OK folks, I spent all my newsletter prep getting ready for a seminar I was asked to present for Utah State University, my ol’ alma mater. Somehow I’m supposed to talk for an hour. This is the most I’ve ever prepared for anything I’ve presented on so you had better believe this thing is going to be doing some double duty.

First I’m going to share this week’s contributor post, though, so that you don’t have to scroll very far to see it.

This is from J. Spahr, aka @science_visuals on Instagram.

J. Spahr is a professional scientific illustrator specializing in infographics about fragile ecosystems and creature lifecycles. She works with researchers and science centers to create illustrations and infographics that make complex scientific information more digestible and fun.

J. is such a fun follow on social media and I think this image is really stunning. It’s nostalgic in the way that when I was young I used to pore over images like this, and also just a testament to the work that goes into the imagery we see in parks, at kiosks, and in textbooks. Watching J.’s process will make me look at pictures like this differently from now on.

And here’s my script for the presentation. I plan on doing some improvisation but this is the guts of it.

If you’ve ever been to Yellowstone, or watched a single documentary about it, or even watched a couple of episodes of Yogi Bear, or have ever eaten out of a pic a nic basket, you probably have heard about the miraculous recovery of streams in the greater ecosystem when wolves were reintroduced in 1995. Since then, elk were scared away from streams, the stream vegetation recovered, and beavers came back. All because of wolves.

Trophic cascade, in a nutshell, says that removing top predators from a landscape results in prey proliferation, which in turn creates an imbalance in grazing. The assumption is that by reintroducing that predator, the imbalance can be reversed, just like that.

The story in Yellowstone National Park is one of the most recognizable ecological victories in modern history. Such a simple solution! What a relief because usually ecosystems are complicated things and in every way we should resist easy answers. This must be the one exception.

Right?

If only it were that easy. A 20-year-plus study called that hypothesis into question. Now of course no science is ever settled, and if someone says it is they’re selling you something sketchy, but this is a pretty compelling study. And let’s just get this out of the way. By no means do I think this is an argument against wolf reintroduction. As Aldo Leopold is famous for saying, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

Speaking of cogs and wheels, we need to talk about all of them. Not just the one that looks the coolest on a t-shirt. Starting in 2001, researchers identified plots to monitor and measured the willow heights year after year. The plots were either fenced-off, fenced-off with an artificial beaver dam, no fence with a beaver dam, and unaltered. The idea is that if wolf reintroduction alone was enough, even the unaltered plots would show regeneration of willows over 20 years. But those plots remained more or less unchanged. In the fenced plots with beaver dams, willows grew over three times as high as those without either. Fenced plots without dams and unfenced plots with dams both outcompeted the control group, though less than when both measures were implemented. That means that predators alone weren’t preventing enough browsing from elk for meaningful recovery. The most important factor was physically protecting the stream bank willows with fencing and raising the water table so roots could more readily access it.

Another aspect identified in the study is that it took into account the expansion of both mountain lion and grizzly bear populations at the same time as the wolf reintroduction. This is a place with more than one capable apex predator. The difference is that cougars and grizzlies repopulated the area naturally. The study’s literature review found that in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, each cougar killed double the elk than each wolf. According to the National Park Service, the northern range of the park has between 34 and 42 cougars. That’s compared to over 100 wolves. Grizzly bears go after elk calves, and also seem to have a larger impact on elk populations than wolves do.

Now, the prevailing theory for why the ecosystem was and is in that degraded state in the first place still is the deliberate eradication of predators, the Yellowstone Visitor Center didn’t lie to you about that part. It’s still overgrazing by elk. And it’s still the eradication of beavers and subsequent decline in habitat that resulted. Without dams the stream cut so far into the slopes that plants couldn’t access the water anymore and converted from willow to grassland. This is why predator reintroduction and protection is still vital to maintain already healthy ecosystems across the country.

Unfortunately, like many ecological problems, just putting that thing back where it came from or so help me does not seem to be the fix.

It kinda makes sense. Let’s say I were to just stop putting oil in my car. It would eventually lead to a catastrophic engine failure. Putting the oil in after the fact wouldn’t fix the parts that need complete rebuilding, right?

So the bad news is that, at least according to this study, the Yellowstone ecosystem probably won’t recover to the kind of state it was in the early 1900s when predators were killed off if we just leave it alone with the parts back in it. Not without some pretty drastic human intervention, which is generally contrary to current US National Park management philosophy and that of Yellowstone specifically. In other locations perhaps some backhoes and a lot of math that in spite of going to two whole Rosgen courses I can’t say I fully understand, this could be solved in a few years. But we do what we can with what we have.

