Reclaiming Resilience: Addressing Conservation Fatigue and Ecological Grief with Courage, Care, and Compassion

by Alice Hotopp and Andrea Bogomolni

How do you cope when your life’s passion asks you to endure the joy and pain of caring for the natural world?

Imagine dedicating your career to protecting a whale species—tracking its behavior, monitoring its declining population, and celebrating the hope brought by each birth. Over time, the species becomes a part of your life. Now, imagine responding to the death of one of these whales—a mother that you have known since her birth. She drowned, entangled in fishing gear. Imagine having to document the trauma she incurred in heartbreaking detail. Her loss marks another blow against the survival of the species.

Ecological grief is the bereavement felt for experienced or anticipated environmental degradation, such as the loss of species or the changing of ecosystems (Cunsolo & Ellis 2018). Such grief often stems from the severing of cultural and personal relationships to meaningful species or places (Barnett 2022); the unease of observing rapid changes that make familiar places feel unrecognizable (Albrecht 2007). Conservationists and others with ties to the natural world experience such emotions daily.

Conservationists work to prevent ecological degradation, but their efforts do not always succeed. Conservation fatigue, defined here as burnout due to the emotional toll of conservation work combined with inadequate support structures, is driving many skilled practitioners to leave the field. Like compassion fatigue in the medical fields, conservation fatigue can impact health. Medical first responders experience high rates of burnout, depression, and suicide; issues which are exacerbated by low wages, exhaustion, heavy workloads, the stress of responding to unpredictable and traumatic events, and a lack of career recognition (Torres et al. 2022). Unfortunately, these conditions are also experienced by conservationists, who analogously are first responders to environmental crises. Today, people working in the sciences are also experiencing major blows to their work and personal lives through loss of funding, layoffs, and furloughs.

Despite the toll taken on ecological first responders, their perseverance is vital for a biodiverse and safe future. What support can be provided to conservationists to help them manage fatigue and remain in their professions? How can the greater community recognize their efforts?

Moving from fatigue to resilience

We have come to think about such questions through experiencing fatigue and eventual healing. In 2018, Andrea participated in the Better Selves Fellowship at Knoll Farm, VT, created and facilitated by Peter Forbes. The experience was transformational, allowing Andrea to learn from the open and professional dialogues amongst social and environmental justice leaders. These ways of communicating and being with community were unlike those that she had encountered in marine conservation. Andrea has since brought these lessons into her work, listening to collaborators and stakeholders, holding space for others experiencing stress and trauma, and valuing the role of personal stories in conservation. These efforts have proven to be as important for marine conservation as is the scientific method. 

Art hanging in the barn at Knoll Farm

To introduce conservationists to these ideas, Andrea (Island Foundation) and Peter (Knoll Farm) co-developed the “Marine Conservation Resiliency Fellowship” in 2020. Over the last five years,  this year yearly fellowship cohort to addresses conservation fatigue through rest, reflection and grounding has built a strong network. Alice, one of 48 alumni, found the fellowship helped her cope with grief, reinvigorate passion for conservation, and feel more connected to community. By creating a space for those in conservation to address the emotions of their work and learn from environment and social justice movements, we are seeing individuals and organizations dig into the root causes of fatigue and relearn, rebuild, and challenge past expectations as to what it is to be a conservationist. We are seeing hope be brought back into the work, and more importantly, seeing hope and a core sense of being valued, within each individual essential in this movement. Today, this fellowship is called Restoring Force to embody the power which brings water to a momentary stillness following a wave. The hope is to provide a similar respite, needed to build the resiliency to continue on and harness the strength of the tides. 

View from Knoll Farm

We've learned there are more meaningful ways to understand our roles than the Western view of the independent, objective scientist. Grief and other emotions experienced by conservationists reveal the love we hold for the natural world. Importantly, that love can be a powerful motivating force for collective action (Barnett 2022; Butler 2004). Shifting the scientific mindset to recognize the power inherent in emotions is a first step towards strengthening the resilience of our research and conservation efforts.

