Conservation Is About People (Even When We Pretend It's About Trees)
Confessions of a conservationist who thought saving nature was mostly about understanding nature. Like many conservationists, I started my career believing that conservation was fundamentally about nature. I was trained as a biologist. I loved fieldwork, collecting data, observing species, understanding ecosystems, and trying to make sense of the extraordinary complexity of the natural world. There was something wonderfully straightforward about it. You went into the field, asked scientific questions, collected evidence, analyzed your findings, and hopefully contributed a little more knowledge to help protect the planet. Of course, nature was never simple. But at least the questions seemed clear. Where are the species? What threatens them? How do ecosystems function? What can science tell us about protecting them? I genuinely believed that if we understood nature well enough, we could figure out how to conserve it. And then, somewhere along the way, people happened. The unexpected care...