Carlton Ward Jr. exposes Florida's ecological crisis, where rapid population growth and sprawl fragment habitats into isolated islands despite the state's vast cattle ranching lands. He details how conservation easements protect over 70% of conserved acreage, supporting vital wildlife corridors for the last 200 Florida panthers and connecting fragmented ecosystems across private ranches. While addressing threats like phosphorus runoff from sugar farming and the political complexities of the Everglades restoration, Ward emphasizes that unifying concepts like the Florida Wildlife Corridor can bridge divides to secure biodiversity against development and climate change. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
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Florida's Development Wall00:07:12
How much of Florida is overtaken by development and construction every year?
Is there like a stat on that?
Do we know roughly what that is?
It's hard to say the exact number.
We know the population.
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 1,000 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.
It's got to be more than that.
Well, we've gone from 8 million to 16 million.
Oh, okay.
You know, so it's, and that's a million people every three years almost.
Right.
You know, that's right at 1,000 people a day.
So we have been sustaining about 1,000 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 we do it the way we have been, where we sprawl out to accommodate that growth.
I mean, the state's only 130 miles wide.
You know, you cut it in half with development if you keep piling people and rooftops in the way we have been.
And it's how much of the state of Florida is currently developed?
Is it like one third roughly?
Develops such a.
Like continuum, you know.
There's like yeah suburban, there's rural sprawl where you have five acre ranchettes, there's, um, 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.
Less than a third, less than a third, excuse me.
The state's around 40 million acres, I think it's like 36 million acres of not lakes, you know, like dry of land.
Um, 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 landmass.
I don't know what percentage is pine forest or timberlands, but it's getting up there.
So because of all those working lands, we still have green space.
I was blown away.
I was listening to, I don't know if it was like an interview slash 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 state for beef.
Once upon a time, early on, but I think overall we're probably somewhere in the top 20 for beef.
But we have six of the top 10 individual biggest cattle ranches in the state still in terms of cattle production.
But you can put more cows on an acre in Florida than you can in Texas because of all the rain and the lush grass.
And so.
The Deseret Ranch owned by the Mormon Church outside of Orlando.
If you're headed to the East Coast, basically from Orlando all the way to Melbourne and north, it's a 300,000 acre ranch that's the highest producing cow calf operation in the United States.
Really?
I had no idea.
That's wild.
That's the thing about Florida.
All this is like hidden in plain sight.
Yep.
Because 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'll go right by on the highway if you don't stop and pay attention to it.
So it's all there, but it's not so evident to people.
It's a crazy thing about Florida is that, like, and I'm sure you can attest to this too, but like me, 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 things all the time that 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 never really stop and like consider, like, what the hell could be going on here.
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, I'll, you know, pull over and 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.
Right.
But so important for kind of holding the green space together.
So, can you explain like your background?
How did you come up into photography 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 lay that out for people?
Sure.
Yeah.
Well, I grew up.
Not far from where you grew up in Pinellas County.
And here we are in the most densely populated county in the southeast.
And so.
This is?
Yeah, Pinellas County still isn't.
More than Dade.
Yeah.
Wow.
Because Dade at least has a homestead.
Or I don't know if it has a homestead, but it has a hinterland.
Pinellas is built out wall to wall, gulf to bay.
Oh, yeah.
The only green space left.
Our barrier islands that were too inconvenient to develop, and a couple parks, you know, a few parks.
Why?
So there's something about growing up here where I think 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 Wachula.
Around the 1850s, and I still have a lot of family in that part of the state today.
So 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.
From Ranching to Conservation00:07:25
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 going to study physics and go into engineering or maybe study business and go to law school.
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 as 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 how 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 in sophomore year really to go surfing.
Like I found a study abroad that took me to the Gold Coast where you have Cura and Burley Head and Stratabroke Island and all these awesome surf breaks.
And they have a university that gave credits to.
My school at Wake Forest.
So, a couple of buddies and I went to Australia through this Austro Learn Exchange program, lived on the beach, surfed every day, and my parents got me a camera to document my experience.
And that kind of opened me up to this.
I started to 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.
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 Tim Duncan was a basketball player at Wake Forest then, so it was fun to shoot ACC basketball.
And so I just was shooting as much film as I could 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 did a study abroad in Kenya one summer, and I was able to borrow the school's telephoto lens and really start to evolve as a photographer from that point.
Wow.
It's kind of, you know, I'm taking you on the long roundabout version of this.
No, this is good.
This is fascinating.
But I really 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 DC.
And my job was really just to scan slides.
This was 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 a disk.
I was helping digitize these archives from these photographers who'd 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 DC, where they have the elephant in the entryway and whale skeletons hanging in the ocean hall.
And you walk the back way up to your sixth 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.
I met all these amazing people and attended all these lectures.
I met this group of folks from the biodiversity program that 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 were 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, it reminded me of home because you're facing out to the ocean over the west.
Is that near Namibia?
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 the ponds where they spend the day to the savannas 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 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 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 is possible and kind of moved in that direction.
Early Camera Trap Work00:04:35
How old were you at that time?
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.
Yeah.
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So here's me back then.
And this is Africa?
Yeah, I'm in Gabon and the rainforest.
This is an aerial view of what's now Luongo National Park.
Wow.
And this is from like, what was that, from a helicopter or something?
That was from an airplane.
The airplane.
Stuffed in the back of a Cessna 182.
But this is some of my early work with camera traps.
Yeah.
The camera trap stuff is amazing.
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 that are impossible to take without a camera trap.
So that's what this setup is.
There's a Nikon.
Basically, drill a hole or cut a hole out of a pelican case, right?
Right.
There's a Nikon film camera in there firing three different strobes that are in these makeshift waterproof housings that I made out of like lantern flashlight casings.
Um, And the thing kind of near my elbow on that other stake in the ground is an infrared tripwire.
Whoa.
And so the animal walks by, breaks the beam, sends a 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.
Oh my God, dude.
It's so.
The camera trap photos are so different.
There's nothing like them because there's no human in there.
It's just the animal in the wild, but nothing around.
And I don't think people can appreciate that without understanding the backstory, how that photo was actually taken.
This wasn't you standing there with a camera and then the things looking at you.
This is just.
Completely uninterrupted in the wilderness, except for the flash might like throw him off.
Like, whoa, what was that?
Yeah, he probably hears the click.
He probably shoots two or three pictures in a row.
He probably heard the click and then looks up for one more.
But this, I mean, this leopard had probably never seen a camera, right?
He probably never saw one again.
Like, this is a leopard in the wild in the night stalking down a trail in the rainforest.
It would be like us seeing a flying saucer or something like that.
Yeah, I can't even imagine.
But 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.
How close would you say the camera was to that leopard?
Two feet, three feet.
Three feet, yeah.
It's walking down a trail, maybe three feet.
It's probably a 24 millimeter lens, which is the same equivalent to what your cell phone shoots with.
Right, right.
So yeah, I kind of saw what was possible.
Ancient Coastal Migrations00:08:57
But then this was 2001 to 2003.
I'm doing this work and It 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.
Right.
And like literally ranches and wild places turning to golf courses and subdivisions 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 100 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'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.
No, not at all.
But at the time, it was one fifth of the state by landmass.
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 own heritage with it because, like, this is that's me and my granddad on our family ranch back in, you know, I was.
