I’m often asked if I have a guiding philosophy when it comes to
conservation. While our work, by necessity, is an evolving discipline,
there is a mindset that serves as a constant for me.
It came from my dear friend, the late Tom Lovejoy. Tom was the first
scientist WWF hired. He became a legend in the conservation community
and spent decades working in and studying some of the most remote areas
in the Amazon. The first time I visited the Amazon with Tom, he shared
some simple but ultimately profound advice—that in order to understand
and protect a place, “Do whatever you can to look at the whole.”
By which he meant: Look at the birds, look at the trees, look at the
bodies of water, look at the people and how they live on the land. Look
at everything that makes a place tick. Don’t just arrive with a chosen
solution in hand and see everything through that lens. Because only by
understanding the entirety of a place can you understand what it needs
to thrive.
Some call this system-level thinking. I think it’s far clearer to
think of it as seeing the whole, understanding the whole, and then
determining the best ways to keep the whole intact.
Tom believed—and I do as well, thanks to his influence—that it is
important to take the time to fully consider the entirety of the place,
whether a landscape or a seascape or a watershed, to understand the
genius of an ecosystem. In the Amazon, that means understanding the
hydrological cycle that provides rainwater to a landscape that contains
one in 10 known species on Earth. It means understanding the needs of
hundreds of Indigenous groups as well as the economy, politics,
infrastructure, and livelihoods that define the world’s largest rain
forest.
