- Just ahead on "This American Land"... - It probably hasn't been trapped there very long.

- Thousands of seabirds are not as fortunate.

Abandoned marine debris, known as ghost gear, poses a global threat to wildlife.

Wildfires are growing larger, and the risks are getting greater-- warmer temperatures, too much fuel, and more people moving to fire-prone places.

- So you're just cutting down every tree out here?

- Yeah.

- Difficult decisions about our future with fire.

- The river is a big part of my soul.

- And a most unlikely alliance that's been paying off for the Mississippi for more than 100 years.

Meet some of the heroes of our landscapes, waters, and wildlife, starting now.

[dynamic music] ♪ ♪ Funding for "This American Land" provided by The Walton Family Foundation, The Horner Family Fund, Roni and Jim Wilkins, Jr., Winchester, Virginia.

- Hello, and welcome to "This American Land."

I'm your host, Ed Arnett, and on every show, you'll meet some of the people crafting bold solutions to our conservation dilemmas.

One of the biggest challenges in the American West is the growing number and intensity of wildfires.

Correspondent Brad Hicks shows us how it's forcing us to rethink our future with fire.

- We're going to go up here past the mountain park and up towards Mountain Campus.

- Take off into the woods with Camille Stevens-Rumann-- - We're in the middle of the Cameron Peak burn scar.

- --and she'll take you places that won't make the top pics on Instagram.

- The largest wildfire in Colorado state history.

[pensive music] - She's a fire ecologist, and we're heading to her experiment.

- So here's our soil moisture and temperature probe.

- The 2020 fire scorched 325 square miles and took more than three months to contain.

Five years later, from above, the forest looks like the fire was yesterday.

♪ ♪ - This is a Douglas fir.

We have ponderosa pine.

- One tree at a time, she is trying to change that.

Where the fire burned, she is planting with a purpose.

- We have Engelmann spruce.

This is one of your classic, like, Christmas trees.

[whirring] - But faster than she can plant, Shawn Cheeseman and crew are cutting trees down.

- This is a Tigercat 855 Harvester.

We're cutting it into a length that meets the mill we're selling it to.

[rock music] [whirring] - So you're just cutting down every tree out here.

- Yeah.

As soon as they're done with this one, they're on to the next one.

- What may surprise you is they share the same goal.

- Getting young, healthy trees on the landscape.

- And have a forest here in the future.

- The fact they're applying opposite approaches underscores the growing complexity of our relationship with fire in the west.

For more than a century, we did a great job suppressing fires.

Smokey Bear made sure of that.

- Only you.

- Except it turns out that practice may not have been so great after all.

- We've always thought fire is this sort of scary thing that we needed to suppress.

And fire is definitely a part of this ecosystem here.

And so by suppressing those fires, we have what we call overstocked conditions, maybe unnaturally dense conditions across the landscape.

And this is sort of a West-wide issue.

- Too much fuel in the forest.

- Too much fuel on the forest, yep.

This is a classic logging operation.

- Sam Pankratz is the Rocky Mountain regional program manager for the nonprofit National Forest Foundation.

- Bet a lot of people don't know the Forest Service has a nonprofit.

- Yes.

A lot of our goal is to really support the broader partnerships around work happening on U.S. Forest System lands.

[pensive music] ♪ ♪ - Here in Central Colorado, they're partnering with Shawn Cheeseman's local logging company-- [machinery whirring] --to clear several hundred acres of densely packed lodgepole pine so a new, healthier forest can grow.

- We are doing some-- what would be termed as clearcutting, right?

And that can be hard to digest.

But we're mimicking what a natural fire would have done on this landscape anyway.

We're really looking to regenerate these stands, get some young lodgepole pine back on the landscape.

- So this is a lodgepole pine tree.

- With a ladybug on it.

- Yeah, with a ladybug.

- A couple hundred miles to the north, in the scar of the Cameron Peak fire, Camille Stevens-Rumann is digging into a deeper issue.