Nine or ten years old, or something.
That's so cool.
I've just 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.
And it's like one in three people were born here anymore by the numbers.
Yeah.
You know, it's like really maybe a quarter, 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.
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 hooves being destroyed?
That's my understanding.
And they call them cracker horses, but they're horses that came from the Spanish, the marsh tackies or the Andalusian horses and cattle.
But they live wild in the Florida woods for several centuries.
And same with the cattle.
And so I've heard it said that they've where they're less bothered by the insects and they can stand in the water all day.
They're smaller, they're nimble.
I mean, same with the cattle.
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 going to survive on palmettos or in the deep woods.
Right.
And when the early, like when my ancestors came to Florida, there were so many different waves of kind of migration into Florida.
Most of the original natives here, the Calusa, the Temuquin, the Tocobaga, 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 Cuba, like were brought there on display or something awful.
So 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.
Oh, okay.
But they really got pushed here during the Trail of Tears, during like the Seminole Wars, during trying to extirpate Native people from in this really dark history, 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.
When are we talking roughly?
1700s, 1800s.
And Ponce de Leon came in the 1500s, right?
Ponce de Leon came, yeah, 1521 was his second voyage.
Okay.
And that's when the cattle and horses came for the first time.
And the hogs, right?
I think hogs.
And he also got a souvenir as an arrow from a Calusa Indian.
A poison arrow, right?
And he went and died of his wounds in Cuba.
But horses and cattle stayed.
And I mean, I don't know if those exact cattle produced 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 the time my ancestors came in the mid-1800s, and most of the kind of pioneer American colonists at that time, cattle had been living in the Florida woods for three centuries.
Wow.
And so it was a naturally occurring resource where if you're 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.
Right.
If you read the book A Land Remembered, no, I haven't heard of it.
And a friend of mine is about to adapt it for a TV series, but it's by Patrick Smith and it chronicles the life of an early pioneer Florida family all the way up through the generations up into Miami and it kind of gets into these stories.
Oh, interesting.
It's really fascinating.
Do we know what Florida was like before the Spanish came?
Like what was here?
What kind of animals were here?
Well, if we go back, there are 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, Florida was twice as wide as it is now.
Right.
Because the oceans were 80 or 100 feet lower.
Right.
And the shelf went out really wide.
Right.
On the East Coast.
It looked practically the same because the shelf is steep yeah, but here in the Gulf where you go fish, at the Middle Grounds 80 or 100 miles offshore, that was land.
The middle Grounds was, 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.
Wow Steve, you got to find a, an image of that or an illustration of that.
There's got to be one online, 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.
Yeah.
I mean, all these big, massive animals that lived here, saber toothed cats.
Yep.
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.
Holy shit.
Look at that, dude.
Yeah.
That's incredible.
So there would have been people living along that coastline.
Right.
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, I haven't spent much time up there, no.
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.
There 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, 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.
Underwater Archaeology Sites00:02:51
Yeah.
Well, they found the 11,000-year-old mastodon skeleton with butcher marks on the tusks.
What?
And it's on display at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.
There was also.
When did they find this?
In the past 40 years or so.
Wow.
A guy, David Webb, who ran the underwater archaeology department at FSU, found it.
But then they found it was a prehistoric bison from 12,000 years ago that had a Clovis spear point in its skull that they found in this place.
Oh, my.
God, dude.
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 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.
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Comet Impact Hypothesis00:08:43
Now, do we know how all of those megafauna died?
Because it's interesting how in North America there's no more megafauna, but in Africa there is.
I don't, I've heard different theories about it.
I don't know what the current thinking is, but 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 a land bridge, first showing up in the fossil record in that 12,000, 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 changed.
So it's a.
You know, it probably wouldn't be hospitable for a giant furry elephant to live in Florida in this climate.
If it was like a rapid climate, like a rapid change.
Right.
I'm not sure how fast that happened, but I do know that people in hunting were a new presence on the landscape starting then, too.
Have you heard of the younger, driest 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, there was some sort of comet series of comet impacts.
They called the Younger Dryas that happened for about a thousand year period between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago.
And they think they've found evidence of these cosmic impacts in the ground layer.
They found this black matte layer in the ground that 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, 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, and those rocks could have settled there.
But yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it makes sense.
I mean, I know a little bit about the Cambrian Cretaceous boundary with the extinction of the dinosaurs and the massive.
Asteroid that 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 right from all these comets and other asteroids.
So it's just like a 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.
Oh my God.
And a fireball would have raced across the continent that would have hit like Montana within three minutes.
So it just literally scorched the earth 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.
Find a picture of the cenotes in the Yucatan, Steve.
They're incredible.
So, yeah, I mean, it.
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, you'd have boulders going across all of North America, right?
Right?
But it's interesting, like it could have wiped out all those species too or contributed to it, sure.
Sure, this is the uh, yeah, this is in the Yucatan.
Is this uh, 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 are these are freshwater, but they come in the interface.
And it's, I mean, Florida has the highest concentration of freshwater springs in the world, right?
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, right?
It changes the structure of a lot of it.
Now, do we know like what happened to 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?
I think they've kind of pinpointed where it was.
Right.
I don't know exactly.
I mean, I've heard about it across my adult life, but I don't know when it was.
I think it was relatively recent that we actually discovered that it hit the Yucatan.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was like in the 40s, I think.
40s.
And they know where it is, and I think they can measure where it hit.
But, dude, Steve, so I want to show you this real quick.
So, check out the Midwest scablands.
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 biblical flood where he thinks like millions of tons of water were rushing through these scablands.
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 western part of the North American continent.
And he does this incredible presentation of how he believes it all happened and in what series.
And it's super compelling.
Combined with the fact that they did the black mat, they cut into the earth and found that black mat 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.
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.
Yeah, no, it totally does.
But, like, you know, just going back to Florida, to before all those ice sheets melted, how wide and how far it went out into the Gulf is insane to me.
And it shows you how much.
How much things change over time.
I mean, you know, 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.
Right.
Yeah.
It's been a roller coaster.
But, you know, whether it's happening faster than species can adapt to it, that's a problem.
And the way we've hardened the landscape, you know, it's not like 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.
Family Ranching History00:02:55
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 open space and green space around the Suwannee River, around these different river mouths where.
You know, you see the palm trees dying off in Chazowitzka, 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.
So, going back to the cattle ranching, the cattle ranching project that you did when you got back 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?
Like, what's happening with it?
Here, I'll show another picture here.
So, this, that's my great granddad who I never met.
And 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.
What?
Like he was a guy from rural Wachula, grew up with nine other siblings in the woods and then ended up studying, going to Stetson, going to law school in Chicago and New York and coming back and being a governor and starting the law firm Carlton Fields here in Tampa.
Wow.
But I did get to meet the, I think, nine-year-old boy in that photo was my great-uncle, Daryl Carlton Jr.
He started the thing called Cracker Country at the state fair, at the Florida State Fairgrounds, where you can actually go see the house that his dad grew up in.
No way.
And I'm not trying to go down a side off ramp of family history, but 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 of 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.
Wow.
And when 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.
Land Ownership Changes00:12:18
You go from a wild, free range place where cattle moved.
as wildlife in a way, 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 people are dividing up the land and taking ownership and that was part of it.
