Conservation has always been near our hearts.
From my earliest memory, I was around the woods, and waters . . . but I was also around a conservationist working for a state agency. Supper table discussions over sludge, or wastewater management, or estuary programs, or environmental lands, these were as frequent as conversations about turkey hunts and catching bluegills.
As I grew up, something about our wild places always nagged at my heart. Not that I wanted to be outdoors, but that I NEEDED to be outdoors. Fishing, hunting, hiking, camping . . . breathing.
In the past decade, my wife and I have shifted a huge part of our lives towards the idea of conservation – managing wildlife and wild places for their proper use . . . To somehow balance the propensity for growth in our state with a stewardship to ensure that wild Florida exists in the way we’ve always experienced it.
All Florida is the culmination of these efforts . . . Unless we can look at our state through a broader lens, we will continue to falter on the conservation front.
This organization is many people and things – it’s doctors and welders and ranchers and hunters and environmentalists and stargazers and teachers . . . It’s an effort to keep our balance, to keep wild things and places in the forefront of conversations.
We are not all of Florida.
But we are All Florida.
-Travis Thompson