[00:00:00] Crystal: I am Crystal DiMiceli, and welcome to the Forces for Nature Show.

Do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the doom and gloom you hear of these days? Do you feel like you as just one person can’t really make a difference? Forces for nature cuts through that negativity. In each episode, I interview somebody who’s doing great things for animals and the environment. We talk about the challenge.

They’re addressing the solution. They have found what keeps them going and will leave you with practical action tips so that you, YouTube can become a force for nature. Today’s guest is Carlton Ward Jr. He’s a National Geographic explorer and photographer who for almost two decades has been advocating for the natural areas throughout the US state of Florida.

I was really excited to chat with him because I feel connected to this issue in a way. I grew up visiting my grandparents there, and now my parents have a home in southwest Florida, right near where the story takes place. Every time I return, it’s impossible not to notice the explosion of development that’s happening and the natural areas disappearing.

And I always think about the wildlife whose home it was before and if they stand a chance. As a matter of fact, I was there recently and saw a bobcat as roadkill. So to say that I was looking for signs of hope by talking to Carleton, it would be an understatement.

Hi Carlton. Thank you so much for joining me on Forces for Nature. Today we’re celebrating your new film and book Path of the Panther, which is an extension of the Path of the Panther Project, an impact campaign with National Geographic and other partners that helped to inspire the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act in 2021.

Before we get into that though, I would first like to start with your upbringing because you have a personal connection to the work that you’re doing.

[00:02:03] Carlton: I am an eighth generation Floridian, and through that I have a sense of connection and heritage to natural Florida, particularly the rural parts of the state and the Florida heartland.

And Florida has this wide swath of green space in the interior that remains largely hidden in plant site to. The millions of people living on the coast and the 130 million plus annual visitors we get, but I’ve always felt a connection there. I have a lot of cousins and family members who are full-time ranchers and cowboys still.

And although I grew up mainly on the coast in the town of Clearwater, in a very developed suburban setting, I had one foot on the coast and one foot in the heartland, and I think it helped my sensitivity and appreciation for the natural side of Florida. And also gave me quite a bit of grief and concern for how fast we were losing it.

[00:02:57] Crystal: And the work you’re focusing on now is about the panther, the Florida panther. What’s the history of this animal and what are the challenges that they’re facing right now?

[00:03:08] Carlton: The Florida panther is a puma. It’s technically according to some the same species as the mountain lion or the cougar. It extends from the southern tip of Chile all the way up to the Canadian Rockies.

It’s the North American and South American big cat. But as colonial settlers moved into the Americas, as habitat was developed, as there was conflict of livestock, all the panthers and known existence in the eastern United States were wiped out either through hunting or persecution or habitat lost, or a combination of all the above.

To the point that the last remnant of any pumas east of the Mississippi River was surviving at the very southern tip of Florida in the Everglades, where the swamps and remote forest were wild enough that there hadn’t been conflict with people and panthers scratched out in existence all the way up until the 1960s and seventies when they were discovered and proven to be there and kind of.

At that point switched from being a persecuted species to a conservation species. Going back to 1973, they were one of the first animals listed on the US Endangered Species Act, and once they became a focus of conservation, there’s been a lot of effort to help revive and save the Florida panther. It’s led to a lot of land conservation, the establishment of big public preserves like Big Cypress National Preserve, and to some genetic rescue where.

They were so inbred, you know, in in the 1980s and nineties, that even with all the habitat protection in the world, they weren’t gonna make it. And scientists brought in eight female Texas Cougars, which is the closest living relative to the Florida panther. Geographically, five of those females bred into the Florida population, and it helped alleviate in inbreeding problems like holes in the heart and infertility.

And help give them kind of a genetic foundation for the recovery that we’re experiencing now. So, you know, four or five decades later, they’re nearly 200 Florida Panthers living in the swamps and forest of South Florida, but that’s not enough for a genetically viable population into the long run. The Species Recovery Plan calls for nearly 700 panthers, which would require access to three times as much territory as they’re currently inhabiting.

And the reason for that is that panthers need a lot of land. One male, Florida Panther has a home range requirement of up to 200 square miles. So to put that in perspectives, that’s four times the size of Miami in size for a single male panther. It’s the reason that 200 panthers is pretty much filled up the available habitat.

