TYGER, TYGER, BURNING BRIGHT 💎

I went looking for some good news again this morning.

I found a tiger.

Her name is Umit. It means HOPE.

On 31 July 2026, Kazakhstan released her into the wild beside Lake Balkhash, where tigers had disappeared more than 70 years ago.

And this wasn’t somebody just opening a cage and hoping for the best.

For more than a decade, people have been preparing the land. They created a protected nature reserve, restored habitat and water systems, brought back kulan, deer and wild boar, and worked to rebuild the prey base a tiger would actually need.

They also trained people to track the animals and deal with encounters between tigers and humans.

Then finally they brought in Umit, a wild Amur tiger from the Russian Far East, fitted her with a satellite collar...

...and opened the gate.

She walked out.

The tiger that originally lived there, the Caspian tiger, is extinct. But genetic research showed that Caspian and Amur tigers were extraordinarily closely related.

So this isn’t Jurassic Park.

It is something much more achievable and, to me, much more beautiful.

We damaged an ecosystem badly enough to lose one of its great predators.

Then people spent years repairing that ecosystem sufficiently to invite tigers back.

The plan is eventually to have about 50 wild tigers living beside Lake Balkhash again.

There is still plenty that can go wrong.

But this morning, somewhere in Kazakhstan, a tiger named Hope is walking through country where no wild tiger has walked for more than seventy years.

I think that deserves a little attention too.

@3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works

#GoodNews #Tigers #Rewilding #Conservation #Kazakhstan #Habitat