I am nearing the end of my original internship of five months, in fact I just entered in the last 80 hours of the 880 allotted before this post.

I obviously have not been very punctual when it comes to writing blogs describing my Conservation Land Management experience. However, I have come to learn several lessons in the past five months and several thoughts have crossed my mind which are as follows.

Public lands worked on by Conservation Land Management interns are not always functional. These lands are often plagued by disturbance events, enveloped in invasive plant and animal species, and left altered beyond recognition of the native state. These picturesque public lands we often see are not always indicative of the state of health of other lesser known lands available to the public. I have seen channelized streams, monocultures of invasive species, severely grazed pastures, unimaginable soil loss, and large scales of land conversion among other things, as I am sure many of my fellow interns have.

These sights may make some people pessimistic, or even defeated. I however, am somewhat empowered by the fact that I have so much work ahead of me. Even though I feel the weight of such a daunting task, and am touched with the hint of sadness and responsibility associated with this destruction, I am reminded that these processes can often times work in the opposite direction. A direction that pushes these landscapes out of a negative spiral and back to a functioning condition. I just need to figure out along side other interns how to make that happen. We are here to witness the non functioning along side the pristine. We are shown the pristine in order to stoke the fire under the non functioning and surround ourselves with the desirable. It is all well within our power.

CLM thank you for this knowledge.