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Rewilding Earth Podcast
Episode 132: Rewilding Our World – Big Ideas for Landscapes Large & Small
00:31:17
About Dr. Jessica Hardesty Norris is a biologist with over 20 years of experience in ecological planning and research, program development, strategic planning and community outreach for natural resource conservation.
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- [00:06]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
There's also a much more personal question, which is how to keep up your efforts every day to work on something where it seems like the scale of your work is so dwarfed by the scale of the problems and potential solutions. And I think you've probably hit on this before with people, but there's also just the simple decision to, to work where you can work effectively on work that you believe in and not let yourself go too far down the road of what does it all mean? Or how much of a difference is this gonna make? So there's a lot of small scale work that we do and you still just are doing good work without having to think at the end of the day, oh, did it really scale up to making enough difference? There's never enough difference. There's just, do you feel good? Does it seem right that you made the right choice and saving the fish that was in front of you that day?
- [01:21]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. Today we're diving into the fascinating world of ecological restoration with a true expert in the field. Dr. Jessica Hardesty Norris is a senior ecologist at BioHabitats, bringing over two decades of experience in everything from strategic planning to hands on conservation. Jessica is not just a brilliant scientist, she's also a gifted communicator, able to translate complex ecological concepts into terms we can all understand. In this episode, Jessica shares her unique insights on rewilding our world, both in grand landscapes and in our own backyards. We'll explore the philosophy behind restoration ecology, the challenges and opportunities in the private sector, and how we can all play a part in healing nature's wounds. Jessica, thanks so much for being on the Rewilding Earth podcast.
- [02:21]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
It is a great pleasure to be here. Thanks for bringing us pre to this.
- [02:26]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
We were talking about why you're here and you were maybe a little bit confused. And I'll start by saying that you were implicated by someone on staff who wishes to remain anonymous. As someone who's most likely at staff parties to wax philosophic about rewilding and about the work that biohabitats does in the world. And so whether or not you are happy with that designation, you have been designated.
- [02:51]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
So I am embracing the designation.
- [02:53]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
Designation, as I hoped you would. Let's just start with how'd you get here?
- [02:59]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
See, so I am an organismal biologist. I really liked running around in the woods, catching things and counting them. And that took me to Peace Corps where I got a lot of field experience in the tropics and back to graduate school. With John Terborg. And John Terborg appears regularly as co authors with the founders of the rewilding movement, often a collaborator with some of the big thinkers in rewilding. So I came from this very strong intellectual background or tradition of thinking about trophic cascades and top down and bottom up regulation of wild systems and the need to conserve very large landscapes. So when my husband's job moved me to Charleston, I was reached back to my professor John to ask him if he had any ideas for me. I had just gotten turned down for a fundraising job in the Nature Conservancy and I was convinced that was going to be my path forward. But turns out I didn't have the right social connections and understanding of the lay of the land for donor relations in in the low country of South Carolina, which is a very specific breed of place. And John said, you should go talk to this guy Keith. He's down there. He's sitting on the boards of some organizations with us. He thinks about the big picture. And so that's how I got started at Biohabitat. So I had written a dissertation on altitudinal migration in tropical hummingbirds. So it was a very big step for me to come into a company that works domestically. And I just been leaving the American Bird Conservancy. So I had been on the NGO side. And I do think a lot about that relationship between the work we do as done by NGOs and the work that's done by government and the work that's done by the private sector.
- [04:50]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
It's always been a little bit of a puzzle to help people understand how a place like Biohabitats fits in to all of this. It's one thing to say it's the practical application of certain processes and the philosophy we all learned from the guys who made this stuff up. Soule, Noss, Foreman, Terborg. But it's more than that, as and I always like to hear people's different definitions of what's your place in this and how does it fit on the big SC of things.
