From Birdwatcher to CEO: What 30 Years in Conservation Taught Me

In the summer of 1989, I was fifteen years old and completely obsessed with birds. Not in the casual, pleasant way that people enjoy a robin on the garden fence. In the way that had me cycling to Jersey Zoo at dawn, pressing my face against the mesh of the breeding aviaries, trying to sketch the plumage patterns of captive red-billed choughs before the keepers arrived and told me to move along.

Gerald Durrell’s zoo. The place that existed not as entertainment but as an ark — a last-ditch effort to breed endangered species back from the edge. I didn’t fully understand that mission at fifteen. I just knew that being close to those animals made me feel something I couldn’t find anywhere else. A sense of urgency. A sense that the world was losing something irreplaceable and that maybe, if I paid close enough attention, I could help.

That feeling has never left me. It’s been refined, challenged, beaten into different shapes by decades of experience, but the core of it remains exactly the same.

The fieldwork years

My twenties were spent in the mud. Wetland bird surveys in the Somerset Levels. Bat emergence counts in disused railway tunnels. Vegetation transects across chalk downland so steep I once slid thirty metres on my back clutching a quadrat. The fieldwork taught me two things that have governed everything since.

First: nature is not a concept. It’s specific. It’s this particular population of water voles in this particular stretch of riverbank, and if you don’t understand the granular, local reality, your grand strategies will fail. I’ve watched well-funded conservation programmes collapse because they were designed by people who had never knelt in the habitat they were trying to save.

Second: data matters more than passion. I arrived in conservation burning with conviction and discovered that conviction without evidence persuades no one. The best conservation argument I ever made wasn’t a speech. It was a spreadsheet showing three years of population data that proved a development site held a regionally significant breeding colony. The planning inspector didn’t care about my feelings. She cared about the numbers.

The pivot

By my mid-thirties, I’d hit a wall that every field ecologist eventually encounters. I could survey a site, document its value, write the report, and still watch it get destroyed because the economic argument for development outweighed the ecological argument for protection. Every time. Without fail.

The system wasn’t broken. It was working exactly as designed — it just didn’t value nature. And no amount of ecological data would change that unless nature had a price that showed up on a balance sheet.

That realisation was uncomfortable. Many of my colleagues in conservation saw economic valuation as a betrayal — reducing sacred landscapes to commodity units. I understood the objection. I shared it, emotionally. But I’d watched too many sacred landscapes get bulldozed by forces that spoke only the language of money. If nature couldn’t speak that language too, it would keep losing.

CreditNature

Founding CreditNature was the logical conclusion of everything I’d learned. The science of ecosystem measurement had advanced to the point where credible quantification was possible. The financial sector was beginning to take nature risk seriously. The regulatory landscape was shifting. All the pieces were on the board.

But building a company that bridges ecology and finance is a daily exercise in translation. Ecologists and investors think differently, speak differently, and mistrust each other for historically good reasons. My job, more than anything, is to stand in the gap between those worlds and make each legible to the other.

What thirty years taught me

I’ll distil it to three things.

Patience is not passivity. The timescales of ecological recovery and institutional change are measured in decades. You have to be willing to work for outcomes you may never see, while maintaining the intensity to act as though everything depends on what you do today.

Rigour earns trust. In a space plagued by greenwashing and inflated claims, the most radical thing you can do is be scrupulously honest about what you can and cannot measure. Credibility is the only currency that appreciates over time.

The personal is strategic. Every effective conservationist I’ve ever met was driven by a specific, intimate relationship with a place, a species, or a landscape. The fifteen-year-old sketching choughs at dawn wasn’t wasting his time. He was building the emotional foundation for a lifetime of work.

I still watch birds. Most mornings, before the emails start, I spend twenty minutes with binoculars and a cup of tea. It’s not nostalgia. It’s recalibration. A reminder of what all the spreadsheets and frameworks and investor calls are actually for.