Dana Milbank: Retreat, Restore, Rehumanize

DANA MILBANK:

I'm in Rappahannock County. I'm a progressive columnist. It's a 56% Trump voting county, but I don't talk politics with these people. I'm talking about the land and making hay and how are your cattle and why do I keep breaking my tractor? We're seeing each other as human beings.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guest today is Dana Milbank, who spent 26 years at the Washington Post before just jumping into a new DC venture called The Star. He's always covered politics, but when he bought 60 acres in rural Virginia, Dana did something that many of us might aspire to do. He put aside Congress in the White House for a bit. Instead, he and his wife began renovating an old home on the property and he set about restoring the land to its former glory. The situation gave rise to a new column, one focused not on the latest outrage cycle, but on reclaiming what punishing politics and toxic social media had stripped from him. It's called "Rehumanizing." Dana planted trees, hunted deer, and he slowed down to marvel at nature. In writing about these experiences, Dana discovered something surprising: that years of reporting on politics never moved his readers the way that his stories on spring ephemerals and white-tailed deer have. And as the land changed under his hands, so did he. But was this everything he ever wanted? Here's Dana to fill you in.

DANA MILBANK:

My grandparents had a house near Millbrook, New York in the Hudson Valley and they had 18 acres of wooded land and I'd go up there on weekends. And at the time, I wouldn't say I was any lover of the country. I was worried about the daddy long legs that would creep into the house and that sort of thing. So I wouldn't say I was a naturalist or an outdoorsman in any way, but something must have stuck — planting an orchard, running around in the woods, chopping wood, planting pacasandra around the house. So this was all — I guess it was sort of ingrained in me and then I'm in my mid- 50s and suddenly I've become my grandfather.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Was there something about this house in particular or was it, we've looked at a whole bunch of things and this one meets the bill enough?

DANA MILBANK:

No, it was this house. In fact, the house my wife had seen on Zillow was on a little bit up the road and I talked to a realtor and said, "There's this other house coming on. It needs a lot of work." And boy, she wasn't kidding. My wife, upon seeing it, said, "This looks like the kind of place where a psycho killer would chain women to the radiators." I mean, there were rodents all over the house. There were snakes in the house, of course, because they had come to get the rodents. Everything was just so overgrown. If you stood on the porch of that house looking out, you would just see a curtain of vines. Maybe you could pee in this way and say, "Oh, okay. I can see Old Rag," the famous mountain in Shenandoah National Park. I just knew that it could become something. This was a chance, not necessarily to build — I mean, we had to restore the house, but also to this notion of taking the land and restoring it. And I was like, "Well, here's my chance that I can wake up each morning and look out and see this.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

These are big projects. This is not a small thing to step into. Did you recognize how much of an effort, how much of a project restoring the land was going to be?

DANA MILBANK:

None whatsoever, Ted. And I went in with complete ignorance because I had in my mind the notion of you plant fruit trees, you plant a nice lawn. One of the first things I did is I paid a fortune. I mean, we'd already paid a fortune, but even more of the money I didn't really have to hire some guy to cut down a lot of this stuff around the house, not realizing if you work with these vines, as you know, if you just cut them, they're going to grow back as twice as much. Yeah. I had no idea what I was getting into because it's not just you clear it all out and then you're there and then suddenly you're back to this beautiful oak hickory forest. It's a constant battle. So I'm three years into it.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

There's just always more to do.

DANA MILBANK:

Right. I feel like sisyphus. But if you just look at a focused area and say, "I've made a difference here. This acre is under control." But I do feel like I can now look at this and say, "Hey, I've made a difference. We planted 1400 native trees." And they're right now in four foot green tubes, so they don't look like much of anything, but you can start thinking like, "All right, we're going to give this a chance to rebuild this. This is going to become the kind of forest and the kind of meadow that it would've been before it became part of grazing and other agriculture."

