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- Women in conservation
Women in conservation
Friday 8 March 2024, 9am to 12:45pm
Free
Join us in a day of inspiration and empowerment as we celebrate International Women's Day with a captivating event hosted by Forest & Bird and the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. This event is dedicated to honouring the profound influence of women on the world of conservation.
Join us online or in person.
Watch the digital session replays
Champions of nature
Celebrate and learn about the unsung impact of women in conservation history. The event, which also marks Forest & Bird celebrating 100 years of conservation, aims to inspire and teach practical skills to the next generation of women to use their voices and take collective action to help nature.
The day commences with a mihi, followed by an insightful discussion on early women in conservation. Following that, guests will have an opportunity to listen to and be inspired by a compelling panel discussion featuring renowned women conservationists who have amplified their voices to champion the cause of nature.
Register for your spot
We are running this event at the Library and also online.
The online event, hosted via Zoom, is open to the public.
The in-person event is for students from schools, colleges, and universities aged 14 to 24 who identify as female.
Spaces are limited so register your spot now.
Programme
Opening talk
When — 9:15am to 9:45am
The day commences at the National Library with a mihi, followed by an insightful talk about early women in conservation — including the work of Lilly Daff and Audrey Eagle and other women who have used their voices and expertise to raise awareness of conservation over Forest & Bird’s 100-year history.
The talk will be live-streamed for online participants.
Panel discussion
When — 9:45am to 10:30am
Join a panel discussion featuring renowned women conservationists who have amplified their voices to champion the cause of nature. The panel includes Stephanie Rowe (Department of Conservation), Amanda Black (BioProtection Aotearoa), Trish Kirkland-Smith (Fonterra), and Nicola Toki (Forest & Bird).
The panel discussion will be live-streamed for online participants.
Morning tea
When — 10:30am to 11am
Morning tea is provided for participants attending the event onsite at the Library.
Workshops
When — 11am to 12:35pm
All attendees will have the opportunity to participate in workshops. Workshop topics focus on science, advocacy, art, and design.
In-person workshop — Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in smaller, more intimate workshops led by influential women. Speakers include Tanya Marriott, Margaret Tolland, Jessica Lamb, Aishwarya (Ash) Muralidhar, and Dr Kareen Schnabel.
Online workshop — The online sessions will take the form of panel discussions featuring professionals from various fields, each dedicated to specific topics related to conservation. Speakers include Emily Mabin Sutton, Dr Susie Wood, Mahuru Wilcox, May Downing, Fee Cortis, and Jenny Mitchell.
Closing address
When — 12:30 to 12:45pm
The closing address will be live-streamed for online participants.
He Tohu tours
When — 1pm to 2pm
In-person attendees will have the opportunity to take a 30-minute tour of the original Suffrage Petition in the He Tohu exhibition.
About the speakers
Nicola Toki, Forest & Bird Chief Executive, has a 20-year history of conservation leadership and advocacy for New Zealand’s wildlife and wild places. Having worked in a range of roles across the private and public sectors, Nicola is an enthusiastic champion for engaging people with the special values of New Zealand’s natural world and has a deep understanding of the environmental management challenges and opportunities in this country. She is a strong believer in the power of storytelling to build people’s understanding of and love for nature, so that they feel inspired to act to protect it.
Some of her storytelling achievements include convincing the Prime Minister to name Sirocco the kākāpō as New Zealand’s official 'Spokesbird for Conservation', being part of a team that created 'Royal Cam' — the web camera at Taiaroa Head focusing on the albatross colony, her weekly radio segment on RNZ with Jesse Mulligan 'Critter of the Week', and most recently, co-host of the new nature documentary series Endangered Species Aotearoa, which has begun filming for its second season.
Returning to Forest & Bird as Chief Executive is an honour and a privilege for Nicola, who worked as a conservation advocate for Forest & Bird a decade ago. Since that time, she worked in pest control advocacy for OSPRI, set up the Living Water programme in the South Island for Fonterra, and was the very first project manager in the Predator Free New Zealand movement, creating the Predator Free NZ Trust.
Immediately preceding her role as Chief Executive of Forest & Bird, Nicola was in a senior leadership role in the Department of Conservation as the Operations Director for the Eastern South Island.
