My Nonprofit Reviews

The Northern Jaguar Project represents community-driven conservation at its best and is an exemplary environmental non-profit. I am an anthropologist and filmmaker who has made several trips to the NJP reserve and surrounding communities in the Sonoran Sierra Madre over the last three years, spending extended periods of time with the organization's dedicated field staff. The reserve itself is a startling example of what wildlife conservation might look like if it were driven by multiple commitments, not only to threatened species and ecosystems but to the human communities upon which the survival and stewardship of the former unequivocally depend. I have been lucky enough to have accompanied NJP’s team on multiple weeks-long trips into the reserve and neighboring ranches participating in the pathbreaking “Viviendo Con Felinos” program and can attest to the passion and work ethic of the staff, who brave the harshest conditions in order to check the more-than 150 trail cameras used to monitor and track the area’s jaguars, ocelots, and pumas. I have also witnessed the actually profound difference—clearer and clearer with every visit—that the work of the NJP has made in the area. Enacting cultural change over the natural world is a difficult and often fraught process; as an anthropologist who has spent close to a decade studying land use and natural resource management, I can attest to this. The ethic of care that the NJP has brought to its work in Sonora, human and wild, represents a shining example of the conservation that we need so desperately, this century.