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It’s a tough time for young conservation scientists

24 08 2021

Sure, it’s a tough time for everyone, isn’t it? But it’s a lot worse for the already disadvantaged, and it’s only going to go downhill from here. I suppose that most people who read this blog can certainly think of myriad ways they are, in fact, still privileged and very fortunate (I know that I am).

Nonetheless, quite a few of us I suspect are rather ground down by the onslaught of bad news, some of which I’ve been responsible for perpetuating myself. Add lock downs, dwindling job security, and the prospect of dying tragically due to lung infection, many have become exasperated.

I once wrote that being a conservation scientist is a particularly depressing job, because in our case, knowledge is a source of despair. But as I’ve shifted my focus from ‘preventing disaster’ to trying to lessen the degree of future shittyness, I find it easier to get out of bed in the morning.

What can we do in addition to shifting our focus to making the future a little less shitty than it could otherwise be? I have a few tips that you might find useful:

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Tags: anxiety, career, depression, employment, hope, interdisciplinary, job prospects, multidisciplinary, policy, psychology, social science, transdisciplinary
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, deforestation, disease, ecology, economics, education, environmental economics, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, fire, flood, governance, habitat loss, health, human overpopulation, invasive species, management, mathematics, modelling, poverty, prioritisation, research, science, sustainability, threatened species

How I feel now about climate change

10 03 2020

‘Bleak No. 2’ by David Vogler

Five years ago I was asked by a researcher at the Australia National University, Joe Duggan, how I ‘felt’ about climate change.

This was part of an original initiative that put a human face on the scientists working on elements of one of society’s greatest existential threats.

Thus, Is This How You Feel? became a massive success in terms of bringing to the world the idea that scientists are also deeply affected by what they see happening around them.

Five years later, Joe asked me and all the other scientists who participated to provide an update on how we feel.

Here’s what I wrote: Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: anger, climate disruption, democracy, depression, desperation, emotions, feelings, Global warming, plutocracy, politics
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, corruption, development, economics, Endarkenment, environmental policy, exploitation, governance, human overpopulation, recovery, science, sustainability

Influential conservation ecology papers of 2017

27 12 2017

As I have done for the last four years (2016, 2015, 2014, 2013), here’s another retrospective list of the top 20 influential conservation papers of 2017 as assessed by experts in F1000 Prime.

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Tags: Africa, Amazon, biodiversity, boundaries, cats, climate change, decline, depression, disturbance, dogs, drowning, elevation, eutrophication, Fish, forests, fragmentation, Genetics, Global warming, green spaces, insects, mental health, networks, nutrient cycling, ocean, oil, oil spill, oxygen, photosynthesis, phytoplankton, Planetary boundaries, Predation, predators, prey, productivity, rainfall, richness, Soil, wildebeest, zooplankton
Categories : Africa, algae, Amazon, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, cat, climate change, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation ecology, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, drought, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental science, eutrophication, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fragmentation, function, genetics, habitat loss, marine, pollination, toxicology

Psychological toll of being a sustainability scientist

8 12 2014

Like many academics, I’m more or less convinced that I am somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum. No, I haven’t been diagnosed and I doubt very much that my slight ‘autistic’ tendencies have altered my social capacity, despite my wife claiming that I have only two emotions – angry or happy. Nor have they engendered any sort of idiot savant mathematical capability.

But I’m reasonably comfortable with mathematics, I can do a single task for hours once it consumes my attention, and I’m excited about discovering how things work. And I love to code. Rather than academics having a higher innate likelihood of being ‘autistic’, I just think the job attracts such personalities.

In the past few years though, my psychological state is probably less dictated by the hard-wiring of my ‘autidemic’ mind and more and more influenced by the constant battery of negative information my brain receives.

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