The Burrow Nature Center (BNC) was founded in 2024 to promote ecological restoration in Southeast Mississippi’s Pine Belt, a biodiversity hotspot home to vulnerable and endangered species and habitats, including the gopher tortoise and longleaf pine ecosystem. Heavy logging in the early 20th century ravaged the land and decimated the region’s virgin pine forests, leaving racially diverse Lumberton and surrounding communities economically depressed to this day. Now, climate change threatens increasingly severe hurricanes, tornadoes, water pollution, heat-related diseases, and pine beetle infestations. BNC’s immersive environmental education programs include forest schools, youth job skills training in sustainable land management and climate resilience, and adult programs in land stewardship, homesteading, natural building, and mental health. By creating sanctuaries for learning and healing, BNC strengthens Gulf communities and inspires regenerative relationships with the natural world.
Prescribed burns in the Pine Belt help restore diverse ground cover, providing grasses and wildflowers for tortoises and other grazers. Photo: All You Need Institute
Founder Jordan Bantuelle manages BNC as a full-time volunteer with the support of four board members and other occasional community volunteers. BNC grew out of the All You Need Institute, a nature-based learning center on ancestral Chahta (Choctaw) land in the heart of the Gulf South. Mississippi’s longleaf pine ecosystem and its diverse understory were traditionally maintained and managed by fire, bison, and cattle herds. BNC is working to reintroduce pastoral and sustainable farming systems that return nutrients to the soil and increase biodiversity. They also teach prescribed burning, forestry thinning, invasive species management, replanting, and other land management skills along with beekeeping, mushroom growing, and ecologically sound agroforestry skills like sawmilling. “This land and its people were exploited for profit and left in disrepair,” Bantuelle said. “We’re working to restore local ecosystems while providing for our basic needs and building community.”
The gopher tortoise, native to the southeastern U.S., is categorized as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Photo: All You Need Institute