← Rewilding Earth Podcast
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- [00:03]
A
All of the qualities that we had really humans had feared in Catamounts all of a sudden became qualities that we really admired. Their strength, independence, their resiliency, athleticism. To the point where Vermonters and New Englanders started making them our mascot of our state university. Uvm, adopted the Catamount as their official mascot. Middlebury College has the Panther as their mascot. But then across the state, you'll see Catamount beers, Catamount solar companies. Catamounts are used in a cultural way across the state. John Davis actually used to always say that they're on our jerseys, but they're not in our forests. And it's time to bring them back into our forests.
- [01:22]
B
You're listening to the Rewilding Earth Podcast. I'm your host, Jack Humphrey. On this episode of the Rewilding Earth Podcast, we're joined once again by Renee Secor, now in her new role as the Northeast Rewilding Director for Mighty Earth. Today, we're discussing a crucial piece of the rewilding puzzle in the Northeast, bringing the elusive catamount home. Known by many names, mountain lion, cougar, puma, painter, panther, wildcat, and catamount, this iconic big cat is key to a healthy ecosystem. Join us as we explore the plan to reintroduce them and learn just how close we are to seeing catamount tracks in our Northeastern forests. Once again, Renee, thanks for coming back. You were here rewilding for too short of a time for my liking. And then you were at Project Coyote, and now you're at Mighty Earth, and I need to know everything. What's going on, what are you working on there? Give us the lowdown.
- [02:16]
A
Yeah. Well, it's so good to be back and chatting with you, Jack. I'm the Northeast Rewilding Director at an organization called Mighty Earth. Mighty Earth is a global advocacy organization whose overall mission is to protect half of Earth for wild nature and secure a climate that allows life to flourish. They do that through a variety of really diverse campaigns working to protect wild nature, stopping things like global deforestation in places like South America, Brazil, Southeast Asia, transitioning our food system away from industrial agriculture, and kind of all the negative effects that that has on the environment, decarbonizing industry and also restoring wildlife, which is the project that I'm working on. It's actually a new initiative of the organization called the Eastern Rewilding Project, and we're focused on rewilding the Northeast and specifically looking at welcoming catamounts home to their place in the region. And for folks who don't know. Catamounts is kind of the common name that we use in the Northeast for cougars, mountain lions, and kind of the species as a whole, which I've learned has the most common names out of any species in the world.
- [03:33]
B
I was just getting ready to say also, your title is probably one of the coolest titles in our world. Rewilding Director, how do you feel about that? And congratulations.
- [03:42]
A
Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah, it's exciting. Yeah. It brings me back to my days at the Rewilding Institute and learning about kind of foundational principles of rewilding and now applying those to the Northeast and getting to like, work on a project directly related to rewilding. So it's, it's. Yeah, it's really exciting. I think the Rewilding Institute was integral in kind of making me think really continental scale at large science scale, kind of wilderness recovery and recovery of natural processes across whole landscapes. And so I'm excited to get to work on rewilding right here in my home, in my backyard, right in the Northeast, and to get to think about bringing catamounts back into these forests.
- [04:27]
B
The Rewilding Institute works in the Northeast and signs onto and supports in any way that we can, catamount recovery and other rewilding projects. But how would you explain or describe why there's such a focus on the Northeast? Because I think people have heard that here a lot in different ways on the podcast and on our site from you in the previous years, and now you're working in this position. And we are not the only two organizations working on these issues in the Northeast. Why is there such a. A sense of urgency for Northeast carnivore recovery?
