About Today’s Guests George Wuerthner (President, Sage Steppe Wild) – George is a professional photographer, writer, and ecologist. He has visited hundreds of mountain ranges around the West, more than 400 wilderness areas, more than 200 national park units, and every national forest west of the Mississippi. George is the author of 38 books on environmental issues and natural history including Welfare Ranching, Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy, Energy: The Delusion of Endless...

Note from Randy: Hi everyone thank you for listening. On the podcast I speak about not reporting possible poachers when they talk about jaguar killings. In addition to the fact that information channels would dry up if we were to report those who talk about killing jaguars, there is also the fact that actual poachers with evidence of the crimes are not prosecuted. In the death of Corazon the jaguar and the bear killed in Cumpas there was physical evidence and no charges were brought against...

About Before joining The Rewilding Institute, Megan “Turtle” Southern was the coordinator of the Northern Jaguar Project, where she helped to establish and grow the Northern Jaguar Reserve in Sonora, Mexico, organized scientific research projects and conservation education among youth, and worked extensively with ranchers to promote coexistence. It has been 15 years since the jaguar known as Macho B died. That is an entire lifetime for a jaguar. It has been eight years since El Jefe was...

About Paula MacKay has studied wild carnivores for the past two decades and is currently a carnivore conservation specialist with Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. Also dedicated to communications on behalf of her wild kin, Paula earned an MFA in creative writing from Pacific Lutheran University in 2015. She was managing editor for Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores (Island Press, 2008), and her work has been published in numerous journals, magazines, books, and anthologies. Paula lives...

About Lauren Strohacker is an eco-political artist whose work emphasizes the non-human in an increasingly human-centric world. She received a BFA (2006) from The Ohio State University and an MFA (2011) from Arizona State University. Strohacker’s co-creative and site-responsive practice routinely collaborates with both local and national wildlife conservation organizations to conceptualize animals who have been displaced by the colonial built environment, controlled by the North American...

About In the early 1980s, an outdoorsy, nature-loving undergrad named Keith Bowers had an epiphany. Keith had been studying landscape architecture at the University of Virginia when he met Ed Garbisch, a pioneering practitioner of marsh restoration along the Chesapeake Bay. “Wait a minute,” thought Keith. “I can apply my education to restoring the places I love?” After graduating in 1982, Keith started Biohabitats, an ecological restoration company. 36 years later, with a mission to...

About Christina Selby is a conservation photographer, filmmaker, and science writer, who uses multimedia storytelling as a powerful tool to share the beauty of the planet and motivate others to act on behalf of nature. She uses use aerial, macro, landscape, underwater, remote camera, photojournalism, and any other technique required to tell engaging stories that speak to our shared need for beauty and connection to nature. Her storytelling focuses on remembering who we are, what we can be,...

About A native of New Jersey, Jamie discovered his passion for Wild Nature surrounded by meadows and forests near his home and on a family outing in an old growth forest in the Quebec wilderness. In 1986 he bought a log cabin in northern New Hampshire where he still lives. In 1985 Jamie became involved with Earth First!, and his “Preserve Appalachian Wilderness Proposal” appeared in the May 1987 issue of the Earth First! Journal. The following year, working as a reporter for the local...

About Duncan is the Founder and Managing Director of Journeys With Purpose.  Journeys With Purpose is a member of 1% for the Planet, a...

About Rachel Conn As Deputy Director of Amigos Bravos, Rachel advocates for strong and environmentally just local, state, and federal water policy. She provides hands-on support to New Mexico communities and groups working to protect their watersheds. She is a leader in the ongoing campaigns to hold Los Alamos National Lab accountable for pollution, designate more of New Mexico’s waters as Outstanding National Resource Waters, protect New Mexico’s ground and surface water from degradation...

About Peter Alagona Peter is a professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s an environmental historian, historian of science, conservation scientist, and nature-culture geographer. His work explores what happens when humans share space and resources (their habitats) with other species: how we interact with non-human creatures, how we make sense of these interactions, why we fight so much about them, what we can learn from them, and how we might use...

About Chris Hawkins leads the Colorado Chapter of The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) Cities program where he spends his time focusing on improving regional habitat connectivity and access to nature; creating a more equitable and climate resilient urban forest; and ensuring there is funding and support for helping the region achieve more sustainable outcomes at the intersection of people and nature. Prior to this role, he was a member of TNC’s Chief Conservation Office and Global Cities team...

