EcoStrategist

There is something I have been thinking about for a while. In conservation, we invest heavily in technical expertise. We train people to understand biodiversity, restoration, carbon, community development, safeguards, monitoring frameworks, and increasingly complex standards. And we should, but somewhere along the way, many of our best technical experts become managers. And that is where things get interesting. One day, you are valued because you are excellent at your technical work. Then suddenly, your job changes. You are no longer responsible only for solving technical problems. You are responsible for people. You need to motivate teams, manage conflict, delegate, give difficult feedback, navigate budgets, build trust with communities, manage donor expectations, and make decisions with incomplete information. The technical expertise that made you successful is suddenly only part of the job. Yet we often behave as if leadership will simply appear. As if being a brilliant conservation...

 As many of you already know, this blog has always been my space to think out loud, a place for ideas, learnings, the things that stick with me long after they happen. Today's post is more personal than usual, and harder to write. Last week my son was diagnosed with leishmaniasis, and the days that followed taught me more about our public health system than I ever wanted to learn. For those who don't know it, leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease spread by the bite of a tiny sandfly. It's not rare here,   Ecuador has reported it for years, mostly in cases quietly absorbed by public hospitals and rarely discussed anywhere else. The World Health Organization classifies it as a “neglected tropical disease,” a category that exists specifically for illnesses that strike the world's poorest communities and never quite make it onto anyone's priority list. Somewhere between 700,000 and a million new cases appear worldwide every year, and most of them, like ours, happen far...

Hay algo profundamente valioso en querer entender cómo funciona la naturaleza. Durante siglos, biólogos y ecólogos se han dedicado a observar, describir y tratar de comprender la enorme diversidad de formas de vida que nos rodean. Gracias a esa curiosidad conocemos especies que antes eran invisibles para nosotros, entendemos relaciones ecológicas extraordinariamente complejas y hemos descubierto procesos que sostienen ecosistemas enteros. Muchas veces, además, los conocimientos que hoy resultan fundamentales para la conservación comenzaron con una pregunta que no pretendía resolver ningún problema inmediato. Por eso, defender una ciencia orientada a la conservación no significa cuestionar el valor de la investigación básica. Al contrario: significa reconocer que nuestro conocimiento sobre la biodiversidad se construye poco a poco, gracias al trabajo acumulado de personas que estudian especies, poblaciones, ecosistemas, genes, comportamientos, interacciones y procesos ecológicos. ...

I remember the exact meeting where I stopped believing in perfect plans. We were sitting in a community hall somewhere in the Amazon basin maybe something like 20 years ago; plastic chairs, a fan that wasn't doing much against the heat, a stack of maps we had spent weeks preparing. Beautiful maps, honestly. Deforestation models, priority zones, protected area gaps, all color-coded and defensible. We had the science. We had the funding logic. What we did not have, it turned out, was the room. An older man in the back,   I won't use his name, but I still hear his voice, waited until I finished my presentation and then asked, quietly … And where in this plan is my son's future? I didn't have a slide for that. That question rearranged something in me that has never gone fully back into place. Twenty-five years + into this work, I still think about it more than I think about most of the technical papers I've read or co-authored. The Methodology I Actually Belie...

  In a world that often measures success through productivity, wealth, and recognition, the Japanese word ikigai offers a gentler way to think about a meaningful life. Ikigai, pronounced ee-key-guy , is commonly translated as “a reason for being” or “that which makes life worth living.” It can describe the purpose that guides someone through life, but it can also refer to something much simpler: a morning ritual, a creative hobby, caring for a loved one, tending a garden, or sharing time with friends. People often assume that purpose must be extraordinary. They believe they need to discover one perfect career, calling, or mission that will explain everything. Your reason for getting up in the morning does not have to impress anyone. It does not need to become a business, attract attention, or change the world. Meaning can be found in small actions that make life feel worthwhile. For one person, ikigai may be teaching. For another, it may be cooking for family, learning a la...

