2023 Year in Review

Intro: You're listening to It's in Our Nature, the podcast that celebrates the connections between people and nature with host Adam McLane, The Nature Conservancy's Missouri state director. For more information, visit nature.org/Missouri.

Hi everyone. I'm Adam McLane, Missouri's state director for The Nature Conservancy. Thanks for joining us on a special episode of It's in Our Nature today. We're going to look back at the past year. This is becoming kind of a little tradition where I take on the impossible task of recapping 12 months of TNC's work in 35-45 minutes.

So, before we get started, let me say I'm not going to be able to cover it all. There's just too much, and that's impossible. But 2023 was a big year. I don't want to oversell it. But it was a year that will set the stage for what we do for a lot of years to come.

As you probably know, TNC is a global organization. And the organization has set huge conservation goals for 2030. Really big stuff like reducing or storing 3 billion metric tons of carbon. For context, that's like taking 650 million vehicles off the road every year. So those kind of goals are collective goals. They happen through the efforts of thousands of people working in places like Missouri.

A lot of you have already experienced that because you've been right there beside our staff and trustees. Those kind of goals also take really smart planning at all levels of the organization. So in 2023, we sat down and created 2030 goals for Missouri. Again, big, ambitious stuff. But you can't just have goals; you have to figure out how you're going to achieve them.

So we took a very close look at our operation here. We wanted to figure out where to focus and what resources we'll need to get there. That's involved some new investments, expanding our staff with some really talented people, and lots and lots of legwork to prepare. We wanted to be really intentional so that we can be bold in what we go after.

A lot of you have already probably been traveling during the holidays. Much of 2023 was like, for us, it was like getting ready for this long trip. If you figure out where you're going, you then pick your routes…or routes, however you want to say that. You can say it two different, routes, routes, routes, routes.

Anywho, you make sure all your passengers are in the car, and I will tell you as a side note, make sure you don't forget your passengers. I have two kids, just, you're just going to have to trust me on that one. And then you set out. You get on this long trip. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to run through a lot of the work that's happened as we prepare for that adventure.

Some of the new faces, a lot of the projects that are already on the ground in Missouri. Just a lot of really neat things happening here. And I've picked out seven highlights of 2023. So let's get started.

Highlight number one. We're building our team and tracking our goals. The first bullet point I have on my list here is about our staff.

In 2022, we had a handful of staff, really critical staff members, take advantage of some other opportunities and positions within The Nature Conservancy. So to me, the moves made perfect sense. Moving closer to family in a couple situations, taking advantage of some good career opportunities and growth. You're always excited to see good things happen for your colleagues.

But then you think, wow, these are some big shoes that we need to fill. There are a couple ways that you can do that. A lot of times you just try and find the best person you can hire for that position. But we knew that we were going to be doing some real goal setting soon. Some deep goal setting. And this was a good opportunity to take a look at our operation, see if there were some ways that we wanted to realign our teams.

So that's what we did. In the past year, we've created new positions for Director of Resilient Lands and a Director of Resilient Waters. So those are filled by Megan and Rob. I want to go a little bit into Megan and Rob's background just so you can see how perfect they are for these roles. So Megan is our director of resilient lands.

Megan has a MS in applied forest ecology from the University of Alabama. She has a BS in physical geography from University of Alabama. I try not to be around her during Alabama football games. It's just obnoxious. Otherwise, terrific addition to the team. She came from the Missouri Department of Conservation, where she was a research silviculturist and was the terrestrial habitat and social science supervisor for them.

So this great background, deep knowledge of the ecology of Missouri and how we would go about trying to protect resilient lands and waters. For the benefit of everybody in Missouri and well beyond it, so terrific addition to this to the team. Wonderful skill set that we didn't have. That's now a part of the team and she's doing. She's rock star level. It's awesome.

Rob Hunt. He's our director of resilient waters. Rob has an MS in wildlife biology from Missouri State University, a BS in wildlife biology from Missouri State University. I don't think there's ever any Missouri State football games on TV that I can remember, so he's fine during football season.

Great experience. His previous role that he came from was he held several positions at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. He was eventually coordinating policy reviews and departmental initiatives as a senior advisor to the director of the Department of Natural Resources in Missouri.

So a really broad scope, really strategic thinker, and has been a terrific addition to the team for thinking about all the diverse waters that are in Missouri and how do you go about coming up and crafting strategies that ultimately make them really resilient and protect them well into the future.

