Conservation Scientist | Whistleblower | Relentless Voice for Truth in a Broken System
I haven’t turned against conservation.
I’ve turned against what’s hollowing it out from within.
My fight didn’t begin in the field.
It began in a neighborhood built on poison.
I grew up in Western New York, just miles from Love Canal—the disaster that forced America to admit it was burying its people along with its waste. My grandfather worked at Hooker Chemical, the company that dumped 21,000 tons of toxic sludge beneath homes and schools. We rode bikes through radioactive fallout zones. My childhood playgrounds are now Superfund sites. My classmates were sick. Some never made it past childhood.
Later, I lived near LOOW (Lake Ontario Ordnance Works)—a secretive military site laced with uranium, radium, and TNT waste. Nothing was labeled. No one was warned.
And in the cotton fields of the Deep South, I saw it again—cotton, one of the most pesticide-intensive crops on earth, grown beside homes where people hung laundry to dry. The poison didn’t stay on the plants. It seeped into water, air, and bodies. It killed bees. It burned skin. It ended pregnancies.
This wasn’t accidental. It was sanctioned.
That was my first awakening to environmental injustice—where corporate power, government silence, and ecological harm collided.
But the deeper lessons came later.
For nearly a decade, I worked in South Africa researching rhino poaching and the social systems surrounding it. As a conservation scientist trained in social science, I studied the crisis from within—working alongside rangers, interviewing stakeholders, and listening to communities living at the edge of protected areas.
What I witnessed wasn’t just poaching.
It was a slow-motion collapse of trust, governance, and justice—a crisis fueled by organized crime, political collusion, global demand, and institutional silence.
The world saw horn.
I saw lives—erased, exploited, discarded.
Over two decades, I’ve worked across ecosystems—from sagebrush steppe and old-growth forests in the American West to wildlife corridors and protected areas across Southern and Eastern Africa. I’ve led ecoregional assessments, coordinated field teams, and partnered with Indigenous communities, NGOs, and international coalitions.
I’ve also traveled through key trafficking zones—including Rundu, South African ports, and the Golden Triangle—as a researcher and as a witness. I saw how markets in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand casually sold endangered species beside fruit stalls. These weren’t abstract threats. They were real, visible, and deeply entrenched in global trade routes.
I’ve investigated laboratory animal violations—primates, dogs, birds—and helped expose the conditions at Envigo, a global supplier that bred thousands of beagles for sale to research laboratories worldwide. That investigation helped shut them down.
Wherever harm hides, I follow.
And the closer I got to the core, the clearer it became:
Conservation isn’t just failing. It’s being undermined—from the inside.
I’ve seen endangered species disappear from reports to protect development deals.
I’ve seen top scientists abandon their findings under pressure from funders, politicians, and internal leadership.
I’ve seen conservation organizations bury data, sideline field voices, and trade truth for optics.
This isn’t just a broken system.
It’s a rigged one.
That’s why I built this platform.
Not to destroy conservation—but to defend what it was meant to be.
To publish what peer review can’t.
To expose what press releases omit.
To say what others won’t—because they’re not allowed to.
I still work in this field.
But I don’t owe it my obedience.
I owe it my fire.
If you’re done with stage-managed progress, redacted truths, and conservation that plays nice with power—
If you believe we can’t protect what we’re not allowed to name—
Then welcome to Dangerous Ground.