Bryan: All of our work at Arcus is really about thinking about how human beings see and define that which is other. And being able to respect that which is other, whether it’s another species or whether it is another human who has some other differentiating aspect of identity. And that brings you back to our vision tagline, which is living in harmony with one another and the natural world. Because once people actually see themselves as part of nature and recognize other, People as being part of nature and recognizing the environment around them and the non-human animals around them and even the non-human animals who are not around them. Once you recognize that all of those beings are part of nature and so are you, then, then showing respect for all of them becomes a no brainer. It just becomes easy.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): Welcome to the Mongabay newscast. I’m your cohost Mike DiGirolamo. Bring you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists, working on the front lines of conservation shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet. And holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the newscast, we feature Bryan Simmons. The vice president of communications at the Arcus foundation, an organization supporting human rights and LGBTQ causes and great apes and gibbons conservation. Now Arcus is a funder of Mongabay, but they had no editorial influence in the making of this episode.

I met Bryan at an event at Climate Week in New York City, which was focused on how philanthropies can more effectively help conservation organizations in Africa. And I was struck by the philosophy of artists so much. That I felt it was worth exploring it more in a conversation. Here Brian describes why Arcus focuses on both LGBTQ rights and great apes and gibbons conservation, the work they support, the positive impacts they’ve seen. And what concerns them most right now. My favorite part about this conversation of course, is how well Bryan articulates Arcus’s philosophy. Which highlights the inextricable link between social justice for people and justice for the environment.

Mike: Bryan, thank you for joining us. Welcome to the Mongabay newscast. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.

Bryan: Lovely to be with you.

Mike: So, we’re going to talk about quite a few things today, but first, can you give our listeners an overview of what Arcus Foundation is and the kind of work that it supports? So, what do you work on?

Bryan: So, I’ll describe the role of the foundation and its foci and then I’ll maybe talk a little bit about what I do. Arcus is a private foundation that was founded in 2000. So, we’re actually in our 25th year. And we have a focus that spans both environmental and social justice. We’ve got two grant making teams in the organization. One that has long been one of the leading grant making teams in the LGBTQ movement globally. And the Great Apes and Gibbons team, which has long been one of the lead grant making teams in the ape conservation movement. Which connects us to a much larger conservation community, obviously, because when we work on those issues of ape conservation, it takes us into Other areas of work such as more responsible industrial agriculture activity, more responsible extractive industry activity. We make grants that are focused on the well-being of apes in captivity on reconciling the economic development with conservation. So um, in the terms though, we are a foundation focused on LGBTQ. Equality and Rights and Great Apes and Conservation. And we talk about our work in a holistic way. You know, we describe our vision as you know, believing that people can live in harmony with one another and the natural world. We think about humans, non-human animals and the environment as one inextricable hole that has many, if maybe even an unlimited number of component elements that are interdependent and whenever we disrespect any thing. One part of that, any individuals or populations or the environment or non-human animals that we’re actually undermining the entire whole and its, its prospect for well-being and for a future.

Mike: And we’re gonna dive into all of that. And I want to kind of pick up the, because we were having a conversation, you and I, together in New York City during Climate Week. And you were describing to me how you came to work with the Arcus Foundation. Do you care to share with us how you came to work with them and what it is that you do with them?

