Eco-Grief, Burnout, and Building Resilient Conservation Teams
When Michelle Doerr started her career as a wildlife biologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, she had one clear mission: help animals. Her graduate school dreams of becoming a tiger biologist may have shifted to working with deer populations, but the passion remained. Then reality hit. "I got into wildlife to help animals and I have to spend most of my time killing them," she explains. That cognitive dissonance—the soul-crushing gap between why we enter conservation work and what the job actually requires—is just one symptom of a field in crisis.
Doerr is now the president of Anavah Consulting, a firm that works with state and federal wildlife agencies across North America to build capacity, create inclusive teams, and develop communication skills. Her shtick, as she calls it: "90% of wildlife management is people management, but we didn't get that in school." After years working in urban deer management and the archery industry, she recognized that conservation professionals receive extensive technical training but almost nothing to prepare them for the actual work: managing hostile public meetings, processing grief over environmental loss, or navigating the emotional weight of watching their science questioned daily.
Add eco-grief and eco-anxiety to the mix, and you have workers who desperately need honest spaces for hard conversations. Doerr's recent survey revealed this as the number one request: places to talk about what's really going on without fear or silencing.
Topics Discussed:
The hidden crisis of burnout in conservation work
Why "self-care" puts too much burden on individuals
Cognitive dissonance: entering the field to help animals, spending careers killing them
Eco-grief vs. eco-anxiety: present loss and future fears
The lack of people-management training in conservation education
Michelle's transition from wildlife biologist to conservation consultant
Finding hope through community and positive stories
Links:
Episode Transcript:
Michelle Doerr (00:00):
There was a wildlife biologist and conservation officer, so the conservation officer had to kill the bear and kind of got teared up. And the wildlife biologist said, "I quickly grabbed the conservation officer, shoved them aside so no one would see." And I said, "What if the public would have seen that emotional reaction and know that we're not just robots walking around that we really do care about this?"
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (00:31):
Hello everyone, and welcome to We Are Not Doomed. We bring you interviews with industry leaders, authors, journalists, and real people who are making an impact on climate change every day. We Are Not Doomed is produced by Puddle Creative. We're a full service podcast production agency, and I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld, the executive producer. Today, my guest is Michelle Doerr. She's the president of Anavah Consulting, a consulting agency based in Minnesota that works with conservation organizations and groups to help facilitate resilient self-care, inclusive and safe teams, and effective communication. She works with teams via online workshops, personalized coaching, and really has a pulse on what it's like to be working in the conservation and environmental world right now. Two of the topics that we get into that are really interesting and super of the moment are burnout and eco-grief, eco-emotions, eco-anxiety. I really enjoyed this conversation with Michelle.
(01:34):
She has some really insightful wisdom to take with you into this current time, and I really hope you enjoy the conversation. You can find our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and click the follow button, which really helps us grow our show. If you leave us a review and a rating, that would be awesome as well. Without further ado, here's our interview with Michelle Durr.
(02:03):
Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here. Where do we find you today?
Michelle Doerr (02:07):
I am sitting in St. Cloud, Minnesota today, not very far. I have a seasonal campground where I have an RV, so I'm not very far from there today.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (02:18):
Nice. My next question was going to be, how's your summer going? And it sounds like good. You've got a seasonal campground there.
Michelle Doerr (02:24):
I do. This is my ninth season at the campground. It is, I call it my sanctuary. It's 1,200 acres. There's a private lake, so I can go kayaking, I can go hiking, I can do my nature art. I live for my summer at the sanctuary.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (02:43):
Oh, that sounds gorgeous.
Michelle Doerr (02:45):
It is. Except for mosquitoes, right? We have the mosquitoes and gnats are pretty bad right now, but I can get through those for the rest of it.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (02:52):
Yeah. I just did a camping trip at a hip camp. Have you heard of hip camp before?
Michelle Doerr (02:57):
I have heard of it. I have not experienced it.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (03:00):
It sounds like a little ... I got a little taste of what you have. It's basically like you can rent other people's land. And so instead of camping at a state campground or something, people ... Sort of like Airbnb for land, people put their things. And there was an eagle at this property that lived in a tree and a little creek, and it was gorgeous. Summertime is great.
