K Gregg Consulting - Communicating Conservation

The Accidental Businesswoman: Sharing Lessons Learned from Self-Employment

K Gregg Consulting — Wed, 16 May 2018 23:30:15 +0000

This Conservation Communications blog has, until now, concentrated on the conservation side of the equation. Today, I’m going to address the communication side—marketing to be specific.

In fact, today will you please be my marketing guinea pig?

I never had any ambitions to go into business for myself, and yet I’ve had a conservation communications business for almost 10 years now. That’s why I call myself an “accidental businesswoman.” It’s been an amazing journey, and I’ve busted my butt, working weekends and late hours many a week.

I’ve also loved every minute of it! (okay, almost every minute!)

This explains one of the reasons I decided to write a book about my experience in business. I sincerely think if I can successfully run my own business, a lot of others probably can too. In fact, I think that finding your passion and turning it into a business is probably one of the best ways for anyone to achieve their full potential as an individual in this world.

One of the things I enjoy most about having my own business is the opportunity—the necessity!—to learn: new developments in conservation, new skills, new internet-based tools. Online communications seems to move at the speed of sound, and it’s getting faster.

As I began paying attention to forces making it easier for people to go independent, I also discovered and dove into a few mega-trends affecting work:

the decline of corporate jobs in America
the rise of artificial intelligence
the growing number of sharing platforms and the “sharing economy”

I also found out that I’m in good company in my thinking about the value of self-employment. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of microcredit and social entrepreneurship, says in his book A World of Three Zeroes, that as fundamentally creative and problem-solving humans, “We are not job seekers, we are job creators.”

Here comes the guinea pig part

Aanother reason I decided to write a book is that self-publishing also means self-marketing. My learning in that arena has increased exponentially since I began thinking about writing a book.

My book, Career Reinvented, is now complete and available on Amazon. Now here is my latest marketing trick. You’ve all seen this tactic, I’m certain, but it is something that appears to be absent from the bag of tricks employed by most conservation nonprofits.

I’m giving away the stories behind the book as a means of "building my list." Called How They Did It: Ten Wild Rides with Successful Solopreneurs and Small Business Owners, these are the hero's journeys of the generous folks who provided much of the advice that is key to my book's self-employment recommendations.

The stories illustrate individuals at different points along the career spectrum, such as . . .

Dan is an engineer, who after getting laid off in his late 50s began a handyman business that is now booming.
Ivan is a young cinematographer who immigrated to the U.S. from Brazil, and was, by default, self-employed from the moment he graduated from college, but has managed to work with the likes of Anthony Hopkins.
Jose and Melanie are a couple in their 40s who, after losing their jobs, were running 5 microbusinesses until they hit upon their own eureka formula: a sport fishing business on a Pacific Island off the coast of Baja, California.

I was uniformly inspired by the people I interviewed for my book.

And thanks for being my guinea pig!

Not a still life: What birds at my winter feeder taught me

K Gregg Consulting — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 13:35:34 +0000

It has snowed in Memphis, but not enough to warrant making tracks through the pristine polar environment after weathering a bout of the flu. Instead, I am perched at my kitchen table with a cup of hot coffee and cream, a pair of binoculars, and my ancient National Geographic bird guide. Outside my winter window, the birds flocking to my feeders have engaged me for hours.

Here are the things I am reminded that I knew but had forgotten:

Finches are some of the feistiest birds on the block. I’ve seen goldfinches stand their ground, hissing and billowing out their wings to scare away larger juncos and sparrows. A simple vine a mere half-inch from the ground can make all the difference in the world to a dove with fluffed feathers bloused over its feet to get warm. The glimpse of yellow in the spread of a Pine Siskin’s tail just glows. The mottled border between the white and charcoal of a junco’s plumage resembles cloud edges. How gosh-dern cute are chickadees! (If my sweet pup, a schnauzer/poodle mix, were a bird, she’d be a chickadee.) How beautifully rich are all the shades of brown in nature’s rainbow. How a cardinal simply defines the color red.