In her spare time, Nicola enjoys spending time outdoors, and contributing to pest control while hunting.
Professor Amanda Black, Direction Bioprotection Aotearoa (National Centre of Research Excellence).
Ko Maungapohatu toku maunga
Ko Tauranga toku awa
He uri ahau Tuhoe, Whakatohea, Te Whanau a Apanui nga iwi
Ko Amanda Black toku ingoa
I grew up in Whakatane, Eastern Bay of Plenty, left to go to Otago University to study whatever took my interest. I have worked in a Regional Council, Independent Research and Consultancy before coming back to University to pursue an academic career. My research expertise are in soil chemistry; biochemistry; microbiology; inclusion and development of Māori priorities and solutions in biosecurity and mainstream science. My current areas of research are in understanding external influences on ecosystem functioning and health especially pathogen spread across landscapes; and, the protection of culturally significant taonga species and ecosystems from unwanted pests and diseases and the impacts of climate change.
When I’m not working, I spend time with my whānau, including two boys aged 9 and 7.
Trish Kirkland-Smith, Head of Nature Solutions & Partnerships at Fonterra. Her team drives the nature agenda in the Co-op, develops at-scale nature-based solutions programmes, and brokers and oversees the implementation of partnerships with public and private entities to accelerate action for nature. Trish has spent much of her career working in natural resource management and sustainability in the public, NGO and business sectors. For the past eight years she has been focused on putting nature back at the heart of food production and productive landscapes. Her keen interest is in the system change required for regenerative food production and how we support farmers and rural communities to adapt and thrive.
Stephanie Rowe, Deputy Director-General Biodiversity, Heritage and Visitors at Department of Conservation. The Biodiversity, Heritage and Visitors group is the centre of DOC’s technical and scientific expertise and also delivers national operations for pest management, monitoring and biosecurity. The group leads the implementation of Te Mana o Te Taiao (the Aotearoa New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy) and the Visitor and Heritage Strategy.
Tanya Marriott is a character designer who works in a variety of media including interactive storytelling, playful interaction and character-centric communication. Her work seeks to build meaningful experiences and storytelling opportunities between digital and tangible activities and objects. Tanya has led pedagogical development which explores methods of playful experience design for social change, and the character as a communication tool.
Tanya is an internationally recognised character designer, and the president of international consortia the National Institute of American Doll Artists. Tanya has contributed design expertise to the Toy industry in the UK, and the film industry both nationally and internationally.
Margaret Tolland is an established artist, based in Titahi Bay, Porirua. She has enjoyed a long career in arts education in both school, gallery and museum settings. More recently Margaret has been a part of the Artists in Schools programme creating art programmes and murals. Margaret has illustrated a variety of children’s picture book titles over the last 10 years with many focussed on Aotearoa’s endemic species. She continues to paint for exhibitions and commission work and facilitates hands-on workshops.
Her artworks are rich in texture, colour and detail, and they invite you to peek into the environment of the wonderful birds, animals, insects, flora and fauna that inhabit everyday spaces and also places maybe not so often seen. Recently she has become interested in predation and the challenges facing our native species with a series of paintings with the birds becoming the activists.
Jessica Lamb is the Forest & Bird Youth Director. Kia ora, ko Jess tōku ingoa. I am in my last year at the University of Canterbury studying a Bachelor of Science majoring in Geography, minoring in Environmental Science. I have been involved in environmental mahi for the past 5 years, since I first joined Forest & Bird Youth in 2019.
I co-founded the Rotorua F&BY hub with my twin sister, Kaitlyn, and since moving to Ōtautahi for uni, I have become a leader of the Christchurch hub. Recently I have become the Youth Director for F&B. I am also passionate about other forms of climate action, such as composting and waste minimisation. I do this through my mahi at the University of Canterbury through the Sustainability Office and the UC Compost Club
Aishwarya (Ash) Muralidhar is an environmental educator, project coordinator, tour guide extraordinaire, and conservation advocate. She has worked for, volunteered for, and engaged with sanctuaries and conservation not-for-profits in India and Aotearoa New Zealand for over a decade, having done everything from tiger surveys to award-winning educational videos to volunteer recruitment.
