Conservationist and land manager Doug Duren checks on the cattle at his fourth-generation family farm. Photo by Matt Geiger.

In conversation with Doug Duren

How a kid from Cazenovia became a conservation icon

Eleanor Duren was getting ready to kill her first deer when she heard her grandfather’s voice whispering in her ear: “Remember, aim right behind that point of its front leg. Let your breath out and slowly squeeze.”

The strange thing was, Eleanor’s grandfather, Vincent Duren, had passed away in the autumn of 2016, one year earlier. It was actually her dad, conservationist Doug Duren, who was sitting behind her, offering words of encouragement in the ground blind that day.

“You said something to me just now, but it sounded like grandpa,” she told her father after the sound of the shot faded into the woods of their family farm in rural Cazenovia. Doug was even wearing his father’s old, blaze orange hunting cap as a tribute to the man who taught him so much about what it means to be human in a wild world. The words had not been his own. Rather, it was merely his turn to utter them, passing along precious fragments of wisdom to the next generation.

She shot perfectly. The bullet pierced both lungs. The buck unleashed a mule kick, dashed 50 yards and fell to the ground.

It’s one of life’s grim realities that every being dies. But a few things don’t share their fate. Ideas – about family, friends, hunting and conservation – can live long beyond any mortal lifespan. The same is true of any healthy ecosystem, which can brim with life for generations as long as balance is maintained.

That morning in the ground blind was the kind of moment Doug Duren lives for, because nothing better encapsulates his philosophy and land use ethic. He believes each person is merely a temporary vessel through which wisdom and connection to the natural world temporarily linger before being passed on to the next generation. Just as the deer come and go, each generation making way for the next.

“I like hunting by myself,” Duren muses. “I enjoy time in the woods by myself. But it’s a fuller experience when I get to share it with other people.”

He’s shared it with a lot of other people, from famous hunters like Steven Rinella and Joe Rogan, to family, friends, and people who thirst for more connection to the wilderness. He even shares with those who have already departed, just as his grandfather, his father, and his beloved younger brother, who died in a tragic car crash nearly 30 years ago but whose memory still resides in those woods.

“The whole shared experience thing is so important to me,” Duren adds.

The Art of Conservation

Duren, a popular speaker, land manager and character (by any positive definition of the word) on the popular MeatEater TV series and podcast, talks a lot about sharing these days. He founded an initiative called Sharing the Land that’s intended to connect property owners with access seekers in ways beneficial to both parties and the environment. He’s also frequently seen in TV shows, blogs, podcasts and even a movie, sharing both physical land and words of wisdom about the transient but vitally important experience of being human in a wild world.

Most of what he does seems to be for the environment, for plants and animals and the people who love and care for them next, but he says he’s really doing it for himself.

“This isn’t altruism,” he says. “I get so much out of it.”

Whether it’s working to connect new people with the land, trying to maintain healthy deer populations by combating Chronic Wasting Disease, or reveling in tales of a good “mooch” (more on that in a bit), Duren is often leading the charge. He grew up milking cows, spent periods planting (and harvesting) trees, “galivanting” in his younger years, and, increasingly, philosophizing. He currently runs the Duren Family Farm, which has been in his family for four generations. It is here, on a sunny morning, that he hops off the mower and heads inside to talk for much of the remaining day about what it means to love the land, and to share it with both animals and humans.

“Come on in the buck shack,” he says, his big frame briefly filling the doorway of a building constructed in the 1800s. Inside are the countless obligatory antlers, an assortment of maps, pictures of family members, and a sombrero that viewers of MeatEater are familiar with. (Tradition long held that anyone who shot a small buck had to wear it.)

Whenever Duren is in the building, it is also filled with something else; an assortment of stories and ideas. Some are folksy, using a unique Wisconsinite lexicon. Others are cutting edge. He talks about playing guitar, his degree in history, and the need for intellectual humility.

“You don’t need to know everything. You just need to be able to learn,” he says. “One of the things I learned, finally, was that I reserve the right to change my mind.”

He regales with tales of mooching, which is essentially a carefully-orchestrated, slow motion deer drive. He talks about family, memories of life and death, and the fact that conservation isn’t just a science, or a moral obligation, but rather a form of high art.

“I talk about the art of conservation,” he muses. “There is so much beauty in it. There is science, but there’s also art.”

Like Father, Like Son

An old proverb states that society thrives when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. Duren is only 63, so he isn’t exactly old yet, but he is increasingly thinking of the people who will come after him, and the many plants and animals they will – hopefully – get to know as they tread the Earth.