So it was a free range situation back then.
But ranching stayed an important part of the landscape.
And 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.
Why would they be bad?
Well, like in Brazil, we're cutting, you know, people are cutting down rainforest.
Oh, right.
To slash and burn rainforest to put in cattle on soils that are not evolved or meant for grasslands.
And, you know, ecologically, 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 trucking them and putting on 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, in a grass fed ecosystem, a cow is very compatible with the environment.
And here, where we had buffalo or had, you know, where there are historic grasslands and rangelands that supported those kinds 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.
Wow, that's fascinating.
So, that's this picture.
This is Appalachicola National Forest, but you have 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 thrive and support the biodiversity and animals like the panther and the black bear and all the different species that live out there.
Yeah, this seems like 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 eats, you would want your food to eat things that are native to where you live, not things that are being shipped from across the country.
I would imagine it would be better for the cow to eat food that was grown there, the grass or whatever is native to the environment it lives in, right?
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, cows are made to eat grass.
And we have to give them antibiotics.
And other things to help them eat the corn.
Right.
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 taste is preferred by American consumers.
Grass fed beef can be drier, more gamey.
So there's been an appetite in the market that 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, I would think, drops by orders of magnitude because 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 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?
And the downside is you're not going to probably make as much money because they're not going to gain weight as quickly.
Right.
Okay.
So you might take, you might be able to feed them up to slaughter weight on corn and half the time they would take to feed them up to that same slaughter weight just eating grass.
But there's some.
I'm sure it's competitive.
It's a competitive market and it's about the bottom line.
But there are people who are doing it.
Like I met, I photographed ranches for more than 20 years across Florida now and you meet some amazing people.
But 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, what we produce 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 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 grass.
And then they're slaughtering them locally.
And you can do that.
And there are health conscious people or certain restaurants or certain who create a demand for that more premium.
Low environmental footprint, probably healthier food product, but it's just not mainstream yet.
Right.
How many ranches are doing it this way in Florida that you're aware of?
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 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 growing corn in the state of Florida, feeding the cow in the state of Florida.
So, it keeps it a little closer to home.
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 way that an outside investment company portfolio could buy a cattle ranch, right?
And then put people in there to run it in Florida and sit in their high rise in Manhattan and trade it like stock.
No, I'm pretty sure there are at least a few ranches I know of that are owned by out-of-state entities.
Oh, really?
Okay.
And they hire local crews to run their ranch.
So 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?
I don't think so.
No.
Okay.
But most often those are real estate plays.
You know, like the people who are buying these, you know, if a, and the thing is, it's really hard to keep owning a ranch.
Like, 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.
Yeah.
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 the 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, it's developers, real estate people.
Yeah.
God.
And that's what my motivation in all of this has been conservation.
And 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 in 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 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.
And who pays them for that?
It's often state programs or federal programs, sometimes land trusts like the Nature Conservancy.
But the biggest programs in Florida are either out of our Department of Environmental Protection or our Department of Agriculture.
Okay.
That makes sense.
And I think it's one of the most cost effective ways to save.
Landscapes.
Yeah.
Because when the state comes in to buy, I mean, 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 we can't afford, nor should we, to 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.
Right.
And then it stays protected.
Right.
And it stays in production and stays on the tax roll.
Mm hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
So 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.
Wow.
That's incredible.
In terms of acres.
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Wildlife Corridor Science00:12:08
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So, why is this in this ranch?
It looks like it's flooded.
Um, 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 um, but by you know, keeping them.
So this is south, this is pretty far south.
This is well yeah, in interior Bradenton.
Okay, got it here.
I'll show you a few.
Oh, near like Myaka, or yeah yeah, this is not far from Myaka, similar type of ecosystem.
Wait, I was going to show you this guy.
Wow.
Is that a trap?
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've 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 the 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.
Is you do have a scattering of public lands like Highland Tamak 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.
Wow.
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.
I knew there were black bears in Ocala National Forest.
I knew we had them in the state somewhere.
I didn't know they were surviving on ranches 40 miles from my family's ranch.
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.
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 Whales 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 Wayne of the Pooh territory.
I'm out of here.
But no, he, he, um, But we can find this map.
I don't think I have it in this particular slideshow, but I can dig it up.
It shows the GPS points along the southeastern edge of Interstate 4 where the bear couldn't get across.
Oh, wow.
And so there are 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.
God, that's beautiful.
That's the headwaters of Fish Eating Creek, but entirely on a private ranch 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 spent my career advocating for.
Right.
But that bear, 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.
God, dude.
So, 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.
Okay.
And Thousand 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 look at the red.
That's the development footprint in 2006.
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.
Wow.
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 the 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.
Can you go back one more time and then go forward again?
Yeah.
Wow.
So, this is what they called the trend development.
This is what it would look like if development continues on its same current pattern, the same rate that it's experienced.
The same rate in the same sprawling consumption without really intentional conservation.
Mm hmm.
And you can see how it renders conservation lands as islands surrounded by development or separated from one another.
However, it doesn't have to be that way.
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 the University of Florida had kind of planted the seeds for it.
He wrote a book called The Fragmented Forest and had 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 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.
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 protected national parks basically siloed from each other, do we know like how that negatively impacts species and evolution and all that?
Yes.
Yeah, it's called island biogeography and the science of it.
E.O. Wilson, a 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 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 the wide ranging animals first.
The bigger your territory, 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.
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, all the evidence suggests that anatomically modern Homo sapiens that would look like you or me have 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 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 word is fragmentation.
And the fragmentation definitely affects the wildlife, but it affects the ecosystem as a whole when it comes to water and resilience.
Fire and all the different things that need a connected landscape.
Wow.
That's incredible.
That's insane.
Protecting Connected Lands00:15:08
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 2012, the red line depicts the 100 day, 1,000 mile expedition that myself, that bear biologist Joe Guthrie, and a fellow conservationist Mallory Demitt.
And I took, and we went for 100 days and 1,000 miles from the Everglades to Georgia to show that you still had a connected corridor through the state.
And there was a.
On foot?
On foot and paddling.
Here we are in Everglades National Park.
That's incredible.
Really naive, idealistic 30 year old who's about to didn't know what I was getting into.
That's incredible, dude.
But we followed this route, stitching together the public and the 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 of Alabama.
Okay.
To show that the corridor still existed there.
And so that's.
And so, do these corridors still exist today?
Largely, yes.
Largely, yes.
Okay.
And we led a campaign 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 remotivated 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.
Florida Forever, its precursor called Preservation 2000, was started in 1990 by Republican Governor Bob Marcellus.
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, we already have 10 million acres of public land.
Why do we need more conservation?
Because this story wasn't being told, the fact that we need to keep it connected.
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.
There's 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're being told what to do with their 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 and 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'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.
And people see the logic in it.
And by framing conservation in the state through the lens of the Florida Wildlife Corridor, it went from polarized to everybody 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 $100 million, $200, $300 million a year again.
And so since the Florida Wildlife Corridor 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 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.
Are there any, um, who are the biggest opponents of this?
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, it's bad to litter and it's bad to kill animals, right?
Like, it's bad to at least, you know, unless you're going to eat a real estate.
It's about to make other species go extinct, right?
So, Yeah, who would be the groups that would be most opposed to this stuff?
I don't think there's anyone that I've met that'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 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.
