Renee (Mission Impossible: a paid job in Wildlife Conservation)

Written by Renee

My journey into conservation began almost two decades ago in the UK, when I started University reading conservation biology. I was deeply inspired by incredible people like Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Sir. David Attenborough because I thought they were the real heroes in Conservation as they dedicated their lives to observing, studying and understanding wildlife like chimpanzees (Jane Goodall), gorillas (Dian Fossey) and worldwide habitats and species (David Attenborough).  They brought wildlife’s habitats and social complexities to our attention so we could learn to value and protect them from extinction. I was lured by the possibility of studying and working in the field, rescuing, rehabilitating and reintroducing wildlife. I truly followed my heart and decided that I wanted to help the plight of the natural world and its inhabitants.  I was extremely naive and I thought I could study and get a paid job doing what I truly loved. So, I sold everything I had more than once, including property, got myself a few degrees, a dozen specialist courses, and spent almost 10 years volunteering. Nevertheless, I still haven’t been able to land a single paid job in conservation despite moving countries twice. 

Usually, to start in Conservation, you will need to fund yourself while studying at a higher level, volunteering, working to pay the bills and publishing research papers. This means you will need to work in odd jobs like social care, customer service, pubs etc. until you get a first paid relevant job towards a conservation dream job. The downside is if you work on these odd jobs for too long, the only experience you will have outside conservation might be irrelevant in the future.

Conservation needs a huge investment shake-up, it needs very large private and public investment and it needs to become a priority, the same as education and health care. The importance of Conservation could be included in science studies early in the school’s curriculum to enable people to understand more about the connection between biodiversity and ecosystem services. Because when the natural world ceases to provide water, food and clean air that we depend upon to survive, it’s game over. The appeal of climate change seems great and happening now but it only fools the non-experts, without the urgent protection and restoration of the natural world there is no successful mitigation of harmful emissions without functioning natural climate controls.

Climate change is as important as Conservation, but without nature’s services there are no natural climate controls. It’s pure marketing and imagination that we can fight climate change without restoring and conserving biodiversity.

Conservation also needs time, an ordinary conservation program recovering native species in their native habitat might take between 10 to 50 years to show considerable positive impact. We might consider 50 years to be too long if compared to someone’s general lifespan but we must understand that tropical forests took at least 3 million years to develop. 

Conservation is a highly expensive venture with an extremely specialised handful of people employed by an even smaller number of organisations. These organisations have all the power in their hands picking and choosing from thousands of applications for only one job. This misfortune makes the positive impact desired by all grants, projects and programs impossible. With fewer projects and even fewer long-term studies, how can we expect a globalised positive impact if there are many more problems to solve than funded projects?

My situation is far from unique, as the years went by I noticed that there are far more qualified unemployed conservationists than employed ones. I know many university colleagues that could never work in science. Some told me that they were smart enough to change careers as soon as they realised that they couldn’t get a paid job in conservation. I should have believed one of my professors who once said that it was easier to become a successful high-earning footballer than to become employed in conservation, especially if you wanted an academic job. Academia is another world and a very toxic one, in my opinion, it needs its own article. Academic or non-academic jobs, conservation paid jobs are almost impossible to get in my experience and conservation is mostly an expensive hobby and university degrees are a rip-off. 

Now I am 50 years old and I started University at 35 thinking that I would succeed and that it’s never too late, right? Dreams come true and you will never work a day in your life if you love what you do, right? Well, I chose the wrong field and at the wrong time.

In my opinion, due to my experience, I believe now that if I had an earlier start when I was 18 years old, it would have been a bit better. But also, if I could have funded myself all the way up until now it also could have been a bit better as well.

There are very few starting jobs and most of them are done by volunteers. The life of a conservationist is basically volunteering, working odd jobs and publishing papers for free while hoping for an eventual position or paid job in conservation.

This is how you usually start in conservation, years of volunteering and paper publishing, while you network, get more and more qualifications and keep focusing on a specific job. If you look at the jobs offered today, almost all of them are for experienced people, which is scary because the demands, qualifications, experience and the endless list of what they want from you do not match the age of people they usually prefer to employ, which is very young people fresh from graduate school, so they can be exploited, but can they be professionals? It doesn’t make much sense, but this is what positions described as officers, assistants and project workers really mean.

The cruel reality is that conservation organisations either want to check their equality, diversity and transparency boxes by inviting you for an interview when they already have someone from inside lined up for the job. They open up recruitment because they have to. The application process results usually take weeks but recruitment people or the computer CV reading program takes around 3-6 seconds to pass your letter and CV. The potential of a candidate is no longer acceptable and great candidates get disqualified for obscure reasons. Most applicants never hear back and if candidates ask for feedback there’s usually no reply. Even after an interview, they rarely give you any feedback.

Some professors and lecturers, conservation professionals and volunteers are desperately hanging on to their hard-earned jobs that they have no idea how to help people like me, or don’t want to help as they probably went through the same process. They just say ‘Try harder’,  ‘Don’t give up’, ‘Keep looking on the internet’. The advice to never give up is very cruel actually because there isn’t space and opportunity for everyone.

Science today has enough knowledge and expertise to put into practice real solutions for wildlife conservation. However, conservation is stifled by a huge lack of investment, little public awareness, nepotism, politics, academic megalomaniacs and blatant discrimination. Conservation is a verb, is action on the ground and not just publishing papers and going to network in conferences. A patch of standing forest with surviving biodiversity is much more important than posh dinners to sell art to fund rich NGO’s executives’ salaries. People who work in conservation at ground level like forest rangers and community environmental workers are much more valuable and heroic than posh university professors and tv celebrities getting awards and selling beautiful documentaries. At the ground level you don’t need degrees or fancy accolades but you are ultimately the one responsible for saving the natural world and you should be well paid for that job. Conservation is a relatively new field but it will never evolve or have a real positive impact on the survival of the natural world if employability continues to be such a tragedy and the bulk of the money continues to go to the wrong hands.