Dear conservationist, you don’t need to be angry to care.

Dear conservationist,

For as long as I can remember, I have been furious about the state of the world. I have talked numerous times about how when I was 5-years-old I was mad at adults for not cleaning up their messes, so apologies if you’re sick of hearing about it (unfortunately I can’t go back in time and generate new and exciting personal narratives for you.) As I grew older, my anger grew when I realised that I was still too young to be taken seriously or to join initiatives to take action. I vividly remember being 14 and staring at a palm oil information poster on my wall, fuming that I was too young to volunteer and not knowing what else I could do. Keep in mind that these were the days before social media.

In high school, I was angry that I was seen as too dramatic in my assignments, rather than studious and unbiased. I remember an essay that I wrote about the oil palm industry titled “We are killing our own cousins.” My teacher said that this was going a bit far, I thought that to say anything else was being dishonest.

In university, I started to learn how to harness that anger for good and I was finally old enough to take action into my own adult hands. I made a petition that made the state news and impacted the company sales of a large palm oil consumer. I started creating events to raise awareness and seeking out more nuanced education by travelling, attending conferences, and seeing what was happening beyond my textbooks. This felt good. I finally felt like I was able to take action and make my mark on the world. Many people tell you to harness your anger and turn it into something meaningful. At this time of my life, I was being positively rewarded for my anger and it started to feel necessary to become the conservationist I wanted to be.

As I left uni and started trying to establish myself as a career conservationist, my anger grew toward the people in the industry who were causing roadblocks for myself and others. It turned out that there was a lot of hypocrisy in the industry, times when business decisions were made that defied genuine conservation efforts, and egos galore. You and I both know the frustration of finally equipping yourself to go out into the world and make change as a passionate, educated, and driven individual only to end up spending time and energy battling social and political qualms rather than creating mechanisms for environmental preservation.

You have probably heard about the 5 stages of grief at some point in your life: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It’s really baffling that so many of us are caught spending so much time in stage 2 of this process. I feel like I was in the anger stage for over a decade of my life.

When it comes to environmental issues, some people don’t even get to the anger stage and spend their entire lives in the first stage, denial. Denial is a powerful coping mechanism and many people find that ignorance is in fact, bliss. I mean, why worry about the loss of forests, coral reefs, and alpine ecosystems when it is so damn real and depressing? Jokes on these deniers though, because whether they are aware of it or not, denial is still the first stage of grief and the other stages could come out of the woodwork at any time.

Having swiftly moved past denial, many of us are, or have been, stuck in the anger stage. The cyclic nature of burnout and anger can sustain individuals at stage 2 for a long time, sometimes for an entire lifetime. Many campaigners I have met fit this brief, with an intense high-energy campaign period followed by a long stage of burnout. Regardless of whether we are campaigners or not, many of us rinse and repeat the anger to burnout routine for years and years of our lives. Many angry individuals have no idea that they are grieving either, similar to the folks in denial. As I experienced, anger is often celebrated in conservation, and can easily start integrating with our identities and how we believe we are supposed to feel.

In 2021, I participated in a leadership program for women in the environmental sector. During an afternoon session, a group of us sat around a giant bowl that held space for our grief for the environment (as you do). We were each tasked with picking up different objects that represented a feeling, like a worry stick or rock of despair, and placing them in the bowl. I was one of two people in the circle who chose anger as the feeling, and sadly, I cannot remember its vessel. I remember sharing that I was angry that I had to spend my childhood worrying about the longevity of forests rather than playing carelessly outside. I was so angry that all I had ever wanted to be was a conservationist but I was finding it so challenging to do so after years and years of dedicated commitment. How can I throw my entire self into solving a problem and it still not be enough?! I was enraged at the time, energy, and joy, that I had lost to caring. Anger felt like a more tangible feeling to feel than sadness. Sadness felt debilitating, anger felt powerful.

If we are lucky enough to move out of our anger, then we are greeted with the bargaining phase. My interpretation of the bargaining phase is when we believe that if we can take enough sustainable actions, we can negotiate a better chance of fixing the world’s environmental issues.

“If I can just remember my keep cup, then the world will be okay.”

It is possible that many work-a-holics are caught up in the bargaining stage, believing that each new project holds all the power in securing the future of a revitalised Earth.

“If I can just secure this grant, the wetland will be saved!”

The depression comes in close succession after bargaining, when we realise that no amount of us remembering our keep cups or finishing our grant applications is comparable to the emissions of one major celebrity with a private jet or one fossil fuel conglomerate.