And the southern tip of the state, the carrying capacity is the only way that, yeah, exactly. And so the only way they’re going to reach those more sustainable numbers is having access to more of their historic territory throughout the Florida Peninsula and beyond.

[00:06:10] Crystal: Do they need that much land to find enough food for themselves?

Why do they need such a big swath of land?

[00:06:16] Carlton: It’s my understanding that they patrol and defend large territories. You know, the, they’re highly competitive and male panthers won’t tolerate other male panthers occupying the same space. The female panthers have smaller home ranges, more in the order of 40 square miles, and as a result, the recovery has, has been slowed by the lag in time it takes for females to occupy a certain geography.

If you look at the peninsula of Florida, there’s a big lake in the middle, lake Okeechobee, and there’s a river, which really is more of a drainage canal these days. It goes from Lake Okeechobee down to Fort Myers in the Gulf of Mexico, that that river, the Caloosahatchee has been the northern limit to the known breeding range of Florida panthers for the past 50 years.

Male Panthers, which defend larger territories, have been seen and documented throughout the Florida Peninsula in recent decades. In fact, 11 years ago, there was a male panther shot by a hunter further north than Atlanta, Georgia, and that individual had actually been born in the Southern Everglades. So it shows the kind of distance they can travel and there’s still a wildlife corridor for them.

But it wasn’t until 2016 that the first female panther. In 43 years have been documented on the north side of the CLOs Hatchie River, and so we’re just at the cusp of a potential recovery and expansion into that northern range, but it’s a very fragile recovery for reasons. You mentioned like the rapid development that’s happening throughout Florida.

Was

[00:07:48] Crystal: the panther and photography something you were always interested in?

[00:07:53] Carlton: You know, my, my journey into photography actually, even though I was a. Alto generation Floridian. I, I went away to college and then as I got into photography, I thought that meant exploring and taking pictures in other parts of the world.

And I had an amazing experience to go work with the Smithsonian in Central Africa. And I published my first book there and really learned about the power of photography and storytelling to combine with science and create a voice for conservation and ag advocacy. But every time I got on an airplane and left Florida for a couple months and came home.

There was a new massive subdivision or a new road on what used to be ranch land or natural land. And it took me going away and coming back a few times to really understand the pace and scale of loss in in my home state. And I felt called like an obligation to come back and use my voice and use my energy to speak up for natural Florida.

And my pathway into that was kind of a winding path, but I started my first long-term photo documentary project to look at Florida’s cattle ranches. Because I felt like this was one of the most underappreciated sides of our state that had tremendous consequence for the future. When I started looking at ranches in 2005, 2006, they occupied one fifth of our state by land mass and, but virtually vin, but virtually missing from Florida’s identity.

And so focusing on ranches. I published a book in 2009 called Florida Cowboys Keepers at The Last Frontier. So looking at this like stewardship and relationship between working lands and conservation. But as I went deeper into that story, I discovered so many things I hadn’t known about Florida, including the fact that we had a population of black bears living almost entirely on private cattle ranches in the Northern Everglades, in the central part of our state.

And so like the Pioneer Rancher, these black bears became an emblem or an icon of these underappreciated wild places in Florida. And I met a bear biologist named Joe Guthrie back in 2006 who was putting GPS collars on these black bears to learning the ways they traveled across this network of ranches and public parks and preserves through the Florida Peninsula.

And that opened my mind. Into the idea of wildlife corridors. I started looking at the research. I started learning from Joe and his colleagues and folks like Tom Hawk from the University of Florida about something called the Florida Ecological Greenways Network. There was this kind of green infrastructure plan, if you will, that was showing how we could connect up all these other parks and preserves.

[00:10:29] Crystal: Can you, can you first des define what a wildlife corridor is?

[00:10:34] Carlton: Yes. My working definition of a wildlife corridor is, Connected wildlife habitat, it’s ideally not a thread or a narrow band of green. It is a robust ecological connection that provides contiguous habitat for all kinds of wildlife, including wine racing species.

If we were to use, and this is, when I talk about the word wildlife corridor, what I’m really talking about is an ecological corridor. It’s a water, you know, it’s a watershed corridor, it’s a climate corridor. It’s a wildlife movement corridor. It’s really the negative space that remains after all of our development and human activities on the landscape.