Here are the things that, even after decades of birding, I just noticed today:

Chickadees prefer the red kidney beans to all the other oil seeds in my feeder mix. Larger animals—the cardinals, sparrows, and squirrels—seem to act almost like “granivore engineers” because when they land on the ground, numerous smaller birds alight nearby attracted to the detritus that falls from their seed-cracking efforts. Cottontails are fastidious about maintaining the bottoms of their long hind feet free from snow. Songbirds on the ground will apparently hop around on one leg, switching them out occasionally, presumably to conserve body heat. After cracking them open, cardinals eat black sunflower seeds by stripping out the meat from first one side of the shell, then the other. The “stripe” on the top of a White-throated Sparrow’s head can actually be more of a zig-zag, a la current barber fashion. The subtlety and gradation of hues that shine out softly from the face and breast of a Mourning Dove are worthy of Rembrandt.

Here are the questions I have:

When all the birds startle at once, is it sometimes just because the flightiest one among them jumped the gun at something innocuous? How does a tiny icicle ever begin to form on the tail of a goldfinch or the crest of a titmouse? Is the Carolina Wren, an infrequent visitor to the feeder, dominant to all the finches because of its long sharp bill or its pugnacious personality (or both)? What is the evolutionary advantage of having cream-colored eyeliner on a squirrel but black face markings on a cardinal?

Above all, how would life be different if I could concentrate this much attention on every important thing in my life?

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Of Prairie Preachers and Sacred Gems

K Gregg Consulting — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 12:45:17 +0000

“Twenty-five years will be too late.” That is the tagline of the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative (SGI), and until I heard from the luminaries who assembled at Austin Peay State University on Nov 7th for a Summit to launch SGI, I did not realize quite how literal those words were.

To quote Dwayne Estes, the South’s “Prairie Preacher” and Executive Director of SGI, “There is no greater issue facing terrestrial Southeastern biodiversity than loss of open habitats.” Theo Witsell, SGI’s Research Director, emphasized that native prairies should be thought of as “sacred gems” because of the importance of these small high-quality remnants to larger-scale grasslands restoration.

Why will 25 years be too late?

First, native grasslands in the Southeast are simultaneously extraordinarily diverse and critically endangered. We don’t have an “Endangered Ecosystem Act” (although we probably should), but many species native to Southeast grasslands are already listed, rare or declining: specialized plants, pollinators, grassland birds and more.

Second, once destroyed, it is impossible to bring native prairies, savannas, glades, barrens and meadows back to their original diversity. For someone like me, used to the world of riparian forest restoration where tree species diversity can often be counted on two hands, and plantings respond with relatively rapid growth and wildlife response, it is hard to conceive that a system can get so broken it can’t be put back. One speaker at the Summit cited a 40-year-old restoration in the Midwest that still had a fraction of the diversity of native prairies, even though its current diversity is quite high. Scientists recently discovered new elements of the prairie soil microbiome that are completely missing from agricultural lands.

Witsell says that native grasslands should not be thought of as early successional systems on their way to becoming forest, but as stable mature communities with a late successional or even “climax” ground layer maintained by periodic above-ground disturbance (often fire). Someone called for a revolution in branding, recasting grasslands from early successional systems to naturally open, sunny ecosystems.

Third, and most importantly, 25 years will be too late because the native grassland sites, the balds and barrens, the savannas, prairies, and seepage meadows of the South, are almost entirely left in small patches of 1 to 5 to 40 to 600 acres. Grasslands are now so rare, that their loss often goes unnoticed. In Arkansas, the Grand Prairie, once truly grand at 500,000 acres, has been reduced to less than 400 acres (this number had to be updated from 430 to 400 after posting this article - that's how fast native grasslands are going). One could cite similarly depressing statistics for every other southeastern state.