 The Silent Crisis No One Talks About at the Monday Meeting There's a conversation happening in break rooms, in bathroom stalls, and in the quiet of a commute home, a conversation about exhaustion that goes bone-deep, about dread that arrives with Sunday evening, about smiling through a team call while quietly falling apart. Mental health at the workplace is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, yet it remains one of the least addressed. The numbers don't lie. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy $1 trillion per year in lost productivity. Burnout was officially recognized as an occupational phenomenon by the WHO in 2019. And yet, in most organizations, the response to a struggling employee is still a polite suggestion to "take a day off”, as if a single day off could undo months of chronic stress. This blog isn't about quick fixes or motivational posters in the office kitchen. It's about understandin...

  After decades working in the field I've come to one unavoidable conclusion: you cannot save nature without first understanding people. There is a moment every field conservationist knows. You stand at the edge of a forest patch, species checklist in hand, satellite imagery overlaid with boundary lines, and you look out at a landscape that is quietly, relentlessly changing. Not because of some distant abstraction called deforestation, but because a family is clearing half a hectare to plant maize. Because a herder's cattle are following the same corridor they have followed for generations. Because a river that once ran clean now carries the residues of a village that has no other option. In that moment, the biology is simple. The ecology is legible. But the solution? The solution lives entirely in the domain of human behaviour. I have spent my career, working to conserve key ecosystems and species in Latin America, and more recently in other areas around the world, watch...

Yesterday I sat down with someone and we started talking , the kind of talking that starts casual and ends up going somewhere you didn't expect. We were talking about purpose. And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, something quietly shifted for me. We've all asked ourselves the question at some point. What is my purpose? We frame it as a deeply personal search,   something to discover alone, like a treasure buried somewhere inside us, waiting to be uncovered. I've spent time with that question myself. Turned it over. Examined it from different angles. And for a long time, I thought the answer had to do with me. My passions. My fulfillment. My happiness. But yesterday, my friend said something that stopped me: "Purpose isn't something you find inside yourself. It's something that happens between you and other people." "We think we're doing things for ourselves. But we're always,   always,   doing them for someone else." ...

There is a quiet paradox at the heart of today's sustainability conversation. The organizations that spend their days restoring mangroves, training indigenous land guardians, measuring biodiversity baselines, and building equitable governance structures in fragile territories, the NGOs, foundations, and civil society coalitions of the third sector, are often the least visible players in the ESG discourse. And yet they are, in practice, doing ESG work before ESG had a name. The time has come to close that gap, not merely to speak the language of ESG, but to actively reshape it from within.   A Framework Born for Finance, Borrowed by Mission ESG, Environmental, Social and Governance, emerged as a screening mechanism for investors seeking to value companies beyond traditional financial indicators. Its logic was straightforward: measuring a firm's carbon footprint, its labor practices, and the integrity of its leadership, and you have a richer picture of long-term risk and value. I...

  People ask me sometimes,   how did you learn what you know? Where did you get your approach to work, to teams, to leadership? Honestly? Most of it didn't come from a course or a book. It came from people. Leaders who crossed my path at the right, or wrong,   moment. And I think it's worth talking about, because we don't say this enough: the leader you work for can change the entire trajectory of your career.   The One Who Told Me the Truth Early in my career, I received feedback that stung. A leader sat across from me and told me, plainly, that I wasn't paying enough attention to detail. That my work was good in the big picture, but I was missing things, small things that mattered. I remember leaving that conversation feeling deflated. Maybe even a little humiliated. I had worked hard. I thought I had done well. But here's the thing, that leader was right. And more importantly, they cared enough to say it to my face instead of working around me or simp...

  Every year, NGOs around the world invest enormous effort into strategic planning. Workshops are held, consultants are hired, beautifully formatted documents are produced. The vision is clear. The priorities are aligned. The board approves. And then, slowly, quietly, nothing changes. This is not a story about bad strategy. Most NGO strategies are perfectly reasonable. It is a story about the gap between deciding and doing, and why that gap swallows so many well-intentioned plans whole. The uncomfortable truth is that execution doesn't fail because people don't care. It fails because organizations lack the operating infrastructure to turn decisions into sustained action. They have strategy. They don't have rhythm.   The Five Reasons NGO Plans Fail Before we talk about what works, it is worth being honest about what consistently doesn't, and why. These failure patterns are remarkably consistent across organizations, regardless of size, geography, or cause area. ...