#350 - Expert Warns: The Scary Reason Wildlife is Starting to Disappear in America | Carlton Ward

Summary

Danny Jones Podcast #350: Expert Warns – The Scary Reason Wildlife is Starting to Disappear in America

Guest: Carlton Ward (Conservation Photographer & Florida Wildlife Corridor Advocate)
Date: November 21, 2025
Host: Danny Jones | QCODE

---

Main Theme & Purpose

This episode dives deeply into the rapid disappearance of wildlife in America, with award-winning conservation photographer Carlton Ward. Focusing primarily on Florida, the conversation explores development pressures, the hidden ecological value of cattle ranches, the crucial role of wildlife corridors, and the tenacious efforts to preserve some of the region's (and planet’s) last wild spaces—including the enigmatic Florida panther. Along the way, Ward illuminates the balancing act of conservation, ranching, and development in one of the fastest-growing states in the country.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Population Growth and Development Pressures in Florida

• Florida has experienced a dramatic population increase:
  • "We've gone from 8 million to 24 million people in Florida since I was born in 1975. That's about a thousand people moving here a day for almost 50 years." (Carlton Ward, 01:00)
• Less than a third of the state is currently "hardened" (developed with concrete/rooftops); much is still agricultural or forested, but sprawl threatens this balance.
• Special mention of how development creates biological "islands" that threaten long-term conservation.
  • "These places like Ocala National Forest and Everglades National Park... They're becoming islands surrounded by development." (Carlton, 02:37)

2. Untold History of Florida's Cattle Ranches

• Florida's unique cattle ranching history dates back to Ponce de Leon, and it's still home to some of America's biggest cattle operations.
• Large tracts of cattle ranches serve as vital ecological green space, acting as buffer zones and habitats for native species—even supporting panther and bear populations.
• The Deseret Ranch (owned by the Mormon Church) is the most productive cow-calf operation in the US (300,000 acres).
  • "You can put more cows on an acre in Florida than in Texas because of all the rain and the lush." (Carlton, 04:04)

3. Carlton Ward’s Journey: Ranches to Africa and Back

• Growing up with one foot in the urbanized Pinellas County and another on his family's historic cattle ranch, Ward gained an early appreciation for Florida's wild spaces.
• Interest in photography sparked by adventures in Australia and matured through fieldwork in Africa (Gabon) for the Smithsonian, where he used camera traps for scientific documentation and storytelling.
• Returning to Florida, he realized the urgency for homegrown conservation efforts:
  • "I started feeling this pull towards home... not enough was being done to tell the story here." (20:26)

4. Camera Traps and the Power of Storytelling

• Camera traps allowed for unprecedented, candid views of wildlife, including elusive species like leopards, bears, and panthers.
• Notable for the unseen intimacy: "There's no human there....This is just the animal in the wild with nothing around." (Host, 18:37)
• Led to impactful conservation photography and books, and inspired Ward’s campaign for the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

5. Bears, Corridors, and the Science of Connectivity

• Discovery that black bears thrive on private ranch lands, not just public parks—surprising even to native Floridians like Ward.
• Bear GPS studies (notably bear "M34" who trekked 500 miles but was blocked by Interstate 4) proved that agricultural working lands make up an interconnected corridor for wildlife.
• "All these agricultural pieces connected together make a corridor. That became the foundation of the Florida Wildlife Corridor campaign." (Carlton, 60:52)

6. The Florida Wildlife Corridor: Mapping & Policy Wins

• Explains the concept and need: Florida’s public lands are at risk of becoming isolated islands.
• Introduces the “opportunity area”—8 million acres of unprotected, often working lands (ranches, farms, timber) that keep nature connected.
• Bipartisan, incentive-based programs (like conservation easements) are now flourishing, with over $2 billion invested since 2021, protecting 400k+ acres.
  • "People really understand the value...75% of voters voted for that water and land legacy amendment." (Carlton, 75:20)
• Not oppositional to ranchers: "Keeping it where it's attractive to everybody involved is the way that you can really make strides with this stuff." (76:14)

7. Wildlife Fragmentation: Island Biogeography & Species Loss

• Isolated "islands" of habitat reduce species diversity and threaten ecological health, especially for wide-ranging animals (panthers, bears).
• Connectivity supports healthy fire regimes, hydrology, and climate stability.

8. Florida Panther: The Struggle for Survival

• The Florida panther is the last eastern puma population and critically endangered—estimates hover around 200 adults.
• Females have only just begun to expand north of historic barriers like the Caloosahatchee River (first documented in 2016).
• Camera-trap work captured the first images of a female north of the river with kittens—crucial for species recovery.
• The panther’s story is symbolic for broader conservation, illustrating the stakes and hope for Florida’s wild future.

9. Development, Toll Roads, and Conservation Tensions

• Discussion of toll roads as catalysts for deep habitat fragmentation and sprawl; the Florida Wildlife Corridor framework now stands as a counterbalance in infrastructure planning.
  • "We need to present land conservation as infrastructure..." (Carlton, 146:14)

10. Global Context: Wildlife Corridors Everywhere

• Discusses large-scale visions like E.O. Wilson’s “Half-Earth” (setting aside 50% of land/sea).
• Presents wildlife corridors as scalable framework for balancing development and connectivity—regionally and globally (Yellowstone-to-Yukon, Jaguars in S. America, Tiger Corridors in India, Whale superhighways).

11. Oceans, Fisheries, and Conservation

• Oceans face similar fragmentation and depletion threats; marine protected areas are only a small fraction of the ocean.
• Trawling, IFQ (Individual Fishing Quota), and international factory ships discussed as examples of failed regulation, disconnecting local economies from sustainable practice.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

"We've gone from 8 million to 24 million people in Florida since I was born in 1975... we've been sustaining about a thousand people a day for my entire life, which is just crazy. And you look at it that way, you know, it's not sustainable."
— Carlton Ward, 01:00

"The thing about Florida... all this is hidden in plain sight."
— Carlton Ward, 04:58

"A Florida cattle ranch can have just as much wildlife diversity as a state park or a national park."
— Carlton Ward, 45:56

"All these agricultural pieces connected together make a corridor. That became the foundation for the Florida Wildlife Corridor campaign I've spent my career advocating for."
— Carlton Ward, 60:52

"As the island of habitat gets smaller and more isolated, the number of species decrease... it affects a wide-ranging animals first. The bigger your territory, the more, the more it hurts you."
— Carlton Ward, 65:02

"The panther's story... it's going to help people understand why we need to save these big areas."
— Rancher Carrie Lightsey (as relayed by Carlton Ward), 143:07

“We need to rewild ourselves as we rewild the planet.”
— Carlton Ward, 157:59

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• Florida’s Explosive Growth & Land Use – [01:00-05:20]
• Florida’s Hidden Ranching Heritage – [03:45-05:58]
• Carlton’s Conservation & Photography Journey – [06:34-15:29]
• Camera Traps & Wildlife Observation – [17:07-20:01]
• Florida Bears & the Start of the Wildlife Corridor – [56:16-61:15]
• Wildlife Corridors: Science & Policy – [61:28-77:09]
• Fragmentation & Species Islandization – [65:02-68:00]
• Florida Panther: Struggle, Research & Recovery – [94:03-137:21]
• Development, Toll Roads, & Conservation Strategies – [143:54-148:55]
• National/Global Wildlife Corridors & Half-Earth Vision – [78:26-81:38, 167:47-168:58]
• Oceans & Fisheries Management Issues – [82:01-89:13]
• Personal Safety in the Swamps & Wild Encounters – [113:20-124:41]
• Big-Picture Optimism & Global Rewilding – [157:53-166:06]
• Carlton’s Future Projects: The Gulf, Stories of Hope – [159:20-167:26]

---

Additional Highlights

• Florida’s ancient fossil history: Discussion of Ice Age megafauna, submerged paleocoastlines, and archaeological finds (27:39-29:42).
• Role of incentive-based conservation: Conservation easements as a win-win for ranchers, taxpayers, and wildlife (53:37-54:43).
• Innovative conservation storytelling: The power of expeditions and visual storytelling to shift public opinion, policy, and funding.
• Remarkable on-location stories: Camera trap failures (bears, weather, vandalism); Ward’s brush with a gator (117:28); panther tracking with researchers (125:16).
• Challenges and hope: The balancing act of keeping Florida wild while accommodating growth—a model with global resonance.

---

Concluding Thoughts

Carlton Ward presents a compelling argument that the solution to vanishing wildlife in Florida—and globally—lies in recognizing, connecting, and protecting the vital working landscapes that persist between parks and preserves. By shifting both the narrative (via awe-inspiring imagery and expeditions) and the policies (incentives, corridors, easements), it’s possible to sustain both the human and natural legacy of wild America. The panther becomes a rallying symbol—if it can reclaim its lost range, perhaps America can reclaim its place as a land of the wild and the free.

---

Learn More / Follow Carlton Ward:

• Conservation projects: wildpath.com
• Fine art: carltonward.com
• Instagram: @carltonward

---

Summary prepared for clarity, completeness, and to preserve the conversational style and impact of the episode. All advertisements and non-content segments omitted.

Transcript

[Interviewer]

Extra value meals are back.

[Carlton Ward]

That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and.

[Interviewer]

Medium fries and a drink are just $8 only at McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery.

[Carlton Ward]

Shopping is hard, right? But I found a better way. Stitch Fix online Personal styling makes it easy. I just give my stylist my size, style and budget preferences. I order boxes when I want and how I want. No subscription required. And he sends just for me, pieces plus outfit recommendations and styling tips. I keep woodworks and send back the rest. It's so easy. Make style easy. Get started today@stitch fix.com Spotify that's Stitch Fix.com Spotify.

[Interviewer]

How much of Florida is overtaken by development and construction every year? Is there like a stat on that? We know roughly what that is.

[Carlton Ward]

It's hard to say the exact number. We know the population. Like we know that about 300,000 people move here every year. You know, since I was doing the math recently, preparing for a talk. I was born in 1975. There are 8 million people in Florida, you know, now there are almost 24 million people in Florida. You hear the statistic? A thousand people move here every day. Well, if you do that out across 50 years, you know, we've gained 16 million people since I was born.

[Interviewer]

It's got to be more than that.

[Carlton Ward]

Well, we've gone from 8 million to 16 million.

[Interviewer]

Oh, okay.

[Carlton Ward]

You know, so it's, it's. And that's, that's a million people every three years almost. Right. You know, that's.

[Interviewer]

Yep.

[Carlton Ward]

Right. At a thousand people a day. So we have, we have been sustaining about a thousand people a day for my entire life, which is just crazy. And you look at it that way, you know, it's not sustainable. Especially if you do it the way we have been where we sprawl out to accommodate that growth. I mean, state's only 130 miles wide. You know, you'll cut it in half with development if you keep piling people and rooftops in the way we have been.

[Interviewer]

And there's, and it's. How much of the state of Florida is currently developed? Is it like one third? Roughly.

[Carlton Ward]

Develop such a, like continuum. You know, there's like, yeah, suburban, there's rural sprawl where you have five acre ranchets. There's. But I'll say that, I mean it would be less than a third. That's like actually hardened, you know, to rooftops and concrete.

[Interviewer]

Less than a third.

[Carlton Ward]

Less than a third. Excuse me, the states, around 40 million acres. I think it's like 36 million acres of not lakes, you know, like draw of land. Half of that is designated as a Florida wildlife corridor. Now that's 18 million acres. 10 million acres of those are like public lands, national parks, state parks, parks and preserves. So Florida is like 27 public land already, but this land is like places like Ocala National Forest, Everglades National Park, 175 state parks scattered throughout. They're becoming islands surrounded by development. And that's what's going to happen without saving the land in between. Thankfully for Florida, there's still a lot of agriculture. And so yeah, there's, you know, I think a sixth of the state is still cattle ranch by land mass. I don't know what percentage is pine forest or timberlands, but it's, it's getting up there. So because of all those working lands, we still have green space.

[Interviewer]

I was blown away. I was listening to, I don't know if it was like an interview SL documentary, it was an older one on the cattle ranching stuff that you did. And I was blown away by the fact that the first cattle was in Florida brought by Ponce de Leon. I had no clue. And this is also the biggest, the.

[Carlton Ward]

Biggest state for beef once upon a time, early on. But I, I think overall we're probably like somewhere in the top 20 for beef. But we have six of the top 10 individual biggest cattle ranches in the state still, you know, in terms, in terms of cattle production. But you can put more cows on an acre in Florida than you can in Texas because all the rain and the lush and so the Deseret Ranch owned by the Mormon Church outside of Orlando, if you're headed the east coast basically from Orlando all the way to Melbourne and north is. It's a 300,000acre ranch that's the highest producing cow calf operation in the United States.

[Interviewer]

Really? I had no idea. Yeah, that's wild.

[Carlton Ward]

That's the thing about Florida. All this is like hidden in plain sight.

[Interviewer]

Yep.

[Carlton Ward]

Because it's, we don't have the mountains. You can't sit here on the coast and look out in the morning and see this wild corridor. You, you, you'll go right by on the highway if you don't stop and pay attention to it. So it's, it's, it's all there, but it's not, it's not so evident to people.

[Interviewer]

It's a crazy thing about Florida is that like, and I'm sure you can attest to this too. But like, me, I. I just grew up driving, doing road trips all over Florida to, like, surf and stuff and go do different things and just drive right past time that I. I really, like, never pay attention to. You know, you can drive through a huge cattle ranch or through like a little town like Yeehaw Junction, or like down, you know, through the Everglades and. And never really stop and like, consider, like, what the hell could be going on here.

[Carlton Ward]

You know, I've always been one of those people that kind of wonders what's on the other side of the berm, you know. You know, pull over and.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

Go see what it looks like to look down the Kissimmee river from there near Yeehaw Junction. But it really wasn't until I came back to Florida as a photographer and started looking at the cattle ranches that I started actually going off the road and seeing all these places and understanding the scope of how much is out there and all these families every day getting on horses and working cows all across the state that they're not even in our mind's eye of what the state is.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

But. But so important for kind of holding the green space together.

[Interviewer]

So can you explain, like, your background, How. How did you come up into. How did you get into photography, like, growing up as a young kid? I think you went to Africa for a little while and then you finally came back. Can you kind of like. Like lay that out for people?

[Carlton Ward]

Sure. Yeah. I. Well, I. I grew up not far from where you grew up in Pinellas County. And you. Here we are in the most densely populated county in the southeast. And so this is. Yeah. Pinellas county still is more than Dade. Yeah. Wow. Because Dade at least has homestead or. Or I don't know if it has homestead, but it has, it has a hinterland, you know, it has. Pinellas is built out wall to wall, Gulf to bay, you know.

[Interviewer]

Oh, yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

The only green space left are barrier islands that were too inconvenient to develop in a couple parks, you know, a few parks.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

So there's something about growing up here where I think I had. I had one. I grew up here, but I also have a cattle ranch in the family and lots of cousins who are full time ranchers. We have a smaller ranch that's kind of where these historic family lands were. My great, great, great grandfather homesteaded around Wautula around the 1850s, and I still have a lot of family in that part of the state today. So I. I had this. I mean, I was a suburban kid. Who went to the ranch for Thanksgiving for Boy Scout camps to learn how to go hunting. And so I kind of had one foot in both worlds. And so I would feel how developed it is here, and then you would go out there and it was so wild and open. And then you would come back here and you'd feel the squeeze. And I think that was kind of in my background, but I didn't. I didn't go to college setting out to be a conservationist or to even study biology. I thought I was gonna study physics and go into engineering or maybe study business and go to law school. I. I didn't really have it all mapped out, but I studied biology. I studied anthropology. I got really interested, kind of got my eyes opened a bit. I was like, oh, wow. Like, maybe. Maybe everything I think of is, quote, progress is not progress. And I started to really get sensitive to, like, the conservation issues and learning about the loss of species, learning how they were losing species at a rate like many, many multiples. Faster than hell it has been over history and the loss of language and all the kind of other side of globalization. And so I started studying ecology. And at the same time, I got into photography. Kind of in parallel to that, like, it was more I was into. Well, it was actually. I went to Australia and sophomore year, really, to go surfing. Like, I found a study abroad that took me to the Gold coast, where you have Kira and Burley Head and Stratovrook island and all these awesome surf breaks. And they have a university that gave credits to my school, Wake Forest. So.

[Interviewer]

Oh, wow.

[Carlton Ward]

A couple buddies and I went to Australia through this Australuren exchange program, lived on the beach, surfed every day. And my parents got me a camera to, like, document my experience. And that kind of opened me up to this. I started really get into it. Like, we go to the Outback on the weekend or go explore the Northern Territory or just on the beach. And I started taking pictures. And I had this kind of autofocus Minolta film camera. And actually someone broke into our car surfing at Byron Bay, and my camera disappeared. And so I went to Ted's Camera Shop, where I was getting on my film process, and the guy took pity on me and let me borrow this old mechanical Pentax camera. And that was like my. It, like, set me off on this adventure. So we're in the Northern Territory with these waterfalls and crocodiles and Aboriginal natives and so much cool stuff. And I felt like I was in my own little National Geographic assignment with this mechanical camera and I really loved the process of just capturing the image and sharing it, like bringing that story home, putting it in the scrapbook to show my family. And so when I got back to Wake Forest to college, I was like, hungry for more about photography. And they didn't have a journalism class, they didn't have photography as a liberal arts college. So I went to the local community college to learn how to process black and white film and kind of talked my way on to the photography and yearbook staff at the school. And I shot NCAA sports. And, you know, Tim Duncan was a basketball player at Wake Forest then, so it's fun to shoot ACC basketball. And so I just was shooting as much film as I could on the, on, on the film, on the school's expense. But at the same time, I'm studying biology, I'm studying anthropology, I'm getting interested in nature. I got. I did a study abroad in Kenya one summer, and I was able to like, borrow the school's telephoto lens and really start to evolve as a photographer from that point.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

It's kind of, you know, I'm taking you on the long, roundabout version of this.

