To dive into my report, “Review of Seven Mammalian Species for Potential Reintroduction to Point Reyes National Seashore”, please click here.
I started my internship with Turtle Island Restoration Network in the summer of 2025 as an Environmental Advocacy Intern. It was my first time working on a role like this but I was excited and grateful for the opportunity to do work for this organization that fights against climate change, advocates for our oceans and land, and does real hands-on work like the SPAWN program. I’m not a current student, or really a recent graduate, and have been working full time for a while now so I appreciated being able to expand my horizons and work on a project like this, something I wouldn’t normally be able to do.
This particular internship was a new venture by the Executive Director Ken Bouley, and marked the beginning of a new “department” within TIRN, the Resistance Office, which aims “To expand, focus, and optimize our advocacy and litigation activities regarding the environmentally regressive agenda of the current administration”. I worked directly with Ken for the duration of this project which admittedly I did not expect, after all as the executive director of TIRN he has a lot on his plate, and supervising and guiding interns – seemed to me at least – like it would be low on his priority list. The opposite was in fact true, Ken always had time for interns, scheduling one on one meetings with us, reviewing our work and finding mentors and experts in the fields we were studying and researching to match us up with – it seems like Ken knows everyone in the Marin County Environmental space! So, if you’re looking for an internship that you can work at your own pace, but still have plenty of support and resources I can’t recommend this enough!
The goal of the internship was for each intern to have at least one main focus of research and produce a project or report at the end of the internship that would be published on the website and could be used for future advocacy work at TIRN. We also had the opportunity to write blog posts for the website as well as write public comments on behalf of TIRN regarding various proposed environmental law and regulation changes. At first picking a main focus was daunting, we had the freedom to choose anything we wanted and were interested in that fit in with the mission of TIRN – which is a lot! Thankfully there was a list of suggested topics, to give us some ideas and help us get an idea of what kind of project we might want to work on. It did take me a couple of weeks to pick a topic, in the end I combined a few of the suggested topics and together with Ken we came up with the idea of doing a restoration palette / comparison for Point Reyes National Seashore – the area where TIRN is actually located.
Since the project was self paced and we were creating it as we went along, the scope, goals and methodologies of the project changed a lot with time. Being my own project manager I had to reign in some of my ideas to make the project more feasible with my skills and timeline – and we had a lot of ideas along the way! Some we decided to add to the project and alter the course of it slightly, others – while we felt they would add value – deemed too ambitious for the timeframe we had. It seemed however with almost every weekly meeting we were tweaking the project. I enjoyed the dynamic flow of the project, without strict guidelines I was able to explore aspects of the project I felt were interesting and worthwhile, and change direction when I felt I hit a dead end or if something wasn’t working like we wanted it to.
All in all, I am very grateful for this opportunity and this experience has been truly eye opening. The amount of work and research that goes into environmental advocacy work is a lot. My project was more abstract, not a direct call to action, but more of a call to consider what could be. My project feels optimistic in a time where environmental regulations are being slashed and funding for environmental projects and even national parks is in decline. I hope my project inspires discussions on the reintroduction of species to Point Reyes, but also opens up a dialogue about species reintroductions in other state and national parks, and how various species can enrich and enhance these spaces.
I do have to admit that I have not visited Point Reyes yet! I’ve studied it enough that I feel like I know it, but a visit in the future is definitely in the cards. To conclude I’ll finish with a weird piece of history I learned during my research: in the 1940s in an attempt to relocate some beavers to certain areas in Idaho, they loaded beavers into wooden crates and parachuted them down! The crates opened automatically upon landing but this is definitely not the method we would recommend to bring beavers back to Point Reyes!
