EcoStrategist

  After decades working in the field I've come to one unavoidable conclusion: you cannot save nature without first understanding people. There is a moment every field conservationist knows. You stand at the edge of a forest patch, species checklist in hand, satellite imagery overlaid with boundary lines, and you look out at a landscape that is quietly, relentlessly changing. Not because of some distant abstraction called deforestation, but because a family is clearing half a hectare to plant maize. Because a herder's cattle are following the same corridor they have followed for generations. Because a river that once ran clean now carries the residues of a village that has no other option. In that moment, the biology is simple. The ecology is legible. But the solution? The solution lives entirely in the domain of human behaviour. I have spent my career, working to conserve key ecosystems and species in Latin America, and more recently in other areas around the world, watch...

Yesterday I sat down with someone and we started talking , the kind of talking that starts casual and ends up going somewhere you didn't expect. We were talking about purpose. And somewhere in the middle of that conversation, something quietly shifted for me. We've all asked ourselves the question at some point. What is my purpose? We frame it as a deeply personal search,   something to discover alone, like a treasure buried somewhere inside us, waiting to be uncovered. I've spent time with that question myself. Turned it over. Examined it from different angles. And for a long time, I thought the answer had to do with me. My passions. My fulfillment. My happiness. But yesterday, my friend said something that stopped me: "Purpose isn't something you find inside yourself. It's something that happens between you and other people." "We think we're doing things for ourselves. But we're always,   always,   doing them for someone else." ...