But I mean, this, I don’t, I don’t, you tell me if I’m getting too detailed on things, but I think that it’s a, it’s an interesting distinction to think about. Cause some people talk about wildlife corridors. They’re referring to road crossings. They go mm-hmm. Beneath or above roads. To me, that’s a wildlife crossing where the wildlife corridor is the wide swath of connected green space that comes to each side of that road, and that’s the priority.

We have to connect these large, robust green languages wherever we can across the world so that we can keep the functions and processes of. Wild places, and then we can come back and where that natural infrastructure butts up against our infrastructure. We have a little more time to fix that. Add the permeability, add the underpass, add the overpass so we can keep it connected.

[00:12:02] Crystal: As a matter of fact, my parents have a reserve in their backyard that butts up right to the, their development, and it acts as a connection between two bigger pieces of land. So it, it’s a tiny little corridor in itself.

[00:12:17] Carlton: That’s really cool. And, and those things, you know, narrow corridors can work. It’s just not ideal on what we go for because, no, what, what, what we want is one connected hole when it comes to nature.

What we’re left with sometimes is a bottleneck or a narrow passage that can be okay as long as every generation for these animals, somebody gets through and it can help spread the gene flow and keep the populations connected. Yeah, it

[00:12:44] Crystal: helps them get them from one end to the other end from one side to the other side of livable habitat.

Exactly. I, I had first interrupted you, you were talking about the Greenways project.

[00:12:57] Carlton: Okay. So, you know, this is my, my path into working on this project. But, you know, I was studying ranches, learned about black bears, learned about wildlife corridors in the state of the science of wildlife corridors. And there’s a system in Florida called the Florida Ecological Greenways Network that scientists at the University of Florida now directed by Tom Hawk.

Had used to envision what a connected reserve network would be for our state. I’ll say a little bit more about the positioning of Florida’s conservation lands to help this make sense. Florida’s pretty unique in the Eastern United States, particularly the Southeast, and the fact that it has more than 25% public land, and that’s a pretty strong heritage of conservation.

But if you look at the locations of those public lands like surrounding Everglades National Park, There are 4 million acres of contiguous public land near the southern tip of the Florida Peninsula. That’s an area that’s twice as big as Yellowstone National Park. But if you start moving north, the next really big public land is Ocala National Forest up in the center part of the peninsula, and then further north from that you have Osceola National Forest in the Oki Fki National Wildlife Refuge, and you have some other scattered significant conservation lands in between.

But if. You look at what’s happening with development, if you don’t protect robust wildlife quarters linking together all the existing stepping stones of habitat connectivity, you’re gonna get islands of conservation surrounded on all sides by development. And that’s the trajectory that Florida’s on unless we’re very intentional about protecting Wildlife Corridor to connect up our existing public lands.

So what the Florida Ecological Greenways Network envisioned was. A connected network of reserves. So we have these big hubs of conservation throughout the peninsula, throughout the panhandle, and then you have wildlife corridors and linkages tying them all together. It’s a brilliant concept and it was pretty much missing from the public conversation.

So my contribution has been to try to wrap this greenways network in a more public facing story, and that’s where the Florida Wildlife Corridor idea was born. I was at a Bear workshop in 2009 and I naively raised my hand during a presentation about all these critical linkages in the ecological greenways network and these regional connectors, and I said, can we string all these together and call them Florida Wildlife Corridor so people in the public will have a better sense of what we’re talking about?

And I don’t think I really realized I was getting into a 15 year long project with that question, but it’s been amazing and it’s been my life’s calling ever since to try to. Bring energy and identity to this story because a place without a name is a place that’s missing in the priorities and the planning of the people who surrounded.

That was the purpose of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Project from the beginning. It was ironically, in a way, motivated by a toll road project because in 2006, just as I was learning about those black bears living in the Northern Everglades, a proposal for a new toll road was. Put out into the media called the Heartland Parkway, and this was supposed to provide a new highway to connect Orlando, Florida all the way down to Naples.