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.
Wow.
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.
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, has 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.
Right.
And keeping it where it's attractive to everybody involved is the way that you can really make strides with this stuff.
Yeah, that's really smart.
Are there, do we know, are there any other states dealing with this same problem?
Every state's dealing with the 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.
Yes.
You know, if you are Georgia, even 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 you don't save this area in the next 10 years, the state's cut in half.
Yes.
And so it kind of makes clear what needs to happen to keep the balance.
Yeah, that makes total sense.
While we're here on the corridor map, 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.
Okay.
It's that 10 million acres that we talked about.
Right.
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.
What color is the 8 million?
The 8 million is the darker green in this case.
The darker green.
Okay, gotcha.
I think, yeah, it should say it on the.
Bottom on the key.
There are other maps I can share.
This is kind of a watercolor version that we came up with that kind of presents the big idea without getting into kind of pixel peeping of whether your ranch is in or out.
It just shows the concept.
Clever.
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 a half-earth project.
I mentioned that EO 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.
Oh, interesting.
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 a jaguar, Amazon has a lot more protection, but lots of need for more protection too.
I mean, they're not just dealing with other countries coming in there trying to suck up the resources and monetize it.
Yes.
And, you know, and for like 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 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 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 for the whole planet.
And right now, 15% of the land is protected and 8% of the oceans.
How much percent of the oceans?
Eight.
Only eight?
And only 3% have any level of enforcement.
So it's like between three and 8% of the oceans, depending how you count it.
And so 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 are going to help us get there.
It's not like a top down, someone in the UN tells you what you're supposed to do with your country.
It 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 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 truly global connected landscape.
And before we know, we'll have saber toothed tigers showing up in our driveways.
That's right.
Well, yeah.
If you get the genetic stuff going along the side.
Oh, yes.
I want to ask you about that too.
You bring them back, they'll have space.
They'll have space.
Maybe we won't advertise on that.
These things go in the ocean too, though.
So this is the work that I'm here.
I'll show you this picture.
Yeah.
I was going to ask.
I was going to add like 8% of the oceans.
The earth is 70 something percent ocean.
Right.
And, you know, a vast majority of it is unexplored.
And when you say protect the ocean, you mean the fishing, the fisheries?
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.
Right.
If you haven't seen it, check out the David Attenborough film Ocean.
It's on the Nat Geo channel, or it's on Disney Plus under National Geographic right now.
It changed my perspective about things like trawling for shrimp.
Yeah.
Really?
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 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 not worth it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ocean Floor Destruction00:14:48
Are you familiar with the fishing situation on the Gulf Coast, like with the quota system and the IFQs and all that?
I'm not dialed into it.
I know it exists, but I don't know the pros and cons or the tensions on it right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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 pretty gruesome.
Like they have these quotas.
I think it was in the early 2000s, the federal government set a limit of 3 million pounds of red snapper per year in the Gulf, in like this specific area of the Gulf.
And there was like derby fishing, right?
So all the boats could go out and catch as much as they wanted.
They would come back after fishing, weigh 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 IFQ quota per year.
And so, if that's Red Grouper, that's like a dollar a pound.
So, some of these guys got 100,000 pounds of quota a year.
Some guys got 250,000 pounds of quota a year every single year, just based on previous fishing catch history.
And so, 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 trade this IFQ on the internet like stock.
It's insane.
Oh, wow.
So now the fishermen, the deckhands on the boats who are breaking their fingers pulling up these fish are getting paid barely anything.
I don't know if this is how it's happening now, but 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, 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 support the local.
Not at all.
Right.
And in some of the Northeast states up in the Northeast, the whole fishing community is way different.
It's where the boats are owner.
They have to be owner operated.
Right.
Well, and you see that in the Southeast.
And I think, I don't want to take what I said about Asian immigrants out of context, but it's like they'll take advantage of the person who will work for the lowest wage.
Yes.
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 appreciation of fishing people and 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, take fish like tuna, they're just being obliterated.
And the average size of tuna gets smaller and smaller and smaller year after year.
Really?
Yeah, the bluefin tuna.
I mean, it's because of the high seas.
I mean, 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.
On the ship.
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 into whoever sent the factory ship there to do it.
Somebody was telling us, who was telling us about this recently, Steve?
Somebody was telling us it was either Mexico or some Central American countries had just loads of these Chinese factory ships just catching tons of fish.
And it was like hurting their economy.
I forget who that was.
I think it's everywhere.
I mean, it's Africa, it's off the coast of South America, it's the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.
It's a challenge because you have.
People coming there to catch the krill and catch all this abundant life.
Well, 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 that depends on it starts to decline.
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.
Right.
Because there's no checks and balances, no reason.
They don't care.
Yeah.
You know, 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%.
It's all about how these numbers are compared to whatever else we would be investing in.
Right.
Right.
Hold that thought.
I got to take a leak real quick.
Okay.
We'll be right back.
Well, we're talking about oceans.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Where do you think I took that picture?
Let me.
Offshore of the Gulf.
Yep.
Yeah, yeah, 30 miles off of St. Pete.
Yeah, right out here.
I've seen a couple of them offshore here.
That's awesome.
Yeah, dude, they're incredible.
The scientist that's a guy from NOAA 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 oh, really?
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 went to Bermuda, another one off the Bahamas.
So they're going to try to do it again.
I mean, Noah is in a tough time funding wise with the federal government right now, but if they can cobble the funds together to keep the research going, they'll try to put some more tags out this spring.
If the whale starts showing up again in May, early June, put some more tags on and see where they go.
Yeah, I've been following the tagged great whites all around Florida.
Oh, yeah, off OSearch?
Yeah, well, now there's an Instagram page I follow.
I forget what it is, but it shows the updates, like where they are.
I think there was one literally swimming right off.
Like 10 miles off New Smyrna Beach yesterday or two days ago.
Wow.
That's amazing.
That's crazy how many of them are coming down here.
And here's some of the work on the golf project we're doing, but here's researchers from FSU putting a camera tag they put on a loggerhead sea turtle.
Does that mess up his swimming at all?
Yeah, that one stays on for like 24 hours and pops off.
Oh, okay.
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 those stay on for keep some more air a couple years or yeah, you kind of slide, slide through the water um yeah so yeah what, what next?
What do we want to talk about?
Oh, I was going to show you um, 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 is done, kind of mapping out these priority conservation areas.
And then they have a vision for having a connected corridor up the Appalachians.
Wow, that's amazing, man.
And in order 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 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.
Yes, yes, totally.
All right, let's talk about the Florida Panther.
Okay.
That's something I can talk about.
How did this whole thing start for you with the Florida Panther?
So, I finished the 2015 Florida Wildlife Quarter expedition.
And so, here, three years into 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 it.
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 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 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 the best business person in that sense.
But it kind of, I was already like wanting to be more engaged or learn more about that story.
Yeah.
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 Fackahatchie Strand 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 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 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.
How rare is the Florida panther at this point in time?
How rare was the Florida panther?
This, I mean, this is only.
Do we know how many of them were?
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 adults.
Wow.
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 panth, 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.
Did they mess with humans?
There's never been a documented case in Florida.
I mean, I know of some turkey hunters who probably shit their pants when they 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 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 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.
One panther will patrol throughout their defending of a territory and looking for mates.
