Conservation Leadership Across Continents: Dr Howard Nelson | Fauna & Flora / University of Cambridge

[Music] Hi there, Nick here from Conservation Chris and welcome to the podcast. Now how do we train the next generation of conservation leaders to drive real impact? And what does it look like to lead across sectors from government and NGOs to academia and across cultures from the Caribbean to Cambridge? And how can underrepresented voices and small island states help to shape global conservation discourse? Well today's guest is Dr. Howard Nelson, lecturer in conservation leadership at Foreign and Florenta National and also the University of Cambridge. Now Howard brings over 30 years of experience in the Caribbean and in the UK, including roles such as Policy Advisor, CEO, Academic Leader and Forest Ecologist. His work spans conservation education, science policy interfaces, island ecology and developing equitable partnerships across the global South. In this episode we explore the role of conservation leadership, the power of diversity in education and how is fascinating career journey from managing birding ecologists in Trinidad to teaching and mentoring emerging leaders in Cambridge. He also shares powerful insights on optimism, energy policy and how artists and communicators can drive conservation change. It's an inspiring, wide-ranging and wisdom-packed podcast. Enjoy. Hi everybody, my name is Dr. Howard Nelson. So my job title is Lecture in Conservation Leadership for Fauna and Flora. And with that title also comes a role at the University of Cambridge. So I'm working the geography department at the University of Cambridge and my title there is Affiliate Lecture in Conservation Leadership. And like with most things at Cambridge, most Cambridge academics usually have a college affiliation. So there are 31 colleges that make up the University of Cambridge and so I'm affiliated. My college affiliation is with Lucy Cavanish College where I'm a fellow and oftentimes as now, acting vice president of college. You're wearing so many hats. That's like the longest job possible ever as well. I know. Well you asked one question and you're going to get a lot of answers. That's good. That's what we're here to discuss. Great. Well thanks for jumping on the podcast. I know each of you for a few years now, which is great. I should mention that I help out a little bit on the Masters in Conservation Leadership so I really enjoy and I'm pleased to be invited to kind of teach on that. But we're here to talk about you today. Yeah. So let's start with your role as Lecture in Conservation Leadership at Fauna and Flora. Yes. Alongside the other things. Like what does that role look like? Like what's the typical day? How would you describe it to one of your friends who have no idea what you do? Yeah. That's a really good question. I think I'm really lucky in that my role is mostly to teach on leadership in our discipline in the geography department. So it's a kind of unique position within Fauna and Flora. So Fauna and Flora, we have a relatively big team that work on capacity development, that work on people and development. And we've got quite a few of us that have very specific kinds of roles, whether it's educational or organizational development, et cetera. And one of the interesting things with Fauna and the team that I'm in, for instance, is that this role really arose from the relationship between the Department of Geography and the Cambridge Conservation Initiative of which Fauna and Flora is a part of. And what that sort of means is that the role of lecture and conservation leadership is a role that's been rotated over the last, it's been about 13 or 14 years now around the different NGOs that make up the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. So Fauna and Flora is the second of the organizations to hold a role. Previously, it was UNEPWCMC. And basically that person is an employee. And the lecturing conservation leadership is an employee of one of the NGOs, but ostensibly lecturing the Department of Geography. So the idea is that there is this direct connection between conservation and the conservation practice represented by the NGO and the actual teaching of leadership and conservation done by the department. So to come back to your question about what my day to day is, my day to day is I spend most of my time interacting with my, on any given year, 20 or so graduate students. So today, for instance, I had a meeting with my program lead, Chris Sandbrook, where we were discussing student exam results and comparing notes about this and thinking about what we might do differently for that particular module. And we'll spend, or spending time grading assessments or designing the next set of teaching. So right now, we're thinking about how we're going to use a new kind of case study that we've been developing with one of our alums. So basically a mixture of teaching, assessment, developing new ways of teaching and shepherding relationships between all the different people that we have coming to teach on our program because our program is kind of unique because we've got something like 60 different lectures that come to speak to the students over the course of a year. Wow. Yeah. Painters, a bit of a picture then. What is the Master's in Conservation Leadership? You've mentioned there already is like 20 different graduate students from all around the globe aren't they? Yes. How do you pick them? What were their sort of genetic? Yeah. It's so funny because what do they learn? Yeah, go on. Yeah, that's a great question Nick. The students ask me this all the time when we get