I was contacted yesterday by a high schooler interested in prairies and a future career in conservation. (Definitely the highlight of my week!) They were looking for any advice I could offer, so I took some time to come up with a thoughtful response. I quickly realized I had a lot more to say than I’d expected. After finishing the email, I decided to share my thoughts here as well in case others might find them interesting or helpful. I also hope many of you will build upon my suggestions by adding your own to the comments section of this post. Thanks in advance for that help. Maybe we can craft something that will help and encourage lots of future conservation heroes!

Here are some of the tidbits of advice I offered to a young person interested in a potential conservation career:

• Conservation success relies on building ecological resilience, which relies on habitat size/connectivity and biological diversity. Biological diversity is formed mainly by small organisms like plants, invertebrates, and members of soil and other microbial communities.  Don’t ignore those small organisms.  Learn as much as you can.  It’s rare to find people, especially these days, who can identify plant species, let alone insect species or soil microbes.  Regardless of where you go with your career, learning as much as you can about these little organisms and their stories will serve you well.  If you’re so inclined, helping others to learn about them is even more important.

• Be a story teller.  Whether you decide to pursue science, land management, policy, or other aspects of conservation, the ability to tell compelling stories will be an important part of your skill set.  There are lots of ways to do it, but all of us working in conservation have an obligation to help build support among the public.  Without that support, nothing else we do will matter.  Convincing the public that conservation is important and relevant isn’t going to succeed if we just focus on the utilitarian values of nature – carbon sequestration, water filtration, etc.  Those are absolutely important, but our success will come through the sharing of stories that connect people to nature through emotion and empathy.  Sharing your passion with others (as it sounds like you’re already doing) is incredibly important. 

• Don’t lock yourself into a specific career path too early.  Most people I know have changed their mind multiple times between starting college and settling into a career.  Many have had several careers because they’ve found more than one way to find joy and fulfillment (if not wealth) in the conservation arena.  If you go to college, you’ll have to make some decisions before picking a major, but even after that, there will be plenty of chances to learn about things you didn’t even think were career options and ways to shift your focus to those new interests.  I was sure I was going to become a forest ranger when I started college and ended up as a prairie manager focused largely on fighting trees trying to invade my grasslands.  Now I’m a scientist, photographer and story teller.

• Regardless of what role you aim for, I’d suggest trying to get some experience with land management, even if it’s just a summer job building trails or killing weeds.  It’s important and gratifying work, and worth doing for that reason.  However, I also think it’s really helpful for people to have that kind of experience in their background because it builds empathy and understanding that will help in whatever job you have afterward.  It’s easy to establish common ground with a rancher, farmer or other land manager if you can swap stories about trying to start a grumpy chainsaw, for example.  Even more importantly, understanding the kind of work that goes into land management will make you more effective at designing policy, raising money, or working on any other aspect of conservation. 

• Conservation is really gratifying in some ways, but can also be depressing if you’re not careful.  There are always more challenges than we can solve and new ones pop up all the time.  There are few occasions when there is a defined end point to our work.  It is more of a long process that will continue well beyond any individual person’s career or life.  The way I deal with that is by reminding myself that my job isn’t to save the world, it’s to do what I can to make sure it’s still running when I hand it off to the next generation of conservationists.  We are just one link in a very long line of people who have been stewarding the earth for thousands of years.  All of us make mistakes and face new and daunting challenges and have to respond by finding creative and adaptive strategies.  Do the best you can and then let those who come after you deal with the next set of challenges.

• Finally, and this is really important, don’t let anyone convince you that nature is better off in the absence of people.  For the last 15-30,000 years or so, most ecosystems on earth have been strongly shaped by the actions of people.  As a result much of our current biodiversity is adapted to the actions of humans, if not dependent upon us.  The western (and recent) concept of pristine wilderness (meaning separate from people) as an ideal is mostly inaccurate and problematic.  Not only does it disrespect the long and crucial history of stewardship by indigenous people, it also absolves all of us (indigenous and otherwise) from our stewardship responsibility both today and tomorrow.  Sure, we often screw things up, and our actions and those of our predecessors have sometimes led to extinctions and other major negative impacts.  That doesn’t mean we should just pull out and ‘let nature take its course’.  Nature and people are interconnected and mutually reliant upon each other. Let’s focus on finding the best ways to bring ecosystems and species into the future with us. 

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Please add your thoughts to mine by putting them in the comments section.