In short, native prairie is more rare globally than tropical rain forest. Put another way, grasslands are the least conserved and most threatened major ecosystem on Earth.

The Southeast: Resilient biodiversity engine of North America

Alan Weakley, Director of the UNC Herbarium and Chair of SGI’s Scientific Advisory Committee, took a step back and asked, “Where is the biodiversity in the U.S.?” The Southeast U.S. gets top billing for the following: native grasses, tree diversity, amphibian diversity, amphibian endemics, reptile endemics, mammal endemics, bird endemics, fish diversity, and fish endemics. Along with California, the Southeast is very high in narrow endemics, woody plant species, and number of species overall, and probably also competitive in crayfish and cave fauna Wow.

Weakley went on to give us a more in-depth evolutionary understanding of our open, sunny Southern heritage. Biodiversity is higher in southeastern grasslands than other areas of the U.S. because they are more ancient: they have never been glaciated (and interior grasslands have never been covered by oceans.) Southeastern grasslands have the highest fine-scale plant species richness in the world—with as many as 50 plant species found in a single square meter plot!

Hot spots of species endemism in the Southeast are indicators of refugia from climate change and other factors precisely because these areas have had a long time to evolve under changing environmental conditions. These patch communities are prepared for just about any future possibility because they have been shaped by many past events. According to Weakley, they are “mini-arks of biodiversity” containing both indigenous species as well as others that migrated, pushed by glaciation then left behind as glaciers retreated.

Unlike your stock portfolio, past performance is an indicator of future results when it comes to biodiversity and resilience! Of approximately 6,500 plant species in the Southeast, roughly two-thirds are grassland obligate or dependent. Of 161 new plants discovered since 2000, 70% are grassland species.

The Summit closed on an ironic note. Reed Noss, esteemed ecologist, author of Forgotten Grasslands of the South, and Chief Science Advisor for SGI, has long been an advocate for landscape conservation. But he said, “With the recent shift in emphasis to large landscape conservation and working landscapes, many naturally small grasslands are no longer of interest to public and private conservation agencies.” But, he pointed out, this is a mistake because relatively small, pristine “pocket prairies” are hugely important for biodiversity conservation. Remember: once they are gone, we cannot bring them back.

Using gems as anchors

Summit participants seemed nearly unanimous in their recognition that large-scale landscape conservation is important. But, they said, the pendulum has swung too far if we are willing to let go of these remaining precious jewels forever simply because they are small. Instead, these irreplaceable gems should be the anchors that define fixed points of conservation around which larger landscapes, habitat restoration, and integration with working lands can be managed more flexibly.

“It’s not just about wildflowers,” said Estes, “It’s about ecological collapse. When you take away the base of the food web it affects all elements of biodiversity.” What does SGI aim to do to halt the loss of biodiversity and bring back native grasslands? SGI has an 8-pronged approach, which includes preservation, restoration, recreation, rescue, research, seedbanking, markets, and education. A key means for achieving these goals is to develop a grant program for partners around the Southeast using funding from philanthropic and corporate sponsors.

Education is profoundly important because people don’t understand grasslands. Even some conservationists don’t recognize the value of small-patch communities.

Aside from the inherent worth of such a diverse, resilient and beautiful ecosystem, here are some of the additional reasons we should be using prairies and savannas as anchors for our landscape conservation: water filtration, pollinators, carbon sequestration, flood control, wildlife habitat, drought-resistant livestock forage, a source of native biofuel materials, extraordinary biodiversity, and seed sources.

We also need to focus on helping people to recover their sunny, open habitat heritage. We can do this through volunteer programs, such as the Botanical Guardians, lovingly shepherded by Jennifer Ceska of the Georgia Plant Conservation Alliance, or other forms of hands-on involvement, and especially local access to prairie patches. Paraphrasing Carol Davit, Executive Director of the Missouri Prairie Foundation: From a distance, prairie can all look the same, like an ocean. But it is also alive like an ocean, with its own wild teeming wonders that come into focus only when we take the time to explore it.

