Every Learning for Action cohort carries the name of a threatened or endangered species. Monarchs. Orcas. Tigers. Elephants. Tapirs. Sea Turtles. Uakaris. Each one chosen with care, each one connecting our community to the living world we are working to protect.
Our next cohort is the Woylies.
If you have never heard of a woylie, you are in good company. It remains one of the world's least-known marsupials. Yet few animals on Earth do more to keep a landscape alive.
A One-Kilogram Animal That Moves Six Tonnes of Earth
The woylie (Bettongia penicillata) is a small marsupial from the forests and shrublands of southwest Australia, a member of the rat-kangaroo family that hops on its hind legs and works entirely at night. It weighs about a kilogram and fits in two cupped hands. Its name comes from the Noongar people of Western Australia, whose Country the woylie has always been part of, long before it had a scientific one.
Here is what makes it remarkable. A single woylie digs dozens of small pits every night, hunting for the underground fungi that make up most of its diet. Those fungi are the truffles that live tangled in the roots of eucalypts, feeding the trees in a quiet exchange that keeps the whole forest standing. When the woylie eats them and moves on, it carries their spores across the landscape and plants them in fresh soil, alongside the seeds it buries and forgets.
Researchers call the woylie an ecosystem engineer. One animal turns over close to six tonnes of soil in a year, aerating the ground, cycling nutrients, and opening seed beds where new plants take root. It is doing the work of a gardener it will never see the results of, planting forests that will outlast it by centuries.
The woylie is proof that the smallest actor in a system can be the one holding it together. Remove it, and the fungi stop spreading, the seeds stop moving, and the forest slowly loses the machinery that keeps it healthy.
A Catastrophic Collapse, Watched by Almost No One
The woylie once ranged across more than 60% of the Australian mainland, from the west coast through the interior and into the southeast. It was one of the most common small mammals on the continent.
Then it nearly vanished. European foxes and feral cats, introduced by settlers, found the woylie easy prey, and land clearing for agriculture erased the cover it needed to survive. By the middle of the twentieth century it had disappeared from most of its range, surviving only in a few pockets of Western Australia. For a while, careful predator control brought numbers back, and by 2001 the population had climbed to around 40,000.
What happened next still puzzles the scientists who study it. In the space of a few years in the early 2000s, woylie numbers collapsed by roughly 90%, one of the sharpest declines ever recorded for an Australian mammal. Predators, habitat loss, and a suspected wave of disease all played a part. A species that had outlasted so much was suddenly staring at extinction. The hardest catastrophes to stop are the quiet ones, the collapses that never force us to look up, and a woylie can be most of the way gone before anyone thinks to pay attention.
The Slow Work of Bringing It Back
The woylie's story did not end there, because people decided it would not.
Conservation teams built predator-free havens, fencing off large areas and clearing them of foxes and cats so the woylie had somewhere safe to breed. They moved animals between sites to keep the gene pool strong. In 2021, woylies were released back into the Northern Territory for the first time in more than 60 years, into country where they had been locally extinct for generations. On South Australia's Yorke Peninsula, the woylie became the first species reintroduced through Marna Banggara, a rewilding project named in honour of the Narungga people who care for that land. When animals were moved from Western Australia to strengthen the new populations, it was done with the permission of Noongar traditional custodians.
The work is slow, unglamorous, and measured in decades. It is also working. Populations that were written off are breeding again, and in 2025 the woylie was reassessed to a lower threat category than the critically endangered status it once held. It is still a fraction of what it was, still dependent on the fences and the fieldwork and the people who show up year after year. The recovery is real all the same.
The woylie reminds us that decline is not the end of a story. It is a chapter that determined, coordinated effort can rewrite.
What the Woylie Teaches Us About Climate Work
There is a reason this name felt right for a cohort of people building climate careers.
The woylie does its work underground, where no one claps for it, and the effect ripples out through an entire ecosystem. The fungi it spreads link the roots of separate trees into one connected network, so that no tree stands entirely alone and the forest survives as a whole rather than a collection of parts. That is what climate work actually looks like. Progress rarely comes from one dramatic act. It comes from many people doing specific, often invisible work, connected to each other in ways that let the whole system hold.
This is what Learning for Action is built to give you. Over 12 weeks, at six to ten hours a week, you move through climate science, policy, economics, and justice as one connected system rather than separate subjects, and you figure out where your particular skills fit inside it. You do this alongside a cohort of professionals who each bring something different, the way each woylie brings its own patch of forest to life.
The connections outlast the program. The Terra.do community spans more than 7,000 people across 85+ countries, and over 200 of them now volunteer as mentors for the fellows coming up behind them. Alumni have founded climate companies, moved into roles at the organizations shaping the transition, and built local initiatives from the ground up. They refer each other for jobs, collaborate on projects, and show up for each other's work long after the twelve weeks are done. That network is the mycorrhizal web of climate work, the quiet connective tissue that keeps everyone growing.
Join the Woylies
We are building the Woylies cohort now, a group of people ready to do the patient, connected, systemic work that climate progress actually requires. If you are looking for a place to find your role and the community to sustain it, we would love to have you.
Applications for this cohort close July 7. 👉 Apply for Learning for Action here.