That's not the only people we've hired, but I'm giving you a couple of different examples. Those people added into the team. And then The Nature Conservancy overall, as we did goal setting designed a system called the HUB. I don't know what it stands for. The HUB is an acronym for something. And basically, you should think of it as a dashboard.

We think of it as a dashboard. So, my background is business. My degree is business. I worked in the for-profit environment for quite a while before joining The Nature Conservancy. Key performance indicators, dashboards. They're such a big part of that environment within large organizations, and for really good reason.

So, we had dashboards in Missouri to drive our work, but they weren't apples to apples with anything across the broader organization. So, if you think you're doing great in Missouri because you're measuring in a certain way, but somebody else in a different state or a different country is measuring it a completely different way for conservation outcomes, that creates a giant challenge.

You can't learn from each other; you can't optimize the things that are working best for our mission. So TNC invested very heavily in a system and a way of going about doing that. And that took a lot of time from Rob and Megan and their teams to put our work into an apples-to-apples scenario across the organization so we could really start thinking about how do we optimize the things we're best at in Missouri that the world needs us to be really good at.

And there are plenty of them.

So highlight two. We accepted the challenge. There's a lot of work to do, and we're working beyond our borders to protect vulnerable landscapes. So one of the big goals of restructuring our teams was to put a new emphasis on working across the Great Plains. So, the Great Plains for us is a big collection of 9-10 states kind of in the middle of the country that share a lot of things.

They share a lot of grasslands work, they share some woodlands work, they certainly share freshwater work. And you could call it flyover country. A lot of people do. And so we think about that a lot. What is our relevance to the broader conversation of conservation? What do we have that's uniquely important in these places?

And there are a lot of them. And how we go about getting those accomplished is a big, meaningful thing for us to think on and drive towards. And we don't do that alone. We do that with partners. So if you think about it, it doesn't make much sense to say, we're gonna restore prairies. but only within our fence or state line.

Wildlife doesn't work like that. Plants don't work like that. So we've spent a lot of time talking to partners and mapping out how we can work together in some new ways. We've got some awesome news on that front in November, when the Department of Interior announced it was awarding $4.7 million to a new collaboration that we're a part of.

It's through the America the Beautiful Challenge grant. So we've worked with many of the partners before. Missouri Department of Conservation, Pheasants Forever, Quail Forever, Missouri Prairie Foundation, Jay N. Darling Institute at Drake University and Iowa Department of Natural Resources. But this is a cool framework that connects the whole group to work on the grasslands from southwest Missouri all the way up into Iowa.

Our end of that is going to be activating a couple new Habitat Strike Teams. I think we've talked about those before in podcasts, but if you haven't heard about those, they're these mobile teams that we can send out to do a lot of different things, from conducting prescribed fires and fighting off invasives, to reseeding areas to boost biodiversity.

A lot of the time, they're going to be the extra hands that somebody else needs. So if MDC, or the Forest Service or even a private landowner needs some help, a Habitat Strike Team can pop in and add that capacity when they need it.

Even though it's not part of the grant, this overlaps a lot with that strategic vision that we have for grasslands and some of our sustainable grazing work.

A lot of those efforts are taking place in some of the same exact landscapes, they just have some different focuses, but they're running in parallel with each other. And supporting each other and complementing the ultimate outcomes that come from that. So it's kind of this 1 plus 1 equals 3 scenario that we go for all the time. And I think this is a really great example of it.

Highlight number 3. I'm going to move on to removing barriers for people and nature. So this is really about low water crossings. So we're working across boundaries. We've also been really creative on creating resilient waters. So land, water, they are completely intertwined, but for kind of functional purposes and planning, we have to separate them sometimes and understand what strategy is impacting what, and then there's all kinds of overlap and cross benefits that come to the other.

But in resilient waters, really, water's the ultimate boundary crosser. You've heard that saying that we all live in a watershed. It's true, especially in Missouri, where North America's two longest rivers converge. Taking care of our watersheds here is super important for Missouri, and everyone and everything downstream of us.

And one of the ways that we've been trying to do that is through replacing low water crossings. Low water crossings are basically just like roads that run through creeks and rivers. They're all over Missouri. They block fish from their habitat. They're pretty bad for humans and a little bit dangerous, too.

When waters rise, people can't drive across them safely. Emergency vehicles can't get across them safely. And you might have whole communities cut off during a flood. So, our staff has been working for the past couple of years with a lot of people. Local water districts, county governments, other conservation groups and private landowners.

