Caring for the environment, caring for each other
Words by Marcel Currin
Photography by Ross Campbell
The life-changing difference a supportive workplace makes, and what happened when an environmental compliance officer was given time to heal.
It’s 4am and Ella Florence is running down a mountain in Italy. It’s been a night of great food, wine, and laughter in a hut on Mount Resegone.
Ella and her friend Lorna spent the previous day on the summit cheering for competitors in the Resegup running race, a 24km mountain run that starts and finishes in the little town of Lecco.
Since then, they’ve been hanging with the locals and now they are galloping down dark, stoney trails in the rain to catch a flight out of Italy. Ella is having the time of her life.
“I like being surrounded by people, maybe even a bit of chaos,” she says with a grin. Ella is the second of seven siblings, which may explain some of that chaos. They are a close family. “It gets laughed about in the office that I’ve usually been up to something weird or wacky with my family on the weekend,” she says with a grin.
The office is in Whakatāne at Bay of Plenty Regional Council where Ella works as an environmental compliance officer. It’s a monitoring and enforcement job, making sure that places like orchards and campgrounds meet agreed conditions for their water use and on-site wastewater systems.
The human side of compliance
At first glance, Ella seems an unlikely candidate for a compliance officer. She is cut from a template that is perpetually young and cheerful, not the type of person you’d expect to show up at your door with a warrant. However, chatting with Ella, it becomes clear that she is a people person, which turns out to be an ideal quality for the role.
“My job relies on keeping good relationships with people,” she confirms. “Taking five minutes to have a conversation and connect on a personal level at the start of a site visit makes the biggest difference. The option of flashing your warrant and barging onto someone’s land is never going to lead to the best environmental outcomes because right from the get-go they don’t like you and don’t want to work with you.”
Ella started out in medical laboratory science but wanted to get outdoors so pivoted to environmental science. After graduating from Massey University in 2019, she took her first full time job in Queenstown, arriving on the same day that New Zealand’s first COVID-19 lockdown was announced. “I started my new job in a lockdown, in a new town, with two new flatmates,” she laughs. “It could have been a disaster but we had a fantastic time. We’re still really good friends.”
As much as Ella enjoyed Queenstown, she missed her family and returned to Whakatāne in late 2021 for a role at Bay of Plenty Regional Council. At this point our conversation skips casually to her overseas travels: Australia, South-East Asia, Europe… wait, what prompted the trip? There’s something that’s not been said.
It’s only later, via email, that she fills in the gap: about a month after Ella started her job at regional council, her younger sister Julia was critically injured in a farm bike accident. Julia did not survive. She had just turned 21.
My sister died. Three simple words that upended Ella’s world. “It was a really difficult grief journey,” she says when we next speak in person.
“I was struggling big time. When you work in compliance, you come across some tough situations and I had no emotional capacity to deal with anything more than what was already on my plate.”
She pushed on for 10 months, then decided to hand in her notice. Instead of accepting her resignation, her team leader put an alternative plan on the table: Was Ella open to taking a year of unpaid leave?
“The idea was that I could come back in a year’s time when I was in a better space. Or, if I still felt the same, I could hand in my notice then.” Telling this story, she pauses to reflect. “How many employers would give you a whole year off to take some space and do some healing so that you can come back later and have another crack at the job?”
Grief, growth and a year of exploration
That’s how we find her running down a mountain in Italy. “My friend Lorna had dropped everything to be with me when Julia passed away. I can’t quite remember whose idea it was, but we decided to book one-way tickets overseas and basically go on an adventure for as long as our savings would last. We had no itinerary, we were just seeing where the wind blew us.”
She is grateful to her managers for giving her time to grieve for her sister, acknowledging it was an exceptional circumstance. “I was in a much better head space returning from overseas. I was in a good place to be challenged,” she says.
One such challenge, she admits cheerfully, is that being a compliance officer “definitely sounds like a bad guy role”. This is where it helps to be good with people.
“I had a lady respond quite aggressively to a site visit request, so I made sure that I arrived with a big smile and a ‘kia ora’. By the end of my visit we’d had a super productive conversation and she thanked me for explaining everything. I’d explained how her consent is there to protect people and nature from wastewater pollution, and I walked her through maintaining her on-site wastewater system. Overall, it will be a better outcome for the environment.”
Rules to protect what matters
Ella says a lot of compliance work is communication and education. “When we do a really good job of these things, we don’t have to venture down the serious enforcement pathway too often.”
It is still an enforcement role, though. “In simple terms, I’m there to enforce the rules that are designed to make sure there are enough natural resources for human activities while also maintaining healthy ecosystems.
“I genuinely believe this stuff is important. If we didn’t have these rules, or people to enforce them, I think New Zealand would be a pretty stink place to live!”