The good news is that all the major pieces are coming back. Another positive thing is that it appears that the current state, though different, appears to be stable. This is called “alternate stable states theory.” Instead of thinking of ecosystems as places on an inevitable pathway to a certain “ideal” climax state, alternate stable states proposes that the same place can settle into different ecosystem types based on the current factors and stay that way unless something truly momentous comes along. That’s how people I chat with in meetings and conferences talk about their careers. You never know what your last job is going to be until it is. So the idea of a climax state being a myth also applies there. There are many stable states you may settle on before things get shaken up again.

An amazing example of this is found on a time scale we often don’t think about in Homestead Cave, in the Utah Test and Training Range in the west desert. It’s been home to owls for thousands of years and as their pellets have piled up, they’ve created a library of rodent, fish, and amphibian taxa. There, in one cubic meter of bones, you can find 13,000 years worth of data. There have been several studies based on just this cave to show things like species richness and energy flow over thousands of years through huge changes in the landscape, from when the cave was exposed by Lake Bonneville contracting to the post-european cheatgrass invasion and grazing practices. Even as climate has changed, new fuzzy guys have found ways to survive, and attract predators, and establish food webs.

The federal job landscape used to feel very stable, and now it doesn’t. There may be a day in the future where the tide shifts again and we see the largest hiring boom in the federal sphere in a generation. But I know from talking to colleagues that it will never feel the same. This is something we’re all talking a lot about these days when confronting the challenges associated with climate change. These will be momentous shifts where looking too much to the past can lead to pitfalls. We don’t talk as much about “restored” ecosystems anymore. We talk about resilient ones.

Resilience is the word I would bring up when talking about a career in natural resources. Sometimes this is physical resilience working long days in inclement weather in tough topography, but even more it’s the psychological resilience of just sticking things out. Another way I may put this is “persisting while fueled by the one truly renewable resource, spite.” Sometimes I have stuck with this career path like I have my bike commute when on the first day of work someone told me I wouldn’t last the winter. I am now entering my 9th. The deeper the snow, the louder his voice in my head. I’ve met people over the years who studied natural resources and then ended up as, say, oil executives and tell the old joke “what’s the difference between a biologist and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of five.”

Just as the simple act of reintroducing a piece to an ecosystem may not be enough to set it right, there will be no magic words I can say today that guarantee you a successful career. But if this advice and encouragement doesn’t push you through the rough times, may you have a doubter who you spend the next two decades proving wrong.

Aside from stubbornness, I wonder if I’m the right person to deliver this message. This isn’t false modesty. I will talk about the things I’m good at in a bit, but I was an unremarkable student when I was wandering the atrium here at the college of natural resources. Anyone who looked at my transcript upon graduation would be forgiven for never predicting that I would be asked to return to speak. I often feel inadequate when around people with more advanced degrees than me (which is almost everyone). Also, I can think of many people who I went to school with who have done some amazing things who aren’t here talking to you all. It occurs to me that maybe they turned it down and I’m like 5th on the list.

In the plus column, I’m a fast learner and a good sport. I am even-keeled and can be calm when things go wrong, and in the field things often go wrong. I’m a strong writer and good at making connections and creating relationships, especially in connecting other people with each other who I think should collaborate. In my opinion, anyone who has managed to make a living as a natural resource professional has pulled off a bit of a miracle. So in that sense, I’m probably as good a person to talk about it as anyone.

One of my favorite things when I meet someone new in this world is to ask “what’s your story? How did you get to this moment and this conversation?” The stories I’ve heard over the last 20 years or so remind me of a tour I went on at the Middle Provo River restoration site near Midway, Utah. That project sought to restore braided channels to a section of stream that had been turned into a straight canal for irrigation. One of the key goals the Mitigation Commission had for the project was to acquire as much land as possible to give the river the chance to be itself.

There are many highly successful stream restoration projects around the world that have boundaries constrained by things like development and land ownership. These have heavily armored banks that try to replicate a healthy stream’s dynamics without a lot of wiggle room. Rivers and streams don’t want to be constrained, though. They go in a general direction and end up in the same place, but they braid and split and shift; they create oxbows and then cut them off into little lakes. They get beavers in them and flood and the dams break and broken dams create even more complexity.

