Our Wild Lives
Our Wild Lives takes listeners into the heart of wildlife conservation, sharing compelling stories from wildlife professionals doing critical work around the world. Your hosts Katie Perkins and Ed Arnett, of The Wildlife Society, bring you thought-provoking conversations with leading experts and emerging voices. Each episode dives into the wild lives of diverse species, explores complex ecosystems, and unpacks the urgent issues facing wildlife conservation.
Our Wild Lives
Wildlifer Wellness
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Our winter 2026 issue of The Wildlife Professional featured a special focus on the mental health of wildlifers with articles discussing burnout, rehumanizing the workplace, imposter systems and more.
In this episode of “Our Wild Lives,” TWS digital content manager Katie Perkins is joined by TWS member and special focus contributing author Michelle Doerr. Together they explore Doerr’s path from urban deer biologist to conservation wellness and culture consultant. Along the way, she shares actionable tips for wildlifers looking to prioritise their mental health.
“Our Wild Lives” is The Wildlife Society’s weekly podcast, sharing compelling stories from wildlife professionals doing critical work around the world. Your hosts, Katie Perkins and Ed Arnett, of The Wildlife Society, bring you thought-provoking conversations with leading experts and emerging voices. New episodes are released weekly wherever you get your podcasts.
Further reading:
About Michelle - https://anavahconsulting.com/about-us/
Michelle’s business: https://anavahconsulting.com/
Read The Wildlife Professional - https://wildlife.org/the-wildlife-professional/
About her book, “Grapevine” - https://store.bookbaby.com/book/grapevine?srsltid=AfmBOoqz0mrkuo-3pry83_H7oiX_zslC3wo7FEysjssAHt6skFnYii7X
The Voice of the Earth by Theodore Roszak - https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Voice_of_the_Earth.html?id=RnyxQgAACAAJ
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold - https://www.aldoleopold.org/products/a-sand-county-almanac
Share your thoughts on the Our Wild Lives Podcast by sending us a text here!
Become a member of The Wildlife Society: https://wildlife.org/membership/
Support Wildlife, Invest in Wildlife Professionals: https://wildlife.org/donate/
Follow us on
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewildlifesociety/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thewildlifesociety
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-wildlife-society/
[00:00:00]
Katie Perkins: It is no secret that working in wildlife can sometimes weigh on you, but what can we do about it?
Today we're joined by TWS member Michelle Doerr, a former wildlife biologist who now focuses on mental health and culture and conservation. Michelle talks honestly about burnout, ecoemotions, and why most wildlife jobs are really people jobs.
We learn about why it's important to reconnect with nature when the work gets heavy, how to set better boundaries, how to stop carrying everything alone and more. It's a real conversation about staying human in a field that ask a lot from the people in it. And how taking care of yourself actually makes you better at taking care of everything else too.
I'm Katie Perkins, and this is our Wild Lives Podcast, brought to you by The Wildlife Society.
[00:01:00] Michelle, thanks so much for joining us for another episode of the Our Wild Lives Podcast. Let's just jump right into it and can you give me a little bit of your background and how you got to where you are today?
Michelle Doerr: Well, I am originally a wildlife biologist. I started my career, well, if I went way back, I was actually a fisheries intern for a little while, but I decided. You know, I liked the furry stuff a little bit better. So I, I switched over to wildlife. I started my career as an intern, in wildlife research here in Minnesota. I went to graduate school then when I came back I was doing a little more research, ended up in wildlife damage management, and ultimately entered urban deer management. And basically through, my work on primarily the metro bow hunters resource base here in Minnesota, I ended up in the archery industry for 14 years. And then when I left there, what I'm doing now is around leadership and culture and wellbeing in the field because I just [00:02:00] felt like there was some gaps missing there. And my shtick is 90% of wildlife management is people management, but we didn't get that in school. So that's the gap that I'm trying to fill.
Katie Perkins: Definitely. Yeah. I'm so excited for this episode because this is something that we hear over and over again and I, so I hope that this will be a really valuable conversation for people in the field to listen to and to hopefully learn a little bit from.
Michelle Doerr: Me to.
Katie Perkins: So you have this wildlife background. Can you just talk to us about how you kind of started to get into this psychology, wellness like how, where did that shift happen?