And you're starting to see some pretty good progress in replacing those crossings. Bridges that allow fish to swim underneath and people to travel across the top. As we record this in December, there are three replacements underway in Missouri along the Huzzah River, which is about two hours southwest of St. Louis and then in the Shoal Creek watershed, which is south of Joplin, Missouri.

And the bigger piece of this is creating the framework for the projects. It's like the blueprints for how we want to try and achieve these things in the future.

Are they more expensive than throwing a bunch of gravel in the stream to cross? Yes, in the short term. But we're needing to make the justification for some longer term thinking and how to actually finance and invest in those things in a smart way, so that over time we can transform how we do these things for the benefit of people and nature. We want these to be demonstration sites, where others can come out, kind of kick the tires and see how they work, how to fund them, and then how to bring whatever is useful back to their communities. It's pretty awesome stuff.

Highlight number four. We are helping increase Missouri's renewable energy production in a way that doesn't impact nature. So this is kind of around solar and wind and some other odds and ends, so you'll just have to bear with me for a little bit.

But basically our biggest opportunities, many of them, for conservation are in helping to increase access and production of renewable energy. We've been working with partners in the Environmental Improvement and Energy Resource Authority of Missouri on different ways to make that happen. In October, the group which is administered by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, applied for a $250 million grant from the EPA's Solar for All program.

We're still waiting to hear, but that proposal would offer forgivable loans to help people and communities install solar panels in underserved areas across the state. It would also create a revolving loan that would help Missouri continue solar deployments after the EPA program.

So, I get it. I'm not naive. I know there's dialogue around incentivizing things that we want to transition into the future. I will also tell you that I'm a big public land hunter, fisher, recreator. And if from my standpoint, through that lens of Adam as a person rather than as the state director, there's a lot of upside to figuring this out.

If we don't figure it out, and we need a lot of energy production, and it starts ending up in places that it shouldn't, and we haven't found ways to enable that in a thoughtful, long term, sustainable way, boy, I think we could make some really bad decisions that end up with solar panels and wind farms all over the place on public land.

And I'm not for that, like, personally, without really thoughtful ways. So I love investing in thought processes and problem solving early before things become a giant challenge. And I don't think there's any way we can look at deploying solar in smart, thoughtful ways that we all benefit from in places that aren't disrupting habitat in other places.

So I'm a big fan of exploring this. Do we have all the answers? Absolutely not. But I think there's a lot of smart people that can help us figure this out. And as a, as a society, I think we need to. So I'm excited about this effort.

So that's one. Potentially big opportunity. Another would be amending Missouri law to diversify the types of energy covered under state renewable regulations. That would include carbon free sources such as hydroelectric power. So our government relations staff have been working in Jefferson City on this. This legislation will help expedite the energy transition to more carbon free energy. And it supports our 2030 goal to increase renewable energy production in Missouri to 30%.

This one effort will not immediately accomplish this goal, but it's a big step in the right direction.

Okay, highlight number five. We're raising funds and helping our members fulfill their legacies. So philanthropy is another place where we've got some new faces. We have a new director, Sunny Unnerstall.

Sunny started in December, so not technically a 2023 hire, but part of the incoming class of leaders, and she's hitting the ground running, probably literally in a lot of cases. She's been all over the place, meeting people, seeing a lot of our projects in person. But really, the whole philanthropy team has been evolving.

We have some new people, and just about everyone's in a slightly different tweaked role. Just like our conservation staff, they're preparing for those 2030 goals. For philanthropy, that means saying, okay, if we're gonna reach these huge goals, what resources are we gonna need and how do we get there from here?

We can't just say, we need a bunch of money. You have to figure it out. Do we have staff that we need? How can we be intentional and strategic in making the biggest difference and impact? They've examined every piece of their operation to make those plans. It's a lot of behind the scenes work that people don't hear about, but none of this happens without them.

And now to the legacy part. In 2023, bequests were up. If you're unfamiliar with bequests, kind of a weird word, sometimes also called planned gifts, that's easier. Or when, when someone names TNC as a beneficiary to their estate. Or their insurance plan. There are many different ways that someone can leave a bequest to The Nature Conservancy.

They can be one of the most meaningful ways we've seen people support our work. So these are people who are entrusting us with their life's work. They're saying they believe in what we're doing, not just now, but in the long term. It's like saying about, you know, that saying about people that plant a tree, they'll never sit under. It's not something that they do for their own benefit. It's for future generations.

