The most important conservationists of the future probably won’t even abide by that name.
Already today, it’s politicians that decide on whether biodiversity loss is taken seriously or pushed to the fringes.
It’s engineers who are designing disruptive technologies for tackling climate change and ocean pollution.
It’s pioneering economists who are exploring new ways of designing systems that safeguard the planet’s life support systems, rather than continually exploiting them to fuel economic growth.
It’s neuroscientists and psychologists who are revealing the forces that shape human behaviour and pro-environmental decision making.
The future will be a playground of grand challenges, from rising sea levels, to collapsing pollinators.
If we want to address such problems, the absolute last thing we should be doing is talking to people who share our biases, building walls between disciplines and propping up our own area of expertise as the “silver-bullet”.
There will always be a role for good science, for solution-focused research and for outward-looking people who dare to skip over non-existent disciplinary boundaries.
But so long as conservation continues to be the job of tracking wildlife declines and of insulating ourselves from new voices and challenging points of view, then it is doomed to irrelevancy at exactly the point in history when it is needed most.
We must create new tribes of innovative thinkers. Forge new collaboration between scientists and policy-makers. Create new platforms that don’t just pull together existing colleagues but the whole spectrum of thinkers and doers.
There’s a blueprint for how this can be done. It’s been written about in hundreds of history books.
We need a Manhattan Project aimed at tackling biodiversity loss.
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