Conservation by Design Was Never Just About the Forest or the species.
I remember the exact meeting where I stopped believing in perfect plans. We were sitting in a community hall somewhere in the Amazon basin maybe something like 20 years ago; plastic chairs, a fan that wasn't doing much against the heat, a stack of maps we had spent weeks preparing. Beautiful maps, honestly. Deforestation models, priority zones, protected area gaps, all color-coded and defensible. We had the science. We had the funding logic. What we did not have, it turned out, was the room. An older man in the back, I won't use his name, but I still hear his voice, waited until I finished my presentation and then asked, quietly … And where in this plan is my son's future? I didn't have a slide for that. That question rearranged something in me that has never gone fully back into place. Twenty-five years + into this work, I still think about it more than I think about most of the technical papers I've read or co-authored. The Methodology I Actually Belie...