- [05:06]
A
Yeah, it's a really good question. And yeah, the Northeast, there's been this interest in rewilding based projects in the region, and that is in part because the region is missing and has been missing for the last century, plus their top carnivore species. And so during the 1800s, when we eradicated wolves and cougars from the landscape, they were never able to recover populations like they have been in the West. And so there's been a lot of conversations in recent years, in the last several decades, thinking about how, you know, how would we bring back carnivores into this region, which does have a suitable habitat. And there's decades of science that's identified suitable habitat throughout the region. And I think that goes to kind of the conservation achievement that's really been the last hundred years is kind of have brought to the region there. This is A region that, like most ecosystems in North America, went through pretty intensive habitat change. There was massive deforestation that occurred across the Northeast during colonization of the region. And catamounts were one of many species that were driven to extinction primarily through state sponsored bounty systems where folks actually received payments for killing catamounts and other carnivore species. But we also saw species like deer, beaver and grouse. Those were some other species that actually were basically functionally extirpated from the region as well, which is kind of hard to believe considering deer are now so plentiful in the Northeast. But part of the reason that we've been looking at carnivore recovery is because it's kind of complementing the amazing kind of conservation success. Right. Like over the last, the turn of the last century till today, we. At one point the Northeast was 80% deforested. Now Vermont has kind of 80% forest cover across the state. And so we're seeing prime habitat and kind of core habitats and protection of wildlife corridors by some of the conservation groups like Northeast Wilderness Trust, Adirondack Land Trust, there's the Staying Connected initiative of the Nature Conservancy. These are all groups that have worked really diligently on sustaining landscape connectivity across the region. And it's now opened up the opportunity to think about the next step which would be restoring large carnivores.
- [07:39]
B
Let's try, if possible, to disabuse people of the notion that the Northeast has New York City and places like that in it. And it's got to be too densely populated to be talking like this. We should be talking like this about someplace out West. There's no way there's enough space, enough wildlands connected or disconnected to possibly be doing what you're talking about, is there?
- [08:05]
A
I know, I know it's hard to believe, but it is true that the Northeast does have a large contiguous habitat that could sustain large carnivores like cougars or catamounts. And this has been, when we think about Adirondack State Park, Green Mountain National Forest, White Mountain National Forest, these are large contiguous blocks of habitat. And they've been confirmed in studies that have looked at habitat suitability for species like cougars. There's recently published research from the Cougar Research Collaborative, which is a collection of researchers that have looked at the Northeast for potential catamount recovery. And they've identified 13 large contiguous blocks of 10,000 square kilometers or larger kind of habitat patches that could sustain biologically populations of cougars.
- [08:57]
B
Yeah, we're talking, let's just hit it right on the nose. We're talking about Adirondack park encompassing approximately 6.1 million acres. I really wanted to bring that up because I think most people still forget that this is an enormous. One of the biggest chunks of wildlands networks in the world, much less the country and certainly in the lower 48.
- [09:19]
A
Definitely. Yeah, it's a really good point. And I think our, our land protection in the Northeast is a little different in terms of like federally protected lands, which is more abundant in the West. Right. We have a lot of state protected lands, but then we also have kind of this like hodgepodge of communities in existing in and around Adirondack Park. So it doesn't look like your traditional kind of national park that we see out west, but it's, I think, like you said, like the largest connected piece of protected land in the US in many ways.
- [09:52]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I, I just really love the fact that it's really primed and ready. In some instances, when we're talking about rewilding in some areas, the areas themselves, the wild land needs more protection or more connectivity. And that's of course true here. It's, it's true everywhere. But this place is in much better shape than a lot of places like that where you're like, well, we would like to bring back this species, but we're worried that we don't have the habitat for it yet or the protections for it yet. So they kind of work in tandem where here it just seems like, let's go, it's ready. Or am I having too rosy of a view of it?
- [10:27]
A
No, I mean, the last several years there's been research that's identified again those contiguous blocks and, and they've found in the eastern United States, east of kind of the Mississippi, looked for large contiguous blocks of basically 6,000 square kilometers or more, and they found 17 kind of habitat patches that fit that criteria and 13 that actually are greater than 10,000 square kilometers. And that's the reason for those numbers in particular is that that 10,000 square kilometer or 6,000 or more is kind of what's believed to be among cougar researchers as kind of the minimum habitat size needed to maintain healthy and kind of the vigor of populations in isolation from one another, not connected to other metapopulations. So These are these 13 habitat blocks. In particular, the ones that are over 10,000 square kilometers. Those would be able to sustain self sustaining cougar populations in isolation from one another, albeit that's not necessarily in the Northeast. There would Likely be connectivity and dispersal between those patches. But, yeah, there's most certainly, again and again, has been identified as having real key habitat patches that could sustain large carnivores.