Michelle Doerr (03:23):
Well, we have loons and sandhill cranes. So depending on the day, I might hear loons waking up in the morning or I might hear the sandhill cranes.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (03:32):
Oh, that's awesome. So I want to talk all about Anavah consulting and your work and everything. And I especially want to ... I think this podcast we started last year, and obviously with the changes in administration this year, there's been a lot of ... I think a lot of the work that you do, some of it has to do with burnout in conservation. And I think that's something that so many people are dealing with right now, just because it feels like there's a lot of headwinds and there's a lot of work that people have done that feels like it's getting rolled back right now. So I definitely want to dive into that. But before we do, I did want to talk a little bit about how you got here. And I know that you've had a couple other cool careers basically before this one. You started out.
(04:18):
Talk to me about starting out as a wildlife biologist in Minnesota.
Michelle Doerr (04:22):
Yeah. My first job with Minnesota Department of Natural Resources out of graduate school was at the Farmland Wildlife Research Station. My first project was inventorying all of the deer vehicle collisions in the entire state of Minnesota. So all of the tickets that were issued for accidents came down to me and I logged them all. And we used that to some extent for population estimation. The other little odd thing we had to do as part of it was in May, which was towards the end of their gestation period about to give birth to fawns. Any dough that we found on the side of the road, we would have what we called a fetus kit inside of our vehicles, which had a knife and gloves and some things. And so we had to cut them open to figure out how many fawns were inside if it was a dough, and then we recorded that.
(05:17):
So it was kind of a very odd job. And people always thought it was pretty interesting that got in my vehicle that I had my little kit in there, and they always asked what it was. So that was quite an interesting job. But then the other piece that I was involved in was we did a major bow hunting study of wounding in bow hunting. And it was actually a landmark study that I participated in. It wasn't my study, I helped with it. So those were just a couple of the research projects that I was directly involved in.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (05:52):
When you started back then, did you start out as someone who was ... First I cared about animals and then I started caring about the environment. Or what was your relationship to that back in the day?
Michelle Doerr (06:03):
Well, I grew up on a dairy farm. So animals and even animal death to some extent were just a part of my growing up, but I always wanted to be ... I had tiger posters hanging in my room. I always wanted to be a tiger biologist, but when I got older, I realized there's what, four tiger biologists in the whole wide world. Maybe I should be a little bit more realistic. And I ended up working with deer.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (06:34):
How'd you transition from that field into the archery industry?
Michelle Doerr (06:38):
Well, from my job in research, I ended up ... There's the job that I did in between. I did wildlife damage management for a while, which in Minnesota is basically building fences against deer damage and damage created by Canada geese. But I was only in that for a short amount of time. My master's thesis was actually on urban deer management. So I ended up doing an urban wildlife job where my primary role was deer management in the Twin Cities metro area. I was in that for about a year, and then I got married and had children. And I do not regret taking a few years off to be with my children. Before I left though, I had helped developed what in Minnesota's called the Metro Bow Hunters Resource Base. So there was a lot of sharp shooting. We did some trap and kill back then to manage deer in the cities, but we also created this program, which I call, it's basically an urban deer service organization.
(07:44):
So instead of the cities having to pay for sharpshooters to remove deer, if it was done during the archery season, the city could work with this group who did shooting tests and they had to take orientation. It was very, very strict in order to be in the program, then they could work with this group to maybe remove deer from a certain park or something like that. And I also want to say that when that happened, all of those deer were either sent to food shelves or they were utilized in some way. People don't realize that we must utilize it all in some way. People don't take pleasure in having to do that. I got into wildlife to help animals, so we don't take pleasure in doing it, so we try to do the best we can.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (08:32):
Has the deer management in urban areas changed a lot since you were doing it, or has there been things that related to climate change that have changed this, just how many animals there are or the kinds of issues?
Michelle Doerr (08:46):
If I think in generalities, it probably hasn't changed a lot. I haven't kept track of some of the research, like the fertility control research. I haven't kept track of it, but as far as I know, it never really was able to be implemented in free range populations. I think generally each city, we always used to think that if a city had a deer management plan and then the city next door was going to start doing something, we'll just take the plan, just do the same thing. But community members have to have ownership in their own plan. And so we do have to let them go through the process. I would say, I don't know in general in the industry, but something that I wish, knowing what I know now that we had done better, is utilized animal rights activists who didn't want us to kill any deer at all and actually fought the program pretty hard.