TED ROOSEVELT V:

You've mentioned a Sisyphean quality, but in my mind, that's a benefit that the land is never done.

DANA MILBANK:

Yeah, absolutely. Because I was this kid from the suburbs. Now I'm a hunter. I've got guns. I mean, I couldn't have imagined such a thing. I grew up thinking hunting, bad. Men who shoot deer, bad, that's Bambi. It didn't take long out there to realize that, well, why are our forests not regenerating? A main reason is we have something like 17 times the number of whitetailed deer on the land that it can sustain. So every little seedling, they're just going over there and devouring. So I have become in my old age, a hunter. It's just a totally different world. I can't say I love the thrill of the hunt. I don't think I've got that yet, but I feel that I'm doing what is ecologically right.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

What you're describing to me is that you're having a dialogue with the land. You're having a dialogue with nature. I think one of the misconceptions I think is the one that you just described, which is like hunting is bad because you're killing animals. And in reality, it's quite a bit more complicated than that. There is a back and forth between what is healthy for the environment and your interaction with it. And yet there is certainly bad examples of hunting. And this is no surprise given my lineage, but have a strong belief that hunting is one of the great ways to interact with the outdoors and to understand that ecosystem on a level that you certainly can't in the suburbs.

DANA MILBANK:

I absolutely agree with that. Some of the most delightful time I've had is up in my — I have a hunting tower, like a hunting stand that's a freestanding tripod. Most of the time you sit there and I think the deer are on to me so they don't come anywhere near it, but just listening to the birds. So I totally agree that is, I think, the best way of connecting with nature.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Your experience in this created a series of, it sounds like very profound learnings because your day-to-day job has been working in the sort of belly of the beast of Washington DC, where as you know better than most, news travels very fast, everything's breaking, everything's the sort of apocalypse is upon us and you get a different angle on that because of this experience that you have in Virginia. Talk a little bit about that.

DANA MILBANK:

So I've been covering politics my entire adult life. I briefly worked for the Wall Street Journal. I was a foreign correspondent, but really for the last 30 years I've been in and around Washington covering Congress, the White House, writing a column. Starting around 2015, I wouldn't even say starting then. It really accelerated and it just became so ugly and so nasty and so awful. It was my job to focus on this all the time after the '24 election. I was like, I just can't keep doing the weekly politics thing. So then I started doing this full-time. Being out on the farm is just the source of my rejuvenation. So I spent an entire day procrastinating, not actually writing and committing journalism, instead sticking fresh pine straw into the purple Martin Gorge and playing this music, which goes off at dawn every morning on a timer to try to say, "Here I am. Come Purple Martins, you'll like it here." So that's how I spent my day to just two days ago rather than actually doing journalism. But I do that, then I come back and it's like, all right, all is right with the world.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

It's certainly something that's been passed down in my family, this idea of the restorative power of nature at the very least and something that I feel like is underappreciated in this country because technology and everything else that sort of puts a barrier between us and nature seems like an easier path forward, but it also dehumanizes us to some degree. It takes us away from where we've evolved as a species. Do you feel that that's true that we are sort of increasingly getting further away from this core healing component for a species and why do you feel like this thing that has clear benefits for us is something that consistently gets overlooked?

DANA MILBANK:

A lot of this estrangement or detachment from nature is because we're spending our lives on our devices. But really, it's been a much longer pattern. I mean, since industrialization, it's been happening, moving us to the cities and removing us from the land. But we now know because science is looking at this in terms of brain chemistry, just a short amount of time in nature. I mean, we're talking minutes can have these profound effects. And what it does, I think above all is it can extend and restore your attention span because with our phones particularly, we're just getting bombarded all day long with sort of things that capture our attention. Nature breaks that up. Suddenly you're not looking at recognizable pattern. You're focusing on the sky, the river, a bird, and that's what is able to extend and restore your attention span. You can do this in a city park.