- [05:20]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
So one thing that's very biohabitats centric is that we have these conversations internally and we look at the landscape of where we fit in. There's multiple levels and there's different sort of aspirations from different people. But one thing we know that we do is keep track of and watch national conversations on landscape connectivity and work, oftentimes for municipalities. So when I participate in something like we were helping out with the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives Southeastern Blueprint, that was I interacted with them primarily in South Carolina. They came down, did regional workshops to try to think about where are the, are the important connectivity points on the landscape for future migrations of living organisms, plants and animals across this landscape, both in terms of protecting unfragmented land, but also thinking about climate change and how things are going to be needing to move up and down climactic corridors and across climactic conditions. When I interact with them, you're in this room, this stimulating, exciting room with like all these scientists, big thinkers and federal land managers who are taking a very high level perspective. And I feel like sometimes I'm maybe a little closer to what it feels like to be a mid level bureaucrat in a municipality who's trying to think about how their park hooks up or trying to think about what are the important things to consider when you're looking at land acquisition. And so we really see a need to be able to bridge the academic and the federal and big thinking initiatives with the local decisions, because these local decisions about land use and the local decisions about what's being allowed to be built, where are happening, whether or not they're informed by people who understand landscape scale processes and people who understand the scale of change that's coming with climate change. I think I would say that biohabitats is very aware of our ability to bring some of the broader scale conversations into the conference rooms where local decision makers are deciding what land gets preserved, what land gets restored, what land gets developed.
- [07:48]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
There's a lot of work to be done that the conservation movement was not trained to do. Nobody here knew how to go to a local government and talk about planning, development, planning. And I imagine Keith saw that when he was thinking about biohabitats in the early years and that something needed to be done to bridge that gap. So it makes a lot of sense that we're talking more and more to people like you. The biggest gains to be had now are connectivity more than anything else, as I see it. Do you see it that way?
- [08:20]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
So what are the biggest gains to be had in terms of a lot of the huge ecosystem scale processes that could be recovered on a landscape? I feel like some of the biggest gains that might be had is, would stem from completely unpredictable economic and social change. And maybe it's not completely unpredictable, but I think about what if a laboratory, like a technological solution to mass agriculture of certain crops shifted and all of a sudden you had land on a scale that you hadn't been able to play with before, that needed, that was no longer economically Viable for agriculture.
- [09:06]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
Interesting.
- [09:06]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
Something big like that. Or what if we ended up with a huge economic change whereby we had some sort of like, guaranteed minimum wage model happening and needed to put in service hours in order to get it, and all of a sudden there was like a huge unformed but interested workforce in putting restoration solutions out on the landscape. What if there was like a huge driving shift in our population and all of a sudden we're looking at empty spaces in a way that we hadn't had before, like the really big moves? I think we need to be prepared for them. Because if you'd asked me this question in 2018, I never would have been thinking in these directions. But once we had Covid, it made me think so hard about so many ways that we could have a seismic change of how humans are on the landscape. Just a foundational shift in what we expect from our ability to coexist with nature. Natural processes that I think about it in a whole different way than I think I ever used to.
- [10:18]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
We don't give ourselves permission often to talk about the what ifs, and that's the conversation I really wanted to have today. What are the what ifs that you think about?
- [10:28]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
I think the question in some ways is how do you reconcile the scale of the solutions we're developing every day to the scale of the problem? Which seems well beyond the scale of the solutions, to say the least. And that's what made me think about huge system disruptors that might shift that relationship significantly. One example I've become familiar with is the rehabilitation of Gorongosta national park in Mozambique in Africa. And it's this place, it's like the DMZ or Chernobyl, where you've got these. These huge human processes that have had a dramatic effect. But in Gorongosa, what happened was that from 1977 to 1992, there's a civil war in Mozambique and there was a 95% war induced complete collapse of the. The biomass. Like just dozens or dozens and dozens at least, of species that were big savanna herds, wildebeests and elephants, et cetera, that were all just eradicated from the landscape. And you have just, over the course of just a few decades, you've seen this enormous recovery. Just. It just boggles the mind to drive across that landscape today. See elephants, see herds and herds of 9,000 kg per km squared is what the biomass was on the landscape at one point, and it was just gone completely. And in only two decades, you've seen this enormous recovery to where you've got almost a Complete cohort of species. You've got lions back. It's just amazing thought piece to realize what the ecological rebound can be with some facilitation. And I don't think we ever know when those opportunities are coming, but the reason we know what to do when we have them is because we're pecking away at restoring a little river here and a little grassland here and what reintroduction works. And I think that the science and the philosophy and the professional practice of restoration is something that is often learned in smaller, sometimes better funded opportunities. And it gives us the tools and the vocabulary to get after huge opportunities when they come wherever they come from. Biohabitats is proud to sponsor this episode of the Rewilding Earth podcast during the UN Decade on ecosystem Restoration. And always Biohabitats applies the science of ecology to restore degraded ecosystems, conserve habitat, and regenerate the natural systems that sustain all life on Earth. Ecological restoration is positive action that you can take and support today. It's also incredibly rewarding and a lot of fun. Learn how you can get involved in the UN Decade on ecosystem restoration by exploring the links and extra credit.
