What's the connection between traditional American folk music, convincing landowners to allow hunters on their land, and the supervising of game wardens? Brian Kahn talks with Mike Korn, retired deputy chief of law enforcement at Montana's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Korn has a background in folklore and cultural anthropology, and worked in the 1980s as the Director of the Montana Folklife Project. Korn made the leap from cultural conservation to natural conservation when he joined FWP as a coordinator for landowner-sportsmen relations in 1989. "George Bird Grinnell did it, too. The man was a great naturalist but also an ethnographer of the Blackfeet. Cultural and natural conservation walk hand in hand, in my mind."
"I feel absolutely privileged to do the kind of work I have. I've been able to do the things I want to do and have a really good time doing them. A person's career isn't a checklist of accomplishments; I think it's a checklist of relationships and things you've accomplished using those relationships."
(Broadcast: "Home Ground Radio," 5/10/15. Listen on the web, weekly on the radio at Sundays at 11:10 a.m., or via podcast.)