them in the room, you know, by the time they're at this point in the year, they're getting ready to do their placements and they always say to me, "Well, how do you decide about all the people that come to us?" And so, you know, we've got between 20 and 25 places in the room. We're really constrained by the space that we have to teach and COVID really put a, you know, put an exclamation mark on that because of the challenges we had to do, you know, teaching spaced out and that kind of thing and really made us think about, "Okay, how big is the class, can the class be if we had a big disaster like COVID?" So usually we have between 20 and 25 students and we try as much as possible when we look at people who've applied to find people who do have real experience in conservation. So not people who have volunteered necessarily, primarily people who are working in conservation but that working in conservation can be in multiple different dimensions of our field. So for instance, we take people who work in conservation communication. We take people who are hardcore foresters or wildlife biologists. We take people who work in conservation finance. We look at folks who have an interest in design. So, you know, structural design or whatever in conservation. So we try to maximize the diversity of different kinds of experiences in the field. People for instance who've worked in international negotiation around conservation. And so we expect the folks that come to have some level of professional experience because the idea is that we really want our students to learn from each other in the classroom. Yes, we've got this fantastic situation where we're based in Cambridge and we can pull on the 11 or so NGOs that are based in the Cambridge Conservation Initiative. So we've got all these people with all this experience coming to lecture. But actually we say that the students learn more from each other than they will learn from either myself or Chris, the program lead or even the lecturers that come in because we're putting together like a jigsaw puzzle, people from as many different backgrounds as possible. We look at people from many different age classes as possible. So we have really young conservationists in our rooms, so people in their mid-20s. But we also oftentimes have people that are approaching retirement who want to change the degree of focus, the things that they've been working on. And so we try to mix that demography in the classroom. We try it and get people at different stages of their careers because as you know, somebody could be really advanced in age but really just starting off in our discipline. So age doesn't necessarily necessarily a prerequisite for having experience in our field. So we try as much as possible to really mix age, experience, geographies. We were talking about having 20 students in a class. On average, we tend to have of those 20 people from 18 different countries in the class of 20. As you know next, I mean, you've been in the classroom to see them. So we really kind of do this jigsaw puzzle to try and get all these different dimensions of diversity in the space because we know that when we put these people together, because we know that they're excited and engaged and they really want to learn about how to lead in conservation. We know that if we choose these levels of diversity, that that will improve the learning experience for these people. Yeah, that's so nice. And I find just hearing it makes me so excited as well, actually, just thinking about, yes, you know, people teach you teach, I teach others teach, but it's really about that melting pot the people in the room and also like the cohort that they've formed. And see what my own eyes, they really come together as a group, don't they? And they bond together. As they usual, you know, context, they come in, bum, yeah. And there they are. Well, yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, for me, I think the, the real experience every year is, you know, you'll get to a point, usually at the end of the first term, where, you know, the students, they really start jelling as a cohort. And you can see long-term relationships. And one of the things that we tell the students when they come in is that it's more important to us. I always say this. And I know my colleagues will cringe. But I always say that for me, I'm not really too concerned about the grades that they get. You know, they, you know, we've gone through a rigorous process to select them. And they're here because we think they show some kind of exceptionality in their application and in their interview. So this is not about smarts. So when they come here, I say to them, listen, I'm less interested in the grade that you get. And more interested in the kind of relationship and relational things that you do with the people in your cohorts and with the other professionals that you're going to meet. Because if you look around you in the classroom today, the people that you see will probably be the movers and shakers in our disciplines around the globe for the next 20 or 30 years. And so here is an opportunity for you to build your network. And so there's been a lot of time on that. Yeah, and that is so important. Something we've talked about here in lots of different ways. But conservation is a small world, you know. Absolutely. And almost 90 out of 10, you have people and connections in common, almost 100% to be honest. Absolutely. I see that. I want to broaden the conversation out a little bit around conservation leadership. And I guess the thrust at the program, like, how is tricky question? But how do you define conservation