Author: Muse Ecology

In addition to the podcast epidoses, I’ve also done quite a few webinars with some great guest presenters.  I’ve consolidated all of the webinars I’ve done into three playlists on the Muse Ecology Youtube channel.  The bison webinar and future webinars will go into the Muse Ecology Webinars playlist.  Another playlist is the three panel discussions I organized and hosted at the Global Earth Repair Conference 2019.  The third playlist is an archive of all the Ecosystem Restoration Deep Dive Webinars.  Many thanks to the Ecosystem Restoration Camps Foundation for asking me to start that webinar and for providing the use their Zoom Webinar account for the last year and a half.

Here’s the link for the webinar playlists.  Cheers!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM1Lapc0I6Q5SBq_0Lgc7Qw/playlists

In this fifth and final episode in this series on the bison in the Great Plains, we visit the Savory Institute Headquarters in Colorado and speak with Daniela Howell, Director of the Savory Institute, and Allan Savory, inventor of the Holistic Management framework.

We also hear some collaborative discussion about how regenerative cattle ranchers might support efforts to facilitate the return of large roaming herds of wildlife to the prairie.

Continue reading “#8 Holistic Management, The Savory Institute, and Wild Bison”

Wild Idea Buffalo Company is a bison ranching business that exists to conserve and restore the prairie ecosystem of the northern Great Plains. With no roundup, and an innovative field harvesting method, they care for the well-being of the bison, and as much as possible allow them to express their co-evolved behaviours.

You can follow their blog and order their bison meat at wildideabuffalo.com

Continue reading “#7 Wild Idea Buffalo Company”

In our visit with Mark Tilsen in the Black Hills for Episode 5 about Tanka Bar, our interview happened to take place right before a prayer walk to a proposed gold mining site up the creek from Mark’s place.  As I began to include this synchronous content in the Tanka Bar episode, I realized that it lit up a section of the rabbit hole that needed it’s own episode for a proper introduction, so I created this bonus episode to explore some of the complexities that emerged while looking at gold mining in the Black Hills.  It includes another historical introduction, audio from the prayer walk, and recordings from phone conversations with Mark Tilsen and Cheryl Rowe of Dakota Rural Action.

Continue reading “#5 Bonus: Protecting the Black Hills”

In this episode, the second of four in this series on the bison in the Great Plains, we visit the lands of the Oglala Lakota in the Black Hills of Western South Dakota, where we met with Mark Tilsen, cofounder of Tanka Bar.   Tanka Bar, a company owned and operated by the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation, created the first commercial bison meat and fruit bar based on one of their sacred foods, called wasna.  The mission of Tanka Bar is to restore the Pine Ridge landscape and economy by bringing back the buffalo.

Before the interview with Mark, I also share a bit more history of the time of the buffalo slaughter.  I feel it’s useful to have some understanding of the creation of the wounds that Tanka Bar is working to help heal.

Continue reading “#5 Tanka Bar: for the Buffalo, the Land, and the People”

This episode of Muse Ecology is the first in this four part series beginning to explore humankind’s relation to the bison in the Great Plains of North America. This buffalo series features diverse voices of folks involved in the bison’s return that Alison and I met on our buffalo investigation journey in February 2018. While the next three episodes feature entrepreneurs (Tanka Bar) and ranchers (777 Bison Ranch and Wild Idea Buffalo Company) who are working to restore bison to the landscape, this first episode features voices of wildlife advocates who see the buffalo as a wild elder whose right to roam long precedes our recent human constructs.

The first visit on our buffalo journey was with the Buffalo Field Campaign, a volunteer-run organization that exists to defend the dignity and freedom of the last continuously wild herd of buffalo in North America, in Yellowstone National Park. Founded over 20 years ago by Lakota Grandmother Rosalie Littlethunder and videographer Mike Mease, through documentation and advocacy, the BFC seeks to promote awareness of the story and management of the Yellowstone bison, and to influence policy to allow them to roam free like the other wild ones.

At just over two and a half hours this episode ended up a bit long, but felt like one story to be released together, so I divided it up into chapters like an audio book or radio play, and created a table of contents with minute and second, to make it easy to restart if you have to take a break.

Continue reading “Episode 4: The Buffalo Field Campaign, Protecting the Last Wild Bison”

Episode 3 closes out Muse Ecology’s inaugural series recorded in December 2017, about ecosystem restoration and the work of John D. Liu. In this episode, John and I have a conversation on the way to the airport that weaves through many topics currently affecting our global situation, and we discuss how a large scale shift to focusing on ecosystem restoration addresses the roots of all of them.

John D. Liu is Ecosystem Ambassador for Commonland Foundation and Visiting Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also catalyzed the Ecosystem Restoration Camps movement. You can find his films and research papers at knaw.academia.edu/JohnDLiu

One of the topics we discuss is how water vapor is more of a greenhouse gas than carbon emissions, and how ecosystem destruction has disrupted the water cycle and led to increase of uncondensated (not formed into clouds) atmospheric water vapor. The source John was referring to for his greenhouse gas numbers can be found at the following link.

Continue reading “#3 A Bonn Voyage with John D. Liu”