Who we are

The Bring Catamounts Home campaign is a project of Mighty Earth working to restore catamounts to their historical range throughout the Northeast, United States. We’re pursuing this vision in close partnership with local communities and conservation organizations throughout the region.

Meet our Campaign Director

Renee Seacor leads the Bring Catamounts Home campaign on the ground in Vermont, an initiative working to restore mountain lions to the forests of the Northeast. A wildlife advocate and policy specialist trained in ecology and environmental law, Renee works at the intersection of science, storytelling, and community engagement to build the public and political will to bring back one of the region’s most iconic native species. Throughout her career, she has advanced coexistence between people and wildlife and is passionate about rewilding landscapes to create healthier, more resilient ecosystems for all.

Meet our Rewilding Advisory Committee

Mark Burget serves as Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Re:wild, where he oversees the organization’s work in North America, supports global teams, and helps strengthen relationships with global conservation philanthropists.
For 25 years, Mark served The Nature Conservancy, including as Chief Conservation Programs Officer, North America Managing Director, California Director and Colorado Director. Mark also served as President and Chief Operating Officer of the ClimateWorks Foundation, a $1B+ global philanthropic network focused on energy and land use policy.
Mark earned both his J.D. and M.B.A. from the University of Virginia and his B.A. in Government from Dartmouth College. Mark has served on numerous boards, most recently including the E.O Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, the Energy Foundation (U.S. and China) and Allotrope Partners, LLC. He also has served on the boards of the European Climate Foundation, the International Council on Clean Transportation, the Climate and Land Use Alliance, the Institute for Industrial Productivity, and Bio-Logical Capital, LLC. In addition to his role at Re:wild, Mark is the Managing Partner of Tumalo Creek Partners, LLC, a mission-driven partnership dedicated to supporting the future of life.

A lifelong advocate for wildlife, Beth Pratt has worked in environmental leadership roles for over thirty years, and in two of the country’s largest national parks: Yosemite and Yellowstone. As the California Regional Executive Director for the National Wildlife Federation, Pratt leads the #SaveLACougars campaign to build the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which broke ground on Earth Day in 2022. The largest wildlife crossing of its kind in the world, it will help save a population of mountain lions from extinction. Her innovative conservation work has been featured by The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BBC World Service, CNN, CBS This Morning, the Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, The Guardian, NPR, AP News, and more.
Her books include When Mountain Lions are Neighbors, published by Heyday Books, and I Heart Wildlife: A Guided Activity Journal for Connecting With the Wild World, by Di Angelo Publications. Her new book, Yosemite Wildlife: The Wonder of Animal Life in California’s Sierra Nevada, will be published by the Yosemite Conservancy in 2025. Beth has also given a TEDx talk about coexisting with wildlife called, “How a Lonely Cougar in Los Angeles Inspired the World,” is featured in the documentary, “The Cat that Changed America,” on CNN’s Heroes in Conservation series, on PBS Nature’s Wild Hope Series, and the new reboot of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.
Beth obtained a BS/BA from the University of Massachusetts, an MBA from Regis University, earned the LEED AP credential, and trained with Vice President Al Gore as part of his Climate Reality Leadership Corps. In 2007, she traveled to Japan as part of a month-long Rotary International Professional Exchange to study business and national park operations. Beth also served as a founding board member and the board chair for the nonprofit Outdoor Afro for eight years. The Western Section of the Wildlife Society named her “Conservationist of the Year” in 2023, and in 2024, she received the Alan Rabinowitz Conservation award from the Explorers Club.
In 2023, Beth founded The Wildlife Crossing Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating the building of wildlife crossings and connectivity infrastructure across California, the United States, and the world to reconnect lands for our collective future.
Beth spends much of her time in Los Angeles, but makes her home outside of Yosemite, “my north star,” with her six dogs, two cats, and the mountain lions, bears, foxes, frogs, and other wildlife who frequent her backyard.

Clay Rockefeller is a real estate and community developer. Over the past decade, he has also been investing in green technology startups, with a particular emphasis on advancing the energy transition. Driven by a deep passion for the planet and its inhabitants, Clay dedicates his volunteer efforts and philanthropy to fostering a more compassionate, just, creative, and healthy ecosystem for all. Clay is currently the chair of the David Rockefeller Fund, sits the board of the River Valley Arts Collective, and has long standing relationships with several Rhode Island based non-profits including The Steel Yard (an industrial arts nonprofit that he cofounded in 2001) and Farm Fresh Rhode Island (a food hub dedicated to strengthening local food systems).

Ben Goldsmith has been a pioneer in the field of sustainable investment, having founded and built two green investment businesses, WHEB Asset Management and Menhaden Plc.
Ben has also been a longstanding advocate for nature restoration and rewilding, particularly in Britain and Europe. Ben founded and chaired for more than a decade the UK Conservative Environment Network; he co-founded the UK Environmental Funders’ Network, and was a non-executive director of the UK Government Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for five years.
Recently, Ben has co-founded Nattergal, a new natural capital venture which aims to rewild landscapes (and seascapes) at scale.