And what it would do is basically cut through the wildest least developed parts of our state and open them up for further development. That was ultimately vetoed by then, governor Charlie, Chris. But in the articles describing the toll road, they talked about all kinds of corridors they talked about.

Transportation corridors, multimodal transportation corridors, economic development corridors, hurricane evacuation corridors, but not a single mention of wildlife corridors. And that was that moment where I was like, wow, the most fundamental type of infrastructure that exists is missing, not just from the planning institutions that decide the futures of infrastructure, but is missing from our language.

It’s missing from the conversation. And so that, that was a catalyst for saying next time a road like this comes around. I want wildlife corridors to be part of the conversation. So that’s where my focus, my energy has been for the past 15 years. And the path of the Panther Project is an extension of that work.

I worked with that bear biologist, Joe Guthrie and a fellow conservationist. Mallory likes Demit, and we did expeditions through the state of Florida in 2012 and 2015 to show that a wildlife corridor still exists in our state and can still be protected. And we. These were media efforts with P b s films and multiple publications where we started to get some traction.

You walked it

[00:17:37] Crystal: like, I, you can’t not say that you walked it the whole corridor.

[00:17:43] Carlton: Fair point. May, maybe it was tra May. Maybe it was one of those traumatic experiences that I just glossed over. I don’t know. But no, we, um, but yes, we walked paddled road horses, did a little bit of bike lake bicycling, but under our own power.

Traveled a thousand miles from the Everglades to Georgia the way a Bayer Panther could still travel through our state. And then in 2015 we connected from the midway point of that first expedition around the Everglades Headwaters in Orlando, around the Gulf Coast to Alabama. And this is kind of a making the case that this thing is still here.

It still needs our attention. It still needs to be saved. My transition from looking at the wildlife corridor broadly to really going deep on the Florida panther was motivated in 2015. Towards the end of that second big expedition, a couple things happened around the same time. First, I went to my editor at National Geographic and said, I wanna do a story about the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

And she told me, I don’t think that we’re necessarily interested in this story about a regional Wildlife quarter right now, but maybe. You could do a story on the Florida panther and we could communicate the need for a corridor through that. And I was frustrated at first and then that 15 minute conversation ended up sending me on a six year long journey because she was right, because the story of the panther is a way to bring more and more people into the conversation.

And I started to learn more about the panther and I, I started to learn that there is no recovery for the Florida panther. Without the protection of the Florida Wildlife Corridor because all the panthers and known existence were on life support on an island in the southern tip of the state. And what they needed is a lifeline to the north.

They needed that connected habitat that would help them recover into the lands they used to occupy. You know, in times before I was born, the Panther’s also the state Animal of Florida, and it has. A fair amount of cultural and public intrigue. So that’s kind of like, that’s the genesis of the Path of the Panther Project for me.

[00:19:47] Crystal: And you followed one particular individual for that story.

[00:19:51] Carlton: The Panther who became the main character of the path of the Panther film and, and the obsession of my photography for a few years came a couple years later, near the end of 2016, scientist from our state Wildlife agency, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Got a granny black and white photo combined with evidence from a track of the first documented female panther north of the Cleshay River since 1973. And in that moment, the focus of the story changed. My efforts leading up to that were to try to show Panthers in their core habitat in this remote wild places of the Southern Everglades that have given them a foundation for their recovery to date.

But when that female panther. Affectionately named Babs by one of the scientists because her new territory was on a place called Babcock Ranch. That female Panther became an emblem for the hope and recovery of the species. And when I got my first picture of her at Babcock Ranch, I shared it with the scientist from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, David Shindel, and he said, I’ve been dreaming about her for 18 years.

This is a moment they’d all been work working towards where. The numbers had come up to the point where they’re starting to expand their territory, and thankfully the scientist allowed me to set up camera traps close to where they’re working. I got that first picture in January of 2017, and then in January of 2018, we got a picture of Babs followed by two Florida Panther kittens walking down the trail.

And that became the most important photo of my career to date because. It was showing something that hadn’t had not been documented in my lifetime. Florida Panthers returning to that former home range.

[00:21:39] Crystal: I I also want to emphasize too, that these pictures, these few pictures took years to get, like, this is not something that you just can set up and get in a couple of weeks.