Can the Southeast’s grasslands survive into the 22nd century? Not until there is a coordinated effort to conserve, research, and rebuild them. That is the mission of the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative.

[Endnote: The ideas in this blog are borrowed from the presenters at the SGI Summit, but any mistakes and inaccuracies are mine.]

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Letting Nature In

K Gregg Consulting — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 14:45:27 +0000

Over the past year, I found myself opposing a mixed use development near my neighborhood -- a rather awkward position for an avowed conservationist to find herself in. Awkward because mixed use development and infill development are two important ways that urban planners can lessen the footprint of cityscapes on the land, making it easier to leave more open space for agriculture, forests, and habitat.

Although many of us supported the infill aspect of the development, our reasons for opposing the mixed use were many. They included three (now four) midrise apartment towers (originally proposed as 9-stories and later amended to 6) plopped down in the middle of a typical single-family home suburban residential neighborhood. Traffic at the time, exacerbated by nearby work on Interstate 40, was already a headache and seemed destined to become a permanent nightmare with the potential of up to 2,600 more cars in a relatively small space.

But above all, my own personal reasons for opposing were aesthetic. This development, called “Parkside,” borders the 4,400-acre Shelby Farms Park — America’s largest urban park located in Memphis, TN — as well as its Greenline trail.

Please don’t mix your city with my park

Although aesthetics is the most impractical of arguments against development, it’s notable that a majority of comments from people, left on the opposition Facebook page and on the community’s >1,300-signature petition opposing Parkside, focused on loss of beauty and an anticipated decline in the quality of the park experience. People expressed sadness and anger at the prospect of heavy traffic, tons of people, businesses, and tall buildings looming over this bucolic park.

Shelby Farms Park is extraordinary because it allows roughly 1 million residents of our greater metro region to access, right within city limits, areas without any visual traces of the city: no pavement, no concrete, no cars, no buildings. It may not be possible to entirely escape the muted sound of distant traffic, but it is deeply calming simply to be surrounded by living plants, pond views, birdsong and nothing else.

Inviting Nature in

We lost our battle last year, and Parkside will be built. Ironically, I now find myself hoping that the developer is successful because for good or ill, the fate of my neighborhood is now tied up with that of Parkside. I also hope that as details of Parkside’s design and landscaping take shape, he will consider inviting nature into the development as a counterbalance to the cityscape he is bringing into the Park. In so doing, he would be joining a distinguished and visionary group of thinkers who are calling for a new way of approaching habitat, wildlife, and green spaces within cities.

One such thinker is Doug Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home. He promotes this simple approach: instead of thinking where we might “leave” areas for landscaping, we should think what is the minimum we need to take and let the rest remain. In a 2015 interview with High Country Gardens, he said, “Abandon the age-old concept that humans live here and nature is somewhere else and embrace the concept that we need to share our spaces with nature. We enjoy a walk in the woods; we enjoy seeing butterflies, birds, beautiful flowers, etc. Research has shown that spending time in nature is the very best way to recharge your attention span and deal with the stresses of life. Living with nature is a healthy necessity, not a sacrifice we must endure.” This is something that Parkside developers are betting on!

Tallamy continues: “We have 45.6 million acres of lawns and it is growing by 500 square miles each year. That’s an area 8 times the size of New Jersey from which the species that run our ecosystems have been removed. . . . Lawn should be restricted to the areas on which we walk in our landscapes; it is a mechanism for guiding us through our landscapes. Lawn should not be our default landscaping practice.”

Making the Greenline less green

Current plans for the roads to accommodate Parkside traffic will require removal of some trees along the shaded Greenline Trail that marks the northern park boundary and Parkside’s southern edge. In addition, the developer has proposed taking on management of the trail fronting his property by clearing the “underbrush” from beneath the Greenline’s oaks and maples and installing a lawn.