(09:41):
But I think what we could have better worked with them on is help us educate people on why they shouldn't be feeding deer. Because if you're feeding deer, you're increasing the reproductive rate, which means we have to remove more animals in the end. So help us with that part, help us with homeowners and educating them on landscaping that's not going to create deer candy, that the deer aren't going to want to mow down. So I think we could have done a better job with some of those aspects of urban deer management.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (10:16):
Just transitioning to you starting Anavah Consulting, was there a moment when you saw this as a path that you could maybe go down and how did it all start?
Michelle Doerr (10:28):
Well, actually from my work, my urban deer work and the archery aspect of that, after I took some time off for my kids, an old boss ended up in the archery industry and he said to me, "Whenever you're ready to come back, let me know. " So that's how I ended up in the archery industry. And a lot of it had to do with the urban archery work that I did. And then when I left the industry, I just saw that my shtick for my company is 90% of wildlife management is people management, but we didn't get that in school. And I saw that working with the state and federal wildlife agencies, I saw that in archery too. We get the technical skills, but we don't get the people skills. And in fact, even upper levels of leadership, they may dabble in some training here and there, but they rarely get all the people training they need to do the work.
(11:21):
So I saw that as a big gap and that's where my company is focused now.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (11:27):
When you saw that need, how did you decide that you're like, "I'm going to start this consultancy." And was there a first client that you had that made you realize that you could maybe do this?
Michelle Doerr (11:38):
Yes. I had a client actually from the shooting sports industry, so related to archery, that didn't know that I had left the archery industry and I had posted something on LinkedIn and reached out to me and we actually hadn't been in touch for years and we ended up talking and he said to me, "I don't know what you're doing for us yet, but you will be doing something for us." So because I did the archery retail education program for the archery industry, I ended up doing it a similar, more reviewing their current programs, the shooting in the firearm side of it, reviewing their retail education programs and some of those things and suggesting some recommendations for how they might improve what they were doing. So that was my first big client. That's not ultimately what I do now. I do do some consulting, but not to that extent, but that was the impetus to believing that I could do this long term.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (12:39):
And so for people who just aren't familiar with your business, talk about the services you provide and what your consulting looks like.
Michelle Doerr (12:47):
I do a lot of work for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. I'm a national faculty there, so they do a lot of leadership development work with the state fish and wildlife agencies, the federal fish and wildlife agencies, even North Americans, so Canadian provinces. And then I do similar work with my own company. My current focus has really been on, I've shifted from words like self-care to capacity building. I'm shifting from burnout to it's not burnout. It's many other things that are not burnout. I'm actually not a big fan of the burnout industry because I think it puts too much ownership on the individual and not enough ownership into the system. Even imposter, I don't like the words imposter syndrome. I say it's imposter systems. Shout out to Teen Zikas, who I believe coined that term. So that's a lot of the work that I do now is you mentioned the administration, like literally all the chaos that's going on right now, and I don't think it's going to get better anytime soon.
(13:57):
We have to have people's capacity built at the forefront, not when they're in survival mode and we want to just help them along. We need to create systems of thriving and then go from there. And then we can do the good work we all want to do.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (14:11):
Does that look like you're meeting with a leadership team on a regular basis to kind of give them coaching or is this like one-off sessions that they're doing or how does that look?
Michelle Doerr (14:23):
It could be all of the above. The work that I do for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies tends to be a little more one-off. It's like they offer the workshops, people sign up for it. Tomorrow, I am starting to work with an executive team and we're doing every month for the foreseeable future, we're going to be doing some sort of capacity building topic for their leadership team because if you're not modeling at the top, it doesn't pay to talk about it at the bottom because they're going to look to the leadership. I've spoken to some groups and I listen to what they're struggling with and I might develop a workshop or a series around addressing their specific issues. I also just completed a survey that I called Voices from the Field and I'm going to put it on LinkedIn or Eventbrite or whatever.
(15:15):
For anyone in the field, I'm going to create a series of workshops built around what they've told me from the survey. One of the big things was they need honest places to have hard conversations about things like eco grief, burnout, what's really going on. That space is seriously lacking.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (15:37):
Yeah. And what are the biggest challenges that these groups are facing right now?