[Interviewer]

No, this is good.

[Carlton Ward]

This is fascinating, but I really, I didn't know what it meant to be a photographer professionally, and I took some time. After undergraduate, I did an internship with the Smithsonian, where I went to the Natural history museum in D.C. and my job was really just to scan slides. This is the beginning of the transition to digital. And I would go to the cold storage facility, get a few thousand slides out, bring them back that week. I would scan them through the computer, color correct them, crop them, put them on disk. I was helping digitize these archives from these photographers who've been working around the world for the Smithsonian. But it was an amazing place. I don't know if you've been to the National Museum of natural history in D.C. where they have the elephant in the entryway and I think whale skeletons hanging in the ocean hall. And you walk the back way up to your 6th floor office and there's like drawers of bones and animal skins. And it's just like this night of the museum kind of real thing to intern there and all these amazing people. So there's these lectures every Friday in the anthropology department, and people from the biodiversity programs would come into the photo lab to scan their slides from their expeditions to Peru. And I met all these amazing people and attended all these lectures, and I met this group of folks on the biodiversity program. They were just about to start a series of expeditions to Gabon in Central Africa. And so they had just done a whole series of expeditions to Peru and didn't bring a photographer with them. And we're kind of regretting it because they didn't have the tools to tell the story afterwards or not so much. So they planned it from the beginning. So I had this amazing opportunity to go as an intern to a country in Central Africa on the Atlantic coast. In some ways reminded me of home because you're facing out to the ocean over the west.

[Interviewer]

Is that near Namibia?

[Carlton Ward]

It's more north of that. It's right on the equator. It's 80% covered by rainforest still. You have elephants that come down through the forest onto the beach. You have hippos that actually travel in the surf to get from ponds where they spend the day to the savannahs where they graze during the night. It's just wild. Like going down the beach on the back of an atv, saw a gorilla on the back of the beach, like, you know, so like, you know, maybe as wild as Florida once was, but like same type of orientation to the sun, same kind of thing, but a totally wild world. And that was such an awesome experience. I went on six different expeditions over three years. It turned into a wow, a job opportunity. And I. My primary function for them was more of like a scientific imaging. I did studio portraits of all the animals they were collecting against black backdrops. So it was, you know, I think I photographed 400 different species of birds, frogs, reptiles and amphibians all alive, that they were collecting and keeping some of them for museum specimens. But I was kind of set up a studio in the field for the science purposes of that. But then I also got a kind of tell the story of the place to go with that. And that, that was my first kind of entry into that kind of photography. I published my first book called the Edge of Africa, my first Smithsonian magazine story, my first magazine covers, and kind of saw that, okay, this, this is possible and kind of moved in that direction.

[Interviewer]

How old were you at that time?

[Carlton Ward]

I was kind of 20, 25 to 28 somewhere. Somewhere in that range. I'll pull up a couple pictures here if I have them.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, anytime I'm working outside Brunt's Marin work boots have become my go to. It's like they're already broken in. And if you've worn bad work boots before, you know all about the blisters and the pain. But right out of the box, these Marin work boots are comfortable. No painful break in period. No limping around for a week, just Pure, straight up comfort from day one. Eric Girard founded Brunt after his work friends complained that their work boots hadn't changed since the 1920s. Brunt's boots are not just comfortable, they're built to perform. It's lightweight, waterproof, slip resistant, heat resistant, and even electrical hazard rated. Basically, whatever the job throws at you, these boots can handle it. And the best part is, is it doesn't hurt. I can't stress that enough. Brunt's got over 500,000 workers backing them up, and you can send them back if you don't like them. That's how confident they are. So if you're tired of work boots that destroy your feet more than the job itself, it's time to check out Brunt's workwear. Your feet will thank you. So with the temperatures dropping and the holidays coming up, it's time to treat yourself or the hardworking man in your life to real comfort. Skip the throwaway gifts and get him something built to last. Brunt Workwear, our listeners get $10 off their entire order when you use the code Danny at checkout, that's B NT workwear.com and use the code Danny. It's spelled-A N N Y. Order today and let them know you heard about it here. And thank you to Brunt for sponsoring this episode.

[Carlton Ward]

So here, here's me back then.

[Interviewer]

This is Africa.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. I'm in Gabon in the rainforest. This is an aerial view of what's now L Park.

[Interviewer]

Wow. And this is from, like, what was that from? A helicopter or something?

[Carlton Ward]

That was from an airplane. Airplane Stuffed in the back of a Cessna 182. But this is some of my early work with camera traps.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, the camera trap stuff is amazing.

[Carlton Ward]

Like, one of my role models from National Geographic, Nick Nichols, had been doing camera traps and kind of pioneering with camera traps, he photographed tigers in India. He had photographed. All these pictures are impossible to take without our camera trap. So that's what this setup is. There's a Nikon, basically drill a hole.

[Interviewer]

Or cut a hole out of a pelican case.

[Carlton Ward]

Right, right. There's a Nikon film camera in there firing three different strobes that are in makeshift waterproof housings that I made out of, like, lantern flashlight casings. And the thing kind of near my elbow on that other stake in the ground is an infrared trip wire.

[Interviewer]

Whoa.

[Carlton Ward]

And so the animal walks by, breaks the beam, sends its signal to the camera, takes a picture. So that's the theory of it. These are the days of film where you only get 36 exposures and you don't know what you got until you're back in the United States getting it processed three months later. Right. So it's a big mystery. But yeah, here's another. Here's me testing one of the camera traps then. And there's a whole lot of failure. But then once in a while it works out.

[Interviewer]

Oh my God, dude. It's so the, the camera trap photos are so different. There's nothing like them because it's, there's no human there. It's just the animal in the wild with nothing around. And I don't think people can appreciate that without understanding like the backstory how that photo was actually taken. Right. Like this wasn't like you standing there with a camera and then like the, the things like looking at you, this is, this is just completely uninterrupted in the wilderness. Except for the flash. Might like throw like, whoa. What was that?

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, he probably hears the click. He probably shoots two or three pictures in a row. He probably heard the click and looks up for, for one more. But this, I mean, this leopard had probably never seen a camera. He probably never saw one again. Like this, this is a leopard in the wild, in the night, stalking down a trail in the rainforest.

[Interviewer]

It would be like us seeing a flying saucer or something like that.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, I, I can't even imagine. But the, in the perspective, like this is a wide angle lens. Like if I took a picture of a leopard with basically an iPhone camera perspective from that close, I might not be here to tell you about it.

[Interviewer]

But how close would you say the camera was to that, that leopard?

[Carlton Ward]

Two feet, three feet. Two, three feet? Yeah, it's walking down a trail, maybe three feet. It's probably a 24 millimeter lens, which is same equivalent to what your cell phone shoots with.

[Interviewer]

Right?

[Carlton Ward]

Right. So, yeah, it, you know, I kind of saw what was possible. But then this is, this was 2001 to 2003. I'm doing this work and was amazing. And I was living in D.C. and I was working to publish this book, but every time I got an airplane, left Florida for three months and came home, I was seeing scenes like this.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And like literally ranches and wild places turning to golf courses and subdivisions.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

In real time. And I started feeling this pull towards home because here I am, you know, a white guy from Florida exporting a conservation ethic to an African country. And there's probably a hundred people who would take my job to work with the Smithsonian in Africa. But I didn't feel like enough was being done to tell the story of what was going on here. And I was probably better suited for that because that's where I'm from. So around 2004, I decided I'm going to come back to Florida and try to work as a conservation photographer here. And that, and that's what led me into beginning the ranch project. So, you know, we were talking a little bit about before, like ranches are this thing that's not even associated with Florida.

[Interviewer]

No, not at all.

[Carlton Ward]

But at the time it was one fifth of the state by land mass. It's a huge proportion of the state and arguably the most pivotal landscape in the state because it's either going to be ranches or it's going to be rooftops. Right. You know, if you look at the long term trends and I don't think people understood what's being lost. So that was my motivation and I was also motivated by my, my own heritage with it because like this is, that's me and my granddad on our family ranch back in, you know, I was 9 or 10 years old or something.

[Interviewer]

That's so cool. I have to say, like, it's, first of all, it's so rare to meet anybody who was born in Florida, but it's impossibly rare to meet somebody whose lineage goes back from Florida natives as far as yours do. That's incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

And it's like one in, it's like one in three people were born here anymore by the numbers. Yeah, you know, it's like really, maybe a court, maybe 25% of people were born in Florida. It's a small proportion, very small. And this is a. Well, I'll go back to the photo before it.

[Interviewer]

Is it true that the horses in Florida have specifically evolved different than other horses to where they can actually stand in water for days without their, their hooves being destroyed?

[Carlton Ward]

That's, that's my understanding. And they, they call them cracker horses, but they're, they're horses that came from the Spanish, the marsh tackies or the, you know, the Andalusian horses and cattle. But they live wild in the Florida woods for several centuries. And same with the cattle. And so right there I've heard it said that they've adapted where they're, they're less bothered by the insects and they can thicker skin, they can stand in the water all day. They're, they're smaller, they're nimble. I mean, same with the cattle. The, the cracker cattle, they're not going to gain the weight the way that A Hereford or an Angus or these English breeds will, when you put them on feed, but they're gonna survive on palmettos or in the deep woods.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And when. The early. When, like when my ancestors came to Florida, there's so many different waves of kind of migration into Florida. Most of the original natives here, the Calusa, the Timucuin, the Tocabaga, the. All these amazing civilizations of native people were basically wiped out by Spanish disease to the point. I mean, I think the last Calusa passed away in. In Cuba, like were brought there on display or something awful. But so the. The Miccosukee Indians, the Seminole Indians who are here today. Florida was part of their territory, but they were Creek people from, you know, north of Alabama and through the Southeast who ranged and traded and had a presence in Florida. Okay. But they really got pushed here during the Trail of Tears, during, like the Seminole wars, during the. Trying to extirpate native people from. In this really dark history of trying to move native people off the land and push them out to reservations in Oklahoma and so forth. Right. The Seminoles pushed into the Everglades.

[Interviewer]

When. When are we talking roughly?

[Carlton Ward]

1700S, 17, 1800s. I mean.

[Interviewer]

And Ponce de Leon came in the 1500s, right?

[Carlton Ward]

Came. Yeah. 1521 was his second voyage.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

And that's when the cattle and horses came for the first time.

[Interviewer]

And the hogs.

[Carlton Ward]

Right. I think hogs. And he also. He got a souvenir as an arrow from a Colosse Indian, a poison arrow. Right. And died of his wounds in. In Cuba. But horses and cattle stayed. And I mean, I don't know if those exact cattle produce lineages that stayed for long. They may have eaten most of them, who knows. But subsequent Spanish missions kept coming and they kept bringing horses and cattle and disease. And disease. But the cattle naturalized to the Florida woods. And so by time, my ancestors came in the mid 15, in the mid 1800s, and most of the kind of pioneer American American colonists at that time, cattle have been living in the Florida woods for three centuries.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

And so it was a naturally occurring resource where if you're a, you know, a poor cracker settler moving down into Florida, trying to scratch out an existence, you can get some good dogs and a brand and a horse and go round up cattle that live in the woods, make them your own, and start to build some stability for your family.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. If you, if you read the Book of Land Remembered.

[Interviewer]

No, I heard of it.

[Carlton Ward]

And a friend of mine is about to adapt it for a TV series, but it's it's by Patrick Smith, and it chronicles the life of a early pioneer Florida family all the way up through the generations, up into Miami. And it kind of gets into these stories.

[Interviewer]

Oh, interesting.

[Carlton Ward]

It's really fascinating.

[Interviewer]

Do we know what Florida was like before the Spanish came? Like, what was here? What kind of animals were here?

[Carlton Ward]

Well, if we go back, they're great fossil records for Florida. If you go back. What I think is really fascinating, if you go back 10,000 years to the end of the last ice age.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

Florida was twice as wide as it is now.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

Because the oceans were 80. 80 or 100ft lower. Right.

[Interviewer]

And the shelf went out really wide.

[Carlton Ward]

Right, right. On the east coast, it, it looked practically the same because the shelf is steep.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

But here in the Gulf, where you go fish at the middle grounds, 80 or 100 miles offshore, that was land.

[Interviewer]

The middle grounds was.

[Carlton Ward]

Or all the way almost to the edge. Like 80 miles, 100 miles from the coastline was the edge of the land where it drops off.

[Interviewer]

Wow, Steve, you got to find a, an image of that or an illustration of that. There's got to be one online.

[Carlton Ward]

And so if you think about it, at that time, Florida was drier than it is now. We still had woolly mammoths and bison and mastodons, like giant ground sloths.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

I mean, all these big, massive animals that lived here. Saber toothed cats.

[Interviewer]

Yep.

[Carlton Ward]

But. But there were also people. And so like, the early Native Americans were here 12, 13, 14, 15, 000 years ago. And there's been this phenomenal.

[Interviewer]

Look at that, dude.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

That's incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

So there, there would have been people living along that coastline.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And all of those archaeological sites are deep underwater at this point and mostly lost to the tide, so we don't even get a glimpse. But there's places, if you've been to the rivers kind of south of Tallahassee, like the Silla river or the St. Mark's River.

[Interviewer]

I haven't spent much time up there now.

[Carlton Ward]

Well, it's a really low energy coastline. Like, basically the beaches stop in Tarpon Springs and then it turns to kind of a marshy coast up in that corner. Well, these are these incredible underwater archaeology sites in that Big Bend area where there's these rivers like the Asila river, which is a series of sinkholes. And when the water was lower, it would have been sinkholes, like kind of like the cenotes you see from the Yucatan, where the river would disappear underground and there were watering holes that the animals would go to. Yeah, well, they found 1111,000-year-old mastodon skeleton with butcher marks on the tusks.

[Interviewer]

What?

[Carlton Ward]

And it's on display at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. There was also.

[Interviewer]

When did they find this?

[Carlton Ward]

In the past 40, 40 years or so. A guy, David Webb, who ran the underwater archaeology department at fsu, found it. But then they found there's a prehistoric bison from 12,000 years ago that had a Clovis spear point in its skull that they found in this place.

[Interviewer]

Oh my God, dude.

[Carlton Ward]

So you've got this completely connected wild continent where apparently the mastodons and the mammoths would migrate from the Appalachians all the way down to the coast of Florida in the winter and back. Because they could trace from their fossilized dung or from some, some index, they could see the pollen and what was left behind. Like they have this picture of how all these things were fitting together back then.

[Interviewer]

Minnesota. Nice. The nation's leader in Amanita Mascaria has rebranded to Amantara with a brand new website and an expanded mission. The folks at Amantara have been sponsoring this episode for almost half a year and their product has made a huge impact on me. When an eighth of America is on anti anxiety meds, it's easy to see why. The Amanita muscaria mushroom is growing in popularity because of its ability to ease anxiety. Stress and anxiety make it easy to slip back into addiction. And that's why thousands are turning to Amanita miscaria from Amantara. Full recovery still needs community and support. Its founder, Christian Rasmussen, used Amanita to overcome his own withdrawal and built Amantara to make natural healing accessible and affordable. And their website is packed with dosing, education and user community. Their capsules kick in within an hour and last six to eight hours. And they cost a fraction of pharmaceuticals. They sent me a ton of Amanita to try out and I've already ran through it all. Because the incredible state it puts me in makes life's everyday stress so much more bearable. Especially when you're dealing with intolerable 2 year olds. Try sitting in a room surrounded by screaming children and a giant mess and not feeling triggered. That's what Amanita Mascaria does. Plus they give back like donating $12,000 to the fungi foundation with leading new resour research with brain Mechanics. Amantara wants to help you find harmony. Head over to amantara.com go/dj and use the code DJ22 for 22% off your first order. That's a M E n T a r a.com go dj with the code dj22. It's linked down below. Now back to the show. Now do we know how all that, all of those megafauna died? Because it's interesting how in North America there's no more megafauna, but in Africa there is.

[Carlton Ward]

I don't, I've heard different theories about it. I don't know what the current thinking is, but it, I don't think it's any coincidence. It's about the same time that people showed up, you know, because humans were first coming by water and coming across the land bridge, first showing up in the fossil record in that 12, 13,000 years ago, about the same time that they went extinct. But it's also the end of the Ice age. And so that's when the glaciers started receding and the climate change. So it's a, you know, it probably wouldn't be hospitable for a giant furry elephant to live in Florida in this.

[Interviewer]

Climate if it was like a rapid climate, like a rapid change. And. Right.

[Carlton Ward]

I'm not sure how fast that happened, but I do know that people and hunting were a new presence on the landscape starting then too.

[Interviewer]

Have you heard of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis? It's this theory that geologists and some geologists and climate scientists have come up with that basically around 11,000, 12,000 years ago that there was some sort of comet series of comet impacts they called the Younger Dryas that happened for about a thousand year period between 11 and 12,000 years ago. And they think they found evidence of these cosmic impacts in the, the, the ground layer. They found this black matte layer in the ground that they has like nano diamonds and specific elements that would come from comets as well as like giant pieces of rocks that were from the Northeast North American ice sheet that would have been like in the Northeast, above New York, Toronto area, like, like, I'm talking like 10 ton boulders that they found in the Midwest, like near like Washington, that kind of area. And the hypothesis is, this is just part of their hypothesis is that if this hypothetical comet impact happened, it would have like hit the ice sheet, sent water flooding through the North American continent and it would have had ice chunks that had giant rocks in them that would have washed across the continent, could have gone all the way across the continent and then melted in those rocks could have settled there. But yeah, I don't know.

