About a year ago, I had a mini-revelation about international conservation that made me feel marginally better about my seeming inability to stick to the really excellent goals I regularly set for myself.
I was once again (as many times before) growing frustrated with my tendency to craft gorgeous to-do lists, only to flippantly disregard them. It was as if part of my brain figured that creating the list was enough of an achievement to excuse me from actually adhering to it. Rationally, I knew that making more multi-colored, structured lists would not fix this tendency. I needed to figure…
Allow me to stroll in, fashionably late, on an issue that sparked furor in my corner of the conservation world about a year ago: unpaid conservation internships. Though, of course, I’m only “late” in the sense that I’ve missed the most recently major swarm of impassioned tweets and group chat discussions and email exchanges; the issue itself has been around for decades and, unfortunately, still persists and will continue to inspire further rounds of impassioned debate.
The broader context of unpaid internships, across sectors, and how that plays into complex structural characteristics of inequity and funding practices is beyond the…
The rationale behind the Conservation Realist series
Welcome to the Conservation Realist publication! I am a conservation researcher who specializes in studying the interactions between conservation and communities. I’ve worked as an academic and as a conservation practitioner, and currently am a consultant for various conservation projects, including as a monitoring and evaluation specialist to understand the processes and impacts of conservation activities. I am deeply motivated to work for more effective, ethical, and equitable conservation, driven by practical lessons learned from extensive on-the-ground work.
And that is precisely why I have very little patience for unproductive and even unethical…
As a conservation researcher whose work focuses on the interactions between conservation efforts and communities, a critically important part of my job is to better understand people. Those who aren’t particularly familiar with conservation might be surprised to learn that there is often conflict between conservationists and communities. This is generally because conservationists want to save XYZ species at any cost, which often involves substantial disruptions to the way of life, livelihoods, and well-being of people whose activities happen to impact — or even just overlap with — the species in question. Conservationists also, unfortunately, tend to come from “outside,”…
I’ll be very candid. When I first learned about Design Thinking, I internally rolled my eyes. “This is just… common sense. Why does it need a flashy label?”
And then I thought it over, and remembered — to quote many elderly people in my life — “common sense isn’t very common.”
Upon further consideration, I realized that Design Thinking (DT) is actually a very compelling approach that encompasses important processes and mindsets that are often missing in conservation research and implementation. …
Jakarta, August 2012.
My first visit to Jakarta, completed.
It was not as bad as I’d expected, based on warnings. Though, I am not sorry to head off to Kalimantan Timur (southeastern Borneo) after several days tediously criss-crossing the city on the large-scale scavenger hunt to process my research permit as a foreigner*.
The traffic is…amazing. The pollution is thick and hazy. The city is immense.
And the smiles are fantastic. I read in a guide book that “Indonesians are great smilers” — it’s true.
I haven’t gotten to experience much of the city outside of various bureaucratic offices and…
About a month or so ago, the grumpy old lady who lives in the not-so-deep recesses of my mind was stirred by social media posts like these:
“Nature is healing! Humans are trash!”
“The COVID crusade is saving the planet from humans doing bullshit.”
“Mother Earth is now healing. Maybe that’s the plan after all.”
“Mother Earth is healing. Don’t panic. Take a break and join her.”
Rainy season in this part of southeastern Myanmar is miserable. It brings relief to the scorched remnants of the hot dry season, but then it runs amok and often floods the cities and villages and rice fields. It is a time of mud and mold.
It is not an ideal time to go traipsing around doing fieldwork.
Yet we were doing just that. There we stood, on gray soggy sand under a damp dreary sky, at the edge of a small village by the sea. We were narrowing in on the goal of a months-long quest: finding a place from…
Zion shot me a look of doubt, which I deftly avoided by gazing off into space. I snuck a glance at the man sitting in front of us — a grizzled old salt, a man of the sea, a sinewy and no-nonsense fisherman. He was one of the first participants in my research project on Irrawaddy dolphins in Malampaya Sound, in the Philippines, which included interviews of local fishers. Neither Zion nor I felt particularly confident about the next question on our list, but I had stubbornly insisted on including it just to see what would happen.
She cleared her…
My father’s birthday was last week. He would have been 76. As with so many of his birthdays, I was far from home, though the situation this time was certainly more surreal. I was whiling away the days in my partner’s apartment in Yangon, self-isolating instead of pursuing my original plan of meetings, field visits, and trainings for my 8-week work trip. I had arrived just as the COVID-19 situation started to grow more frenzied, and had been instructed (several days later) to self-isolate as a recent arrival from the US.
Two years ago, I was also in Yangon, also…