This may sound like a small thing, but this is how it begins: we let the urban creep into our natural areas bit by bit until they are unrecognizable as natural.

Bicyclists, joggers, walkers, and wildlife watchers who venture along such a sanitized portion of the Greenline will be unlikely to see cardinals flit across the trail, to hear the scolding calls of wrens that nest in the trailside shrubs, or the song of the towhee that skulks in the underbrush. They will not see Black-eyed susans blooming at the trail’s edge, and without flowers and blooming shrubs there are sure to be no bees or butterflies either. Trail users will no longer feel cool when the sun sits low in the sky and the sun’s rays heat the paved trail formerly enclosed by vegetation. All of this in exchange for what? A clipped lawn that costs money to maintain, including regular (and noisy) mowing during spring and summer.

Having lost the battle to prevent an urban invasion of my natural area park, I would like to ask the Parkside developer to consider inviting more nature into his mixed use design. As the dominant species on the planet, we have to do better at inviting nature into our yards, our parks, and our businesses while preventing “city creep” into the forests, meadows, and streamsides we still have left.

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Bumpersticker explained: “Want more forests? Use more wood!”

K Gregg Consulting — Fri, 21 Jul 2017 14:26:37 +0000

Peter Stangel is an expert birder who has spent his life working to conserve bird habitats, and — for the past 10 years — forest habitats in the South specifically. When Peter bought his 100 acres of pine forest in coastal South Carolina, it was a “very densely stocked, dark forest with almost no understory, habitat or aesthetic appeal.”

He wanted to thin it—removing some of the smaller trees to allow others to grow bigger, to allow sunlight to reach the forest floor and stimulate plant growth, and to create habitat for birds and other wildlife. Due to the lack of markets for the small trees that would be thinned, he could not find anyone who would perform this service on his property for a percentage or even all of the value of the harvest. He finally secured a small grant to help cover some of the costs and paid for the rest out-of-pocket—an approach that is unlikely to be available to many small landowners.

This is a problem.

Since the Great Recession knocked back single family home construction by over 60%, demand for forest products is down and this has created a cascading effect of mill closures. All over the country, land owners literally cannot manage their forests properly because there is no market or place to send their thinned timber. Especially here in the Southeast, where private landowners own 86% of forests, and 2/3 of them are families or individuals -- essentially the forestry equivalent of the family farm.

James Cummins is a conservation policy expert and Executive Director of Wildlife Mississippi. He says, “One of the things most needed is to help educate people and change their hearts about this issue because most people think too much logging is bad, but now it is precisely a lack of logging that is threatening forests in many places.”

Nature abhors a dark forest

What does timber removal have to do with excellent wildlife habitat? Almost everything, as it turns out. But don’t trust me, and don’t trust the timber industry. The folks who recognize the need for increased timber removals by a variety of means are wildlife scientists, birding enthusiasts, and conservation initiatives like the Longleaf Alliance who have been working for more than a decade to bring back longleaf and other types of forest communities in the South. But let’s give the timber industry credit, they too are looking to manage their forests for the benefit of wildlife, through research and initiatives such as the North American Forest Partnership. The NAFP wants you to understand the mutually beneficial relationship between the forest sector and those who simply love a forest by taking a walk in the woods.

Decline by lack of a thousand cuts

Southern pine forests are dominated by one of four species (longleaf, shortleaf, slash, and loblolly) and are often called “open pine.” Open pine is one of the most beautiful forms of pine forest, known for its open structure — maintained by fire, thinning, or selective harvest — that allows dappled sunlight to support a diversity of grasses and flowers in the understory, where a lot of the habitat value happens.

Yet, according to a draft rapid ecological assessment conducted by the the Gulf Coastal Plains & Ozarks Landscape Conservation Cooperative, about 25% of a 180-million-acre region in the central southern states is pine forest, but only 4% has an open canopy. An even smaller amount, 1%, can be considered high quality open pine habitat.