And that is not something that we take lightly. When someone tells us that they want some aspect of their final philanthropy or legacy to support TNC, I would say that's what fuels us, like figuratively and financially. It fuels us to wake up every morning and take on some of the major challenges that nature is facing. And it's truly an honor to be the organization where people choose to plant those seeds.

Highlight number six. We can't do an end of year highlight without talking about some protection of land. We're still protecting land and that will never change.

Big land deals. So, you know, we're getting close to the end, but I'm going to cram in a couple more highlights from the year, and that includes some big land transfers. Let's start with Chilton Creek. Back in 1991, TNC and the State of Missouri teamed up to buy a huge chunk of Ozark forest land. TNC actually bought about 80,000 acres to help keep as much of the landscape together as possible.

The plan was to eventually transfer about 75,000 acres to the Missouri Department of Conservation, or MDC, as you're, as you'll hear us refer to that most of the time, which we did five years later. But TNC held on to 5,500 acres, roughly. Where we created a preserve. So for three decades, we did a bunch of restoration and also hosted a lot of research on different conservation techniques.

At the end of 2022, we had the opportunity to transfer that property to MDC. It was the perfect situation for us in many ways. A lot of what we'd been doing at Chilton Creek had been in partnership with MDC and we knew the preserve would be protected permanently as part of the agreement will still be able to offer input on the management there and collaborate a bunch on projects that take place on that property and beyond it in the larger landscape.

It's also a move that lets us take the funds from a safe, protected preserve and put them towards more vulnerable places. We had a ceremony last spring to announce the change, and I think it was a really, really moving experience for everyone who was there. It's a really cool thing to see a great outcome for such a spectacular part of Missouri.

In other land news, last year TNC Missouri acquired the 612-acre Rubidoux Creek property. This property includes several karst or cave features and is adjacent to a known bat hibernaculum protected by MDC. The acquisition plan for the property was for TNC to purchase the property to protect the land and the vulnerable assets while working to transfer the property to a conservation partner to own and protect into perpetuity.

That process is now underway with a conservation partner and is expected to take about a year to complete. However, we were able to parcel off part of that land which featured a house and surrounding 10 acres and sold that in November. So all of this work happens. I think it's, I'm going to dwell on this a little bit.

It's one of the pieces of niche that I think TNC plays that you all help us play in really effective ways. When something comes on the market that has a lot of conservation significance, sometimes you have to have dollars or staff or know how and an ability to act quickly. We become a potential buyer in that scenario when something is on the market, which was the case for this. There are other potential buyers out there as well. Everybody's bought a house, everybody's bought a piece of property, etc. They know how quickly that can go. Agencies in Missouri and every other state that I'm aware of have a hard time having the availability and the to make a quick decision like that and not run it through a lot of different councils to be able to decide whether they have funds and come up with them, etc.

That's just the reality of government. So we have this ability when we know that there's value to a conservation partner and they don't have the ability to act incredibly quickly. We don't want to see that property get sold or bought by somebody else and then it resets a cycle where that property might not be available for another 10 years then we try and participate again. So when we have dollars available or just generally we have the financial health of The Nature Conservancy at a global level, we can participate again. We can step in in those places, acquire a property if we're the winning bidder in a situation, it's sold to us and then we can hold on to that, do some restoration, protect it for a time being until that transfer can be made and funds can be aligned to ultimately have that land where, where it was designed to, designed to land from the very beginning.

So we do that a lot throughout Missouri and we'll continue doing that. Similar to Chilton, kind of going back to that example, this is an example of TNC being able to quickly purchase property with ecological value, protect it, and find its forever home. Sometimes that's with TNC, sometimes with a partner agency or organization, or sometimes it's with a conservation easement and back on the open market. In the end, it’s land that's protected forever.

Highlight number seven. We've arrived at the last highlight. I've titled it, We're Leveraging Our Lands, is basically the big title here. So we are always looking for ways to squeeze the most good out of what we're doing. One of the ways that we do that is by leveraging our preserves and the land that we own.

So for example, we've regularly welcomed researchers onto our property to study Missouri landscapes and wildlife that they might not otherwise be able to access. We've had people study everything from tarantulas to soil to bison. It helps researchers, but it also helps drive new conservation techniques and better understanding.

