March is Women’s History Month, so I have been thinking about the tremendous contributions of women in conservation and beyond.
My daughter is a first-year student at Mount Holyoke College, a women’s college founded by Mary Lyon in 1837, a time when “the idea of a college for women was horrifying to many people.” After nearly two centuries, there has been important progress toward changing attitudes like this, but the 2024 Women in the Workplace report reminds us that—this part comes as no surprise to every woman I have spoken with—gains are fragile and less extensive than you might think. This is ironic in part because gender diverse teams perform better than single gender teams and, on average, women score higher than men in most leadership skills, including in areas essential to collaboration such relationships, teamwork, resilience, communication, and driving for results.
In 2014, it was two women who led a petition signed by hundreds of women and men calling for an end to fighting about whether we should conserve nature for its own sake or because it has value to humans. To move past this debate, they argued, we should create “an equal role for women and for practitioners of diverse ethnicities and cultures in envisaging the future of conservation science and practice.” In our current political environment, “equal role” and “diverse” might sound like a liberal agenda, but the stakeholders involved in conservation success come from across spectrums of values, geography, and culture. For example, I recently met with a private landowner who is committed to both protecting pronghorn migration routes (nature for nature’s sake) and maintaining healthy sagebrush for raising cattle (nature for its value to humans), demonstrating “care-based” decision-making present among many rural, often conservative, ranchers in the Western US.
On my path to the Center for Collaborative Conservation, I am grateful for my mother, my spouse and daughter, and many women friends and colleagues who have taught me so much over the years, including several who were instrumental in creating the CCC. In a 2016 lecture, the first CCC director, Robin Reid, said “the thing I like to do most is help people reach their potential.” She certainly helped me reach mine. When I arrived at the CCC in 2019, Kim Skyelander had just completed her first decade leading the CCC Fellows Program, which continues to support collaborative conservation in Ecuador and across the globe. Heather Knight, also at the CCC in 2019, spent 25 years beautifully and effectively demonstrating work in communities that led to the protection of more than 400,000 acres of the Laramie Foothills. I learned much from Ch’aska Huayhuaca’s Atlas of Collaborative Conservation in Colorado and more recently Preparing landscapes and communities to receive and recover from wildfire through collaborative readiness. I also continue to learn from María Fernández-Giménez, who, in addition to being a world-class researcher, inspires me around the power of vulnerability, care, and love. As María has written, this is hard work, but it is work worth doing.
Be well,
This letter is part of our monthly series, “John’s Journal”, where CCC Director John Sanderson shares his musings on current happenings in the world of collaborative conservation.
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