As a major conference on the global biodiversity crisis opens in Montreal, a conservation biologist explains how ideas about protecting nature have evolved over the past 40 years.
E.O. Wilson was one of the world’s leading experts on ants, but his other passion was convincing humans to see themselves as part of the natural world.
Tom Womack, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand’s conservation needs to consider the long-term impact of climate change and focus not only on protecting native species but on preserving ecological richness.
When something is free, people use a lot of it. Economists are urging governments to compute values for natural resources – wildlife, plants, air, water – to create motives for protecting them.
Michael Obersteiner, University of Oxford; David Leclère, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and Piero Visconti, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Wildlife populations have plummeted by 68% since 1970. But we have a plan to turn things around.
A new plan targets areas around the world that can store carbon and protect large numbers of species. It calls for preserving these lands, working with Indigenous peoples and connecting wild areas.
Framing cats as responsible for declines in biodiversity is based on faulty scientific logic and fails to account for the real culprit – human activity.
Evolution seems to lead to increasing complexity of species. But perhaps a dominant, intelligent species like humans will always end up destroying itself.
Populations of plankton are in decline. If we push this critical foundation of the marine food chain to extinction, we could cripple ecosystems for millions of years.
Realising the silence of outer space was what made us appreciate our precarious position down on this pale blue dot – so beginning our obsession with extinction.
Growing evidence suggests that the extinction of the dinosaurs involved profound, complex and interconnected changes to the global systems that support life. Much like we are facing today.
Australia is losing mammals faster than any other country, as well as plenty more plants and animals besides. Extinction is theft from future generations – it’s time to treat it as such.
Death is inevitable for individuals and also for species. With help from the fossil record, paleontologists are piecing together what might make one creature more vulnerable than another.