“To me, it doesn’t seem unusual,” he says. “It just seems like the right thing to do.”

Duren learned “the right thing to do” from his father. Vincent Duren was a living beacon of service. He was on the local school board, worked as a volunteer firefighter, and founded a rural EMS service to help people get life-saving care faster in remote areas. He put some of his land in CRP, the land conservation program administered by the Farm Service Agency that strives to improve environmental health and quality. He taught his children myriad lessons about the land they shared.

“When you have an example like that…” Doug says with a shrug, going briefly silent as he remembers time with his father in the woods.

“I had plenty of examples,” he says.

The Duren Family Farm sprawls more than 400 acres. Today, he raises cows, hunts for mushrooms, and manages timber there. In his youth, Duren lived nearby and labored there. Farm work taught him valuable lessons, too.

“Some of my earliest memories are of being in the woods when grandpa had someone logging,” he says. “I just know trees. I think I passed it along to my daughter. She can ID a tree at 60-miles-per-hour.”

The Duren story is an American story. A tale filled with war veterans, baseball players (one of his uncles inspired Charlie Sheen’s  Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn character in the hit movie Major League), farmers, hunters, loggers and, perhaps most importantly, storytellers.

In a sprawling and eclectic life, there are a few pivotal moments. For Duren, the death of his younger brother in a car crash was one of the most significant, and the most devastating. Matthew, who passed away at the age of 22, would have turned 50 this year. He is never far from Duren’s thoughts. He says when he thinks of his little brother, it’s usually with a big grin on his face, following a successful hunt.

“Life changed pretty dramatically when that happened,” he says. “When my brother died, it was very hard on our family. Our family is very close.”

“I would be friends with my brothers and sisters even if they weren’t my brothers and sisters,” he adds. “They’re some of my favorite people.”

MeatEater

Duren describes himself as merely “a kid from Cazenovia.” “Ninety-nine percent of my hunting has taken place right here,” he comments.

Not every kid from rural Wisconsin has appeared multiple times on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and contributes frequently to MeatEater’s TV series, podcasts and various other ventures. Duren has welcomed some of the biggest names in hunting to his property, and they, in turn, have leaned on his expertise when it comes to Whitetails and their habitat.

One of the reasons he’s so well known is another “kid.” This one is from a small town in Michigan, and he grew into one of the biggest names in hunting and fishing. His name is Steven Rinella, and Duren got to know him early in his meteoric rise.

“There was no MeatEater back then,” Duren recalls. “Just a guy whose books I liked.”

The first time they went to the Duren Family Farm together, Rinella made a small gesture that resonated with his host.

“We hadn’t even gotten out of the truck yet, and he asked, ‘Is there anything you want me to do around here?’” he remembers.

“Steve is an unusual person, and I mean that in the best possible way,” he adds.

On that first trip, Duren was having a cow butchered, and Rinella asked for the tongue, which he brought back to New York with him, had prepared by an expert chef, and then mailed back to Duren.

“It was good,” says Duren. “The taste that tastes you back.”

In the ensuing years, their relationship grew well beyond the confines of media, and their families are now close friends. But being friends with the guy who founded the MeatEater empire does have its perks.

“Because of my relationship with Steve, I have been able to tell a story,” Duren says.

It was in conversation with his friend that Duren first articulated an idea that’s become central to his thoughts on deer management. The two were chatting, and Duren mentioned that there are “too many deer” in the area.

Rinella asked a valid question, he recalls: “Too many deer for who? For the hunter? For the farmer?”

Duren thought about it for a moment before giving his reply. “How about, for the ecosystem?”

Share and Share Alike

Duren’s latest venture, a modern reimagining of something initially dreamed up by Aldo Leopold, is called Sharing the Land. Its slogan, fittingly, is also Duren’s: “It’s not ours, it’s just our turn.”

The idea is simple: connect landowners with people seeking access. People who don’t own acreage can meet up with people who do. They can help maintain and improve the land, stabilizing streambanks, removing invasive species and lending a hand with any number of projects. In return, they can gain access, for hunting, or fishing, or foraging in places they wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience. Public lands are great, but the United States contains huge swaths of land where nearly every square foot is privately owned.

“People can contribute in different ways,” Duren says. “There are so many examples of this out there.”

As usual, he is quick to point out that he is just the latest person to entertain the idea.

“It’s frickin Aldo Leopold, man!” he exclaims. “Go back to old Aldo. He was a teacher. He was a scientist. [He was a] conservation philosopher.”

