Maryann Speaks! Founder's Blog

Maryann Bishop is the founding director of the Rosebud Continuum EcoScience Center in Land O Lakes, a 501 C3 she created with her husband, Sonny Bishop, who was born on the Lakota-Sioux Rosebud reservation in South Dakota, in order to help preserve indigenous flora and fauna, celebrate indigenous culture and demonstrate a new sustainable hybridity of best practices from around the world in keeping with the native American idea of planning for at least 7 generations.

Maryann and Sonny run the Bishop Construction Company in Pasco County and have built the foundations for numerous schools in the area over the years. Now they have turned their attention to constructing their very own sustainability school, working with teachers and students from the USF Patel College of Global Sustainability and local middle and high schools to make hands-on education in the natural sciences a tangible and hopeful reality.

The center in Land O Lakes features everything from rewilding native landscape restoration, beehives, goats and free range chickens, bat and bird houses, hydroponics, food forests and even a large biodigester sculpted to look like a "fire breathing dragon" that turns the Bishop's food scraps into clean fuel and healthy fertilizer.

Maryann "life tests" all of these techniques and passionately speaks of her commitment to showing other home and property owners what we can all do to be part of the solution rather than the problem. She is currently organizing the community to fight a rapacious development proposal that threatens the neighborhood.