Restoring National Parks, Working with Bison, and the Value of Reinventing Yourself with Jeremy French

Laura and Nic interview Jeremy French, Chief of Ecological Restoration for the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, about restoring some of America’s rarest grassland ecosystems, rebuilding habitat in national parks, and the surprising role bison play in shaping landscapes. From conservation leadership and mentorship to curiosity, reinvention, and dreaming big, Jeremy shares why it's never too late to forge a new path and make a lasting impact.

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Connect with Jeremy French at jeremy.french@segrasslands.org. 

Guest Bio:
Jeremy French serves as the Chief of Ecological Restoration for the Southeastern Grasslands Institute. He is based out of Clarksville, TN and serves as the SGI lead for the NPS IRA and BIL projects. Jeremy and his team spearhead grassland conservation across SGI's 24-state focal region, encompassing grassland research, restoration, and reconstruction. Previously, he led a multi-state and multimillion dollar project geared toward restoring grasslands on private lands, which impacted thousands of acres. Jeremy's love for grasslands stems from his time researching the effects of Bison grazing on herpetofauna communities in prairie remnants and community response to oak savanna restoration.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental nerds, Nic and Laura. On today's episode, we talk about the difference between evolving and reinventing ourselves. We interviewed Jeremy French about restoring national parks, working with bison, and the value of reinventing yourself. And finally, what did the buffalo say to his son when he dropped him off at school? Bye son. I knew that one. thank you, dear writers.

Here are some fun facts on bison. Bison are the largest mammals in North America. Bulls can weigh up to 2000 pounds and stand 6 ft tall, while calves are born weighing just 30 to 70 pounds, and they are super cute.

Despite their size, bison are surprisingly fast and agile. I love the way that Jeremy talked about this in the interview. Yeah, they can run. There was a video. Did you see the video of the guy? Oh yeah, yeah, we saw that exactly. They can run up to 35 MPH, jump high fences, and are strong swimmers. That one I did not know. I like that. I do not like that. I don't, you know, it's like learning that hippos are all tanks, like they're all muscle, no fat. That's terrifying.

Yellowstone National Park is the only place in the US where bison have lived continuously since prehistoric times. Did not know that either. These are some good facts lately. Their comeback is now one of America's greatest conservation success stories. It started around 2005 with the American Bison Society and a breeding program at what's now the Bronx Zoo. Oh my gosh, I have to go, and by 1913, they were able to donate 14 bison to Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. Those animals went on to help re-established herds across the country and even into Mexico. How about that?

Get that music.

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Let's get to our segment. Have you ever reinvented yourself?

Well, I mean, honestly, yeah, I think so, honestly, I would say. I probably wouldn't frame it that way, but the way I would look at it is, you know, I think I spent a lot of my early youth, I would say, trying to avoid my own self in a way, and what do I mean by that?

I mean, I grew up in a place where like I was like I could basically like fall asleep next to a book and then wake up and have it in my brain, right? Like I just, I could learn stuff without thinking that hard. I could just be like, oh, that's how that works and You know, I had a brother who was not in any way a dumb person by any, any means. He was not, uh, and he is not, but, you know, he had to struggle with school and math in particular. Like he really didn't enjoy it and it was really, really hard for him, and I could understand it. I didn't like it either, but I didn't have any problem with it. I was like, oh, this is how it works. That's the answer. Wish there was more than one answer, but cool.

And I think for a long time. That, that, you know, oh, I don't want to show, you know, make my brother feel bad by being like, oh this is so easy. Why are you struggling with this, you know, so I would go out of my way to not appear like I knew what I was doing and so I would just not try very hard on certain things because I felt like if I was I was showboating or showcasing or being, you know, very arrogant or whatever it is, overly confident, and I had to kind of unlearn some of that to succeed with my career, right?

I had to stop saying I'm gonna just do the thing I know I can do and then see what I can't do and see if I can still try to find a way to do it, right? So I had to change the way I thought about how I approach things. Like I found out that I do love a challenge. I love being challenged, right? And you can't be challenged if you take the easiest path possible and I think especially like, you know, how I chose my college. How I chose grad school. Even I just was like, this is easy, this will be easy, this will be easy.