- [11:48]
B
So what are we missing? We have the places, we have the contiguous acreage, the habitat is healthy. Everything sounds really cool. I can't imagine what is the resistance. It can't just be that humans are the problem, can it?
- [12:05]
A
Yeah, I know. The human problem. It always gets back to the human problem. Yeah, yeah. So cougar restoration in the east, or catamounts bringing them home to the east, really will require an active effort to do so. And the reason that I say so is because there's also research that has looked at modeling to see how long it would take catamounts or cougars to get back to the northeast on their own. And that modeling has shown that it would take well over a hundred years for them to be able to reestablish breeding populations in the northeast, just because.
- [12:45]
B
It'S so difficult to get from where we have populations to there.
- [12:49]
A
Yeah. So the farthest kind of eastern populations at the current moment, outside of the Florida panthers, which have an isolated population in southern Florida, and those are pretty restricted from northern movement because of kind of the gauntlet of roads that they face as they move, as they try to disperse north. And so dispersal of that population has been really difficult and not really viable. And so the furthest eastern populations in the United States are the ones in the Black Hills in South Dakota, as well as Nebraska. And as individuals from those regions have tried to disperse east, we've pretty well documented that they butt into roadways where they're consistently killed, or human communities that also target them as well. And so those two populations are also heavily hunted, which is limiting the number of individuals that can actually disperse each year. And so all of those factors are really heavily, heavily limiting cougars ability to establish new populations to the east of them. And so when researchers took all of that data and everything we've known about cougars over the last several decades trying to move east and created a model to kind of model out eastward movement, they found that it would be over 100 years before they were able to make it back on their own to the Northeast. And so to get to your question, if we want them back in the northeast, it's going to have to be an active effort to reestablish them here and to bring them home. And that is always the key word around in taking an endeavor like that is coexistence and working with communities to welcome Cougars back onto the landscape will require a certain level of adaption from communities in the Northeast about learning to live alongside this large carnivore again.
- [14:43]
B
Yeah, I imagine it's going to be similar to what Chris Tompkins has talked at length about in the work that they've done in Patagonia with communities. I mean, she made it sound like at different times of the campaign, or maybe the entire campaign to bring jaguars back and other endangered species, like it was almost 99% community education and development and relationship building. And she almost makes it such a point of it. It sounds like the reintroductions were the easy part once they had established that kind of thing. Or, I mean, we could even talk about Colorado wolf reintroduction. The wolves weren't the problem. The habitat wasn't the problem. It was the will of the people that had to be stated quite loudly in the voting booth or in Tompkins foundation just building that will and that support. Where do you see the Northeast groups like yours? You mentioned several other groups that were also working in and around these issues. Where do you feel like you can say we are in that process?
- [15:46]
A
Yeah. So you hit it right on the head. I think it's the will and desire of people to welcome cougars back home in the Northeast and then the willingness to make certain adaptations to coexisting with them in the landscape. And yeah, part of our efforts, we're at the early stages of really working to ensure that catamounts are welcomed back into the state with strong public support and that any reintroduction efforts, obviously guided by scientific expertise, but also strong public backing. And so, like we said, it's not a question of habitat or prey abundance. Those things are plentiful in the region, and studies have continued to confirm that time and time again. But it's really that public interest component and then the willingness to coexist. And preliminary data in the Northeast, and the reason that we continue to kind of move forward with this effort is because that preliminary surveys of residents in kind of eastern states with the. With those cougar habitat patches found that many of the states do show strong signs of support for cougar restoration. Just to highlight one in particular in Vermont has found kind of the second highest ratio of strong support when compared to strong opposition at kind of a 12 to 1 ratio. So that means essentially for every one person opposing cougar reintroduction, there are 12 people who strongly support. Support it. Now we're kind of working on, I would say, ground truthing that data, but also putting that to the test and going out and talking to communities across the state of Vermont and having kind of, because I love a good alliteration, like catamount conversations, and actually having these kind of, like, town hall meetings where we're going and talking to Vermonters about catamounts, what it would mean to bring them back, what coexistence measures would be necessary to make this successful. And really trying to meet Vermonters in particular, but really obviously thinking on a regional scale about meeting New Englanders where they're at and trying to have conversations over public support for cougar reintroduction.
