“It’s often you can get into an organization and just be like, oh, this is the way it’s done, okay. And you get in your cubicle and this is your workload and this is your boundary and you’re not going to think outside those things. And I think you can throw that playbook out the door in some ways.” – Veronica Woodruff

What happens when the playbooks we’ve relied on no longer work? In a world reshaped by climate change, dramatic political swings, and changing local sentiments, it’s becoming unmistakably clear: traditional ways of doing business are falling short.

Veronica Woodruff is back to remind us that leadership today requires something new: adaptability, collaboration, and a focus on what really matters. As an environmental professional and trained biologist, Veronica has seen the limitations of siloed thinking. Tourism, she pointed out in an earlier conversation, isn’t separate from the ecosystem—it’s part of it. Yet industries often operate in isolation, struggling to tackle challenges that demand cooperation and innovation.

She draws inspiration from Rob Hopkins’ words: “If we wait for governments, it will be too late. If we act as individuals, it will be too little. But if we act as communities, it might just be enough, and it might just be in time.” This sentiment, she argues, highlights the importance of activating our unique spheres of influence to drive collective change.

Her insights reveal a critical leadership truth: when old models fail, it’s time to evolve. Expertise isn’t static, it adapts as the world changes. By identifying levers of change and working across boundaries, organizations can amplify their influence and drive meaningful results.

In this episode, you’ll also learn:

• Why individualism may be holding us back from innovation.
• How storytelling drives social change.
• What it means to be a leader in an unpredictable environment.  
• The power of grassroots activism to drive environmental impact.

Subscribe to Travel Beyond through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast player.

Show notes

Destination British Columbia — The publicly funded destination marketing organization (DMO) for British Columbia, Canada, responsible for global marketing, destination development, industry education, collaborative community programs, and visitor services.

Duffey Lake — A provincial park in British Columbia located along Highway 99, renowned for its opportunities for canoeing, kayaking, and wildlife viewing.

Fraser Canyon —  A natural and cultural landmark in British Columbia, offering rugged landscapes, outdoor adventures, and historical significance.

Episode transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been lightly reviewed for accuracy.

Veronica Woodruff: It’s often, you can get into an organization and just be like, Oh, this is the way it’s done. Okay. And you get in your cubicle, and this is your workload, and this is your boundary. You’re not going to think outside those things. And I think you can throw that playbook out the door in some ways. And yeah, you can do all those things, but you can also do more.

So you have an opportunity to be a leader in all of those positions.

David Archer: Welcome back to Travel Beyond, where we partner with leading destinations to bring you inspiring solutions to the greatest challenges facing communities and the planet. I’m David Archer from Destination Think, recording from Haida Gwaii, the territory of the Haida Nation off the north coast of British Columbia in Canada.

On this show, we look at the role of travel and choose to highlight destinations that are global leaders. We talk to the changemakers who are addressing regenerative travel through action in their communities, and often from the bottom up. And we’re actively looking for the best examples of efforts to regenerate economies, communities, and ecosystems.

You can reach me if you have a story to share at david at destinationthink.com. And for some great story examples, you can also check out 100 travel innovations. These are bite sized stories of solutions led by the travel industry. You can find them at innovate. destinationthink.com. Two episodes ago, we spoke with Veronica Woodruff about some environmental restoration projects that she’s been helping bring to reality alongside various communities, and some of those projects have involved the tourism industry.

In that episode, Veronica also mentioned the need for cross sector collaboration when we work on climate challenges, and she helped us imagine what it would be like to think of tourism as part of the ecosystem. And she points out that old methods of doing business in siloed industries might not cut it in a more unpredictable world, such as the one we’re facing now, whether that’s because of climate impacts or politics or local sentiment or something else.

So, when past models are obsolete, what kind of leadership will be most effective? Veronica will share her perspective in this episode as an environmental professional toward thinking about complex topics and making change happen. We’ll hear about leadership responsibilities, the shifting nature of expertise, and why it’s time to double down on your particular levers of change.

She’ll also tell you why she’s trying to build an army of nature nerds, which is a phrase that I love, and Like many of us, Veronica has also had her own moment of awakening or realization that yes, the climate crisis does demand her full attention. So she’ll tell us about that too. Here she is now with Rodney Payne.

