Let me take you back to 2010. I’m in South Africa for the first time. My husband, Kruger, who grew up there, is introducing me to African penguins. I’m enchanted. Something shifts that I don’t have words for yet. I’m not a conservationist. I am running my technical writing company. Logic and facts are my compass. And yet something about that bird, we call him Waddlesworth, makes a lot of lifelong “shoulds” dissolve.
Later that year, we learn that African penguins are uplisted to an endangered species.
When we co-founded KruShan Foundation, the window to protect African penguins had narrowed from the day Waddlesworth first looked back at me.
I tell you this not because it’s part of my “why,” but because it explains how this work is personal in a way that’s hard to compartmentalize. When the population data comes back worse than expected, and it does, it isn’t just a professional setback. It feels like losing something you love. And nobody really prepares you for that part of conservation.
The problem has a name (several, actually)
Researchers now use terms like “eco-anxiety,” “ecological grief,” and “solastalgia,” a word coined to describe the distress caused specifically by environmental change in places you know and love. A landmark study published in The Lancet Planetary Health surveyed 10,000 young people across 10 countries and found that nearly 60% reported being “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change, with that figure climbing above 90% in countries already bearing the worst impacts. More than half described feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, or guilty. The American Psychological Association now formally defines eco-anxiety as “chronic fear of environmental doom.”
That’s the public. For people who work in conservation, the exposure is more concentrated.
The urgency trap
African penguins are projected to be functionally extinct in the wild by 2035 if current trends hold. That kind of knowledge doesn’t stay neatly in a professional compartment. It affects sleep, eating, and makes small talk seem irrelevant. The crisis narrative can fuel a mode of relentless activity that feels like dedication but is really just a way to outrun and numb the grief. It works for a while. And then it doesn’t.
When the mission is a huge part of your identity, and mine is, a setback in the field stops feeling like a professional problem and starts feeling like a personal failure. I didn’t get into this to have a career. I got into it because a penguin looked at me and something changed. When that cause loses ground, the threat becomes more personal.
What doesn’t help (and why we all do it anyway)
Isolating yourself from people outside the field. Convincing yourself there’s no time to rest. Treating the inability to stop working as evidence that you care enough. I recognize all of these in myself.
The instinct in those moments is to withdraw, from family, from friends, from anyone who doesn’t share the same vocabulary of loss. It’s understandable. It’s also counterproductive. Connection isn’t a luxury in this work. It’s a load-bearing wall.
What the research recommends
The things that work are sustainable practices that must be built into how you operate, not bolted on when you’re already in crisis.
- Name what you’re experiencing. Climate psychologist Caroline Hickman, who has spent over 15 years in this space, is direct: eco-anxiety is not a mental illness, and one of the most important first steps is to validate feelings of anxiety. Calling it what it is, grief, dread, exhaustion is accurate not weak.
- Find your people. When conservationist Jessie Panazzolo started the Lonely Conservationists blog, she did it to process her own despair. What she found instead was a global community working on the same problems. It made her realize that the world wasn’t on her shoulders alone. “I care about conserving conservationists — that is my part and I’m going to do it well.” That reframe, your job is your specific piece, not the entire puzzle, is functionally useful, not just emotionally comforting. I come back to it often, especially in the harder weeks.
- Know your limits and say so out loud. Do what you can. Admitting personal limitations, rather than treating them as shameful, is what allows people to stay in the field long enough to make a difference.
- Act at the scale you can influence. Researcher Sacha Wright puts it plainly: “When you feel helpless, focus on what is within your control, then take small steps in the right direction. Often, motivation follows action, rather than the other way around.” Research confirms that direct conservation work, hands in the habitat, eyes on the species, measurably improves mental health and sense of agency. This is part of why we stay close to the work itself, not just the fundraising, advocacy, and education around it.
- Treat your grief as information, not failure. Conservation biologist Tierra Curry, after writing eulogies for 21 species declared extinct by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in a single year, said: “It’s important to make space for grief, because grief is a rational response to what is happening to the planet. But it’s also important to not dwell there.” Grief points at what you value. It doesn’t have to dictate what you do next.
- Go outside. Not to document it. Not to assess it. Just to be in it. Conservationist Jessie Panazzolo says it’s “sometimes hard to remember, when we’re in the thick of it, to just go out in nature and enjoy it.” I get outside every day, sometimes more than once. It helps. Always.
The institutional problem we’re finally talking about
Individual resilience matters. But it would be dishonest to put all the weight there.
Conservation burnout is largely invisible to the outside world. Stories about wildlife protection rarely extend beyond the animals and the ecosystems. But every field study, every community partnership, every advocacy campaign runs on human endurance.
KruShan is small and scrappy by design. But I also know it means there’s no structural cushion when the work gets heavy. We’re not unusual in that. The conservation sector chronically underfunds the human infrastructure that makes the ecological work possible. If organizations treat staff and volunteer mental health as a wellness add-on rather than an operational priority, that’s not just a management failure. It’s a conservation failure. Species recovery is measured in decades. You cannot achieve decade-scale goals with a workforce that burns through people every few years.
The argument for staying
I want to be clear: none of this is an argument for pretending things are better than they are. African penguins are critically endangered due to human activities, including overfishing, oil spills, climate change, and habitat destruction. The situation is genuinely urgent. I’m not going to soft-pedal that.
But the argument for staying in this work with full capacity intact, rather than hollowed out, is equally real. Waddlesworth didn’t ask me to destroy myself on his behalf. He just looked back at me, and somewhere in that exchange, a different set of priorities became obvious.
The people doing this work who last, who move the needle over the long arc of a species’ survival, are not the ones who feel no grief. They’re the ones who’ve found a way to carry it without being crushed by it. Who’ve located their specific piece of the work and learned to do it well, day after day, even when the headlines are bad. Who’ve stopped treating rest and connection as rewards to be earned and started treating them as requirements for staying in the fight.
That’s the disposition. Not optimism, exactly. Not the certainty that it will work. Just the stubborn insistence that this piece, the one that’s yours, is worth showing up for. Waddlesworth is still out there. That’s enough to keep going.