And then that changed. That was me reinventing myself like, no, let's start doing hard things, you know, and I started to do that when in my first job, you know, when I, when I went to Dawson, I decided to take a huge leap. I was like this is going to be really hard. I want to do it and I was really successful there and then I was like, you know, coming to Jacobs, another huge leap. But I wanted a really good challenge and I wanted to push myself, and it's been going really well, and I think that accepting that I'm good at things, you know, was hard for me. I know it sounds so silly to say, but I don't know, and I, I mean like, you know, we talk about you. I think you've reinvented yourself a million times. I don't know.

I don't really see it as a reinvention. This feels like an evolution, yeah, maybe that's a better word, but I think my reinvention happened in like 6th grade. When I, you guys wouldn't, you wouldn't believe when I was a kid I was so shy. I wouldn't any sports. I wouldn't go to anything. My mom signed me up for dance. I said I wanted it, and then when she signed me up, I screamed until she returned the shoes. Like I tried to get out of. PE in first grade by writing a note in from my parents in crayon, which obviously didn't fly. I even was sent to a counselor's for like, what is wrong with you? And even at that age I was like, there's nothing wrong with me. I just don't like my teachers, um, but.

Something in me changed somewhere, so somewhere I got, I reinvented from this shy kid that I was to someone who just, I just think I just learned that like no one cares, no one remembers, doesn't matter, and so then I was just like, I'm gonna do what I want. But over the years I feel like I am still the same 18 year old that I was deep down. My core, my values have not really changed, but I have evolved obviously through experiences and knowledge and things and learning what I am good and not good at. But like I was trying to start businesses at 18. Like I was very entrepreneurial, just didn't know it, and then, um. You know, when I quit EPC, I just, I got to like, I guess that was, that wasn't really a reinvention, it was like a reawakening, like, let me pull that part of me back into my being and run with it, you know.

Yeah, but it is funny, like I think I would look back at my, my 18 year old self and like that kid looking at me now I'd be like, whoa, what happened? Whoa, you know, I feel like that's, that's what, that's how he would react. But I don't know. I mean, I think that's kind of a fun thing. Some of it is just like, I think so much of it is comfort, right? Like finding your comfort zone and then pushing past that comfort zone and then realizing you can expand your comfort zone and it's like, oh, it's now so much broader and you know we had a proposal the other day and and we're trying to do like a 5 minute I I couldn't believe this. I could not believe this was what's happening. It's like, oh, we have 5 minutes. And we have to end at 5 minutes. They cut us off right away. They'll give us a light at 1 minute, and I'm like, What is this, a stand-up routine? And I'm like, Oh, I got this. It's no problem.

I've done this a million times. I've done this a million times and now it is important to my job, job. That is so funny to me. But yeah, I mean, like, never would have thought I would do stand-up comedy. Never in a million years would I think that. And then I did. Right. And I was good at it. Yeah, and I think, you know, the little reinventions or evolutions, they, they have to keep coming.

I'm right now reading a lot of Eckhart Tolle and listening to a lot of, most of them are AIs, but I don't care as long as it's the same sentiments from Alan Watts and just really trying to, how do I take where I'm at now and get to the next level of freedom and doing what I want in my life while still making an impact, like, what's next, you know.

Yeah, exactly, and it's an expansion. I think that's a, that's a, an evolution. I like that, that's a good word. It's an evolution of who, who you are as a person. It's not like you're not the same person, you're just a more realized version of you. Yeah, and I think even if someone quote unquote reinvent, I think sometimes somebody else from the outside might see it as a reinvention when you personally don't feel that you're like, no, I've always been like this, you just didn't see it till I started doing this other thing, you know. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, and then, yeah, and it's like, you know, all that does is just breed more confidence and you get better and better and better. It's a really cool phenomena.

Yeah, so, you know, if you are feeling that way, go for it. Don't worry about what people think. Yeah, it'll wash away in the end anyway.

And with that, why don't we get to our interview?

Welcome back to EPR. Today we're joined by Jeremy French, Chief of ecological restoration for the Southeastern Grassland Institute. Jeremy, it's great to have you here.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, absolutely. We just had Gabrielle Patterson on a few weeks ago, and she was amazing, so it gave us a little bit of an insight into what SGI does, but hers was a little bit more from the historical aspect. So we're looking forward to learning more about the boots on the ground elements today. And before we get diving in, what sparked your passion for conservation in the outdoors?