The paradox is it's probably never been easier for people to get out into nature and yet we're doing it less than ever happened before. Not when you're on your phone, put that thing away, just looking at the trees or just going out in your backyard or on your balcony or whatever and look at the sky, study the clouds. These things have profound effects on us. So that is the paradox. You don't have to fix up a dilapidated farm, but yeah, just spend 10 minutes and look at the sky and say everybody can do this.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

One of my favorite tricks on a hike, because I'm so goal oriented, it's hard for my brain to totally dislocate from getting to the end of the hike is sort of the goal. But one of the things I do fairly systematically is to pause and look up at the tree canvas up there and just watch the wind blowing through it and the trees are all moving in unison and there's this beautiful elegance to all of it. I find great solace in just to your point, one minute, just having a moment to look and see there's a whole thing happening above me that I would otherwise completely ignore. And then all of a sudden you see the birds and you see the squirrels or whatever else is up there and you realize that there's a whole world literally right above you that you can miss even on a hike, even when you're out there.

DANA MILBANK:

Absolutely. And the effect of pausing in that small animals see large animal like us busting onto a scene trying to do the mile in 15 minutes on all trails or whatever it is, they're going to scatter. If you just stand in one place for a while, not very long, they start to say, "Oh, I guess that's not a predator." And eventually they forget you're there all together and suddenly you're there, you'll see deer walking up and then they'll spot you and they'll snort or something. But you'll see all kinds of animals, birds that will get close to you, the insect life, everything else. So yes, just that brief pause changes the entire picture.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I'm curious how, because what you describe of your experience of DC and the sort of mental health implications of living in that environment, how do you manage that because you still are spending time in DC politics? How do you balance those two very diametrically opposed visions of the world?

DANA MILBANK:

I try to make sure I'm not scrolling all the time to carve out time, even though that is my job. I am trying to set aside one day I do, I'm Jewish, so I make it Saturday, the Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath, or make it Sunday, make it a Tuesday. I mean, if you can do this and just don't answer your emails or don't answer your text messages, put on and out of office say, "God, I'll get back to you. " I love on the weekend to take a long hike. I'm right near Shenandoah National Park. So just a few hours without the phone. And of course in the park, you don't get reception anyway, so you're forced to.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

There's this fear that if you disconnect, if you really find peace or start to find happiness and peace, that it's going to come at the expense of motivation and success and drive. Has that come up for you at all?

DANA MILBANK:

So that's an interesting question because I'm turning 58 in a couple of weeks. I'm at a point in my life and in my career where I'm perhaps less concerned about that. What's the next job? What do I have to do for my kids or whatever else? So it's possible that this time of life puts somebody in a different position than if you're young and need to be ambitious in your career and you've got that going on. But based on the research that I've written about, the time you take away, particularly if it's in nature, this restorative time, it's improving your cognitive ability, improving your attention. It is helping you to think in more abstract ways. I mean, I do know from my own experience if I'm really stuck in my writing, I just put it down and I'm outside. I'm taking a walk. I'm pulling garlic mustard and it comes to me.

So I think the answer is even if you're at an earlier stage in your life, I don't think it comes at the sacrifice of ambition. I think it makes you better because it restores your attention and restores your cognitive ability and you're not overloaded. Then you can go back and take on more.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

So you've written about how we've become dehumanized and that we desperately need to rehumanize. Is that an actual word or did you coin this idea?

DANA MILBANK:

So it's not a real word, I don't think. But —

TED ROOSEVELT V:

It's very intuitive.

DANA MILBANK:

I think it should be. So we've lost our connection to nature for sure as we've been discussing, but we've also lost it to our community. I think we've lost it to each other and I think we've lost it to our country, to our way of life. And we're alienated from nature for the reasons we've been discussing, but also it sometimes feels hopeless with climate change and habitat loss. It just feels like we are losing our ability to connect with each other. I've been looking for ways to how to rebuild all of those pieces. So I've been writing not just about nature in my community out in rural Rappahannock County, Virginia. There's only 7,000 people in the whole county, no traffic lights, but also about the coffee clatch at the local coffee shop and the guy at the dump who runs the dump who everybody loves and brings the community together.