Dick Raines lives in rural Virginia with his wife Nancy and two dogs, Bailey and Simon. He has 3 sons, Nate, Drew, and Chase. He recently retired from Carfax where he was CEO for 30 years.
During his tenure Carfax grew from 6 employees to over 1,500 and became a nationally recognized brand helping consumers with trusted information about used cars. Carfax regularly won awards as a “best place to work”.
Dick has been active in environmental conservation organizations. He was board chair of The Potomac Conservancy. He served on the boards of the American Bird Conservancy and NatureServe. He is currently on the board of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters and the advisory board of The Finger Lakes Land Trust.

Kristine Tompkins is the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation, an American conservationist, and former CEO of Patagonia, Inc. For three decades, she has committed to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity by creating national parks, restoring wildlife, inspiring activism, and fostering economic vitality as a result of conservation.
Kristine and her late husband Douglas Tompkins have protected over 15 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina through Tompkins Conservation and its partners, making them among the most successful national park-oriented philanthropists in history.
Through Tompkins Conservation and its offspring organizations, Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile, she has helped to create or expand 15 national parks in Argentina and Chile, including two marine national parks, and works to bring back over two dozen species that have gone locally or nationally extinct, such as the jaguar, red-and-green macaw, and giant river otters in Northeast Argentina, and Darwin’s rheas and extremely endangered huemul deer in Chile.
Kristine served as Patron for Protected Areas for the UN Environmental Programme from 2018-2022. The recipient of numerous honors, she was the first conservationist to be awarded the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and has given two TED talks.

Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan is a Franco-American entrepreneur, philanthropist, environmentalist, and art collector. He is the Chairman of precious metals-focused asset management firm The Electrum Group; past President and Chairman of the 92nd Street Y, Manhattan’s premier cultural and community center; Founder and former Executive Chairman of Panthera, the global leader in big cat conservation; Founder of The Leiden Collection, the world’s largest private collection of Rembrandt and Dutch Golden Age art; and past Chairman of the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (ALIPH), a multilateral organization led by France, the United Arab Emirates, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Dr. Kaplan stands among the world’s foremost advocates of wildlife conservation. Along with the late Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, he founded Panthera in 2006 to protect and preserve big cats and their ecosystems from extinction — an enterprise that now encompasses over a hundred partnerships in forty countries. In 2009, the Kaplans endowed the Recanati-Kaplan Center at Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), creating the preeminent university-based center for felid conservation, and the Postgraduate Diploma in International Wildlife Conservation Practice to train young conservationists from developing countries. In 2014, Dr. Kaplan launched the Global Alliance for Wild Cats, an international coalition of the world’s leading environmental philanthropists, together with the then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, H.H. Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and other committed Chinese and Indian donors. In 2019, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia officially joined the Global Alliance. Dr. Kaplan is also the Founder and Chairman of The Orianne Society, a U.S.-based environmental organization protecting imperiled reptiles and amphibians, and of the Indian Ocean Tortoise Alliance (IOTA), a Seychelles-based NGO dedicated to the preservation of Aldabra giant tortoises and island ecosystems.
Dr. Kaplan earned his Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Among other distinctions, for services to France, he was appointed Chevalier (2012) — and subsequently promoted to Officier (2020) — in the National Order of the Legion of Honor, as well as Commandeur in the Order of Arts and Letters (2017). In 2018, he was awarded the rank of Officier in the Order of Orange-Nassau for his efforts in disseminating Dutch culture and building bridges between people through art.

Rick Ridder is President and Co-Founder of RBI Strategies and Research. A former presidential campaign manager and a senior consultant for six other presidential campaigns, Rick has consulted for numerous U.S. Congressional, gubernatorial, and state and local initiative campaigns. Internationally, he has worked in over 23 nations including the successful campaigns of eight heads of state.
For his work in electoral reform, Rick was recognized with the “Award of Achievement” from the Gleitsman Foundation for “commitment and leadership initiating social change,” and the IAPC’s Founders Lifetime Achievement Award for “contributing to the robust debate of world issues, civil discourse, and the sharing of knowledge of the democratic political process.”
He has written for numerous publications in the US and abroad, and has appeared on “The Daily Show,” all major US networks, and numerous foreign broadcast networks. His book, Looking for Votes in All the Wrong Places, received top honors for “Humor” and “Politics” from the Colorado Independent Publishers Book Association.
He is a former member of the Metropolitan Denver Baseball Commission and is a current member of the Colorado Transportation Commission.
He holds a B.A. from Middlebury College, a M.S. from Boston University, and was a Special Student at Harvard Law School. He lives in Oak Creek, Colorado with his wife and business partner, Joannie Braden.

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