[Carlton Ward]

I mean it makes, it makes sense. I mean those, I know a little bit about the, at the Cambrian Cretaceous Boundary with the extinction of the dinosaurs and the massive asteroid that, yeah, crushed into the Yucatan around that time. And the chief scientist at National Geographic now, Ian Miller, was like a paleo expert, and he was explaining to me kind of what happened in the world when that thing hit. And he said, I might not get this. All right. But the gist of it is all these things had to happen. Like, normally, the gravitational field of Jupiter protects the Earth from all these comets and other asteroids. So it's just, like, somehow snuck through this asteroid belt and came crushing into the Earth. But when it hit, it collapsed the entire. It would have collapsed the entire atmosphere of the Earth to touch the surface. It would have hit and liquefied the surface and the crust when it. And it would have made of an explosion backwards. Like when you drop a rock into a puddle of water and the water bounces up, that refractive bounce back would have been three times the size of Mount Everest.

[Interviewer]

Oh, my God.

[Carlton Ward]

And a fireball would have raced across the continent that would have hit, like, Montana within three minutes. So just literally scorched the Earth and. And uplifted. I mean, he says you can see it now. You see how the cenotes and all these amazing things around Cancun. It's like the underground limestone got folded upwards.

[Interviewer]

Find a picture of the cenotes in the Yucatan, Steve. They're incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

So, yeah, I mean, if, you know. You know that you basically pressed reset for the planet with that particular meteor and, you know, doesn't surprise me if a comet snuck its way through that, you'd have boulders going across all of North America.

[Interviewer]

Right, right. But it's interesting.

[Carlton Ward]

Like, it could have wiped out all those species, too, or contributed to it.

[Interviewer]

Sure, sure. This is the. Yeah, this is in the Yucatan. Is this. There's, like, these underwater things that you can. Is that what they're called, the cenotes? When you're. When you're diving in the Yucatan and you see these, like, honeycomb structures everywhere underwater there.

[Carlton Ward]

These are fresh water, but they come in the interface and it's. I mean, Florida has the highest concentration of freshwater springs in the world.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

So we have a similar kind of karst geology, but there it's. Has, you know, different and has this history with the meteor impact, which is the structure of a lot of it.

[Interviewer]

Now, do we know, like, what happened to that. That asteroid when it hit the Yucatan? Did it, like, go underwater under the ground? Or did it, like, just disintegrate into a million pieces? Or, like, is there any remnants of it? Like, and when do we, when did we actually come up with that theory that it hit the Yucatan?

[Carlton Ward]

I think they've kind of pinpointed where it was, right? I. I don't know exactly. I mean, yeah, I've heard about it across my adult life, but I don't know when it was.

[Interviewer]

It was, I think it was relatively recent that we actually discovered that it hit the Yucatan.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, yeah, it was like in the 40s, I think.

[Interviewer]

40S.

[Carlton Ward]

And they know, they know where it is and I think they can measure where it is. It's.

[Interviewer]

But dude, Steve, so I want to show you this real quick. So check out the, the Midwest scablands, the, the scablands that Randall Carlson talks about. So in his younger Dryas impact hypothesis, he believes that the North American ice sheet was hit by comets and it basically unlocked this, this biblical flood where he thinks like millions of tons of water were rushing through these scouts. Yeah, top left. Go to the top left. The Washington scabland. So, yeah, blow that up. He thinks that basically millions of volumetric tons of water were rushing through the scab and channeling out these areas in the, in the western part of the, the North America. North American continent. And he does this incredible presentation of like, how he believes it all happened and in what series. And it's, it's super compelling. Combined with the fact that they did the black mat, they, they cut into the Earth and found that black matte layer of the nano diamond particles and the other elements that would have been in those comets corroborating the time that this would have happened. It's just fascinating.

[Carlton Ward]

It's so interesting. I don't know nearly as much about the rest of the country as I do Florida, but it makes sense.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, no, it totally does. But like, you know, just going back to, to Florida, to, to before all those ice sheets melted, how wide and how far it went out into the Gulf is, is insane to me.

[Carlton Ward]

And it shows you how much, how much things change over time. I mean, you know, the, the sea is rising now, probably from our carbon and other impacts, but it's not the first time it's risen or gone down.

[Interviewer]

Right? Yeah, but it's been a roller coaster.

[Carlton Ward]

But, you know, whether it's, whether it's happening faster than species can adapt to.

[Interviewer]

It, that's a problem.

[Carlton Ward]

And the way we've hardened the landscape, you know, it's not like the, you know, the sea rises, the marsh grasses would shift back, the mangroves would shift back, the pines would shift back, everything would kind of like move itself gradually. Uphill? Well, we haven't left that option for much of the coastline. I mean, we've left at best like a few feet before you hit the seawall, you know, and then it's. So there are still places north of Tampa along this area we're calling the Wilderness coast, where you still have room for nature to adapt. You still have enough grow open space and green space around the Suwannee river, around these different river mouths where, you know, you see, you see the palm trees dying off in Chazawitzka, you see the saltwater intrusion, the evidence of the sea rising. But if you give nature enough space, those ecosystems can kind of go up the hill and reappear up the gradient and still sustain the diversity of life and food and biodiversity that's there.

[Interviewer]

So going back to the cattle ranching, the cattle ranching project that you did when you got back from, from Africa. So how has this, the cattle ranches of Florida evolved since then, up till now? Like, what is the current state of them? Like, where are they going? What's happening with it?

[Carlton Ward]

Here, I'll show, I'll show another picture here. So this, that's my great granddad, who I never met. That's the summer of 1929. And the young boy in that photo is his son. So Doyle Carlton and Doyle Carlton Jr. My great granddad was just becoming Florida's 25th governor at the time.

[Interviewer]

What?

[Carlton Ward]

Like he was a guy from rural Wachula, grew up with nine other siblings and, you know, in, in the woods and then ended up studying, going to Stetson, going to law school in Chicago, in New York, and coming back and being a governor and starting the law firm Carlton Fields here in Tampa.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

But the I, I did get to meet the, the I think nine year old boy in that photo was my great uncle, Bill Carlton Jr. He started the thing called Cracker country, the state fair at the Florida State Fairgrounds where you can actually go see the house that his dad grew up in.

[Interviewer]

No way.

[Carlton Ward]

And I'm not, I'm not trying to go down a side off ramp of family history, but I'm, I'm bringing this picture up because I took this in 1999. I did a magazine writing class at the University of Florida when I was kind of in between undergraduate and graduate school. And I did a personality profile on my great uncle and I went and spent a day with him on his ranch in Horse Creek and kind of saw the land through his eyes for the first time. And he told me when he was a boy he would go out with the cowboys, moving herds of cattle, sleeping under the stars for two or three nights at a time and never see a fence. You know, he was born, there were a million people in Florida. And so across a single lifetime, you go from a million people to 24 million people. You go from a wild free range place where cattle moved as wildlife in a way at as you would, to fence laws. And fence laws were coming into place with the advent of the automobile because you don't want to have the collision with the car and the motor vehicle. And you know, people are dividing up the land and taking ownership. And that was part of it. But. So it was a free range situation back then. But ranching stayed an important part of the landscape. And it's, I think it's, I'm going to back up a couple of pictures of this. Ranching and cattle can be really bad for the environment and they can also be really compatible with the environment. It depends where you are.

[Interviewer]

Why would it be bad?

[Carlton Ward]

Well, like in Brazil, we're cutting, you know, people are cutting down rainforest.

[Interviewer]

Oh right.

[Carlton Ward]

To slash and burn rainforest to putting cattle on soils that are not evolved or meant for grasslands. And you know, ecologically you're, it's a double whammy. I think the environmental footprint of beef can be improved across the board. Like right now we feed cows corn. And it's cheaper to ship a cow to a feedlot in Texas and Oklahoma as a 600 pound calf to eat corn for the next year before being slaughtered than it is to ship that much corn to the cows where they live in other parts of the state. So you know, we're, we're trucking them and putting them trains and feeding them corn. And so there's a lot of energy that goes into producing a pound of beef and a lot of water that goes into producing a pound of beef. But in its simple form and a grass fed ecosystem, a cow is very compatible with the environment. And here where we had buffalo or had, you know, in his, where their historic grasslands and rangelands that supported those kind of wildlife, the cattle can fit right in. And that's the thing. A Florida cattle ranch can have just as much wildlife diversity as a state park or a national park because of the way the cattle are compatible with the landscape.

[Interviewer]

Wow, that's fascinating.

[Carlton Ward]

So that's this picture, this is Appalachicola National Forest. But you have this palmettos and longleaf pine trees and cattle living in that kind of ecosystem. It's not, you have to cut it all down, mow it Fence it. I mean, they can, they can thrive and support the biodiversity and animals like the panther and the black bear and all the different species that live out there.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, this seems like a, a much more natural way to have. I mean, you think about where you live and the food you eat. You want to eat food that's native to where you live. And then when you think about what your food, what your food eats, you would want your food to eat things that are native to where you live, not things that are being shipped from across, across the country. I would imagine it would be better for the cow to eat food that was grown there. The grass or, you know, whatever is native to the environment it lives in.

[Carlton Ward]

Right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, cows are made to eat grass and okay, you know, we have to give them antibiotics and other things to help them eat the corn.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

But from a production standpoint, they put on weight faster eating corn. There's more nutrients in the corn, they put on more weight, it makes a fattier, more tender cut of beef. So the, the taste is preferred by American consumers. Grass fed beef can be drier, more gamey. So there's been an appetite in the market that, you know, set it up the way it is. But if we could adapt a taste for grass fed, locally grown, locally slaughtered beef, then the environmental footprint, you know, I would think drops by orders of magnitude because you're, you're growing an animal that's compatible. You're not having to provide water, you're not having to provide fertilizer, and you're gaining a high quality protein without having to put nearly as many inputs into it as we do the way we grow beef.

[Interviewer]

Now, now let me ask you this. If I had a cattle ranch and I had a ton of cattle, what would the, is the, other than the fact that majority of society will buy corn fed beef because it's fattier and it's, it's more, whatever, it's less gamey. Is there any other benefit or is there any other downside to just feeding them grass?

[Carlton Ward]

And the downside is you're not gonna probably make as much money.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

Because they're not going to gain weight as quickly. Right.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

So you might take, you might be able to feed them up to slaughter weight on corn and half the time they would take, oh wow. To feed them up to that same slaughter weight just eating grass. But there's some.

[Interviewer]

And it's, I'm sure it's competitive, it's.

[Carlton Ward]

A competitive market and it's about the bottom line. But, but There are people who are doing it like there I met, I, I photographed ranches for more than 20 years across Florida now. And you meet some amazing people. Some of the one family I met was raising cows in south Florida because most of the ranches in Florida, they're called cow calf operations. And so all what, what we produce is, is calves. And then once that calf grows up to a certain weight, they get shipped off to the feedlot. And so you sell your calves and then they go to eat corn and eventually be slaughtered. Some people are kind of closing the circle and keeping the whole life cycle here, here at home. And the grasses that grow on the sandy Florida soils aren't the nutrient rich grass that's going to help them gain weight quickly. So some of them are going up to the panhandle where you have the clay soils and having a different ranch property there. And then they feed the cattle more protein rich foods and legumes that they can grow and they go eat them straight off the, you know, off the grass. But. And then they're slaughtering them locally and you can do that. And there is a, there are health conscious people or certain restaurants or certain. You create a demand for that more premium, low environmental footprint, you know, probably healthier food product, but it's just not mainstream yet.

[Interviewer]

Right. How many ranches are doing it this way in Florida that you're aware of?

[Carlton Ward]

Not very many. No, I mean most of it, including my own family, is shipping the cows, selling your calves at the market and they go to the feedlot there. There is a group of ranchers called Florida Cattle Ranchers who are kind of doing a hybrid where they're not naturally grazing grass through their whole life, but they're feeding them grain and other things that are at least grown in the state of Florida. So up around Chiefland there's some feedlots where they're, you know, growing corn in the state of Florida, feeding the cow in the state of Florida. So.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

It keeps it a little closer to home.

[Interviewer]

Now I know it's like this in fishing, but I don't know if it's like this in cattle ranching. But there's no, there's no way that like an outside investment company portfolio could buy a cattle ranch. Right. And then put people in there to run it in Florida and like sit in their high rise in Manhattan and trade, you know, trade like stock.

[Carlton Ward]

No, I'm pretty sure there, there are at least a few ranches I know of that are owned by out of state entities.

[Interviewer]

Oh really?

[Carlton Ward]

And they hire Local crews.

[Interviewer]

There's no laws that you have to be owned and operated. Like, the people that are running it have to live there. Like hands on?

[Carlton Ward]

I don't think so, no.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

But most often those are real estate plays, you know, like the people who are buying these. You know, if a. The thing is, it's. It's really hard to keep owning a ranch. Like, if you're a. If you're a generational family who has a ranch, you know, first your family grows. And the probability of having everyone from the next generation interested in ranching versus having the paycheck that could come from selling the land, it. You know, to even keep enough consensus generation to generation to keep the land is a big battle.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

And then you enter the estate tax. And so if your ranch is worth something more than the estate tax threshold, you've got to sell off some of the land to meet tax obligations of the passing of each generation. And so there are a lot of pressures that are pushing these bigger ranches into smaller and smaller pieces. And the people waiting on the sidelines to buy a ranch aren't other ranchers.

[Interviewer]

It's developers, real estate people. Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

God. And that's what my, My motivation in all of this has been conservation. And that's, that's really the solution where state programs like the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program or the Florida Forever Program can buy the development rights from the rancher. And so every one of these ranches, even the one we're looking at here, this is Horse Creek Ranch and Hardy and DeSoto county, they have a development density of, say, one house and five acres. That's part of their rights in owning that land. They could develop it at a certain density. And so you can't tell someone, oh, you, you can't develop your land. They'd be taking away value from them. But if they're open to it, you can pay them for those development rights, take the development rights away, they keep owning the land as an agricultural property in perpetuity, but it'll never be developed.

[Interviewer]

And who pays them for that?

[Carlton Ward]

It's often state programs or federal programs, sometimes land trusts like the Nature Conservancy. Right. But the biggest programs in Florida are either out of our department, Environmental Protection, or our Department of Agriculture.

[Interviewer]

Okay, that makes sense.

[Carlton Ward]

And it's. I think it's one of the most cost effective ways to save landscapes.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

Because when the state comes in to buy, I mean, we need. We need public lands. We have a growing population, and state parks are widely utilized, and there's A real case for public lands for hunting or recreation. But. But we can't afford, nor should we spend all state dollars to buy all these lands when you can spend a fraction of what it would cost to buy it to buy the development rights.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And then it stays protected.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And it stays in production and stays on the tax roll.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

[Carlton Ward]

So of. Of all the land that's being protected in Florida Now, I'd say 70 or 80% of it is through conservation easements versus buying the land outright.

[Interviewer]

Wow. That's.

[Carlton Ward]

In terms of acres.

[Interviewer]

Every day, subtle changes occur in our bodies and often go unnoticed. This is called inflammaging, a chronic low grade inflammation that deteriorates our bodies as we get older. It's more than just a sign of aging. It's a key contributor to health issues like heart disease, dementia, depression and physical dec. It continuously weakens the body's resilience, turning minor infections severe and impacting mental health and cognitive function. Inflammation significantly diminishes both the quality of life and independence. Proper diet, good sleep and exercise can only get you so far, which is why I take clean being by versa. It contains ingredients targeted to fight off and help prevent inflammaging. Research shows that these ingredients clean out damaged cells in the body that affect healthy cells, reduce inflammation, protect against oxidative stress, and improve conditions like heart disease and brain disorders. And clean being. For some time, I've noticed a whole laundry list of benefits, from less joint pain to increased energy and a better mood. Clearer skin, and I don't get sick as often. These are all benefits of reduced inflammation. Plus, Verso ensures transparency and quality by publishing third party testing results for each batch they produce. So you know you're getting exactly what you're paying for. Click the link in the description below or head on over to Ver. So forward slash Danny and use the coupon code Danny at checkout to save 15 on your first order. V E R. So slash Danny and use the coupon code Danny and thank you to Verso for sponsoring this episode. So why is this in this ranch? It looks like it's flooded.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, that's in the summer. There's a lot of. There's a lot of water on these lands. And they're. I mean, that's. This is the headwaters of Horse Creek, which goes into the Peace river, which goes into Charlotte harbor. But by, you know, keeping them.

[Interviewer]

So this is south. This is pretty far south.

[Carlton Ward]

This is. Well, yeah. In interior Bradenton.

[Interviewer]

Okay, got it.

[Carlton Ward]

Here, I'll show you a few.

[Interviewer]

Oh, near like Myaka or.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, yeah. This is not far from my act. A similar type of ecosystem. But I was gonna show you this guy.

[Interviewer]

Wow. Is that a trap?

