Two Conservation Champions, E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy, are Gone, But a Global Array of Successors is Emerging

Each biologist helped reveal and convey the splendid diversity of living things and the responsibility facing one sapient species, ours, to conserve that which sustains our spirits and societies.

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USDA Forest Service photo, Diego Perez

Much has been written and said about two of this era's greatest naturalists and conservationists, Edward O. Wilson and Thomas E. Lovejoy, both of whom passed away Christmas weekend - Wilson at 92 and Lovejoy at 80 (from pancreatic cancer). You can find links below to some marvelous testimonials.

My focus here is on how to attain their shared vision of a human enterprise operating within the wider living world more than dominating and disrupting it.

They each made major strides right through their final years and months - Wilson with his "Half Earth" project brashly seeking to protect half the area of land and sea from harmful human intrusions and Lovejoy, as always with partners, helping forge major new diplomatic and economic initiatives for conserving the Amazon rain forest for its indigenous peoples, unique ecosystems and carbon-storing value.

Right into his final weeks of life, Lovejoy helped produce the first Science Panel for the Amazon assessment of the faltering vital signs of the vast river basin, released at the COP-26 climate negotiations, and the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use.

Wilson's Half Earth project is helping drive conservation commitments where needed most; Lovejoy was a key shepherd of a new Amazon science report and commitments at forest-conserving commitments at the COP-26 climate talks.

Relentless pressure to extract resources is still imperiling wild areas and the indigenous and local traditional communities making a living within these ecosystems instead of destroying them.

To keep moving from pledges to outcomes, and to do so from Amazonia to the Arctic to the Taiga to Oceania, the world needs a much more variegated and global array of solution seekers with the inquiry-driven, systems-savvy, communicative, inclusive, optimistic traits of these two environmental heroes.

Luckily, because both men grounded their lives not only in science, but also teaching and public engagement, we're off to a great start. You'll meet some of the new crop of emerging leaders below. But first here's a brief look at what made Lovejoy and Wilson so special.

Along with many other achievements in science and scholarship, each man helped illuminate, communicate and conserve the stunning diversity of life on Earth.

Tom Lovejoy at Camp 41 near the forest fragment research project in 2017 (photo by Zachary G.B. Smith; listen to his podcast with Lovejoy)

Lovejoy, in fact, is widely credited with coining the phrase "biological diversity" as a distinct metric and his groundbreaking 1979 project in the Brazilian Amazon, creating rain forest tracts of varying sizes to track species changes under various conditions, sparked hundreds of studies and launched dozens of scientific careers. The resulting network of scientists, along with educators, journalists, local community leaders and people working in corporate sustainability, continues to spawn fresh talent.

Here's a short film on the findings that emerged from Lovejoy's research, made by the young visual storyteller Jayme Dittmar, who started out in conservation biology and moved to filmmaking. It was shot during her visit to Camp 41, a logistics and visitors' hub for the wider forest-fragmentation study, built by Lovejoy and colleagues in unbroken rain forest north of Brazil's biggest Amazon city, Manaus.

Dittmar visited the forest research project and camp in 2017 as one of 15 students on a storytelling workshop run by the George Washington University's Planet Forward initiative. Frank Sesno, a journalism professor and director of that project, just posted a reflection on Lovejoy's work and says this year's Planet Forward Summit, on April 7, will be devoted to Lovejoy.

Ed Wilson never stopped poking at life, including at his retirement home in Massachusetts when I last visited him, in 2019. The quote is from an interview I did with him in 2008.

Wilson, through his field and statistical studies, teaching, big-idea pot stirring and eloquent prose (which garnered him two Pulitzer Prizes) is widely considered one of the most influential biologists of the modern era.

I feel blessed to have gotten to know each of these remarkable human beings through my decades of reporting. I first interviewed Wilson around 1989 for a story on the fast-spreading imported tropical fire ants that he discovered as a 13-year-old in his home state Alabama. That same year, I met Lovejoy at Camp 41. I last saw Lovejoy in October on a busy swing he made to New York City to do his duty (despite his weakening condition) as a member of innumerable nonprofit boards.