Awesome, that's a, that's a great question, and, and Gabrielle's phenomenal to work with. I think from an early age, I spent a lot of time outside. Outside was kind of a refuge from my foster home, and so growing up outside was kind of a safe space. It was a space for me to explore and adventure. And as I transitioned into college, I never knew that, you know, you could work outside, that that was a job. I was actually about a semester away from a mechanical engineering degree, and a buddy of mine came up to me. His name is Wesley Yoder, and he was like, hey, you kind of like don't love this mechanical engineering stuff, do you? And I was like, actually, I kind of hate it. And he's like, you should come to this wildlife conference with me. He's like, you are obsessed with like the outdoors, you love nature. I think you'd really like it. And so I went to this conference, and at that conference, I met my future advisor. I decided to change my Major then and there, even though it required more schooling, and then I kind of never looked back.

That's awesome. That's really fascinating that it happened that way. What was it at the conference, or was there anything specific, or it was just the people, any specific topic that really drew you in?

I think it was the opening of my eyes that you could have a fun job, and you, you didn't have, you don't have to, like, I had viewed college as kind of a means to an end, and I always knew that I just wanted to do something so that I could live a comfortable life, you know, and like, my impression of a job was something you went to every day, and you kind of hated, and then you went home, and as long as it paid you enough, then it was OK, you know, it was worthwhile.

And then at this conference, I met all these professionals and people that loved their job, you know, they loved what they did. And they were doing things that I found cool or things that I would want to do in my free time already, and that flame was kind of fanned by my, my future advisor, cause I would ask him these questions, and I could remember, I loved science growing up, going through grade school and high school, and I would ask like my teachers really off the wall questions, and they kind of would always shoot me down, you know, they're like, oh, I don't know, ask somebody else. And when I'd go to this advisor, his name is Doc, his name's Doctor Araldi, I'd be like, you know, tell me about box turtles. Like what are they doing out there, you know? And, and he would indulge me. He's like, well, you know, like, what do you wanna know? What do you want to know their habitat, their history? And so it's kind of this eye opening experience to realize, I could go do something that I love, that is meaningful for the planet, that, you know, I wouldn't have to hate my job every day, and that kind of sold me on it.

Awesome, that's great, and love to meet people who are having fun in their careers. Your job does sound very fun. I can't wait to talk about these projects, but I have to mention that, you know, one of the Nic's favorite things to talk about. his box turtle days. I think he's gonna be sad he wasn't here to have a little bit of conversation about that.

So your work at SGI focuses on leading large scale grassland restoration, which sounds really cool. Reconstruction. I would like to dive in a little bit between the difference between restoration and reconstruction, as well as stewardship in 24 states. So, give us a little insights into the, the work that you're doing.

Yeah, it's a big job. It keeps me very busy. I too have a, I have a 3 month old at home, so I'm like busier than I've ever been in my whole life. But really the driving force behind my job is to turn the tide of grassland biodiversity loss. And in the east, we've lost for most grassland systems, above 99.99% of them, and some of those we lost early on, some of those we're still losing. And so my whole job is to try and stop that, or try and change that or improve that in many ways, day in and day out. Some days I may be on a piece of equipment helping train a team how to use herbicide or large machinery to restore grasslands or working a fire line, or I might be in my office talking to, you know, different funders or senators, or just trying to change the understanding of grasslands.

We split grassland restoration and reconstruction up. The big difference is what we would classify as restoration means that some amount of what was once an old growth grassland still exists there. These grasslands in the east are truly old growth ecosystems, you know, they evolved for thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and sometimes we can find those in postage stamps. We can find them in giant sites like In the past year and a half ago, I found, you know, a 300 acre site at Fredericksburg, Spottsylvania National Battlefield, right, that that nobody knew about. It was right beneath our nose, this old, old growth ecosystem, and so that's what we classify as restoration.