Michelle Doerr (15:42):
I did a keynote speech for a group and I use Mentee. It's an online polling system. And for that particular group, the burnout level was at about 83%. The survey that I just completed was at 53%. So we're talking significant numbers of people and it could be around emotional load. There's also this whole, I want to have hard conversations about real things going on. Again, we mentioned the administration. There's a lot of fear and silencing and they don't feel like it's a safe place to talk about some of these things, so that's a big challenge. I think some of the other challenges that come up are at public meetings where the public seems to be able to believe that they can behave in whatever manner they want to behave in without any sort of boundaries. This is one of the things that I almost insist on.
(16:39):
If you're doing public meetings, set up some agreements on how you're going to behave with each other.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (16:44):
Like the public who comes in, they sign something or they all verbally go ...
Michelle Doerr (16:50):
Yeah. I mean, in my dream world, they would register and at the registration part, these are the agreements that people are signing, sign your agreement. If it's a public meeting that's in a physical location, I would have those agreements up on the wall. I would verbally remind people when we started the meeting. And then the other thing is after some of these heated meetings, having a time to process afterwards, that's also skipped oftentimes. And then the whole thing around science, if the science doesn't say what I want it to say, it's not real science, I'm a scientist. We got into this work believing in our science and to have our life's work question on a daily basis, it kind of feels discouraging and defeating. Those are some of the realistic things that I think people are missing that I want to provide spaces for them to talk about.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (17:47):
I want to talk about something that you just mentioned, which is about that sometimes using burnout can put the onus on the person's shoulders and have it be more like, "Oh, this is a personal problem you have rather than a systemic problem." So how do you kind of flip that perspective and what would you help us kind of see that system?
Michelle Doerr (18:08):
Yeah. One of the ways I flip it, I did a workshop last year for, I called it high profile wellness. So these are people that are doing wolf management or chronic wasting disease or really highly public contentious issues. And what I asked them was, I listed a whole series of skills that's required to do that work, conflict resolution, cooperative language. There were probably 10 different things. And I asked them in a poll, "How many of you have got training in all of these things?" And guess how many there were?
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (18:46):
Almost zero.
Michelle Doerr (18:48):
Zero. There were a few people that had two or three of them, but no one had all of it. And oftentimes even people coming out of grad ... Like my job when I started in urban deer management, my first job was public facing, very public facing, but I wasn't trained in, like I said, cooperative language, maybe some psychology, that sort of stuff. And we're just not trained to do the real work we have to do. So that's a big one. I also talk about, again, going into urban deer management, it's cognitive dissonance. I get into wildlife to help animals and I have to spend most of my time killing them. So it's like a soul mismatch and we don't talk about that. Same way a story that I've told several times is I was doing a workshop for a group and the story was about a bear that had to be killed because some people didn't follow proper garbage covering procedures.
(19:56):
So the bear got in there, it started causing trouble and they had to kill the bear. There was a wildlife biologist and conservation officer, so the conservation officer had to kill the bear and kind of got teared up. And the wildlife biologist said, "I quickly grabbed the conservation officer, shoved them aside so no one would see." And I said, "What if the public would have seen that emotional reaction and know that we're not just robots walking around that we really do care about this. " So that's very much cognitive dissonance. We have to issue permits to drain wetlands or to do wetland replacement. And I'm sorry, even at a four to one, if I've got a wetland here, even if I replace it four to one, it's not the same wetland, not the same ecosystem. So we have to do these things that don't sit right for why we got in the field and we don't talk about that.
(20:53):
So that's just a couple of things to flip the script.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (20:56):
Yeah. And if I was someone hypothetically who's experiencing burnout in a sense that, as you said, there's a lot of rollbacks of environmental protection and things like that that are happening just in society at large. There's sometimes this distance maybe of just feeling like, "Okay, I have to keep working on the things that I'm doing, but also is our planet and our country going to be okay?"
Michelle Doerr (21:25):
Yeah.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (21:26):
What advice would you give for people who are dealing with that? It sounds like one thing is to think about, okay, there may be things that you have to deal with at your job that you have no training on and maybe try and get some of that, gain some of those skills, but any other kind of little bits of advice for a podcast?