Should the forest that was there be the forest of the future?

Or should there be a forest at all?

- All of these trees established 200-300 years ago, and we don't know if the current climate is going to be suitable for trees to re-establish in those same places.

And so whether or not those species are going to come back naturally, or even at all, is a big question that we-- we're struggling with right now.

- So in dozens of locations at different elevations, she is monitoring 10,000 seedlings from six species.

And that's to build in some resiliency, some climate resilience?

- Exactly, yeah.

Because there's some places that, you know, we should probably accept there aren't going to be forest again.

And that's OK, as long as they're a really wonderful functioning ecosystem that's not a forest.

And on this side is where we planted 16 trees.

And you can see this used to be a tree.

Here's a poor little stump of a tree.

So that kind of tells you how harsh this site actually is.

[pensive music] - One could look at a fire and say, this is an ecological disaster.

But I get the sense that you might look at it as an opportunity to see what does nature do, given this circumstance.

- Yeah, I generally, as a fire ecologist, don't think about wildfires as a disaster.

- And neither did Native people.

For many, fire was a tested and trusted way to shape and manage their environment.

- I've come to learn that humans can be good for the landscape, that we can steward the landscape.

People have been doing this for thousands of years to protect their communities, to facilitate certain species.

And so what we're seeing now is this fuel buildup from almost 200 years now of Native peoples being forcibly removed from the landscapes.

- These fuel-rich forests, combined with climate change and more people moving into fire-prone areas, are creating a kaleidoscope of questions and conflicting priorities about what our future with fire should look like.

The fires are getting larger, the damage is lasting longer, and the answers are getting harder.

- We have a lot of people now that have moved into fire-prone landscapes, so it's created a conundrum in a sense that we're dealing with what is a natural process, and how do we really live with fire moving forward.

- There are definitely people who believe the more hands-off we are, the better.

But that kind of comes down to how you see yourself in relationship to the world.

What's your belief about how humans should be in the environment?

- We have a fire problem.

And that fire problem is one that we have helped create.

And I think when we think about the future, we're not going into a world of less fire, but we are going into a world where we are making a choice now whether we control that fire or if we're letting those fires control us.

[mellow music] - Hundreds of thousands of abandoned metal fishing traps are scattered all over the planet.

They don't degrade naturally, and they kill and maim seabirds and other wildlife that become entangled and trapped.

These seals have been rescued, rehabilitated, and are now being released by Connecticut's Mystic Aquarium.

They were found entangled in marine debris.

The aquarium's animal rescue program has helped injured and stranded marine animals along 1,000 miles of northeast coastline for decades.

And off the coast of Maine, veteran science correspondent Miles O'Brien of the "PBS NewsHour" introduces us to some experts and volunteers working to clean up what's known as ghost gear.

[seagulls calling] - Hart Island is a tiny, rugged spit of land about a mile off the coast of Maine.

It is uninhabited, a natural refuge for seabirds.

But humans are spoiling the landscape with an unending tidal wave of lost, abandoned, and dumped fishing gear.

- It's incredibly overwhelming.

And the fact is, it just keeps coming.

Oh, it still has use of that leg.

It probably hasn't been trapped there very long.

- Linda Welch is a wildlife biologist for the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service.

It manages the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge, 73 islands that are home to thousands of nesting seabirds, some of them endangered or threatened.

- I don't think there's another industry that would be allowed that type of behavior, where trash from your industry accumulates on public land, and you have no responsibility to clean it up.

- Chicks instinctively seeking shelter from predators crawl into washed up lobster traps, confining them inside.

- It looks like it has a piece of the rope line in the trap wrapped around its foot.

And it died because it wasn't able to get free from that marine debris.

- The tangled, mangled traps weigh at least 50 pounds apiece.

And the refuge islands have no harbors, docks, or boat ramps.