Bryan: Absolutely. It’s a story from my perspective. It’s really a story of gratitude and, and, and fortuitousness. I worked in the tech industry for 23/24 years. What I have done for living all my professional life is work in marketing and communications. So I worked in the software industry. I worked at IBM where I was a vice president of marketing and communications for 15 years. And my work was focused on promoting and selling software, hardware, and services. I am participatory in my community always have been, so my whole life wasn’t technology. I always cared about conservation. I cared about human rights. But my profession was in the tech industry. And Thirteen years ago, I left IBM, took some time off, and was thinking about my next challenge. And actually, for some geographical reasons wanted to make sure I had a job in the Boston, Massachusetts area in the United States. And someone approached me about having conversations with the Arcus Foundation about joining as the Vice President of Communications, which is the role that I have at the foundation. And actually, the job was going to be based in New York City, so that wasn’t part of my plan. But someone said to me, “You know, why are you not considering a job you haven’t been offered yet, so why don’t you talk to them?” And the person who was running the foundation at the time had also worked at IBM, although we hadn’t known one another. But I had a conversation with her and that’s when I really understood that the foundation had these two areas of focus. Which, I’m going to be honest and say my first reaction was one of surprise. It surprises people usually. When they hear about a foundation that is working in in LGBTQ issues and in conservation. And I would say most people are surprised when I thought about it. It really is because the human brain likes to pair things. If there are two, we’re going to either try to pair them. Or we’re going to contrast them or polarize them. If there were a third body of work that our foundation did, most people wouldn’t blink. So, I decided to explore the possibility and went on an interview fairly skeptical about whether this would be a good fit in the end.

And I met the woman who is today the CEO of Arcus at the time. Her role was a vice president of the Great Apes and Gibbons program. In fact, she had come to Arcus to build that program for the foundation. And we had a conversation that centered around some of these issues about the relationship between environmental justice and social justice. Between human rights and animal rights, between economic development and the well-being of the environment and non-human animals and cultures. She encouraged me to read a book called Chimpanzee Politics by France Duval, a primatologist who died recently. And the book follows a group of chimpanzees for a number of years, and you get to understand their relationships. It’s how the power structure worked among this group of chimpanzees and who’s number one and who gets toppled and is no longer number one and then who makes an alliance number three and number two make an alliance to, to retake position. And I started to just reading that to really see just how blurry the boundary is between humans and non human animals and how non-human animals have, can have grudges and have memory and have depression and have a psychic experience of the world that’s so similar to our own. And it sort of opened up another aspect of curiosity for me that made me very attracted to this experience. And I joined the foundation and have been while, you know, fulfilling my responsibilities as the VP of communications, helping the foundation explain its philosophy, its grant making to all the relevant audiences and doing the best job it can do of that, I’ve also been learning and my relationship to other humans. And to the environment has been maturing even over those years of professional practice. And so, that’s kind of been my journey, both professional and personal in this role. I suspect some of my colleagues who came into the foundation to do LGBTQ work would represent that they’ve gone on this same journey of exposure inside the foundation. The way that I relate to other human beings. And I think a very healthy way. I now certainly humans have a tremendous ability to frustrate one another. We have our rubs, just like in any group of chimpanzees or there are power dynamics. There are conflicts. Everyone has needs that have to be resolved. Their individual needs have to be resolved with the needs of the group. But I look at other humans now. With more empathy and curiosity and understanding than I think I did than I did previously. And so some surprising developmental benefits to my role.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): Hey there listeners. Thank you. As always for tuning in. Last year, you might’ve noticed that Mongabay’s website got a welcome redesign, which includes sections for features, videos, articles, specials, shorts, and hey, also podcasts. If you want to listen to past episodes and review each episode summary you can find all of them there. And if you want to donate to Mongabay, you’ll find our donate button in the top right corner of the screen. But as always, I really do encourage you to subscribe to our weekly newsletter where you can get notifications on our latest investigations, webinars and the work we’re doing here on the podcast. That’s everything. Back to our conversation with Bryan Simmons.

Mike: I really love this journey that you went on it. Thank you for sharing that. That’s a really remarkable story. And it’s something that I really attracts me to what Arcus does. I read a quote from Jon Stryker, and he said social justice for people can truly enable Conservation and I was kind of hoping that you could expand upon that for us because it seems it seems pretty central to the philosophy of the foundation. So what does that mean when he says that social justice can enable conservation?