I'm just sort of looking for ways that we can get beyond red and blue DNR and try to figure out what we have in common. I'm in Rappahannock County. I'm a progressive columnist. It's a 56% Trump voting county, but I don't talk politics with these people.

I'm talking about the land and making hay and how are your cattle and why do I keep breaking my tractor or getting their help over at the deer processor. And so we're seeing each other as human beings, not as some kind of stereotype, but yeah, we're relating as humans.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

What's interesting about that too though is talk about the impact you're writing about these topics has had on other people who maybe don't agree with you politically, their ability to read your political writing. Has that changed?

DANA MILBANK:

It has. And I've get occasional emails from somebody who's a Republican judge or conservative and they've said things like, "I've read your politics. I don't think we agree on just about anything, but I love the piece you wrote about spring ephemerals, the flowers that are popping up this time of year in the forest before the canopy closes in." So occasionally they'll say, "And now that I've said that, I'm going to read your political writing in a new light." So they've now seen me as a human being. And I would like to think, Ted, that now that I've decided I'm going to back from my sabbatical, I'm going to be doing more political coverage, I want to try to avoid being part of the problem, in terms of playing on stereotypes and riling people up and probably dividing people. I mean, I hope I do that less than others do because I tried to do it with a sense of humor, but hopefully I've learned a bit from this experience in this sabbatical to go back at it with a little less outrage and a little more amusement, maybe something to be hopeful about. I mean, I am convinced my time in Rappahannock County has convinced me that there are plenty of people who vote differently and think differently and they're not bad people. I mean, some of them are bad people, but I'm sure some people who agree with me are bad people.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

What I like about that framing is that it's a two-way street because it's not just people sort of seeing you as a human and understanding being more amenable to your political views when they were not before. And there's quite a bit of science behind what you just described, which is if you have two people that are ideologically juxtaposed, the only way to get them to find commonality and to have a polite conversation is to start with something unrelated to that topic that is a piece of connective tissue. It can be their kids, can be their love of nature, it can be enjoyment of travel, anything. But once you've done that, you've established trust between each other and that opens up a much more useful and productive dialogue. I'm wondering as you think about your political writing in the context of a greater appreciation for your community and a greater appreciation for maybe the other side and the humanity of the other side, whether that's ever bumped up against the need to sound the alarm on something that's truly dramatic, how do you balance those two tensions? Does that make sense?

DANA MILBANK:

Yeah, it does. And I think this is going to be an interesting question for me going forward, right? Because now that I've had a bit more perspective on this and I want to try to not crank up the outrage each time. I had a great wonderful editor, Fred Hyatt, ran the Post editorial page for many years. He died young, unfortunately. But I remember very early in the first Trump administration and I was making some sort of Nazi comparison or something and he's like, "Let's hold some adjectives in reserve. You can't go with the Hitler analogy every time."

I hopefully have learned from that. I think there are times when outrage is the only answer, but I also think that if you're screaming outrage all the time, number one, it's not going to be as effective. Number two, it's doing damage to our civic fiber. And number three, and maybe most importantly, it's really unpleasant for yourself. So I do think you have to calibrate the outrages because they're going to keep coming. So just for my sake and for the sake of my readers in the country, I think it's going to be best to try to maintain some equilibrium. In this area, you're sort of forced to be with people who disagree with you. I mean, you're all going to the black twig for a beer or to the corner store or the dump, whatever it is. I mean, you're going to know everybody. So in a way, that's how America was.

I mean, we weren't always segregated by party. It's a little easier in my rural community to actually see others as human beings than it is in the city where I might not even encounter all day somebody who's a MAGA Republican.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Do you feel like there's a scalable solution to this? I mean, you can't move everybody from New York City to rural Virginia. I'm quite sure rural Virginia would not welcome them. How do you think about this on a more grand scale?