It, I think you just covered three years of time, right? That right

[00:21:53] Carlton: there. No, you’re just, you’re you’re about right. And it came really slowly in the first two years cuz I was learning as I went and we, I was building camera traps myself. I was learning the way the animals used the trails and even. In the densest of Florida Panther habitat in South Florida, I was maybe getting a panther coming by the camera once a month or once every two months facing the camera and maybe once or twice a year with any manner of daylight, cuz they’re mainly nocturnal.

And so most of the pictures that went in the National Geographic Magazine article, or are now in the book, took about two years to capture working with Cameron Traps. And it’s because they’re so rare. And to get them to come by in the right light with all the elements combined together to make a National Geographic quality image.

It just took a lot of time.

[00:22:44] Crystal: So the story that you were able to tell over the years with, with your pictures and, and your journey helped to create the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act in 2021, is that correct? That’s right. And how much land has been preserved from this, this act, and what still needs to be preserved.

[00:23:08] Carlton: We have a long way to go to still protect the Florida Wildlife Corridor. We just had some, we’ve had some great success in recent years. You know, it’s interesting. The catalyst for the Florida Wildlife Corridor Project, in my mind, was a toll road back in 2006. The impetus for pursuing the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act was also a toll road.

In 2019, a new toll road proposed for a very similar route to that first Heartland Expressway in 2006. This time, not just threatening the habitat of black bears, but threatening the new territory of this first female panther in the Northern Everglades. So for the past few years, we had been in this public awareness phase, stakeholder alignment, public awareness on the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

And with that new Toll Road proposal, I realized it was an hour and never moment for the wildlife corridor. And if we did not get it recognized in state law, at least designated as a geography worth considering, it didn’t stand a chance to persevere. And that’s when our team went to the National Geographic Society and started working with their Impact Media Lab to develop a suite of communications that would help inform the decisions.

That were going on with land protection in the state of Florida. Um, my Florida Panther story was published in National Geographic Magazine in April of 2021. At the same time that state leaders had come together to support the new Florida Wildlife Corridor Act, which recognized and defined the physical geography of the Florida Wildlife Corridor as a priority for conservation and.

The visual identity and the logic of the corridor really resonated with lawmakers from all backgrounds, and it led to unanimous bipartisan support of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act. And there wasn’t any funding specifically attached to that legislation. That legislation was a framework to set up the idea and set up the prioritization to show that we have more work to do to save nature in Florida.

And the idea inspired existing lawmakers to put recently unprecedented funding into land conservation. So 400 million in 20 21, 400 50 million in 2022, and there might be just over a billion dollars of new land conservation funding going into the corridor in this year if it makes it through the end of the legislative session.

That

[00:25:38] Crystal: would be amazing. And just to be clear, this isn’t just for the preservation of the wild areas, there’s also human landscapes included in this.

[00:25:48] Carlton: Yeah. There are, um, a whole lot of funding going to support the protection through public acquisition and conservation easements of missing lengths in the Florida Wildlife corridor.

The corridor, as it’s defined in the legislation, it’s 18 million acres. It’s approximately half the state of Florida. It includes those 10 million acres of existing public lands, the stepping stones of connectivity, and then it maps out 8 million acres of opportunity area. These are places where it’s often a cattle ranch or a timber farm, or even an orange grove or row crops that are are green space and compatible use that keep other conservation lands connected.

The goal is to protect a substantial portion of those opportunity areas so that in the end we have a connected network. From one side of the state to the next.

[00:26:35] Crystal: Okay. But there’s a chance that that 8 million acres could be paved over.

[00:26:40] Carlton: Right? Yeah. An economic study commissioned by the Florida Wildlife Quarter Foundation and partners at the Live Wild Day Foundation has prioritized 1 million acres of new conservation that are needed by the end of this decade to be on track for achieving the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

And so we’re off to a great start. There’s been nearly a hundred thousand acres protected since the Florida Wildlife Quarter Act, but we need to be, we need to be protecting a hundred thousand acres a year in order to have balance with the development that’s otherwise assaulting these lands. The state of Florida is gaining a thousand new residents every single day, and it’s been that way for most of my lifetime on average.

It’s shocking to think about now, but that’s how it’s been, and without conservation. We’re on path to lose 500,000 acres of land just this decade.

