Mountain & Prairie Podcast

Francesca Claverie is the Native Plant Program Manager at the Borderlands Restoration Network. Based in the southern Arizona town of Patagonia, the Borderlands Restoration Network’s mission is “to grow a restorative economy by rebuilding healthy ecosystems, restoring habitat for plants and wildlife, and reconnecting our border communities to the land through shared learning.” Through binational partnerships and community-led innovation, Francesca and her team are making progress toward solving many border-specific conservation challenges– challenges that are often not very well known to those of us living far from the border. - We could easily spend five or six hours discussing Francesca’s various conservation projects, but for this hour-long conversation, we zoned in one particularly innovative project that spans the US-Mexico border called "Bacanora for Bats: Binational Conservation and Sustainable Agave Spirits." The project is focused on conserving agave plants– plants that are a critical food source for