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Few people have experienced nature quite as intimately as Jeremy Pryor, the Conservancy’s field representative for the Lower Brazos River. His home in San Leon, a small town on Galveston Bay, was on the front lines of Hurricane Ike, and he was left homeless for four months as he tried to keep the project running while searching for a new place to live.
Eventually he moved to a farmhouse not far from the banks of the Brazos River, where he opened a new field office. From his new porch, he’s a spectator to some of nature’s best winged creatures. More than 200 million migratory birds pass through the area every year as they fan out through North America, making it one of the most important migratory bird habitats in the country.
“The Conservancy has been interested in this area for many years,” he said. “My office represents the first formal presence in the bottomland. It’s been a priority for a long time, it just took time to get someone down here.”
He received his BA in anthropology at Baylor University, where he studied the historical significance and modern value of petroglyph sites in Northeast Utah with the Shoshone people, an experience he credits with cultivating his conservation ethic. He later joined a consulting firm, where he worked on Superfund remediation, tribal environmental issues, and natural resource management for the Army.
He returned to Baylor for an MBA with a focus on the global relationship between economics and the environment.
“Once I found The Nature Conservancy, it was immediately clear how I could use my background in a career for the service of others!” he says.
Pryor first joined the Conservancy as a seasonal fire crew member, with the idea of learning how to manage prescribed burns while laying a foundation for advancing within the organization. He moved into his current position as the Lower Brazos River field representative in February of 2008. Now, his focus is on conserving the Brazos River and the Columbia Bottomlands habitat it supports.
The biggest threat to this area, he says, is the development sprawling out from urban areas. To the south and west, it is the ‘status-quo’ of incompatible land-use, which degrades ecosystems and opens the door for destructive invasive species.
In the future, Jeremy looks forward to pursuing the first carbon-financed conservation project in the Texas chapter, a reforestation project along the lower Brazos River.
He’s traveled widely through his life, throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe as well as in more exotic locales—Nepal, Bali, Thailand and Peru.
“I believe travel is as important as formal education,” he says. “You can travel to the other side of the globe in a day, and it makes you realize, the world’s not that big a place. As much as we like to think we’re in our own little world, we can’t get away from the interconnectedness of everything. We truly are one global village.”
Nature picture credits: Photo © Clay Carrington (Jeremy Pryor)
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