- [13:30]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
I had the opportunity to talk with Paola Boulay from Gorongosa national park in episode 57. So if people listening to this, after you listen to this one, you can go to episode 57 and get even more of what Jessica's talking about here. It's incredible. What else don't we know that could happen that would open up an opportunity? But you don't want to hope for civil wars or. Or anything.
- [13:55]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
Exactly. Or pandemic or any of it. Yeah, but I think without apocalyptic on some of these examples, you can look at the Lower Klamath river project with these four dams coming out after years of decades of, well, maybe centuries of advocacy and efforts by the Yorok and other people who are involved in changing the way we're looking at that landscape and what we can do. You know, that's going to be like rewilding those reservoirs is going to be an opportunity that's really stemming from policy shifts and shifts in the way that people are willing to think and do business. But there's also a much more personal question, which is how to keep up your efforts every day to work on something where it seems like the scale of your work is so dwarfed by the scale of the problems and potential solutions. And I think you've probably hit on this before with people. But there's also just the simple decision to work where you can work effectively on work that you believe in and not let yourself go too far down the road of what does it all mean? How much of a difference is this gonna make? Like, from some race equity training I had, they used that analogy of the river and the fish. So if you're on the banks of a river, and I always like it because it ties into my professional life so well, but you're on the banks of a river and you see a dead fish, you're like, I wonder what's wrong with the fish? And then you see another dead fish, and then you see hundreds of dead fish, and you realize, this is not a fish problem. This is something that's wrong with the river. This is something that cannot be solved at the fish level. But if you have a fish with a hook in its mouth and you can unhook that fish and send it on its merry way, just because that there's some river level problems doesn't mean that you don't save the fish if the fish is right in front of you and you can save it. So there's a lot of small scale work that we do and you still just are doing good work without having to think at the end of the day, oh, did it really scale up to making enough difference? There's never enough difference. There's just, do you feel good? Does it seem right that you've made the right choice and saving the fish that was in front of you that day? I think that's a different perspective on how the scale, temporal and spatial scales work in his work.
- [16:18]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
And what else would you do with the knowledge that you have? You can't not do anything. It's impossible for us to just sit and twiddle our thumbs when we get really depressed about, oh, man, are we the only ones talking about this?
- [16:28]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
I'm going to steal a line from see that Tom Jacobs is works for the Mid American Regional Council. And he said something in a conversation a year ago with me that I think about all the time because I think we're in a similar position where for the first 20 years of my career, I just felt like I was always trying to say, like, this is what we should be doing, this is what we should be doing. This is why we have to do this. This is why we have to do this. This is why you have to fund this, this is why. And all of a sudden the conversation has shifted so much in my day to day experience where people are coming to me and say, how do we do this? How do we incorporate landscape connectivity in our park planning? How do we raise our ecological function? How do we get real, restore? How do we bring this stream back to the surface? How do we make this landscape more compatible with life? And it's just, it's mind boggling to me to realize that after two decades of why, now we're on the decade of how and the tools and the restoration science and the, the pieces that need to get into place and the considerations that need to be holistic to get processes better able to coexist with humans. That's. I feel like it's exciting and that makes me feel optimistic despite it's so exciting and it makes me feel optimistic. I think for biohabitats we are often working in constrained systems and often, often working in urban or peri. Urban locations. We are often we're thinking big scale about all the things we'd love to do given a bigger canvas. But what we're looking at is a small and hardworking stream that is having a hard time getting any of its ecological functions intact. And so we're often asking ourselves that question of like how small is too small and how much healing is the right amount of healing. Just recently this has been coming up as we're looking in some of the sort of high performance or multifunctional landscape world Biohabitats has an entire practice that I'm not sure would have come up much on the rewilding. But we're looking at. We do a lot of work with integrated water systems is what we call it. But we do on site wastewater. And so we're involved with some initiatives. For instance, Living Buildings, which is a certification program that is created by the International Living Features Institute. These buildings need to be. Or a lot of them can reach net zero water or net zero carbon. They are really. It's a whole other scale of ambition in sustainability metrics. It's like lead on steroids to try to get a living building certification. I think there's still less than 20. But when we're working on that, on those sorts of incredible projects where the built form is trying to just push the edges of what architecture can do in a regenerative form capacity, they also want to talk about the area around them. So we're also looking at sometimes a relatively small footprint of land around these projects. And there's a part of the certification