Episodes

What if the outcome went badly—but you still made the right decision? Leadership rarely gives us complete information or guaranteed results. We make the best call we can, something unexpected happens, and hindsight makes it tempting to judge the decision entirely by how things turned out. In this episode, Chris talks with keynote speaker, author, former actuary, and champion poker player Steve Fredlund about making better decisions in an uncertain world. Steve shares lessons from his “Safari ...

What if protecting the parks and natural areas we still have simply isn't enough? Dr. Doug Tallamy has spent decades studying the relationships between plants, insects, birds, and the ecosystems that sustain them. His conclusion is both sobering and empowering: our remaining parks and preserves are too small and too isolated to carry the entire burden of conserving biodiversity. We have to put nature back everywhere else, too. Doug is an entomologist, professor at the University of Delawar...

What can 100 conversations teach us about leadership, conservation, and the people who make meaningful work possible? For the 100th episode of Parks and Restoration, Chris Lee is joined by past co-host Jeremy Yost, with Teli Van Rycke turning the tables and facilitating the conversation. They look back at how the podcast started as a simple effort to capture the institutional knowledge of retiring conservation leaders, how it nearly ended, and how it eventually evolved into something much ...

What if one of the best ways to prevent burnout is not reducing the work—but changing how people experience it together? Nonprofit leaders and volunteers often enter the work because they want to make a difference. But when every solved problem is replaced by another, even deeply committed people can lose sight of the progress they are making. Jordan DeGree, executive director of the Iowa Nonprofit Alliance, joins Chris for a wide-ranging conversation about nonprofit leadership, volunteer eng...

What changes when you treat leadership as a privilege instead of a position? Matt Doty has spent decades studying leadership in places where trust, accountability, and performance matter. After a 20-year career in the Iowa National Guard—including service as a first sergeant and command sergeant major—he carried those lessons into senior operational roles in the corporate world. In this episode, Matt joins Chris and Teli to explore what values-driven leadership looks like in practice. They di...

How do we protect the places we love without forgetting the people who make that protection possible? Most people enter parks and conservation because they care deeply about the land. But as Rachel Franchina explains in this episode, the longer you stay in this profession, the more you realize that conservation is ultimately about people. Great leaders don't just manage resources—they build relationships, develop others, and create communities that care enough to protect those resources for gen...

Why would an award-winning filmmaker move to Iowa planning to retire... only to end up making one of the state's most ambitious conservation documentaries? That's exactly what happened to Charlie Morris. After years producing conservation films around the world—from South Africa's disappearing great white sharks to threatened forests on the East Coast—Charlie arrived in Iowa intending to leave filmmaking behind. Then he started asking a simple question: "Why is everyone telling me not to swim...

Are great leaders born...or are they built through experience, relationships, and deliberate practice? After spending ten years as a junior high English teacher, Teli Van Rycke made the kind of career change most people only talk about. Today, as Regional Director of Workforce Innovation at the Greater Burlington Partnership, she develops leaders, strengthens workplace culture, and helps shape the workforce of tomorrow. Together we unpack several assumptions about leadership—from the myth of t...

What do a lightning storm, a white suit jacket, and a barbecue competition that ran out of food have in common? They all showed up at Burlington River Days 2026 — and they all left Chris with something worth talking about. This week's episode is a little different. Fresh off three days on the riverfront (and one very memorable Saturday night with a multi-platinum rock band, a delay, and skies that opened up right on cue), Chris shares three leadership lessons straight from the after-action revi...

What if a robin-sized bird just flew 1,700 miles in 48 hours — and Iowa was a critical stop along the way? That's not a hypothetical. It happened. And we only know because of the Motus Wildlife Tracking Network. In this episode, Chris sits down with Anna Buckardt Thomas, avian ecologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Diversity Program, to dig into one of the coolest conservation science stories happening right now. Anna initiated the Motus network in Iowa, growing it fr...

What if your local conservation foundation didn't just sell raffle tickets at a banquet — what if it headlined a three-day riverfront festival that drew 12,000 people and netted over $20,000 for conservation? That's exactly what happened in Burlington, Iowa. And it started with a half-baked idea about boat races on the Mississippi. In this episode, Chris sits down with Chris Gram, Executive Director of the Greater Burlington Convention and Visitors Bureau, to tell the origin story of Burlingto...

What if the nonprofit that supports your park or agency did more than peddle firewood? What if its fundraising revenue had a few extra zeroes? That's exactly what's possible with a few small mindset shifts. The Great Outdoors Foundation is proof. In this episode, Chris sits down with Hannah Inman, Executive Director of the Great Outdoors Foundation, the nonprofit partner to Polk County Conservation that has grown from a scrappy, volunteer-led support group into one of the most impactful conser...