In a 2008 meetup at The New York Times, Wilson laid out what he coyly called "Wilson's Law," which I quoted and described on my Dot Earth blog:

“If you save the living environment, the biodiversity that we have left, you will also automatically save the physical environment, too,” he said. The restorative and balancing influences of functioning ecosystems are potent and vital. But, Dr. Wilson added, “If you only save the physical environment, you will ultimately lose both.”

I last spent time with Wilson again in 2019, when I visited him at his managed-care facility in Massachusetts for an interview musing on lessons learned and his vision of the future as he reached his 90th birthday. Read my National Geographic summary of the interview here.

Here's a wonderful moment, in which he describes how scientific discovery doesn't have to come in the wilderness. It's right out the door - if you look down.

Why bigness matters for biodiversity

The intertwined science of both biologists affirms one big idea - that unbroken large tracts of land or sea best sustain rich arrays of species.

In my 2019 conversation with Wilson, he made this critical point about limiting ecosystem fragmentation:

“When you leave intact as many species as possible, in a major habitat, whether it's a pond or a bay or a forest somewhere, the better it functions. And the better it functions, the better it serves.”

In a New York Times op-ed article Lovejoy co-wrote with John Reid, an economist at the indigenous-empowerment organization Nia Tero, they made this point about bigness: “In the tropics, intact forests store an average of twice the carbon held in forests bisected by roads or otherwise disturbed by development. That’s why we must let the big forests stand.”

Both of these leaders recognized something vital, and daunting, about global-scale efforts that require local engagement and buy-in. Success only comes by working the entire system, from the fraying, often-violent edges of rain forests to the equally turbulent, predatory political ecosystems in Washington and the corporate world.

Lovejoy, who grew up in elite circles and spent much of his time in Washington, was as adept at navigating the tangles of the Beltway as he was negotiating with landowners in Brazil to shape their pastures in ways that created those island-like tracts of forest he and so many others studied.

Wilson didn't spend much time in Washington, but did also have a passion for crossing all kinds of boundaries in pursuit of progress. This included energetic outreach to a community that other scientists focused on evolution sometimes like to demonize - evangelical Christians. Wilson's 2006 book, "The Creation - an Appeal to Save Life on Earth," is written as a series of letters to a Southern Baptist pastor.

The more such crossover, the better.

They leave more than a legacy

Ed Wilson long envisioned building a worldwide community of conservationists, with or without advanced degrees. His work with the National Geographic Society centered on community exercises like "bioblitzes" - daylong surveys of animals and plants involving students, teachers, scientists and the rest of us. He added professional training for young people in regions at risk through the E.O. Wilson Foundation's Half Earth Project.

The first Half Earth Scholar, Ricardo Guta, started out as a biological survey intern in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. He became a research technician at the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory there, focused on insect biodiversity, sampling and data bases. Here's a fascinating video of Guta and Norina Vicente, another technician at the park's zoology lab. She describes how educating girls in surrounding villages and towns has been particularly valuable - with more than 2,000 reached as of 2020 through 50 schools.

There are dozens of other stories like those of Guta and Vicente emerging from research, education and training projects for conservation around the world. Scientists from Columbia and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, partnering from the start with members of the Indigenous Inupiat community in Kotzebue on Alaska's Arctic coast, recently completed the first phase of a research project on climate-driven changes in sea ice and seal ecology.

But the need is vastly greater, and that's why I was excited this week to learn about, and sign onto, a pledge to create a Thomas E. Lovejoy Endowed Fellowship for Biological Diversity (and also to sustain Camp 41).

The effort emerged swiftly through a network of individuals and organizations that benefited from Lovejoy's decades of insights and advice, including the Global Council for Science and the Environment, Camp 41, George Mason University, the National Geographic Society, One Earth, Planet Forward, the United Nations Environment Program and the United Nations Foundation.