process called the ecology of place where you are asked to think concretely and critically about the ecological functions on the landscape in your building, in your site, before you start tampering with anything. And then what they can be Afterwards, whether it's a renovation to get to this standard, or whether it's a, a new development where they're trying to put in a living building. And so that takes us to a very small geographical scope sometimes. And so I was, I was chatting with you before we started recording about an internal conversation that we just framed up and had about where biohabitats wants to be in those very small, high performance, multifunctional landscape spaces. Because the potential for ecological restoration, for bringing biodiversity back, for instance, is on a whole different level. If you're really talking about something happening in a city block or in a few city blocks, or in landscapes that are so altered and so constrained by their history, I don't think I have an answer for you there. But that is something that we are actively engaged with as a company right now is thinking about where does, where do we want to be and is there a site that's too small, or is it all the right thing to, for us to be doing? Because what you can teach people about living in a way that does not make it impossible for other life forms to coexist is a powerful lesson. And what we can be teaching people about, that really depends on how many people are seeing it, how people are engaged with it. And if you can take an office building that's bringing thousands of people in and out and show them what a living and regenerative landscape around that looks like, and start to shift the aesthetics and make people think of upscale and cool as wild and diverse, then maybe you've done the right kind of work. Even if you're not saving that many, there's not that many species that can survive in that area or that you'd want to attract to that area. So we do have a very active conversation going on at our firm. And I think the one we had today, we actually had some visitors from our peers who are also wrestling with this conversation.
- [21:51]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
That brings me to something that we've been noticing at the Rewilding Institute quite a bit, and that is people reaching out to us, hoping, expecting that we might have some answers for them. Kids who have lost their parents and inherited 75 acres, and they don't have any interest. In fact, they have the opposite interest. They really want to rewild. They don't want to do what was done on the land traditionally. They want to do you. Can you guys help us, do you think, at some point, or does this ever come up at Biohabitats?
- [22:23]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
Yeah, we do that now. So we've, we have some private landowners who are interested in just ecological restoration. And sometimes they'll, you know, run into us in the cities that we live in. I It's not a huge practice that we try to spread. And so when you asked your question, I'm immediately thinking about scale, like how do we serve people like that? Network level we've done, especially on private ranches, we've done several projects that are just that are helping landowners take a regenerative and restorative approach to how they're managing their land. Now there is a threshold on where biohabitats gets involved a lot of times, like the real the organizations and the partners that we work with who are wrestling that question down the most are probably people that you've spoken to. But local land trusts or local chapters of the Nature Conservancy are taking those calls all the time. Right. Trying to figure people are calling and saying, I want to do something different. What's the conservation easement? And it's often a struggle. We know a lot of land conservancies that just are saying yes to everyone because they don't believe that any land is not worth saving. And there's others who now have portfolios that are so, you know, diverse and complicated and hard to understand or to. To build into something cohesive that they've started to take a very strategic approach to saying, we are interested in conservation easements or purchase or acquisition or TDR or other mechanisms of conservation preservation only within this corridor because they just can't take more little pieces of landscape. And so I think that there's probably landowners out there who would have a really hard time finding support. And there's others who would be. Would very easily find themselves in a good situation for getting more input because they're in an area that's been prioritized through another mechanism. There's also a little bit of a difference between there's people whose restoration or conservation impact on their own land might be limited to what they can do while they're maintaining a lot of mowing. They might be better off just talking to their soil conservation districts and understanding what are the things that they can do to revitalize as much as they can. And then there's others, like the ones that probably we work with most actively now who really have a vision for transformation or understand that they're in a flood brain and they can think about this whole new way. And then they need to or want to or able to bring room to kind of the level of professional consultations to say if we really are willing to push some dirt around. What could we do here? I think as a planet we're coming to that phase where people are understanding that it is not inexhaustible and we are going to have to change things. And that is, that's a wonderful driver for innovation and for the private sector to be able to jump into as well to build a restoration economy that we can be proud of every single sector.
- [25:23]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
Have you ever worked on a project where somebody was in that camp where they knew how to operate a bulldozer and they weren't really necessarily from the. The terborg soul camp of conservation biology. They were primarily there to do a job. Have you ever watched someone kind of change during a project that.