That’s what the careers I hear about do, too. There’s a general direction we’ve all gone, but the pathway there, if it were a stream, would score high in channel sinuosity.

I asked on social media for some career pathways, and here are some of the interesting ones. If you’re like me, when you tell people what you’re in school for, the inevitable question is “like a park ranger?” And that’s because that’s the visible version of the job. Like how when you ask elementary kids what job they want they list off the ones they’ve heard of: police officer, school teacher, firefighter, and whatever their parents do. I hope that these give you a glimpse of all the different options out there.

“Fish and Wildlife diploma. Volunteered at ministry of natural resources for that 1st summer, was hired for following summers. Moved right into BSc honours biology. Worked (and volunteered) in forestry, wildlife, aquatics, whatever I could talk them into letting me do. Returned to school years later for graduate work. Turned into a prof for a few years. Got out, worked at consulting agencies across the country. Then independent (self-employed) biology consultant, and occasional prof as needed”

“BS in Biology & Ecology, summer internships for FL parks service doing field surveys and an aquarium internship, Divemaster & Scientific Diver cert, PhD in Fisheries & Aquaculture (conservation/ ecophysiology of imperiled aquatic spp), 1 year post doc Fisheries & Aquaculture, 2 years teaching for a Bio& Env Sc department at a regional comprehensive teaching university, Asst Prof of Aquaculture in Renew. natural resources school (tenure track) at an R1 University with a primary research appt”

“Started as Art major, left school, traveled, seasonal tech for USFS trails, back to school -BA in biology/botany. USFS botany seasonal, tech in fish genetics lab, 10-YR INTERLUDE: had babies, stayed home; some short-term botany contracts, gardening gigs, volunteered for native plant society. Returned to work as part-time field botanist, went FT and started native bee monitoring program. Got MS in Entomology age 48, Now work at county weed district focused on pollinator education/conservation.”

“BS Botany, work study job in the herbarium, summer field biology at Malheur Field Station, MS Biology, seasonal work doing rare plant surveys along a proposed power line corridor for an engineering firm, and for the Nature Conservancy, and Mt. Hood NF. First full time job at botanic garden in Portland creating a seed bank for rare plants of the Pacific NW, then 30 years as botanist with the US Forest Service in northern California.”

“BA in Anthropology/Sociology, internship for TNC, State Park ranger, Natural Resources Planner and Science Communications for DEP/NOAA, Invasive Species Planning and Coordination at state level in 2 different states, now Communications for a non-profit dedicated to native plant conservation.”

So when I talk about my career, I don’t want you all to think it has been particularly remarkable. What I think it has been is representative. And because it shares many hallmarks as those of the careers of my colleagues, many of whom I am humbled to know, I think it can be useful to learn about. Much of this I wish someone had told me when I was in your seat.

I started out as a creative writing major at Weber State, and was pretty close to finishing. In a perhaps uniquely Utah way, I was also starting my family at a young age and had to face the fact that there wasn’t a real job at the other end of a creative writing degree. I was working at the IRS and miserable, and the people I worked with also had degrees in jobs that didn’t have careers on the other end of them. In my writing I was starting to gravitate towards creative nonfiction with a natural resource focus, influenced heavily by Edward Abbey.

This kind of writing often involves poetically documenting decline; the end of all things beautiful. This felt like an important job at the time. That’s what I was doing, and it was making me a very cynical and burned out twenty-something. At some point I realized two things: I needed a degree with a defined job path when I graduated, and when Abbey wrote his famous quote about being a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic, and outliving the bastards, it was 1976.

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

At the time Abbey gave this talk, NEPA was only 7 years old. The Endangered Species Act had been passed three years before. It predated the Clean Water Act. Peregrine falcons in 1976 were at an all-time low, just 324 known nesting pairs left on earth of the most widespread bird species on earth. The black-footed ferret was thought to be extinct. Beavers wouldn’t be reintroduced in Yellowstone for another ten years.

In other words, by the time I was reading Abbey’s words some of the things he told us to enjoy while it’s still there are, today, not gone yet. And in many cases in much better shape than they were at the time. We are facing all-new challenges and calamities, and those also seem too daunting. But it was comforting to me to learn that there were people who weren’t just fighting back, they were succeeding. Maybe I could do that too and also get very wealthy. At the very least maybe I could do that first part.

