Conservation Efforts
A fortunate life spent outside naturally leads one to a hope of giving back. Concerned with climate change, the protection of wildlands and social detachment from nature, I'm increasingly writing and researching around these topics and seeking field assignments and opportunities.
This has led me to immensely fulfilling work with Bear Trust International, where I direct media publications, and am currently designing an annual print magazine. I've also worked on the ground level of conservation through area management and anti-poaching efforts in Tanzania and Zambia.
All these initiatives stem from a lifelong intrigue with our species' connectivity to the nonhuman world. I consider this to be a holistic personal and community pursuit. I'm always keen for new chances to seek and collaborate with others.
Our human relationship to the rest of nature is not akin to the analysis of bacteria in a petri dish; it is more like the complex, love-hate relationship we might have with lovers or parents or siblings. It is who we are, unspoken and felt and frustrating and inspiring and vital and impossible to peer-review. You can reach part of it with the analytical mind, but the rest will remain buried in the ancient woodland floor of human evolution and in the depths of our old ape brains, which see in pictures and think in stories. Civilization has always been a project of control, but you can’t win a war against the wild within yourself.
Paul Kingsnorth
Bear Trust International
Working closely with founder A.C. Smid and Executive Director Logan Young, I direct communications and publications at the Montana-based nonprofit Bear Trust International. We raise funds for distribution to on-the-ground conservation projects concerning all eight species of bears. Education is a primary focus of our initiative, and growing our membership and public engagement is our top priority. We aim to celebrate humans' ancient relationships with bears across the world, and are currently preparing a print magazine to further this.
Read a sample of my work for Bear Trust:
Kwalata Safaris
When I was a teenager, I chased a long-held dream to Tanzania where I worked as an Apprentice in man-abandoned landscapes that demanded huge acceptance, to the extent that trackers and guides and an apprentice alike would lose themselves, happily, in the seas of wild grass and curling forests. The only control we even pretended to have was over our own survival—a truck, our supplies, a little tent camp at the end of a long, handmade road. That was vulnerable, by the standards of man, and it felt wonderful. Encounters in the bush have since then inspired my writings and continued searching in nature.