The depression phase is where I ended up last year. As I suspected, it was worlds more debilitating than anger. What do you mean I have to actually feel the depths of my grief? It’s honestly so rude of my body to do that to me and I get why I put it off for so long. I have spoken about my experiences with my big sads a bit on this very corner of the internet, so check out this letter if you want to explore my experiences navigating this phase a bit more.

Now- acceptance is when it gets a bit tricky. You land yourself at a fork in the road. On one path, there is a sign directing you to a state of apathy. You can travel down this path and accept the world’s problems as they are and make the decision that there is nothing you can do about them. You may have guessed that this path is not for me.

On the second path, you see a sign that says “If you love it, keep going.” The thing is, you don’t have to be angry to fight for something, you can be a loving fighter. Anger is fleeting and saps power, love is enduring and provides it.

*Record scratch*

If I am really honest with you, yesterday I stopped the blog here because I felt, well, that the cheesy love angle was honestly too lame to publish- what do you mean love is enduring?! What is this? A Rom Com? But then last night I started reading Beyond Climate Grief by Jonica Newby and do you know what? She said the exact same thing. When you love someone or something, you fight until the very end. Love is powerful and sustaining. It’s not cheesy if you reckon with love’s full force. So thank you Jonica for validating my thoughts here.

While navigating the loss of my anger, I asked someone in my community how I could balance my mental health with my desire to care for the environment. I explained that I don’t want to go back to a state of anger or depression, however, when I am happy, I don’t feel like I care enough. I only feel like I am truly grappling with the real state of the world’s affairs if I am in a state of rage or despair.

This very intelligent individual told me a very life-altering piece of wisdom. She said that I probably associate care with anger even though they are not intertwined, nor inseparable. I can care when I am happy, and most likely, if I am happy, I will be able to care in more fulfilling and creative ways. I can care for longer without burning out and I can care with love, rather than malice. I just need to get used to caring in this new way and get my brain used to uncoupling care with feelings of anger or sadness.

In the poignant words of Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass:

“We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear nothing of how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings.”

Evidently, it is not surprising that we are not equipped to understand how to nurture the environment and ourselves. Our anger is all we know how to do because most of us were never shown another way.

I wanted to start the year with this letter as my intention to practice radical love for our wonderful natural world that I am so fortunate to be a part of. I want to throw the stigma of cheese aside and embrace the power of what love can do. I want to fight for our environment, not because it’s being destroyed, but because I love it. The same goes for you, my dear conservationist, I want to fight for you because I love you. I love that you care so much for our planet and I love that you have dedicated so much of your life, from your time, to your thoughts, to your income, to your education, to care for the parts of the world that you love too.

In Beyond Climate Grief, Jonica talks about how we can love places as much as we can love people, and like a dying person, we can love a dying place right up until the very end. They might get better, they might not, but we will do whatever we can to help. Love helps us to enjoy what we have while we have it. Both mine and Jonica’s reaction to grief was to run away and spend some quality time with the places we love. We both felt a bit guilty for that, but we have both been sustained by it too. I’d much prefer an exchange of love to and from the places we love, rather than a cycle of isolating anger and burnout, but that’s just me.

Unlike my anger, I trust that this love will sustain me into the future, as I know, underneath the anger, it has sustained me up until now. I also endeavour to practice showing love to myself, as I do not know the entirity of the impact that my care for conservationists has, nor the impact of the other conservation endeavours that I, or this wonderful community contributes to. Usually, at this time of year, I log into LinkedIn and see that people are already winning awards and getting promotions and I think, “Shit! I have to do more!” But this year, I have chosen to intercept those thoughts and instead practice thinking, “I love that there are so many amazing people in my network working on so many incredible initiatives for our planet! It’s great to be on this Earth with them working together for the future we want.” Not only does that give me relief, but it also makes me feel proud to be working alongside them for a greater cause.

If you are going through any of the stages of grief, just know that you are not alone and there are some resources here if you need them. I have said this many times, but a climate-aware psychologist was a HUGE help for me in my grieving process. I went through the brunt of the depression stage last year and I made it out alive feeling stronger and happier this year- in case you need reassurance that it’s possible. Conservationist care and environmental care are synonymous. We are as much a part of nature as the bees, the trees, and the wild animals of the Pyrenees (don’t mind me, just flowin’). So if you get into a situation where you don’t feel like you are caring enough for our natural world because you aren’t angry enough, ask yourself what you need to feel cared for. Is it anger? Or is it love? Give the world what you’d love gifted to you.

Have a nourishing start to 2025,

Jessie