So I changed majors, changed towns, and started over. None of my social science pre-requisites counted so I entered the same meat-grinder you all have of the intro to bio and intro to chem classes that almost broke me. I made friends who I still work alongside regularly. Because I had kids and bills, I had to pass on the glamorous summer jobs like counting lemurs in Madagascar or tramping around Puerto Rico with a machete and instead did a season counting plants near the exotic town of Elko Nevada. I did another season conducting rare plant surveys in the scenic oil fields near Vernal. I didn’t go to a lot of football games. I took one final three hours after my daughter was born, having not slept in 24 hours. I squeaked through with a bachelor’s and was so embarrassed by how close it was and how long it took that I didn’t walk.

My early career years felt like I was always 3-4 years behind, because I was. My first real job I worked in the Uintah Basin oil fields looking for the two sclerocactus species that only exist there. I lived 10 days on, 6 days off in a communal rental house with a bunch of single 20 year olds who treated the situation like college dorms 2.0 while I tried to find a place quiet enough to read a bedtime story over the phone to a three-year-old. I watched a grainy video of my daughter’s first steps while eating a sandwich on a flip phone in the back of a tailgate in the desert badlands.

To reference Abbey again, he once said that there are three kinds of nature lovers: desert, mountains, or ocean. While I was working in the desert it became increasingly clear to me that I was not the first one. Realizing once when I did a raptor nest survey that birds live in trees, and trees made shade, I started volunteering on everything bird related. It started as just taking data, then picking up the bird songs myself, then conducting my own surveys. This led to work on wind farms and travel. Helicopter surveys for raptors and sage-grouse; burrowing owl surveys first thing in the morning and last thing before dark; goshawk and bald eagle surveys in Alaska, breeding bird and owl surveys in California, and a lot more.

I learned a lot of stuff you don’t learn in school, like how to load and unload snowmobiles and ATVs, how to load a trailer by yourself, how to not throw up on a float plane over the ocean during a storm, and what to do when you’re 6 days into a 10 day stint of 12 hour days in a truck with someone you don’t get along with. I also learned that I didn’t want to work in the business environment, though the hotels were nice. I am grateful for the opportunities, but I’m not cut out for marketing and keeping track of how many times I reached out to clients that week. Some of my colleagues have discovered that they’re great at business and genuinely love pursuing that world while keeping a toe or two in ecology. This guy is not one of them, which is just fine.

Part of your journey will be learning not just what you want to or don’t want to do, but also what you’re bad at, and I was bad at a lot of it. Because of undiagnosed ADHD, I struggled with datasheets and had to come up with some pretty elaborate strategies to make sure I filled in every necessary section before moving on. I was easily distracted, and suffered from time blindness that led to issues when traveling. As a crew lead, I was able to compensate for some of my forgetfulness by giving gear assignments to dependable crew members and dividing up tasks so that I wasn’t the only person trying to keep everything in mind. What I was good at was envisioning how everything worked together on an ecosystem level.

The housing crisis and subsequent recession led to private industry drying up. Oil wells weren’t being drilled, wind farm subsidies were gone, and we were on the brink of losing our house. The job market was bleak. What a difference a couple decades make, huh?

My conservation and restoration ecology degree made me enough of a generalist that I could jump on any project and add it to my resume, though sometimes it excluded me from being put on a proposal for something specific. I leaned into that generalism, considering myself the American robin of biologists. I could thrive in the woods, the windswept plains of a Wyoming wind farm, or eat (metaphorical) worms in a city park.

This generalism led to a position as Impact Analysis Biologist with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. There I fielded questions from people and entities who were building things like wind farms, roads, transmission lines, and such. I rarely had all the answers, but I knew enough to know who to ask. This required relationships with all levels of the agency. These were built in the field. I could go along with the wildlife biologists one day to help them dart and haul a moose out of a backyard, and another day could electroshock fish with our aquatics section. I helped the restoration biologist do post-fire seeding and plan out habitat restoration projects for mule deer. Or I could go out with our outreach people and answer questions from reporters and members of the public.

The most exciting thing I got to do, though, was work on wildlife crossings with UDOT. While I was at DWR I got to coordinate on the Deer Creek wildlife crossing, which within one year became Utah’s second-most used crossing. While working with UDOT on the Parley’s Summit wildlife crossing planning process, my relationship with their environmental program led to them reaching out when the position I now have opened.

As one of my first duties, I got to help oversee the design and construction of the crossing and oversee the monitoring process, and because of the media attention the crossing attracted, became the media representative for UDOT environmental. None of these things were in my job description. The bulk of my work is federal compliance with laws like the endangered species act and migratory bird treaty act.