Bryan: Well, I think I could go a lot of places in answering that. And actually I could go down some roads where I would be more or less competent to speak. But I think what he’s getting at there is he’s chipping away at, an approach that’s very Western traditionally very Western where even the well-meaning conservationists come to conservation with this idea of a complete separation between humans and the things in nature that they are trying to conserve. You know, traditionally, we’ve often thought about conservation in terms of some Westerners swooping into Africa or Asia and marking off an area and protecting it. So, no one can hunt there, and no one can live there, but there has historically been, on the part of many Western conservationists I would say a lack of awareness and potentially a lack of curiosity. About the relationships that the people who have been coexisting with those non-human animals and have been coexisting with in certain environments, in certain physical environments. They’ve been coexisting with many other species and communities for centuries and more. And, actually there is, in what Jon is saying the Western conservationist is now letting go of the idea that you need to come in and protect that which you want to conserve from the people who are there. In fact, those people have a stake in the conservation of those other species. And they know that better than anyone else. Many of them have integrated the non-human animals into their own thinking about their own cultures and ways of life. And they want to protect those for their own reasons. Sometimes for reasons that it’s difficult for a Westerner to understand. But, when you really engage with Indigenous peoples and people who have long made their lives and their livelihoods and their well, and, and pursued their well-being alongside other species. When we’re open to it, we actually find out that they are conservationists, too. And they were conservationists before we Westerners were there. So in the most practical sense maybe one of the best examples is we’ve actually seen where communities in Africa or Asia have actually, have the local people figuring out how to preserve how to conserve the non-human species who live around them by building their tourism industry and actually protecting that which would otherwise be vulnerable to trade or to or to bush meat hunting. So, in the end, I think what Jon is referring to is a departure from a traditional Western conservation perspective.

Mike: Right. I mean it’s kind of like that fortress conservation concept, which we’ve highlighted quite a bit on Mongabay and a reconciliation towards recognizing Indigenous peoples as the stewards and the guardians of that land. So, with that said what are some of the more, there’s two separate categories of grants that Arcus has, can you give us some examples about what are some of the more heartening or successful grants that you’ve had on the social justice program end of the grant spectrum?

Bryan: Well, I think it would probably be a mistake for me to try to identify by specific instance of a grant because a lot of the success that we see in the movements that we support, those grants are, that success, first of all, has a very long arm, the kind of change we’re trying to affect, it’s usually not overnight, you know, that we make a grant to an organization and then two years later we see the result we intended and it’s also usually not simply one grant or one grantee actor. Often what we are doing is we are contributing to an effort that involves numerous players. We might not even be funding all of them. Sometimes we are making a grant to an organization that is working with some other organizations. Sometimes we make grants to multiple organizations who are working with one another. And because of our perspective as a community. As a grant maker over time, sometimes our teams actually have a sense that they should help facilitate contact and collaboration among various grantees to give them a chance to figure out ways that they can work together. But I’ll give you a couple of examples of some things that have happened that we believe our grantees have contributed to. So, in the United States, for example. In the early days of our ape conservation program, one of the things we worked on at, at very early on had to do with all of the chimpanzees in captivity in the United States who were being used in biological experiments, either by the National Institutes of Health some of them they were in the possession of NASA. Some of them had been, you know, sent in spaceships into space. Others had been subject to more biological experimentation. And over time, you know, there became a much larger body of evidence to demonstrate that in fact, a lot of research that people were using other apes for could actually be conducted just as successfully using biological models so that you weren’t actually doing physical damage and breeding apes and taking their infants from them, whom we now know that when you when you keep a chimpanzee, for example, its entire life in a cage and it, all it knows is, you know, all they know is those experiments, that environment of living in a cage, never actually being to keep the infant to whom they give birth. And we now know they experience the same sort of depression long term depression. They have no sense of what it really is like to be a chimp because they’ve never been in a natural environment. So, for many reasons, and over time, we had grantees and including PETA and the Humane Society working on these issues, and we funded them both over a period of years, and eventually, the National Institutes of Health changed its policy and agreed to release to sanctuary hundreds of chimpanzees who had long been in in the custody of the government.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): The national Institute of health agreed to cease federal funding of chimpanzee experiments in 2015. By 2022, it had completed most of the transfer of these chimps to a sanctuary. As reported on by NPR. They did retain about 85 chimps that were deemed too fragile to move in 35 chimps at the Alamogordo lab in New Mexico. Advocates reportedly influenced the release of some of them, but most remained. Just last year in November, the NIH formally agreed to release the remaining 23 chimps of the Alamogordo facility to a sanctuary in Louisiana.