leadership? And what qualities do you think are essentially in conservation leaders? Like what are you trying to instill in these students that also other people can learn from? Well, the first thing I'd say is that back in the day, when you talk about leadership, most people have in their mind a single individual who really stands out as being eloquent, as being a forceful speaker, et cetera. And what we try to convince our students is that actually there's many different ways to lead. There's leaders of opinion who don't necessarily wear a title. So this idea of not necessarily having to carry a title to lead in your area, to lead in the thing that you're doing in conservation. So first of the beginning, we say, leadership can be situational. You can be leader in a particular situation. And so to then focus on, what are those key skills that good leaders have? Abilities to address things like conflict. How do you-- good leaders are able to see emerging issues. So how do you vision? How do you go about building consensus? How do you communicate bearing in mind that today our conservation leaders have to articulate their positions to many different kinds of audiences that may not be experts in the area that they're an expert in? And then how do you communicate the insights that you have as a conservation professional to these diverse audiences and diverse age groups and people across different cultures? If you aspire to work in an international conservation space, you might be working in, in my organization, 40 countries, potentially. And then how do you communicate your message to all these different people? And I think for us, we kind of focus on these skills of not only being able to communicate, to find ways to stay on top of those areas in our discipline that are emerging really quickly. Of course, most people are concerned about artificial intelligence. The big discourse today in conservation is around the global targets for biodiversity and how do we achieve those things? And how do you communicate all these different nuances to these different audiences? So a lot of the stuff that we do tends to focus on developing those skills that are necessary to allow those things to happen. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess what connects all those threads for me is like, how do you create impact as a conservationist? Yeah, which is why we're communicating and why we're challenging various issues. What sort of impacts do the students go on to have? Close graduation, if we can call it that. They also many of them go back to their previous roles and go to new roles. But what are you being from the cohorts that have graduated? Yeah, I think for me, so our program has been going for more than a decade now. And almost a decade and a half, actually. And I think when I think about impact, I think about generational impact of the students. As you know, when you teach on a master's here in the UK, a master's is one year. So a generation of students is a short period of time. And when I look at the student's impact, I look at how are they impacting the discourse around important areas of our discipline? And what I mean by that is, so for instance, at the last Convention on Bologna School of Diversity, Chris, our program lead, went to that meeting. And he was sending us, you know, basically daily updates on what he was seeing at this meeting as a team. And it turned out that quite a significant number of our alums were there at the CBD COP either representing their NGOs, representing their national governments, and leading a lot of the discourse around these key issues of figuring out what would be our goals for the next 10 years of the Convention on Bologna School of Diversity. Seeing our students engage with the local communities and their work on communicating, you know, threats, you know, for instance, we, maybe it was two months ago, we had one of our alums from Brazil, showing a video that she and some colleagues they'd created a film about changes in the pantanal. And this was so impactful, such an eloquent tool. And it makes you really proud to be able to say, yes, that was, you know, somebody came through our program. And here being able to communicate in a forceful way, what they see to be as the, you know, key issues for the country that they're living and working in. And that's real impact. Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting to reflect that you've got these big conservation partnerships. You've got bird life internationally, you've got foreign and fluore international obviously where you're based. You've got IUCN. You've got many others, all these different organizations working together in different ways. And in some ways, you're creating like another network within that. Absolutely. And a way to kind of work together very quickly because you have that bond of we all came through this program. Yeah, we did this together. Absolutely. And we've got a really vibrant alumni group. So we've got, you know, Cambridge Conservation Alumni Group that we've got a staff member working on that half time Shelley. And she spends a lot of time, you know, facilitating communication between the different regional groups because we now have hundreds of students, you know, that have graduated to the program. And we can see them, you know, still 10, 15 years later, wanting to collaborate with each other, always wanting to get to know the next cohort of students and to help shape their development. So we've got alumni teaching on our program. We've got alumni hosting placement projects for the students. And, you know, together across cohorts working on projects, conservation projects in their regions. So it's just, you know, it's amazing to watch. So it's not just you come to us and you do this degree for a year and then you're off. And we don't see or hear from our students again. It's nothing like that. We have such a strong community across the alums. And, you know, the alums, they work really hard at keeping in touch with each other. And, you know, across the cohorts, you can see, like they're almost like family. Yeah, I was going to say it's family. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking it. Yeah. Let's shift gears slightly then. So I'd like to talk about you and your career, actually. Yeah. And, yeah, you've been working in a variety of different roles. We've been just heard about your roles today, but going back in your career today. And paint's a bit of a picture of briefly thinking on, you know, just like what are the kind of key roles you've-- Key roles. Yeah. So I was lucky. You know, I started working in conservation, you know, almost 35 years ago. My first job was working for the Trinidad and Tobago Forestry Division as a biologist in 1989. That was my first role. As an undergraduate, I came out and I got this job with a woman who was going to turn out to be one of my most important mentors, Dr. Carol James. She was the first woman to head the Wildlife Farm of the Forest Department in Trinidad. And that was really-- it was a really important and formative relationship that to this day remains important for me, to have this female leader. in my part of the world. And she really helped me think about what it means to be a leader, even in an organization like the forest agency. So for most of us that have worked in the civil service, most civil service ministries and divisions and agencies tend to be very top down institutions. Even whether or not you could speak in public is a really regulated thing. And so for me, the five years that I spent at the Forest Department was really influential and I was very privileged to have her as my first boss and as my mentor. And so my first five years as a professional restarted officer, biologist and again, very lucky in terms of where I was being in a small country. It meant that I had opportunities to work on globally important and globally important networks, for instance, like Cytes. So I was through that role on the international trade and endangered species correct. And you know, for my troubles in, I think it was 1991 or '93. I was vice chair of the Standing Committee because it just Cytes because it turned out Trinidad and Tobago in my country was vice chair. My boss, she wasn't able to go to the meeting and I wanted to be vice chair for that meeting of the Standing Committee. And I was young, I was 26. And so that was quite an introduction to international conservation politics. How did you find that? Yeah. What was that like 26-year-old being put into that position? Really intimidating, but at the same time really exciting to learn from all the people around and just an amazing learning experience about that kind of nexus between politics and nature conservation. So yeah, it was really, really interesting, you know, the start of that early. But it then did affect the trajectory that I took. So, you know, after doing my five years at the Forest Department, I went back and did a master's degree in zoology and that focus was on, my focus was on hunting and sustainability and hunting. And then that led me to a PhD in a double PhD in forestry and wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So I did my research in Intranant Tobago for my PhD. And then after that, I got head-hunted for conservation manager role back in my home country. So this was at a place called the Acerite Nature Center, which at the time was the kind of largest land-owning conservation NGO in Intranant Tobago. They had about, I want to say, about between 1,300 acres of forest, tropical forest in the northern mountains of Intranant under conservation management. And so I spent five years in that role and after my first year as conservation manager, I became CEO. So then I was CEO of this NGO that again had a lot of land under conservation, but was also an ecotourism facility. So the way the NGO was funded was through hosting guests and it was a very well-known because it was set up since 1967, a very well-known ecotourism site for birders. And so managing the nature center meant not only a conservation education role, a habitat management role, but also actually acting as a hotelier for what was a very well-known ecotourism site. So that was another thing. And then subsequent to that, I went back to the University of the West Indies through a circuitous way. I went back to government for a couple years working in environmental policy at the Ministry of Environment where a lot of my job wound up being going to international treaty meetings like the Convention on Biological Diversity, what was then the UNEP governing council meetings, that kind of thing, a UNCCD, the UN Convention on Desertification. So basically my desk assignment was a whole bunch of these nature conservation treaties and representing the country and voting at these meetings. And then that I went back to the University of the West Indies where I taught for five years, I basically led online masters in biodiversity and sustainability. Then I came to the UK and I've been here for just about 11 years now. So I spent about six years at Chester, at the University of Chester, where I led their masters in wildlife conservation program. And then I came here to Cambridge and now I teach on the conservation leadership masters. Here we are. Yeah, that's a great positive history. I've got so many questions to ask you off of that. I think one that I'd like, and you started touching it there, which you'd find really interesting. What are the kind of key differences between working in academia, in government, civil society and also NGOs? Yeah. You talked about how government can be very bureaucratic, top down. I looked at them, clear and contrast them. What are your views of the key differences? Oh, gosh. People thrive within the different within the different. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, I started off by saying I think I was really lucky to start off working in the civil service because it provided a lot of structure for my kind of understanding of management of natural resources. Because a lot of times I see with my students today, they turn up in the classroom very enthusiastic about nature conservation. Maybe they've come through an NGO sector or a CBO sector pathway. But oftentimes their questions tend to revolve around why is it governments can't do ABC and D. That question itself reflects a degree of naivety about politics, governance and how policy-making and funding from the state then is transformed into what we see on the landscape, whether it's national parks or government agencies that manage natural resources or the way law enforcement is done in a particular jurisdiction. And so, I see, you know, for me, I still see, and again, you know, this is about bias, right? We say we all carry all different kinds of biases because of, you know, our ontology, right? So, for me, because I started in the civil service, I understand it a lot better. And maybe some of my peers who maybe just started off working in academia. So, in terms of the differences, governments are big machines. They, you know, represent the will of the people where they are, hopefully, in a democratic society. And so, there's a lot of money behind government. But there's the issues of accountability with government tend to require the agencies that work in government to be very conservative in the way they act. So we need to go to public consultation. Every time we do a policy change, et cetera, et cetera. And these things slow things down quite a bit. And they affect how we make policy, how we make decisions about how we're going to act on a particular issue. And because of that, the NGO sector and the CBO sector tends to be much more agile. And those folks that work in the civil sector, so work in government, tend to be way more constrained in terms of what they can say to the public. So people always say, well, you know, civil servants, you know, you can never get a straight answer out of them. In part, that's because of the way the system is set up. It's set up in such a way that the people that are responding to the public tend to be politicians. Because they're the ones that, you know, ostensibly have decided the policy. And then we as the civil servants, our job is then to give effect to the policy, the will of the people through their representatives. And so it can be very complex in terms of how, if you ask us civil servant, but why are we doing a B C and D? And why aren't we doing these other things? Then it becomes complicated in terms of responding. And, you know, what's, you know, separating out what you have as your personal views as opposed to your, your job responsibilities and your roles, et cetera. Whereas for, for instance, the NGO sector, there's a lot more passion. So for instance, you know, my colleagues here at, you know, at Bonan, they're all really passionate. They've worked in a sector for a long time. Many of them, some of them are younger and really passionate about the thing that they do. And people wear that energy and enthusiasm under a sleeve. And this is not to say that civil servants aren't that way. And this is to say that the mechanisms for being able to act on the ideas that you have and convert those into, say, projects that projects that get funded and, you know, actions on the ground, the distance between the conceptualization and the action on the ground is much shorter for the NGO and CBO sector, community based organization sector, then say for the civil servants, because it's a lot more of a constrained thing. But that doesn't mean that the NGO sector is, say, you know, naturally more impactful. means because as we can see, when government makes a decision about, say, some funding scheme, whether or not we're thinking about renewables in our context, the state through the government bodies can have huge impacts on how the whole society responds to a question. It's just that getting to that, have that huge response takes a lot more prep time to be able to happen. Whereas if I work in the NGO sector, I can perhaps see my impacts a lot more immediately. Yeah, yeah. Really interesting reflections. Yeah, yeah. And I'd love to dig deeper, but actually for time, I'm, yeah, I'm trying to get into it again, but yeah. Another thing I want to look back on, some you touched on there as well, that when you, when you were the CEO of the, the, the, the, the, the, Aza Wright was it? It's a right nature center. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. That you had this income source from being almost like a hotelier and the e-caterism that came from that. And we know alternative light does is really important. We know that actually creating funds that also benefit biodiversity conservation is really vital because there's a real kind of spiral effect of that, you know, we can actually grow a business that does good for wildlife. Could you just give us some other examples, maybe it's kind of filling some piece of like what are the other ways of generating income from wildlife that also helps to protect it because e-caterism is such a clear model. Have you got others? