Bethany Olmstead is the Director of Conservation for the Conservation Fund, a national nonprofit dedicated to employing unique approaches to conserving land; it creates innovative solutions and enduring partnerships with communities, government and business to ensure that every conservation dollar delivers maximum impact. Her environmental career spans three decades, including time at North Carolina’s Piedmont Land Conservancy and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. She is equally at ease tagging kangaroos in the Australian Outback, crafting Forest Legacy grants, drafting conservation easements, and negotiating real estate deals. An outdoor enthusiast, Bethany is also the proud mother of three children.
Please tell us a little bit about your time at Duke and what brought you there.
I earned an MEM from the Nicholas School in 1996 with a focus on resource ecology. We were the first class to officially graduate from the Nicholas School because the gift came in during our first year. I was actually pre-med all through my undergraduate years at Denison University, a small liberal arts school in Ohio. I loved science and math, and so I studied biology. And what do you do with a biology degree? You go to medical school.
But then I had the great fortune to take a couple of ecology courses with phenomenal professors that got me thinking maybe medicine wasn’t what I wanted for the rest of my life. During my junior year, I studied abroad in Australia and spent time in the Outback doing field research, studying environmental factors on the milk production of red kangaroo females and the effect on joeys. It was so much fun that, when I came back for my senior year, although med school was still on the table, I started thinking maybe there’s another direction for me that involves outdoor field work. I took both the GRE and the MCAT and listened to my heart when I received my scores to guide my decision to pursue graduate school. I looked for broad-ranging ecology-based programs in environmental management and found Duke. One of my best friends also happened to get in, and so we came down to the Nicholas School together; she went into water resources and, since I was a biologist, I went into resource ecology.
What are some of the things you appreciate most from your time at the Nicholas School?
One of the things that attracted me to the Nicholas School was that it felt like a continuation of my undergraduate liberal arts background. I didn’t have to limit myself to a single topic – I came focused on wildlife biology but ended up also taking silviculture and forest ecology courses. I also took advantage of the opportunity to take courses at N.C. State, which were far more technically focused and gave me a bit more grounding in wildlife management. I got an internship for the summer between the two years of my program with one of my State professors, who was leading a research study on neo-tropical migratory songbirds on timberland owned by the paper company Westvaco in South Carolina. We were studying the impacts of leaving 300-foot wide forested corridors when harvesting blocks of forestland to create connections between larger blocks of forestland to be harvested at a later date. I focused on running the mist-net stations and banding birds, but we also conducted nest searches and auditory point counts. It was a fun summer in the woods – hot, humid, and filled with mosquitoes, but it resonated and confirmed that I was heading in the right direction.
Were any professors or experiences particularly impactful for you?
During my undergrad, I had a biology professor, Dr. Schultz, who was just phenomenal and really opened my eyes to the possibility of doing something besides med school with a biology degree. And then once in grad school, there was my internship with Dr. Lancia. Dean Urban and his landscape ecology course helped me see the interwovenness of ecosystems, as did Ram Oren’s silviculture and forest ecology classes. Those classes are still relevant today in the work that I do. Understanding the basics of silviculture – even though I’m not a forester, I know enough to be dangerous – helps when I’m crafting working forest easements that thread the needle between creating conservation uplift while maintaining the viability for the continuation of sustainable forest management on the property.
What have you been up to since graduation?
I sent my resume everywhere possible, and I landed my first job with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission as the coastal region forest stewardship biologist. That took me to New Bern, North Carolina, in the fall of ‘96. In that role, I worked with other resource agencies like the North Carolina Forest Service, the Natural Resource Conservation Service, and cooperative extension offices throughout the coastal region to develop resource management plans for landowners who wanted to manage their woodlands for multiple purposes, not just for timber, but also recreation or wildlife habitat. I got to travel a lot within North Carolina, especially the coastal region, and got to work in a really collaborative fashion doing multidisciplinary development of management plans. I also got a lot of practical experience doing prescribed burns, planting loblolly pine, and installing nest boxes for red-cockaded woodpeckers in the state’s game lands. Getting to do field work built a stronger base of understanding the practical side of forest and wildlife management and gave me a really solid foundation.
We had so many people from so many different disciplines and backgrounds coming into the Nicholas School, so you learned how to sit at a table and work with people who had different perspectives to solve a common problem.
I was with the Wildlife Commission for about three years and worked with a lot of private landowners who were just phenomenal people who loved their land and had put a lot of sweat equity into making their land the best it could be. But as they aged, sometimes issues arose that forced them to sell their land, and I saw the difference between land being sold to somebody who didn’t necessarily care as much about it versus long-term stewardship of that land. I thought about how we’re not making more land – it’s a finite resource that we need to protect – so I started looking for an opportunity where I could have a broader impact on maintaining land in a natural state as part of the ecosystem for the long haul, as opposed to its status changing from one landowner to the next. That led me to Piedmont Land Conservancy, which is a small regional land trust here in North Carolina, where I started as the land protection specialist and became the associate director. That job enabled me to work with landowners who voluntarily wanted to conserve their lands permanently through conservation easements or fee sales to create a county park or add to a state forest.
Around that time, my husband finished grad school and got a postdoc fellowship at an EPA lab in Duluth, Minnesota, so we moved there for what was to be three years but ended up being almost eight. I briefly continued working for the Piedmont Land Conservancy remotely and then took advantage of a series of opportunities for part-time work while my children were young, including volunteering and paid contract work with the Minnesota Land Trust and doing GIS work that used my ecology skills from Dean Urban’s class. I eventually took a job with The Conservation Fund in Duluth as the Midwest program manager, where I assisted with grant writing and project management.