Bryan: That’s one of the successes of which we are, we are most proud. And some of those many of those chimpanzees now are living in sanctuary at Save the Chimps. In Fort Pierce, Florida, which is one of our long standing grantees. And there’s also Chimp Haven. There are several sanctuaries that we have supported who all work together on a well-being standards and standards of practice and care for apes in captivity. Our goal, of course, is that eventually there will be no need, that there will not be apes in captivity, that apes will be living in their natural habitats.

But meanwhile that’s one body of success that I can certainly point to. Where social justice is concerned, where our LGBTQ work is concerned one of the ways in which LGBTQ people have, in, all over the world met with resistance to the fact of their existence has been their rejection by communities of faith. And we have supported many progressive faith leaders and faith communities who have wanted to who have had a point of view that’s inclusive of LGBTQ people and we have funded groups that made significant progress in some of the policy changes that were made in certain denominations communities primarily in the United States, among the Episcopalian churches, for example and there have been some religions where we’ve seen unfortunately, where we’ve seen some part of a denomination actually split off because it wanted to maintain this principle of inclusion. But the fact is, because of the work of many of our grantees, there is more visibility for those voices that seek to include LGBTQ people across the Abrahamic faiths. So those are some successes to which we can also point. We don’t take credit for them, but we believe that we and our grantees, those we have supported have contributed to them. And so the commonality across all of those all of that work and those successes really has to do with the notion that all of our work at Arcus is really about thinking about how human beings see and define that which is other. And being able to respect that which is other, whether it’s another species or whether it is another human who has some other differentiating aspect of identity. And that brings you back to our vision tagline, which is living in harmony with one another and the natural world. Because once people actually see themselves as part of nature and recognize other people as being part of nature and recognizing the environment around them and the non-human animals around them and even the non-human animals who are not around them. Once you recognize that all of those beings are part of nature and so are you, then showing respect for all of them becomes a no brainer. It just becomes easy. So that’s what we’re really trying to forge. In all the work that we are funding and in the opportunities that we have to promote that perspective in the places we’ve chosen to, to do our work.

Mike: Now this might seem like a really big question, so we can hone it in a little bit if you’d like, but from Arcus’s perspective, what do you see as the biggest challenges or roadblocks in this moment to conservation and human rights? What are the ones that you’re most concerned about and focusing your efforts on?

Bryan: That is a big question. It’s a question that invites hesitation to answer it because I feel like the answer will, inevitably be incomplete. But I would say I’m just going to start listing some of them and they really do converge across both bodies of work. Climate change, for example, is a huge threat to both social justice and environmental justice. Just because we know that the people who are most marginalized to begin with are those who have the most negative impact when there are circumstances of scarcity emerge. Some of the threats to the well-being of non-human animals in the places where we work in Africa and in Asia. Some of those threats have to do with, you know, reconciling economic development with the needs of the legitimate needs of humans with the with the survival requirements for these non-human communities, but they’re all at risk of the effects of climate change of the scarcity of the availability of clean water. All those three elements, humans, non-humans, and the environment. If we don’t get control over climate change if we, if we’re unable to figure out sustainable ways to feed people, then there’s a whole chain of events that will occur. What is it that drives people to hunt for bushmeat, or to engage in illegal wildlife trade? What happens when all the habitat has been consumed? And we can’t feed everyone. I mean, I’m speaking in some extreme terms, but you start to see if we don’t figure out how to minimize the zoonoses, you know, where we see diseases jumping from humans to non-humans and vice versa the risks to humans and non-humans of these threats are colossal. So, we just completed a report that, was very focused on this notion of One Health, of zoonoses, and about the transmission of disease across humans and non-human animals.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): The Arcus foundation has an entire book series regarding the threats and dangers facing great apes and gibbons, which you can download right now at stateoftheapes.com. The fifth volume of this book series explores disease, health, and ape conservation. It also looks at the One Health approach. I recommend you read it.  You can find a link to all five volumes in the show notes and the write-up of this episode.