Veronica Woodruff: I feel like my moment, my moment of being like, holy shit moment, uh, I think built over 20 years, but I think for me it started in the heat dome in 2021 in BC and seeing the effects. I have, um, cedar trees at the front of my house that are probably a hundred years old. And the whole fronts of those trees were burnt.

Like the, it burnt the trees. And I was like, wow, how do you mitigate that? And we haven’t had, that was 44 degrees. We were over 40 last year, right when my headranges came out, the flowers came out, and the whole tops of them burnt to a crisp. Like they were in an oven. So those two things where you just, you know, I’ve been watching kind of ecosystem changes or, you know, impacts from different sports or all of those things over the decades, but since that heat dome in 2021. That was quite profound. And further, the data from start, the drought in BC started in 2022, not having any rain that next fall was so unnerving because as a mushroom picker, You know fall is one of my favorite times. That forest was crispy and to have no rain was panicky, you know, it’s like where’s we where are we gonna get water that those so while I’ve had these 20 years and these 20 or 25 years of opportunities to be like wow, this is it It’s almost like those 20 years.

It’s like we need to do something. We need to do something. You need to do something and now it’s like I’m not sure we can do anything anymore. But here it’s good. It’s here now and so, I feel like I need to be part of this now. Like, I’ve been doing this work for a long time, and I now know how important that has been, but now I need to find a way how I can double time that, and, um, double the area of influence.

So that’s how I feel now. And this is really since the heat dome. 

Rodney Payne: Yeah. 2021 in British Columbia was real, right? If you think about the six months we had from that heat dome, Alpine areas were flooding with no rain, floods, evacuations, a crazy forest fire season, lit and burnt to the ground. And then a lot of those fire scars slid and wiped out highways.

And we also had a billion crustaceans die in the heat dome that year. 

Veronica Woodruff: That heat dome was four days. 

Rodney Payne: Yeah. 

Veronica Woodruff: What if that heat dome was 10 days? That’s not out of the realm of possibility, and, you know, you had over 600 people that were, uh, deaths attributed to that for four days. 

Rodney Payne: If you back up to why that heat dome occurred, right, we’re seeing insane temperatures in the Arctic that’s causing melt.

And that’s causing cold water to enter the ocean, that’s slowing down the ocean currents, that’s causing weather systems to slow down. 

Veronica Woodruff: Or speed up in some areas, like this is the thing, those, that continuity, like those predictable things that are happening. That have happened over our entire lifetime are no longer predictable.

And so I hear people talk about it all the time, like, oh, the weather, they don’t know what they’re talking about anymore. It’s like, you think? Of course, they don’t know what they’re talking about because we’re in a new era of how weather is going to work. 

Rodney Payne: The past data that all of our models are based on, all of our predictive models, it doesn’t apply anymore.

Veronica Woodruff: It doesn’t apply. And in the same way, like things are shifting around. 

Rodney Payne: Do you think there’s a way that the travel industry can sort of move beyond some of the things that caused you not to focus your attention there. Do you think, do you think there’s something we can do?

Veronica Woodruff: I think that there’s opportunities to intersect with travellers meaningfully within communities.

And you have always talked about that as a driver of change, where how you can inspire. People, while they’re, they’re traveling, they’re a tourist, they’re learning, they’re open to learning. I think there’s opportunity there, but I’m skeptical. I’m skeptical of the person that’s just on vacation. I think that we, it has to be very cleverly done.

Because it has to be passive. Basically have to use the advertising industry’s version of human psychology and tricking them to take in the information that’s, you know, gonna get us out of this mess. 

Rodney Payne: If you compare an all inclusive with someone who’s traveling very mindfully, how do you think about the opportunity and maybe part of the thought there is around what you’re trying with the mountain biking QR codes?

Veronica Woodruff: You know, like the, I don’t know exactly the stats on who goes to an all inclusive. The person on the all inclusive, they’re there. They’re there for a short period of time, a week or two. They’re there because it’s easy. Everything’s set up. They don’t need to think. They’re just there. So having that, uh, interaction with that guest in a way that it is influential but at the same time the experience, it would be the key, you know, and I think the destinations where these people are going, uh, an all inclusive, you know, in Mexico or, um, anywhere in Central America, like there’s such beautiful places and people want to be inspired.