Michelle Doerr (21:46):
I don't know if you're familiar with Joanna Macy, but she recently passed away. Googled Joanna Macy and you'll find lots of great things. But in the work that reconnects, she developed this model that goes in four steps, starts with gratitude, acknowledge the pain, see with new eyes and go forth. So start with gratitude, right? It's hard work, but we're still here. What can we be grateful for? And that acknowledge the pain is like, let's speak to what's really going on here. Let's not skip that step because if we acknowledge what's really going on, we can find that seeing with new eyes piece. We can find how can we look at something a little bit differently. And then other things that come up for me is what's in my control. And then the other thing is I think we forget to tie some of the mundane tasks that we have to do to the bigger purpose.
(22:39):
And so I ask people, take those mundane tasks, tie them to the bigger purpose. So even when you're doing them, you're reminded that there's something bigger that's related. The other thing I'll say is a lot of people in the field do not have the time that they really should be taking to be with nature. A lot of people are behind desks. They're doing what I'm doing. They're talking to the public and they don't actually get the time to go back and remember why they got in the field in the first place. So I'm even suggesting walking meetings outside, taking breaks. During COVID, I said, "Open the front door instead of the fridge door." We don't take that time. And when I say be with nature, I mean put the device away, drop everything, don't take the stuff with you, get that time that you need to reground yourself in that bigger purpose.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (23:36):
It's such good advice. And it's something that as soon as you said it, I was like, "Oh yeah, I really need..." I bet everybody who hears that from you is like, "Oh yeah, I really need to do that. I need to build that into my schedule." Or even people who live in cities, it doesn't mean driving two hours. It can be as simple as the park next door or things like that.
Michelle Doerr (23:57):
Yeah. Another statement that I use is the thing that you're resisting the most is the thing you need to do. I need to push through this. As urgent as it might feel, the most important thing you need to do is take a break, take a rest and reset.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (24:16):
Yeah. We've talked a little bit about eco grief already, and that's something that I think you probably have in surveys and stuff have come across a lot of, besides the burnout question. Can you explain just what it is and how that's showing up for people right now and what people can do about it? I mean, we've already talked about a couple things, but ...
Michelle Doerr (24:37):
Yeah, I use the term eco emotions. So there's a whole list of eco emotions. In fact, there's a book, it's called Earth Emotions by Glen Albrecht. So there's a whole verbiage around some of these emotions. The two that are probably the most commonly used out there are eco grief and eco anxiety. And I would say eco grief, like we think about the floods in Texas, floods in North Carolina, fires. This is grief for things we're seeing happening to nature right now in the present. So it's the grief that you normally think of losing someone. We're losing these places that are often very meaningful to us and sometimes our source of life too. And then you also have this ecoanxiety, which is similar, but it's more future oriented. It hasn't happened yet, but it's the worry that that sort of flooding situation's going to happen where I am or that sort of fire is going to happen where I am.
(25:40):
I'm not very far. We're affected by smoke from Canada. I'm not very far right now from potential fire. So there is a concern about that. And going back to removal of some of the Environmental Protection Agency, there's a serious worry about some of the things that we've done well over the past few years, like endangered species all disappearing. It's a legitimate worry and some of the same things. I go back to that Joanna Macy model. What am I grateful for right now right in front of me, the people around me, the animals and wildlife around me, like really soak that in. You know what? Don't skip that, acknowledge the pain, say what it is, speak it, share it. Because if there's one thing that I learned since COVID in the field is people just wanted to know they weren't alone in their suffering. So speak it.
(26:30):
And then again, the same things. Find what you can control, get out in nature, find a community of people that you can have these conversations with. Those are the big ones.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (26:38):
Yeah. I think a lot of right now when you talk about climate change, environmental issues, sometimes there's like this political polarization that happens, especially in our country right now. How do you kind of navigate that as a conservation professional?
Michelle Doerr (26:55):
Yeah. Actually, I've been talking to a state that's about to implement a wildlife advisory committee, as you can imagine. It's a very polarizing issue. And the way I approach it is it's not me against you. It's what you value, what you hold at high value and what I hold at high value seemingly conflicting. And how can we acknowledge the values? I would argue even in the urban deer management work that I did, it might appear that I don't value deer if I'm spending my time having to kill them. But no, I do actually value deer. I didn't enjoy doing that part of the job. It was part of the job. So can we focus on the values and figure out how those values can sit together? How can we hold all of those values in a single community rather than making it you against me kind of thing.