Bryan: We all just lived through what we believe you know, to be a classic example with the with the covid with the pandemic that we’ve all just lived through. We’re all much more conscious of that threat now. Even as even in this moment, bird flu is in the news, and we wonder where that is going. So we also have a concern about the proliferation of the kind of kind of populism that’s spreading around the world right now of inequality, let’s just say where the pursuit of wealth and the concentration of wealth plays into the threats to both environmental and social justice, because, again, when people are not able to have their justice, economic needs met, conservation begins to pay the price right away. So, that’s certainly not an exhaustive answer to your question, but directionally, what I’m saying is that climate change and inequality are huge threats to both our bodies of work, but they are not the only ones.

Mike: I’m going to ask about the Congo Basin region specifically here because it is, you know, the world’s second largest rainforest. It’s home to many great ape species. Is there anything in particular in that region that Arcus is concerned about that you wish more people knew about or that you’re working to help impact?

Bryan: Well one prominent concern that we have about the Congo Basin has to do with transition minerals. Because I should have said moments ago when you asked me about other, you know, threats that we’re concerned about, I should have mentioned even AI. Which is going to be a, drive a huge demand on just the, just the cooling, the, the requirements for cooling I heard a stat about how much water is required to cool the systems that drive AI from just a single chat GPT question. It’s I believe it’s meant to be two liters.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): According to researchers from the university of California, Riverside, the water needed for ChatGPT queries is four times higher than previously thought. Consuming roughly two liters of water for between 10 to 50 queries.

Bryan: When we look at some of what we’ve been discussing as steps forward in terms of energy and solar that electric cars and such that the copper, I believe the copper, the nickel, the cobalt required to make that progress. Well, where does that come from? It comes from, it has to be mined, and we already see, I believe in the Congo Basin, we already see the effects that that’s having on, on the demand for on child labor, on social justice issues with children involved in mining also with destruction of habitat. So, there’s a huge cascade of concerns that have to do with some of what appear to be steps forward in the Congo Basin that put a lot of the work that we’ve been invested in with our grantee partners in in danger. So that’s just one example, but I wouldn’t pretend to try to give you the fullest answer about our concerns about the basin, but it’s still one of the most mineral rich areas in the entire world. And yet, it’s also home to some of our most endangered species. And some of our poorest people. So, there’s a lot hanging in the balance there.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): If you want to learn more about these topics that Brian is talking about, I highly recommend you listen to the. Fourth season of our sister series. Mongabay explorers. And aside from this being a shameless plug, it really does go in depth on the topics he’s discussing, particularly transition minerals, which you can find on episode four and on fortress conservation, which you can find on episode two, both those episodes will be linked in the related listening section of this podcast.

Mike: I always hesitate to ask people where they get their hope and optimism from, because I feel like sometimes it can come across as a bit tone deaf. But we are living through quite a dark period from an environmental perspective and a human rights perspective. And so, I’m curious, Bryan, to the people listening who may feel the despair of that, what would you point them to, to sort of derive a bit of hope and optimism in this particular moment?