And, you know, I haven’t seen it yet where. Again, with my view, uh, I haven’t seen those destinations that have done that well. 

Rodney Payne: So we’re missing a really massive opportunity. Do you think we should just end all inclusives? 

Veronica Woodruff: No, uh, no, I don’t think you should end all inclusive. I think about the people that work there, that depend on those, uh, jobs and, you know.

That’s a good question, actually. Do I think all inclusives should end? I don’t know. 

Rodney Payne: Because it’s just one of the stories we tell ourselves, right? 

Veronica Woodruff: Yeah. 

Rodney Payne: Because when you, when we’re sitting here with the river there, and yesterday we got to go and see the landslide, and we know that the permafrost at the top of our mountains are melting.

Veronica Woodruff: And the glaciers. 

Rodney Payne: And the glaciers are melting. And that the river ecosystem is really challenged because of that. Should we stop flying to all inclusives at this point? 

Veronica Woodruff: Right. So more broadly, should we stop flying? 

Rodney Payne: Well, should we, should we stop flying is probably different to should we stop flying to all inclusives?

Veronica Woodruff: Right. 

Rodney Payne: Because there are valid reasons probably to fly. And one really good analogy I was given by someone who thinks a lot about energy use is the heart surgeon who flies to Africa to do hundreds of volunteer surgeries on kids with heart conditions probably always going to get a hot pass. Yeah flying to Fiji for five days to have a Mai Tai on the beach, that’s going to come under more and more pressure 

Veronica Woodruff: Scope 3 is the nail in the coffin for travel.

I think you can do so much in destination, but when you account for the flight I’m not sure that there’s any sustainability work that is going to offset the emissions to get to a destination. So how do you reconcile that from where we are today in the travel industry? That’s a hard question. 

Rodney Payne: It’s the question.

Veronica Woodruff: The question.

Rodney Payne: What role do you think storytelling plays in driving social change? 

Veronica Woodruff: That is a great question. This is like the connection to nature. I think we’ve lost our ability to understand that our whole life is a story. You know, we’ve got these important laws and these policies and regulations, but they’re all stories that we’ve told, that we’re telling.

Like, we’re all living in this Western story. And I think, you know, I have a science brain. The idea of stories always sounds so hokey, but I’ve really shifted on that. When I do look at the story of capitalism, Or the story of crony capitalism, or the story of economic development, or story of jobs, or life satisfaction.

Like, all of those stories are just defining this lifestyle. But there’s other stories, there’s other ways we can be living. So, I have come full circle on how important recognizing a story is. And how it can change. 

Rodney Payne: The other ways we could be living, is something you and I have talked about a lot. Do you think those ways are actually gonna be better for us and make us happier?

Veronica Woodruff: I, yes, I do. Um, although, like, you know, one of the things we’ve talked about is like, a speedboat on a lake. You know, in the summer. And I think it’s gonna be hard to transition that without sort of lamenting, like, oh, wouldn’t it be nice to be on the boat? And I think that, that’s, it’s a hard, it’s a hard sell because we have a really fun, powered life right now.

Like things are really fun and we can go really fast and we can satisfy like a ton of like exciting recreational pursuits with the energy we can burn right now. But it’s hard when you think about that burning that energy if that is influencing the ability for the next generation to live. The same way. Like, is it really worth it? Yeah, it’s hard. 

Rodney Payne: And we often think in extremes, right? Like our brains jumps to, to shortcut things. The creative and optimistic side of my brain thinks about the boat example and wonders, maybe there’s a net better outcome where a community owns a few boats and we all get to go together.

Veronica Woodruff: Totally. 

Rodney Payne: And they’re electric. And they store energy for an emergency at the same time, right? And that we’re all going to enjoy those together. And it’s less expensive for individuals because we share the cost. And then we’ve got an emergency fleet of boats should we ever need to evacuate in a flood, right?

We’re so individualistic and we glorify ownership of things so much and that becomes part of the story of status. It doesn’t need to be all or nothing, right? And I think that’s easy to get tripped up on. 

Veronica Woodruff: Yeah, I like that you said individualistic. Because I do think that is part of our story that’s really not serving us well.