Michelle Doerr: Well, the shift is kind of radical. Um, I got into psychology through my daughter's eating disorder. We actually wrote a book about our experience and what happened was she was inside the treatment, kind of typical treatment stuff, and I just kept saying they're not getting to the underlying cause. I shifted her over to my counselor suggested a teaming approach, and between him and my daughter's counselor, [00:03:00] when I walked into the room after that first session, I could see something had shifted on her body. And that's when I found Adlerian psychology. So the only thing people really need to know about Adlerian psychology is it's a psychology of strengths based, encouragement and community feeling.
Kind of, those are the three things. And I got hooked on seeing how my daughter shifted, and then I started studying human and organizational development with an Adlerian lens. And now I, I bring it to, to my work all the time. So it was that struggle though, and seeing how it shifted both of us and our relationship. It just made me so curious about it and it's so relevant to everything we do right now.
Katie Perkins: Did you ever think that that experience would move into the wildlife space? Did you think they were gonna stay separate or was it just kind of this like serendipitous joining of these two experiences in your life?
Michelle Doerr: I think what happened was after that experience and in starting my new business, [00:04:00] one of the things that I went, went back on was I, I went way back to why did I join the, the field of wildlife in the first place. I wanted to be a tiger biologist. Now, in the scheme of things. Um, there aren't very many people that can be tiger biologists. It's not a super accessible, so I decided to be more realistic and, and, and go after deer. But as I studied the psychology and looked back at my wildlife work, I realized this disconnection in the field itself even, and for people in general, this disconnection between humans and nature and this hierarchy. And through my study of psychology and especially Adlerian psychology, which frames things in, um, horizontal, like were horizontal.
It just made sense for me to bring that into the wildlife work.
Katie Perkins: Was there an experience while, you know, before this kind of, uh, change [00:05:00] with your daughter, was there an experience while you were just a wildlife professional where you just kind of had this thought of like, something needs to change. Something's not right here.
Michelle Doerr: Well, I don't know if I had that conscious thought in my brain while I was doing urban deer work, but, You know, uh, maybe this, I'll tell you a story, maybe this will help a little bit. Something that really shifted things for me in a big way, and I, and I tell this story multiple times because of the shift, is I used to do urban deer work in the city of Minnetonka here in Minnesota, I helped them with their deer management program. And at the time I did that, it was very, my way or the highway, very rigid. You know, people were animal rights activists are here, we're over here. And it was just, it's very rigid. And the woman who used to run, she's since retired, the institute at Adler Graduate School where I'm now [00:06:00] an adjunct professor. Used to, I'd come into her office and she'd tell me about her fox family, her deer family, her, you know, wildlife in her backyard.
And then she told me that she came from New York where she had no access to that. And so here she has so much access to it and they're such a part of her life. And just listening to that story made me think. You know, that's not a bad way to look at wildlife. It's just a different way than what I experienced growing up on a dairy farm and through my work in wildlife and how can I take advantage of her frame so that we can do this work better all the way around.
So at the, like now, if I would be doing urban deer work, I would ask her to help me to talk about feeding issues with neighbors. Like, did you know feeding increases the reproductive rate of deer, which means we have to ultimately kill more deer at the [00:07:00] end. Maybe help us reduce the amount of feeding that's going on.
Now I don't know how many people would comply with that, but I think there's, it just helped me look at things very differently by really truly listening to her story.
Katie Perkins: Yeah, I think that human connection piece and, and always working to learn more about how people, not just wildlife biologists, but regular folks interact with wildlife and how can we leverage that in our management? I think that's a really unique and interesting approach. So is this what you would call ecopsychology?
Michelle Doerr: Yeah, really, truly is, ecopsychology at its at its base is to reconnect people to nature. And when I say that, I mean we have separated ourselves from nature and the, and the truth is, we are nature, right? We have a gut microbiome. We have, you know, we have little critters, little teeny, tiny critters inside us,
Katie Perkins: Right.
Michelle Doerr: And so it's this separation and ecopsychology is [00:08:00] meant to heal that separation. There's, there's a couple of quotes that I think are super helpful for people to understand ecopsychology. That's from my favorite book. It's The Voice of the Earth. You can see it's you know, it's beaten and bruised.
Katie Perkins: Yeah.
