Land & Line

LAND & LINE Ep 09: Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story

When a wild otter in need of help appeared at their jetty in Shetland, Billy and Susan Mail’s lives changed. Their relationship with Molly became the subject of the National Geographic documentary Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story, directed by Charlie Hamilton James.

In this episode of Land & Line, Emme Hayes talks with Billy and Susan about Molly, the landscape they share with her, and the difference between loving the outdoors and loving nature.

We talk about:

How Molly entered Billy and Susan’s lives

What their relationship with her changed

The responsibility that comes with caring for wildlife

Why enjoying the outdoors does not always translate into protecting nature

Can protecting wildlife become a natural part of loving the outdoors?

Land & Line explores how we build a closer, more responsible relationship with wildlife and the places we love.

Watch Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story from National Geographic on Youtube. If you liked this episode, share it with someone who might like it too.By being a paid subscriber, you support more stories like this one that help put a spotlight on wildlife and critical wildlife issues.

Meg Carney from Outdoor Minimalist, Off Script

A candid conversation about racial identity, climate, veganism, hunting culture, and why the outdoors is not nonpartisan.

Every once in a while, I pick up the phone, call someone, and hit record. No video, no studio setup, and no agenda —just an off script conversation with friends in the outdoor space.

For this episode, I called my friend Meg Carney, host of Outdoor Minimalist. Meg usually likes to begin a podcast with an agenda in hand, so recording without one became something of a running joke between us. It also gave us room to have a more personal conversation than she typically shares publicly.

We talk about the experiences that shaped our relationships with the outdoors, including Meg’s Filipino heritage and rural Minnesota upbringing, my experience growing up Korean American in the Midwest, and the complicated ways racial identity can affect where we feel at home.

Our conversation moves through veganism, hunting culture, wildlife, public lands, and the tendency to approach the outdoors through control, extraction, and recreation. We also examine why the outdoor industry continues to separate climate from nearly every other conversation it has—and why an industry shaped by political interests cannot credibly claim to be nonpartisan.

More than anything, this is a conversation between two friends who share many of the same concerns about climate and sustainability, but arrived at them from different lanes. We don’t resolve the contradictions within outdoor culture. We talk candidly about what it feels like to live and work inside them.

Be sure to subscribe to Outdoor Minimalist on YouTube to keep up on the latest outdoor news and public lands developments. And of course I'd love for you to also subscribe to Land and Line for more talks that get us reflecting on systems within our culture.

Bears in Hot Tubs is a short documentary created by filmmaker Claire Musser directed by Maddie the Bear. Set in suburban Los Angeles, the film gives viewers a perspective of how bears can co-thrive with humans. Not as intruders or problems to manage, but as neighbors navigating their home reshaped by urban sprawl.

The film was an official selection of the Lake Tahoe Documentary Film Festival, where its quiet and unconventional approach to wildlife storytelling stood apart. The bears are not chased, staged, or treated as spectacle. The camera waits for them. Their movements and decisions shape the film.

One part of our conversation that stayed with me was Claire’s discussion of wildlife having personhood. And rights that require defending. She's asking us to recognize that they are sentient individuals with their own experiences, needs, preferences, and stories.

That distinction changes the relationship. Wildlife is no longer scenery, a symbol, or a problem moving through a human world. The bears are participants in a shared landscape. They have agency. They communicate through their choices and behavior. Our responsibility is to pay closer attention - coming to their defense when their lives are threatened.

In this episode of Land & Line, Claire Musser with Brian Gordon talk about Bears in Hot Tubs, life alongside black bears in Los Angeles, and what it means to move beyond coexistence toward co-thriving in a rapidly declining planet.

Lexie and I started where a lot of good conversations start — with dogs. And like most of our conversations we quickly dove into the latest on policy, climate, and what we're noticing in the outdoor space. Questions that came up in this phone chat like what does it actually mean to be outside, and what are we really after when we go? Why can't you protect public lands without naming the cattle industry, the USDA's grip on the Forest Service, or the Canadian mining company quietly trying to drill near the headwaters of LA's water supply? We got into California's snowpack and what this wildfire season is shaping up to be, wildlife crossings, the trophy hunting origins of WWF, and what the film Trade Secret uncovered about why polar bears still aren't fully protected by law. Lexie works in policy — she's been apart of conversations with these corporations that I haven't, and she sees firsthand how slowly change actually moves, and why. What I didn't expect was how quickly we'd find the edges of an industry we both believed in, and how much we'd agree on what we found there.