- [17:58]
B
What are the one out of the 12 people saying? I imagine they're rural predominantly, and I imagine that they're blaming all of this support for carnivores on city dwellers. It's the usual thing. They always do, and I don't expect it to be any different in the Northeast. But what are their objections?
- [18:17]
A
Maybe not even just opposition, but concerns that folks might have about bringing catamounts home. And to preface all this as saying, like, it's a species that hasn't roamed in the Northeast since 1881, which was the last confirmed catamount that was killed.
- [18:32]
B
In Vermont, and so no one alive there knows how to live with them or has had any experience in doing so. Even conservationists, you'd have to go out west or westerly to have an experience, right?
- [18:44]
A
Exactly. So I think it's why we're intentionally trying to engage a lot of rural and agricultural communities early in this conversation, because those are the communities that might have actual conflicts with catamounts, which are real conflict. Conflicts with carnivores do happen. And. And many times it's tied to domestic animals and conflicts with domestic animals. And so there are successful models from the west, from South America, from other regions where catamounts are roaming for solutions to conflict. And we know what those solutions are. We know how we can ultimately and effectively prevent conflict. But it's getting to those communities to educate them on kind of the tools that are necessary to do so. And then the other thing I'll say with, in terms of potential opposition or folks who might be wary of catamount restoration in the East. Many times I'd like to highlight, like, the difference between perceived conflict versus actual conflict and what we see in regions in the west where cougars are prevalent on the landscape is that perceived conflict is actually the vast majority of conflict. And that's just situations where people have a belief or a feeling that they're at risk of experiencing conflict when they're just getting, seeing a mountain lion or having a mountain lion sighting. And it doesn't help that these are highly sensationalized in the media, which leads to further perpetuating of fear. But there is a difference between perception of conflict and actual conflict. And, and I just like to highlight that for folks because it's a, it's a species where there's a fear of kind of human attacks or attacks on humans. And what we know about that is that they're extremely, extremely rare. Far less likely than a whole slew of things that can kill you, like dogs or deer related car accidents or even vending machines. Is, is one that apparently kills more people per year than cougars, but especially.
- [20:44]
B
I mean, not just from falling on you, but from what they contain. One way or another, a vending machine is going to get you.
- [20:50]
A
This is very true. This is very true. I don't think that was factored into the statistic, but this is very true. So yeah, but with, with proper education and planning, we know that mountain lions and humans can coexist. And we know that because we see it in so many communities in the west, even super densely populated ones like urban areas in the suburbs of Los Angeles. So we know it's possible because it's happening in so many communities in kind of the Western U.S. and other communities in North America.
- [21:18]
B
Okay, so ahead, definitely a lot more relationship building and education and things to come for sure to get people to understand what real and not so real risks are, to get them behind it. And then while that's going, I can't help but think about the bureaucratic support or resistance to the idea. Where are the challenges ahead with state agencies or federal agencies who will inevitably have to become involved? When you talk about reintroductions, I would imagine, or is my western view of reintroduction, is it different or could it potentially be different than in the Northeast?
- [21:55]
A
Yeah, definitely. Well, I think that's all definitely relationship building. And we're currently working to lay the groundwork for, for either a state or regional led feasibility study in real close collaboration with wildlife professionals and hopefully informed by the broad and diverse public throughout the region. And so we want to work closely with state wildlife agencies in the Northeast on collaborating on a feasibility study and ensuring that all the proper components are included in that. And yeah, that's continuing to advocate for that kind of state and regional collaboration between the broad public as well as the wildlife agencies.
