Ecology Without a Roadmap

How many of us had a dream job as a child that we actually went on to pursue? Rae Wynn-Grant did just that. In her newly released memoir, Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World, Wynn-Grant details her journey from a dreaming child watching nature shows to a carnivore ecologist who co-hosts one, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild.

And she did it without a map. The path to her dream job was more like a foggy forest, especially for a young, Black, city-girl with less-than-ideal math scores. All the nature hosts were White, male, and apparently British or Australian. She had no idea how to become a nature host or even an ecologist. She nearly took an entirely different route, towards opera and piano, having been convinced that she did not have any academic acumen.

Thankfully, Wynn-Grant’s vision of her future pushed her into the world of science and ecology, even as she dealt with society’s expectations on gender and race and, later on, motherhood and marriage.

Her journey started in earnest in college. She was the first African American in her study abroad in Kenya, and as her career progressed she faced daily microaggressions as the only Black scientist at top-tier institutions. Yet due to her perspective as a Black woman, Wynn-Grant gained insights that others missed. For instance, she writes, beginning with her college study abroad program, she developed stronger relationships with the Maasai people and other local groups in Africa.

This perspective passes insight on to the reader, as Wynn-Grant explores human-wildlife conflicts and pushes against a science background that trained her to “stay blind to the human problem.” For instance, during her work in Africa, she came face to face with a giraffe killed by poachers who were captured by rangers. She learned that no meat goes to waste, as people came from distant villages to take it home to their families; she even helped process the meat herself for others.

Poaching is wrong “full-stop,” she writes, but “one person’s life can be snuffed out because of killing one giraffe. Yet there I was, hands soaked [with blood], waiting to greet women from the nearby villages as we turned a setback into an opportunity.” The giraffe is dead, and people need to eat. Wynn-Grant has added the human factor into her ecology.

In another story, Wynn-Grant travels to Burundi, East Africa, to help a friend who had launched a medical clinic and preschool, by adding environmental science and climate change to the curriculum. There, as she teaches a class on climate change, she quickly realizes the injustice of a small country that has done little to contribute to the crisis but is disproportionately hurt by it. “They would suffer the most from it and have to enact the most drastic changes to survive its impact,” Wynn-Grant says. Her job, then, is to provide “practical solutions,” which she calls “Band-Aids for a bullet wound.”

Conservation efforts, Wynn-Grant ultimately concludes, “don’t have a future without an economic component. Poverty is like a rain cloud; it dampens everything underneath it, including how we deal with and interact with our ecosystems.”

Wynn-Grant writes of her struggles managing motherhood, marriage, and an active career. It’s clear that she loved conducting research in the field. But when she gives birth to her first child, she is torn about the desire to continue her work given her own and others’ expectations of her as a mother. It is, sadly, a familiar tale.

While Wynn-Grant brings the human element to the center in her memoir, it may leave the reader wanting more discussions about her interactions with the large carnivores. She opens the book with a tale of flight from a bear, and later describes how her work sometimes involves hugging cubs to keep them warm as researchers measure the mother bears. A few more such anecdotes would have been welcome.

But that may not have been the book Wynn-Grant set out to write. Her memoir is honest and forthcoming. She does not pull punches and is very upfront about her missteps in her marriage and career, even as she notes significant accomplishments. Wild Life is a deeply personal book about a woman finding her calling and blazing a path despite the obstacles, from racism, to expectations of motherhood and marriage, to even her own sense of self-worth. Wynn-Grant provides a much-needed perspective to the world of ecological and conservation memoirs.