for tasks. We are told to work for free or even to pay to work, removing the financial incentive that most people get to signify they have completed a job well done. We are expected to work in harsh conditions, often remotely and among cultures that we have never experienced before. There is no risk pay for getting chased by tigers one morning and there is no rest when there are bird surveys to be done at 6 am and nocturnal surveys at 11 pm. Our promotion system is often going from paying to work or working for free for decades in these conditions to getting paid less than minimum wage. Often the higher-paying jobs take you out of the field and into the office where you see less and less of the types of work you went through all of this for in the first place. This is why it is so important that conservationists are praised and shown value for their work through language and behaviour. If the only gratification you get from your job is seeing your study species of nematode survive another day, life can be pretty gruelling when your family and friends don’t know or care about what a nematode actually is, or even why you care about its survival so much anyway.
In the same vein, it's important to accept when people consider themselves to be conservationists in the first place. If someone you know is proudly owning “conservationist” as their title, let them have it. Everyone who is making strides to conserve our natural world is making some kind of difference, no matter how small, and therefore, they are a conservationist. Scientists have enough trouble acknowledging their value through titles already and so it can be extremely soul-crushing to have a friend or family question your conservationist identity, especially if you have trained in another field before moving into the industry. Even after completing an honours degree in ecology and working on multiple ecological field studies, I still sit uncomfortably with my personal Instagram URL being a play on the word ecologist. Despite the degrees, work, or experience someone has in a field, it is hard to own a title if they aren’t getting paid and don’t have a business card with their title under their name to reaffirm their position.
If you are a counsellor and a conservationist comes into your office and sits down on that slinky chair of yours and explains all of this to you, never and I mean never, bother to waste your breath by telling them that they should change careers. The truth of the matter is that conservationists come out of the womb with world-saving blood in their veins. They have shown resilience and have overcome all hurdles to feed their passion for years and due to the nature of their determination and resilience, they will keep jumping through hoops until they die. Many conservationists define themselves by their careers. They think they are real conservationists if they have a job and justify their efforts if they don’t, in a strong bout of impostor syndrome. They announce it proudly to those they meet and label all of their social media bios with their identity so everybody knows that their sole purpose in life is to save the world. As a counsellor, the best use of your breath would be to remind these poor souls that they are in fact more than a job description. They are a brother, a sister, a daughter, a son, a mother, or a father. They are a sum of their behaviour, their intent, their loves, and their pet peeves. The kinks, the quirks, the fantasies, what they have done so far, and what they continue to do, all make up the person they are, not their career.
You need to remind them that they are not less than for missing out on an opportunity whether it be work or study, they are not less than for not being wealthy enough to pay to work, they are not less than for not being able to afford a house or even to find a partner to settle down with because they are stuck wading through poop mangroves every day. They are not less than for not conforming to the societal norm or for the fact that they cannot sum up what they are doing with their lives in one single word.
You need to hammer home that rest is actually productive and by resting, they will be healthy enough to do everything they want to do and their cells will have a chance to divide and conquer properly without any nasty mutations slowing them down. By resting they can have clearer thoughts formed by the chance to reflect on the past or read books or watch movies and experience different perspectives to their own. By laughing with friends they can get a serotonin rush and feel the warmth and happiness they forgot existed in the hard slog of it all. By taking time to walk in nature and experience the sights and smells around them, they can actually appreciate their planet that they are trying so desperately to save.
Of course, they have probably heard all of this at one point or another but it is really hard to believe if it is not the continually enforced message. Society rewards stress and business and hustling harder. Society seldom rewards a drink of your choice and a book on a sunny day, but trust me, with conservationists you will see a better future for our ecosystems and wildlife if we start to celebrate these moments of rest. In a world where conservationists are rested, valued, and respected, we may start to see a more long-term sustainable change in the trajectory for the species we care so much about (probably just the cute ones though, am I right? Sorry nematodes.)
If you ever see a conservationist in the wild sipping a drink and looking out at the sunset, or on a couch reading a fantasy novel or even playing hopscotch in the yard, please use your language to reinforce how productive they are being and how proud you are of them. Let’s face it, they deserve to know.
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