And, you know, you see that in our human connections with, in our youth. You know, I have a teenage daughter and her connections are certainly, you know, with her friends at school, but a lot of her connections on her phone and it’s in her apps and that’s not connection. Like that is not nuance and laughing and rolling around on the lawn and like, you know, like, or and I think that we’re becoming extremely isolated in so many, in so many of our youth, like I’d say, you know, 30 and under these people that now are just so ingrained into their tech.

We’ve, this individualistic pendulum has gone to this crazy place and we’ve got to draw it back to human connections and communities together.

Rodney Payne: In such a complicated society, we’ve all specialized and you’ve really specialized in understanding biology and the environment and your local environment. I, I was, until we first met, very, very focused on travel. We’re all in these silos and I had a moment where I could luckily poke my head up outside of my gopher hole and look around and see what was going on and talk to people like you and realize that information wasn’t flowing between those silos as well as it needs to be.

We’re not listening to each other. We have all this expertise, but we’re discounting it if it doesn’t suit our immediate needs. If you could say to the people making decisions or people in other silos, anything, what do you wish they knew? 

Veronica Woodruff: Oh, well, first off say, I have to say I am not an expert in anything.

I am, I am a generalist. And so I, I do work with the experts. So I do really, um, think of myself as. Uh, you know, a generalist, so expert in none. But I do know a little bit about a lot of things. And I think the things that those people, uh, so whether it’s a lifetime bureaucrat that works in a government agency, whether it’s someone new coming into the career, uh, you know, and they’re working in these influential silos, so a government agency, uh, an industry, they have to take leadership responsibility.

It’s often you can get into an organization and just be like, oh, this is the way it’s done. Okay, and you get in your cubicle and this is your workload and this is your boundary and you’re not gonna think outside those things and I think you can throw that playbook out the door in some ways and yeah, you can do all those things, but you can also do more.

So you have an opportunity to be a leader in all of those positions. I don’t think individually that people are driving ahead as much as they could be. So, um, I want to see inspiration from those people. You see this a lot in emergency management, where the individual boundaries that we’ve put on our areas of responsibility, so you can think of a municipal boundary, or a, you know, government boundary of any kind, it’s like, well, okay, that disaster is now outside my boundary.

I, okay, I’m gonna not talk about that. The flood’s over there now. And it doesn’t work. Floods don’t work like that. Emergency management doesn’t work like that. Ecosystems don’t work like that. We all need to be having cross boundary conversations. Collaborations, because this is how that’s going to work.

This is not how we currently do things. We all stay in our silo, in our lane, because there’s no incentive for us to work together. It takes time in our already busy lives, and it just, it isn’t part of our culture to go outside our boundary. And we really need to start doing that. The tricky part is it’s going to, in order to do that, you’re going to have to sacrifice some of the things that were within your boundary.

But I’m pretty sure I could talk to anybody in any organization, in any job and be like, Yeah, you know what? I could shave that Monday meeting. Then, you know, like, there are ways that we can do this. It’s not impossible to have conversations and initiate that from a leadership position, regardless of what your job is.

Rodney Payne: In the moment we’re in where the world’s changing so quickly and the physical world is becoming a lot more extreme, what does leadership mean to you? 

Veronica Woodruff: You know, Leadership means to me, this is such a funny word, again, coming from that science background, is to be reflective. And I almost dislike that word, but taking the opportunity to be like, what if I’m wrong in this moment?

Other perspectives should I be considering? Like, even just those two questions, it’s all scenarios that I can start asking myself or someone could to come into any situation with thinking like, hmm, maybe I’m wrong. How else can I look at this? Like, those are really important questions. I think it’s an important piece of how we’re going to move forward.

Rodney Payne: Have you found any ways that you can leverage the really powerful work you’re doing on the ground? Like the Mount Meagher landslide restoration to catalyze broader environmental awareness? 

Veronica Woodruff: Yeah, the Mount Meager project has been really good because it’s got a really cool story. You know, we’ve got this massive landslide.

It’s tied to this active volcano. Um, flood risk. It’s a beautiful valley. It’s an increasing population. Um, so being able to use that story as a platform to talk about, um, not only ecological restoration, but things like climate change and the influences of glacier loss on instability and how that relates to downstream effects.

Uh, in, uh, surface water, ecosystems, flood risk, that kind of thing. So, the Meagher project’s been probably one of the most interesting, uh, and profound projects I’ve worked on. For sure. 