- And so we have to come ashore in small skiffs, hand-carry the traps into those boats.

Those boats shuttle the gear to offshore larger boats, and then those boats transport it back to the mainland.

It's incredibly time consuming.

- The cleanup is largely left to volunteers, coordinated by nonprofits.

- Man, you get an appreciation for how these friggin' things are made.

- Laura Ludwig is manager of the Marine Debris and Plastics Program at the Center for Coastal Studies.

We caught up with her on a foggy morning on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts.

- My gosh.

It's like a spiderweb.

- After a long week of beachcombing by an army of volunteers, the heavy equipment and the barge had arrived to finish the job.

- At its peak, I believe there were 3.2 million trap tags sold annually.

That could be anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 traps lost annually-- annually.

- That's a pretty stunning number.

- It is.

It is.

- Lobsterman Steve Train has been fishing in the Gulf of Maine for more than 40 years.

- Last year, we had quite a few storms, and I lost 30 traps.

And that was, like, a record for me.

- The climate emergency will likely worsen that problem, but it's not the only reason traps go missing.

- Boats cut them off.

Ships cut them off.

But it's not-- it's not trash.

It's not stuff that just got thrown away.

- There aren't fishermen under cover of night going out and dumping old nets and traps in the water because they don't want to deal with it?

- Oh, do I think that might happen?

Probably.

But is that the industry norm?

No.

That's not what we do.

- Right about the time Train began fishing, the industry started using steel traps coated with plastic and plastic lines.

They replaced wood and sisal, which degrade naturally.

This gear does not.

It lasts forever.

For Buzz Scott, the bigger problem is out of sight, but not out of mind.

- You're clear.

- Traps that pile up on the sea floor, so-called ghost gear.

- They're ghost gear because we've lost them.

They're gone.

They're ghosts to us.

But they also are ghost gear because those traps are still fishing.

If they catch one animal a year that is eaten by another animal that's in that trap, we're wasting a lot of resources.

- Scott is founder and president of Oceans Wide, a nonprofit that educates students about the Gulf of Maine.

His dismay over the huge mess that lies beneath the surface has led to some action.

Over the past three years, he and his team have removed about 3,600 lost traps from the bottom of Boothbay Harbor.

- We could have 100 divers, 20 boats, and five ROVs working in the Gulf of Maine constantly.

It's taken 40 years to fill the ocean up, so it will take us a lot longer to find all these traps.

- Of course, the problem is not limited to lobster traps in the Gulf of Maine.

All over the planet, the seas are littered with abandoned nets, lines, buoys, and traps, death traps for all kinds of marine life, like these desperate crabs.

- Fishing gear is the most harmful form of plastic marine debris in the ocean.

- Ingrid Giskes is with the Ocean Conservancy.

It is seeking solutions to this burgeoning problem, part of the plastic onslaught on the oceans.

So pound for pound, is this more lethal for marine life?

- Marine animals can get entangled in ghost gear.

They can ingest it.

It can't break down.

And the reason for that is because fishing gear can be incredibly light and float within the water column, where often the marine animals live and play.

- The nonprofit leads the Global Ghost Gear Initiative, fostering recycling projects that lead to consumer products.

They have partnered with a company called Bureo to make clothing, sunglasses, and skateboards out of fishing nets.

But recycling any kind of plastic is problematic, and the massive nets and heavy traps present an even greater challenge.

Most fishing ports do not even have a place for fishermen to recycle their old gear.

- So all of the gear that I have here comes from different fishermen in Massachusetts.

- Caitlin Townsend works for a nonprofit called Net Your Problem, also trying to make it easier for fishermen to recycle their plastic gear.

She works mostly alone, with her dog, in a warehouse near the most lucrative fishing port in the U.S., New Bedford, Massachusetts.

- I take these nets and I will lay it out.

And essentially, I'll go through and separate it out into all the different types of plastic.

- Net Your Problem has recycling sites in Alaska, Washington State, California, and Maine, as well as this one.

