How do I start protecting land when it feels overwhelming?

You want to protect the land, and the sheer weight of the science and the practice makes you feel like you are already failing before you begin. That overwhelm is honest, because the work is genuinely huge. But wanting to hold the whole of it in your head at once is what is crushing you, not the work itself. No one protects everything, and no one masters all the science at the start. The people you admire in this field did not begin knowing it all. They began caring about one place, learned what that place needed, and let their knowledge grow from there. The land does not ask you to save it all. It asks you to tend the piece in front of you. So shrink the task until it fits your hands. Choose one patch, one species, one problem you can actually learn this season, and go deep on that. Mastery in conservation is not a flood of facts. It is patient attention to one living place, repeated until it becomes many.