Here are Species Unite’s five most-listened to podcast episodes of 2024
How to protect rhinos from poachers, learning about what owls know, and the campaign to stop the construction of the biggest ‘monkey farm’ in the US - these are just some of the topics covered in our most listened-to episodes of the year.
At Species Unite, we hear from some of the brightest minds who are working to make the world a better and kinder place for animals (and humans!).
This year has been packed with episodes that give us a reason to find hope, with so many inspiring and incredible guests who have shown us how much impact one person can have.
Listen, and be inspired - here’s the episodes our community listened to most during 2024:
S11. E2: Mark Vins: Brave Wilderness
Mark Vins is an Emmy Award-winning wildlife and adventure filmmaker and the co-founder of the Brave Wilderness YouTube channel.
Mark and his co-founder, Coyote Peterson, created the Brave Wilderness Channel to bring people closer to animals and nature and crazy encounters all over the world. Some of them include things like watching Mark and Coyote get stung and bitten by some of the most painful stings and bites out there.
Brave Wilderness has 21 million subscribers and their videos have had more than 4 billion views.
Mark is also one of the leading ambassadors for Leonardo DiCaprio's organization Re:wild. Mark made a documentary with Re:wild called Brave Mission. It's about Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the mountain gorillas who live there and the women and men who protect them. This single documentary video has raised over $700,000 to help the rangers in Virunga.
Damien Mander is the founder and CEO of Akashinga, an organization that is changing everything we ever thought we knew about how conservation works. Formerly known as the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF), Akashinga is a nature conservation organization that creates resilient ecosystems where nature, wildlife and communities will thrive together for years to come.
Akashinga Rangers are Africa's first plant-based all women anti-poaching unit, and they are revolutionizing the ways that animals are protected, the communities are supported and that wilderness landscapes are restored and safeguarded.
Damien is an Iraq war veteran who served as a Naval clearance diver and special operations sniper for the Australian Defense Force. In 2009 he founded the IAPF which later became Akashinga.
Damien is the winner of the 2019 Winsome Constance Kindness Gold Medal. He was featured in the James Cameron documentaries “The Game Changers” and National Geographic’s “Akashinga – The Brave Ones’” about his work with the women of Akashinga.
Carl Safina is an ecologist and author who writes extensively about our human relationship with the natural world and what we can do to make it better.
His most recent book is called, Alife and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. It’s about rescuing a baby owl, watching her grow up and what he learned from her and himself in the process. And, it's about our relationship with nature and the beauty and the magic that surrounds us.
Carl's writing has won several awards, including a MacArthur Genius Prize, Pew and Guggenheim fellowships, and the John Burrows, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. He is the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and the founding president of the not for profit, The Safina Center.
There's a small town in Georgia called Bainbridge. It has 15,000 residents, and recently those 15,000 residents were duped by their city and county officials. What happened was that some people came in and proposed a deal to build a $400 million monkey breeding facility, and city and county officials not only agreed to do it, but they gave them almost $60 million in handouts, a 20-year tax abatement, and hundreds of acres of public land.
And when the people of Bainbridge found out, they reached out to PETA’s Senior Science Advisor, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel.
Lisa spent many years working with primates in biomedical laboratories. She knows more about the industry than just about anyone. In 2019, when she couldn't take it anymore, she left the biomedical world and joined forces with PETA with the aim of taking the primate testing industry down. And that is exactly what she’s doing.
Mark Elbroch is an ecologist and author, storyteller and the director of the Puma Program for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization.
Mark has been on the podcast before to talk about cougars, but something has changed since the last time he was on. For years, many people in the scientific community, and this is backed by research, have claimed that cougars would return to their historic range in the eastern US in the next 10 to 20 years.
But there's a new study from Panthera that says that this is not true, that they won’t make it to the East Coast even by 2100, which means, if we want cougars in the east we're going to have to help them.
This is a big deal because we do want cougars in the east. Large predators make fragile ecosystems strong. Mountain lions interact with nearly 500 other species and their reintroduction could lead to healthier forests, less zoonotic disease, and many other benefits. Let’s bring cougars home!
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How to protect rhinos from poachers, learning about what owls know, and the campaign to stop the construction of the biggest ‘monkey farm’ in the US - these are just some of the topics covered in our most listened-to episodes of the year.