Michelle Doerr: Theodore Roszak talks about if psychosis is the attempt to live a lie, the epidemic psychosis of our time is the lie of believing we have no ethical obligation to our planetary home. And in the back of the book, he actually lists eight principles of ecopsychology.
And I'll just read the last one 'cause I think it's the most, uh, maybe relevant to this group is ecopsychology holds that there's a synergetic interplay between planetary and personal wellbeing. The term synergy is chosen deliberately for its traditional theological connotation, which once taught that the human and divine are cooperatively linked in the quest for [00:09:00] salvation. The contemporary ecological translation of the term might be this. The needs of the planet are the needs of the person. The rights of the person are the rights of the planet. And
Katie Perkins: Wow
Michelle Doerr: And let's not forget when we're talking about ecopsychology. Let's not forget Aldo Leopold. Aldo Leopold. If, if you, you know, can play around with a little bit, talks about ecological conscience. And so when we're talking about, and, and many ecopsychology texts actually name Leopold. So for me and the land ethic is total. I mean, that's ecopsychology at its best, right? It's reconnecting us to our land. So if you have not read your Sand County Almanac lately, read it again and look for that
Katie Perkins: Yeah.
Michelle Doerr: ecological consciousness.
Katie Perkins: Yeah. Cool. So TWS has a member magazine and it's called The Wildlife Professional. The winter [00:10:00] of 2026 edition just came out and we have a special focus on, wellness and culture in the field and you and contributed to some of those articles.
Could you tell us a little bit about why this topic is so important to the wildlife profession right now?
Michelle Doerr: Well, it's always been important and I just wanna, couple things I wanna say before I really answer your question is, It's always been important, but the field has never really been designed to care for its people. Right. Early on, we had, oh, I mean, we have passion everywhere. We have care and passion everywhere, but early founders of the field probably didn't have the foresight to see how emotionally laborious and uncertain that it could, it could turn into. And so I wanna have compassion for people that are in the field, especially in leadership positions because it just was never designed to do that. And so we're all struggling with it. But the reason it's so important, and I will say [00:11:00] since, since COVID, COVID kind of triggered it, I feel like. This happened before that, that was the trigger. And, and over the past five years, I would say um, the, the burnout numbers are increasing. I hear imposter syndrome, like I hear these words more and more and more. Sadly though, so last year I did a more than burnout, I call it more than burnout presentation for an entire section of wildlife. And when I, I do some polling when I'm doing this work just to kind of get a sense for, you know, how people in the room are feeling. And it was like 80 to 85% of people were experiencing burnout.
That's a crazy number. And
Katie Perkins: Mm-hmm.
Michelle Doerr: afterwards when I looked at the rest of the data, what was happening is not only are people becoming burned out, they're flipping into disillusionment, which means, yeah, my [00:12:00] agency knows about burnout, but they're not gonna do anything about it. So why are we even talking about this anymore?
That's even more scary. So I am super grateful and, but you know, before this issue, I've written four separate other articles over the last few years on wellbeing topics. They just showed up individually. I'm super proud of The Wildlife Society for really getting out there and putting this, putting it out.
And so, and of course this year, the severe, you know, uh, shrinking of the federal government and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, you know, all the federal cuts that happened, that that's caused some severe damage, you know, to the, not only to the people that were doing the work feel like, well, why did I even do this stuff in the first place? But that fear that's, that's rolling down into new people who are now, as if the competition [00:13:00] wasn't hard enough. Now it's, you know, it's even extra hard. And so we have the, there's one article on there on Rehumanizing the Workplace. So I just did a presentation at the Midwest Fish and Wildlife, conference this week, primarily geared at, undergraduates and graduate students. And I'm trying to liberate people from the terms imposter syndrome and burnout. Because, it's a small part of it is, is your work to do, but we are in working in conditions that create self-doubt and that create burnout by, you know, un unclear expectations, overworked, understaffed, a lot of like, sort of unwritten rules underneath.
So I, what I did with the, with the students this week was to, first and foremost, ask them to discern, and I gave them some tools for how to discern, and this is your part, [00:14:00] procrastination that's on you, right? But unclear expectations - that's on the system. So I, I'm, that discernment was the big part that we talked about.
So I'm trying to liberate people from those terms, and I'm trying to put the ownership and accountability where it actually belongs. And then the other thing that I talked to them about is protecting their passion. And one of the things that I suggested was; like whatever land or wildlife, whatever you connect to, put that in your plan every week.
