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,...

About Deborah Landau is the Director of Ecological Management at the Maryland/DC Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, where she has worked since 2001. Her work focuses on restoration at more than 30 Conservancy preserves across Maryland and DC. She works with staff and partners to restore natural communities across the state, ensuring they are healthy and resilient in light of an uncertain climate future. Among the many restoration activities Deborah manages are prescribed burns, and she has...

About Ben Ben Goldfarb (@ben_a_goldfarb) is an award-winning environmental writer whose journalism has appeared in Mother Jones, Science, The Guardian, Orion Magazine, High Country News, Outside, Audubon Magazine, Pacific Standard, Hakai Magazine, VICE News, Yale Environment 360, and many other publications. His fiction has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Motherboard, and The Hopper. He has spoken about environmental storytelling at venues including Stanford and Yale Universities,...

To support the continuation of Dave’s work at The Rewilding Institute, please sign up for our newsletter here and consider donating here. Thanks to everyone who has sent messages, songs, poems, and condolences in the past week. They have been a great comfort to your friends here at TRI and to Dave’s family. Bart Kohler’s song to Dave… To the tune of Amazing Grace Walk in the woods, you know I’m here; When a Chickadee lands near! (“Chickadee” “Chickadee” call) The cries of the Loon echo...

About Dr. Liz Hillard is a Senior Wildlife Biologist for Wildlands Network and helped lead and manage the study design, implementation, analysis, and report writing for road ecology research focused on the important Pigeon River Gorge/Interstate 40 corridor near Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee. In addition, she works to build partnerships and engage the public in wildlife habitat connectivity and conservation efforts throughout the Southern and Central...

About George Wuerthner is an ecologist, former river ranger for the Alaska BLM and backcountry ranger in the Gates of the Arctic NP in Alaska. He has visited more than 400 designated Wilderness Areas and approximately 200 National Park units. A prolific author, he has published 38 books including such titles as California Wilderness Areas, Alaska Mountain Ranges, Nevada Mountain Ranges, Montana’s Magnificent Wilderness, Forever Wild: The Adirondacks, Welfare Ranching-the subsidized...

Note: This interview was recorded before the Supreme court decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Nonetheless, Nandita and Carter present a deep look into the driving cultural and political forces behind it. About Nandita Bajaj, Executive Director, Population Balance A Humane Educator and a passionate advocate for planetary health, Nandita’s area of interest is on the intimate links between pronatalism, anthropocentrism and overpopulation and their impacts on human rights, animal protection, and...

About Kevin Kevin is founder and executive director of the Southwest Environmental Center. He received a BS in Biology from Dartmouth College, and a MS in Natural Resources Policy at the University of Michigan. After decades of advocating for wildlife, he realized that as long as the people who viewed wild animals as soulless resources were making all the decisions about how they should be managed, wildlife advocates would be fighting endless rearguard actions to stop bad things from...

About Renee Renee Seacor is an interdisciplinary environmental advocate with a background in wildlife ecology and environmental law and policy who has dedicated her professional career to using science-based advocacy to guide and develop policy solutions to challenging conservation issues. She currently serves as the Carnivore Conservation Advocate for Project Coyote and The Rewilding Institute, where she advocates for the conservation of carnivores and wild nature through rewilding and...

About Bethanie Walder joined the Society for Ecological Restoration as Executive Director in September 2015 and has more than 20 years’ experience in environmental conservation, restoration and education. Prior to joining the SER, Bethanie served as the Executive Director of Wildlands CPR, where she oversaw several highly successful conservation and restoration campaigns. Today she is responsible for helping guide SER’s overall work to achieve its mission of advancing the science, practice...

About Fran is an interdisciplinary researcher and nature advocate with over a decade’s experience in conservation and animal science, ethics and policy issues. He is the Big River Connectivity Science and Conservation Manager for Project Coyote and The Rewilding Institute, where he helps promote compassion and respect for wild carnivores and nature, their protection, and the rewilding of the Mississippi River Watershed. His work explores the application of nature ethics to our...

Welcome to a special Earth Day episode of the Rewilding Earth Podcast! About Cara Nelson is a Professor of Restoration Ecology and the Chair of the Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences at the University of Montana’s W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation and a leader of the Restoration Thematic Group of the IUCN’s Commission on Ecosystem Management. Cara has helped develop the guiding principles for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and she contributed to the...

About Brad Meiklejohn is a member of the Rewilding Institute Leadership Council, and he is currently Senior Alaska Representative for The Conservation Fund, where he has worked since 1994. Brad has directed hundreds of conservation projects protecting over 500,000 acres of wild land in Alaska, and he recently completed a major dam removal project on Alaska’s Eklutna River. Brad was successful in removing cows from 200,000 acres in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park and he is working on...

Nicole Rosmarino, Ph.D. co-founded the Southern Plains Land Trust (SPLT) in 1998 and has served as its Executive Director since 2011. In her work for SPLT, she is striving to create large shortgrass prairie wildlife refuges that emulate the “American Serengeti” that once occurred in the Great Plains. Dr. Daniel Kinka is American Prairie Reserve’s Wildlife Restoration Manager. His primary responsibilities include restoring and monitoring wildlife on the Reserve and managing the...

About Chad Hanson co-founded the John Muir Project in 1996. He first became involved in national forest protection after hiking the 2,700-mile length of the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada with his older brother in 1989. During this hike he witnessed firsthand the devastation caused by rampant commercial logging on our National Forests in California, Oregon and Washington. Chad finished his Bachelor of Science degree from UCLA after completing the Pacific Crest Trail and then...