[00:27:32] Crystal: And that could easily spiral into more as more roads get built into these areas, which usually tempts more development.

[00:27:42] Carlton: And that that’s kind of how the, how the, the stakes are very clear.

We either gonna have, well, how do I say that? They, um, um, you know, it’s, it’s interesting. I think the. The rapid development that’s coming to Florida, the thousand people today who are moving here is part of the reason that people of all backgrounds are aligned on the importance of protecting the Florida Wildlife Quarter.

You don’t have to imagine it. It’s not some existential threat. It’s not some pie in the sky ideal that we wanna save nature like you can see firsthand no matter where you are in the state, that if we don’t do something, we’re gonna lose it. It. And so that’s motivated people to recognize these last wildest places that we still have.

It’s worth all of our collective energy to keep them protected. Mm-hmm.

[00:28:29] Crystal: And it actually, it brings together two. What you would think are unlikely players on the surface, ranchers and panthers would be at odds with one another, but in fact, they need one another. So can you, um, just explain that,

[00:28:48] Carlton: why? Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great observation, and I’ll say that not all ranchers recognize that ranchers and panthers need one another, but there is a growing number of ranchers.

Who recognize that they themselves are endangered species in the state of Florida. That’s a

[00:29:06] Crystal: really interesting way of putting it. Do you have a specific person that comes to mind or a specific story?

[00:29:14] Carlton: Yeah, they’re, um, um, well, I’ll, I’ll share two stories. Um, um, there’s a character in the path of the Panther film named Elton Langford, and he was managing the cattle operations at Babcock Ranch in the same place where that first female Panther had set up her territory.

Elton himself is a 11th or 12th generation Floridian. He actually descends from the Spanish near San Augustine as a Florida cattle rancher. And once we started talking and he started thinking about it, he’s the one in the film who says the Florida ranchers and endangered species as well, because with the development that’s happening, there’s no future for the rancher without protecting that land.

Just like there’s no future for the panther. And Elton goes on to say that. People on the coast, people around the country and around the world, they’re not gonna spend money to save the Florida Cowboy, but they’re gonna spend money to save the Florida panther. And if he and that cat can get along, he and all the other ranchers are gonna benefit because it’s gonna save habitat for them too.

And that’s one of my favorite perspectives of the film. Is that like this, that they recognize they can get along.

[00:30:22] Crystal: Yeah. Their land provides the connectivity for the panther.

[00:30:26] Carlton: Yeah. So yeah, I mean that’s, I guess I’m, I’m leaving out what I see is the obvious piece. Like there is no recovery of the Florida panther without the protection of ranch lands.

Once you get out of the Southern Everglades, where you have the big public lands, the available habitat through the Northern Everglades, and then further north through the peninsula is either cattle ranch or pine plantation in timber. Um, it. The next frontier for the recovery of the Florida panther is the Northern Everglades.

And unlike the Southern Everglades, which are predominantly public land interspersed by private lands, the Northern Everglades are predominantly private lands interspersed by public lands. The only way we’re gonna achieve connectivity for the wildlife corridor and recovery for the Florida panther is preservation of those working ranches that make up most of that part of the state.

So there is no recovery for the Florida panther without the preservation of ranch lands. What people might not know is that there’s possibly not much future for Florida ranching without the preservation of the Florida panther. And the reason for that is that the public will get behind efforts to save our state animal, the Florida Panther, putting investment into conservation easements and land acquisitions.

And what that will ultimately do is protect the land from development that will ensure a future for cattle ranching in this state. Mm-hmm. Now, ranchers and panthers don’t always get along and panthers do eat calves. Yeah. And so it’s a matter of setting up a framework where a panther becomes an asset instead of a liability.

And their organization’s, non-profit organizations, and some of the government agencies who are working to set up systems to pay ranchers for the ecological services that they’re providing. For wildlife, like the Florida panther, and I think it’s a good model to be looked at throughout the rest of the state and the country.

Mm-hmm. Now how with, oh, I’m sorry. I’ll share one, I’ll share one, I’ll share one more cowboy story, and you can choose if you use both, which, uh, but, um, uh, so there’s a moment. You know, my favorite, my favorite picture or moment discovering a picture was finding Babs, that first female panther on the back of the camera with her kittens.