(27:53):
And the other thing is I've been doing some work on environmental identity. How did your environmental identity form? So if you go back to my story, I grew up on a farm, dairy farm, I was around animals, I was around animal death. And so what I believe about nature makes sense based on how I was raised, where I was raised, that sort of stuff. And so someone else who had a very different experience from mine, it makes sense that they believe what they believe. So again, it's not right or wrong. It's not you against me. If we spend time figuring out, okay, how did you get to that belief? Okay, that makes sense. So then it's not so conflictual. So I kind of dabble in those sorts of things. What are we valuing? And then how did we get to believe what we're believing in and that there's no necessarily right or wrong.
(28:46):
It all makes sense based on our background. So hopefully we can weave in some things that connect us as we're telling those stories.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (28:53):
Yeah. I can see going back to the consulting work you do where you like, even just the simple advice of the agreements going into public meetings, that all these things you're saying, not only is it important to understand them yourself, but to vocalize them to the community or to the group or to the people that you're working with at the very beginning so that you can say, "Hey, I don't know where we're going to go in this conversation, but here's the groundwork that we can lay to not start yelling at each other, basically."
Michelle Doerr (29:26):
Yeah, right. I mean, I think it's a good practice anyway, but sadly in today's environment, this isn't optional anymore because the people working inside the agencies deserve protection as well as individuals, as people, and I think anyone in the room. So everyone also deserves to be valued, to be heard. And if that requires us to have some agreements about how we're going to behave with each other, then the deal is too also, it takes some of the pressure off at me as a facilitator, and you all agree to this. They're called agreeing Payments for a reason. You all get to let everyone else know, "Hey, I think we're violating an agreement here," or maybe there's an agreement we need to add.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (30:09):
So just looking towards the future, what keeps you hopeful in the work that you're doing and maybe outside of that too, if there are other things that you've seen from clients or other organizations?
Michelle Doerr (30:20):
There's a couple of things that keeps me hopeful. One is that there are more and more people in the field that are talking about wellbeing, talking about these topics, bringing these hard conversations to light. It kind of takes a little bit of the pressure off. You can almost feel like a balloon popping like, "Okay, we're all experiencing this. It's not just me. " So there's more and more of those conversations happening. Another place that I really get hope from and I suggest for other people is find community that really inspires you. One of the communities that I love that I enjoy being a part of is called the Global Regeneration Collab. It's all things regeneration. It's regenerative economics, regenerative leadership, regenerative governance, regenerative agriculture where most people think about. So we're talking soils and water and regenerative communities. So I know I have access to people globally who are doing the on- the-ground regenerative work and some of their projects are just so inspiring.
(31:25):
So find that community of people, find those research articles that show, "Hey, we found a new species or this endangered species is doing well." Pay attention as much to the positive stories because otherwise the negative stories can kind of really creep in. And there's another group that I'll mention too is called the Center for Purposeful Leadership and I get inspired by them all the time.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (31:51):
Yeah, that's really great. So just I guess to wrap up, tell people where to find you and what you're doing next.
Michelle Doerr (31:58):
So you can primarily find me on my website. It's www.Anavahconsulting.com, A- N-A-V-A-H. I also am on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. And again, I do a lot of this work around leadership, culture, capacity building in conservation and the environment. That's my heart. That's where my heart goes. I can do it for other businesses and stuff, but the field of conservation and environment is, they're my people.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (32:24):
Awesome. Well, Michelle, just thank you so much for first taking the time to chat with us today and love learning about your business as well as your story. And also just thank you for the great work that you're doing. It sounds like we need about a million more Michelles in the world, so thank you so much.
Michelle Doerr (32:41):
That's really a great compliment. Thank you so much. And thanks for having me. I had a great time.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (32:49):
Thank you for listening to We Are Not Doomed. I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld with Puddle Creative, and thanks so much to Michelle Doerr for being on the podcast today. To find more episodes of the podcast, go to wearenotdoomed.com. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Until next time, have a wonderful week.