What is the answer?

There are many, thank goodness! Increased use of timber for beautiful buildings, even skyscrapers, will lead to better economics for landowners (not to mention carbon sequestration) and increased timber removals, thinning, and even prescribed fire, which in turn will lead to better wildlife habitat and more beauty in the woods. The U.S. Forest Service has programs and Natural Resources Conservation Service has programs that encourage and assist private forestry. State agencies also recognize this issue. The bottom line, as explained by Darren Miller, a Certified Wildlife Biologist with Weyerhaeuser Company, is that “landowners, who own over 80% of southern forests, must be able to derive economic gain from land ownership or it will likely be sold and converted to other uses." That’s why if you love the woods with their birdsong, frog voices, deer, lizards, snakes, butterflies, and spring wildflowers, you should buy more wood (the kind grown in America). Bumper sticker explained!

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When all may be lost, but no regrets - Personal reflections on what the Trump administration’s budget means to me

K Gregg Consulting — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 19:17:42 +0000

The President’s budget made me experience deja vu. Not because I’m some seasoned political operative with long experience of partisan shakeups, but because twenty years ago the Cosumnes River Preserve Visitor’s Center in California burned down. That project was one I had spent the last two years of my professional life shepherding to completion.

So it was with the same sense of shock, loss, and semi-disbelief that I learned the President and Department of Interior had singled out for elimination a little-known, but highly sophisticated award-winning program within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in FY18. It’s called the Landscape Conservation Cooperative Network, and its goal is quite simple: use science, big data, cutting-edge technologies, and partnerships to secure the future of our natural world in all 50 U.S. states and our protectorates.

This program seeks to do for natural resources what a long-range plan for our national highway system does for transportation, or what long-term forecasting does for businesses intent on remaining profitable for years to come. The people with the LCCs, as they are known, that I’ve had the honor to work with over the past six and a half years like to explain the need for long-term, large-scale conservation planning this way:

If not us, then who?

If not now, then we could miss our chance.

We’re planning on more than leftovers

Our forests, rivers, grasslands, and coastal marshes are like a beautifully woven tapestry with holes in it that are growing larger each year. Without thoughtful planning, there’s no guarantee that the tapestry can stay in one piece. Without a landscape conservation approach, the decisions of many different actors - most of whom do not prioritize the needs of wildlife, wild rivers, and ecosystems - will dictate what happens on the land and in the water. The “leftovers” will become all that remains of our natural systems.

But the great news is that by building partnerships across state borders and federal agencies, and by including nonprofit organizations, private landowners, and businesses such as timber companies - and most especially new partners who will have an interest in coming to the table - there is every reason to believe that we can continue getting clean air, clean water, protected shorelines, abundant wildlife, and high-quality outdoor recreation from the lands and waters that we as Americans hold so dear.

That is what the LCCs have been working toward over the past eight years, and we have made significant progress. In the South, our Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy with its ever-improving Conservation Blueprint is pioneering this type of large-scale planning and partnership building.

LCC partners aren’t going away either. Though the future of federal funding for LCCs is in question, many states and nonprofits have already made investments, are likely to continue doing so, and some are voicing their support for LCCs. We probably won’t fully know the outcome until long after October 2017.

No regrets

When something to which you have committed significant levels of time and psychic energy goes “up in smoke,” it makes you really sit back and take stock. You ask yourself, if I had it to do over, would I make the same choice? I am honored to have worked with such a highly dedicated and visionary group of people and partners from across the country. Knowing what I know now, I would do it all again. My guess is, most of our partners will continue to recognize the value of landscape conservation as will some of the more visionary leaders in Congress. That’s why all may not be lost.

That Visitor’s Center was rebuilt. And I know that even if Congress carries out the President’s FY18 budget request and dismantles the LCC Network, the landscape conservation imperative will remain alive in the hearts and minds of our partners. We will wait for a final decision then regroup or rebuild, as circumstances dictate.

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