In the very best spots, I would see a panther come through once a month.
And so trying to get it all right to get the pictures, it ended up being a six year long trip.
How many camera traps did you have to build and set up?
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 when we started doing the film.
Ghost Orchid Discovery00:15:22
Incredible.
Incredible.
Started putting 4K Sony video systems out in the swamp and 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 sound.
Oh, you had audio?
Yeah, we had audio.
How'd you do that through the Pelican case?
You get a little hot shoe type microphone, put a Gore Tex bag over it, and then you drill a hole through the Pelican and run the 3H inch stereo plug down into the camera.
Oh, yeah.
It's just like a port.
I'm sure those would get ruined a lot, right?
Everything got ruined.
Everything got ruined a lot.
But here's what it looked like for me the first year of trying on this particular spot, another spot I was really excited about.
And I was saying, I think a smarter photographer would pick the other side of the log at this point.
But I'm getting a real gender study here.
If you wanted to know whether it's the male female ratio, it was very clear in these.
Super cooperative bears again.
And then panthers are just like tail wow, just juking me.
But the bears were not always cooperative.
Here, it took me a while.
It took 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.
Oh no, he's like flossing his teeth with my flash wire.
Everything's going off.
Yeah, but I'm not getting the picture because it's pointed somewhere else.
That's terrible.
They're like, oh no.
They're like, what is this?
And he's going to scratch on it.
He's a furry animal in the swamp.
He's like, that feels good.
Yeah.
Now they can't get in there.
They never actually damage the camera, right?
No.
But they can obviously mess up the wires.
They mess up all the wires.
Yeah.
I had.
I have a camera.
I had a camera stolen at one point.
I had one shot on the edge of the corkscrew swamp.
There's a.
Because you put it on somebody's property or something?
No, it was on the Audubon Sanctuary's property.
Okay.
It was pointed at the fence.
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 one of her kittens is just hidden.
Oh, yeah.
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.
But 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.
Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, if you've never been, is amazing.
It's.
Ancient old growth cypress.
It's just near Naples and it's a beautiful three mile long boardwalk through the cypress trees.
And you can, it's like a window in time.
Cypress has never been logged.
500 year old trees, beautiful.
Wow.
So this is a 220 square mile sanctuary.
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, it was 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 hole in the side of it, and my camera's bodies exploded, and there's like a 223 round.
Did the memory card survive?
Yeah.
Did they get a shot of the guy who shot it?
No, because he was probably 20 feet away on the other side of the fence.
So he smoked it without.
Right.
So I was like, well, there's that.
Add that to the list.
That's insane, man.
Hurricane Armour did a doozy on him, too.
Oh, yeah.
Opening up.
I saw the opening up the cases and just water pouring out of the cases.
Yeah.
I'll show you a picture I got.
We didn't.
In the.
There's a scene where I like.
I won't play the video because you've seen it, but I got the.
No, you can play it.
Looks like there is water in this camera box.
Okay.
This was right after Irma.
Yeah, well, like 10 days after, because they wouldn't let us in to the Panther Refuge.
Oh, really?
Because everything's shut down, and we had to chainsaw our way back to get down the roads at this point.
But.
Oh, my camera's cooked.
What kind of cameras were those?
That was a Nikon D800.
Oh, God.
This one hurt.
Now, when that happened, did the memory card survive?
That memory card survived.
And the cool thing about that one is so.
That's like a little bit of a silver lining in your camera breaking.
Well, see, I knew the hurricane was coming.
Generally, towards that area.
And I had this decision like a week ahead of time do I go take all my cameras out or 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 whether the storm is going to come or not.
Right.
Well, the storm did come.
And last minute it went like inland.
Right.
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 this, all these false triggers from when the storm was really bad, and then there's like a video of like it's down.
Oh, god!
But on the card, like buried under all those 3,000 false triggers, I found this picture.
Whoa, is that in the rain?
In the rain, that's wild.
Jumping over the swamp.
So I was like, So this is like right when the hurricane was hitting, I think this was like.
A couple of days before the hurricane and just a big thunderstorm that happened in the days before.
Wow, dude.
Yeah, I was pretty excited about that.
That's incredible.
So finally, I was like, yes, the world will see this.
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.
Yeah.
And this is like two years in, and I was like half ready to quit because 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 I'm like, I've got nothing.
I've got nothing because I have to show the Panther with as much beauty and power as my colleagues have shown the snow leopards or the tigers in India.
It has to stand shoulder to shoulder with all these other cats around the world.
It can't 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.
I felt.
Felt the power of the swamp at that point.
Here we go.
And so this became like 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 Fatcahatchee 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.
And what are the ghost orchids?
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 in 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 the 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 trying.
There's about 2,000 ghost orchids in the wild in Florida.
About one in 10 of those bloom each year for a couple weeks in the summer, in the peak of the summer.
And maybe one in 10 of those get pollinated.
So you really have to be.
Wow.
Now, what's the significant?
Like, what's the.
I mean, they look incredible.
They're really cool.
They're rare.
There's a lot of like lore to them.
It's just, it's a rarity and the beauty of them that kind of draws you in.
But, but, We finally got the system working and photographed five different moth species probing or pollinating the ghost orchid.
There's a Nat Geo story about it, there's scientific papers written about it.
It was pretty cool.
Whoa.
But that's what I'm doing in that picture I was showing you.
I didn't paddleboard to my normal panther camera trap, but the ghost orchid would be growing near that bromeliad, in that kind of environment.
But I was really trying to show the panthers like wow, um, 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.
They're kind of like a water hybrid mountain lion, right?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, a mountain lion could do this too, but it's just because they are adaptable enough.
I mean, they live in the Amazon.
They live in Central America.
They live throughout these different areas.
And I have to be careful about how I'm making this analogy, but I don't think it's any coincidence that America's only unconquered native tribe in the Seminoles or the Miccosukee also persevered in the Everglades.
Because it's like you can have it.
No one wants to go in there and fight it.
The U.S. generals were like, you can have it.
And the Panther, who is one of the most significant clans and cultural elements for the Seminole people, also persevered in that landscape.
That's incredible.
And this one, this is one of my favorites.
This thing was.
Whoa.
There's this trail.
Why is he growling?
Just hissing.
Or her.
Why is she hissing?
Is that a he or a he?
I think it's a he.
I don't know.
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 on.
But this is an old logging trail that goes through the Facahatchie.
This is in Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge north of I 75.
But there's this old logging trail that goes up through this ancient swamp 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.
Okay.
So I've got my camera set up on the other side, and there's a video in the Panther film where it kind of jumps over the water.
It's at the same place.
Oh, okay.
Now, where on the totem pole on the hierarchy, where do gators match up against Panthers?
Are gators more afraid of the Panthers or vice versa?
I would think that 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, you're like a 10 footer or 12 footer, but yeah, I would think that I would think the gator's on the menu if you're a small gator, um, for a panther, okay.
And I think it's like that in the Amazon with like the cayman and the jaguar, yeah.
Jaguars crush caymans, yeah, yeah.
That's, I mean, jaguars are 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 cruises by.
So that gator was like, I'm out.
They might be cautious and get in the water for anything, but she looked like the queen in that one.
Are you ever freaked out when you're out here by yourself, trekking through the freaking Everglades with all these wild animals around you?
