Born to Run: lessons for conservation from Springsteen

This year marks 50 years since the release of Bruce Springsteen’s first two albums and we just passed the 48th anniversary of his breakout album, Born to Run. Given that I’m a river scientist, that title always hits with an echo of sub-text about the value of rivers that flow free.

But, let’s be real, Born to Run is about friendship, yearning for love and redemption, and the traps that life sets, and then busting out of those traps, not river conservation (though the album does include a track called “Meeting Across the River,” but that song is about friendships, redemption, and yearning to bust out of life’s traps.)

But having seen Springsteen perform over the years—including most recently taking my 21-year old son to see him in Cleveland in April—there’s something about his work that I can’t get out of my head, something that offers some serious inspiration for those who work in conservation. ?

Simply put, it’s about the power and the joy and the dignity of trying.?

I’ve been a fan of Springsteen since about the 7th grade, in the mid-eighties, and back then I would read everything I could find about him (not easy pre-internet).? I remember finding a reprint of a decade-old interview with Bruce, written during his tour for Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Talking about what drives him to give marathon shows in which he pours out everything in?an attempt to raise up, even for a moment, each person in the audience he said, “You can’t save everybody, but you gotta try.”?

That quote has always stuck with me for some reason, mostly as a summation of why I respect him so much.? He has never stopped trying—in that interview he talked about trying to make some difference to the struggling teens who’d show up at his shows looking for even a brief moment of meaning.

And beyond individual salvation, throughout his career he continued to try to make a difference, to say something meaningful about people’s lives: at the height of his fame he eschewed easy commercial records and put out collections of spare songs that forced listeners to contemplate the lives of those left behind by America’s economy, or giving names and dreams to otherwise faceless immigrants slipping through the shadows of our country trying to help their families.

And if you’ve ever seen him perform live, the man tries like no one else.?

And when I saw him in April, those words about trying came back to me. Thinking about those words while watching his incredible effort—exuberant and raucous, yes, but a massive effort nonetheless—I realized how Springsteen’s approach to work can inspire the work of conservation.?

In conservation, it often seems we face long odds and we must accept the reality that we can’t save everything.? And I know that we really can’t even try to save everything.? There must be cold analyses, prioritization, and quantifiable measures of success.? That is a necessity for the responsible use of limited resources and the best way to advance our objectives.?

But while all that is essential—akin to the long hours that Springsteen or any performer puts in behind the scenes, making choices, scrapping things that don’t work, endless repetition—it is not what drives the work.

What must drive the work is the burning conviction that we must try.? We’re not gonna save everything, but we’ll try to save as much as we can?and in that trying there is joy and pride and meaning. ?

And even, against all odds, that trying might bring about restoration and redemption.