- [25:40]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
Oh absolutely. Like we've watched people, you know, in partnerships with contractors over years we've watched. I wish I could rattle off some memes cause I'd love to give them a shout out. We've watched the ecological restoration knowledge base just grow because of the passions of people who are leading companies. I think Left hand excavating, there's a whole bunch of them where after working on several projects together you're like we often have this experience where we're. We do a design, we're totally in love with it. We they put it out to the lowest bid contractor and then it just becomes this very difficult situation actually get it built the way that it was supposed to be and to understand which are the important parts to mess with and to not mess with. And in contrast we've had sometimes you just need a guy when he's really knows his plants better than our biologist knows this landscape because he's got history there and becomes an a co designer like an inestimable asset to the work and to the process. And sometimes we've been able to cultivate those relationships. I would say that a lot of our design build work where we everywhere we're working with there's a bunch of contractors me bill that they are restoration ecologists to the bone and that's why we work with them over and over again because it's been such a successful and productive collaboration. And a lot of designers, they don't know what they don't know until they're talking to the builders. So it's definitely a two way street. Like what we've learned from, what our designers have learned from contractors is just.
- [27:15]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
As rich people on the ground, they really know places better than we ever could. If we're coming from the outside.
- [27:20]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
Yeah, it's so important to the landscape history. You do all this work and the Internet's pretty awesome these days. But then you just get a couple key conversations and realize that's why these, this, that's why the vegetation looks so different, because somebody's explaining something to you about what this site was used for before, or that there was material brought in and it didn't show up on any paper, but they understand it. People have brains that are so deeply attuned to understanding what's around them. We just from an evolutionary point of view like our, we are designed to understand this tree versus that tree so that we can mark the way. And people have that awareness whether or not they're trying to think of it in any sort of formality or terms. If they know the land, they know the land.
- [28:05]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
And they're sometimes really dying for somebody to recognize that fact. I, I imagine you come in and you're applauding someone who's not used to anyone caring what they know or listening to them about this. They're considered the geeks in their community. And oh, here he goes again, or she goes again talking about that watershed, whatever that is. And you guys come in and you're like, you can talk to them and see them and appreciate them, and it's just gotta make lifelong friendships so much easier. So what, what's your advice to people who are listening to this? What would you tell people to do if they're thinking, this really sounds cool? I love her job. I love what she gets to do.
- [28:43]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
I decided when I was 16 that I didn't like people enough to want to work with them. And I wanted to protect things that needed our protection and had never done anything wrong and never done any to earn the situation they were in. And so my ideal job was to be on a fire tower out in the middle of nowhere. So I would try to go to a forestry school so that I could just be around natural world all the time. That changed a bit. And then I went to Peace Corps and I started to understand what makes people who are living on the edge need to cut down those trees to get their kids to the doctor. That revolutionized my idea of what I wanted to be. And I came back and got a PhD in tropical ecology thinking that I was working on large scale conservation in the tropics for the rest of my life. And again, I've worked on altitudinal migration, hummingbirds. And then I went. My first job was on seabird conservation and then I ended up at biohabitats. I, I don't think, I think people who are training and trying to figure out what to how to get into it and what to do next, have a grossly overinflated idea of how tightly what the decision they make today, how tightly it will correspond to what their future actually holds. So I think it's just don't take it very that seriously. Just keep yourself on the side of things that you want to be on and it will someday come together in a configuration that you didn't realize because you never realized you had a knack for working a room and doing fundraising. And it ends up that the thing you can do for conservation is actually donor relations, even though you thought you wanted to be a scientist. Like, these kinds of surprises happen all the time and you just need to be open to them and listen to what your path is telling you. You should try out next.
- [30:30]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
Jessica, thank you so much for taking the time today. This was enlightening. I had a great time. You are awesome. Keep up the great work.
- [30:38]
Jessica Hardesty Norris
All right. Thank you so much. We always appreciate talking to you and I had a blast.
- [30:44]
Host of the Rewilding Earth podcast
Thanks for listening to the Rewilding Earth podcast. We do what we do because of you. This podcast is supported by listeners like you who long to live in a wilder world. Please consider donating@rewilding.org and subscribe to our weekly News and Article Digest while you're there to go the extra mile, you can follow and share Rewilding Earth on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Bonus points for sharing this podcast with your friends. To listen to past episodes, go to rewilding.org pod that's rewilding.org pod.