- [22:39]
B
So I still can't live out my dream where I have industrial grade catnip in the back of my Jeep somewhere out west, grab a couple of traveling mountain lions and bring them myself to the Northeast. That's still, that's still probably a ways off in the future.
- [22:57]
A
I mean, you could certainly live out that dream. I don't like to squash anyone's dreams, so I'm not gonna squash that dream for you. But I think the process that we're pushing for is definitely one of scientific vigor. Working with the wildlife agencies on making this happen in the most kind of scientific way possible. But also the ethical implications of reintroducing an animal and ensuring that any actions that the agency takes are backed by the best available science and ethical considerations, as well as strong public support, which again, like we said, is super necessary in order to make something like this successful.
- [23:36]
B
That really leads the whole thing. Right. I mean, to the extent that you get anything else done is how much the public gets behind it first. Right. And kind of pushes agencies and, and other stakeholders to really face up to the idea that people want this looks like it's going to happen. But now we need to really think about doing, taking the steps to get this done. It always starts with the public, right?
- [24:01]
A
Yeah, definitely. Again, and I think the reason, again, it goes back to that, that coexistence piece. And we always, I think we used to say at Rewilding Institute, or in my head we did. Right, like the fourth sea of the core Cs of rewilding or cores, corridors and carnivores. And then that fourth one being coexistence. Because yeah, a coexistence friendly landscape is an, is a prerequisite to large carnivore recovery. And so, yeah, that, that public support piece is, is crucial. And this is a landscape in the Northeast where there's so many conservation successes over the last several decades that we should be so proud of. I mean, I touched on that. So statistic of this is a region that underwent 80% deforestation in some areas and now has rebounded in so many ways due in large part to some of the key conservation groups that have been working tirelessly at protecting this region. So the fact that we're at a point where we can consider large carnivore recovery is such a testament to the work that's been happening within the region. And now we can think about bringing back this long lost kind of missing puzzle piece of our ecosystem.
- [25:14]
B
I think the importance of really laying a solid groundwork as you possibly can, across the board for public sentiment and education support, but also agency and management could be highlighted best in what happened in Colorado, you used to do at rewilding quite a bit of work with wolves. And I'm sure you kept up on all of the things as they were happening with the debacle in the Colorado with the capture of the wolf pack and. And eventual release. But a lot of damage was done there. It felt like, man, the public sentiment was there. The ballot initiative went over really great. The reintroduction or the allowance of wolves was felt really great. And then there was this like where it just felt like it came out of left field. This animosity and. And these wrong moves by the agency and. And all that. I mean doesn't that speak to. You can think you have the best plan and that everything is the groundworks really laid well. But stuff like that must inform how you guys think about. We really got to get all of this stuff right so we can prevent after reintroduction and after pause are on the ground that everything is handled correctly then. Because it seems like resistance can rear its ugly head even after it looks like it's a slam dunk.
- [26:27]
A
Yeah, any situation, I think there's always lessons to be learned from that can be taken from reintroduction efforts or other issues like this across the country. And I think in particular, I guess one that it highlights to me, and it's something that we know in the carnivore world is that public. You can't understate the importance of proactive public education and outreach work and getting to communities where they're at and having these conversations around coexistence and. And adaption, the level of adaption that will be required to coexist with catamounts. These are conversations that need to happen in communities across the Northeast and in really close collaboration with the wildlife agency so that we're promoting the best practices. And folks in the Northeast are getting good public education and outreach from their wildlife agencies as well. And they're a partner in all of this. And so there's certainly lessons to be learned and yeah, hope to take some of those and apply them to the Northeast.
- [27:31]
B
So what's really, truly missing on the landscape when mountain lions, catamounts are not present and like, what does the land feel like when you're in it? And you know that there's something a really big chunk missing here. This place doesn't look like it should like it would if they were here. You can include wolves even if you'd like. But you know what. What are we missing so that people can understand how big a deal this is and what this omission on the planet and that particular part of the planet is causing.