What's the sketchiest situation you've been in?
Is there any specific animal you're more afraid of?
Well, I try not to go alone because it's just not a good idea.
You mean more likely going to 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 get inside a gator's mouth once and that was, that woke me up.
What do you mean?
How did you get inside a gator's mouth?
And what part of you?
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 one of these spots where we were doing a time lapse pictures of the swamp water coming up.
Swamp Photography Challenges00:10:36
And so 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 how I created those.
But I normally never go at dawn or dusk to my camera trap sites because I don't want to ruin the shot.
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.
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 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 coming up too high.
And at the same spot, I'd walk 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.
That's for gators.
Yeah, I just poke it in front of me when I walk.
And I never had.
I never scared anything off except maybe once, never really had a close run in.
So I had 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 trap and the slider set up.
And I just grabbed a like a four foot long walking stick 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, that's like waist deep, black water.
It's like a head the size of a garbage can lid.
It's like, whoop, bam, on my hand.
And it was so fast.
And I had the walking stick and I had this waterproof backpack on.
And then I had a slider, like a four foot carbon fiber slider and a rifle case.
So I'm really loaded down and kind of awkward.
And I just pull and fall backwards.
And there's a little bit of current coming around 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 lower stomach groin.
And it was like a toothy punch.
He didn't hold on to me.
You know, I didn't have like a snap.
I didn't have bite marks on both sides of me.
It was just like a 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, 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.
And it was probably like a nine foot gator from.
The look of it, or Jesus, dude.
So I was like, So it was just like a defensive move.
It wasn't, I think it was a defensive move.
I mean, I think it probably heard me coming.
Just it was big enough that it probably had its feet and tail on the ground in four feet 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.
And you were lucky, man.
Yeah, no, had I, yeah, had it wanted me, it would have gotten my arm or worse, you know, it either ripped my arm off or drowned me or.
You know, something, but yeah, you know, 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.
But that's interesting, that's interesting that it didn't try to like eat you or take you because it's like you hear about the stories of gators eating dogs and people in like suburban areas, right?
Like in 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.
Yeah, I mean, and this thing's probably never seen a human.
It might not.
And I don't, I mean, unless you're a fed gator, or unless you're a really big gator, like 12 feet, like someone my size or your size isn't on the menu typically.
I mean, it's like, had I had a dog swamped in there, that 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 instincts like not worth it, you know, not return of investment, not worth it.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, 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.
Right.
You know Manny Puig?
Yeah.
You've seen the foot.
I love him.
Yeah.
He's never met him, but he's a wild man.
He's wild.
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 uses them to hunt gators and hogs.
Oh my gosh.
And I'm like, why are you doing this?
Like, why do you.
What made you decide to create a trident to hunt gators and hogs?
And he did catch his tilapia with them too.
He's like, he goes, I got bored with.
With guns and spear guns.
He's like, I wanted to find a more difficult way to catch these animals, to challenge myself.
I'm like, okay.
He just wants to make shit more primitive and difficult.
Oh my gosh.
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.
Yeah.
Dude's a maniac.
No, yeah, I've seen video.
I mean, 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 20 years ago.
He's been bit by seven different species of sharks.
And he said the worst one was a lemon shark bite.
He said the lemon shark could have easily taken his whole arm off if he wanted to.
He's been bit by a Mako shark, Caribbean reef shark, what's the nurse shark?
I have no, I'm sorry.
He said the nurse shark was the worst.
Really?
The nurse shark.
You have to work hard to get bit by a nurse shark.
Yeah.
And he was like trying to tickle it to the surface too?
He's very handsy with sharks.
I mean, I have no aspiration to get bit by anything else.
I think I'm one and done.
I don't need any bragging rights on that.
Yeah, he's a different breed, man.
He's from Cuba.
He's a rare species.
Oh my gosh.
What does Chris say about him?
Did you ask Chris about Manny?
Yeah, I can't remember what Chris said about him.
But yeah, he thought Manny was off his rocker, too.
I emailed Chris when I got bit by the gator to get his take on it, and he thought it was probably like a territorial kind of thing, too.
That's what it sounds like.
Yeah.
But yeah, it was interesting.
I was in shock for 15 minutes.
Dry land was only 20 feet 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 a first aid kit.
And we went.
Oh, so you weren't alone?
She was on her way a little bit later.
I was alone, but I was 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.
Got it.
So she caught up to me.
I went the long way around to stay shallow to get to my camera.
And I went and went ahead and 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 got bit by the gator.
Because if I would have called it in right then, they would have made me go to the 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 I think the funniest thing is like, I feel like a character from a Carl Hyacinth novel.
I show up to an urgent care in East Naples.
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 receptionist is going to at least be somewhat impressed by my damages.
And I'm like, she's, what are you here for?
I'm like, I got bit by an alligator.
And she doesn't even look up.
She's like, take a seat.
The doctor will be with you in a minute.
Didn't even look at you.
I'm like, either this happens, like, Every day here?
Poor girl, she needs a vacation.
So she's like, Have a seat at the dock, we'll be with you in a minute.
So I go sit down, and the same retired ER doc who stitched me up when I hit myself a machete a couple years before comes in, gives me the tetanus shot, and soaks the hand.
It was in and out, but she didn't even give me any props at all.
That's crazy.
That sounds anticlimactic.
What about snakes?
Never had any trouble with snakes.
No, that's how Manny actually almost died from a snake bite.
He lost his finger.
Yeah, I mean, 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 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.
Right, right.
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 who walks by doesn't see it, it like coils and gets ready.
And the third person who walks by and accidentally kicks the snake gets it somehow.
Oh, wow.
That makes sense.
Takes a while.
Yeah.
So you only bring a machete to protect yourself typically and a stick?
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 the camera trap.
I did start after that gator, I did start carrying knives.
Okay.
Like I got a neck knife and I got a hip knife.
Okay.
No gun.
No.
And you're not allowed to carry a gun at these federal properties anymore.
Oh, no.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, on one of our expeditions, I carried a.
Like a little 45/410 revolver in case I came across a python with like a pistol with buckshot, basically, but never had to use it, right?
Female Panther Evidence00:13:43
Um, god, that would suck to run into a pissed off plant panther though that was like trying to protect its cubs, yeah, yeah, no, but it's that's not going to happen, like they would see you so far before you see them, right?
You know, like they'd be out, right?
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 feel in danger.
I mean, there's a group of people, but that's the way 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 a 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, 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 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 5 a.m., they call it.
And if it ding, ding, ding, she's in the den.
But if they call it at 5 a.m. and she's not in the den, that means she's still out hunting.
They'll come in, and 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.
Then they find the kittens and then they'll put a 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 panther kittens.
What's up, man?
And so, yeah, I've been in there where, you know, then someone's always listening.
Yeah, okay, the mom is coming home now.
Like, we got to get out of here.
She's coming home.
She's coming back from hunting.
But I have the most admiration for the female Panthers.
I mean, to think about it, 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.
Wow, dude.
Now, how is the population?
It's growing.
Is it growing consistently or is it growing slowly or like what?
Is it still around the 200 or did you say it was about 200 now?
About 200.
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 they worked up.
Oh, wow, man.
And because, 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.
Okay.
Male Panthers have that 200-mile home range I was talking about.