About Born and raised in Massachusetts, Jon Rezendes had a lifelong obsession with wilderness and big cats interrupted by the tragic events of September 11th, 2001. Jon was a high school freshman and watched the first responder jets fly overhead from the now-defunct Otis Air Force Base en route to New York City and felt the unshakeable urge to serve. He took that deep obligation with him to the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 2009 as an infantry officer. Less...

About Erin English Erin leads Biohabitats’ visionary Integrated Water Strategies planning & engineering efforts. She applies her background in chemical and environmental engineering with her passion for water and ecology to help clients advance innovation in One Water and nature-based infrastructure. She has led constructed wetlands, wastewater, rainwater, and water reuse engineering for award-winning projects that have achieved the Living Building Challenge™, Net Zero Water, and that...

About Chris Chris is a practice leader with Biohabitats, leading the firm’s research and development effort called Bioworks. He is an ecological engineer with 20 years of experience in restoration and regenerative design. Combining engineering and ecological design through a biomimicry lens, he approaches every project as an opportunity to create and restore functional life support systems. Recognizing that best intentions in design and implementation are not verification of outcomes, Mr....

About Kelly Borgmann grew up on a historic farm in rural east-central Indiana. Spending her days playing in the woods and caring for the land gave her a deep appreciation of nature. Participating in 4-H and FFA taught her how to be a productive member of rural and agricultural communities. Following her passion for wild nature, Kelly earned an undergraduate degree in Wildlife Biology from Ball State University. She then spent the next several years traveling and has spent time working as a...

About Suzanne Suzanne Fouty has been exploring the issues of water and the return of wolves in the West for over 30 years, the contributions made by beaver to ecosystems for over 25 years, and the synergy between beavers and wolves in restoring stream systems for over 10 years. Her work on wolves began in 1990 at Yosemite Institute where she gave weekly presentations to students on the pending return of wolves to the West and some of the social questions in play related to livestock...

About Carter, author of Justice as a Fair Start in Life, began his career as an Honors Program appointee to the U.S. Department of Justice. He later served as a legal adviser to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in the national security law division. He wrote his thesis reformulating the right to have children under Jeremy Waldron, his extensive academic work on family planning has been published by Yale, Duke, and Northwestern Universities, as well as in peer-reviewed pieces, and he...

About Rick Steiner is a conservation biologist in Anchorage, Alaska, and founder of Oasis Earth. He has been involved in the global conservation movement for over 40 years. From 1980-2010 he was a marine conservation professor with the University of Alaska, stationed in the Arctic, Prince William Sound, and Anchorage, specializing in marine conservation, and worked on environmental effects of offshore oil, climate change, fisheries, marine mammals, shipping safety, habitat conservation, and...

About Bill Ryerson is Founder and President of Population Media Center (PMC), an organization that strives to improve the health and wellbeing of people around the world through the use of entertainment-education strategies. He also serves as Chair of The Population Institute in Washington, DC, which works in partnership with Population Media Center. PMC creates long-running serialized dramas on radio and television, in which characters evolve into role models for the audience resulting in...

About Matt Koozer As Senior Restoration Ecologist & Construction Mgr. for Biohabitats, Matt has 24 years of experience leading design-build teams in water resources management and habitat restorations. He has managed all phases of river, estuary, wetland and riparian restoration and management projects, with a focus on habitat restoration construction. Matt has been involved in over 150 habitat restoration projects including dam removal, channel realignment, estuary levee breaching,...

Links to full episodes featured here: Kate McFarland Stephen Pyne Deborah Landau Bethanie Walder Cara Nelson Ben Goldfarb Remembering Dave Foreman Francisco J. Santiago-Ávila Renee Seacor John Davis Kelly Borgman Extra Credit Subscribe to “Leaf Litter” at Biohabitats! Sponsor of several episodes highlighted in today’s year-end recap. Links to full episodes featured here: Kate McFarland Stephen Pyne Deborah Landau Bethanie Walder Cara Nelson Ben...

About Kate Kate McFarland holds a BS in Mathematics, MS in Statistics and PhD in Philosophy (with a focus on pragmatics and philosophy of language) from Ohio State University, which she completed just for fun before leaving academia to spend a few years as a freelance writer. She now works as the Center Associate for the Ohio State University Center for Ethics and Human Values. When European borders reopened in the summer of 2021, Kate left her flat in Columbus to live nomadically in...

  About Stephen Pyne became interested in fire as a result of 15 seasons on a fire crew, the North Rim Longshots, at Grand Canyon National Park.  He has written a gamut of fire-themed books, among them national fire histories for America, Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), Mexico (pending), and the Earth overall, culminating in The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.  Other works include How the Canyon Became Grand, The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica,...