conservation

And so I, I had this moment in grad school.

I was like, okay, Conservation is critically underfunded.

We're losing species super fast.

People get apathetic.

A lot of our earliest acquisitions were a series of prairies.

We had no management capabilities at the time, so we were good at land acquisition, and we would then lease them typically to the Department of Conservation for management.

And a lot of the prairies in southwest Missouri today, even though they're no longer within Nature Conservancy ownership, they may be managed by the Missouri Prairie Foundation or Department of Conservation, They started out as Nature Conservancy acquisitions.

So there was an awareness of prairie, but it was relatively unfocused.

Prairie was known to be rare, and any time a prairie came up, there was an attempt maybe to purchase it if it was of significant size or to get it into conservation ownership.

et cetera, as this evolving tool that we continue to use, not just here in Missouri, but much more broadly throughout all of the Nature Conservancy.

I think it's a useful tool in the toolkit.

Do you remember how that came to be, the Conservation Buyer Fund in the Ozarks?

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Soul Seekers podcast, where we believe that hunting has the power to transform lives through primal adventure as we share our mission of mentorship is conservation.

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That's H-U-X-W-R-X.com. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Soul Seekers Podcast.

I'm your host, Johnny Mac.

Today's episode, we're talking conservation.

We're talking community.

We're talking about actually getting involved and supporting what you love beyond carrying a gun or a bow out in the field and actually getting action going in your local community.

Brazil advances global forest fund as investors signal support.

Brazil is pushing forward with an international forest financing initiative designed to make conservation economically rewarding.

Launched in November 2025, the Tropical Forests.

Forever Facility aims to mobilize 125 billion American dollars through public and private investment.

Arosha.

That is Christians in Conservation.

It is a Christian organization that is trying to show that we need to take care of God's creation.

It was founded by an Anglican minister, Peter Harris, and Arosha now works in more than 20 different countries.

Kevin Kavanagh is the owner of South Coast Gardens and Consulting in St. Williams, Ontario.

This episode is filled with stories from his early life in Quebec, working summers in bogs and wetlands propagating blueberries, to fundraising and advocacy work while at the University of Toronto with the Botany Conservation Group.

Kevin then spent years working for national conservation organizations like World Wildlife Fund and Nature Conservancy of Canada.

Today, if you go to Kevin's nursery, be ready to be awestruck.

Mature specimens of magnolias, rhododendrons, azaleas, pawpaws, and dogwoods, to name a few, form a storefront forest to demonstrate what he has built in the last 20 years.

And in one night, we raised almost $55,000, which back in the late 80s was tremendous.

And it did it.

huge advancement of that project and it was just such a good feeling and I think at that point I realized that I had been very involved in sort of theoretical research at that point but it was you know you needed to do something tangible for nature as well and that just I don't know I think those were turning points in my life about feeling like there's a way to make change and so From that point forward, I really was involved in national conservation organizations to help sort of make change.

This is the last week.

And matter of fact, by the time this drops on Wednesday, we may be in the final hours of our popforconservation.com raffle that directly supports the mission here at CSF.

So as I just said, popforconservation.com, P-O-P, the number four, conservation.com. Go there now, enter to win many wonderful prizes, hundreds of thousand of dollars in prizes, gift cards, gear for hunting, fishing, wheeled vehicles.

Don't miss out.

Final hours now.

popforconservation.com, P-O-P, the number four, conservation.com. And finally, final bit of housekeeping, NASC registration ongoing.

We're getting down to it, folks.

If you can believe it or not, we're halfway through October at this point.