Parks & Restoration

What does it look like to spend nearly 30 years leading an organization built around one of conservation’s most enduring ideas—and to keep growing along with it? Buddy Huffaker arrived at the Aldo Leopold Foundation in 1996 as a seasonal intern looking to get his hands dirty doing restoration work. Three years later, at just 30 years old, he stepped into the role of Executive Director. In this epi...

What if the secret to excellence isn’t reaching the goal—but learning to love the work required to get there? Ryan Hawk has spent more than a decade studying leadership and high performance through more than 700 conversations on The Learning Leader Show . He’s interviewed some of the most respected thinkers and leaders in the world, written four books, and built his career around a simple question...

How do you grow an organization without losing the culture, relationships, and local ownership that made it successful in the first place? Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever have undergone extraordinary growth. What was once an organization of roughly 150 employees has grown to more than 600, including more than 400 private-lands biologists working across the country. That kind of growth requires...

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 Fre...

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 nat...

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...

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 Nonprof...

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, M...

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 relati...

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 fil...

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...

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...

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 conserv...

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 Direct...

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 Conservatio...

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...

Chris sits down with Dr. Nick Askew, 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 Pacif...

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 f...

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 t...

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 d...

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 argum...

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 for...

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....

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 have a parks or conservation background. She comes from the c...

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 a...