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, these days there's a lot of interest in, again, because I work in a university, biomemetics and using nature as a source for new ways of thinking of materials or new ways of thinking about how we develop drugs or new ways of thinking about how we adapt to a particular kind of challenge, say biological challenge, you know, whether it's disease or whatever. And so for many communities and I see this with governments and communities this, there's a lot of focus today on genetic information and how we make when we take an idea from nature and commercialize it, whether it's some kind of new medicine or whatever, how do we then bring back some of those financial benefits from the commercialization of those ideas that are provided by nature to the places where we have that nature. So whether it's marine sponges providing some insight about some new kind of drug or new kind of antibiotic or whatever it is and then how do you get that money back into the place where those sponges occur or where those forests occur, etc. It's those kinds of agreements between companies and governments, between companies and local communities. Those things are really critical mechanisms for getting back some of the value of nature. Of course, today there's also a lot of focus on nature services. So of course, many conservation NGOs are involved in carbon credits and carbon trading and providing sites where if I protect these forests, then that will allow more for more carbon sequestration. And there's of course a lot of discussion around whether or not this is working or not, whether or not we can actually track that and how do we value this and as with most most markets, the cost of the price of that carbon fluctuates a lot. So that's another area that many community groups are interested in and CBOs and NGOs all involved in that ecosystem service. And of course, there's been a big push to monetize many of the services of nature. And those things seem to be the things that are getting more traction in terms of getting the private sector to invest in nature conservation. In terms of traction then and looking into the future, are you optimistic for wildlife conservation efforts? We all know that wildlife is having a real tough time without painting too much of a doomy picture, but we know that populations are knee-clined across the globe. Are you optimistic for the future? That's a great question, right? So I would say if you're working in our field, if you're working in conservation, then you have to be optimistic because if you're not, you're going to have burnout pretty quick because every year there's a report that will come out that will say, well, we're losing nature, this rate or that rate or whatever. But I like to, and maybe this is just my nature that, and I tell the students all the time, well, is this glass half full or half empty and some of them will either say it's half empty or others will say half full? And then I'm always minded by a show I watch watch all the time, the Big Bang Theory. And I think, well, am I sheldon or am I Leonard? I think I tend to think that maybe the glass is all the way full, it's got both air and water in it. And I think that, in terms of the teaching and coming back to you a question about, am I optimistic or not, every time I enter the classroom and I see the 20, 23, 24, whatever it is, number of students that we have in the class, I see opportunity for us to shift the dial on nature conservation. And as long as we have people that are willing to do the work, then there's hope for us to save some of these things that we've inherited. Every generation, we, you know, I've been around for a while. And what I feel sad about is that, you know, some of the nature that I experience, maybe other people won't see it. The people that come after me won't see it. And I see as my job to make sure that I get enough of my students interested in doing something about that nature that we have more of it to pass on to the people that come after us. So I'm optimistic that we have people that are interested in willing to do the work. And it's just there are things that we need to do about the way we relate to nature globally to shift the needle. And the more people that we have that are willing to do it, then, you know, the closer we are to actually fixing it. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Yeah. And if there are people listening who are aspiring conservationists, yeah, maybe they're in the global south, maybe they're in a small island state even, you know, like yourself. And what advice would you give them that might help them to secure employment, to follow their passion, to have impact? Yeah, I think so. You use the right phrase there for all your passion. So I would say number one, just bring, turn up with that passion, you know, for whatever it is that you love, whether it's art, you know, it may be that the thing that you really love is making music or painting or whatever. And you might go, well, I want to career in conservation. Well, you know, right there with the thing that you love, you've got a tool for communicating, you know, critical messages. And you'll find that many people in art or field, many people in conservation aren't that good at communication. And so you have a unique tool that you can use to bring your passion to the table. And I think, you know, the thing is to turn up