And if you're a male panther born south of the Clouse Hatchie River or south of Fort Myers, That territory is pretty full.
You know, there's probably a male panther who has every territory claimed in that part of the state.
And so you're going to push north.
You're going to swim the Clouse Hatchie River and you're going to be on the ranch lands or the other parts of the corridor further north in the state.
But there are no females documented north of Fort Myers, basically.
And so that's a limiting factor.
So, 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.
Right.
So the only way for that is for female panthers to keep moving further north in the state and even into Georgia and the southeast to give enough territory.
And the big story happened in 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 Clouse Hatchie River since 1973.
And so that was like the, there's a black and white picture.
And why weren't they going north of that river?
Well, it's the females had less incentive to go there because they, you know, 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.
Right.
Um, 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.
Okay, 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 north of the Clusahatchee.
Wow.
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.
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 going to ever have a camera and find one of these things in the wild without a camera.
The camera trap's the only way.
You're not going to get a picture like this.
I mean, 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 going.
I was in tears watching that.
I was like, that was so sad.
It's, well, yeah, when the injured kid, but yeah, it was, it was.
But that's the one time and all the time trying that I ever saw.
And so you're not reliably going to get photography of one.
I mean, if you were saying, if you were like obsessed with getting a picture of a panther holding a camera, I would send you to 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.
Wow.
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.
Wow, man.
Which is amazing.
But 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 the Clusatchee 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.
Yeah.
And it's erasing its time to whether we can.
Where the panthers can reclaim that historic territory before the development takes it.
So the the the kittens stay with the mom until about a year.
Until about a year 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 um, 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.
And the males are just out looking for new females.
Yeah, they're looking for food.
They're looking for mates.
Right.
But the male doesn't stay with the female mountain lion that it bred with.
No, not.
They just keep moving, keep defending their territory.
Right.
Okay.
I mean, we did have some photography and video in Big Cypress 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 seemed 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 actually two males that came in.
And so first it was like 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.
Wow.
Um, how many of the uh mountain lions that are in Florida right now are tagged with GPS or radio frequencies?
I think, I think maybe like five or six.
That's it, yeah.
I mean, maybe maybe it's 10 if the National Park Service is doing anything in Big Cypress and parallel to the state agency here, but um, it's not a lot.
Wow.
Um, but if I show you this map, the male panthers have been wandering the peninsula.
You know, there was one killed on the road in Hillsborough County, not that far from the Alafaya 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 Ocalcoochie 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, then that means the wildlife corridor is still there.
Yeah.
And it's still working.
Yep.
So that's the silver lining of that one.
I saw you had photos of Panthers walking underneath like highways, right?
Yes.
Yeah, I've got some pictures of that here.
Like this is a Panther traveling underneath Interstate 75.
Wow.
And that's Picayune Strand State Forest on the south.
Oh, that's a long exposure.
Yep.
I can see that red line is a car.
It's a car streaking by.
Yeah, it's probably a 10 or 15 second exposure at night.
Wow, man.
That's so crazy.
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 14 different strobes lighting this scene.
It's about 200 yards from foreground where this Panther is to the background where the southbound lane of Interstate is.
Oh, so you're lighting up that far, far back bridge band?
Yeah.
So, 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.
Good Lord.
How long does that take you to set that shot up?
And do you have to like test it on yourself?
Yeah, and you test it at night to see it.
I mean, 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.
You don't want to haze it from doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing, going safely underneath.
And so the flash would go off a couple times.
And so this panther is about 50, 70 yards away 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 it got the timing with the.
Wow, that's wild.
That's such a cool shot.
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 Picayune Strand to the Panther Refuge on our way north to the state.
Oh, really?
So, I've got history with that spot.
Toll Road Development Risks00:09:38
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?
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 the actual genome or if it's kind of like a proximate.
They used CRISPR, I think.
Yeah, I'm not totally up to speed on the genetics.
I mean, I think it's fascinating.
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, it 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 want to get into a Jurassic Park kind of scenario where you're really meddling with things because that could throw ecosystems more out of balance.
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 be co mingling with wolves.
And the dire wolves are like, Like, what three or four times the size of normal wolves, right?
So, like, I mean, yeah, I don't know if they've thought that through or how far they've thought that through, yeah.
Yeah, and wolves are, it's a complicated history of wolves.
You know, like 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 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.
Right.
But in the case of the Florida Panther, I think it's kind of a really hopeful example.
I'm going to show you a picture of this.
Do they take out cattle?
They do.
They do.
But it's in some places, there's some places that have had significant losses, but they're often the ranch that.
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.
Okay.
But if you have like young calves, it's like a fresh buffet right up on the edge of the cypress swamp.
It's, you know, you're giving the panther, you're tempting the panther.
Yeah.
So this guy is a hero of mine.
He's a rancher named Kerry Lightsey, whose family has been ranching in the Kissimmee River Valley and in Florida for.
Generations and he's one of the early adapters of conservation easements.
They own an island called Brahma Island in the middle of Lake Kissimmee, a 3,000 acre island.
Um, and they put the whole thing under conservation easement, 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 you know part of the solution now, yeah.
That's incredible.
I asked him when that first female panther came north of the Clouse Hatchie River, that's where all his ranches are located.
I was like, Carrie, they're the panther's coming back to the northern Everglades.
What do you think about that?
Never forget his answer.
He's like, Carlton, the Panthers are going to 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.
Yeah.
And so 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 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.
Yes.
And they can see that.
And so, if 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.
That can help the rancher get their land protected.
Right.
Now, what about this the push for development of more toll roads?
Where does that fit into all of this?
Because the toll roads aren't, I mean, it's obviously a different thing than housing development.
Yeah.
Well, a toll road can become a major catalyst for development.
Right.
And they can funnel development right into the least developed places.
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 was 2006.
It was like a precursor to what came up in 2019, 2020 with the M Corps 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 MCORS, 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 I 75 and the Suncoast Parkway.
But that 2006 toll road was a major impetus for me to start the Florida Wildlife Corridor project.
There's a writer who I really admire from the University of Florida, Cynthia Barnett, who wrote a story for Florida Trend.
There's a cover story about that toll road to nowhere, the heart.
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 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 a 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 sent me to Google to try to see whether Florida Wildlife Corridor existed 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 highway so that it'll 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 going to make a choice to put in a road that ruins a wildlife corridor, at least we'll know it and we'll be talking about it.
Yes.
And so fast forward to 2020 when the Heartland Parkway or when the new toll roads came out, the MCORS toll roads, the.
The Florida Wildlife Corridor 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 helped kind of put shape to a name, basically naming the conservation opportunity.
Yeah.
And by giving it an identity, it helped it have a place in the conversation.
Yes.
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'll just be a road coming through and we'll do mitigation for the roads that'll help save land.
So even if the road does get built, it gets built in a way that's mindful of the wildlife corridor.
Governor DeSantis Concessions00:08:43
It ends up that the legislature and Governor DeSantis.
Threw that one out too, and it's gone away for now.
So, oh wow, that happened in 2021, the same year that the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act got passed.
Right, that's amazing.
Yeah, I don't know, I don't pay so much attention to like 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.
He looks, he's the bald guy.
Rick Scott?
Rick Scott, that guy.
There was a bunch of sugar farms, I think, in Florida.
Everglades, yeah.
In the Everglades, right.