Rodney Payne: With something that massive happening so close to a high functioning community, does everyone now understand how critically urgent it is that we act on climate?

Veronica Woodruff: Uh, no. I don’t think that there is a logical step between flood risk, volcanic risk and what that means for climate. So, relating the risk to a receding glacier because of warming temperatures, because of increased emissions, sort of goes down that chain. We just actually surveyed the community about Mount Meagher and, you know, Our, and the question was, are you aware of the influence on flood risk in town?

And 89 percent of respondents said yes. So it feels like we’ve been doing a really good job about talking about the effects of Mount Meagher, but we haven’t got, there, we haven’t been relating the story of that landslide more broadly to what that means for climate change. So there’s an opportunity there. 

Rodney Payne: You, in your spare time, you also created something called Nature Camp.

Can you tell me about that and what’s the purpose? 

Veronica Woodruff: I started a group with some like minded people in 2006 called Stewardship Permanent Society. And our, um, vision was to connect community to nature. So we did a wide range of things like ecosystem restoration, so a lot of these salmon projects. And we started Grow with Nature programs, so educating kids from three to twelve.

So we had our little saplings were the three to five year olds and then we had five to twelve in our Grow with Nature program. So that was really, really successful. Those really kicked off. We fundraised to build a Nature Centre in 2010 and then Nature Centre opened for business in 2012 and we started our programming there.

Unfortunately, the cats were affected by COVID, and we have, we are just trying to figure out what our organization looks like now, post COVID, but, uh, we were, we had hundreds of families in our, um, in our roster of the kids that we got to connect with, and, uh, it was an incredible social enterprise, you know, we had 13 staff, and, um, we really loved being part of a community in that way.

Rodney Payne: Why is it so important to teach kids about nature and the watershed they live in? 

Veronica Woodruff: Because it’s so cool. It’s like, it’s such an easy way to engage with kids. You know, when you see a salamander, you see a snake, you see a frog, you see a beautiful bird. And it’s quite easy to inspire that curiosity with nature.

Because, uh, there’s no shortage of cool things to tell them. 

Rodney Payne: Do you think we’re adequately prepared for crisis? Both in terms of the people that live here and the people who visit? 

Veronica Woodruff: No. I don’t think any community is adequately prepared for a crisis. And I don’t think that’s because it’s lack of planning, or lack of professionals.

I just think that we, Alex Stephan talks about this expertise bubble. I think we’re just at a stage where things are happening so quickly that we haven’t experienced before. That we just don’t have the vision on how it’s going to play out in real time and therefore can’t build the step by step plan on how to address that.

You know, look at Lytton burning down in that instant, like those videos, those poor people driving away and every house is on fire. Nobody was ready for that. And there was no plan to put in place in that moment. So I think we are woefully unprepared currently and under resourced in trying to become prepared in whatever that might look like.

Rodney Payne: What are your hopes and fears about the climate and biodiversity crisis? 

Veronica Woodruff: I’m hoping to create an army of nature nerds. That would be the best thing to address some of the, uh, biodiversity crises in the province. I think that we just need more people to consider both how they fit into the ecosystem and then what they can do to protect it.

And that goes beyond emissions. I know we’re looking at things like pollution and the toxification of water, of all of us, you know, so I think that those are the types of things that we really need to start paying attention to. 

Rodney Payne: Are you an optimist a pessimist or a realist? 

Veronica Woodruff: I am an optimistic realist. 

Rodney Payne: What does that mean?

Veronica Woodruff: It means that I’m not a pessimist for sure. I because I think that I have faith that we can work together because I actually think the solutions aren’t as hard as we. Uh, make them out to be like these barriers we have to collaborate more. I think we have to have more honest conversations together and also with our own selves and invest in understanding ecosystems and our role in it.

Like those things are not that challenging. And again, that real conversation about what does this mean for me in five years, 10 years, 30 years, imaginary numbers of 2050 or 2040. You know, it’s so close now, but. I think we have a hard time relating that as humans to what that actually means to us today.

And I think we need to start to force those conversations on ourselves and among our peers and above our networks to really make some differences. 

Rodney Payne: What conversations do we need to have? 

Veronica Woodruff: What conversations? This is where the challenge lies, right? What should I do? When someone asks me, well, I care about climate change.