We're finding a remnant grassland and we're going into that grassland and either applying the right type of fire, the right timing of fire, treating invasive species, oftentimes. Our most precious old growth grasslands have become unhealthy forests in many ways, so they're dominated by mesophytic trees that don't belong there. So sometimes it includes removing trees, opening the canopy up, returning light back to the ground, but it doesn't really involve ever really putting seeds in the ground, right? The ecosystems already there.

On the other hand, reconstruction is the opposite. Because we've lost 99.99% of our grasslands in the east or the southeast. We have these giant grassland ecosystems that don't exist anymore, and at SGI it's not enough for us to say, well, we've lost those, we just need to go do something else. We believe, and I believe truly that we can reconstruct those and we can take, you know, some agricultural fields or some pasture lands or set aside lands or corporate lands or whatever it may be. And turn them into semi-functioning grass and ecosystems.

Now, if I'm honest, in my lifetime, those reconstructions, they're never going to be as good as a remnant, you know, we're not going to fix or be able to create thousands of years of evolution in, you know, a 3 to 5 year span, but we can make them functional, and I've had the pleasure of taking sites from literal agricultural just destitute landscape. Two sites now where, you know, the most common bumblebee on site is the American bumblebee, which is extirpated from seven states, or that, you know, you can go every spring and hear Bob White whistle, which is, you know, a very fast declining grassland bird. And so we split them into those two categories, because they are very different, but the ultimate goal is the same, is to turn the tide of that grassland biodiversity louse.

And then we always have kind of stewardship. So, you know, once we restore, restoration is kind of always ongoing, but once you restore, reconstruct a site, they need to be maintained. One of the things that I think is very unique about grassland ecosystems is humans have been a part of them for at least 1500 to 20,000 years. The Native Americans that were here, you know, they lived and persisted within these grasslands, and these grasslands were really important to them. And we live in a world today where often humans remove themselves from nature, like nature is outside.

We're not a part of nature, but the cool thing about grasslands and grassland ecology is human ecology is grassland ecology. These grasslands largely in the east won't persist without us, right? They're going to degrade into something else because of the fragmentation and the fracturing that we've done. But I think it's a cool story of redemption, where we can play a huge role in saving and really restoring these old growth ecosystems, and not only the plants that live in them, but the sheer abundance of life and biodiversity that relies on these places is, is astronomical.

Right, yeah, that's amazing. And so you mentioned fire, and then also needing human intervention to maintain them. So what type of tools and techniques are you using, and then how are you making the decisions when to use them?

That's a great question. So fire is by far one of the most cost effective. And efficient means of restoring and maintaining large open ecosystems. We at SGI hold ourselves to a very strict standard of fire. There's a common misconception that all fire is good or all fire is bad, and really neither of those are true. Some fire is great, some fire is terrible, and so we hold ourselves to what we would consider the historic fire regime for a given ecosystem.

That changes depending where you're at within our focal region. If you're in the outer coastal plain, you know, fire in that, in those regions was predominantly spring, you know, you have these large pine adapted ecosystems, and that was the right time for that system to spring. But if you shift to like where I sit, where my office is in Northern Tennessee, the proper timing for fire based on history and ecology is really in the fall. And so we're constantly looking through history as a lens, through culture as a lens, and ecology as a lens to understand how these systems function to allow us to infer how we can return that function to them.

Most of what we're deciding or how we approach site assessment is we are going to go through and look for what we'd call storyteller species, right? So if we walk into a site that we've never been to, which is a common occurrence, how can we tell what that site was? How can we tell if it was a grassland or it should be a grassland? Well, we know that in the Southeast and many other places we have species that are, you know, adapted for open ecosystems. Those species occur along a gradient called a coefficient of conservatism.

That coefficient of conservatism goes from 1 to 10, right? All species, not all states have this, but all species fall along this gradient. A 1 would be like a weed, like ragweed or something super common. It's gonna grow like in the cracks of like New York City, maybe. A 10 is like a species that is only going to persist in a narrow, narrow like niche of habitat suitability. So it's not going to withstand a lot of disturbance or a lot of changes. And so when we approach a site, we're looking for the species along those gradients to tell a story.