DANA MILBANK:

Well, I don't think there's on big solution. It needs to be a cultural change and it happens from these sorts of conversations. It happens from what you're doing with this podcast, but it has to be a thousand other things like that. I also think if I could put in a plug for community news, part of what's gone wrong in our politics is we've lost half of the local community newspapers in our country and the remaining ones are just ghosts. They're just shadows of what they were and it's because people are not focusing on the issues in their community — the potholes, the schools, are they building the new courthouse? Oh, we need this ordinance for these runaway dogs. They're not focusing on that. So instead we're fighting about everything's a national issue. So we're fighting about things that don't directly immediately affect us. So we're fighting about, is Trump going to build some ridiculous new arch in Arlington National Cemetery rather than focusing on something that matters.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

We had Sarabeth Berman, who's the CEO of the American Journalism Project, which has been fun. It's a VC firm that's been funding a bunch of local news. And it frankly had gone under the radar screen for me, just how much that deterioration of local news and the ability for people to have shared information about their community was leading to exactly what you're talking about, the separation of tribe because everybody was focused on the national politics issue. The issues that were affecting people on a day-to-day basis were getting lost and those day-to-day basis issues were often where there was a lot of commonality. So you're moving into another newsroom, so to speak, notice, which is a working title or is that

DANA MILBANK:

The- Yeah, so it was noticed, but it is just we've now announced the new name. It's going to be called The Star, which is an echo of the old Washington Star. The guy who owns our publication, Robert Albritton, his father owned the Washington Star back in the day. And I'm glad you brought that up because that is part of why I'm making this move and that is the Washington Post has unfortunately really cut back on its local coverage and its sports coverage. And The Star has made a commitment to build local and sports coverage. And even though I write about national politics, when I go around talking to people about this new venture like, "Oh, thank God somebody's going to be covering what's happening in our community, or they're going to be covering the nationals." I mean, it is across the board this decline of local news.

And I think the conventional wisdom says you just can't make that work economically. I don't believe it. And I think we do need to sort of see this as a public service, right? I mean, we're not working for the government, but we're not going to get out of our national political crisis unless we build up our communities to solve the problem of local news.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Dana, we ask everybody on this podcast this question, but I'm curious, given your recent experience, moving to Virginia, "Rehumanize," still in national politics, how you would define a good citizen.

DANA MILBANK:

It's an important question and an excellent one. I think to be a good citizen is to be doing something to make our country better. I mean, that can be any number of things, right? I mean, I like to think when I'm writing about politics, I'm moving us towards a better place. I don't know. I mean, maybe sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail at that. Since I've been out in Rappahannock County, Virginia, I've been looking at these guys who've retired, they're in their 60s, 70s. They've become ambulance drivers or EMTs, went and took a course and now they're getting people to the hospital or they're just driving people to a doctor appointment. I think they're good citizens because they're doing something to build their community, to build their connection to each other. So I don't think the actual subject of what you're doing matters, but you're doing something bigger than yourself, something greater than self to serve.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

It's a great definition and it ties back to purpose, which ties back to happiness, that being a good citizen creates a level of purpose and purpose is another key input to happiness. Thank you very much for doing this with me. I really appreciate it.

DANA MILBANK:

This is my pleasure now. I want you to — whenever you're coming down to our nation's capital, would you let me know we'll go for a hike in Shenandoah?

TED ROOSEVELT V:

I would love it.

DANA MILBANK:

That'd be wonderful.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Thank you so much, Dana. I loved hearing your story and I deeply connect to the experiences you've had. I really look forward to checking out your new political writing in The Star and I found myself newly motivated to avoid being part of the problem. Listeners, please make sure you're following the podcast. Rate and review us, share this episode with a friend and get ready for the grand opening of the library on July 4th. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.