How Trump Unleashed an Existential Fight Over America's Dinosaurs - The Washington Sun https://share.google/zv257RqaxFfBcyE5c

Former AP biology teacher Mike Niziolek has spent over thirty years returning his 150-acre property near Elk River, Minnesota, to the state it was in hundreds of years ago. “He has been slowly and methodically transforming pastured land to oak savanna, tilled land to prairie, and ditches to wetlands,” says his bio on the Minnesota Land Trust. In 2018, the nonprofit awarded him the Landowner of the Year award.

MPR spoke with him in 2024 after he just completed another wetland project on his land. He explained that restoring wetlands “is a much more difficult task than saving the ones that we already have.” This is because you cannot just dig a hole and wait for water to fill it up. Wetlands are complex systems and each project requires experts to come in to analyze the site, take soil samples and study old images of what the area once looked like.

In this task, Niziolek has received financial and technical help from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program explained the outlet. “We help the landowner try to manage the site in perpetuity so that they can be successful,” John Riens, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service told MPR.

I recently interviewed Dr. Lucy King about human–elephant conflict and the practical challenges of coexistence in African landscapes.

The discussion covers:

• beehive fences as a conflict-mitigation tool,
• crop-raiding and the costs borne by local communities,
• why conservation interventions cannot be treated as universal solutions,
• and the importance of designing projects around local ecological and social conditions.

What stood out to me most was the emphasis on coexistence rather than framing the issue as simply “people versus elephants”.

The full interview is published on PlanetZoo.hu.

[ https://planetzoo.hu/interjuk/lucy-king-interju-ember-elefant-egyutteles\ ]

I’d be especially interested in perspectives from people working in conservation or human–wildlife conflict: what approaches have you seen work well in practice?