- [28:02]
A
Yeah, it's such a good point and such a good question. Yeah, I think rewilding is obviously like a conservation concept, and a lot of it is centered around kind of this ecological restoration vision. But there's also this. This almost philosophical and kind of cultural healing element to thinking about rewilding. And so when we think about large carnivore restoration, there's a whole slew of ecological benefits. We're talking about a keystone species that really anchors food webs and has the potential to create much more resilient ecosystems throughout the region and have a whole slew of biodiversity benefits. But there's also this larger kind of healing of a historical and kind of cultural harm that happened to our landscape when catamounts were driven to extinction. And like we said, since 1881, they haven't roamed freely throughout the region. And so this offers a chance to confront that kind of profound ecological and cultural loss. And what's fascinating about catamounts in particular is. And focusing in on Vermont is from the time that we lost that Last Catamount in 1881 In Vermont, there's this kind of shift that's happened where 40 years after losing that particular animal, the language around catamounts, and I've done a bit of historical research on looking into this, but the language really started to change, and all of the qualities that we had really, humans had feared in Catamounts all of a sudden became qualities that we really admired. Their strength, independence, their resiliency, athleticism, to the point where Vermonters and New Englanders started making them our mascot of our state university, uvm, adopted the catamount as their official mascot. Middlebury College has the panther as their mascot. But then across the state, you'll see Catamount beers, Catamount solar companies. I mean, the Catamounts are used in kind of our cultural way across the state. And so it's. I think John Davis actually used to always say that they're on our jerseys, but they're not in our, like, forests. And it's time to bring them back into our forests and to steal his. His saying there for a second. But, yeah, I think this is partly a cultural healing. And I think when I know that being in an ecosystem with its full suite of species is something really special, even if you're not physically seeing that animal, knowing that we're kind of one part of this larger kind of intricate web of life, and that it's almost indescribable feeling of getting to be part of a species kind of bound together in that web of life and sharing the planet with other wild species. So I think we have an opportunity to do that and to welcome that back into the Northeast where it hasn't been for generations.
- [31:08]
B
It's kind of akin to that tree story of planting, being wise enough to plant a tree whose shade you'll never sit in when it comes to cougars. I'm just going to try to use every one of their names in this podcast.
- [31:21]
A
I know.
- [31:22]
B
I think we got 16 to go. That's definitely planting a tree whose shade you're probably not likely to ever sit in in terms of being being seen by one is more likely than seeing one. And I've known wildlife biologists who've gone most of and some all of their careers when it's not the mountain lion is not their specialty. But being out there so much and still never seeing one, this is definitely the shade of a tree that people who bring this creature back are never going to likely sit in.
- [31:51]
A
It's such a good point. Yeah. And I think that's when rewilding as like a concept goes way beyond, just like ecological restoration, but almost our recognition again that we're one species among. Among many that are bound together in like this intricate web of life. And we have to be willing to share this planet with our fellow species. And so, yeah, I think just knowing that they're out there despite not actually seeing them. And again, which goes to. To the lack of conflict. This is a very elusive species that most times and most people never actually get a sighting of. But just knowing that we're part and parcel to a landscape that has its full suite of species is a really special feeling. I think the good news, especially for the Northeast, is we are uniquely positioned for success in terms of coexistence. Just speaking to the context of the Northeast and our agricultural communities, our farms are much smaller. There's no public lands grazing like there is in the West. And we have many of our, like large scale dairy farms in the region are actually already using nonlethal methods like night enclosures. And those are really common. So. And when those are enclosing your animals from dawn to dusk in night enclosures is 99% effective at preventing conflict. Obviously can never say a hundred. But also we recognize that not every farm has secure night enclosures as well. There's smaller, larger operations that are context specific, that have different circumstances on the ground. And in these cases, there's a ton of effective tools available, including things like livestock, guardian dogs, electrified fencing, Fladry fox lights, motion triggered alarm systems. And there's some currently being new devices and things being explored by some of our partners at Panthera in different organizations and ground applying them in regions in South America as well. So there's new and exciting tools that are also coming up as well.
