Stuart Pimm
THE PATH TO SAVING NATURE
Stuart Pimm founded Saving Nature as the embodiment of his vision for a new approach to conservation – one based on science and on supporting local people.
Our mission is the culmination of his training as an ecologist and his drive to prevent extinctions. Over the course of his career as a scientist and educator, Stuart PImm honed his approach to tackling the extinction crisis. Using technology to distill large sets of data, he defines the urgency of conservation actions. This blend of experience and vision is at the core of Saving Nature.
Here we share the origin story of how an encounter in Hawai’i with an I’iwi (scarlet honeycreeper) set Stuart Pimm on the path toward making a meaningful difference to the planet and to local communities.
In his own words, Stuart reflects on his path to Saving Nature.
Stuart Pimm In the Namib desert
help save the world's great forests
Stuart PImm has devoted a lifetime to preventing extinctions. Guided by science, using annual surveys with drones and camera traps, he shows donors where the forests and species are returning.
I’iwi — a species of honeycreeper
Awakening
In my late twenties, I got the biggest shock of my career: I went to Hawai’i. I wasn’t on the beach, but in the forests looking at honeycreepers. I was interested in how species related to each other — which hummingbirds fed on which flowers. Honeycreepers do the same thing.
When I wasn’t in the field, I built computer models of who fed on whom — food webs. I was starting a career in these years just after my Ph.D. doing ecological theory. It was then that I published a book titled Food Webs.
In Hawai’i, I knew there were many species of birds that I hadn’t seen. However, I was sure that spending long days in the field week after week that I would see them all in time. I didn’t.
Some of the species I expected to see were already extinct, some were about to become extinct, and some were so local that unless I went to the right place, I would never see them. Extinction was real and a shock.
Reflection
Two things then happened. The first was a deep sense of moral responsibility. I was an ecologist: how would my colleagues and students view my career when I retired — if all I had done was to write academically brilliant papers. “Where were you, when we lost biodiversity” I heard the ghosts of future years ask. For that matter, society at large would ask the same question.
The second was that as a scientist, studying extinctions — and what we can do to prevent them — was an entirely reasonable occupation. How many species were going extinct, where, which species were the most vulnerable? And so on. Nothing I did made sense unless it was in the context of this tragic loss of our biological heritage.
At the computer working on food web models
Redefining Conservation
So, I was there on May afternoon in 1985 when colleagues and I voted into existence the Society for Conservation Biology. Like Lord Elrond says in Lord of the Rings, “I was there at the beginning.”
Theory helped. Computer models made predictions about some of these questions, ones that I could test. One was that the smaller the numbers of individuals in a population, the quicker would be its extinction — something I’d seen in Hawai’i. I’d seen it too on tiny islands off the coast of Britain, where I’d bird-watched as a teenager, joining others to count nesting birds for decades. Field experience across the tropics told me that a lot of what we’ve left of natural habitats was in fragments too small to sustain the populations that remained there.
“We should fix that,” I thought. But who is the “we?” and realised it had to be me. I found the lack of science brought to bear on many conservation decisions disappointing. Moreover, those efforts have to be local. Importantly, they must engage local conservation groups who live in the places where species are at risk. Success depends on understanding local politics, local economies.
In time, with ever better satellite images and better maps of where species are at risk, we identified the places with the highest concentrations of threatened species.
the mission
Then something wonderful happened. There is no Nobel prize for environmental sciences, but the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awards a comparable prize. I became the 2006 laureate for my work. I used money to set up a non-profit to raise money to fund local conservation groups to buy and restore connections between isolated habitat patches. Our first project was in coastal Brazil. Now, 14 years later, satellite imagery shows an impressive forest corridor where once there was a cattle pasture.
Science isn’t all that’s involved, but relevant science means we can focus our efforts, be efficient. It means we can be transparent about what we achieve, measure what we’ve done, measure what we should do better next time. That’s what Saving Nature is about.
Receiving the Heineken Prize from King King Willem Alexander