Leopold founded the Riley Game Co-operative in 1931. Its goal was essentially the same; people could help farmers in exchange for an opportunity to come back later and hunt. It fizzled out after several years, but Duren and his team believe it’s an idea whose time has come again.

“Good artists copy; great artists steal,” he chuckles, referring to a quote most often attributed to Picasso. “This is just borrowing ideas and making things relevant.”

The idea is to reward private landowners for protecting the public’s interest.

“Landowners are concerned about a handful of things,” he points out. “One is liability. Another is not knowing who is on their land. You need to have a relationship with them to make it work.”

Sharing the Land strives to forge those relationships. When it works, both parties are happy, and the ecosystem benefits.

“We have landowners around the country who are interested,” Duren says. “The goal was to have 10 to 12 properties by the end of the year, and we’ll get to that.”

It’s particularly important right in his own backyard.

“Eighty-five percent of this county is considered deer habitat, and 95 percent of the land is privately owned,” he says. “If you’re going to do anything about conservation around here, it’s going to be working with private landowners.”

Fighting an Insidious Disease

A century ago, deer were scarce in much of Wisconsin. So rare that seeing one was enough to make newspaper headlines. Populations remained low for years, well into Duren’s youth.

“When I was a kid and you saw a deer, you told someone about it,” he recalls. But out of that scarcity came important lessons. He remembers buying tags with his friends and knowing the hunting party would share whatever they got. “If you didn’t get one, you got just as much meat as the other guys,” he says.

“One thing my dad told me was, ‘You’re hunting for the other guy, too.’ It wasn’t a lecture, or anything,” Duren says. “It was just one of those things you remember.”

These days, deer are anything but scarce. In fact, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) reports a population of around 1.5 million, and that’s after the annual hunt and before the spring’s fawns are born. That’s half a million more deer than there were in 2009.

But their overpopulation could spell their doom, as Chronic Wasting Disease continues to spread among the throngs of cervids that roam the state. Deer have every right to live here, in their ancestral home, but if their numbers go unchecked, Duren says it will take a devastating toll on their health.

“CWD is like Dutch Elm Disease for deer,” he posits. “Because of the insidiousness of the disease, it takes two years to kill a doe, and in that time she’s reproducing offspring. So, you might still have deer, but you will have different deer. You might not have any old ones.”

For Duren, who spent his childhood milking cows and still raises beef today, there is agricultural wisdom that needs to be applied to the problem.

“On a farm, if you have an animal that’s sick, the first thing you do is remove it from the rest,” he explains. “Now, why don’t we do that with wildlife?”

“It’s animal husbandry,” Duren adds.

He’s doing his part, putting up a free CWD testing kiosk where anyone can drop off their harvest’s head for sampling by the DNR. And he’s working to manage numbers on his own land.

“We killed 40 deer on this place last year,” he says. “After the season, a drone counted 80 deer on this piece of property.”

But deer don’t abide by property lines, and combating the disease, for the sake of future generations of deer and future generations of hunters, will require a collaborative approach.

“Fighting CWD is not easy,” he reflects. “It’s a hard thing, and I understand that people want to just not think about it. But it’s an undeniable, science-based thing.”

“With CWD-deniers, it really comes down to selfishness,” he adds.

He is quick to say he doesn’t know everything, but he’s wise enough to listen to experts on the matter: “I know enough about CWD to listen to biologists.”

He sounds genuinely baffled over the partisan nature of bickering regarding the disease.

“It’s hard when the DNR has been taken over by politicians and appointees,” Duren laments. “It’s politics. It’s not conservation.”

“The North American model is really good at building up a surplus to hunt,” he says. “Real conservation hunting is supposed to be about removing the animals. To hunt is to take the surplus.”

Like Father, Like Daughter

It’s currently Duren’s turn to care passionately about the environment. He knows he won’t be here forever, but his words, and his actions, have already inspired those who will follow in his footsteps.

“Eleanor’s turn is next as she will be one of the next generation’s stewards of the farm,” he says. “She has some knowledge of conservation and knows the farm pretty well. She’s planted trees and watched them grow, she can drive tractors and knows how to fix fences and shovel manure and helps wherever she can. I share the management plans with her and her cousins. Hunting is part of the farm experience, but it’s just that, a part. They know there’s so much more to it than hunting. Those experiences, the knowledge she has gained, and walking in the woods with her grandpa and me have helped her build a conservation philosophy of caring and doing the right things for the entire ecosystem. A Land Ethic, as Leopold called it.”

That land ethic will likely live on, echoing in the woods of Wisconsin, for generations to come.

To learn more, visit www.dougduren.com or www.sharingtheland.com.

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