Now those species along that gradient can be a forested species, you know, you could have a forested 7 or an 8 or a 9 or 10, that would tell me, OK, this landscape is naturally a forest, it should stay a forest. But if we're not seeing that, and I'm seeing, you know, a species that is meant to be in a grassland that is a 7 or a 10 or an 8, or even a 5, and it's just barely holding on, you know, it's holding on in this light gap or it's holding on, on the edge of this mode field, that tells me, it gives me Some forensic ecologist say, this is supposed to be something else. So we really rely heavily on the history and the botany and the ecology, the geology to really deeply understand and assess each individual site, which is time consuming at times, but it is hands down the best way to do things.

Yeah, it's fascinating, and I, I love that, you know, it's not guessing, you really have something that you're using to work on. Imagine that you had to learn all your plants to do this type of work. So, I'm asking this question from experience and from other people that I've known who think they might want to go into ecology or something like this, and so you start learning plants. How do you recommend people who may be looking for this type of work or thinking about doing it, or they've just gotten a job like this, and you'd all of a sudden have to start cataloging in your brain, all these different types of plants.

Absolutely. The number one piece of advice I give to any person who's looking to go into any conservation type job is to learn your plants. That is, you know, one of the basiss for everything. The easiest thing out there to learn plants, in my opinion, is twofold. One is going to be iNaturalist. iNaturalist is, you know, an app you can have on your phone. It utilizes, you know, photo recognition to help you ID things, and to me it's far and away better than like Picture this or seek or all these other apps out there, because you will then post it almost like social media, and I, as an expert in your region, potentially, can get on there and be like, actually, you're wrong here, here's why, here's all these identifying characteristics. So I can either Refute your ID or I can reaffirm it, and through that, over time, you will get that positive feedback loop of I was right or I was wrong, and it's incredible for learning your plants, or your insects, or really anything on the landscape.

The other thing is we, we've gone in a time when I learned botany and I took botany and plant plant taxonomy at school. I had to carry around these giant, um, field guides and like these things where you have to flip through and follow this dichotomous key and they were like 34 inches thick and they were heavy and unwieldy. We live in a world today where for most regions, you can have a field guide in your phone, and you can take it out and you, it's so much easier. I probably sound like the guys who are like, get off my lawn, but, um, but it, it really is. I can't tell you how many times I'm in the field for where I'm at. We use an app called Flooruest. It's for the southeast, but I'm like, what is that? And I'll like pull up floor requests, and I'll like flip through to what I think it is and use it. So, I think in the age of technology, those are probably two of your best tools.

And then lastly, it's invaluable once you get past kind of the entry level stage. I wouldn't recommend this generally for someone first starting cause it could be really overwhelming, but go to a herbarium. I mean, the, the level of history. And the level of learning you can do in a herbarium, where you can look back, I once had this like watershed moment where I had mis-keyed a plant, and I miskeyed this plant as a golden aster, and when the herbarium curator, who's a friend of mine, came to me, he's like, hey, you're wrong here. It was like this shot to like my confidence, you know, here I was already a professional ecologist thinking, man, how can I make that mistake?

And, you know, I think he could tell I felt, you know, somewhat dejected by it, and he said, Don't worry about it, look at this. And we went through all the way back to some of the most famous botanists for our region. We went back to like the early 40s and 50s, and they're like, he was like, look at all these people who made the same mistake as you. They all mis ID'd this, so don't worry about it. And so there's this, once you get past that initial hurdle, there's this like huge resource out there in herbaria of like learning, not only from people that are here today. But people that were here 100 years ago, and I think that's a really special tool, but you gotta get over kind of that first hump.

Yeah, that's awesome. That's great advice. One of my favorites was just going to the local botanical garden, looking at stuff, that's like entry level right there. Herbariums is probably a little more advanced, but I love that. That's a great answer.

One of the projects that you're currently working on is partnering with the National Park Service to restore grasslands in 40 national parks in the eastern US. That sounds amazing, so tell us more about that.

Yeah, so that number kind of vacillates up and down. I think where we sit at today is it's 37, but we may add parks or it's a really great project that SGI gets to work on with our partners. We've partnered and contracted out a good company out of Kentucky called Roundstone, and across these. 40 parks or 37 now, we went through and we identified areas that had remnant grasslands, and then we hired and trained teams that get to pretty much all summer long, all they do is they move from park to park to park doing restoration work in these grasslands. It's like an awful job. Parts of it, parts of it I think are great. Parts of it are, are challenging, but it's an extremely impactful job, you know, and you get to see some of the coolest places.