My favorite conversation. Was when I called my multi-generational rancher, Carrie Lightsy, to ask him what he thought about the first female panther returning to the Northern Everglades where he and his family had all their ranching operations. And I was sitting there servicing a camera trap on the swamp.

I had my phone sitting on a log on speakerphone, and I’ll never forget his words, he said, I’m like, Carrie, what do you think about that female panther coming back near your ranch land? He said, Carlton, the Panther’s gonna have to help us save Florida. Because it’s gonna help the world understand why we need to save these last wild places.

You know? So in just a few words, from a rancher, he had summed up everything I’ve been trying to say in, in the previous two or three years of the project. And that became kind of the central idea of, of all the storytelling going forward, that the panther is gonna help us save Florida. Hmm. That’s

[00:33:34] Crystal: hopeful.

Mm-hmm. So in terms of saving Florida, at least the Wild of Florida, you have to be able to balance the needs of economic development, especially with the skyrocketing land values in Florida right now, with the need to protect the natural habitats and ecosystems. How do you strike that balance?

[00:33:58] Carlton: A big part of what we’re trying to do with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Project is communicate that we need these intact green spaces, not just for wildlife, but for ourselves.

The wildlife corridor contains and protects the headwaters of most of Florida’s river systems. It’s a source of a high proportion of Florida’s drinking water. It absorbs water from storm events and provides resiliency against climate change. There are many reasons. To protect these last wild places. It just so happens in an ammo like the Florida panther helps demonstrate for us how and why we need to do it.

And so you know that that’s the goal of a lot of this work is to balance the ecology and the economy for the state of Florida. But there is no future for prosperity in Florida’s economy if we don’t have the environmental systems that support all life here. And we’ve pushed these systems to the brink.

And we’re surrounded by ocean on three sides. The seas are rising, development is pushing in, but we still have this heartland that has remained largely hidden in plain sight across the decades that provides the hope for this balance going forward. And

[00:35:15] Crystal: why is the story of the panther a story of hope?

[00:35:19] Carlton: Well, it’s, it’s a story of hope against all odds too. I mean, you have this unlikely survival of a remnant population of big cats that’s persevered in one of the harshest, most remote environments in the country. Made it through the bottleneck of persecution from the last century, eed out in existence to become an emblem of conservation and success.

And now you have the first Florida Panthers breeding in the Northern Everglades In my lifetime. And it’s a huge opportunity and a huge hope. I mean, I don’t know, I’m, I mean, it’s in my biggest hope in this story beyond what the Panther is doing, is to see what our state leaders have done to support the protection, to see the way that the story of the Florida Panther, the story of the Florida Wildlife Quarter has helped bring people together to rally around the protection of the Florida Wildlife Corridor.

You know, how often do you find an issue that gets unanimous, bipartisan support anywhere in the world these days? Not to mention Florida. And so the fact that our state leaders are aligned on a vision, the current state leaders to protect Yeah. Yeah. I mean, our, our, you know, our, our current state leaders are aligned on a vision to protect these wild places that we all depend on.

And that’s something I’m super thankful for.

[00:36:45] Crystal: But I would not have guessed that from the, the DeSantis. Uh,

[00:36:49] Carlton: well, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, DeSantis has been strong on the environment and I think it’s, I think it’s because, you know, he is relatively young governor with young children, and I think anyone who’s grown up in Florida, as he did across those years, is seeing how fast things have changed.

And with the Everglades in particular, The degradation of the ecosystem is affecting the quality of life and the economy. Along all of Florida’s coastlines, we’ve had algae blooms, possibly exacerbating red tide events. It’s hurt the tourism economy. It’s just like the cowboys might be unlikely allies for conservation on the interior.

The fishing guides have become the ultimate champions of water quality and conservation on the coast. You have a group called Captains for Clean Water, who’s been a force in Tallahassee, who has held lawmakers to be accountable for all the protections that are needed for these watersheds because what happens upstream affects what’s going on downstream.

And if they, if you don’t protect the watershed, their ability to take people out and go fishing declines. And so it’s like this, it’s this interesting. You know, in a state like Florida with such a transient population, I think fewer than a third of Floridians are actually born here, or fewer than half.