Actions for building resilience

Social constructions of environmental change influence how it is experienced and conceptualized by individuals (Pikhala 2022). Therefore, conservationists can redefine grief and fatigue in a context that acknowledges these emotions, highlights their community-building power, and turns them into sources of resilience. Here, we provide several suggestions for ways to build resilient communities.

1. Be intentional about everyday interactions. Work communities can be a strong source of support and resilience. However, Western scientific culture often encourages us to remain distant from our professional colleagues, potentially leading to feelings of isolation. Think about how your everyday interactions could shift to be more welcoming and connected with others. Normalize talking about experiences of grief and burnout through being open about your own. Thank people for their hard work. Check in with colleagues. Listen.

2. Recognize the system. Conservation priorities and methods are often prescribed by our organizations, whether that be a non-profit, a small business, a government agency, academia, or a corporation. However, remember that your role in the system, while crucial for conservation, does not define you. Consider how your role is both limited and powerful. Know that the ways in which the system limits you is not reflective of you as a person. 

3. Re-assess your values around productivity and professionalism. Conservation often feels urgent. Yet, when we rush to accomplish a list of agenda items, we end up devaluing relationships with colleagues and partners, not listening to stakeholders, and valuing quantity over quality. By slowing down and prioritizing relationship building over “progress”, we can start to shift away from these disenfranchising practices.

4. Find solutions by looking to other ways of operating.  It is time to move beyond the "I did it this way, so you should too" mentality in conservation. Other professions address burnout through sabbaticals, unions, overtime pay, reduced hours, and strategies that make the workplace a source of healing and community.

5. Re-evaluate the power you have in your current position. Regardless of your role as a funder, practitioner, technician, executive director, or student, you can have a positive impact on those around you. Share stories about why you love the species and places you’re trying to protect. Normalize time off for wellbeing and illness. If you are in a leadership position, clearly state that burnout is a possibility and provide tools for its mitigation. 

A Call to Action for Funders: 

1. Commit more, not less at this moment to underrepresented people in conservation.

2. Support Multiyear funding: consider not just multiyear, but 5-10 year funding cycles. 

3. Trust Organizations to do what they need: give general operational support. Conservation needs whole people within to make the work happen. That means all parts of the work, from high risk projects, child care and supporting wellness.

4. Sabbaticals. Support time for growth and care and time to renew energy for the work. This could include support for the staff needed to keep organizations running in their absence. 

5. Fund fellowships, Internships and career building opportunities. 

6. Recognize the work of conservationists as individuals,  not just the organization.

These small acts hold power, demonstrating the value you place on conservation issues and on the people who are striving to solve them.

An alternative model of conservation

              With these actions, we believe that conservation can become more creative, inclusive, and effective. Restoring Force Fellows have already carried this work forward through designing inclusive research meetings; using story to elevate the emotional and cultural losses inherent to environmental degradation; hosting workshops that invite conservationists to focus on wellbeing and mental health; and redefining what conservation means in institutions and organizational missions. 

Though each of these examples is a positive step, conservationists need movement-wide support during this time of environmental destruction. It needs to become as natural for us to care for each other as it is to care for the species and places we are working to protect. 

For this, the field of conservation will need financial and collaborative support. We need the philanthropic community to re-envision conservation as a discipline that faces threats not only to wildlife and the environment, but also to its practitioners. We need to recognize, maintain, and grow a healthy, resilient, and community-oriented workforce in ways that support conservationists, not just conservation.

Literature Cited

Albrecht, G., G. M. Sartore, L. Connor, N. Higginbotham, S. Freeman, B. Kelly, H. Stain, A. Tonna, and G. Pollard. 2007. “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change.” Australasian Psychiatry 15 (SUPPL. 1): 95–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288.

Barnett, J. T. 2022. Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence. MSU Press.

Butler, J. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. verso.

Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Neville R. Ellis. 2018. “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-Related Loss.” Nature Climate Change 8 (4): 275–81. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.

Pihkala, Panu. 2022. “The Process of Eco-Anxiety and Ecological Grief: A Narrative Review and a New Proposal.” Sustainability 14 (24). https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416628.

Torres, A, and R. G. McCoy. 2022. “How to Better Value EMS Clinicians as Key Care Team Members.” AMA Journal of Ethics 24 (1): E898-905.