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 even 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 a person who wonders about the world.

As the Monarchs flew away high in the sky they represented a sense of wonder, freedom, and hope to me. This is the foundation of my inner child and my wild spirit. 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 life. What’s more, I somehow understood that the Monarch’s journey represented much grander innerworkings and complexities of the global network of life.

From this moment on, it wasn’t just that I liked nature topics, I began to uncover a devout connection to the world around me.

Every year, I wait for the natural promise of the Monarchs’ return. The Monarchs are a nostalgic reminder of where it all began and a symbol of the guidance of our inner child and wild spirit.

Part II: The Voice of the Woods

In January 2020, I felt very hopeful. I had just graduated with my Masters and was starting my first teaching position at a four-year University.

I have always been bright and happy- blessed with good spirits and a supportive family. Confident, ambitious, motivated, I moved through the world looking to continually build and achieve. I struggled to accept failure, hardly asked for help, and, sometimes, pride got the best of me. These weaknesses would become my undoing.

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. 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. 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. 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. In what felt like a blur of daily irrationality, or maybe insanity, I searched for my inner child and the memories of joy that I knew she would bring.

My search brought me to a place that I frequented many times with my parents, a County Park within the borders of our town, Mahlon Dickerson Reservation. I had only been back a handful of times as an adult. I started to walk, miles and miles a day. Walking to run, walking to hide, walking to find something that I knew was there.

As the days, weeks, and months passed things changed. Life went on and my wounds slowly healed. I continued to go back to Mahlon Dickerson, walking around and sitting in specific special places by the water and among the trees. I slowed in this place, without knowing it, and because of that slowness, I began to 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 fog, in the rain, in the snow. At sunrise and sunset.

I sat for many hours in those woods beside the pond on a large flat rock. In this place all the daily baggage in my mind was completely cleared, leaving only my most authentic, creative visions. Ideas flowed here without effort and without asking. This place is the place where I envisioned a wild New Jersey. This is where I was compelled to write and build what Rewild NJ would become.

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”. I told my story of Mahlon Dickerson and how 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.”

Part III: The Telephone Pole

One day, I was on a walk outside my suburban apartment. I noticed a telephone pole. The lawn space surrounding the telephone pole was mowed, however, the small diameter around the telephone pole, where the mower couldn’t reach, was thriving with life. The telephone pole habitat, as I called it, was an island 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. I thought, the land of New Jersey is just a giant puzzle made up of controlled, zoned, and planned land pieces. If you focus in on all the local pieces of that puzzle, what a difference we could make for environmental health and function if every one of those spaces fostered nature instead of diminishing it. We could take control by building a tapestry of wilded spaces over a highly developed landscape.

The Telephone Pole Habitat helped me to see the very early vision for Rewild NJ- focused on habitat connectivity, scalable conservation rewilding, and community organizing that could work to restore biodiversity to its full, functional 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, taking one of the last Trans-Atlantic voyages to Ellis Island.

My grandmother knew how to do everything. She knew ecology and how to forge life, 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. She knew how to speak her native language, how to practice herbalism and rituals of the old world. She was a capsule of valuable information- a true representation of real, authentic sustainability.

While I learned many things from my grandmother, over my study of rewilding, 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 Blackberry 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. I now know that I am exponentially less sovereign than my grandmother was. Where does that leave me? Disempowered- I would argue.

The generational relationship with my grandmother is a metaphor for our loss of independence in the modern world.

Part VI: The Garden State Without Gardens

Our origin stories almost always begin with a description of where we are from. The place we call home is defined by the spiritual roots we grow- roots that are fed by the flowing waters of remembrance. We are much more linked to the geographic locations that make up our lives than we may realize. The lands that we call “home” tell the story of who we come to be.

Geography is a discipline of physical, human, spatial, and environmental intersections. A life spent studying Geography has led me to be a professional systems thinker. I seek to understanding the interlinking parts of our world. Everything happens for a reason, everything exists for a reason, and knowing those reasons can empower us to make smarter, more informed decisions about our future.

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. A collective fear for all New Jerseyans is that, one day soon, all of our land will be taken from us. This is a fear not hollow.

I was born and grew up in the Highland Region of New Jersey. Blessed with a life in the outdoors, 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.

Community Rewilding, a nature-first, back to basics provides us with natural solutions for modern problems and empowers us to reach the change that we seek. This is not a cause- it is a physical, social, and spiritual transformation in our daily lives. Community Rewilding will provide us with what we seek.

Community Rewilding is the nexus between Conservation Rewilding and Human Rewilding. This is a revolutionary act that addresses modern complexity by building back sovereignty. After decades of addressing global environmental problems with macro, global solutions, Community Rewilding has emerged to focus power and change on the micro, local level.

This discipline works to redefine environmentalism because it links the restoration of local environments to the sovereignty of people.

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. New Jersey is a special place for people and nature and should not be treated as anything less. It is time that we revamp our view of the Garden State and redefine how the world looks at New Jersey. The more people believe that something is special, the more motivated they are to treat it like it is. Community by community the citizens of New Jersey will create the example of successful statewide community rewilding for the nation and for the world.