somewhat wild life
Conservation isn’t always kind.
You deserve help making sense of that.
I write and teach about wildlife conservation with honesty and depth — for people who care about nature and are ready for the full story.
Hi, I’m Julianne.
Here’s the question I can’t stop turning over:
What happens to people who love wildlife — genuinely, deeply, inconveniently love it — when they discover that conservation is messier, harder, and more morally complicated than anyone told them it would be?
What happens when the organization they donated to makes a decision they don’t understand? When the species they championed becomes the problem? When the biologist they trusted hands them a fact that breaks something open and doesn’t offer anything clean to replace it?
I’ve been on both sides of that moment. And I’ve never found a satisfying place to put it.
I spent years doing wildlife surveys for state and federal agencies — out in the field, counting animals, collecting data, learning the particular grammar of wild landscapes up close. I’ve also worked inside zoos and aquariums, which gave me a different and equally complicated education in what it means to care for wildlife institutionally. I loved all of that work. I also learned, slowly and sometimes uncomfortably, that loving wildlife professionally means making peace with things that are genuinely hard to make peace with.
Later, I started a masters degree in something that might sound unusual: the socioecology of wildlife conservation. Because I kept noticing that the gap between what the science said and what people were willing to do about it wasn’t really an information gap. It was an emotional one. People weren’t failing to act because they lacked facts. They were shutting down, or lashing out, or quietly disengaging because nobody had helped them metabolize what they were learning.
I didn’t finish the degree. I became a stay at home mom instead, which turned out to be its own education in sitting with things you can’t control and loving something so much it occasionally breaks your heart.
The question didn’t go away though. It just waited.
Somewhat Wild Life is where I’m finally doing something with it.
This is a space for people who care about wildlife and have hit the wall — the culling decision, the management plan, the conservation truth that felt like a betrayal. People who don’t fully belong in the hardcore activist camp or the “it’s just nature” camp. People who are somewhere in the honest, uncomfortable middle, trying to figure out what to do with what they now know.
I’m not here to tell you what to think. I’m here to think out loud with you, with the benefit of a field biologist’s background and a genuine interest in why this stuff is so hard for so many of us.
I’ll get things wrong sometimes. I’ll change my mind. I’m still working it out too — hence the name.
Somewhat wild. Figuring it out. Welcome.
The best place to start is Ethics & Field Notes, my biweekly newsletter — essays on wildlife, hard conservation truths, and the people who care about both.
The conservation reality companion
A field guide for staying human in wildlife conservation.
If you felt unsettled after learning learning that conservation isn’t always kind — this guide helps you:
Understand why these decisions exist
Navigate grief, frustration, and moral tension to continue moving forward
Stay engaged in conservation without becoming hardened or hopeless
For Families
Caring about wildlife often begins at home.
If you’re raising children who love animals, I also create grounded, ecology-rooted resources that:
Encourage observation and connection with nature
Build long-term ecological literacy