Bryan: I have been thinking about this a lot because there’s certainly a lot happening that could make even a strong person sort of give up and sort of just accept that the species that are in such a fragile situation whom we are trying to protect…you know, to give up, to just decide that we’re not going to win. But if you look at history the pendulum always swings and the power of collective action has been demonstrated again and again and again and nothing happens overnight. I still have hope that people, enough people will wake up and notice when and why things are going in the wrong direction and that people will be pushed to a place where they actually find one another and coalesce. It’s easy to generalize in this moment where we have more and more inequality to… you’ll hear people talk about wealth and oligarchy. And often when you hear those terms, it makes it seem that all the people with wealth are against equity or don’t care about conservation. But actually, some of the people who have wealth. Who have resources actually do care and do want to do something. So, in my mind, it comes back to the idea of collective action, having the people who act, believe in something, find one another, connect with one another, and put their heads and resources and thinking together. And they all bring something different. Some bring money. Some bring thinking. Some bring their communications capacity. Their ability to tell stories. There are many, many components to change. That are required, and the more people who become aware of the more likely we are able to recruit people to the cause, which is, I guess, brings me back to what it is that I do for a living at Arcus. We find it very, it’s very important for us to, as a grant maker, to move resources to the right people, but we’re also just as importantly, we’re working to help our grantees move ideas to the right places. So that all the people who should be working together see the potential of working together.

Mike: If anyone wanted to reach out to Arcus or collaborate with you on anything how should they connect with you? How should they get in touch?

Bryan: On our website at arcusfoundation.org. If you go there and go to our contact button you can send us email through our website. We pay attention to the mail that we get, and we respond to everyone. So that really is the most efficient way. We have multiple people monitoring that. And we get back to everyone and we would love to hear from anyone who wants to know more. Or just as importantly, who has something important to share with us. Because one of our most important activity is to be learning and listening from other people because we certainly as a foundation don’t pretend to know everything, but we want to be a partner to those who have the curiosity and drive and vision to affect the kind of change that we’ve articulated that we’re working towards.

Mike: Bryan you thank you so much for providing your thoughts and your wisdom in this conversation. I really enjoy listening to you speak and hearing about your journey. I want to give you a chance if there was something that you wanted to talk about that we didn’t get to talk about, I would be happy to explore. Otherwise, I really enjoyed this conversation.

Bryan: Years ago I was in a conversation with Annette Lanjouw, who is the CEO at Arcus now and has for a long time run our led our Great Apes and Gibbons program, and we were talking about the similarity between the psychic experience of the world that non-human apes have to that of humans. And we were also talking about how we humans think we know other species experience of the world. But and that ours is somehow so special and superior and exceptional. But we really can’t we can’t know that. We can’t. It really is a huge error to think of us as exceptional and then somehow rationalize in our minds that something less profound and deep is happening in terms of psychic experience for other species. So, for example, we’ve talked about how similar is the experience of a non-human ape who’s born, an infant chimpanzee, an infant gorilla, knows the same things that an infant, a newborn human knows. We are all born knowing we want to be held, knowing that we need to be part of a group. And knowing that our status is somehow going to be important to our survival.

And these are three legitimate needs that we’re all born with and aware of. And just as is the case with a chimp, it’s also true with humans. That our ability to pursue those and secure those legitimate needs for ourselves. But also, to recognize those three needs as legitimate in others. It kind of determines in the context of your family, your job or in your community, how successful and healthy your life is and how successful and healthy are the lives of all the people around you. And so, I think of that very often as a framework for how I relate to other people. And how they are relating to me.

Mike: Incredible. I mean, that’s, I feel like that’s not unlike sort of what the research keeps pointing to because we’re keep finding out more and more things about apes, as time goes on, like how similar the two experiences between us are.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): I mean, where do I start the headlines and the science last year, show this over and over again, such as Bonobos and chimps, recall friends and family after years apart reported on by Malavika Vyawahare. Male dominance is not the default in primate societies reported on by Tina Deines. Great apes can be silly and playful and tease each other reported on by Spoorthy Raman, and chimps are lifelong learners according to tool use reported on by Charles Mpaka.

Mike: And it’s something that someone who’s a friend of Mongabay, Dr.Jane Goodall, her entire, career was studying the experience of these wonderful animals and how they possess this empathy between them.