So in 2023, we wanted to push that a little bit further with a new model called Centers for Conservation Innovation, or CCIs, as you'll hear us call them pretty often. We're developing three sites around Missouri in different landscapes. These are places with facilities, including housing in some cases, along with access to study sites, pilot projects, et cetera.

It's also another part of operation where we've invested in additional staff. We've hired a preserve engagement manager who can do a lot of the outreach to universities and researchers and help coordinate projects and public access. We're still in the early stages, but there's so much potential in my mind.

Many of these sites, you know, they also have public access components to them where we want them to be educational tools. This could be school field trips or educational kiosks, where visitors can learn more about nature and the work that's taking place right in front of them. Dunn Ranch Prairie is the farthest along of the CCI sites for us, but it's also just a really good example of how we try to bring in the public.

We recently built some new viewing platforms where people can see the prairie and bison. We added restrooms, uh, you know because that's always been a barrier for people when they want to come visit. We opened the Lordi Marker Nature Trail that winds you through a path surrounded by native plants and amazing views.

And because we can't always be there to give tours, we've added a bunch of new educational kiosks with tons of pictures and information so visitors can do a self-guided tour. If you've been to Dunn Ranch before, you should return. You really should. And take a look at all the new enhancements. And if you haven't been to Dunn Ranch, what are you doing? Now's the time. Get up and visit.

Okay, I always say seven, and then, or whatever number, and then I always want to squeeze in more, so I'm going to give you some a bonus highlight. Tanzania. We reconnected with friends from across the globe. We have a podcast that will feature that team, and I really, really hope you listen to that.

I always try to give these seven highlights, but I'm cheating a little bit here, because I can't not talk about it. So, we had the good fortune of, several of us, and some of our close supporters wanted to go see work internationally beyond the U.S., to see the challenges, how the challenges that are pretty common across conservation end up showing up in different places and how they've tried to over overcome those one so we could figure out if there were ways that we could help with talent or resources.

But also because there's a lot that we can extract from what they've learned, how they've approached things differently, the different context that they're working in that we haven't thought about. We can bring that back. So there's a lot of shared a shared ecotypes in general between Tanzania and Missouri.

Are they different? Yes. Please don't send me a bunch of comments saying that they're completely different. I'm talking at a broad scale level. They're working in big landscapes, with protected areas, with wildlife migrating through, in a lot of grassland contexts that requires fire, sometimes there's too much of it, etc.

There's a lot of grazing, sometimes done really sustainably that we can learn from. Other times having detrimental impact, etc. There's farming, there's agriculture, there's water issues, there's climate issues. All of those things are also present here. So hearing that from them, learning about it was a really deep experience for all of us that helped transform our work and I think allowed us to form a lot of partnerships where we could help Tanzania staff as well.

Part of that effort in helping Tanzania staff was really wanting them to give them connections into the broader organization where they could network, where they could continue to learn from other staff throughout the organization. So we helped support bringing them over for a couple different conferences that were, that were going to be really beneficial to them.

And it also allowed us to let them spend time on some of our properties to see it and offer ideas for transformation that they thought we could kind of explore. That has been a wonderful, fruitful process over the last several years. And this year, I was able to host three staff members up at Dunn Ranch and Little Creek Farm to look at that context and grasslands and bison and working grazing landscapes.

It was really, really helpful for our strategy, but I would say it was a turbo charge of energy and passion to see the way they look at conservation, have that infused through us and just see that excitement that connects us way across the globe to conservation being this shared value. It was, it was heartwarming and awesome.

Our team members got to engage in a lot of different ways and we will continue that friendship long into the future. So it was really great largely to just reconnect with old friends out in nature. and brainstorm and think big. It was awesome. Deep, deep breath.

Seven highlights plus a little bonus one that I squeezed in there.

That was a lot, but I really, really love doing this. So, you know, that's it. We've done it. We didn't get through everything, but I think we've sent 2023 out in style. I'm really grateful to our staff, our trustees, and all of you who've supported our work, not just in the past 12 months, but throughout our history.

We have much more to come in 2024. Before we go, I am going to remind you that if you have a question about nature and conservation, please send it our way via our podcast website, which is nature.org/mopodcast and we might just select it to answer in a future show. And as always, if you've enjoyed our show today, please subscribe and tell your friends about us.

You can find this episode of It's in Our Nature as well as all of our past episodes at that same site nature.org/mopodcast, or really wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for listening. And we wish you a happy and healthy new year.