Don't ever let anyone shrink your passion and meaning in the field. Right. So those were two things. So, so there's an article on imposter systems, I'm gonna call it in, in that issue. And there's also the article on preparing tomorrow's wildlife professionals, where there's actually a little case study in there, from Le Moynes College where a professor that I've been in contact with [00:15:00] over time has actually incorporated wellness into the classroom, into his field trips.
And he actually provided me some data for how much difference that made in how they bonded and how they think about their work. And I forget what the last, oh, the last article was really just, uh, I did some survey work this summer with wildlife professionals. And so that was kind of a summation of my research from this past summer.
So again, I, I cannot be more proud of not only the national organization, but if I have to give full credit, it's to my Minnesota chapter of The Wildlife Society because the wellness conversation started at a chapter meeting about five years ago, and that's where I met Gary Potts and Gary's like this ambassador of mine.
Katie Perkins: Love Gary.
Michelle Doerr: And
Katie Perkins: Yeah,
Michelle Doerr: so, he's been carrying this message for me in the, in the field of, so I cannot be more proud of this organization taking this [00:16:00] topic on because if our people aren't well, they can't do work well.
Katie Perkins: Totally, so, through all of this work and all of the people that you talk to, have you, have you been able to identify maybe like a couple of key reasons why we see such prevalence of stress and burnout and emotional exhaustion in the field?
Michelle Doerr: You know, if I have to summarize the past five years, and it came up up again this week 'cause I did a little pre, pre-presentation poll, you could use the wova, to put a poll. And I asked, you know, what's your reason for coming here? The number one response for this group, and I would say I have to summarize over the past five years, is because people wanna know they're not alone in their suffering.
And so I think that it's, it just keeps growing because we're not willing to have the conversation and leaders aren't willing to say, you know what? I'm, I'm drained. I'm feeling uncertain. I [00:17:00] don't know, and that's okay. Or I am, I want, that feels like a loss to me and I want to navigate it, you know? And so it's, it's first and foremost, just let's open up the conversation and primarily that's what why I've been writing these articles for The Wildlife Society.
In fact, I had someone reach out to me that said, I'm actually using this issue to have a conversation with my team. so if that's what it's meant to do, that's exactly why I wrote it.
Katie Perkins: It's awesome.
Michelle Doerr: Lets open these conversations up. So for me, that's the most important thing people wanna feel seen and heard. Again, I keep going back to this week, I was watching my audience as I was speaking.
They're like, know, there's all these people going, I feel seen, I feel seen, you know? And so I think. That's where it is. And then after that, I think we just, one of the things that I've been working on is I have a workshop on emotional inclusion. We've talked about emotional intelligence for years, and it really, it, it, [00:18:00] it's, it's a great addition, but we're in a place now where we have to be able to bring those emotions into the space for the information they provide. And I, I did again, in one of the articles, I actually did a workshop in Wisconsin where, uh, and I described it a little bit where I had people take a scenario, like a, a, you know, a tough meeting or whatever, and I had ' em write the scenario down line by line. And after each one I had 'em write an emotion word. And you know, it's like 15 emotion words, you know? And then I jokingly say, and you're probably having an emotion word about me right now. Right.
Katie Perkins: Yeah.
Michelle Doerr: um, and then they shared stories and it was amazing when, when the group leader talked to me a couple years later, he said, we still talk about that workshop today because of, it opened up the conversation. It bonded people. They check in on each other now. Uh [00:19:00] so I mean, again, I just, I, I can't say enough. We need to talk about this stuff more and more and we need to make, normalize it all the way around.
Katie Perkins: So as we have start having these conversations at conferences and in our magazine and, and in this podcast right now, how do we move from conversations to some kind of action? What do you think the next steps are to begin trying to heal this system?
Michelle Doerr: Well, I think it's, it's a multi-level approach, right? Each layer, if I think of like leadership all the way from like students, graduate students early career, I think of mid-level supervisors and I think of people in, you know, extreme authority at the top levels. Each of them are navigating this a little bit differently.
So again, for the students and grad students, I want them to start by learning this discernment technique. If I can get more and more uh, people in early career being able to firmly discern what's theirs [00:20:00] to own and they're not afraid of accountability, that's what I learned this week. There it is not about laziness or accountability.