What's the big solution, in your view?

- In my view, it would be to have an operation like this in every major fishing port in the United States.

- But she has to send the sorted plastic to Europe, because there are no recycling facilities here that will accept it.

Back down east, Buzz Scott employs a hydraulic crusher to make it easier to recycle the lobster traps.

To get them melted down, he must truck them across the border into Canada.

About a month after our visit to Hart Island, Linda Welch led a cleanup effort.

Volunteers gathered and crushed more than 200 traps.

A chartered barge hauled it all away, but the derelict fishing gear just keeps coming.

For "This American Land," I'm Miles O'Brien.

[mellow music] ♪ ♪ - It takes sunlight, rainfall, good soil, and ingenuity to keep a farm going.

In Southern Iowa, those who work the land are finding ecological solutions to benefit both the environment and their bottom line.

Responsible stewardship of these living systems pays off for farm families and their neighbors.

And it provides clean water hundreds of miles downstream.

[pensive music] ♪ ♪ - Farms, when you get down to it, are really living systems.

That means if we do a lot of things right, then production takes care of itself.

But if we focus on production, it usually fails.

My name is Seth Watkins, and I raise cattle in Taylor County, Iowa.

Our farms, as living systems, are sustained by natural resources.

Mine is sustained by sunlight, rainfall, soil, and my own ingenuity.

♪ ♪ It's a beautiful Monday morning in Taylor County, Iowa, and I'm really tickled today because my daughter Tatum is joining us.

And she's going to be helping us move a group of cattle.

♪ ♪ And basically, what we talk about is rotational grazing.

That means about every five to seven days, we move the cattle to a new pasture.

It allows the grass to rest and recover from the grazing, which actually is really good for soil health and stimulates more grass growth.

And then it also gives the pond some time to rest and recover as well.

And it really follows what Mother Nature would have done when you've followed the migration of the bison.

You know, they didn't stay in one place very long.

They literally were moving every 12 to 24 hours.

[car horn honking] Spuds!

They're coming now.

[cows mooing] We had a really nasty blizzard here.

And it was March 11, 1998.

I can remember it very well.

The cows were miserable in those conditions.

And in the aftermath, I asked, why am I working against Mother Nature?

And we made the decision to move our calving date to about the 10th of April, which was more natural for our time.

[light music] ♪ ♪ I wanted to do what was right by the cows and by the land, and I really wasn't concerned about my profitability at that point.

But the neat thing that happened is, when I made that decision, we actually lowered our costs and increased our production by working in sync with Mother Nature-- [cow moos] Hey, buddy.

--and started to become a more profitable operation from that point on.

Daisies.

Well, that was my entry into what I'd call ecological solutions.

And then from there, I learned about the principles of conservation agriculture.

[engine turns over] You know, the key principles are no till or minimum tillage of the earth, crop rotation with three species or more, and keeping the soil covered with cover crops as long as possible, ideally all year long.

There's a beautiful song sparrow right there.

And then there's a fourth area that I think is just as important.

It's not always talked about as much-- farming in a method that enhances our wildlife.

So what we have here is a riparian buffer.

And what will happen is that the water that runs off is going to go into this little ditch that we see right here, and it acts like a giant filter.

You know, think about how the roots of this grass go down, and they're able to actually capture the nutrients before they make it into the water system and into the stream.

♪ ♪ Any rainfall that falls on my farm-- so we're talking about the water and how it moves downstream-- is going to go to a little stream right down the road.

That stream is going to make its way to the West Nodaway River.

And the West Nodaway River is going to flow about 70 miles to the Missouri River.

And from there, it goes right to the Mississippi.

So, you know, once it hits the streams, for lack of a better word, water is liquid, and it moves fast and it gets there.

Come on, Wally.

I think sometimes we think because we're 1,000-plus miles away from the delta, from the Gulf, that what we do doesn't have an impact.

