As Outreach Specialist for the Wildlife Diversity Program for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD), Olivia Grace Haun spends time both in her home office and in the field throughout the state of Texas working with biologists, citizen scientists, landowners, and nature/conservation enthusiasts to tell their stories and help share their message. Drawing from her skills as a video producer, director, editor, color corrector, sound designer, state-wide conservation program coordinator, and social media manager, she focuses on stories on urban wildlife and ecosystems, rare and endangered species, and citizen science. I chatted with Olivia about her recent film Bayou City, managing multiple projects and deadlines, and the importance of telling local stories.

You and I met as Filmmaker Labs fellows at the 2017 International Wildlife Film Festival, which brought together early career fellows from the academic, filmmaking, and science communication world. What was that experience like for you?

It made me realize the possibility of turning my visual passions into a career. As a trained ecologist, the program truly helped me enter the wildlife filmmaking world. This workshop helped me create my first real short film, Life of Pine, which went on to be nominated for an award at the Science Media Awards and Summit at the Hub, as well as part of the Nat Geo Short Film Showcase. More importantly, it helped me find “my people” – the creative, nerdy, brilliant trailblazers I’d been searching for. I still deeply rely on the network of friends and colleagues that I met through this experience, and I’m incredibly grateful for their continued support. Big thank you to Nate Dappen and Neil Losin of Days Edge Productions for guiding us and putting this together!

(Editor’s Sidenote: Olivia, Chris, and I all met as fellows in the same cohort! While IWFF continues to maintain an amazing Filmmaker Labs program, you can now find Days Edge Productions at the Jackson Wild Media Lab.)

“In my day-to-day, I’m also just thinking a lot…and feeling a lot. I’m trying to figure out how to bridge worlds – the worlds of ecology and conservation, natural resource management and permaculture, agriculture and herbalism, indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge.”

Olivia Grace Haun
Conservation Filmmaker, Ecologist
Outreach Specialist, Wildlife Diversity Program for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department

The program really is a meeting of minds and it’s mind-blowing to look back and think about how each of us, with our respective interests and career paths, were able to work together and create some powerful films! How has the journey since then been for you?

I definitely didn’t get my PhD, which was what I thought I was going to do when I moved to Austin in 2014! I felt extremely burnt out after being involved in academic research for over 8 years and being a research professor just didn’t interest me anymore. I wanted to have an impact on the world, to use the power of emotion to help change hearts and minds, and I knew my academic papers were not going to do that. So I dropped the PhD idea and got a Master’s degree instead, all while continuing to build up my skills in documentary and conservation filmmaking. When I look back, I’m not surprised at all that I chose to leave that path and kind of wonder what took me so long. I know part of me had to overcome the feelings of failure and the strong desire to seem educated and be an expert in my field so people would hear what I had to say. But even with a PhD people aren’t guaranteed to hear what you have to say, and sometimes it does the exact opposite. This was a lesson I had to learn. Your accolades and achievements don’t really matter that much. All that really matters is if you can communicate a message from the heart. 

Speaking of sharing a message from the heart, congratulations on having your film Bayou City nominated for an award at Jackson Wild 2021!

Thank you! It was such a surprise and an honor to be nominated! Bayou City was really a labor of love for me. I started this journey in 2017, right as I was starting with TPWD and right after Hurricane Harvey had hit Houston. I was really curious about what was going on in Houston and it’s ecosystems after the storm, and I just knew there was a story to be told there. So thanks to the generous funding from Ben Masters, Fin & Fur Films, and Explore Ranches, I was able to go down to Houston in 2019 and collect stories of the amazing work being done on the ground to protect and restore Houston’s bayous. I used the themes of history, advocacy, preservation, restoration, and outreach to lead us through the story, and was able to highlight work being done by the Armand Bayou Nature Center, Save Buffalo Bayou, the Bayou Land Conservancy, Houston Parks and Rec, and TPWD. I’m grateful to have been able to gather these stories, to have met passionate conservationists, and to have gained a deep understanding of the natural and cultural history of the Bayou City. Overall, I hope viewers come away from the film with a new understanding of Houston, its people, its natural spaces, and the knowledge that there is an immense beauty, even within concrete jungles.