[Carlton Ward]

That's a camera trap. That's. In 2006, I was taking pictures for my second calendar I did with the Florida Cattlemen's Association. I'd been publishing an annual Florida Ranches calendar just to kind of raise awareness for ranches. It's still going. We have one coming out now, and it has a forward from the Commissioner of Agriculture in it. It gets given to all the state lawmakers, and it just shows that these exist and this matters. But I was visiting a ranch owned by Archibald Biological Station, which is an amazing place. It's like a Smithsonian in the Florida scrub, south of Lake Placid, south of Sebring. And the executive director introduced me to a guy named Joe Guthrie, who is a bear biologist and doing his master's degree from University of Kentucky. But he's catching black bears and putting GPS collars on their necks to see how they're using the landscape. And these bears were living almost entirely on private ranches. In this part of the state, you do have a scattering of public lands like Highland Tamic State park or Lake Wales Ridge National Wildlife Refuge, but the vast majority of the green space there is orange groves and cattle ranches, private lands, and it's still supporting a black bear population.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

And so that was this story, and it opened my eyes to the ranches in a totally different way, because here I am, an eighth generation Floridian, I have a master's degree in ecology, and I have no idea we have black bears living on cattle ranches. You know, like, I knew there were black bears in Ocala National Forest. You know, I knew we had them in the States somewhere. I didn't know they were surviving on ranches, you know, 40 miles from my family's ranch. Right. And it was a fascinating story to me. So I really honed in on this as a photographer, started doing the camera trap work, started learning about the science, and these bears were telling an amazing story. Like one of the bears they caught three years later, named M34, got his GPS collar in Sebring. And then in the summer of 2010, he walked 500 miles in two months. And he went from Sebring, up the Lake Wales Ridge, across Avon Park Air Force Range, around the Kissimmee chain of lakes near Yeehaw Junction, up all the way through Lakeland to Disney World, spent the night in celebration for Two nights. You know, it was like, wow. He's like, this is one of the Pooh territory. I'm out of here. But no, he, he, but the. We can, we can find this map. I don't think I have it in this particular slideshow, but I can dig it up. It, it shows the GPS points along the southeastern edge of Interstate 4 where the bear couldn't get across.

[Interviewer]

Oh wow.

[Carlton Ward]

And so there's 500, 000 acres of the green Swamp wilderness not that far on the other side of that road. And had the bear been able to reach there, he could have struck out and found a whole new territory or gotten up to Apalachicola. But he turned around, went all the way back south, ended up going as far south and west as Fort Myers, and then came back and dropped his GPS collar on a ranch near where he was caught, near Sebring. But what the bear showed is that everywhere that was green that he traveled is still connected from the perspective of a wandering black bear. So places like this, this is a cattle ranch.

[Interviewer]

God, that's beautiful.

[Carlton Ward]

That's a headwaters of Fish Eating Creek. But entirely on a private ranch. Or, or the citrus groves are still safe passage for a bear. And pine forest, we have a lot of working forest in Florida, long rotation pine plantations. So all these agricultural pieces connected together make a corridor. And that became the foundation for the Florida Wildlife Corridor campaign I've spent my career advocating for.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

But that bear, when, you know, when it got to Interstate 4, there are very few places left where there's actually green on both sides of the road. He didn't find this place, but he more finds things like this where the, you can really see the new development just pushing out from Orlando.

[Interviewer]

God, dude.

[Carlton Ward]

So this is, this is around 2006. I'm learning about the bears. I'm also learning about the science of wildlife corridors. And this is a map that came out in 2006 called population 2060.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

And,000 friends of Florida, Florida Department of Agriculture and University of Florida collaborated on this and they did a population growth projection to say, okay, we know people will keep coming to Florida. We think the population is going to double to 30 million people by the year 2060. What's that going to look like? And so they did some projections. So you look at the red, that's the development footprint in 2006. The green, the green space here are the public lands. That's that 10 million acres of public lands that Florida has. Everglades national park and Big Cypress National Preserve down in the south with the other associated lands, makes up about 4 million acres, which is twice the size of Yellowstone national park that we have kind of sitting between Naples and Miami.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

And then other big green swaths going up just north and east of Tampa, you have the Green Swamp, you have Ocala National Forest up the spine of the state. Over in the Panhandle, you have Apalachicola National Forest and other associated state lands, which are about a million acres of conservation there. Further out in the Panhandle, that next big green space is Eglin Air Force Base, which has a lot of conservation lands on it. And so pay attention to the red area as they forecast the development through 2060. And it's kind of a wake up call because you can see the consequence for the green space like the Everglades.

[Interviewer]

Can you go back one more time and then go forward again?

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

So this is what they called the, the, the trend development. This is what would have looked like if development continues on its same current pattern, same.

[Interviewer]

The same rate that it's expanding, the.

[Carlton Ward]

Same rate in the same sprawling consumption without really intentional conservation. And you can see how it, it renders conservation lands as islands surrounded by development or separated from one another. However, it doesn't have to be that way and.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And this was another map from that same time period? No, this is actually a map from 1994. A scientist named Reed Noss at the University of Central Florida published this. Another scientist named Larry Harris from University of Florida had kind of planted the seeds for it. He wrote a book called the Fragmented Forest and it talked about how we need to have corridors connecting up all the reserves so they all function and the species can stay connected. So this is well established thinking in the science community. When I came on the scene in 2006, this is still relatively obscure science that's not finding its way into the public conversation. It's not finding its way into the policies. And that's where, that's where the Florida Wildlife Corridor idea was born. It took the underlying science of the Florida Ecological Greenways Network that wasn't being put in practice politically or in people's identity of Florida. And we basically named it the Florida Wildlife Corridor and brought that story to life through expeditions and storytelling.

[Interviewer]

Wow. Now, okay, so a wildlife corridor like this, I could see how it would be really difficult for Florida because it is a peninsula. But do we know or do we have any idea how not having that corridor, having all these Greenlands and these, these protected national parks basically siloed from each other, do we Know like how that negatively impacts species and evolution and all that.

[Carlton Ward]

Yes, yeah. It's called island biogeography and the science of it. E. O. Wilson, famous Harvard biologist who coined the term biophilia and wrote a book called Half Earth that talks about how much of the planet we need to save for balance. But he, he did a lot of studies here. But basically as the island of habitat gets smaller and more isolated, the number of species decrease. And it's kind of a classic study in ecology and it affects a wide ranging animals first. The bigger your territory, the more, the more it hurts you. So if you're a panther or a bear that needs a lot of territory, you're going to become inbred faster, genetically isolated faster, go regionally extinct faster than a lizard or some other animal who can still have a high genetic diversity in a smaller patch of habitat.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

But it's really not good for wildlife. It's also not good for ecosystems because, you know, rewind the clock just 200 years. You know, if you think about, you know, for all the evidence to this suggests that anatomically modern Homo sapiens that would look like you or me had been on the planet for 200,000 years. And so 200 years of that, that's 0.1%, you know, 99.9 of all human existence. The Earth was connected and whole, you know, you know, you didn't have to have a wildlife corridor because everything was connected and whole and you had pockets of human population interspersed among a wild place, a wild living, connected planet. Well, things that keep nature cycling, things that keep climate stable, things that keep things healthy, like storms and natural fires that burn across the landscape. Like once you start to shrink it down smaller and smaller, you can't burn the landscape anymore because the subdivision of the condo next door won't let you do it. And the fire is what resets and refreshes the ecosystem. And so you start to have a lot of impacts. And then when it comes to watersheds and the way water flows across the landscape in Florida in the summer, as you know, the whole thing's a wetland. And so the water has to gather and drain and recharge the aquifer and fill back up the rivers. And we've had to, we've chosen to channelize it and put in canals and put in drainage to help it be more useful for human needs. And same kind of thing. So it's the, the word is fragmentation. And, and the fragmentation definitely affects the wildlife, but it affects the ecosystem as a whole. When it comes to water and resilience and fire and all the different things that need a connected landscape.

[Interviewer]

Wow. That's incredible. That's insane.

[Carlton Ward]

So this project has been kind of the focus of my career ever since I kind of first spoke the words Florida wildlife corridor around 2007, 2008. But in, in, in 2012, the red line depicts the 100 day thousand mile expedition that myself, that bear biologist Joe Guthrie, and a fellow conservationist Mallory Demet and I took. And we, we went for 100 days and a thousand miles from the Everglades to Georgia to show that you still had a connected corridor through the state. And there was a.

[Interviewer]

On foot.

[Carlton Ward]

On foot and paddling here. Here we are. Here we are in Everglades National Park.

[Interviewer]

That's incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

Really naive, idealistic, 30 year old or who's about to. Didn't know what I was getting into.

[Interviewer]

That's incredible, dude.

[Carlton Ward]

But we, we followed this route, stitching together the public in their private lands. And all those relationships with the ranchers came back into this mission because we crossed and camped on 30 different cattle ranches as we tried to connect the dots through the state. And so those expeditions, we did a pair of them. We came back in 2015 and did another expedition starting from the midway point of the 2012 expedition and followed the Wildlife Corridor, the patchwork of public and private lands around the Gulf Coast, Alabama.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

To show that the corridor still existed there. And so that's.

[Interviewer]

And so does this, do these corridors still exist today?

[Carlton Ward]

Largely, yes.

[Interviewer]

Largely, yes. Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

And we, we got, we led a campaign in 2020, in 2020 and 2021, that helped get the Florida Wildlife Corridor act passed by the Florida Legislature. There's unanimous bipartisan support for the legislation that designated this as an official priority for the state's conservation programs. And then, since then, it kind of re. Motivated the land conservation programs, the Florida Forever program that I mentioned. Roland Family Lands Protection. They had been making significant investments in buying state parks and doing conservation easements. It was really bipartisan, you know, Florida Forever, its precursor called Preservation 2000, was started in 1990 by Republican Governor Bob Martinez. It was continued by Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist. It's always had bipartisan and conservative support. But around 2010, with the advent of the Tea Party, it got polarized and it got treated like an environmental extra. And people started saying, well, what? We already have 10 million acres of public land, why do we need more conservation? Because this story wasn't being told, you know, the fact that we need to keep it connected. So, you know, there was a point in 2014, 2015, where we're spending almost no money on land protection each year, even though development's going full steam ahead and we're losing land way faster than we're protecting it. So there was a group of environmental organizations that put forth a constitutional amendment in 2014 called the Water and Land Legacy act that tried to hold the lawmakers feet to certain investment in land conservation. It said that you're going to take one third of all the real estate documentary stamp taxes and invest it in conservation. But that legislation was written a little too broadly and included management and some other things in it. And the legislature was frustrated that they were being told what to do with their, you know, limited amount of discretionary part of the budget, and decided to spend that money on other existing programs rather than buying more land and protecting more land. And so it even got more polarized because groups like the Florida Wildlife Federation, the Sierra Club, are in a lawsuit against the state legislature for not spending the money on conservation. And everything started getting divided into a Democrat, Republican, urban, rural kind of thing. But in 2021, with the Florida Wildlife Corridor story, with presenting the logic of filling in the gaps, you know, you've got all this legacy of conservation. You've got a cattle ranch. If you have a state park here and a national park there and a cattle ranch in between, a lot of people can agree that it'd be great to try to find a solution to help that rancher keep it. A cattle ranch.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Carlton Ward]

And people see the logic in it. And by framing conservation in the state through the lens of the Florida Wildlife Corridor, they went from polarized to everybody on. On the same page again. And it had unanimous bipartisan support. And all those land conservation programs like Florida Forever that had been cut to zero got funded at full, you know, 100 million 200, $300 million a year again. And so since. Since the Florida Wildlife quarter Act in 2021, there's been more than $2 billion of state funds allocated towards the Florida Wildlife Corridor. And there's been now more than 400,000 acres of land just in the past five years that have been protected through conservation easements and acquisitions. So it's really, like, it's really moving again because people can see how it all fits together and understand that this is a really good investment for the future of Florida, no matter what your perspective is.

[Interviewer]

Are there any. Who are the biggest opponents of this? Like, are there. Like, are there any corporation, lobbyist groups or. Or any. Anything like that? Any people like this that are that are pushing back against this idea because this is like a general idea that all humans can agree on. Like, like it's bad to litter and it's bad to kill animals. Right. Like it's bad at least, you know, unless you're gonna eat them. Exactly. It's about to make other species go extinct.

[Carlton Ward]

Right.

[Interviewer]

So, yeah. Who, who would be the, the groups that would be most opposed to this stuff?

[Carlton Ward]

I don't think there's anyone that I met. It's opposed to the idea of it. There are some people who are real anti government mindset where you don't want to be spending any taxpayer dollars on anything other than, you know, you want to. You want to reduce taxes and you don't want to spend public funds on things like land protection. So there are some people who philosophically don't believe in that the state should be in the business of land protection, but that's a minority. And for the most part, people really understand the value. And if you go back to that constitutional amendment I mentioned in 2014, whether it got implemented or not, it was a great kind of gut check for people's. How much people care about conservation because 75% of voters voted for that water and land legacy amendment.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

And so conservation, initially, people care about conservation. People want to preserve what they love about Florida. And I think one of the challenges is before the Florida Wildlife Corridor, there wasn't a connection to what that meant, you know, like, you know, so this gives a framework and a purpose and an identity for trying to achieve it. And this is the other reason why this, I think, is not received the type of opposition that it could, is that this is being done not as a regulatory solution, but as an incentive based solution. And so it's not like the government's saying to that rancher, you can never sell that ranch for a development. They're saying, we want to buy your development rights from you so that you have the option to keep ranching and preserve your ranch.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And keeping it where it's attractive to everybody involved is the way that you can really make strides with this stuff.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that's really smart. Do we know, are there any other states dealing with this same problem?

[Carlton Ward]

Every state is dealing with a problem in different degrees. I mean, Florida is like an accelerator for it because of the population turnover, because of how many people are moving here, and because the state is relatively narrow.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Carlton Ward]

You know, if you are, if you are Georgia even, or, or Texas, you know, there's enough space oftentimes that you can have more time before the battle lines get drawn so clearly. But in Florida, there are places like, literally, if. If you don't save this area in the next 10 years, the state's cut in half.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

And that. And so it. It kind of makes clear what needs to happen to keep the balance.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that makes total sense.

[Carlton Ward]

While we're here on the corridor map, I'll. I'll point out kind of. I kind of went straight into it without giving the kind of Florida Wildlife Corridor 101. But the dark green here are the. Or, sorry, the light green in the painting are the existing protected areas.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

It's that 10 million acres that we talked about.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

That's already protected but is at risk of becoming islands. The rest of it is called the opportunity area. And those are most often farms and ranches and other green spaces that have all the qualities for water and wildlife to keep a connected landscape, but they don't have protection. They could be a development or a subdivision at any time. And so that's 8 million acres. So there's 10 million acres protected. There's 8 million acres of opportunity area.

[Interviewer]

What color is the 8 million?

[Carlton Ward]

The 8 million is the darker green in the dark green.

[Interviewer]

Okay, gotcha.

[Carlton Ward]

I think. Yeah. It should say it on the.

[Interviewer]

Okay. On the little key at the bottom.

[Carlton Ward]

On the key. There are other maps I can share. This is kind of a watercolor version that we came up with. It kind of presents the big idea without getting into kind of pixel peeping of whether your ranch is in or out. It just shows. It shows the concept.

[Interviewer]

Clever.

[Carlton Ward]

But, yeah, this is a universal issue. I mean, I think here I'm going to fast forward to the slide I did at the end of my talk last night. This is. This is a half Earth project. I mentioned that E.O. wilson. Let me see if I can get it to play. There's a website I can point you to, but all these green areas are the current protected areas across the Earth.

[Interviewer]

Oh, interesting.

[Carlton Ward]

And you can see there's quite a bit of it. But it all is set up in a similar way to what we saw in Florida, where those conservation lands could become all disconnected from one another depending on what happens with the lands in between. If you're in South America and you're.

[Interviewer]

A jaguar, look at the Amazon.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. Amazon has a lot more protection, but, you know, lots of need for more protection, too.

[Interviewer]

I mean, they're not just dealing. Yeah. They're dealing with. With other countries coming in there, trying to suck up the resources and monetize it.

[Carlton Ward]

Yes. And you Know, and for kind of forever decisions of, you know, clear cutting forest and moving it to a different land use, you're never going to really get it back or it's much harder to do that. But the, the idea that E.O. wilson helped popularize, and he was an amazing scientist. I had a chance to meet him in 2014. I did an assignment for Smithsonian magazine illustrating a story about him where they introduced this idea called Half Earth where they wanted all his, all his studies suggested we need to set aside half the planet's land and oceans for nature in order to stave off the extinction crisis and to sustain balance.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

For the whole planet. And right now 15 of the land is protected and 8% of the oceans.

[Interviewer]

And how much percent of the oceans?

[Carlton Ward]

8. Only 8 and only 3% have any level of enforcement. So it's like between 3 and 8% of the oceans, depending how you count it. And so the, the idea is that we need to get to half Earth being protected in order to stabilize climate, in order to preserve the diversity of life that we share this planet with. And my belief is that wildlife corridors are the kind of frameworks that help us get there. Yeah, it's not like a top down. Someone in the UN tells you what you're supposed to do with your country. There can be. Florida identifies its own wildlife corridor, organizes around protecting it, takes federal resources when available to help them. Georgia can do the same thing, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and move on up the east coast. And you end up with an Appalachian corridor.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

That's done state by state, connects the whole country driven by local interest and state by state, country by country, continent by continent. And you could scale up to a, like a truly global, connected landscape.

[Interviewer]

Before we know, we'll have saber tooth tigers showing up in our driveways.

[Carlton Ward]

That's right. Well, yeah, if you, if you get the genetic stuff going along the side.

[Interviewer]

Oh yes, I want to ask you about that too.

[Carlton Ward]

You bring them back. They'll have space. They'll have space. Maybe, maybe we won't advertise on that. Well, these things, these things go in the ocean too though. So this, this is the work that. Here, I'll show you this picture.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I was going to ask, I was going to like 8% of the oceans, the earth is 70 something percent ocean.

[Carlton Ward]

Right.

[Interviewer]

And you know, a vast majority of it is unexplored. And when you say protect the ocean, you mean the fishing, the fisheries?

[Carlton Ward]

Well, it would be identifying an area as a marine protected area. And that would either exclude fishing or exclude Commercial fishing or intensive fishing.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

If you haven't seen it, check out the David Attenborough film Ocean that's on the Nat Geo Channel. Or it's on, it's on Disney plus under National Geographic right now. It changed my perspective about things like trawling for shrimp.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, really.

