Conservation by the People: The Future of Biodiversity in a Divided World

What a wilder, more biodiverse planet could look like, where humanity fits into it, and how to get there.

Biodiversity loss now ranks alongside climate change as a threat to human survival. The United Nation’s secretary general has declared that “humanity is waging a war on nature.” According to some observers, humans are failing to do enough to avoid an extinction crisis. In Conservation by the People, Taylor Dotson challenges the catastrophic story that often gets told about the world’s ecosystems, uncovering the complex scientific, political, and cultural reasons why people disagree about conservation.

Biodiversity is as much storytelling as science. Dotson argues that what a wilder planet looks like, and how we should get there, is not something scientists can decide for us. Rather, we are all bound together in a journey of collective discovery. Scenarios, models, and meta-analyses can help, but what humanity needs most is to nurture the exploratory spirit of our chronically restless species through experiments in collective ecological living, via trials of better reconciling the needs and desires of people and nonhuman species. We need biodiversity democracy.