with that passion and use the thing that you like doing as the way that you get going in conservation. I'm honestly like a Venn diagram, you know, because these are my skills. This is what I love. Exactly. As we do in the classroom with you. Okay, right. Yeah. Well, actually, so on that specific example, let's say someone is an artist, yeah, and they paint that background and they'd love to apply that to conservation efforts. Like what specifically could someone do? Like what role could they play? How could they find employment? What, you know, yeah, I mean, that's a really good question. So, you know, in people's neighborhoods, if you're based here in the UK, I like to use Cambridge as an example, because, you know, there's lots of small conservation NGOs that are members of what we call the Cambridge Conservation Forum. And there are lots of whether it's small birding clubs and whether it's the local chapter of the the wildlife local wildlife groups or even local nature reserves or whatever. If you're an artist or somebody who writes music or whatever, you'll find that they're local NGOs that are more than willing to have you help them communicate a message that they want to get out. And you never know, those things can be the start, you know, you put your your work up on their website or on your on their YouTube channel. And as you know, it doesn't take very much for something to then go viral. And for somebody, you know, somebody else to notice that that work is really impressive or that's really innovative the way that you've communicated this thing or the symbolism you've used here is so amazing. And for that to then spin off into a career and using using this tool that you love using, you know. Yeah, I love that. And I guess if you're listening, you hear the word artist, just replace whatever skill set you've got. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, and yeah, follow that. Yeah. And circling back to optimism, circling back, I'm sorry, to doom and gloom. In terms of wildlife being in decline globally. Yeah. When you reflect like what do you think we as a community of conservationists across all different disciplines need to do more of or be better at how can we kind of really move the needle? What we're missing? Yeah. Yeah. So I think the issue has always been communication. And so we've known that nature has been declining for a long time. You could go back to writings from the turn of the 1800s. So the end of the 1800s you can find writings where people are concerned about the loss of nature and the rollback of nature. I'm from the Americas and many of the changes that we've seen happen in the Americas in terms of habitat fragmentation, species becoming extinct, species becoming more and more threatened. These things literally have been happening since about the 1850s or something. When we really start to see the the the uptick of industrialization taking place and then the dramatic colonization across the whole continent. You know, so this it's such a it's so difficult to come to terms with the scale of the challenge. But the challenge that we have as conservationist is the communication bit. And it comes back to that question that discussion we were just having about people who do art or people who do design or people who write. It's our ability as a community to reach all these different local communities, national level groups and particularly businesses to communicate to them and meet them where they are in terms of the things that they're doing to communicate why this issue is important and why these values that we place on nature are important for, you know, not just for us today but for generations to come. Yeah, yeah. I love that. Yeah. Just a few kind of wrap up questions in if I can. Yeah. Well, we hand over to our audience who are listening after we finished our recording. They can ask their own questions. Again, thinking about kind of global south, thinking about small island states as well in your background. Like how can we as a community kind of support underrepresented voices better in conservation and get more diversity in conservation too. Yeah. Well, I think the issue is for me, when I think about underrepresented voices is actually reaching out to those people and to ask ourselves, have we actually asked that group what they think about a particular issue, whether it's conservation, whether it's access to nature, whether it's the fact that they live in an urban setting, even though they're in the global south. And to understand that the issues of intersection, not just gender and color or race or whatever it is, most people have all kinds of complex intersections. And it's to really recognize that when you speak to one person, say from the global south or from a particular island that that person won't necessarily represent all the diversity of views from that place. And so really it's getting as diverse a number of voices as possible from these underrepresented groups and recognizing that they are all different, that people have multiple intersections and approaching it from that lens of diversity. Fantastic. Quick question. If we could transport you anywhere on the planet right now, and you can see any species, where would you go and what would you hope to see? Well, I would go back to places that I've already seen. So for instance, I used to take my graded students out to a place called Brownsburg Nature Park in Suriname. And it's a place where I've seen Uma and Jaguar and heard them. And I could never get tired. And of course, I'm from the Americas. So of course, I'm biased in terms of the species that I've been drawn to. But