After I hung up with Dennis, one thing he said stayed with me.

Dennis is 88 years old and has been racing pigeons since he was fourteen. During our conversation I asked him what he had learned after doing this for so long.

His answer was simple.

He said that over time he realized pigeons aren’t machines.

Later in the conversation he also said something else that kept echoing in my mind:“If they did good for me, I kept them until they died.”

Those two ideas sitting next to each other made me start thinking about how often our care for animals is tied to usefulness.

Working animals. Hunting. Factory farming. Zoos. Animals in entertainment. Racing pigeons.

Even something like animal shelters overflowing with dogs can trace back to the same pattern — when animals stop fitting into the role we’ve created for them, they’re often discarded.

Maybe I’m noticing it more lately because of where I’ve been and the conversations happening around me. I was recently at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival watching the documentary Trade Secret, and there were a lot of discussions around wolf conservation and reintroduction. Back in Los Angeles, there are protests outside the zoo most weekends.

Different stories. Different contexts.

But when you start paying attention, you begin to see how this inherited relationship with animals shows up everywhere.

This short reflection is me thinking through that tension — between recognizing that animals aren’t machines, and the many systems we’ve built that still treat them like they are.

Sometimes a random conversation in a parking lot reveals more than you expect.

It was a normal day. I parked at the LA Zoo and took my dogs out for a hike. The lot is huge and I had parked off in an empty section.

When I got back, there was this older guy parked right next to me. Tailgate down. Just standing there.

I put my dogs in the car when something caught my eye — a flicker of movement. At that point I see the really short wooden crates. I could see through the mesh on the side that there was something moving inside them.

He slides open the crates, and all these birds fly out. So I get out of the car and I asked him, “Are they coming back?”.

And that’s where this conversation began.

Afterthoughts from my conversation with Constance Founder of SheShredz about how we can support each other towards holding corporations accountable to do better for people and planet.

Tahoe barely opened before Christmas. Resorts are scrambling for revenue. The Olympics are running on fake snow.In this conversation, Constance and I talk about what winter actually feels like right now inside ski culture. Not the marketing version. The real one.

We get into snowmaking, slushy race courses, gear wearing out faster, and whether season passes are about to get even more expensive. We talk about the growing divide between people who can chase storms and people who can’t. We ask the uncomfortable question: if your sport depends on a system that’s destabilizing, what does responsibility look like?

We also talk about consumption, vintage gear, not having kids, personal footprint versus structural power, and what She Shreds is trying to do differently from inside the culture.It's a phone chat between two people in different outdoor spaces talking about climate. And what happens when winter stops feeling guaranteed.

This episode is where patterns start to come into focus.

Not through theory, but through repetition. Moving through industry spaces, conversations, programs, and events that claimed to be climate-adjacent, but consistently redirected away from climate action and toward growth of the outdoor economy instead.

In this session, I talk about what it felt like to keep running into the same friction. The belief that the outdoor industry shouldn’t be talking about climate directly. That its role is to grow participation, grow brands, and grow the outdoor economy, while climate is treated as someone else’s responsibility.

I don’t agree with that separation.

This episode sits at the line between brands and outdoor culture. Between marketing and meaning. Between an industry built on growth and an outdoors that is being fundamentally altered by climate collapse.

I also trace how, when those conversations start to feel uncomfortable, familiar brands often get pulled in as reassurance. Not as an argument, but as a way to steady the moment and move past it.

There are no solutions offered here. Just the moment when noticing becomes unavoidable, and when the idea of the outdoors as something separate from climate no longer makes sense.

This episode is about realizing that the outdoors can’t be siloed. It has to be holistic, or it isn’t honest.

Listen in one go. In motion, if you can. This one is about seeing the whole picture instead of jumping to the comfortable parts.