Summit 2024

SPEAKERS

Mark Emery

Mark Emery is a filmmaker, musician, and photographer. He most recently shot footage for BBC’s Live Alaska, PBS Live, BBC Natural World – Florida: The Sunshine State, and several sections of a 4 part series on North America for the Smithsonian Network.

Emmy Award winning cinematographer/photographer Mark Emery is an independent filmmaker who grew up in central Florida in the sixties and early seventies. He worked early on wrestling alligators and milking rattlesnakes for a living at Ross Allen’s Reptile Institute at Silver Springs. Emery later worked for a time with underwater filmmaker Jordan Klein, Jr. and his father, where he began shooting film and writing soundtracks. Together with Tracy Collins he has shot over 200 television shows and commercials. He has worked extensively underwater with alligators in the clear blue springs around his Ocala, Florida home. He was recently featured filming gators in a BBC film entitled Florida’s Wild Side. He has made many films on different species from crocodiles, fish, grizzly bears to manatees. He has shot in Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica and Argentina as well as several countries in Africa. His most recent work on a large species involved sixty days of shooting on moose in Alaska for National Geographic. He currently has 150,000 still images in stock, many hours of film and HD footage and a large stock of original soundtrack music. He lives with his wife Mary in Ocala, Florida.

In 2021, Emery was honored with a bronze plaque commemorating his place in the Ocala Film Foundation’s Walk of Fame in the sidewalk in front the historic Marion Theatre.

Margaret Ross Tolbert

Internationally Renowned Artist of the Springs
Author of AQUIFERious

Margaret Ross Tolbert earned her BFA and MFA in painting at the University of Florida. Her work has since been about communicating the experience of immersion through painting and installation, writing and film. Since the 1980s, Tolbert’s springs paintings have featured in exhibits and collections in the US, Europe and Turkey. In 2010 the book AQUIFERious, with art and science combining as a guidebook to springs and the Floridan aquifer, and the urgent need for preservation, was released. It received a gold and silver medal in the Florida Book Awards, and the accompanying AQUIFERious exhibit and film was shown in New Orleans, the University of Virginia and in numerous museums and art centers in Florida through 2019.

Tolbert was a producer of Lost Springs (2017), a plea for restoration of a historic river and springs with her art as a starting point, with a premiere exhibition at the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art. Public art installations include the Orlando Springs installation (2011) at Orlando International Airport, and Connected Worlds of forest and springs at the Austin Cary Memorial Forest (2015) in Gainesville. Tolbert has had several exhibits in the Art and Embassies program in Turkey, and her commissioned 18 ft diptych Ulupinar/Great Spring was recently installed in the new United States embassy in Ankara, Turkey. She is based in Gainesville.

Jason Gulley, Ph.D.

Leading Springs Explorer and Research Geologist

Jason Gulley, Ph.D. is a geology professor at the University of South Florida, photojournalist and National Geographic Explorer. His work has been published by National Geographic, GEO, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and WIRED.

Jason’s research and photography career have taken him on expeditions to all seven continents, from underwater caves in Florida, the Caribbean and Africa as well as to glaciers in Alaska, the Arctic and the Mt Everest region of Nepal.

He has a PhD in geology from the University of Florida (2010) and is a technical diving and rebreather instructor. Jason’s research emphasizes the human impacts on the environment, cave systems, the Aquifer, and especially Florida’s springs.

Starting in 2020, Jason had an epiphany of sorts: scientists have never been more certain about how humans are impacting the planet, but the policy changes needed to protect the environment were not being implemented. Because more science seemed unlikely to change public perception, Jason decided to combine his photojournalism background and scientific expertise to tell compelling and science-based stories about our planet.

It is the vision and mission of Horse Farms Forever to inspire conservation of horse farms through education, awareness and idea exchange so as to preserve natural pasture land focusing on horses and their habitats, to protect soil and water on which they depend, and minimize land use conflicts
in Marion County, Florida.

We are watchful of government and others to preserve and protect horse farms and farmland for future generations - especially in the Farmland Preservation Area. We are neither anti-growth nor anti-development; we encourage urban growth to remain inside the Urban Growth Boundary.

Horse Farms Forever® is a Florida not-for-profit corporation registered with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services as a charitable organization and approved as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) corporation by the Internal Revenue Service. Horse Farms Forever® does not have a political mission. Our status as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization does not allow us to participate or intervene in political activities. The organization will neither advocate on behalf of political candidates nor advocate for the passage of legislation.

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