EP15: From Harvard School of Divinity to the Cattleman's Land Trust - Finding the Common Threads That Bind Us All Together

“I needed to practice at hearing other people better, and how they engage with the same landscapes that I love, on their terms,” says today’s guest Owen Yager. Learning about and working to represent other people’s stories is the common theme that unites the seemingly disparate elements of Owen’s story. Once he realized that people’s religion and traditions are the ultimate form of story, he went from an English major in undergrad to studying at Harvard Divinity School. As a land steward with Colorado Cattleman’s Land Trust, he works to help create conversations and collaborations between what have historically been oppositional relationships between the agriculture and conservation spaces, and between landowners and the rural citizens who have been traditionally sidelined. 

 

All parties—from private landowners to guides to recreationalists—share the same hopes and goals for the land. Owen works to engage them all to ultimately form a shared vision for cultural and land management of the American West. 

 

On today’s episode of the Avid Adventurer, Owen and host Dave Secunda discuss leading rock climbers Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold and whether they are the new Emerson and Thoreau, helping to translate the divine in nature to a new generation. 

 

Quotes

• “Those great novels that you read in English class, you’re thinking about the storytelling. And you’re thinking about what fuels you in that story, and religion is that to an extreme. It’s the stories that actually make people do things. It’s the stories that make you go and spend three hours of your morning every Sunday, reflecting and meditating, that make you say grace before you have a meal. Whatever it might be, people take those stories, those traditions and build lives around them in really powerful, really beautiful ways.” (7:22 | Owen Yager) 
• “People care about what they think, what they believe, what fuels them. I had this deep-seated sense that I wasn’t good enough at hearing their stories yet. That’s what brought me… to Harvard Divinity School, was this sense that I needed to practice at hearing other people better, and how they engage with the same landscapes that I love, on their terms.” (12:48 | Owen Yager)
• “Part of where I’m coming from is a deep love of that space, of engagement with land and animals and an engagement with working land as a space of realizing personal fulfillment. I love the people that I’ve gotten to know in those spaces as good, fun, honest, hardworking people that make incredible partners.” (23:38 | Owen Yager)
• “All these people who had power over their landscapes, and deep engagement with their landscapes and deep love for their landscapes, all these people weren’t getting powerfully engaged in conversations that I was seeing. And I really wanted to help with that and to help those folks get heard and help those folks get engaged as equal footing partners not as people to be told what to do but to really empower them in their landscapes.”(25:42 | Owen Yager) 
• “There is this shared sense of want for what land management and the concurrent cultural management of the American West should look like. Everybody who’s a stakeholder wants to have healthy wildlife; everybody who’s a stakeholder wants to have a healthy watershed.” (31:02 | Owen Yager) 

 

Links

You can find more information on the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust’s working landscape conservation work at ccalt.org, and Owen be reached at owen@ccalt.org

 

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