- If I talk to a school class, and I say,
"or just, you know,
it's very, very easy for people
to conjure images of wildebeest and giraffes,
and, you know, rhinoceros, and lions,
and all that stuff just running around.
This cool idea of, like, a wild, biodiverse place,
with all of these big animals just right out in the open,
North America probably looked very, very similar to that,
very recently.
As recently as a couple hundred years ago.
The problem is we undid it so quickly
that I think we've kinda
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You don't need any of this "Jurassic Park," like,
All this wildlife is either there, just in low abundance,
or very, very close next door.
We think we can put those pieces back together,
and we think that we can use this model
of buying up ranch land that's for sale anyways,
and converting it to biodiversity management,
to restore that.
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- Our model is to purchase private lands,
and link those together with existing public lands,
and then, work to restore the wildlife habitat,
help restore native species to those lands,
and open those lands up to the public for their enjoymentー
for their recreational and educational opportunities.
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- Modern conservation works best,
and I would argue, you know,
subjectively works most beautifully.
It's nicest when it's working with local communities.
Not the top-down, like,
we're gonna get, build a park,
or, like, take this thing through eminent domain,
but how do we make sure that the wildlife,
the biodiversity that we create,
is not only tolerated
by the people that have to live with it,
but embraced by the people that live with it,
because they also
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One of the ways
that makes the whole prairie reserve, kind of, thesis work
is that things haven't,
we're very, very close
to the, kind of, previous wild state of the prairie.
When, you know, colleagues of mine in the UK
talk about rewilding,
their, kind of, last wild state
was thousands and thousands of years ago.
Tens of thousands of years ago, in some cases.
For us, you only have to look back to about 200 years ago
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As we shift the focus of those parcels
from commodity production,
cattle production, basically,
to biodiversity management,
there's a lot of, kind of, passive rewilding
that will happen in the background, right?
As fewer and fewer cows are on the landscape,
the prairie is going to keep making grass,
and that grass will feed wildlife,
instead of domestic livestock.
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Wild bison do this thing where nobody's telling them, like,
"Hey, you missed that spot,"
or, "Hey, you're grazing too much here.
"There's good grass over there."
They have this way of automatically, kind of, like,
mowing in this chaotic fashion, right?
So, you get areas
that are grazed all the way down to the ground,
you get areas that are grazed lightly as they're moving,
and then, lots of areas that are just completely missed,
in a given year.
And so, you think about that bad haircut,
and all those different stages of grass.
Each of those is very important habitat
for a number of species.
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and beautiful, and geysers,
and beautiful geophysical things,
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