Bryan: Well, there’s a book that we were involved in in publishing years ago with the Cambridge University Press. It’s called The Politics of Species. And it’s reshaping our relationships with other animals. And one of the essays in it one of the chapters is the expression of grief in monkeys, apes, and other animals. A fascinating piece by Barbara King, where she talks about chimps and gorillas whose experiences of, of grief are palpable. She talks about a male gorilla whose female companion dies, and he actually puts one of her favorite treats into her hands, which is a bunch of celery. And when she doesn’t respond, he knows that she’s dead. And once he does, he displays and holds his head and refuses food for days. In another instance, she talks about a caretaker a primatologist who’d been working with chimps at the Emory Primate Center in, in the United States under Frantz Duval who wrote the book Chimpanzee Politics that I mentioned earlier. And this woman had disappeared from her job for a time because she’d had a pregnancy and a miscarriage. And when she came back to work a female chimp with whom she interacted frequently was upset, and the chimp had learned some sign language. And so, the human, the woman, explained that she had lost her baby. And the chimp responded with a sign for tears. So, there was a presumed sense of empathy there, but that would surprise many people, doesn’t surprise me. Of course they experience grief, and of course they have long memories. And of course, they are subject to the same kind of disappointments and depression that we are. And so, these are, this is all the kind of knowledge and information that allows people to be reminded that we are part of nature. Our westernized, our industrialized lives. They disintermediate us so much from, from nature. We think we’re not part of it. We consume things that are packaged and manufactured and they don’t look like, the thing from which they were made. People don’t think about the fact that the chicken that they’re eating was once a living thing. I mean, it, it is that is the, that’s the communications challenge of conservation, is to get people to snap out of it and remember that we actually are part of nature, and we are soaking in it at all times.

It’s not just something over there on a shelf from which we can extract what we need. It’s something we actually have to steward and take care of. But more and more as people move to cities there are people who’ve, all they know is a city. They don’t really know animals outside a zoo. I could go on with this, but this work is so rich. There’s, there’s just so much we have, we have so many brilliant grantee partners doing so I’ve met many of these people, you know, people from, East and Southern Africa and from Asia the Southern United States, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean who are working on either our LGBTQ work or who are doing work conservation work. There’s so much to learn from this diverse community of people. So that when I’m in a conversation like this with you, I’m dying to bring all those people a lot to life for you. But I hope that I’ve laid the contours for people to learn even more. We have a ton of content on our site for people to explore to read about in much more detail about some of our grantees Our publications page is full of resources that we have reports that we’ve commissioned, where you can really get to know a lot more about the people whom we fund, but also the communities that they are serving where you can get a flavor for indigenous people and the way that they relate to their environments and the other species living there in the same landscapes that they do. So, I’d actually also encourage people to explore our website and all the content there because it’s a great, we’ve tried to make it a great window for people to really understand not only what we are doing and funding, but also to understand more deeply the two movements in which we are so active.

Mike: Bryan, thank you so much for joining us and I wish you all the best. It was great having you

Bryan: Thank you so much.

Mike DiGirolamo (narration): If you want to check out the work of the Arcus foundation or their five-volume book series, state of the apes, you can find links for all in the show notes of this episode. And if you’re enjoying this podcast, please leave us a review and share this podcast with your networks and your friends. You can also support us by becoming a monthly sponsor patreon.com forward/Mongabay. Mongabay is a nonprofit news outlet. So, when you pledge a dollar per month, it makes a big difference, and it helps us with all sorts of production costs and hosting fees. So, if you’re a fan of our audio reports from nature’s frontline, go to patreon.com/Mongabay to learn more and support the Mongabay Newscast. Join the listeners who have downloaded the Mongabay Newscast over half a million times by subscribing to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts from. But you can also read our news and inspiration from nature’s frontline mongabay.com or you can follow us on social media, find on LinkedIn at Mongabay News and on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky Mastodon, Facebook and TikTok where our handle is @Mongabay or on YouTube @Mongabay TV. Thank you as always for listening.