But we have to understand that this is how watersheds work.

And if something leaves my farm, I'm responsible for it.

An area this massive, even though we maybe don't feel like we put that much on each acre in terms of nutrients, when you impute that over the millions of acres that we're putting down, that's a lot of stuff going downstream.

This is like the offensive line right here.

This is protecting the source.

So we've captured a lot of sediment in that pond from the runoff from the neighbor's field.

But that's really not enough when you think about the volume that moves in in some of these areas.

So now we come below it, and we've got a very big pond that we've built to catch more of the nutrients.

So now you can already see the algae around the edge.

See how much smaller it is?

So already, it's starting to do its job.

I'm going to take you my favorite place.

And this is the last step before it goes to the stream.

♪ ♪ You know, all these plants and insects and everything interact together somehow to make this work.

This is the water from that farm field that's going to walk into the stream that goes to the East Nodaway River, that goes to the Missouri River, that winds up in the Mississippi watershed and eventually the Gulf.

And this is how we're trying to protect it.

And I hope more people can as well.

I really believe this problem can be fixed, but it's not going to be fixed as long as we have a totally production-focused Farm Bill.

♪ ♪ In my mind, for our Farm Bill to be successful, it has to focus on the regeneration and protection of these natural resources.

We can't feed people without healthy soil.

And I don't want to live in a world without clean water.

♪ ♪ We're finding practices that do keep the nutrients on the farm where they belong.

We're finding practices that are less reliant on fossil fuel.

We're finding better ways just to care for our livestock.

You know, I want far more out of me than just beef.

I want to make sure that I've got clean air and clean water and all the things it takes to make this a good world to live in.

♪ ♪ - Doing the right thing for conservation sometimes brings together people from very different walks of life.

Picture these allies 100 years ago-- an out-of-work liquor salesmen and thousands of women who had just gotten the right to vote.

Their teamwork led to creation of the 260-mile-long Upper Mississippi River Refuge.

Brad Hicks shows us how they permanently changed the American landscape.

- Barry Drazkowski-- - The river is a big part of my soul.

- --is all smiles walking through the Upper Mississippi Wildlife and Fish Refuge.

The 260-mile-long sanctuary stretches through four states, the longest floodplain habitat in America, where bald eagles soar and the backwaters brim with bass and migrating birds.

- It's a wonderful story.

- A story that almost didn't happen.

[projector whirring] It was the early 1920s.

Women had just won the right to vote, and Prohibition had banned booze.

Will Dilg, an out-of-work liquor salesman, was furious the federal government planned to drain his favorite fishing areas along the Upper Mississippi, and for hundreds of miles, turn the floodplain into farmland.

His son had drowned in those waters just months before.

- And Will Dilg decided that even though he could not save his son, he could save the Mississippi River.

- So he formed a conservation group to take on Washington and called it The Izaak Walton League, after the author of what is considered the bible of fishing.

The group grew, but it still needed help.

He found it in the millions of women who could now vote.

The General Federation of Women's Clubs flooded lawmakers with letters.

And in the summer of 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill creating the 260-mile-long refuge.

- This is an incredible gift that Will Dilg, along with the women of America, bestowed upon the American public.

And it's here for you to use and enjoy.

- The scenery is excellent.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And what's not to love?

- More than 3 million visitors come every year to enjoy what Will Dilg saved 100 years ago.

- And yet, no one's heard of him.

And that's the story.

That's the great story.

♪ ♪ - Now here's a look at some stories coming up in our next show.

- Beavers are known as nature's engineers.

Now they have fans all over the country learning how they manage their healthy ecosystems.

Grazing under the rays-- livestock and solar panels are now a winning combination on some farms.

- Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "This American Land."

- And you can always watch our show on PBS Passport.

Funding for "This American Land" provided by The Walton Family Foundation, The Horner Family Fund, Roni and Jim Wilkins, Jr., Winchester, Virginia.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