Part I: The Monarch Moment

In Fall of 2002, during Second Grade, my Teacher started a lesson plan called “The Life Cycle of the Monarch Butterfly”. This was a common lesson plan for all learners in New Jersey and it remains so to this day. Our task as students was to monitor the changing stages of the Monarch Butterfly’s life cycle. As I watched that egg turn into a caterpillar, a chrysalis, and then into an adult Monarch Butterfly, something ignited in me.

The moment that I watched those Monarch Butterflies fly away upon our class release solidified my path as an individual who wonders about the world.

As the Monarchs flew away, high in the sky, they represented a sense of freedom and hope to me. Perhaps, even more so, they represented the truth that nature brings. Monarchs are energetic, unafraid, and ready for their journey- fitting for an orange-colored creature. If I reflect on this Monarch Moment, I recognize that, even at a young age, I had such a profound spiritual understanding of the intrinsic value of living things and the complexities of the global network of life. From this moment on, it wasn’t just that I enjoyed nature topics, I began to uncover a devout connection to the world around me. This is the foundation of my child self.

Every year, I wait for the natural promise of the Monarchs’ return. The Monarch Moment is a nostalgic reminder of where it all began and a symbol of the guidance of my inner spirit.

Part II: The Voice of the Woods

In January 2020, I was feeling very hopeful. I had just graduated with my Master’s Degree and I was starting my first teaching position at a four-year University.

I have always been bright and happy- blessed with good spirits and positive energy. Confident, ambitious, and motivated, I moved through the world looking to continually add good.

My personal life came crashing down in 2020, with major familial struggles emerging. My youngest sister would make decisions that put her into situations that still haunt me today. My family disbanded to deal with the crisis at hand. I spent much of 2020 alone in my childhood home- a type of alone that I have never, ever known. This, along with the societal ramifications of COVID, destroyed my mind in ways that were completely foreign.

I suffered greatly from mental health disorders for most of that year and the next. It felt like failure. I felt frustrated at my inability to continue working and living at the level that I am accustomed. I had no idea how to deal with how I felt or how to cope. I could not accept this degradation of my mind and I certainly could not understand it. The more I fought it, the worse it was. Eventually, I was required to submit and learn the lessons that were necessary. In what felt like a blur of daily irrationality, or maybe insanity, I searched for my inner spirit and the memories of joy that I knew she would bring.

My search brought me to a place that I frequented many times over my childhood, a County Park within the borders of our hometown, Mahlon Dickerson Reservation. I had only been back to this place a handful of times as an adult. I started to visit the reservation consistently, walking miles and miles a day. Walking to run, walking to hide, walking to find something that I knew was there. I felt called to this place and so I went.

As the days, weeks, and months passed, things changed. I continued to go back to Mahlon Dickerson, walking around and sitting in specific special places by the water’s edge and among the trees. I slowed in this place and, without knowing it, I began to heal, observe, and know. I started to see the woods as a place of comfort and, ultimately, as a friend. I visited my woods on cold winter mornings and hot summer nights. In the sun, in the fog, in the rain, in the snow. At sunrise and sunset.

I spent many hours in those woods. In this place, I began to realize my passions once more. My mind was completely cleared here, leaving only my most authentic, creative visions. Ideas flowed without effort and without asking. This place is the place where I envisioned a wild New Jersey. This is where I was compelled to build the vision of what Rewild NJ would become. The Voice of the Woods gave me back purpose that represented the deepest parts of my inner spirit. It was this place that I evolved. Rewilding is at heart about healing. Healing nature and healing ourselves. In nature, we are coming out of the everyday and going into the essential- finding transformational awareness and reflection.

In September of 2025, I attended a Women and Their Woods Retreat hosted by Ridge & Valley Conservancy. We were asked to discuss the connections we have to “our woods” or the “woods that we steward”. I shared my story of Mahlon Dickerson in brief. I said that the woods “guided me to build Rewild NJ”. I concluded by stating “the woods gave me back what I needed.” Our host, Susi Tilley, Executive Director of RVC, stated back to me “perhaps the woods told you what they needed too.”

Part III: The Telephone Pole

In 2022, I was on my regular walk outside my suburban apartment in South Jersey. I had just begun my PhD program with Prescott College.

I noticed a large lawn space owned by the bank next door to my apartment. There were telephone poles lining the street on this lawn. While the lawn space surrounding the poles was freshly mowed, small diameters around the telephone poles, where the mower couldn’t reach, were thriving with life.

The telephone pole habitats, as I called them, were islands of biodiversity fighting for a right to life- a metaphor for the broken, fragmented habitats scattered throughout New Jersey.

My Geography brain kicked in. I thought on a temporal scale outward from that telephone pole habitat to my neighborhood, Town, County, and State. The land of New Jersey is nothing more than a giant puzzle made up of zoned land pieces. If you focus in on all the local pieces of that puzzle, what a difference we could make for environmental health if every one of those spaces fostered nature instead of diminishing it. We could build a tapestry of wilded spaces over a highly developed landscape.

The Telephone Pole Habitats helped me to see the significance of conservation rewilding- scalable efforts the restoration of biodiversity and the enhancement of habitat connectivity that brings nature to its fullest potential.

Part IV: The Advice of Adelaide

My grandmother’s name was Adelaide Beatrice. From Italy, she emigrated to the United States in the 1940s at the age of 20 on one of the last Trans-Atlantic voyages to Ellis Island.