And they were doing some specific fertilizer.
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 he was somehow lobbied by like Big Sugar to protect the sugar farms.
Yeah, the sugar industry is politically fascinating because you had historically the Fan Hool brothers, one was Democrat, one was Republican.
They heavily supported all sides and it helped 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, but there's an environmental cost to that.
And a lot of the Everglades.
Phosphorus, that's what it was.
It gets polarized.
And the Everglades lobby and the sugar really paint each other.
They're locked heads on all this.
I mean, I think that.
Sugarcane is better suited for that landscape than subdivisions.
Yeah.
So it's a bit of a balance.
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.
Oh, really?
You know, like the Kissimmee River comes out of the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes.
Out of Orlando, out of Kissimmee, out of that whole St. 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 the Mandarin River that naturally filtered out and cleaned itself on its way down to the The southern Everglades.
So there's phosphorus in the system, phosphorus from everywhere.
But I think 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 lobbied to get rid of.
Got it.
Because they decided they didn't want to sell anymore.
The terms have been negotiated for a deal, and they could have been kind of forced to go through with the deal.
And you can, you know, some people argue that land is best served to stay in agricultural production.
Right.
You know, and others think it should be part of Everglades restoration.
So it's kind of a fraught situation down here.
Sure.
But either way, better to be a sugar farm than to be filled up with subdivisions.
Yeah, because you can control your phosphorus coming off of a sugar farm more than you can control it off 5,000.
St. Augustine or Bahia grass lawns.
Yes.
That's true.
So I think, I mean, I tend towards the optimistic we can all do this together, 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 think there's space for all these things still.
It'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 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 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 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 you're urban or rural, Republican, Democrat, you know, people are interested and care about wildlife.
Yes.
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 protect their migratory pathways, you end up saving enough of nature that it's going to serve our needs too.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, it's just this crazy balancing act that can go wrong so easily if you don't do it the right way.
I mean, there's plenty of evidence of where, you know, it has gone wrong.
I think there's 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.
Yeah.
Where there's people who are like every day going out and like shooting iguanas and pythons trying to keep it held back.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
It's in it.
And I think that it's crazy like 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 ape to us is so far.
And we're kind of like playing God with some of these, 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 there's a lot of moving parts.
It's just a hard thing to grasp sometimes.
Well, yeah.
And we're playing God without having the perspective of God.
If we were God, we would understand all.
The domino effect of all of our impacts, yes.
So we play God in one little territory, right?
Exactly, and 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.
Storytelling for Nature00:12:46
Right.
You know, 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 is, yeah.
And so, you know, I think, I think like we have, we're like we're domesticating ourselves, yeah.
That's a good way to put it.
And, you know, we're, we need to rewild ourselves as we rewild the planet, right?
Because there, a lot of the answers are there.
I go to the National Geographic Storyteller Summit every year in DC, 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'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 a voice that we can only like scratch the surface of, right?
But there's this, um, 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 that could help point us in the right direction, yeah, totally.
Man, um, what else are you planning on working on in the future?
Do you have anything lined up that you uh that you're trying to get started or plan on doing here soon?
So, yes, um.
You know, my first love, even before the ranches and the Panthers, is the golf.
You know, I grew up here, learned to surf in the golf, learned to fish in the golf.
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 golf has the identity of oil fields and overdevelopment to the rest of the world.
But people don't think about sperm whales and whale sharks and.
The beauty and the 200 miles of protected coastline between Tampa and Tallahassee and free flowing rivers like the Suwannee and the Springs.
And so I get a lot of satisfaction in trying to bring awareness to that.
But it really connects beautifully to the Florida Wildlife Corridor because if you followed the situation with the seagrasses 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 seagrasses, we have the largest contiguous seagrass in the entire Gulf between Tampa and Tallahassee, like the Nature Coast and the Big Bend 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, 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.
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 um.
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 kind of that stretch of coastline.
That's amazing.
And trying to tell that story.
I've got a my family and I got a 1969 aluminum houseboat that someone converted for outboard motors with a 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.
That's incredible, man.
Is that going to be a documentary?
We're making a film with Sylvia Earle called Katie Bryden from my team's a director for it, really talented director, and it's called Lasting Hope.
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.
Wow.
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 seagrasses 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.
That's amazing, man.
I'll try to find the.
A couple of those pictures I was showing you.
Like, this is the Finn Holloway River.
Like, that's the Gulf.
You know, people don't think of that sort of undisturbed, unbroken beauty on the coastline.
Incredible.
Where exactly in the Gulf is that?
So, this is north of Crystal River, south of Tallahassee.
Wow.
It's called the Finn 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, And this whole, 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 from 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.
Right.
And so, that's kind of the story to tell there.
That's amazing, man.
Could you imagine just taking, ripping an airboat through all that?
It's so, so beautiful.
I took the, I've got some other pictures, but I took the houseboat all the way up into the, you know, right into the foreground of there and was flying the drone.
Oh, this is from a drone.
Wow.
Yeah, I spent a week documenting all these river mouths in July, kind of from Stane Hatchie North.
I also knocked my lower unit off in Stane Hatchie because I misjudged how shallow it was and had to teach myself how to.
Changed 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.
That's incredible, man.
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 corridors are these frameworks that we need to scale.
And so, my team at Wild Path 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.
Right.
And so we'll have to check back in a year or two and see how that's going.
But I see a seed being planted.
And it's a model I followed.
I mean, 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.
Wow.
So it's like science, storytelling, policy impact.
And 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 in marine protected areas in the past 10 years through this method of expedition, storytelling, policy.
That's amazing, man.
And I think that wildlife quarters can actually 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.
Yeah.
100%.
The way you're doing it makes it super digestible and relatable, especially for people that are living in that area.
That's kind of like, 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.
Right.
And stuff in North America.
Here's a corridor in the Yellowstone to Yukon that 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 U.S. Jaguar corridor here in South America, where you can help tie those habitats together in a connected way.
Tiger corridors in India.
Wow.
It's kind of the same concept applying to the whole planet.
Even in the oceans, this is a whale superhighways map that the World Wildlife Fund put out.
Wow.
That's incredible.
And this is a vision off of Costa Rica and Ecuador between the Galapagos and Central and South America, looking at some really important migratory corridors for sharks and other fish.
So, yeah, that's kind of the world I see that there's, you know, a real opportunity to like rethink how it all fits together.
It's amazing, man.
You're doing amazing work, dude.
I'm that's, uh, it's super impressive.
Super impressive.
Um, thank you.
I appreciate you coming and doing this, man.
This is, this has been phenomenal.
I've, I've learned so much.
My pleasure.
And it's, it's nice to come, come home to find Alice County for it.
I felt like I was like driving to my parents' house, coming into your studio.
Not too far away.
That's awesome.
Um, tell people where they can, uh, 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.
Yeah.
Well, check out our conservation work at wildpath.com.
And if you're interested in my art, it's at carltonward.com.
I do fine art prints and really like providing art for people.
And then, yeah, I'm easy to catch, find by email through there, through the websites.
Also, my Instagram's at Carltonward.
Amazing, man.
We're going to have to do a follow-up here in a couple years.
For sure.
Go out on the boat and see some of these places.
Anytime you want a tag along, let me know.
That sounds really good.
Well, I appreciate you sharing these stories with your audiences.