They wanna be clear on what I am accountable for. So I can go after that and not go after this other thing and I'm gonna go up to the leadership. I'm also working with a leadership team that's struggling with their own um, always on attitude and the, and the one thing that I keep telling to them is, you know what?
You need to tell the people below you that you are having this conversation, that you are struggling with this and you need to bring it out in the open. And then it's the middle. To be honest, it's the middle supervisor people that near and dear to my heart. I mean, everyone is, but right now, people at that mid-level are getting information from the bottom that says, this isn't working for us, we need something different. Will you help us? Right? Because you've got some [00:21:00] authority, but not, not that much. they have people coming from the top saying. You know, with very rigid beliefs about what's, what's their job to do, you know? So the people in the middle are really like, yeah, I know I have to do something different, but I, I don't know what I can do. So the one thing I will say, right, especially in the field of wildlife, a lot of us got into it because we're scientists, right? We like to experiment and study things. So that's the approach I tell people to take now. There's no silver bullet for this. It's an adaptive challenge that we all have a part in playing. And so just experiment. Maybe it's just check in with your team on a weekly basis. Um, you know, maybe let's try talking about emotions. Let's create a holding space. Let's just experiment with a bunch of different things and see what takes. I mean, this is gonna take ripples and ripples and ripples.
Katie Perkins: I love you, like connecting [00:22:00] that back to the science because you know, a lot of people listening, they have that science brain. So yeah, if you try to think about it as like, you know, what's a research problem that you're trying to tackle and what's some methods that maybe we could try to, you know, get this conversation flowing and, and figure out what could work and what wouldn't work. I really love that.
Michelle Doerr: And in my presentations, I, I rarely do a presentation or workshop without mentimeter.
Katie Perkins: Okay.
Michelle Doerr: I use an online polling system because even though we're scientists. I know that in this work on wellbeing ev, I might be able to report some data to you, but I'll inevitably have a group of people in the audience, well, that's not my team, or that's not, that's not us, or whatever.
So I love the polling because I can see live how people are feeling right now. And so I can kind of have a conversation with the data. So I am experimenting all the time, even in my presentations.
Katie Perkins: So, you know, from your point of view, we talk about the people, [00:23:00] but how does these feelings of burnout and stress, how does that translate to how we're able to manage and conserve natural resources and wildlife? You know, if, if we have these issues in our agencies and our, our, our workplaces, how does that translate into the work that we are or are not able to do?
Michelle Doerr: Yeah, Imean the translations when people are not doing well are pretty simple. They're reactive instead of responsive. It's almost impossible to be creative or innovative. Right? We're very reactive and we just, defensive. Like we can't slow down and pause and discern like we just, it's just, and, and the urgency thing is also killing us. we have to be able to discern what's truly urgent and important and what has a later deadline, right? So we just can't make good decisions about, [00:24:00] about our work, and we can't relate to other people very well. When our body is shut down, literally burnout is gonna shut down our mind and body to protect itself, then we're just not open to listening at all.
Katie Perkins: Yeah, I like, I wanna go back to this, um, exercise you do about discernment. Do you think that you could maybe break it down into something that people listening right now could get a notepad out and follow along and try to do a little exercise on maybe something kind of laser focused in.
Michelle Doerr: Sure, I'll give it a try. So I used, like I used timing as, um, if you, if you think about the timing issue, right? You have all these tasks that you're doing and everything's important and blah, blah, blah. So, so I, and I did this with the executive team. If you look at your rushing around, what's that about? And what's the, it it, for me, it always comes down to what's the [00:25:00] underlying belief. And this is kind of hard to get to sometimes. And it's, if I don't respond quickly, I'm gonna be irrelevant or, you know, whatever the belief is. So what's it at, what's that thing asking of me? And then the discernment part is, okay, what's mine? If I'm talking about urgency or timelines or deadlines, what's mine? Am I a procrastinator and I don't plan very well? Okay, well, that's my work to do. If, if the timelines provided for me are never negotiable, like if somebody, if somebody sends you an email and says, I need this tomorrow. Do you really need it tomorrow? Or is this really a high priority item or is there something that's priority? We don't, we don't discern what's truly priority and what isn't. And so, you know, if you just take that little bit of time piece in there. And the last piece, and I told the, I told the students [00:26:00] this about this protecting our passion. A couple of things when, when you look at that is when you think about like, like the urgency thing is. Okay, can I think about it as a, as a seasonal, or let's say I do have an urgent issue today. Okay, I do have an urgent issue. It's gonna take a lot of energy out of me. I need to get it done and then that, and then when it's done, I need to go do that land or wildlife connection or whatever.