My grandmother knew how to do everything. She knew how to garden, how to forge life, how to identity plants and animals. How to grow her own food, how to cook, how to preserve food. How to sew and make clothes, how to reuse, renew, and recycle items. How to speak her native language, how to practice spirituality in Christianity and beyond, how to practice herbalism, how to do rituals of the old world, how to heal us. How to connect with other people, how to host, how to forge community, how to share and barter.

My grandmother was a symbol of ancestry, the power of old world, and a representation of real sustainability. Since 1950, modernity has bred safety, convenience, and comfort. This has changed our purpose, how we control our own resources, where our knowledge lies, and our overall resiliency and self-sufficiency. My grandmother grew up in a harsher world but, at the end of her days, she was freer than I am now. She was not dependent on the amenities of modern society, she was independent. If you are awake in this world, you know that you feel like a cog in the machine, unable to break free from what is provided for us, from the control all around us. As we look to a future that is increasingly globalized and technological, we must focus the sovereignty that can be found in our humanity. If we maintain the connection to our ancestors and continue to preserve generational knowledge, we can harness power for ourselves that is much needed in our modern world. The Advice of Adeliade helped me to see the significance of human rewilding.

While I learned many things from my grandmother, I have come to starkly realize that I did not learn enough. Where was I? I can tell you where I was. I was at the mall on my iPhone buying things that I didn’t need with my friends. She always told me that one day I would see- it wasn’t until her passing in 2018 that I did. She tried to teach me more all those years but I was distracted, taken away, by modernity. I was being told that it was important for me to do xy and z but what was really important was safeguarding the generational knowledge of my grandmother. I now know that I am exponentially less sovereign than she was. Where does that leave me? It leaves me feeling disempowered. It leaves me feeling tricked. It leaves me feeling stupid. It leaves me feeling controlled. It leaves me having to learn all the things that she left behind.

Part V: A Land of Loss

One fall afternoon, as a teenager, I was in the passenger seat as my father drove us home from the grocery store. My childhood home is in the Highlands Region of New Jersey on Berkshire Valley Rd. in Jefferson Twp. Geographically surrounded by the Berkshire Valley Wildlife Management Area, Rockaway River Wildlife Management Area, and the Mahlon Dickerson County Reservation, I spent my entire life surrounded by the abundance of protected areas.

Driving down Berkshire Valley Rd., on that day and all others, I watched the density of trees and ferns swishing by my vision as the cool breeze brushed my face. My father said, “You know in the 1990s all these woods were set to be developed.” I turned my head in disbelief although his statement wasn’t very shocking at all. My father continued with his impromptu share. He went on to say “Christine Whitman, the former Governor, used her political power to stop the development here by making this land protected.” I could not imagine the land leading up to our home being developed. The loss of the forest, the wildlife, not to mention the reduced air, water, and living quality from higher density homes and traffic was inconceivable to me. 

While we were blessed Highlands residents, living amongst safeguarded nature, growing up in New Jersey meant the curse of unending grief from witnessing lands lost to development. We are much more linked than we realize to the geographic locations that we call home. The lands that we call “home” tell the story of who we come to be. I have always recognized the nature of New Jersey as a living, breathing part of my life- as if it were another guardian shaping and molding me.

New Jersey is a land plagued by change. Our land has been used for the expansion of industry, agriculture, transportation, and urbanization. These historical conditions shape our daily lives and dominate our relationship with our local communities and environments. Bit by bit, our land is utilized for activities deemed more important than the health and wellbeing of our citizens, the value of our nature, and resources that our local environments provide. New Jerseyans bare a collective fear that, one day soon, all of our land will be taken from us. This is a fear not hollow. The heartache of living in a Land of Loss motives me deeply- I would say this motivation is akin to vengeance. I see this motive in all of the environmental professionals that I interact with.

To learn more about Fran, visit About the Founder.

Get stories from the Founder’s Blog! Get notified for every new post. Subscribe Today!

Part VI: For Wild New Jersey

After several years of study, I now see what the rewilding world can bring to myself and the people of New Jersey. Rewilding is hopeful, revolutionary, adaptive, and common sense. It is a discipline grounded in the ancient truth of nature.

After decades of addressing global environmental problems with macro solutions, rewilding for communities has emerged due to a need to completely reimagine environmentalism by focusing power and change back on the micro, local level.

As of 2025, I have finally authored by definition of Community Rewilding.

“An approach that re-establishes the connection between local environments and the people who live there. Community Rewilding counterbalances modern challenges through citizen-led scalable rewilding efforts that support nature and people in homes, schools, churches, parks, and more. Community Rewilding focuses change locally- in the power of local people, benefiting local environments, and maximizing local resources. The product of combing Conservation Rewilding and Human Rewilding, Community Rewilding in practice works to Rewild Land, restore nature, and Rewild Self, transform people, creating a physical, social, and spiritual change in our daily lives.”

New Jersey is the perfect place for Community Rewilding because its land and people are most at risk for losing the spirit that makes it wild. There is no one better to Rewild New Jersey than the people of New Jersey. I seek to connect with people who understand the duality of wanting for a wilder, more authentic way of life while facing the modern entanglements that we experience every day. I seek a wild New Jersey.