I really am always juggling many projects at once which is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, I get the opportunity to work on a lot of interesting, important topics, but on the other hand, I also don’t feel I have the time and capacity to give projects the time and attention they deserve. To work with these deadlines and multiple timelines, I use GANTT charts as much as possible to stay on track. These help me visually see my timeline across 6 months to a year as most of the time I have to start new projects before I’m done with old ones. As pre-production and production tasks shift, I can see how this will affect my post-production schedule, how they may begin to interfere with other projects, and if I’m able to take other projects on or not. 

Most of the ideas that are on the backburner these days are my own personal projects and ideas that float up i.e. ones that have nothing to do with my day job. Those go on to a giant list of “Someday, Maybe” projects. They are always there for me to look at if I need to, and hopefully one day I’ll be able to revisit them and bring them to life. 

Like many of our creative readers, I can certainly attest to that ever-growing ‘Someday, Maybe’ project list. What would you tell up-and-coming ecologists and communicators that hope to follow in your footsteps?

Don’t ignore your local ecosystems or take them for granted. So many ecologists and filmmakers want to travel the world and captivate audiences with exotic landscapes and creatures (for good reason – they’re beautiful and at-risk), but we are actively ignoring the incredible worlds that exist in our own backyards. I would just urge them to start asking themselves: Where are my roots? What lands am I connected to? What stories around me are not being told? We need to begin redeveloping a connection with place, and in order to do that, we need to see our native and local ecosystems as being just as important and valuable as those across the ocean. 

I 110% agree – there’s a place for all these different stories, but as storytellers sometimes the most important ones we can tell are right under our noses. What stories are you looking forward to telling next?

Film-wise, I’m currently working on 8 different videos, with topics ranging from native bee management, to creating conservation seed collections, to the value of citizen science, to the role of small, urban green spaces in our communities. At the same time, I’m also working on distributing Bayou City by organizing local screenings around the Houston area, and I just finished broadcasting the film on Texas PBS stations. 

I’m also going into my third year with the Bird City Texas Program, which certifies communities for their efforts in bird conservation and long-term conservation vision building. North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970, so it’s incredibly important that we encourage our communities to adopt practices that minimize threats to birds (such as adopting cats indoors policies, dark sky initiatives, and window strike prevention), increase safe spaces for birds (creating and maintaining habitat for native and migratory species), and create an ethos of bird conservation in their communities (by increasing outreach and education efforts). I’ve also been working for ~4 years to help pass new legislation for conservation funding. The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (RAWA; H.R. 2773) would provide ~$1.4 billion annually to U.S. states, territories, and tribes for proactive conservation efforts to protect our at-risk species. Roughly one-third of America’s wildlife species (nearly 15,000 species) are at some degree of elevated risk of extinction. More than 1,600 U.S. species are already listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The point of this bill truly is to prevent more species from becoming listed under the ESA and to help fight back against the many things that threaten them including habitat loss, climate change, invasive species, disease, and severe weather.

In my day-to-day, I’m also just thinking a lot…and feeling a lot. I’m trying to figure out how to bridge worlds – the worlds of ecology and conservation, natural resource management and permaculture, agriculture and herbalism, indigenous wisdom, and scientific knowledge. How can we gather all of these people that care about the land together? How can we pool our resources? How can we change our relationship with nature and walk along a path of unlearning, relearning, acknowledgment, and respect? The answers to these questions are vital moving forward, and I don’t have any solid answers. I’m just enjoying learning from others and genuinely connecting with people who care. One day it will all come together. 

When she’s not sharing local conservation stories to global audiences, Olivia can be found building gardens, restoring native prairies, shooting macro photos/videos, saving seeds, creating art, and learning about bioregional herbalism and ethnobotany.