Like one of our restoration sites is Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountains. So the most visited national park in the country and the most visited part of the most visited park in the country. And so that's really cool and exciting. We made a ton of good discoveries of new remnants like that one at Fredericksburg, Spotsenna that we had no clue existed. We even found one at Gateway National Park, which is technically within, you know, Brooklyn. So very cool.

In addition to that, we looked at the eastern landscape with our partners at the National Park Service and realized that in a lot of our national parks and our national battlefields in the in the east, there's a lot of agricultural fields, you know, there's a lot of places like Gettysburg, which was for sure historically an open grassland. That's why it was settled early. That's why, you know, the battles were fought there. It was a big open field. Um, and we identified sites where we can reconstruct grasslands, and that's where our partners at Roundstone, along with our teams get to co-work on that across the national parks, we're doing, you know, something like 1500 acres of reconstruction, in addition to many, many acres of restoration. So it keeps us very busy. I think it's exciting. It is the largest grassland restoration project ever attempted within the national park system, and it's just one of the great projects we get to work on here at SGI.

Yeah, that's awesome. So do you get to travel to these sites often yourself?

I did a lot of travel on the onset of the project, so I went and I assessed all 122 sites myself. Now I do less of that travel, cause we've built up a team that does a lot of the travel themselves. So like today, we have a team that's sitting in Great Smoky Mountains, and we also have a team at CNO Canal. And so those teams consist of Three restoration technicians, which are usually positions that are kind of transitional right out of college positions, so it's a big learning opportunity. A lead technician who is more skilled, and then those teams are led by a coordinating restoration ecologists, often, you know, has been in the field much longer, and so we have a really nice structure that allows us to take talent that is very young and excited, train them up.

And if they stay with us, great, we love it, but also if they take everything that we teach them about grassland ecology and they go impact grasslands elsewhere, also great. But we've created a really nice feeder system. One thing about my view as chief for SGI is I've always wanted us to have a wide base, and what I mean by that is I want us to continuously take in technicians, whether they're kids going through their undergrads or freshly graduated, and really train them up so that they can go out and be successful conservationists in the field. The bulk of our team is in that group where we get to do a lot of learning, and a lot of training, and a lot of exciting things.

Yeah, that's fantastic. I feel like you have an eye for, I don't know if that's the right term, uh, you have a focus on mentoring, and I don't know if you feel comfortable talking about this, but do you think that your time as a in an orphanage has changed or shaped the way that you lead?

I think so, and I'm pretty much an open book about my childhood. I think that one thing that growing up the way I did is it gave me An understanding of risk assessment. Um, and I didn't, I didn't notice this until later on in life, because I spent many, many days just like outside, and sometimes multiple days in a row outside without returning home, and you learn how to read people, you learn how to be around people, and you learn real risk assessment.

I think that that, along with my athletic career and my career, Uh, in just my own conservation career has pushed me to want to help steward young people and help look out for kind of the underdogs or underserved communities, because I felt that, you know, as a kid, as a poor kid growing up in Miami. Nobody, I mean, nobody told me to go to college, like, I stumbled my way into college. I was very fortunate to have a very driven high school wrestling coach.

And so I, I think that I do draw a lot of my understanding of people, and my willingness and hopeful to mentor and coach people from personal experience growing up, not having that mentorship, or even in my conservation field, there's many times that I worked jobs, and I'm sure it's happened to us all, where I didn't get the mentorship, or I was like, not valued or appreciated. And understanding, like, my worth or my skills were not developed. You know, I can think of a job that I had early on that I was just so depressed and frustrated with, cause I'd go to work every day, and I'd be like, oh my God, can we do this? And my boss would be like, no, go clean out the refrigerator.

So I, I think drawing on all of those things helped shape the culture for SGI of really being a mentorship organization and a people organization. And it comes also full circle to turning the tide of grass and biodiversity loss. I know that I'm limited in what I can do even in my lifetime, but if we can inspire this generation right now, this young generation to want to do more, to care more, those are going to be the ones that carry it on and pass it on, because frankly, Even though I'm, I'm still pretty young, I'm old to many, many people. I'm, you know, mid to late end of my career. My heyday is over, and, you know, we constantly try and pass the torch to allow other young professionals to lead, and we try and do that by giving them the skills and giving them the opportunity, frankly, to fail. And say, hey, it's OK here to fail. If you fail, we're gonna pick you back up, and we're gonna send you out to do it again. So I think mentorship is, is an incredibly important part of what we do.