- [33:52]
B
Okay, so if we just let catamounts find their way back to the Northeast, it's been established with the study of we're looking like around 100 years and there's no way for you to say definitively what timeline we're on right now, but what could it be in terms of going from today? After this podcast, you get back to work and work with all the other organizations that are working to bring the Catamount back home. I love the way you say that. Bring them home because they belong here. It's not introducing something that doesn't, it's something that does. What's it look like? What kind of a timeline are we on in your medium? Hopeful scenario?
- [34:32]
A
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, we used to joke that, yeah, John Davis had them in the back of his truck. Right. And it was just of kind going to pull over on the side of the road and open the. Open the hatch. But yeah, no, I think the pace of this campaign and project, the Eastern Rewilding project, is we hope to make forward movement fairly quickly. Obviously we want to make sure it's a very thoughtful and inclusive and respectful process to the communities in the Northeast. So we want to go at the pace at which communities want to move forward with this. I think in a hopeful vision, five plus year timeline, obviously big goal, definitely within the next decade, it would be amazing to see cougars on the ground, but there's a lot of steps that have to be taken to get to that point. So it's hard to pinpoint an exact timeline, but in an ideal world it could be as soon as five years. So I think we're going to continue to have these catamount conversations across the state to continue to try to collaborate regionally and state by state with wildlife agencies and really, I don't know if we said this, but you know, the next step of this process is to try to get a feasibility study either by one of the states in the Northeast, but really more so on a regional scale, looking at the feasibility of Cougar introduction and working with all the great data that's come out over the last several years. But ground truthing that and looking at the specifics of any given state.
- [36:02]
B
I volunteer for any ground truthing help you need. That would be awesome. That's one of the things I always like to add here, is people are listening. People want to know, especially people who are close to or in the Northeast would love to know how they can get involved, stay up to date on what's going on. But also, I know a lot of them would love to do any. I know citizens were pulled in for a lot of ground truthing stuff. I had no special skills. I'm not a biologist. But I got to play a very integral part in the wolf reintroduction program. And I'm sure that would still be true for citizen scientists here as well.
- [36:38]
A
Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we definitely want as many folks in the Northeast to sign up for our emailing list to volunteer with us to get involved. This is definitely going to be a public campaign where we want to build public support and bring people together around this idea and campaign and project of bringing Catamounts home to the Northeast. So right now you can go to mightyearth.org, sign up for our emailing list, and you'll get updates from the organization as a whole. But also for the Eastern Rewilding project updates, we'll also be launching a campaign webpage that will be coming out in the coming months and that will be plastered and updated on the mightyearth website. I will also share for folks that are based in the Northeast who want to get more involved, like on the ground. I'm going to share an email signup list that maybe we could put in the podcast information and folks can sign up that way to get more involved on the ground in the Northeast.
- [37:37]
B
Yes. So if you're listening to this in one of your favorite podcasters, you want to go to rewilding.org pod and look for this episode with Renee. And we always have a very healthy extra credit section where any of the links mentioned in any episode, including this one, will be included down in the extra credit so that you can take what you've learned. If anything's fired you up here today or in other podcast episodes, you can go and take action and follow up. And I know, Renee, you always ply me with really good stuff. So our extra credit section here is going to be beefy.
- [38:13]
A
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, we'll get some fact sheets and different information in there, too, for folks or tofui.
- [38:18]
B
I don't want to leave anyone out.
- [38:20]
A
Exactly.
- [38:21]
B
Whatever.
- [38:21]
A
Pro.
- [38:22]
B
It's going to have a lot of protein. Okay.
- [38:24]
A
Yeah, a lot of protein.
- [38:26]
B
Renee, thanks so much. It's really cool to talk to you again. You need to be an ongoing guest because you're one of our voices in the Northeast now on this and other carnivore issues. So please do feel welcome to come back anytime.
- [38:41]
A
Oh, thank you so much, Jack. Yes, I deeply love the Rewilding Institute and I'm always happy to come home to you guys as well.
- [38:49]
B
This is always your home. We might reintroduce you to Rewilding someday in the future.
- [38:54]
A
Perfect. Perfect. Love it.
- [38:56]
B
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