[Carlton Ward]

They put cameras on the trawlers and you see what it does to the ocean floor, and it just helps you. It's not out of sight, out of mind anymore. I can't unsee it. Like, I've seen the destruction that happens from these trawl nets dragging the ocean. I don't know how it's practiced, if it differs in different countries or different ways, but what they showed is like, oh, my gosh, it's, it's not worth it.

[Interviewer]

Like.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer]

Are you familiar with the, the, like the fishing situation on the Gulf Coast? Like with the, with the, with the quota system and ifqs and all that?

[Carlton Ward]

I'm not dialed into it. I know, I know it exists, but I don't know the, I don't know the pros and cons or the tensions on it right now.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know the current state of it either. But it's. When I was investigating it, like back in 2014, 2015, it was, it was pretty gruesome. Like, they, they have these, these quotas. I think it was in the early 2000s, the federal government set a, a limit of 3 million pounds of red snapper per year in the Gulf and in like, this specific area of the Gulf. And there was like, derby fishing, right? So all the, all the boats could go out and catch as much as they wanted. They would come back after fishing, weigh their way, and report how much they caught. And a lot of times they would hit the 3 million quota in like October, so November, December, they have to stop fishing. So after that started happening, what they did was the federal government created a monopoly with this fishing quota. And what they did was they gave boat owners an allotted amount of, of IFQ quota per year. And so if that's red grouper, that's like a dollar a pound. So some of these guys got a hundred thousand pounds of quota a year. Some guys got £250,000 of quota a year every single year, just based on previous fishing catch history. And so these, these boat owners got the best retirement plan known to man. And now you don't even have to own a boat to have this fishing quota. You can be sitting in Manhattan in a high rise and you can be traded. You can trade this IFQ on the Internet like stock. It's insane.

[Carlton Ward]

Oh, wow.

[Interviewer]

So now the fishermen, the deckhands on the boats who are breaking their fingers pulling up these fish are getting paid barely anything. This, I don't know if this is how it's happening now. This is the way it was going in 2015 and these guys were heroin addicts, pill addicts, drunks. They were basically just getting high and running out of drugs and then going to the fish house and begging them to let them go offshore to catch fish for two weeks so they would have enough money to come back and pay for drugs like they were. No one was taking care of them and they were just getting the scraps. Because the way this whole IFQ system works where, you know, all these people at the top are making the vast amount of money.

[Carlton Ward]

Right. And they might as well hire Asian immigrants who are, you know, in the country, you know, it's just like it doesn't, doesn't support the local.

[Interviewer]

Not at all.

[Carlton Ward]

Right.

[Interviewer]

And in the north, some of the northeast states up in the Northeast, it's, it's. The whole fishing community is way different. It's where the boats are owner, they have to be owner operated.

[Carlton Ward]

Right. Well, that's. And you, you see that in the Southeast. And I, I think, I don't want to say, take what I said about Asian immigrants out of context, but it's like they're, they'll take advantage of the person who will work for the lowest wage.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Carlton Ward]

And whether that's the desperate drug addicted local person on the Gulf coast or someone who comes in looking for work that's just a little bit better than what they had in their home country. 100 anyway. And I have a real like appreciation of fishing people and, you know, how hard they work and the people who are connected to the ecosystem. And so I don't like the idea of taking their livelihood away by barring certain types of fishing. But you also have to look at the long term and you want fish to be there for the next generation. There has to be some sort of regulation in place that makes it work. Like taking out. Take fish like tuna. They're just being obliterated. And the average size of tuna gets smaller and smaller and smaller year after year.

[Interviewer]

Really?

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. The bluefin tuna, I mean, it's. And it's. Because the high seas, I mean, it's. You cannot. We have our exclusive economic zone that's 200 miles offshore where we can enforce policy. We can exclude other countries from Coming in and taking those fish. But you go outside that 200 miles, it's a free for all, and people are flying. You know, the Chinese do it a lot. You have these factory ships where they go out there, they catch the fish, they process the fish on the ship.

[Interviewer]

On the ship.

[Carlton Ward]

It's a huge factory and they just go set up 201 miles off the coast of anywhere and have at it. Or they strike a deal with an African country that says, hey, we're going to give you some broadband or help you build some roads and you let us pillage your coastline. And none of that money comes back to support that country. It all goes back right into whoever sent the factory ship there to do it.

[Interviewer]

Somebody was telling us. Who was telling us about this recently, Steve? Somebody was telling us it was one of the. It was either Mexico or some Central American countries had just loads of chi, these Chinese factory ships just catching tons of fish. And it was just. It was like hurting their economy. I forget who that was.

[Carlton Ward]

I think it's a. It's everywhere.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

I mean, it's Africa. It's all right because of South America. It's the, the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. It's a challenge because you have people coming there to catch the, the krill and catch all this abundant life. Well, it, that, that, that food is supporting all the whales and all the migratory species and the penguins and everything that needs it. And like how you can only take out a certain amount before everything else it depends on it starts to decline. And you. And you put a market on it and like what you're saying, you disconnect that market from the local people and you put it in some international exchange, then it's just going to drive it closer and closer to depletion.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

Because there's no checks and balances. There's no reason they don't care. Y. You know, those, those markets are indifferent to whether it's going to be sustainable or the quality of life for the people working on the boats is good or not. 100. All about how these numbers are compared to whatever else we would be investing in.

[Interviewer]

Right, Right. Hold that thought. I got to take a leak real quick.

[Carlton Ward]

Okay.

[Interviewer]

We'll be right back.

[Carlton Ward]

Well, we're talking about ocean, so. Yeah, where. Yeah, where do you think? I took that picture.

[Interviewer]

Let me offshore. The Gulf.

[Carlton Ward]

Yep. Yeah, yeah. 30 miles off of St. Pete. Yeah, right out here.

[Interviewer]

I've seen a couple of them offshore here.

[Carlton Ward]

That's awesome.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Dude, they're. They're incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

The scientist that there's a guy from Noah putting a satellite tag on its fin and they tagged 13 of them last May off of them, you know, 30, 50 miles off of St. Pete. And a lot of the tags failed. They're experimenting with some tags that just clip on and I think some of them fell off, but.

[Interviewer]

Oh, really?

[Carlton Ward]

The ones that are still reporting, one of them went to the Hudson, Hudson Valley off New York. What, during the summer. And one of them, one of them went to Bermuda, another one off the Bahamas. So they're going to try to do it again. I mean, Noah's in a tough time funding wise with the federal government right now, but.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

If they can cobble the funds together to keep the research going, they'll try to put some more tags out this, this spring if they come, if this, if the whale starts showing up again in May, early June. Put some more tags on and see where they go.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I've been following the, the tag, the tagged great whites all around Florida.

[Carlton Ward]

Oh yeah. Off o search or.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Well, now there's an Instagram page I follow. I forget what one it is, but it shows the updates, like where they are. I think there was one literally swimming right off like, like 10 miles off New Smyrna beach yesterday or two days ago.

[Carlton Ward]

Wow, that's amazing.

[Interviewer]

That's crazy how many of them are coming down here.

[Carlton Ward]

And here's. This is some of the work on the golf project we're doing. But here's researchers from FSU putting a. That's a camera tag they put on a loggerhead sea turtle.

[Interviewer]

Does that mess up his swimming at all?

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, that one, that one stays on for, for like 24 hours and pops off.

[Interviewer]

Oh, okay.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, that kind of tag is short term. There, there's some other ones where they kind of cement it or epoxy it onto the shell. Right. But it's way lower profile. Right. And they'll stay on for. Keep some more air a couple years or. Yeah, you kind of slide. Slide through the water. Yeah. So. Yeah. What, what next? What do we want to talk about? Oh, I was going to show you, I was going to show you the appellation. I was mentioning how you could have corridors state by state that kind of frame up to a bigger connected landscape. Right. This is a map of the Nature Conservancy has done kind of mapping out these priority conservation areas. And then they have a vision for having a connected corridor up the Appalachians.

[Interviewer]

Oh, that's amazing, man.

[Carlton Ward]

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart Move being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move, having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.

[Interviewer]

Limu Emu and Doug, here we have the Limu Imu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[Carlton Ward]

Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.

[Interviewer]

They see us. Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.

[Carlton Ward]

And in order, you know, to have success with something like this, you need the big picture story about the Appalachians and why they should be connected. But then you need to have kind of storytelling at the level of policy. And so what I mean by that is there's no governing body of the Appalachians who can implement something like this. It's going to be up to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, all the, all the individual states to kind of create their own solution to support it. So you can set a big vision with storytelling. And then you also need to have an identified wildlife corridor plan for each state that works together to create a bigger connection.

[Interviewer]

Yes, yes, totally. All right, let's talk about the, let's talk about the Florida panther.

[Carlton Ward]

Okay, that. How did this thing, I can talk.

[Interviewer]

About, how did this whole thing start for you with the Florida panther?

[Carlton Ward]

So I, I finished, I finished the 2015 Florida Wildlife Quarter Expedition. And so here, three years in to the expeditions, we trekked 2,000 miles through the state. We've generated a lot of awareness with stakeholders like people who are connected to that story, but we still haven't kind of broken through to the mainstream with it or created the political impact of actually getting things protected. So I was looking to try to do more. And at the same time, that same summer, right when I got got done with the 2015 expedition, I got an assignment from National Geographic Travel, just a digital assignment. It was a partnership with Visit Florida, I think, to go photograph 10, 10 parks in South Florida. So places like Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary near Naples or Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. And when I saw Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, I was like, I'm going to dust off my camera traps and I'm going to get a panther photo. And of Course, this is a one day digital assignment and I decided to spend two months trying to camera trap a panther for it. So I'm not, not the best business person in that sense. But. But it kind of. I was already like wanting to be more engaged or learn more about that story.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

So this is one of the pictures I got. I found this amazing spot. I worked with the panther biologist from the Fish and Wildlife Service, David Schindel, who took me down to the edge of the Fakahatchee strand in the, in the end of the dry season, this is flooded, you know, more than half the year, where you have these strap ferns and dark peat soils and cypress knees and this, this otherworldly landscape where if I could get a panther in that place, it would be like the Florida panther. Like, there's no denying that that animal is in Florida. It's not, it's not a mountain lion in Texas or California. It is here in the Florida swamps in this uniquely Florida environment. So that's what I was going for.

[Interviewer]

And how rare is the Florida at this point in time? How rare was the Florida panther?

[Carlton Ward]

This, I mean, this is only.

[Interviewer]

Do we know how many of them were.

[Carlton Ward]

This is only eight or nine years ago, so the numbers haven't changed a whole lot since then. But it's an estimate of 200. 200, 200 adults. Wow. There were. There were fewer than 20 panthers in the 1970s when they were first put on the endangered species list. And the thing about the panther is it is the last remnant population of the puma east of the Mississippi River. So the panther, Florida panther, mountain lion, puma, it's all the same animal. Right. But they were wiped out of existence everywhere east of the Mississippi other than the Everglades. And it's because the Everglades were so remote, so inhospitable for human development, that the panthers were able to persist. Because panthers were persecuted by early settlers, There were bounties on them. People wanted them gone. So they were hunted. They were, you know, perceived and actual competition for livestock. But there was also a lot of fear that drove a lot of that. So people were hunting panthers on bounties.

[Interviewer]

Do they mess with humans?

[Carlton Ward]

There's never been a documented case in Florida. I mean, I know of some turkey hunters who probably their pants, when they woke, fall. Fall asleep at the base of a pine tree and woke up and you got a panther stalking your turkey decoys. But wow. Yeah. No one's ever been attacked.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

That we're aware of. But so I. How this started for me I, I wrote a blog about this for Nat Geo and this is the panther picture I got in those two months of trying to get a camera trap. And so the blog I wrote was called cooperative bear frustrating panther. But this kind of hooked me because there she was. I know she's out there, but a male part Florida panther has a home range of 200 square miles. So they need a lot of land. That's an area twice the size of Orlando that one panther will patrol.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

You know, throughout their defending of a territory and looking for, looking for mates in the very best spots. I would see a panther come through once a month, you know, and so trying to get it all right to get the pictures. It ended up being, you know, six year long.

[Interviewer]

How many camera traps did you have to build and set up?

[Carlton Ward]

I had, I started with four. At one point I had as many as like eight or nine going. And then we started adding video camera traps. We started doing the film.

[Interviewer]

Incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

Started playing 4K, you know, Sony video systems out in the swamp. Trying to do that at scale. But that was fun because in the photo you get this really decisive moment, but you don't get the sounds, you don't get the whole.

[Interviewer]

Oh, you have audio?

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, we had audio.

[Interviewer]

How'd you do that? Through the pelican case.

[Carlton Ward]

You get a little, get a little hot shoe type microphone.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

Put a Gore Tex bag over it. And then you drill a hole through the pelican and run the three agent stereo plug like down into the camera. Oh, this is like a port.

[Interviewer]

I'm sure those would get ruined a lot, right?

[Carlton Ward]

Everything got ruined.

[Interviewer]

Everything got ruined.

[Carlton Ward]

But here's, here's like, here's what it looked like for me the first, the first year of trying on this particular spot. Another spot I was really excited about. And I, I was saying, I guess smarter photographer would pick the other side of the log at this point. But I'm getting, getting a real gender study here. If you wanted to, if you wanted to know whether it's.

[Interviewer]

That's hilarious.

[Carlton Ward]

The male female ratio is very clear.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Carlton Ward]

In these super cooperative bears again. And then panthers are just like tail.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

Just juking me. But the bears were not always cooperative. Here, here. It took me a while to me putting a camera, pointing at my camera to understand why they weren't working when I came back to change the batteries a month later.

[Interviewer]

Oh, no.

[Carlton Ward]

He's like flossing his teeth with my, with my flash.

[Interviewer]

Everything's going off.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. But I'm not getting the picture because it's Pointed.

[Interviewer]

Oh, God.

[Carlton Ward]

Somewhere else.

[Interviewer]

That's terrible. Oh, no.

[Carlton Ward]

Like, what is this? And he's gonna scratch on it. He's a furry animal in the swamp. He's like. That feels good. Yep.

[Interviewer]

No, they can't get in that. They never like actually damage the camera, right? No, but they can like, they can.

[Carlton Ward]

Obviously mess up all the wires. I mean, I, I had, I have a camera. I had a camera stolen at one point. I had one shot on the, on the edge of the corkscrew swamp there. There's a.

[Interviewer]

Can you put it on somebody's property or something?

[Carlton Ward]

No, it was on the. It was on the Audubon sanctuary's property.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

It was pointed at the fence. I got. I'll. I'll show you the picture I got with it. I got this picture with it, which. Wow, that's beautiful. And if you look here, this thing placed in the world press photo competition one year. But if you look here, there's a. One of her kittens is just hidden.

[Interviewer]

Oh yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

Had that kitten just been standing here in the free space, it would have been like next level. But anyway, I'm pretty happy with the picture. Anyway, I set the camera on the barbed wire fence to basically show that from the perspective of a panther, it's all one territory. So this panther's walking from a cattle ranch onto the Audubon's property. Corpse Crew swamp sanctuary, if you've never been, is amazing ancient old Grove Cyprus. It's just near Naples and It's a beautiful 3 mile long boardwalk through the cypress trees. And you can. It's like a window in time, you know, Cyprus has never been logged. 500 year old trees, beautiful. Wow. So this is a 220 square mile sanctuary, but remember that a male panther has a territory of up to 200 square miles. And so the only way that panthers survive in that landscape is if you keep corkscrew connected to bigger landscapes around it. And that involves a cattle ranch next door in this case. And the landowner was. I got his permission to put the camera there. It wasn't even on his property. He's just pointing in that direction. But I think one of the hunters who was hunting out there didn't get the memo and felt threatened by it. I went out there and there's like a, you know, hole on the side of it and my camera's body's exploded and there's like a 2, 2, 3 round. Like.

[Interviewer]

Did the memory card survive?

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer]

Did I get a shot of the guy who shot it?

[Carlton Ward]

No, because he, he was probably 20ft away on the other side of the fence. So.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

He just smoked it without.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

So I was like, well, there's that. Add that.

[Interviewer]

That's insane, man.

[Carlton Ward]

Hurricane Irma did a doozy on him, too.

[Interviewer]

Oh, yeah. Opening up. I saw the. Opening up the cases and just water pouring out of the cases.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. I'll show you a picture. I got it. We. We didn't. In the. There's a. There's a scene where I like you. I won't play the video because you've seen it, but I got the.

[Interviewer]

No, I want. Let's. You can play.

[Carlton Ward]

It looks like there is water in this camera box.

[Interviewer]

This was right after Irma.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, well, like. Like 10 days after because they wouldn't let us in to the panther refuge.

[Interviewer]

Oh, really?

[Carlton Ward]

Because it's all. Everything's shut down. And we had to chainsaw our way back to get down the roads at this point. But.

[Interviewer]

Oh, my camera's cooked.

[Carlton Ward]

Herman takes out one more camera.

[Interviewer]

What kind of cameras were this?

[Carlton Ward]

A Nikon D800. This one hurt.

[Interviewer]

Now, when that happens to the memory card survive.

[Carlton Ward]

That memory card survived. And the cool thing about that one is.

[Interviewer]

So that. That. That's like a little bit of a. Like a silver lining in your camera breaking.

[Carlton Ward]

Well, see, I. I had. I knew the hurricane was coming generally towards that area, and I had this decision, like, a week ahead of time. Like, do I go to take all my cameras out or. And. And potentially miss the one panther shot I've been waiting for two years for, or do I roll the dice and hope they survive and go, like, raise them up as high as I can? So I decided to leave them in because you never know which. Whether the storm's going to come or not.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

Well, the storm did come, and last.