I need to do that protective piece to keep me attached to the meaning and the purpose in why I'm here. So that was kind of a quick answer. I hope that helped.
Katie Perkins: Yeah, I think like trying to provide a little bit of framework. 'cause like you said, this is not something you're taught in school. So just like trying to create these little exercises to go through your mind of when something comes on your plate and you're like, oh my goodness, what am I gonna do about this?
That, that kind of that, that kind of framework you [00:27:00] just said of, you know, think about it, what, where are the priorities actually, you know, can we negotiate this? I think that was, a really helpful example and something that people can take those principles and apply it to other issues that may come across their desk.
Michelle Doerr: And I'll just say, I think there's a table in the Imposter Systems article that does a little bit of discernment for you. So start there maybe for some ideas.
Katie Perkins: Yeah and if you're wondering what we're talking about, if you're a member of The Wildlife Society, it's a member benefit. And you can also access those online at wildlife.org/publications, and we'll have that linked down in the show notes if you want to check that out.
Michelle Doerr: All right.
Katie Perkins: Can you think of any realistic ways that wildlife professionals can start prioritizing wellness in their own lives?
You talk about that protecting your passion. Do you have any other little tips like that, that hopefully people can listen and, and take with them and next time they find themselves at a situation they can think back and be like, okay, let me try this.
Michelle Doerr: Yeah, I mean, I think there's, well, there's a lot of things, but, checking in with, with each other. Also, I [00:28:00] mean, there's some simple things like if you get stuck and if you find yourself, and I'm guilty of this too, if you find yourself like behind your desk and you're like just going at it, going at it, and all of a sudden, four hours later you forgot to get up and move or whatever, literally set your timer. Set your timer for every half an hour to get up and move, breath, you know. It helps 'cause we get so stuck and so that's a good way to get unstuck in the way we do things all the time. There's also, I tell especially well in any position, is there a seasonality to your work? Like when I was doing primarily wildlife research work on deer, right? The hunting season was our busy season. There's no way you can avoid like having to travel for check stations and just being on all day long, you can't avoid it. So then what I want people to do, and I tell leaders this too, like after the [00:29:00] legislative session. You need to take that break a, you need to plan for that break after to be able to just kind of download, debrief for yourself. Maybe even at the end of the day. At the end of the day, a simple thing that you can do is write down, you know, what do I, what did I accomplish today? You know, what's, what's something that I'm really proud of today? What's the next three things for tomorrow? Close the book, close the computer, walk away. Right? So
Katie Perkins: Right.
Michelle Doerr: there's some really good like. Okay, now I, because people talk about work-life balance and I told the students this week, I work-life balance is a thing. And also I'm starting, this is where my cur, I, I'm a perpetual curious person. My
Katie Perkins: Mm-hmm.
Michelle Doerr: I'm starting to think that the, that the work-life balance thing is actually this thing that I talked about earlier about protecting our meaning. Because if [00:30:00] we're protecting our meaning, then the work-life balance issue doesn't come up as much. Right, so I'm, I'm, I'm wondering about that. But there's, yeah, there's some seasonality that we can protect. There's some daily stuff that we can do better with, with opening and closing the day. And emails, emails is another one. Here's a simple tip that I don't think so many people know about. There's this thing on Outlook that's called delayed delivery. If you are working 24/7, and I tell leaders this, especially. If you're working 24/7, that's on you. Okay? But you're modeling for other people. So if you're sending emails at 10 o'clock at night, guess what other people are doing at 10 o'clock at night that work for you? there's this delayed delivery thing in Outlook, and you just plop. You just get ready to send that email and you use the delayed delivery to for eight o'clock in the morning, and then you're not perpetuating that, you know, always on thing. So I mean, there's a million other [00:31:00] tips, but those are just a few to start.
Katie Perkins: Yeah, I love that. Delayed delivery one. 'cause nobody likes getting emails at 10 o'clock at night.