Currently, she is the Youth Network Support Coordinator at Forest & Bird, focusing on providing a platform for rangatahi to amplify their voice and action across the motu and empowering them with professional development and opportunities to enter the environment and sustainability space.
Dr Kareen Schnabel is a taxonomist and systematist focussing her researach on New Zealand decapod crustaceans. She was the Collection Manager of the NIWA Invertebrate Collection between 2006 and 2015.
Emily Mabin Sutton
is the co-founder & GM Climate Club. After working in software for 10 years, Emily joined up with Jenny & Dhanya to create the Climate Club, a group aiming to raise awareness of climate change and help everyday busy people take more high-impact climate actions. They now run a range of workshops, impact newsletter and have a growing membership across the motu.
Dr Susie Wood’s research is multidisciplinary and integrative, with the overarching goal of improving knowledge on freshwater ecosystems. It spans three broad areas: (i) toxic cyanobacteria dynamics in freshwater systems (both planktonic in lakes and benthic in rivers), (ii) the development and application of molecular techniques to monitor and understand aquatic systems, and (iii) integrating cutting edge techniques with more traditional paleolimnological approaches to guide future lake management and restoration.
She received the Kilham Lecture Award from the International Limnology Society in 2022 and the New Zealand Freshwater Sciences Society medal in 2019 for her outstanding contributions to freshwater science.
She recently co-led a large 6-year multidisciplinary project ‘Our lakes’ health: past, present, future’ (www.lakes380.com). Using sediment coring, novel proxy analyses (environmental DNA, high-resolution core scanning), geochronology and mātauranga Māori (indigenous knowledge) the team reconstructed water quality and lake health over the past 1000 years for about 10% of lakes in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Mahuru Wilcox
(Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Ranginui) is passionate about supporting iwi and hapū to engage in research that supports wellbeing of communities and their taiao. Her background is in freshwater and wetland ecology (MSc), and she now works within a Māori research team at Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research looking at restoring health of land and waterways grounded in mātauranga a iwi and hapū.
May Downing, LLM (Hons) is the Senior Environmental Lawyer at Forest & Bird Protection Society Inc. May has been in-house counsel for Forest & Bird for two years and in this time has appeared for Forest & Bird at many hearings — from Council-level through to the Supreme Court. This has included declaratory and judicial review proceedings. May has recently represented Forest & Bird in the Environment Court against resource consent applications to extract sand within the Pakiri Embayment, and before this, against an application to construct a large landfill in Dome Valley. May has also regularly appeared on plan changes across Aotearoa, including on regional plans and freshwater planning instruments. May has a strong interest in the laws about both freshwater and marine spatial planning. Before Forest & Bird, she was a solicitor at the Department of Conservation.
Fee Cortis is currently a Head of Marketing at iconic New Zealand brand BLUNT where she is a member of the leadership team and runs a team covering design, content creation, brand management, NPD, PR and ecommerce. Before joining BLUNT, Fee spent ten years working around the world for global company Heineken and is also a trained photographer and graphic designer who has also run her own full-service ad agencies in two different countries, illustrated a children’s book and likes to paint native birds in her spare time.
Jenny Mitchell is a dynamic storyteller who is rapidly capturing fans across the motu and the globe. Her music is full of warmth, truth and family harmonies — think the best of The Chicks and Norah Jones. Described by Rolling Stone as ‘her best work yet’, her 2022 album, Tug of War, is a deep and emotional dive for the artist and the listener. With songs inspired by new love, change, loss and her discovery of Lucille Ball, it finds Jenny at her most raw and honest while creating a musical work that’s as rich and fertile as the farming country where she grew up.
Tug of War was released via Cooking Vinyl Australia and received nominations for a 2023 Australian Golden Guitar and Aotearoa Music Award and features the pivotal release of 'Trouble Finds a Girl'. A collaboration with Tami Neilson, the stirring anthem directly addresses the mistreatment of women in the music industry and was crowned the 2022 APRA Best Country Song. Her most recent touring project, The Bush & the Birds Tour, travelled throughout New Zealand in support of the conservation organisation Forest & Bird. An extension of track 11 from Tug of War, the tour was an ode to her late Grandfather’s love of the land and generated more than $2000 in donations for Forest & Bird.
Forest & Bird chief executive Nicola Toki.