[Interviewer]

Minute, it went, like, inland, Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And just crushed. Put a lot of water in a lot of places. So when that. When that camera, before it toppled over, it did like, a time lapse of just all these false triggers from when the storm was really bad. And then there's like, a video of, like, it's down.

[Interviewer]

Oh, God.

[Carlton Ward]

But on the card, like, buried under all those 3, 000 false triggers, I found this picture. Whoa.

[Interviewer]

Is that in the rain?

[Carlton Ward]

In the rain.

[Interviewer]

That's wild.

[Carlton Ward]

Jumping over the swamp. So I was like.

[Interviewer]

So this is, like, right when the hurricane was hitting.

[Carlton Ward]

I think this was like, a couple days before the hurricane and just a big thunderstorm that happened in the days before. Yeah, I was pretty excited about that.

[Interviewer]

That's incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

So Finally, I was like, yes. Like, the world will see this.

[Interviewer]

To find one photo like this out of having nine cameras buried in the woods for months on end must make all of it worth it for you.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, and this is. This is like two years in, and I was like, half ready to quit because I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I start out on this, like, trail to glory to get my first National Geographic story on the Florida panther. And yeah, I'm like, I've got nothing. I've got nothing because. Because I have to show the panther with as much, like, beauty and power as my colleagues have shown the snow leopards or the tigers in India. You know, it has to stand shoulder to shoulder of all these other cats around the world. It tends to just be like, oh, look at the panther in that picture. It's got to be a picture like this. And so finally. And so, yeah, I was like, that's insane, man. I was ready to go. Like, I felt. Felt the power of the swamp at that point. Yeah, here we go. And so this, this was like. This became like my. My office and my sanctuary for a while. This is a selfie when I was. I got distracted by the ghost orchid when I was down there because I was camera trapping panthers. But it's part of the fat Kahatchi strand. And there were these scientists from Cuba and different universities around the country who were. Who come in in the summer to survey the ghost orchids.

[Interviewer]

And what are the ghost orchids?

[Carlton Ward]

It's this. I don't have a picture of it in here, but it's this really elegant white orchid that grows on the pop ash or the pond, apple trees and swamps that look like this. And my friend Max Stone had talked about wanting to camera trap him before, but no one conclusively knew what pollinates the ghost orchid. There's this theory that it's the giant sphinx moth, which is kind of like scientific canon. People just, oh, it must be the giant sphinx moth. But no one had proven that. So I had the camera traps and the laser triggers and all this stuff. I'm like, well, we can maybe camera trap a ghost orchid, see what comes in. Well, that turned into a. Took three summers of, you know, trying one these. There's about 2, 000 ghost orchids in the wild in Florida. About 1 in 10 of those bloom each year for a couple weeks in the summer, in the peak of the summer, and maybe 1 in 10 of those get pollinated. So you really have to be.

[Interviewer]

Wow, now what's the Significance, like what's, what's the. There. I mean, they look incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

They're really cool. They're rare. There's a lot of like, lore to them, but it's just, it's a, it's a rarity. And the beauty of them. Yeah, that' of draws you in. But, but we finally got this, got the system working and photographed five different moth species probing or pollinating the ghost orchid. There's a Nat Geo story about, there's scientific papers written about was pretty cool.

[Interviewer]

Whoa.

[Carlton Ward]

But that's what I'm doing in, in this, that picture I was showing you, I was like, I didn't paddle board to my normal panther camera trap, but.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

But we, the ghost orchid would be growing like and near that vermilion, like in that kind of environment. But, but I was really trying to show the panthers like, wow, in the swamp, you know, because if it wasn't for their ability to persist in an environment like this, they wouldn't be here because we killed them everywhere else. You know, humans killed them everywhere else where we wanted to be and. But because they could survive in this swamp outside the reach of our development, I mean, it's kind of.

[Interviewer]

They're kind of like a water hybrid mountain lion, right?

[Carlton Ward]

Well, yeah, I mean it's, I mean a mountain, a mountain lion could do this too. But it's just, it's just because they're adaptable enough. I mean, they live in this, in the Amazon. They live in Central America. They, they live throughout these different areas. And it has, it's. I have to be careful about how making this analogy. But it's. I don't think it's any coincidence that America's only unconquered native tribe and the Seminoles and Miccosukee also persevered in Everglades because it's like, right, you can have it.

[Interviewer]

No one wants to go in there.

[Carlton Ward]

Generals are like, you can have it. Right. And the panther, who, who is the most, one of the more significant clans and cultural elements for the Seminole people also persevered in that landscape.

[Interviewer]

That's incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

And yeah, this one, this is one. This is one of my favorites. This thing was.

[Interviewer]

Whoa.

[Carlton Ward]

There's this trail.

[Interviewer]

Why is he, why is he growling?

[Carlton Ward]

Just hissing.

[Interviewer]

Why is she hissing? Is that a year?

[Carlton Ward]

I think it's a he.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

I don't know. I don't, I don't think it likes water. I don't think it wants to be in there. There's some big ass gators in there. There's a lot Going. But, but this is an old logging trail that goes through the Fakahatchee. This is in Florida Panther National Wildlife refuge, north of I75. But there's this old logging trail that goes up through this ancient swamp and it, and it washes out. So there's an area that kind of turns into a pond and then the trail comes back up. So any animal that wants to travel that trail has to go through water, through this stretch.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

So I've got my camera set up on the other side, and there's, there's a video in the panther film where it kind of jumps over the water. It's at the same place.

[Interviewer]

Oh, okay. Now where on the totem pole on the hierarchy where, where do gators match up against panthers? Are gators more afraid of the panthers or vice versa?

[Carlton Ward]

I would, I mean, I, I would think that the most gators are afraid of the panther. Right? I mean, if you're a big enough gator, you're not afraid of much, right? You know, if you're like a 10 footer or 12 footer. But yeah, I would think that, I would think the gators on the menu, if you're a small gator for a panther.

[Interviewer]

Okay. And I think it's like that in the Amazon with like the cayman and the jaguars.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, jaguars crush caymans. Yeah, yeah, that's. I mean, jaguar is a bigger, stronger animal than a panther and they're adapted for hunting them there. But they have, they have, they do have evidence of panthers eating gators. It's probably smaller gators. But there's a video in the panther film where on the same trail, there's a gator at dry season, kind of like sunning itself on the edge and it just like scatters into the water and then. Oh yeah, like 10 seconds later, a female panther just cruising, cruises behind. So that gator was like, I'm out, you know?

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

I mean, they might be cautious and get in the water for anything, but now she looked like the queen in that one.

[Interviewer]

Are you ever, like, freaked out when you're out here by yourself, like, trekking through the, the, the freaking Everglades with all these wild animals around you? Like what, like, what's like the sketchiest situation you've been in? Or, like, is there any specific animal you're more afraid of?

[Carlton Ward]

Well, I try not to go alone because it's just not a good idea, you know, I mean, more likely gonna trip and break your ankle or something and then get eaten by an animal. But, like, you know, I try not to go solo, but a lot of times I did. I mean, the most dangerous thing I do is drive my car to get there, you know, statistically. Right. But I did, I did get inside a gator's mouth once and that was, that woke me up.

[Interviewer]

What do you mean? How did you get inside a gator's mouth and what part of you?

[Carlton Ward]

My hand and my upper leg. Groin. Oh, no, but it wasn't. So I was in. I've got pictures of it somewhere, but I haven't really told the story because I don't. It's not something you just put on social media without vilifying the swamp. But it. Oh yeah, but there's, there's one of these spots where we were doing a time lapse pictures of the swamp water coming up. And so I, I set up anchor points on the cypress knees in three different places where you could put a slider and then do a repeat move. Dry season, mid water and high water. And so in the panther film there are a few scenes where you can see the swamp water rising. So that's, that's how I created those. But I normally, I never go at dawn or dusk to my camera trap sites because I don't want to ruin the shot. You know, I don't want to show up when the panther I've been waiting for for two years is also about to walk through in beautiful lighting.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

So I try to go in the middle of the day when the lights crap and they're less likely to be there. Well, in this, this case, I was going at dawn to do that slider move so I could get really even lighting. It was like a 40 minute time lapse and I wanted the light to stay the same, so I needed to be before the sun was, was coming up too high and at the same spot I walked through dozens of times. Normally you take a machete, you cut a walking stick that's six or seven feet long where you can poke it out at a 45 degree angle in front of you as you walk through the swamp. So you don't like surprise a gator.

[Interviewer]

That's for gators.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, I just poke it in front of me when I walk. And I've never, I never had, I never scared anything off except maybe once. Never really had a close run in. So I left my machete on a swamp buggy on accident the night before and I didn't have it with me. And so I get to the end of the logging tram to go walk off into the swamp a short distance to get to where the camera trapped in the slider set up. And I just grabbed a, like a four foot long walking stick off this, off the ground and like just ceremoniously poking it in front of me as I walk. And right when I get to the deepest part of the swamp, it's like waist deep black water. It's like a head the size of a garbage can lid. It's like on my hand. And it was so fast. And I had the walking stick and I had this waterproof backpack on and I had a slider, like a four foot carbon fiber slider in a rifle case. Like. So I'm really like loaded down and kind of awkward and I just pull and fall backwards and there's a little bit of current coming around the, the edge of the swamp there. And I basically present my groin to the gator. It pops up and it hits me in the groin, like up lower stomach, groin. And it was like a toothy punch. He didn't, he didn't hold on to me. You know, I didn't have, I didn't have bite marks on both sides of me. It was just like bruise hole in my hand and bruising down the tip of my finger and then one hole in my side, like under my belt line, like through my skin, but just didn't go into the muscle and then like bruising where you don't want bruising, right. And, and, but it didn't hold on and I stood up on and ended up on its back as it like swam out from under me. It was probably like a nine foot gator from the, the look of it, or.

[Interviewer]

Jesus, dude.

[Carlton Ward]

So I was like.

[Interviewer]

So it was just like a defensive move.

[Carlton Ward]

It was a defensive move. Maybe. I think it probably heard me coming. Just it was big enough that it probably had its feet and tail on the ground in 4ft of water and just dunked its head under enough where it was just sitting there and I just walked right into it, right? And it was like bam, bam. And I kicked my ass real fast.

[Interviewer]

And you were lucky, man.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, no, had I, yeah, had it wanted me, it would have gotten my arm or worse, you know, either ripped my arm off or drowned me or, you know, something. But. Yeah, but it didn't. So that was like, that was like I basically walked into a gator in four feet of water and all it did was bite my hand and, you know, crunch my balls.

[Interviewer]

But that's interesting. That's interesting that it didn't try to like eat you or take you because like, you Hear about the stories of gators eating dogs and people in like suburban areas. Right? Like retention ponds or lakes that are like around housing developments or trails and stuff like that. So they've probably become used to those people or animals and hunt them.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I mean, and this thing's probably never seen a human.

[Carlton Ward]

It might not. And, and I don't, I mean, unless you're a fed gator and, or unless you're a really big gator, like 12ft, like someone my size or your size isn't on the menu typically. I mean, it's like it had I had, I had a dog swamped in there, the thing would have eaten the dog. But I think it was just me with all my backpack and all my stuff. Just, you know, some, some instincts, like, not worth it, you know, not return of investment, not worth it. Right. But yeah, I mean it's, it's a truly wild gator in a wild place, which is also a safer animal to interact with than one that's being fed leftover catfish at the boat dock.

[Interviewer]

Right. Have you, you know Manny Puig?

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Have you seen the Foot?

[Carlton Ward]

I know of him, yeah. He's never met him, but he's a wild man.

[Interviewer]

He's wild. He, he makes those, you see those tridents over there in the corner? He hand makes those tridents and he makes them for. People buy them for like the art value, but he, he uses them to hunt gators and, and hogs.

[Carlton Ward]

Oh my gosh.

[Interviewer]

And I'm like, why are you doing this? Like, why, why do you. What, what made you decided to create a trident to hunt gators and hogs until out. He did catches tilapia with him too. He's like, he goes, I got bored with, with guns and, and spear guns. He's like, I wanted to find a more difficult way to catch these animals, to challenge myself. Like, okay. He just wants to make more primitive and difficult.

[Carlton Ward]

Oh my gosh.

[Interviewer]

He's crazy, man. But yeah, he would swim down in those canals and levitate. Like he would swim to the bottom of this like 20 foot canal and like go down and grab the gator under its chin and bring it to the surface. He's like 15 to 20 footers.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Dude's a mania.

[Carlton Ward]

No. Yeah, I've seen video. I mean he's been, he's been doing it a while. I mean, I was like, I used to be like a Clearwater beach lifeguard on summers and people were playing videos of that. Like, yeah, 20 years ago.

[Interviewer]

He's been bit by seven different species of sharks. And he said the worst one was a lemon shark bite. So the lemon shark could have easily taken his whole arm off if he wanted to. He's been bitten by a mako shark, Caribbean reef shark. What's. What's the. The nurse shark.

[Carlton Ward]

I am.

[Interviewer]

No, I'm sorry. He said the nurse shark was the worst.

[Carlton Ward]

Really?

[Interviewer]

The nurse.

[Carlton Ward]

You have to work hard to get bit by a nurse shark. Yeah, he was like trying to tickle it to the surface too.

[Interviewer]

He. He's very handsy with sharks.

[Carlton Ward]

I mean, I have no aspiration to get by bit by anything else. I think I'm one and done. I don't need any. Yeah, I don't need any bragging rights.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, he's different breed, man. He's from Cuba. He's a. He's a rare species.

[Carlton Ward]

Oh my gosh. What does Chris say about him? Did you ask Chris about Manny?

[Interviewer]

Yeah, I can't remember what Chris said about him, but yeah, he thought. He thought Manny was off his rocker too.

[Carlton Ward]

I emailed Chris when I got bit by the gator to get his take on it. He thought it was probably like a territorial kind of thing. Yeah, too.

[Interviewer]

That's what it sounds like.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. But yeah, that it was. It was interesting. Like I was in shock for 15 minutes. Like, I. Dry land was only 20ft away. So I climbed up, surveyed my wounds. I was nauseous and pale and everything. But then I kind of came back to my senses. My assistant was coming a little bit behind me and she brought like a first aid kit and we went and.

[Interviewer]

Oh, so you weren't alone.

[Carlton Ward]

She was on her way a little bit later. I was alone. But I just like, you don't have to get up at dawn. Just meet me there to service the camera trap after I'm done with the slider thing.

[Interviewer]

Got it.

[Carlton Ward]

So she caught up to me. We. I went the long way around to stay shallow to get to my camera and I went and went ahead and like wrapped my hand up and did the slider move I needed for the film. And then I called the Fish and Wildlife Service to tell them I get bit by the gator. Because if I would have called it in right then they would have made me go to the right. Urgent care of the er, leave the property. So I kind of just did what I came there to do and then I left. But this was like peak Covid. And yeah, I think the funniest thing is, like, I feel like a character from a Carl Hiason novel. I show up to an Urgent care in East Naples. I've. I've got pants on that are tethered from an alligator. I'm wet from the waist down. I got a hole in my hand. And I walk in, and I feel like I'm kind of expecting the reception receptionist is going to at least, like, be somewhat impressed by my damages, you know, And I'm like. She's. What are you here for? I'm like, I got bit by an alligator. And she doesn't. She doesn't look up. She's like, take a seat. The doctor will be with you in a minute. You know, didn't even look at you. I'm like, either this happens, like, every.

[Interviewer]

Day here, or, poor girl, she needs a vacation.

[Carlton Ward]

So she's like, have a seat. The doc will be with you in a minute. So I go sit down. The same. The same retired ER doc who, like, stitched me up when I hit myself in machete a couple years before comes in, gives me, like, the tetanus shot and soaks the hand, and it was, you know, in and out. But, yeah, she. She didn't even, like, give me any. Any props at all.

[Interviewer]

That's crazy. Anticlimactic.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What about snakes?

[Carlton Ward]

Never had any trouble with snakes.

[Interviewer]

No. That's how Manny actually almost died from a snake bite. He lost his finger.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. I mean, I don't. I don't mess with snakes, but I also, you know, it's very hard to. Most people, from my understanding, who get hurt or killed by snakes, it's. It's. It's in developing countries, when you're leaving your bed or your tent at night to go to the bathroom and you step on one, if you're vigilant and you have a light and you look, you're not going to just step into a snake and get bit by it.

[Interviewer]

Right? Right.

[Carlton Ward]

Now, they do say when you're hiking, the third person in line is the one that's going to get whacked because the first person who walks by wakes the snake up. You know, the second person walks by, doesn't see it. It, like, coils and gets ready, and the third person walks by and accidentally kicks the snake, gets it something.

[Interviewer]

Oh, wow. That makes sense.

[Carlton Ward]

Takes a while.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. So you only bring a machete to protect yourself? Typically. And a stick.

[Carlton Ward]

I mean, the steady machete is more for, like, bushcraft. I mean, I use it to, like, cut things back or to dig a hole for. Yeah, the camera trap. I did start after that gator. I did start carrying knives.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

Like, I got A neck knife and I got a hip knife.

[Interviewer]

Okay. No gun?

[Carlton Ward]

No. And you're not allowed to carry a gun at this federal properties.

[Interviewer]

Oh, no. Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. I mean, I, I, on one of our expeditions, I carried a, like a little.45.410 revolver in case I came across a python with like, had like a pistol with buckshot, basically, but never had to use it.