We'll be right back after this short break. Love Wildlife? Join The Wildlife Society to connect with a community of professionals working to advance wildlife science and conservation. Membership gives you access to exclusive resources, job boards, publications like The Wildlife Professional, discounts, and networking opportunities across North America. Learn more and join today at wildlife.org/join.
So I know something that doesn't get talked about a bunch, but is very prevalent in this work is this idea of ecogrief. You know, we're kind of working in a space that's not always good news, not always happy, happy things, and it feels like there's so many forces working against us.
How do you see that eco grief and you know, how do you think [00:32:00] that that's something that we could work on in our profession?
Michelle Doerr: Well, I think we need to be able to hold space for that. And when I say ecogrief and or ecoemotions, I talk about eco emotions because there's, there's a whole lot of it. But when I talk about ecogrief, it's kind of, you know, think of like natural disasters, right? Imagine your whole study area getting burned up. Or imagine it getting flooded or whatever, like we have to be able to talk about this stuff. I mean, I don't know about you, but I got into it for the passion of it, and that's painful. Right? But, um, I remember very specifically, and this really isn't ecogrief, but it has to do with the emotional work that we do. Is, when I was doing an ecogrief workshop for, well, there was a team of us doing it for a group. And this bear biologist just proceeded to tell this story where there were bear in a neighborhood and all the instructions for covering the [00:33:00] garbage cans were readily available. And you know, people decide, well, I'm more important and they didn't do it. So we, there were some bear that got into the garbage and eventually at least one of the bear had to be killed. And so he's saying. They're on site. The conservation officer's there, they have to kill this bear. And he says the conservation officer started tearing up a little bit and he said, I pushed the conservation officer aside. So the public couldn't really see the emotional response, you know, 'cause we have to be tough,
Katie Perkins: Mm-hmm.
Michelle Doerr: And I said to him, what if we didn't do that? What if the people in the neighborhood got to see that we're not robots, that we really care about this stuff? I urban deer manager having, I mean, my primary job was to kill deer. I didn't enjoy it, but I didn't say that out loud. Right? And so [00:34:00] I think if the people around us see how deeply passionate we are, they see the emotional side of this, that we're not just doing a job. It's more than a job, then I think maybe they would, I hope they might sit back and go, oh, I didn't realize that impact, and maybe I should just cover my stupid garbage. It's not that hard.
Katie Perkins: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Do you have any tips for. You know, from your counseling background and working through different kinds of grief with your family and, and these kind of really charged emotional situations, do you have any tips for if someone's feeling that way, how they might, kind of start to work through that or work to understand that?
Michelle Doerr: Yeah. I'll just say the first thing is go reconnect with nature somewhere. I was writing some articles, in fact, the, the ecogrief article that was in The Wildlife Professional several years ago um, I, oh, I forget the term. There's this, the [00:35:00] same feelings of actual ecogrief can show up when you're like spending too much time on it. And I noticed I didn't sleep the one night and I woke up the next morning and I was like, oh, there it is. So I went out for like a two hour bike ride. To really reground myself. You know, I went to a local prairie where they're doing some prairie restoration work. I have beautiful access to that, you know, and I just immersed myself there for a little bit.
So the first thing is like go, go ground, whatever that grounding thing is, whether it's breathing, whether it's getting outside, petting my daughter, going back to my daughter's eating disorder. Her dog saved both of our lives. Because when she was upset, I could say, go pet your dog. Right? So just having that nature connection is a great start.
And then I would say after that, right, acknowledge it. Acknowledge that you're feeling some pain. Like don't push it away right away. Maybe journal a little bit like what am I feeling? What is this? What is this bringing up in me? And [00:36:00] then from there it's like, okay, how can I see this differently? And maybe what's a small action I can take that would still like help me overcome that? And maybe it's just like talking to somebody else or holding the space for somebody else. But again, these are conversations that I think we really have to have 'cause we're passionate about this work.
Katie Perkins: Definitely. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today and, and really diving into this topic and opening up these conversations. Like we said, I, I really hope that this is a episode that is, is helpful and, and people share it with, you know, their coworkers and their friends and their other TWS members they've met and all of that.
Michelle Doerr: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, please do pick up the magazine. Start having those conversations with people around you.