Forest Educator with Ricardo Sierra | A Podcast for Revolutionary Conversations about Nature-Based Education · Ricardo Sierra

Lessons from Bears and Jaguars with John Stokes (Part Two)

·49 min·3 clips

He dreams of a jaguar touching his forehead before Brazil work begins.

1. Forest Educator with Ricardo Sierra features John Stokes talking about 'Lessons from Bears and Jaguars' and the practice of tracking as a way to see nature. 2. Ricardo Sierra hosts the conversation, and John Stokes speaks as a tracker and educator whose Brazil work and Tom Brown lineage shape the discussion. 3. The episode asks what happens when tracking becomes a daily way of seeing, teaching, and living rather than a single outdoor skill. 4. John explains the anatomy lesson of cones and rods, then says tracking uses the eyes in '30 different ways' to read a landscape. 5. He describes a porcupine on his driveway, then a test with Peter Blue Cloud and Ray Fadden where he identified a porcupine by its path in a pine forest. 6. He says the layers of tracking include spotting tracks, identifying marks, and reading weather and landscape. 7. Tom Brown's warning not to track lost children or escape criminals pushes John toward education and the Tracking Project. 8. John says he sees animals from airplanes, including a coyote running on a runway, and treats that as part of his work. 9. He describes Brazil as both a new ecosystem and a place where animals like rabbits, skunks, otters, deer, cats, mountain lions, and jaguars still connect to his backyard experience. 10. A mountain lion hunter's discovery of a jaguar around 1996 near the Arizona border and Mexico leads into the 'eyes of fire' story and the effort to protect livestock losses. 11. A dream about two kittens and a jaguar becomes central to John's sense of Brazil and his later work there. 12. Bento Viana brings the Tracking Project to Brazil, and the group chooses a jaguar track whose heel pad resembles the map of Brazil as the logo. 13. In Brazil, John teaches a class of 30 to 35 children at a posada where animals move freely along the trail and a young guide named Benedito knows the land intimately. 14. John holds a 17-foot sucuri after Benedito pulls it from the water by the tail, and the children react with fear while the adults watch closely. 15. Benedito later tells the group they were not listening around them and reminds them that 'Brazil is not a petting zoo.' 16. John follows a mama jaguar teaching two kittens to hunt, hears her roar, and then hears the guide confirm the family group and the danger nearby. 17. Ricardo Sierra and John discuss dream circles, where children and adults often dream of an animal before later finding fresh tracks and signs in camp. 18. John says the same pattern appears with teaching, and he quotes Thomas Carlyle's line that 'the tragedy in life is not what men suffer, but what they miss.' 19. The tone is conversational, reflective, and instructional, with long personal stories, field examples, and repeated back-and-forth between host and guest. 20. People interested in nature education, tracking, and indigenous-informed teaching will get the most from it, while listeners wanting a tight, fast-moving story may skip it.

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