[Interviewer]

Right. God, that would suck to run into a pissed off panther, though, that was like trying to protect its cubs.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, no, but, but it's, it's, that's, that's not going to happen. Like, they, they would see you so far before you see them.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

You know, like, they, they'd be out.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

You know, and I mean, I know I can't. You'd have to be. I've actually been in a panther den with scientists when the mother is like pacing the periphery and you don't, you don't feel in danger, but there's a group of people. But that's the way, that's the way the, the scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Commission study the panthers. They put. Of the 200 Panthers, there might be like a half a dozen at any given time that have a GPS collar or radio collar and they'll listen for the panther. They usually use radio collars because the GPS collars fail and they don't last long enough. So they use a regular VHF and they fly an airplane out in Naples three days a week with VHF listening antennas on the wings. And they'll circle, locate the panther, write down the location on the map and do it. You know, they might only have six or seven out there wearing collars at any point. And then once they get a collar, once they get a female panther who doesn't move for two flights in a row or three flights in a row, it's. She's either dead or she's denning. And so at that point, they go in, they use something called a biologist in a box, which is, it's like a VHF listening antenna that's like ping, ping, ping, when the panther's nearby and they hook it up to a cell phone on auto answer, and they set it in a pelican case like maybe 200 yards from the den. And every morning at 5am they call it, and if it ding, ding, ding, she's in the den. But if they called at 5am and she's not in the den, that means she's still out hunting.

[Interviewer]

Okay?

[Carlton Ward]

They'll come in, they'll and it then, you know, 30 minutes before sunrise, if she's still not there. Then they'll go in and based on the location, go search and try to find the den.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

Then they find the kittens and then they'll put little pit tag under their skin like you would do for your dog at the vet. They'll do a health check, figure out the gender of the, of the panther kittens.

[Interviewer]

What's up, man?

[Carlton Ward]

And so, yeah, I've been in there when you're. And someone's always listening, you know, okay, the mom is coming home now. Like, yeah, we got to get out of here. She's coming home, she's coming back from hunting. But I, I have the most admiration for the female panthers. I mean, to think about, you've got three kittens in a den, two kittens in a den that you have to keep safe, but in order to feed them, you have to go kill a deer or a hog, you know, once a week to feed yourself to, then have the milk to feed them. And so she's going out hunting all night, killing an animal and then coming back and taking care of the kittens, which is amazing.

[Interviewer]

Wow, dude. Now how's the population? It's growing. Is it growing consistently or is it growing slowly? Or like, what is it, how is it still around the 200 or did you say it was about 200 now?

[Carlton Ward]

About 200? I, I think it's here, I'll show you a map about that. These are some of those kittens that, in one of those dens that they worked up.

[Interviewer]

Oh, wow, man.

[Carlton Ward]

And because. So, so I'll show you, this is the map that shows the Florida wildlife corridor and it shows the kind of breeding range of the Florida panther. So the breeding range is where females and males exist together.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

Male panthers have that 200 mile home range I was talking about. And if you're a male panther born south of the Cloosahatchee river or south of Fort Myers, that, that territory is pretty full. You know, there's probably a male panther who has every, every territory claimed in that part of the state. And so you're gonna push north, you're gonna swim the Caloosahatchee river, and you're gonna be on the ranchlands or the other parts of the corridor further north in the state. But there are no females documented north of north of Fort Myers, basically. And so that's a limiting factor. So that in order to have a genetically viable, quote, recovered Florida panther population, they're calling for 600 or more panthers. In order to have that happen, they need to be Spread across three times as much land.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

The only way for that is for female panthers to keep moving further north in the state and even into Georgia in the southeast to give enough territory. And the big story happened. And this is in the path of the panther film. But in 2006. I'm sorry, in 2016, scientists got the first evidence of a female north of the Cloosahatchee river since 1973. And so that, that was like the, there's a, there's a black and white picture.

[Interviewer]

And why weren't they going north of that river?

[Carlton Ward]

Well, it's the, the females had less incentive to go there because they, you know, you, if you're a female panther, you kind of stay next to or adjacent to the home range of your mother, and so you're moving out. And they have smaller home ranges, like 40 square miles. And so they're incrementally filling up that space more slowly than the males are.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

This is that first documented, first photo evidence of a female north of the river the FWC got in November of 2016. And the reason they know it's a female, they, they got a track within like 48 hours of that photo. And the female panther maxes out at like 70 or 80 pounds. And a male panther gets to be like 150 pounds. And the tracks are decisively different in size.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

And so bobcat is really small. Male panther is really big. Nothing else, female panther. Nothing else could be that, other than maybe a young cub, but either one would be evidence of breeding right north of the Caloosahatchee.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

So they got this picture and they let me set up my cameras. This is on Babcock Ranch on the state preserve near Fort Myers. And after a year and a half of trying to camera trap in that area, I got this picture. So that's her. That's that same female panther.

[Interviewer]

Now, it's literally impossible for someone to get a photo like this with a camera in their hand with one of these things. Like, there's no chance you're gonna ever have a camera and find one of these things in the wild without a camera. The camera trap's the only way.

[Carlton Ward]

You're not going to get a picture like this. I mean, I, I, in all my years trying, I did see one Florida panther that I photographed in the wild with a camera in my hands. There's a scene in the film about it. I'm. Oh, I'm going.

[Interviewer]

I was in tears watching that. I was like, that was. It's so sad.

[Carlton Ward]

It's well, yeah, when the injured. The injured kid. But yeah, it was, it was. But that's. That's the one time in all the time trying that ever saw. And so you're not reliably gonna get photography of one. I mean, if, if you were saying if you were like obsessed with getting a picture of a panther holding a camera, I would send you the Fakahatchee strand and I would say, you know, travel up and down Jane Scenic Road, and there's people who do it. Like a guy came to a talk I gave at the St. Pete Museum of History last night who, inspired by the film and this work, really made it a quest to try to photograph a panther. And he's photographed a couple on Jane scenic.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

One, he said he walked like 20 miles on Jane Scenic and he was on his way back to his car. Like he spent like a certain amount of time with a female panther on the same road and he got pictures of her.

[Interviewer]

Wow, man.

[Carlton Ward]

Which is amazing. But this, this is the most important picture of my career at the time because this is the first female panther in my lifetime documented north of Klusachi river being trailed by two kittens. So this was pretty special. And kind of the hope, like, this is what you need. You need female panthers further north in the state.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

And it's erasing its time to. Whether we can. Whether panthers can reclaim that historic territory before the development takes it.

[Interviewer]

So the, the kittens stay with the moment until about a year. Until about a year.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. They'll nurse for like the first three months or so. They don't leave the den and they're. They're nursing and then they get mobile and then they can follow her and then she'll hunt and give them meat and then they'll start to learn to hunt. But it's about a year where they branch off. And if they're a male, they're going to start getting beat up by other males in the territory. So that's when they have the incentive to really push off and find their own territory. Right.

[Interviewer]

And the males are just out looking for new females.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, they're looking for food, they're looking for mates.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And. And they, And.

[Interviewer]

But they don't stay the female. The male doesn't stay with the. With the female mountain lion that it bred with.

[Carlton Ward]

No, not. They just keep moving, keep defending their territory.

[Interviewer]

Right. Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

I mean, we did have a. We did have some photography and video in Big Cyprus where there was a female and a male feeding together on a deer carcass. And it Might be that the female killed the deer and the more dominant male came in and ate, but they seem to be eating cooperatively, so that was okay. So maybe they were mating and one of them killed a deer and they had a dinner date. I don't know. But it was all there was. There's actually two males that came in. And so first it was like a. A young, a younger male with a female. And they got pushed off by like a massive older male that had like worn off teeth because it was so old.

[Interviewer]

Wow. How many of the mountain lions that are in Florida right now are tagged with GPS or radio frequencies?

[Carlton Ward]

I think, I think maybe like five or six.

[Interviewer]

That's it?

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. I mean, maybe. Maybe it's 10. If the. If the National Park Service is doing anything in Big Cyprus in parallel to the state agency. See here, but it's not a lot.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

But if I show you this map, the, the male panthers have been wandering the peninsula. There is one killed on the road in Hillsborough county, not that far from the Alifire River. You know, any male panther was born down in the Everglades and they're finding their way up to the north. About 12 years ago, there was a hunter outside of Atlanta that shot a panther. And they knew from the pit tag or from some other thing that that panther was born in the Ocalicoochee Slough in South Florida. So it had found its way all the way to Georgia. So that's sad that it got killed by a hunter, but it shows you there's still a connected landscape. And a panther can find its way from the Everglades to Georgia still. So that means the wildlife quarter is still there.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

And it's still working.

[Interviewer]

Yep.

[Carlton Ward]

So that, that's the silver lining of that one.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. I saw even you had photos of panthers walking underneath like. Like highways, right?

[Carlton Ward]

Yes. Yeah, I've got some pictures of that here. Like, this is a panther traveling underneath Interstate 75.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

And that's Picking Strand State Forest on.

[Interviewer]

The south long exposure.

[Carlton Ward]

Yep.

[Interviewer]

I can see that that red line is a car.

[Carlton Ward]

It's a car streaking by. Yeah. It's probably a 10 or 15 second exposure at night.

[Interviewer]

Like, wow, man, that's so. That's so crazy.

[Carlton Ward]

That was. Those. Those were kind of PTSD looking at this one. Those were hard pictures to do because every light you see in there I had to provide. So there are. There are 14 different strobes lighting this scene. It's about 200, 200 yards from foreground where this panther is to the background. Where the southbound lane of interstate is.

[Interviewer]

Oh, so you're lighting up that far, far back bridge band.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, so I've got. I've got like a couple hundred yards of Ethernet cable carrying flash signal and then three different wireless radio channels hooked up to 14 flashes.

[Interviewer]

Good Lord. How long does that take you to set that shot up? And you have to, like, test it on yourself and. And.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, and, you know, test it at night to see it. I mean, it's. It took. It was an iteration to get the lights right. You know, a couple months of trying that and then just trying to keep it working. There's six lights lighting the foreground. It's kind of like an alleyway of light. But the thing is, I couldn't have any lights going off when the animal was under the underpass because you wouldn't want to discourage its behavior.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

You wouldn't want to. You don't want to haze it from doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing is going safely underneath.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And so flash would go off a couple times. And it's. And so the. This, this. This Panther is about 170, 50, 70 yards away from the. From the road at this point, and it's about to walk down a trail. But these things work. And here's another. This is another one. This one took about five years to actually get, but you got the timing with the.

[Interviewer]

Wow, that's wild. That's such a cool shot.

[Carlton Ward]

And I had kind of deja vu when I first saw this location. When I was scouting for camera trap sites in the 2012 expedition, we walked on the same path when we were going from Picu and Strand to the panther refuge on our way north.

[Interviewer]

Oh, really?

[Carlton Ward]

So I've got history with that spot.

[Interviewer]

What is your take on this? On the colossal bioscience program that's reviving the. What was the. What was the wolf? The dire wolf that they revived?

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. I've just read headlines on it, so I don't really know the science of what's going on with it. If it's. If it's the actual genome or it's kind of like a proximate.

[Interviewer]

They used crispr, I think.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not totally up to speed on the genetics. I mean, I think it's fascinating. Yeah. I don't know. You know, brings in a lot of ethical questions on how, you know, it could be. It could help you revive recently extinct species and put them back on the landscape potentially, which would be amazing. But then you Don't. You don't want to get into a Jurassic park kind of scenario where you're right. Really meddling with things because that could throw ecosystems more out of balance.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that's the crazy thing. Like wolves. I know people I've heard stories of, like wolves causing lots of problems for people. Like, you don't want to, you don't want to be co. Mingling with wolves. And the dire wolves are like, like what, three or four times the size of normal wolves.

[Carlton Ward]

Right.

[Interviewer]

So, like, I mean, yeah, I, I don't know if they've thought that through or how far they've thought that through.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And wolves are, it's a complicated history of wolves and you know, like. Yeah, man's best friend is a dog that comes from a wolf. And then there's this. People coexisted with wolves forever. But I think that there's a certain fear and there's also a livestock loss that happens for wolves. Whether it's a wolf or a panther or a grizzly bear, we need to have, we need to get to a place where you have the incentives to. Where having animals like that is a, is a, an asset, not a liability for someone. Right. You know, because you need to be able to get paid for your losses. You can't expect the farmers and the ranchers to carry the weight of environmentalism for the world without compensation.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

But in the case of the Florida panther, I think it's, it's kind of a really hopeful example. I'm going to show you a picture.

[Interviewer]

Do they take out cattle?

[Carlton Ward]

They do, they do, but it's in some places, there's some places have had significant losses, but they're often the ranch that's right on the edge of the Big Cypress National Preserve. But even there, once they started, you know, in calving season, keeping them away from the pastures that are right up against the forest, they really cut their losses.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

But if you have like young calves, like, it's like a fresh buffet right up on the edge of the cypress swamp. It's right, it's, you know, you're, you're giving the panther the panther.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

But this guy is a, a hero of mine. He's a rancher named Carrie Lightsey whose family has been ranching in the Kissimmee River Valley and in Florida for generations. And he's one of the early adapter of conservation easements. They own an island called Brahma island in the middle of Lake Kissimmee, 3000 acre island. And they put the whole thing Under Concert Aviation. Eastman. I think in the 1990s with the Nature Conservancy. So they've been, I think 90 of their land is protected. And they've been advocating to the other ranchers to get involved in these programs because it gives them the ability to cash out some of the value of the land by selling the development rights. In his case, he used that to buy more ranches over time, sells the development rights from those, and he's doubled or tripled his acres. But we're all benefiting because that land's never going to be developed and bears and panthers and other wildlife are surviving there. And it's, it's, you know, part of the solution now.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. That's incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

I asked him when that first female panther came north of the Cloosahatchee river. That's where all his ranches are located. I was like, carrie, they're the pan. The panthers coming back to the northern Everglades. What do you think about that? Wayfair's big sale is returning.

[Interviewer]

Get ready for way day.

[Carlton Ward]

For four days only, score up to 80 off all things home with free shipping. Shipping on everything. From October 26th through 29th, score Wayfair's best deals like up to 80 off area rugs, up to 60 off mattresses, up to 60 off bedroom furniture, and more exclusive door buster deals.

[Interviewer]

So mark your calendar and shop Wayday starting October 26th at Wayfair.com Wayfair.

[Carlton Ward]

Every style, every home. Never forget his answer. He's like, carlton, the panthers can have to help us save Florida. I was like, he went on to say, it's because it's going to help people understand why we need to save these big areas.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

And so some of the, some of the ranchers in Florida, I think, are further along in their thinking than some of the ranchers out west because the development is such a clear and present danger to their future. If you're a rancher who wants to stay ranching in Florida, you know you have two paths. It's either going to be, or if you're a rancher in Florida, there's two paths. One's going to be selling out for development and one's going to be working with conservation to give you the resources to keep ranching.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Carlton Ward]

And they can see that. And so they kind of pull their view back a little bit. They understand that the panther and the rancher, if they can get along, they can help each other because people like us on the coast who are interested in saving wildlife are going to support the Policies that protect those lands and that can help the rancher get their land protected right.

[Interviewer]

Now, what about this, the push for development of more toll roads? Where does that, how does that fit into all of this? Because the toll roads aren't. I mean, it's obviously a different. A different thing than housing development.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, Well, a toll road can become a major catalyst for development.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

You know, and they can funnel development right into the least developed places. The. There's a big relationship to those toll roads, to this whole project, really, because in 2006, when I was just kind of forming my thoughts about the Florida Wildlife Corridor, when I first met that black bear that was living on the cattle ranch, when I first saw that Florida 2060 study that projected the population growth forward, there was also a new toll road being proposed called the Heartland Parkway. And this was, you know, this is 2006. It was. It was like a precursor to what came up in 2019, 2020, with the M cores, toll roads. But this was going to be a toll road that basically went from Orlando to Naples through the middle part of the state. And it would have carved open places like our ranch, like Babcock Ranch. Like, if you look at the nighttime picture of Florida, nighttime satellite image, basically everything that's dark in that part of the state would have put the toll road right through the middle of it. Right. And then Governor Charlie Crist vetoed it, and it kind of went away, but it didn't go away for long. And so in 2019, 2020, there's. It came back as a proposal called McHor's, but it included a proposal for a toll road from that same area, Orlando to Naples. It also had one connecting up through the Red Hills near Tallahassee and then a connection point between I75 and the. In the Suncoast Parkway. But. But that 20, the 2006 toll road was a major impetus for me to start the Florida Wildlife Corridor project. Right. There's a writer who I really admire from University of Florida, Cynthia Barnett, who wrote a story for Florida Trend, There's a cover story about that toll road to nowhere or the Heartland Parkway. And it's kind of an investigative journalism looking into the motivations for it and why it was there. And in the story, it used the corridor and like, use the word corridor in five or six different contexts. It talked about highway corridors, multimodal transportation corridors, economic development corridors, broadband corridors, hurricane evacuation corridors, but not a single mention of wildlife corridor. And so that was like, we need to present land conservation as infrastructure in order for it to have a place in the conversation that's making the decisions about this stuff. Because the Wildlife Corridor, to me is the most fundamental infrastructure. But it's missing from the language, it's missing from the planning conversation. It's just an afterthought. And so that. That sent me to Google to try to see whether Florida Wildlife Corridor existed as a. As a name, as an identity, and snatched up the domain name and was motivated. If this thing comes back around, I want to have the Florida Wildlife Corridor be as real in people's minds as a. As a highway, so that it at least have its place in the conversation. And then we can actually decide as a community what balance we want to achieve. If we're gonna. If we're gonna make a choice to put in a road that ruins the Wildlife Quarter, at least we'll know it and we'll be talking about it.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Carlton Ward]

And so Fast forward to 2020, when the heartland Parkway or when the new toll roads came out, the M Cores toll roads, The. The Florida Wildlife Quarter was very much in the conversation at that point. So that was really rewarding to see these expeditions. The initial films we had done, the Path of the Panther project, had held help, kind of put shape to a name. You're basically naming the conservation opportunity. Yeah. And by giving it an identity, it helped it have a place in the conversation.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Carlton Ward]

And then even if the roads did happen, they were going to happen in a more responsible way because people didn't want to mess up the Florida Wildlife Corridor. So there were going to be concessions about. Okay, we're not going to have very many exits in these areas. It'd just be a road coming through, and we'll do mitigation for the roads that help. Help safe land. So even if the road does get built, it gets built in a way that's mindful of the Wildlife Corridor. It ends up that the legislature and Governor DeSantis threw that one out too, and it's gone away for now, so.

