About the Guerrilla Rewilding Blog
Perhaps first a little introduction from me, your Guerrilla Rewilding host. My journey into conservation was a direct one, and began with a capricious decision to move to Jakarta to search for an internship at an NGO with just a backpack and a bachelors in Zoology. Now with ten years professional experience across South East Asia and Africa, and a masters in Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health, I'm looking for a new adventure promoting and strategising rewilding projects across the world.
I'm a researcher and a magpie: I get excited by shiny stories and characters and ideas. I follow them down rabbit holes and sometimes on wild goose chases. I read and read and read, and write and write and write. I'm happiest in the field, in nature, meeting people and seeing projects in their full technicolour glory.
Being a magpie gives me freedom
to explore my curiosity in things and people and ten years of learning about conservation globally has allowed me to dip my toes into so many conservation pools. I've been thinking about many of this discipline's difficult questions: how do we stop deforestation and pollution from industrial agriculture and mining? How can we best prepare rangers and communities to foster more trusting relationships? How can we better integrate human rights into conservation policy and practice? How do we best engage civil society in conservation? How do we restore and rewild species whilst ensuring coexistence and ecological healing? How do we expand the protected area estate and improve the efficacy of its management? I've worked on tigers, orangutans, river dolphins, lions, cheetahs and zebras, grasslands, rainforests, inland and coastal waters... And amongst all this, what is the question floating around in my mind the most? My screensaver question?
The Question on my mind...
The question that is most on my mind - what are the public doing? Outside the habitat of conservation professionals, policy makers and ecologists, rangers and project managers, researchers and academics, what are people doing to restore species?
I’ve heard stories of these Guerrilla Rewilders... people taking rewilding and restoration into their own hands, frustrated by the sluggish pace of policy and permits, engaging in covert operations to reintroduce wildlife to areas where they've been lost.
Who are these people? Far from the safety of their laptops and emails. What do their operations look like? Vigilantes wearing Zorro masks, coordinating on walkie talkies in the dead of night between workmen's vans and secret locations? Ops rooms with whiteboards and maps - red pins marking source population and release sites, police and border stops, species' grocery lists? What does it take to bung a few beavers in the back of a van and release them into a beaver-less river? Who has the guts and what drives them? What are their goals? When are they successful? And when are they not?
What is happening on the GR blog?
The Guerilla Rewilding blog will be hosting these characters, their stories and projects. Here, I'll be exploring when wildlife restoration could be handed over to the people and why.
If you know of any stories, please contact me using the button below. Rest assured that these can remain anonymous if needed and those involved can have the final say in what is published.
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Hannah Timmins
Hannah is a self-employed conservation consultant based in Nairobi. She is most interested in rewilding, species restoration and spatial ecology, the role of civil society in conservation and restoration, legislative frameworks that support community conservation and the expansion and connectivity of the conservation estate globally.
Han worked for several years on forest protection and landscape planning in Indonesia and moved to Kenya in 2018 to learn more about the role of community governance and management in the conservation estate and how communities can coexist with large wildlife.
Whilst in Kenya, Hannah has completed a Masters in Biodiversity, Wildlife and Ecosystem Health at the University of Edinburgh, and worked on a number of projects and publications with Equilibrium Research.