We eventually moved back to North Carolina, and I began working with our Working Forest Fund® program while continuing my work with our Upper Midwest conservation acquisitions teams. When my youngest was around 3½, I moved into full-time work at The Conservation Fund and fully focused my work on the Working Forest Fund team. I eventually became the national conservation director for the Working Forest Program, designing and implementing conservation strategies across our working forest portfolio.
What is the mission of The Conservation Fund?
The Conservation Fund’s mission is to create innovative solutions that drive nature-based outcomes for climate protection, sustainable economies, and vibrant communities.
Our founder, Pat Noonan, wanted to develop a new kind of land trust organization that could work at the speed and pace of business and accomplish meaningful land conservation through partnering with regional land trusts, national forests, wildlife refuges, state forests, state wildlife management agencies, local governments, national parks, etc. The Conservation Fund steps in with its financial resources and transactional expertise when land comes on the market that has high conservation value but is at risk of development. We facilitate the purchase of the land, bridge the ownership, and manage it in the short-term, to give our long-term conservation partner time to raise the necessary funds to acquire the land and then manage them for their conservation purposes in the long run.
I work specifically within our Working Forest Fund program, which was developed to address the landscape level challenge of forestland loss and fragmentation. With the shift from industrial-based ownership to timber investment ownership model that occurred back in the 80’s and 90’s, the forest management objectives and ownership length changed, creating an increasing frequency of forest fragmentation and parcelization that ultimately increases the rate of conversion to non-forest uses. Through our Working Forest Fund program, we invest in these TIMO owned forestlands with high conservation values when are brought to market. Once we own them, our forest operation managers work with our local consulting foresters to manage the forests sustainably in accordance with Sustainable Forestry Initiative standards while myself and my team work with TCF field staff and our conservation partners to develop a conservation strategy and secure the funding to permanently conserve that forestland oftentimes with a working forest easement. Once the forest is permanently conserved, we sell easement encumbered land. Through the sale of the conservation easement and the subsequent easement encumbered property, we are able to recover our original capital which we then deploy into our next forestland acquisition.
Are there any particularly important lessons you’ve learned over the course of your career? And did any of your experiences at Duke inform those lessons?
Learning negotiation skills has been especially important to my work. I don’t typically like conflict, and negotiations can feel adversarial as you sit across the table from someone who seemingly wants the opposite of what you want. Learning how to successfully negotiate without creating a contentious relationship has been vital. In my work, the people on the other side of the table are making business decisions, and I have had to learn to remove the emotion from the situation and remind myself that it’s not a personal affront if they don’t accept my offer. I’ve also had to learn not to be so committed to achieving a deal that it becomes hard to walk away – it’s really easy to get caught up coveting a particular piece of land and end up in a bad deal that just doesn’t work from the standpoint of either risk or financial bottom line – conserving a particular piece of land may be important, but not at any cost. As I look back over my 30 years in this work, I’ve seen that so many properties that are really meant to be conserved have a way of getting conserved when the time is right. Sometimes you have to make multiple runs at the same property – it may be that, at first, the funding’s not there or the landowner isn’t willing to make the deal at that time or they have really unrealistically high price expectations. Patience and trust help, too. These things have a way of working out in the right way at the right time, but you have to learn that through experience.
There weren’t any classes on negotiations at the Nicholas School back in the 1990s, but we did learn it in a way through group work. A lot of my classes involved a collaborative approach via dreaded group projects. We had so many people from so many different disciplines and backgrounds coming into the Nicholas School, so you learned how to sit at a table and work with people who had different perspectives to solve a common problem. You learned to come at it from different angles to create a solid solution at the end of the day. And I think that does relate to negotiation because in both scenarios, there is a place where everybody can come out a winner at the end of the day. To me, the trick to successful negotiation is finding out the values that are underneath what feels at first like a simple financial decision. There’s always something underlying a situation that can help you figure out a way to satisfy everyone’s interests. Being collaborative, being able to have open, honest discussions with transparency is something that you learn through doing.
Working on group projects also taught me the critical link between being a good listener and being an effective leader. From my perspective it is really important to being open to having more voices at the table rather than fewer. But then you also have to have the confidence to say, ‘OK, this is the decision based on discussions,’ and not be paralyzed by having too much information from too many voices weighing in.
Is there a class that you wish Duke offered to students or a skill that you wish Nicholas students graduated with?
Conflict resolution and group dynamics. When I’m hiring people, I’m looking for good relationship skills – their ability to build and sustain and maintain relationships – because everything comes back to relationships. You can teach people how to do data analysis or field work or how to write a conservation easement, but it’s hard to teach people how to deal well with other people. A corollary would be understanding your own personality, strengths, and weaknesses, and how to adapt to them. Equally important is learning to recognize and adapt to other people’s personalities and preferences. That will help you recognize when someone is stressed, and why, and how to alleviate their stress, or understand how to convince them to see things your way – if you’re dealing with someone who makes decisions based on emotions and feelings, for instance, you’ll know not to try to convince them with data-driven arguments. That kind of growth is critical regardless of what you end up doing in life.
What advice do you have for current Nicholas School students, or for your younger self?
My biggest piece of advice would be to listen to your heart and your gut. Don’t be afraid to take a job, even if it’s not exactly what you thought you would end up doing when you started grad school. Be open to branching out from the initial idea that drove you to a particular grad school program. There are pleasant surprises out there when we leave ourselves open to them. When I started grad school, I was thinking of my time tagging kangaroos and thought I would be a field wildlife biologist. I didn’t even know about conservation easements – they were just beginning to be a way to conserve land in the early 90s, so I never pictured that this is where I would end up. But now I’m glad that I’m doing what I’m doing and not doing field work anymore, though I loved it at the time. So, my advice is to leave yourself open for unexpected possibilities and apply to anything that sounds intriguing. You never know what’ll happen.