Yeah, that's awesome. I think clearly your experiences have shaped you to be the right person for SGI to lead this mission, so that's really awesome. Is there any other advice that you would give to someone just starting a career in ecology or conservation?

I think the biggest two advices I would give people is Be curious constantly. Even in today, I think about things and I call Dwayne, our executive director, and I'm like, but what about this? I've never lost that, but what about the Box turtles moment in my life, and I hope I never do. And I'll even talk to, to our staff many times, and I'm like, maybe what if we tried this, or we do, do this differently. We are in an exciting time of discovery and revolution within conservation, and many people often think that like, they look into the past and they're like, you know, the big vision of conservation, the big things like Roosevelt did that, and Leopold did that. We don't do that now, and I think that's wrong. I think that we do do that now, and I think that we should encourage more people to think like that now, and That stems from that curiosity and that love for the land.

And then the other thing is, it's never too late to reinvent yourself, you know, I think about where I was in my engineering degree. And I was like, oh, you know, many people probably would not have made the decision I made to just, you know, do an about-face. And even when I kicked into the conservation field, I was not a plant person. I was not an ecologist. I was a pretty mediocre botanist. I often joke that I was Jedi mind tricked into being a botanist because I had this advisor that anytime I would write research grants, On like wanting to go work with bison, which is a species I got to work with, he'd be like, OK, cool, but you're also gonna do these vegetation surveys. And so, through this, this life of changing and conservation, I went from an engineer to a herpetologist, to kind of a generalist, where I was working with mammals and invertebrates and odinates to an ecologist, and I say this to say, It's never too late to just reinvent yourself, or learn something new, or become an expert in something else. It just takes that curiosity and just doing it. Anybody that listens to this could be a plant expert or a bug expert, even if they know nothing today.

Yeah, especially with the tools we have, like you mentioned.

For sure.

Yeah, that's fabulous advice. Thank you for that. Tell us about the bison before we move on to our field note section.

Yeah, yeah, so I'm like a self-explained bison fanatic, I guess, or I don't think self anymore. A lot of people call me a bison fanatic, but I've been, my advisor did his research on bison, and he kind of passed on this obsession to me, and they were this, they were and are this giant megafauna species that shaped the ecology of many of our ecosystems. Most people think of them as a great plains species, but they were all over the east in Long Island and, you know, in Florida, throughout the South. These, yeah, this giant megafaunal creature was here for a long time. We quickly pushed them out, but the understanding of how they shaped our ecology or the different interactions they had on the landscape, especially in the Southeast. It's a really understudied area. So I've gotten to do, you know, research on originally like herptofaunna response to bison grazing in prairies, cause, you know, they changed the vegetation structure, and now I get to work on looking at reintroducing bison to different landscapes, and it's just a really exciting creature that, you know, North America's mammal.

Yeah, they're pretty awesome. I got to volunteer at the Larry Park Zoo. Way back in the day when they used to have some there and uh it's amazing to spend that time up close with them.

It is now time for our segment called Hashtag Field Notes. This is the part of our show where we talk to our guests about memorable moments doing the work in the field. So if you have a story, please share your funny, scary, awkward field story with us so we can read it on a future episode at info@environmentalprofessionalsradio.com or the form on the website.

And Jeremy, I have a lot of potential stories here for you. I'll let you pick one. I can give you a hint if you get stuck, but I don't think you're going to. But I would love to hear any and all of these stories actually, cause I'm sure that they're great.

I would love a hint.