In this episode, Chris sits down with Brett Hoogeveen, co-founder of Better Culture and Mindset LLC, keynote speaker, TEDx speaker, and host of the Better Culture podcast. Brett’s work is built on a simple but powerful premise: culture is undervalued, underappreciated, and when done right, the most powerful lever any leader has. The conversation draws rich parallels between organizational culture and ecological systems. Just like a prairie is not “done” after one prescribed burn, culture improv...

Chris sits down with Dr. Nick Eskew, founder and director of Conservation Careers, for a wide-ranging conversation that spans barn owl behavior, international wildlife management, and the future of the conservation workforce. Nick shares how a career arc that began with childhood fishing trips and a breathtaking first barn owl sighting led him through Birdlife International, fieldwork in the Pacific, and eventually back to the UK to build Conservation Careers — a global platform now serving ove...

What if the way we’ve been thinking about leadership is fundamentally wrong? This episode is the meetup Chris hosted with Dr. Kathleen Allen, author of Leading from the Roots, and it explores a completely different way of thinking about leadership—one grounded not in control, hierarchy, or efficiency… but in nature. Kathleen’s work focuses on regenerative leadership—designing organizations that function more like ecosystems than machines. And as you’ll hear, the implications are massive. Key ...

What makes people want to stay on your team for the long haul? In this episode, Chris is joined by Des Moines County Conservation’s Environmental Education Manager, Marcus Nack, for a conversation about workplace culture, leadership, and the kind of organizational ecosystem that makes people want to stay, grow, and do their best work. The discussion starts with a real example: an intern who came to the team looking for clarity and left saying, “I want to do this forever.” From there, Chris and ...

What do prescribed burns have to do with leading a team? More than you’d think. In this episode, Chris and Jeremy break down leadership lessons pulled straight from burn season — burn plans, clear objectives, contingency planning, and the kind of flexibility you need when conditions change. They talk through real examples from recent burns (including an 800-acre day at Hitchcock) and connect the dots to the workplace: performance issues, meetings that drain people, programs you’ve “always done...

What’s the ROI of a prairie? A bat you’ll never see? A fence line removed to stitch habitat back together? In this episode, Chris and Jeremy dig into a pressure most parks and conservation leaders feel right now: the growing expectation to put a dollar value on everything—habitat work, land protection, restoration, even species existence. There’s usefulness in ecosystem services and economic arguments… but there are also real limitations (and risks) when money becomes the only language we speak...

What if the key to better leadership isn’t “managing harder”…but managing like an ecologist? From a difficult conversation where Chris was told he could be "intimidating" to his questioning whether he was cut out for a leadership role, this episode unpacks Chris' leadership journey and the origins of his Organizational Ecology framework — a leadership approach rooted in the idea that you don’t force results, you create the conditions for people to thrive and let performance follow. Key takeawa...

What if “performance evaluations” weren’t a dreaded, once-a-year formality… but one of the best tools you have to build culture? In this episode, Chris and Jeremy talk about a different way to look at performance evaluations—less as a grading system, and more as a structured, intentional check-in that helps you understand your people, clarify expectations, and keep the workplace ecosystem healthy. They dig into why annual evals can create recency bias, and why real performance issues should be...

Back in November, we invited the Parks and Restoration Next Level Leader Community to an exclusive meetup with Jessica DeAngelo, author of the new book The Wild Advantage: Why Your Brain on Nature is Your Boldest Business Move. With help from the community, the book hit bestseller status in multiple categories on Amazon. Jessica doesn't come have a parks or conservation background. She comes from the corporate world. Yet she discovered the undeniable value of time unplugged in nature and now ha...

Are you trying to sell a plan… when what people really need is a vision? In this episode, Chris and Jeremy dig into why vision—not strategy documents, timelines, or step-by-step plans—is what actually gets people to care, to say yes, and to get involved. Using examples from JFK’s moonshot and Teddy Roosevelt’s conservation legacy, they connect big, historic visions to very real, very local parks and conservation projects. They share stories from Big Hollow and Hitchcock Nature Center to show h...

Why do we cut cedars out of prairies? Why do we thin trees in forests and oak savannas? Why do we burn? For many of us, the answers to those questions are fairly straightforward. But some people think about land management on a deeper level. They see thinning operations as managing the flow of energy in a system. Or they seek to understand the microclimate impacts from prescribed fire. Some people focus on the "why" before the "what" and the "how" when it comes to working in conservation. My g...

Change isn’t just hard—it’s biologically, psychologically, and culturally designed to be hard. In this episode, Chris and Jeremy break down why teams resist change, especially in legacy organizations like parks, conservation agencies, and natural resource departments. Whether you’re rolling out digital campground registration or shifting from a mow-everything mentality to a pollinator-friendly rewilding approach, resistance is guaranteed. But it’s also manageable—if you know what’s driving it. ...