Hi! I’m Emma Greenlee, and I’m one of The Nature Conservancy’s Hubbard Fellows for this year! I am from Aurora, a small, rural town in the Iron Range in northeast Minnesota. I grew up paying attention to and appreciating the world around me thanks to my parents encouraging this on everyday occasions like walking the dog and special trips like canoe camping in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters.

I went to Carleton College in Northfield, MN where I majored in Biology and minored in Spanish, ran cross country and track, and lived in the Wellstone House of Organizing and Activism for three years. As I got older I looked for a path that would allow me to do good for the planet in a way that corresponds to what I’m interested in, and I was drawn to prairie ecosystems and plant community ecology, which I explored through summer jobs at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, with TNC’s MN-ND-SD chapter, and with the Echinacea Project (an ecology research lab out of the Chicago Botanic Garden).

After graduating, I got to explore the sagebrush steppe ecosystem through a six-month internship with the U.S. Forest Service in Winnemucca, Nevada, focusing on botany work including collecting native seeds for research and restoration use, conducting rare plant surveys, and reseeding disturbed areas on Nevada’s Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest.

I am really excited to be here in Nebraska as a Hubbard Fellow—to get a well-rounded, holistic view of TNC’s work in the state, continue learning more about prairies, and to explore the connections between ecological research and land management. Thanks for checking out my post on The Prairie Ecologist, hopefully the first of many from me this year!

It’s hard to believe it’s been a month of the Hubbard Fellowship already when I think about all that we’ve done so far. (Forgive what must sound like the royal we, I mean me and Brandon, my co-fellow!) If I used this post to talk about everything we’ve learned and worked on it would come out as more of a young adult novel or epic poem in length so I will just focus on a few of the things the job so far has involved and made me think about. 

One of our major focuses for the fellowship is land management and I learn best through experience so it’s been good to see how things I know a little bit about or know about mostly in theory are carried out in practice. Something that I knew in theory but that hits a lot harder in practice is just how many things you need to know how to do as a land manager! Chain saws, skid steer, fence building and maintenance, prescribed burning, grazing, and––at least with The Nature Conservancy––outreach skills, whether in the form of sandhill crane tours, bison tours, or otherwise interacting with other landowners. And these are only the things we’ve done or talked about so far, not to mention the seeding, seed harvesting, invasive plant control, and other maintenance skills that will come up as the seasons change.  

Besides land management, we’ve spent a lot of time learning about the Platte River Prairies area and its land use history, patch-burn fire and grazing regime, and new plant species. Some highlights of the new plants I’ve learned include:  

– Prairie cordgrass (Spartina pectinata), a tall, water-loving grass species with long, gently curling leaves and stiff, mascara brush-like flower branches that look like they could carry a LOT of pollen.  

– Illinois bundleflower (Desmanthus illinoensis), a rather tall forb with distinct, curling seedheads when dry (like it is now in the winter season!) and white, fluffy flowers in the growing season that I’m excited to see.  

– And a re-introduction to roundheaded bush clover, or as I learned it, Lespedeza capitata. I learned this species at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve in Minnesota, where I was first introduced to prairie ecology as an intern maintaining the BioCON experiment (a study on the effects of climate change on prairie plant communities) in 2018. I can still hear my coworker Aidan saying, with full enunciation, “Lespedeza capita-ta”…but this is the first time I’ve come across the species since then, despite all the prairies I explored in the interim! The tall, brown, round (of course) heads of this species stand out between the grasses in the hilly prairie area near our house.  

All the time we spent this first month walking around the Platte River Prairies with Chris and Cody (the PRP’s land manager) also impressed on me just how much humans can change a landscape. This seems like something I should already know as someone who grew up on Minnesota’s Iron Range, a landscaped altered by iron mining to include a patchwork of open, rocky pits that are now deep, clear minepit lakes and bare piles of tailings that are now forested hills and ridges. I’ve also spent a lot of time in grasslands, which are strongly tied to management by people, both historically and today.

Despite all that, it still came as a surprise to me when Chris talked about using heavy equipment to restore a shallow lake to a wetland stream along the south channel of the Platte (and all the sludge that this project unearthed). Only 11 years post-restoration, the area looked so normal, or unaltered; I guess I didn’t realize just how fast the ecosystem could rebound. And this is even crazier when you think about all the other restorations on the Platte River Prairies! There are numerous wetland sloughs dug with machinery in areas that I would not have guessed had been converted from prairie to cropland and back again. This to some degree shows my lack of experience with restoration, but it also highlights how much plants can do if you give them the time, space, and opportunity. I’m curious to see what degree of change in the landscape I’m able to observe in just a year at these sites.