seeing a Jaguar swimming across a river, for instance, I mean, I just, I saw that one time and I still have that in my mind as you know, such a profound moment, you know, and just seeing these species in the wild. So I'd go back to my old Hansen Suriname and see some of the wildlife that I've already seen. Fantastic. And if we could make you a global zar for the day, you're a leader of all humanity. Here you go. And you could enact one decree or one law that is designed to help improve the environment at some level. What law would it create might you? Gorshi, you know, it's it's so complex, right? That there are many of the challenges that we face today are not simple simple problems. The biggest problem I see us facing today at this, this very instant has to do with the way that we produce and use energy, you know. So whether it's fossil fuels in aircraft or fossil fuels in cars or fossil fuels in trains or whatever. So, you know, if I was zar for the day, I would shift by an order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude, the amount of money that we're spending on alternatives to the liquid fuels that we have to find new ways to make because it is the energy juggernaut that we've created in our scent, you know, in the last century. That is plaguing us that we can't we we're struggling to shift from these fossil fuels to other ways. So if I was zar for a day, I would definitely, you know, two orders of magnitude spend more money to try and shift us to something that was more sustainable. And final question, why should anyone care about wildlife? Why should Donald Trump care about wildlife? If you were in a lift and you have 30 seconds with someone like that, well, I don't know if 30 seconds would be enough to do that individual, but, you know, for me, I would say, you know, if there is if there is an emotional cord, which regards any non-human organism to find that and and draw on that in that discussion. So for me, it was the first time my dad took me for a walk in a forest as a as a child and that for me is a deeply resonant thing because it's linked to my relationship with my dad and because it's my first time in nature and that's that sticks with me and so I could talk about that as the, you know, the point where I knew that, you know, nature was important to me, you know, and to find for every individual that point and for everybody's going to be different. Yeah, yeah. Howard, thank you so much for your time. For your initial problem. I'm so open and honest. I really appreciated this. If people want to find out a little bit more about you or perhaps even the Masters in Conservation, leadership, where should they go, where should we send them? Sure, absolutely. Of course, the Department of Geography has a great site, you know, where folks can find out all they want about the about the Amphiline Conservation Leadership. You can find out about those of us that teach on the program that's also on the course website. I've got a page as well on the Department of Geography website. You can also look me up on Lucy Cavendish website, my college website. And, you know, if you're interested in working a conservation engineer, whatever, you know, do reach out. I'm happy to point you in the direction of, you know, in my building, I've got 11 different NGOs. So, you know, folks, if you're interested, just reach out. I'm happy to tell you that that's so kind. And final, final question. Is there a time of year when people should be thinking about applying if they're listening to anything? That sounds great. Is there a window? Yeah, absolutely. So, usually in Cambridge, most of the different degrees tend to be open that that first or second week of September. And so, you know, if you look at our course website, on the right side of the website in my mind, on the right side of the website, there'll be a little box that says whether or not we're accepting applications. And usually it's the first or second week of September. And then the deadline is the first week of December when we'll be scrambling to make our choices about who's coming in the following year. Right. Okay. Keep your eyes on it. We'll provide links as well in the show notes. I'll answer again. Thank you so much. Oh, no problem, Nick. It was such fun to talk to you. And, you know, like I say, you know, really appreciate all the stuff that you guys are doing and in conservation careers and really appreciate all the time that you've spent with our students. So, just a plug for the Master's. If you guys are interested, you'll get to meet Nick and person and have sessions with him. If you come to our master's program. I was preparing for it today, actually. We're doing it together. Excellent. Thank you so much. Yeah. No problem any time. Okay. I hope you enjoyed that everyone. If you did, then please do hit the subscribe button to get notified of new episodes as they drop. And also, please give us a rating or review because it really helps us to get in front of more people. And we really enjoy reading them all. As you love heard, our podcast are now recorded in front of a live audience who sit in and listen to the chat. And then after the mics are turned off, they get a chance to talk to the host, to share their thoughts, and also to ask questions. It's a really great format. If you'd like to be in the audience, all you need to do is join the Conservation Career Academy. Now, in the Constitution goes Academy, you'll get full access to the world's biggest conservation job board, listing over 15,000 jobs, volunteer and internships across the globe each year. 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