Um, well, the, the first one here is getting stuck in a, uh, UTV stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Oh, that, that is a great story. So I got the pleasure, I got the pleasure of working for, for Wyoming Game and Fish for a while. And working for Wyoming G Fish, you are restoring and managing thousands of thousands of acres often alone. And one day I was just tired and wore out, and we were, I was zooming through this area. We had just done this big land swap. So I'm in this piece of property with no cell service. I don't have an inreach on me, and I happened to invite my now wife. At this time, she was my girlfriend to come out with me. I was like, hey, just come right around with me. I'm just pulling down signs. It's not a big deal. I did not think ahead. I didn't bring enough water, like, I just was not prepared, cause in my head, I was going out for, you know, uh, an hour-long excursion, nothing could go wrong.

And so, I get out there and I'm pulling down, you know, these signs on this like, multiple 1000 acre tract. And in Wyoming, they often use this thing called open ditch irrigation, which literally they ditch out the land, and then they use it to kind of irrigate either crops or pastures. I was unaware of the fact that this landscape had been lined out with these open ditch irrigations, and by this time, the vegetation is, you know, waist chest high, so it's like a short grasses, prairie, some of it's invasive species. And I'm trucking along and all of a sudden it just like we smack into a wall, but there's nothing in front of us and we buried this UTV in this ditch essentially and so quickly I pull out my phone and I'm like, oh my God, let me call my supervisor, and I realized no service, like no bars, and I walk all. All around looking for a high spot, no bar.

So we come back to the UTV and I'm telling my then girlfriend, like, hey, just get into the front of it, get into the driver's seat and just floor it in the back, and I'm going to try and lift this UTV out of this ditch. And she's like That's never gonna work. And I was like, well, it, it better work, or we're gonna have like a 10 mile hike back to where, where we have service. Luckily it did work, so she jumps in the front, she starts flooring it in reverse, and I was able to get enough lift on the front of the UTV to get enough traction to just zip us out of there. And then after that we immediately left, and I had to call him kids. Yeah, I had to call my supervisor, and he's like, Hey, did you get all those signs? And I was like, that's a way like bigger project than you think it is. That place is riddled with, with open ditch irrigation.

Wow, well, I'm glad no one was hurt in this story. Uh, sounds very sketchy. Yeah, we love those types of stories cause we've all gotten stuck in situations like that. Can't always get out of them like that, so that's true, that's nice.

We also like to talk hobbies and interests, so you like to camp, hunt, fish, garden. Do you have any favorite activities that you're doing when you're not working?

Yeah, I, I think anything outside. I really love to garden with my wife. We grow a lot of vegetables. I like to hike and camp. We're already talking about our baby's 3 months old, and we're planning her first camping trip for this September. We've already taken her out on a few hikes. I've accidentally already gotten her 5 ticks, cause it's like, I took her through this prairie at one point, not even thinking, but we found the ticks like 5 seconds later, it was OK. Um, at least I tell myself it was OK. So I just like to do anything that that's outdoors. I, I love to hunt and fish. We eat a lot of wild game in my house, and we eat a lot of canned vegetables in my house, and it's just like anything that can keep us outside and really close and tied into the land is, is a lot of fun for us.

Yeah, that's fantastic. And again, I wish Nic was here. He's about to have his own little, little girl, so you guys would have so much to talk about. But we are running out of time. So is there anything else you would like to mention that we didn't get to?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I'd like to circle back to is, it kind of stems off of my wife and I were having a conversation one day, and, and sometimes we live in, at times, seemingly perilous times, and We were discussing having children, you know, and now my, my daughter is here, and my wife said to me this old phrase she had seen, and she's like, don't be afraid to raise dragon slayers in a time of dragons. And I relate that to our work heavily, and, and my work in philosophy heavily, in the sense that it is a time for big vision, large conservationists.

There is still space for big things to happen. There's still space to be romantic about the land and our relationship to the land, and I really encourage. Everybody to think about it that way. It doesn't mean that it's gonna be me who figures out how we make the next big conservation breakthrough, and probably it's not going to be me. It's gonna be someone young who is thinking romantically and big about the landscape, like many of the conservation titans before us. It is still a time for big visions and conservation, so dream big.

That's perfect. I love that. Anyone else would like to spend more time chatting with you, how could they get in touch with you?

The best way to reach me is through my email. It is jeremy.French@SEgrasslands.org.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us, me today. It was really fun conversation and I love that quote. That was a perfect way to end this.

Thank you. It was a blast.

That's our show. Thank you, Jeremy, for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review. Bye. See you, everybody.