It’s a hugely transient population. It’s the farmers and the ranchers and the hunters and the fishers who are still connected to the land and to the water in this state, and they’re the ones who are on the front lines, plus the biologist and the land managers who are seeing firsthand what’s happening.

In the consequences of our development and our shortsighted decisions, whether it’s right there on the edge of the habitat or upstream further in the watershed, and they’re becoming voices for the protection of these places. Hmm.

[00:38:44] Crystal: Yeah. So I just have one more question for this show, but I have. Uh, like a curiosity question actually, cuz you, you brought up hurricanes.

How did, how do these animals protect themselves during these terrible hurricanes that come through?

[00:38:59] Carlton: Well, yeah, I can only speculate cause I don’t know what goes to the mind of a Florida panther when a category five hurricane is blasting over them. But I don’t know if you capture any footage should I asked the panther biologist this, cuz they do have a dozen or so Florida panthers who are wearing G P s or radio collars.

Where they can track their movements. And when big hurricanes have come through their Florida peninsula, I’m like, where do the Panthers go? What do they do? And they hunker down. They go to a deep section of woods and they just hunker down and, and ride out the storm. To me, a hurricane, it’s just one more example of why we need to save the wildlife corridor and help panthers and other wildlife have access to the rest of the state.

Cause if you have. All of the panthers and known existence in the East in a relatively small pocket of habitat at the southern tip of the state, you’re leaving them vulnerable to major storm events or a population level disease that affects them all. But if you have panthers scattered throughout the Florida Peninsula and even up across East Union, United States, the species is gonna be more resilient to all the challenges that are gonna come that way.

And so it’s, it’s just an example of how we need to help get them back to where they used to be.

[00:40:16] Crystal: Mm-hmm. Yeah. When I was in Fort Myers, the devastation, like just in, in the small patches of forest, you see like the trees are just tumbled. But last question, what can the listener do to help, whether they’re in Florida or nowhere near it?

[00:40:34] Carlton: I want people to connect with this story. You know, please watch the film. Go to path of the panther.com where we have ways you can take action to lend your voice to this cause. But I really hope that when people see the film or connect with the story, they’ll see Florida with new eyes. Because the state of Florida, you know, it’s like, you know, unlike so many other places in the world that have mountain ranges, that have big changes in elevation, the Florida Wildlife Corridor is out of sight outta mind for so many people.

We have 22 million people in the state. We have 130 million annual visitors, but most of ’em aren’t thinking about the Florida Panther or the Florida Wildlife Corridor, or these amazing wild places that are still here for us to enjoy and protect. So at a basic level, I hope the film paints a different picture of Florida and it paints a picture of hope of not just places that deserve our attention and protection.

But also show a model of the type of conservation that can be accomplished anywhere.

[00:41:42] Crystal: Carlton, this has been great and you have brought me hope too because I, I do feel gutted every time I go to Florida and I see another patch of deforestation. And so thank you for all that you’re doing. You’re making a difference.

[00:41:58] Carlton: Thank you Crystal. Next time you come to Florida, let’s get out in the swamp and we’ll show you some of these places.

[00:42:02] Crystal: I careful what you offer. I might just take you upon that.

Carlton was right. Florida’s natural areas are hiding in plain sight in all these years. I never realized how much green space there still is, but it might not be for much longer. The story of the panther might be a conservation success, but it’s ongoing and its ending hasn’t been written yet. If we are able to protect large swaths of land and the ribbons that connect them, the animals wouldn’t be the only ones to benefit.

So would all the human residents of Florida that benefit from ecosystem services like, you know, clean water and storm surge protection to learn more. Watch Carlton’s, Nat Geo documentary Path of the Panther. I absolutely loved it or get his book. Both showcase how his advocacy is an inspiring example of how to balance human needs with those of the natural world.

Don’t forget to go to forces for nature.com and sign up to receive emailed show notes, action tips, and a free checklist to help you start taking practical actions today. Do you know someone else who would enjoy this episode? I would be so. So grateful if you would share it with them. Hit me up on Instagram and Facebook at Becoming Forces for Nature, and let me know what actions you have been taking.

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