A video of the wildlife crossing went mega-viral, and several more did afterwards. Celebrities were sharing it. I was listening to the Podcast My Favorite Murder when they brought it up while I was making stuffing for Thanksgiving and almost dropped the baking dish. I didn’t build this crossing, I didn’t design it, I wasn’t the one out there on cold November nights putting on the finishing touches in a race to beat the snow. But it’s probably because of that crossing that I’m here today.

Around this point is when I realized that the time I spent studying creative writing and sociology wasn’t wasted, as I had thought when I refused to walk at graduation. I guess that would be the allegorical equivalent of an oxbow lake. It felt like something I’d disconnected from and left behind, but in the meantime it was still there busy being productive habitat for, like, ducks and frogs? Just waiting to be discovered? The metaphor may be getting away from me.

My ability to summarize complex topics for the public has been tapped regularly. In addition to writing and editing coordination documents and technical reports, I give an annual presentation at UDOT’s conference, and have been able to represent UDOT at Wildlife Society meetings and the International Conference on Ecology and Transportation. I participated in a New York Times article (back when that meant something), and in a national documentary about wildlife crossings. Maybe the weirdest media appearance I’ve had was on BBC Persian, with an audience of 3 million people. Because the interview took place along a busy road, I had to talk loud and my voice was higher than I would have liked. Thankfully the interpreter they replaced my voice with sounded much manlier.

I’ve also pursued environmental education in my free time to stay sharp and keep up to date on new studies. It’s a little embarrassing to talk about social media, and I can’t explain why except that maybe it’s generational. I simply don’t think Gen X people should be making videos online. We were raised to be too cool for that. It’s ironic that I spent so much time writing and trying to publish writing to then have success by speaking into a camera. Thankfully, the skills I have developed by doing science communication have improved my professional resume. Many of you probably know how great UDOT’s Instagram page is, and my tiny contribution to that has been rewarding.

Here’s something I hope I can do to make social media worthwhile for all of us: if you use social media and want to follow me, I will review your resumes and cover letters. I will give you advice on resume preparation. I’ve been on hiring panels, and I have successfully gotten jobs in the private sector, state jobs, and through much trial and error have finally navigated the federal system to get a job offer there, too. I ended up turning it down, but I at least know how to get one.

Sometimes when I talk about having a dream job, I’m met with the response “well I don’t dream of labor.” But I think many if not all of you here do. We want to work. We want to leave this place better than we found it. We want to have dirty hands and sore muscles at the end of the day, wear out boots, get farmer tans and scratches from being whipped by branches or getting too close to a prickly pear. We welcome mosquito bites and blisters and seeing the sun rise and freezing in the woods while playing owl calls. We want to get stuck in the snow sometimes and pile as many hunks of wood as we can find under our tires until we finally get out. We want to drive big trucks and actually do with them what they were made for. It’s an uncertain future, but there sure as hell are a lot of willing hands waiting to be mobilized. And I hate that you all are worried that you can’t do the thing you have been dreaming of. I want to help.

I do think there are dream jobs for people like us, and you will discover for yourself what yours is when you read job listings that you’re not ready for yet. One piece of advice I give people is to save that job listing, make a checklist of skills required for it that you don’t have yet, and find stepping stone positions that will make you the right candidate for that job or one like it a few years from now.

I always used to get frustrated when being told as a student by people my age that we were going to be the ones to fix all the scary things. It has always come across as rich to hear someone in a position to actually affect policy give up already on their own generation and pass that burden on the least powerful people in natural resources. People my age caused a lot of these problems and it’s not fair to ask you to fix them.

That being said, I do look at all of you and I can’t help but feel optimism knowing that the people we get to train up and mentor and empower are this cool and sharp and passionate. This isn’t a backhanded compliment: I love how weird young people are and how unafraid you are of showing up as yourselves in professional environments that may have gotten a little stale. I love that you don’t look and talk like biologists and ecologists traditionally do. I don’t have any tattoos myself but am obsessed with the cute birds and herps and mammals and native plants I see up and down the arms of new colleagues. I’m glad to see people from non-traditional backgrounds bringing their cultures to the field. I can’t wait so see what you do.

I am taking any and all submissions. Poems, art, essays. The only request is that the fit into the general vibe of what I do online, these include: ecology, domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy, books, recipes

Also, if you make stuff that you sell online, I would love to feature your products in anticipation of stocking season.

Feedback, chats, questions? Email [email protected]