What should I do? I have yet to have the real I don’t have the elevator pitch. So, we discussed this yesterday about the levers. Like, you really need to double down on the levers that you have available to you. And I really like this. I think that this is doubling down on your areas of influence and what you can change within this footprint.

I think it’s really exciting and could catalyze people. So, consuming less. Considering the spinach packaging. You know, if it’s in a hard plastic shell, maybe it’s not the right purchase. And that can trickle down to the spinach industry to repackage their food. So yeah, and that takes time, but these are the things that we need to start doing now to speed up the speed up the transition.

Rodney Payne: Do you think we have time for individual action to trickle down? 

Veronica Woodruff: No, but I think it’s part of it. I think all of these things need to work together. Uh, you know, I love that Rob Hopkins quote, you know, if we wait for governments, it’ll be too late, too late. If we act as individuals, it’ll be too little, but if we all work together, it’ll be just enough and just in time.

And so like, that idea of just in time, we need all of these pieces working together. So you’ve got some big levers, I have some levers, and you know, my friend who’s an excellent gardener has levers. Like, we all have our different spheres of influence that we need to activate. Actually, you know, it’s a funny thing.

You know what, you know, what has given me hope strangely, there was a UN report gap report on it was a review of disaster, the progression on disaster management, there was a whole section on this is the first time I saw a report around disaster management that actually talked about human behavior. You know, prior to that, it’s always been like structural, you know, process.

And this was a report that included how to engage appropriately with humans. And similarly, integrating both climate action and disaster management as a single sector versus two separate silos. So, it is actually giving me hope that, um, because the disaster management sector is certainly a sector on its own, and, you know, working through enormous catastrophes around the globe, you know, like Katrina, um, you know, going even farther back like that, there is so much expertise there that hasn’t been touched.

Linked to climate suddenly in the last couple of years, we have those two sectors that are starting to be like, hey, this is actually one in the same. So that’s something that’s actually given me hope is bringing together disaster management sectors and climate change because that almost instantly doubles the attention given within those, um, those, uh, processes that’s going to happen from those two sectors.

Rodney Payne: If I gave you a magic wand and you could have it for a day, what would you use it for? 

Veronica Woodruff: That’s a hard question. I need to think about it. 

Rodney Payne: It’s not meant to be easy. We’re at the end of the questions here. I’m giving you the hard ones. 

Veronica Woodruff: If I had a magic wand You know, I would, I would hope that I, we could all have like a range of thinking that was in like this range that I originally thought that we were all on some version of the same page.

But I think now, like, I now realize that people aren’t even in the same book, like we’re in, we’re not even in the same playbook. So I wish there was a way that we could all, um, agree to the set of rules that we all agree on. We’re not quite there. So I think if we could start having those honest conversations that had the base rule, maybe we could be making more progress.

Rodney Payne: How do we help people to get that perspective and sort of get an alignment on common fact? 

Veronica Woodruff: Tricky. And I think you, I think you just have to keep at it. I don’t think it’s going to be one conversation or one event or any of those things. I think it just happens over time. So it’s being available. It’s repeating and being open to denial and meeting people where they’re at, you know, like I think the people that I know that are outright climate deniers.

I don’t argue with them. I don’t challenge them in the way that is adversarial, you know I just listen and then I just I always try to relate the discussion around something that they recognize in their own realm, so in their backyard, in the sport they like, something like that. So I think we have to have some more of those conversations.

That takes time, and it takes some level of skill, and you can’t just be outraged and adversarial, and it feels like sometimes that’s the way that climate is, um, that people are speaking about climate. Like, why aren’t you listening? But in reality, people aren’t listening because it’s just too much. But if you say, hey, what about your backyard?

What’s happening there that you’ve noticed? I think that’s a way to get people to listen.

David Archer: This has been Travel Beyond, presented by Destination Think, and you just heard Rodney Payne speaking with Veronica Woodruff. For more resources and show notes, visit the blog at DestinationThink.com. This episode was produced and has theme music composed by me, David Archer, Sarah Raymond de Booy is my co producer, Lindsay Payne, Jamie Sterling, and Cory Price provided production support.

If you like what you hear, please take a moment to give us a five star rating. It helps more people find our show and we’ll be back next time with some more solutions. Talk to you again soon.