A letter, read to Lovejoy shortly before his passing, described those who would be supported this way:

Thomas E. Lovejoy Fellows will be recognized as emerging individuals who are committed to advancing the science, policy, and public understanding of biodiversity and the role that biodiversity plays in preserving life on Earth and the integrity of the Earth’s biosphere.

As this fund and fellowship begin to take shape, the organizers told me they are keen to glean ideas from people involved in conservation biology, policy and practice. Please share this post with others and offer your thoughts in the comments!

On my Sustain What webcast today (watch below), I asked David Quammen, the author of a seminal book on the concept of biological diversity, what advice he'd offer, and I agree with every word in his reply:

"To me, the first and most obvious thing we need is Ph.D's in ecology coming out of the Congo, coming out of Gabon, coming out of Brazil, coming out of these places - nationals, people who need the opportunity to go to graduate school, to become ecologists, evolutionary biologists and conservation biologists. Despite the fact that they may have been born in a little clay house in a village in the middle of the rainforest, that's who we need. It is the scientific and educational equivalent of of vaccine equity."

Why diversity

Humans could almost assuredly find ways, through the explosively expanding power of biotechnology, to sustain communities on this and other spheres without Earth's astonishing present-day diversity of living things.

As for aesthetics, we're already diverted hourly by digital kaleidoscopes of magnificent animal and botanical imagery via Instagram and Animal Planet.

A company in Franklin, Maine, breeds custom-colored clownfish for the aquarium trade (yes tropical fish from Maine).

And while I embrace biologist Edward O. Wilson's compelling concept of biophilia - a hypothesized innate bond between humans and other life - I'm convinced that this feeling competes frequently with what you might call biophobia given our aversion to pests, predators and pathogens.

Indeed, when I was in the Brazilian Amazon researching my 1990 book The Burning Season, ranchers used the Portuguese word limpar, "to clean," to describe what they were doing converting wild forests to cattle pasture. It was hard for me to protest given the "cleaning" of wild landscapes Americans undertook through two prior centuries.

Yet despite all of that, I - like most of you, I'm sure - cherish biological diversity. And while future generations have every right to prefer some tidier, less variegated biosphere, we do not have the right to curtail their right to consider richer options.

That is why I so appreciate the lives and legacies of these two great humans we just lost.

Let's work together, globally, to make their vision a reality.

Watch

Here's my Sustain What conversation with filmmaker Jayme Dittmar and David Quammen, whose told the story of Wilson's and Lovejoy's early work in his 1996 book The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction:

Reading and resources

There's much more of course, but here's a start:

The Washington Post's obituary of Lovejoy, by Joshua Partlow, completely nailed his character and achievements, to my eye.

Carl Zimmer's New York Times obituary of Wilson widens the view to include the biologist's wide-ranging achievements in behavioral science and basic evolutionary biology.

Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of The Sixth Extinction, filed a warm and illuminating New Yorker piece neatly retelling how Wilson and Lovejoy had deep synergy in early meetings in the 1970s that elevated biological diversity to a conservation focal point.

Jonathan Rose, the co-founder of the sustainability-focused Garrison Institute, wrote an eloquent testimonial to both Lovejoy and Wilson.

The Amazon Biodiversity Center is the organization maintaining Camp 41 and the wider Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragmentation study launched so long ago by Lovejoy.

David Skelly, and ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Yale who was a friend of Lovejoy's, wrote a beautiful Twitter thread illuminating the importance of what was originally called the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems project - Lovejoy's monumental achievement in field science.

Mark Moffett, an insect-focused tropical biologist, author and speaker who worked closely with Wilson over many decades has written a marvelous and deeply personal tribute for Skeptic. (Added 1/6/2022)

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Parting shot

I took this pair of photographs in Manaus in 1989. Together they show the turbulence and complexity of tropical life in the modern age, with a sloth hanging out in a bar as a soap opera plays on TV and coffins in all sizes, like Starbucks coffee cups, in a funeral parlor. Thankfully the child mortality rate has plunged in the region since then.