving our natural wonders.

- Funding for "This American Land" provided by... the Walton Family Foundation, the Horner Family Fund.

And you can always watch our show on PBS Passport.