Pursuits
Kimberly Campanello

Larry Richardson is a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in Naples and president of the Board of Directors of the Naples Zoo. He has served as a wildlife expert on numerous TV and radio programs, including ABC Nightly News, National Geographic Explorer and Animal Planet. Richardson is also a photographer whose photos have appeared in publications worldwide, and a nature writer and the co-author of Florida’s Unsung Wilderness: The Swamp.

I’ve always wanted to work for Fish and Wildlife and have hands-on contact with animals. I’ve captured and tagged animals from ’gators to panthers. If things got any more exciting, I’d have to jump from a plane without a parachute. My job is never the same day-to-day—it’s a shotgun blast of anything from pulling members of the U.S. Geological Survey out of the mud to managing wildlife conservation projects.

I’m more of a broker when it comes to biology. I’ve done research, but I’m more excited about arranging works and grants and asking the big questions. Then I find people, or they find me. Recently a graduate student from Florida Gulf Coast University called me and said he wanted to do some animal behavior work. I set him up doing a remote video system project to inventory panther presence without being invasive. Basically we find a scent panthers like, put it on a post with a camera, the panther comes and rubs on the post, and we get the hair it leaves behind for DNA analysis to learn about the population.

The real difficulty in saving any species is how to translate the biological needs of the species into the needs of the community. The connection between the two is there, and I’m always working to find new ways of explaining why losing the panther would be terrible for us. I know it would, and there are plenty of biological reasons why—our livelihood depends on the same habitat the panther needs. But there is also an intrinsic connection between the environment and our well-being. Some would say it’s divine.

One of my mantras is from Edward Abbey’s book The Journey Home. He says, "Any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what he discovers." That’s exactly what I try to do in my job. Biologists know how to save a species, but to make it happen, we have to translate our scientific understanding so people can make decisions. A lot of the problem lies with scientists doing research and only sharing it with each other. Scientists aren’t the ones who really need the knowledge; the people do, and not just to know how a particular ecosystem works. They need to understand the implications of what they’ve learned and have the skill to exercise their understanding. I believe everybody should try to be a poet and a biologist, and I don’t mean formally. We all need to be caretakers, and to do so, we need to know how things work and what they mean in a larger sense.

Every garden has a path. Humans are part of this garden, and we can decide how our path will look and what kind of impact it’s going to have on the entirety. When we mess up the garden, we tend to display traits we all suffer from—arrogance, ignorance or apathy. Many of us just don’t care, or we think we know it all and we proceed no matter what. Whatever we do, however, affects something else. Everyone from a big landowner to a public official to a condo-dweller is affecting the land around them.

Unfortunately, when fish and Wildlife or the environmental community talk about our ecological predicament, it’s always after the fact, after destruction. Then I’m managing something broken. My job would be easier if things weren’t in such a state of endangerment, if we were all good managers. Instead it’s one battle after another. Trying to get the county to buy panther crossing signs or wildlife underpasses was unnecessarily difficult even though the alternative would be hastening the extinction of a species. We won, but it shouldn’t have even been a battle. With a little common sense on everyone’s part, these battles would never have to be fought.

Panthers need to be out there so we can know what fear and caution mean, not necessarily in terms of their claws and teeth, but in terms of our assumptions. We’ve never had a panther attack, but every six months, 50 people are killed by deer. Biologically, panthers exist to control the deer population.

I can tell you how to save the panther: habitat, habitat, habitat. Our own habitat is made up of the material things that protect us, including the natural environment. If we didn’t have it, we’d be in trouble. The same is true for the panther. Without habitat, it’s the end. In order to have a self-sustaining population of panthers here, we need 240 panthers, and they would require a certain amount of land to survive. Right now, we have around 100 panthers. This number will never grow without more habitat, and we’re ending up with less wild land each day. When I talk to groups as an educator, I tell them what a beautiful place we still live in despite overdevelopment. I use photography as a way to relay the message. Similarly, the Naples Zoo is a gateway. In the old days, zoos used to represent what was out there. Now they represent what we should save.

Here in Southwest Florida, we have to decide if we want this coast to go the way of Miami, or we have to decide to stop what we’re doing. For the moment, there are still enough cool things left to provide cause for hope that all of us will make the right decisions. I’ve seen the way our culture is going, using everything up. I don’t want this place to be used up.