[Interviewer]

Oh, wow.

[Carlton Ward]

That happened. And that happened in 2021, the same year that the Florida Wildlife Quarter act got passed.

[Interviewer]

Right. That's amazing. Yeah. I don't. I don't paid so much attention to, like, the, like the. The political entanglements when it comes to the wildlife conservation stuff. But I want the one thing I do remember specifically, and, you know, I don't know how it doesn't really tie into the Wildlife Corridor stuff much, but it was when we had the previous governor, I forget his name, the guy who looks like he's from Harry Potter, the. He looks. He's the bald guy.

[Carlton Ward]

Rick Scott. Rick Scott.

[Interviewer]

That guy. He. There was a bunch of sugar farms, I think, in Florida.

[Carlton Ward]

Everglades.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, in the Everglades. Right. And they were doing some specific fertilizer. They were, they were like filtering the fertilizer that was getting into the water stream there, and that was getting out into the Gulf. And that was the precipitous to all the red tide that was killing all the fish and everything like that. And from what I understand is that was one of the primary causes of all the red tide in Florida was that fertilizer running through those streams in South Florida. And. And he was somehow lobbied by like, big sugar to, to protect the sugar farms.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. There. The. The sugar industry is. Has, has. It's politically fascinating because you, you have. Historically, the Fanhole brothers, one was Democrat, one was Republican. They heavily supported all sides. And it helps support a. A price support for sugar. There's a subsidy that gives a price support for sugar in the United States that helps all that make economic sense. And I'm all about locally grown food and. But, but there, there's an environmental cost to that. And a lot of the Everglades.

[Interviewer]

Phosphorus, that's what it was.

[Carlton Ward]

It gets, it gets polarized. And the Everglades lobby and the sugar, like, really paint each other. You know, it's. They're locked heads on all this. I mean, I think that sugar cane is better suited for that landscape than subdivisions. Yeah. So it's, it's a bit of a balance. But the. And it's also easy to point the finger at the sugar industry for the phosphorus in the ecosystem. But that same river, I mean, they're definitely part of it, but that same water body carries all the phosphorus from everything from Orlando down.

[Interviewer]

Oh, really?

[Carlton Ward]

Like the Kissimmee river comes out of the Kissimmee Channel Lakes, out of Orlando, out of Kissimmee, out of that whole Saint Cloud region of the state, all the way down the Kissimmee river into Lake Okeechobee. Even if no one ever fertilized for the next 30 years, there's enough legacy phosphorus already in the muck of Lake Okeechobee that's accumulated across the past 50 years since they channelized the Kissimmee river and turned it into a drainage canal rather than a Mandarin river that naturally filtered out and cleaned itself on its way down to the Southern Everglades. So, yeah, there's phosphorus in the system, phosphorus from everywhere. But I think the, the solution that had been organized under Charlie Crist before Rick Scott was to buy a lot of that sugar land and turn it into part of Everglades restoration. And as time went by and his values changed, that deal didn't look very good to the sugar company anymore. And that's what they've, that's what they lobbied to get rid of.

[Interviewer]

Got it.

[Carlton Ward]

Because they decided they didn't want to sell anymore. That, you know, the terms have been negotiated for a deal and they could have been kind of forced to go through the deal. And you can, you know, some people argue that land is best served to stay in agricultural production.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

You know, and others think it should be part of Everglades restoration. So it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a fraught situation. Sure.

[Interviewer]

But either way, better to be sugar farm than to be filled up with subdivisions.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. Because you can control your phosphorus coming off of a sugar farm more than you can control it off 5, 000St. Augustine or Bahia grass lawns. Yes, that's true. So I think, I mean, I, I tend towards the optimistic. We can all do this together.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

You know, to the point where I'm naive about it sometimes, but I do believe that, like, there is room for the sugar and the Everglades to reform and work together. I, I think there's space for all these things still. There's not always going to be that way. We're going to get up to some. If we keep pushing harder and harder on these ecosystems, it's going to be a point where you don't have time or space to recover it. But. Right. But we still have a moment. Like Sylvia Earle, who we're doing the film about in the Gulf, she has a kind of famous quote in the environmental world of saying our decisions in the next 10 years are the most important for the next 10,000, because that's where we are as a species. We've just, just we, we have the knowledge, we know what we need to do to make really good decisions in most cases. But it's about making those decisions. It's about deciding to preserve that land. It's about transitioning to, you know, a better energy source. And if we keep kicking the. Can you kind of miss your moment to do it? And. Yeah, so it's, it's, it's decisive times. But I feel, I feel encouraged by our progress with the wildlife corridor because, like, I think wildlife is unifying. No matter whether, whether you're urban or rural, Republican, Democrat, you know, people are interested and care about Wildlife.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Carlton Ward]

And if we pay attention to what the wildlife need, whether it's the bear or the panther or one of these whale sharks, they're going to show us what the land needs and what the water needs, and we make the decisions that help their. Protect their migratory pathways. You end up saving enough of nature that it's gonna serve our needs too.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. 100. Yeah. It's just. It's just this crazy balancing act that, you know, can go wrong so easily if you don't. If you don't do it the right way anyway. There's, there's plenty of evidence of where, you know, it has gone wrong. I think there's like, like Australia is one big place where they, like, introduced species to, like, balance out the ecosystem and it's gone haywire. I know there's a huge problem with, like, invasive, like pythons and iguanas and stuff in Florida.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Where there's people who are like, every day going out and like, shooting iguanas and pythons, trying to, Trying to keep.

[Carlton Ward]

It, Keep it held back.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

Well, yeah, it's. And it. And I think that it's crazy, like.

[Interviewer]

To zoom out on all of it and to think about how, how we are so different from every other animal on this Earth. You know, like, we're. There's nothing even remotely close to us. Like, the closest, the closest ape to us is, Is so. Is so far. And we're kind of like playing God with some of these, with, with the world and with the balancing of the species and the environment. And I mean, we're trying to do the best we can, but, like, there's a lot of moving parts. It's just, it's just a, it's just a hard thing to grasp sometimes.

[Carlton Ward]

Well, yeah, and we're, we're playing God without having the perspective of God. You know, if we were God, we would understand all the domino effect of all of our impacts.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Carlton Ward]

So we play God. We're not all in one little territory.

[Interviewer]

Right, Exactly.

[Carlton Ward]

And the, in the, the downstream influence of everything we do is not even in our radar. Right. And so that's the scary part because we're like, we're wielding this massive influence and we don't even do that with the awareness of how much impact we're having. And while at the same time, like, we are so different from every other species, on the other hand, we have like, what, like 80% of our DNA in common with a banana, you know, or it's like, you know, or we are not. Our technology buffers us and isolates us from the problems, but it just pushes the can down the road. Like we need the same clean air, we need the same clean environment, we need the same plastic free water. Right. You know, we need, we need to live in the moment and be in the present like animals. You know, your dog doesn't have to see a therapist or do yoga. Right. You know, it just. Right. Is.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Carlton Ward]

And so, you know, I think, I.

[Interviewer]

Think like we have, we're, like we're domesticating ourselves.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And you know, we're, we need to rewild ourselves as we rewild the planet.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

Because there, a lot of the answers are there. I go to the National Geographic Storyteller Summit every year in D.C. and they have different themes running through it. And a couple years ago the thing was fascinating and they're saying the future is ancestral. And so they had a lot of native voices, Native American perspectives. Another year they were talking about, you want to change the story, change the storyteller. You know, like, you know, you're not going to send a white guy like me to tell an Amazonian native story and get the real perspective on it. You train that Amazonian native in cinematography or photography or give them the tools to tell their story, it's going to come through with a deep generational connection to the land and in a voice that we can only like, scratch the surface of.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

But there's this, the solutions. So many of the solutions exist within people who still have their relationship to the planet. And there's a lot of listening we could do. They could help point us in the right direction.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, totally, man. What else are you, what else do you plan on working on in the future? Do you have anything lined up that you, that you're trying to get started or plan on doing here soon?

[Carlton Ward]

So, yes, you know, my, my first love, even before the ranches and the panthers is, is the Gulf. I mean, I grew up here, learned to surf in the Gulf, learned to fish in the Gulf. And this is one of those vastly underappreciated wild places. And it's another one that we're all way more connected to than we realize. I mean, the Gulf has the identity of oil fields and over development to the rest of the world. But people don't think about sperm whales and whale sharks and the beauty and the, you know, 200 miles of protected coastline between Tampa and Tallahassee and free flowing rivers like the Suwannee and the springs. And so I'm, I get a lot of satisfaction in trying to bring awareness to that. But it really connects beautifully to the, to the Florida Wildlife Corridor because, you know, if you followed the situation with the sea grasses in the Indian River Lagoon, the seagrass is dying off, the manatees are starving. It's because it's overdeveloped on that side of the state. Well, the seagrass is. We have the largest contiguous seagrass in the entire Gulf between Tampa and Tallahassee, like the Nature coast and the big Benton coastline. The seagrasses are thriving, the manatees are thriving. And the reason for that, a big reason for that is all the land upstream isn't developed. And so. Oh wow, you have. What is the Florida Wildlife Corridor along that coastal expedition we did wrapping around the Big Bend, where that could be the next frontier for conservation or it could be the, excuse me, that could be the next frontier for, you know, large scale conservation or it could be the next villages. And it's going to be one of the two of those things. And I'm trying to raise awareness for the consequences and the opportunity downstream. Like we can preserve this unique to the world coastline where you have manatees and clear seagrasses and spring fed waters and. Or we can have a situation where we mess up the water upstream like we've done in the Everglades, like we've done in the Indian River Lagoon and everything downstream will suffer but we still have a chance to get it right. So I'm, this is where I like my golf world and my corridor worlds come together. So that's, that's my focus as a photographer and artist is just kind of that stretch of coastline. That's amazing trying to tell that story. I've got my family and I got a 1969 aluminum houseboat that someone converted for outboard motors or the jack plate and run shallow and 37 foot old boat that I keep in Crystal river. But it's a base camp for getting out there and filming and documenting and telling these stories.

[Interviewer]

That's incredible, man. You know, is that going to be a documentary or.

[Carlton Ward]

We're making a. We're making a film with Sylvia Earle called Katie Bryden for my team's a director for it, really talented director and it's called Lasting. Hopefully it's going to be about Sylvia Earle and her return to the Gulf after 50 years and seeing the opportunity of conservation in that part of the state. And then we're making a series of short films probably for the National Geographic, YouTube. They're going to look at migratory pathways. So Looking at the sperm whales off Veracruz in Mexico, looking at the whale sharks, looking at sea turtles and their connections from the sea grasses to offshore and the sargassum, and trying to kind of bring the science and the corridors to bear on what's going on out there, too.

[Interviewer]

That's amazing, man.

[Carlton Ward]

I'll try to find the couple of those pictures I was showing you. Like, this is the Finn Holloway River. Like, that's. That's the Gulf. You know, people don't think of that sort of.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

Undisturbed, unbroken beauty on. On the coastline.

[Interviewer]

Incredible. Where exactly in the Gulf is at?

[Carlton Ward]

So this is north of Crystal River.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Carlton Ward]

South of Tallahassee there, it's called the Fen Holloway River. It used to be really polluted because of a paper mill that was in Perry. But as that paper mill got cleaned up and has less runoff in, this whole. All the. All the pine forests that are upstream from this are relatively benign. You know, a pine forest, you grow trees for 18 years, you cut them down, you plant more trees, and it stays green. Yeah. And it stays compatible with the ecosystem. And so my goal is to see incentives for more of those forestry operations to stay in forestry. If they can stay in forestry and keep making the fiber that we all benefit and do it in a way that works economically, then it doesn't have to go into subdivisions or other uses. And because it's green upstream, it's beautiful and clear downstream.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And so that's. That's. That's kind of the story to tell there.

[Interviewer]

That's amazing, man. Could you imagine just taking. Ripping an airboat through all that? It's so, so beautiful.

[Carlton Ward]

I. I took the. I've got another picture. I. I took the houseboat all the way up into the. You know, right into the foreground of there and was flying the drone.

[Interviewer]

Oh. Oh, this is from a drone. Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah. I spent a week documenting all these river mouths in July kind of from Steen Hatching North. Also knocked my lower unit off in Stan Hatchy because I no judge how shallow it was and had to teach myself how to change that and got to be friends with a Suzuki dealer here in Tampa who hooked me up with one off a test motor and got me back going again.

[Interviewer]

That's incredible, man.

[Carlton Ward]

But, so, yeah, I'm. That's. That's. For me as a storyteller, like, that's. That's my backyard. That's the legacy I want to leave is, you know, contributing to more awareness and more preservation of these places. And then there's the global vision for it. And now that I've seen it, it's like a message I feel compelled to share. I believe the wildlife quarters are these frameworks that we need to scale. And so my, my, my team at Wildpath has a new partnership with the National Geographic Society called Connected Planet. And the theory there is that we're going to get the best state of the science from partner organizations where the best wildlife corridor connections are, where there's an opportunity for positive policy impact, and then make investments in National Geographic explorers and storytellers to tell those stories. It's a new program, but I think that the science is there and what's often missing is a story to help put that science into action to bring these wildlife corridors to life.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And so we'll have to check back in a year or two and see how that's going. But I see, I see a seed being planted and it's, it's a model I followed. I mean that the. One of my role models at National Geographic in Gabon did an expedition for a year and a half from the center of the Congo to the Atlantic coast of Gabon. Three part series in National Geographic. And then they convinced the president of Gabon to create 13 national parks.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

So it's like science. It's a model that works storytelling, policy, impact. And one of my, one of my role models at National Geographic, Henrik Sala, does this with the ocean. It's called the Pristine Seas program. And they do expeditions, make National Geographic films. And sometimes those films are just for the prime minister of an island nation who's going to create a marine protected area surrounding all of their waters. And they've gotten hundreds of thousands of kilometers of ocean protected and marine protected areas in the past 10 years through this method of, you know, expedition storytelling policy.

[Interviewer]

That's amazing, man.

[Carlton Ward]

And I think that wildlife quarters can actually like bring people together in a common sense way to think about this, like reframe it and think about it in a way that it makes sense to everybody.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. 100. The what the way you're doing it makes it super digestible and relatable, especially for people that are living in that area.

[Carlton Ward]

That's kind of like, that's a, that's a graphic of some of the, you know, how you can kind of tie things together. You have room for development, but you also keep the connectivity of nature in mind as you develop.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Carlton Ward]

And stuff in North America. Here's some, here's a corridor and the Yellowstone to Yukon that they, they named this initiative years ago. And it's part of the model that we followed just by putting a vision to it. How you could keep a big connected landscape in the western US Jaguar corridor here in South America where you can help tie those habitats together in a connected way. Tiger corridors in India.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Carlton Ward]

It's, it's kind of the same concept applying to the whole planet, even in the oceans. This is a whale superhighways map. The world wildlife fun put out.

[Interviewer]

Here'S incredible.

[Carlton Ward]

And this is a vision off of Costa Rica and Ecuador, between the Galapagos and Central and South America, looking at some really important. All the sharks, migratory corridors for sharks and other fish. So yeah, that's, that's, that's kind of the world. I see that there's, you know, a real opportunity to like rethink how it all fits together.

[Interviewer]

It's amazing, man. You're doing amazing work, dude. I'm, that's, it's super impressive. Super impressive.

[Carlton Ward]

Thank you.

[Interviewer]

I appreciate you coming and doing this, man. This is, this has been phenomenal. I've, I've learned so much.

[Carlton Ward]

My pleasure. And it's nice to come, come home and find out his county for it. I feel like I was like driving to my parents house coming into your studio not too far away.

[Interviewer]

That's awesome. Tell people where they can learn more about your work, your website and then if there's any way anyone can get in touch with you where they can do that.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, well, check out our conservation [e-mail] and if you're interested in my art, It'[e-mail]. you know, I do fine art prints and really like providing art for people. And then yeah, I'm, I'm easy to catch find by email through there, through the websites. Also my Instagrams at Carlton Ward.

[Interviewer]

Amazing, man. We're gonna have to do a follow up here in a couple years for sure.

[Carlton Ward]

Go out, go out on the boat.

[Interviewer]

I'm down. Anytime, anytime you, anytime you want a tag along, let me know.

[Carlton Ward]

That sounds really good. Well, I appreciate you sharing these stories with your, with your audiences and.

[Interviewer]

My pleasure.

[Carlton Ward]

Yeah, we'll, we'll keep it up.

[Interviewer]

My pleasure, man. Thanks again for your time.

[Carlton Ward]

Thank you.

[Interviewer]

All right, good night everybody.

[Carlton Ward]

It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app?

[Interviewer]

Some cards are labeled no ding decline.

[Carlton Ward]

Which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding Decline cards won't hurt your credit scores if you aren't initially approved.

[Interviewer]

Approved Initial approval will result in a.

[Carlton Ward]

Hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores. Experience.

[Interviewer]

As a Raider scavenging a derelict world, you settle into an underground settlement, but now you must return to the surface where arc machines roam. If you're brave enough, who knows what.

[Carlton Ward]

You might find fun Arc Raiders, a.

[Interviewer]

Multiplayer extraction adventure video game. Buy now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC rated T for teenager.