The Nature Conservancy. Protecting nature. Preserving life.™

Mark Tercek © The Nature Conservancy

“Science helps us know what places are most important to safeguard, how to go about protecting those places and how to help heal them when damaged.”

— Mark Tercek
President and CEO
The Nature Conservancy

Science drives us now, just as it did some 60 years ago when a group of scientists decided to apply their knowledge not only to study but to protect nature. That impulse led to the founding of The Nature Conservancy.

Today, science helps us know what places are most important to safeguard, how to go about protecting those places and how to help heal them when damaged. As our recent Atlas of Global Conservation demonstrates, the collective strength of decades of scientific research has the power to diagnose our ecological ills and prescribe a path to a healthier planet.

Last spring’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico confirmed that our oceans are in need of a scientific prescription — if not an intervention. Increasingly our seas are being tapped to supply food, energy, livelihoods, recreation, minerals and other resources. It’s a tall order to sustain all these uses while conserving the habitat on which fish and wildlife depend. Status quo management by many agencies, each agency with its own ocean-management objectives, is no longer a viable option.

The good news is that there is now widespread recognition that we need a more coordinated and thoughtful approach. The Nature Conservancy has significant expertise assessing marine systems and is now lending decades of data and planning acumen to support the U.S. government’s efforts to account for all the uses of our oceans holistically, instead of piecemeal (see “A Guide to Our Oceans”). Such a shift holds promise for more effective conservation on a larger scale, helping ensure that our oceans will continue to supply the nutritional, economic and spiritual bounty on which we and all life on Earth depend.

Another innovative application of good science is occurring in cooperation with a longtime rancher in Utah. There The Nature Conservancy has established a research station on the Dugout Ranch to see how science can combine with altered grazing practices to best maintain the grasses that a warmer and drier climate is depleting — grasses crucial to a cattle operation and the local economy (see “Cowgirl Conservation”). What we learn at the Dugout may help others adapt to a changing climate throughout the American West and beyond.

Such lessons might even extend to the rangelands of northern Kenya, where I recently observed how an infusion of Nature Conservancy science is empowering communities to better manage their grasslands for the benefit of livestock and wildlife across an astounding 2 million acres.

More than a year ago, Nature Conservancy scientists from the United States joined with the Northern Rangelands Trust to conduct a series of conservation workshops for village leaders and tribal elders north of Mount Kenya. The workshops encapsulated how The Nature Conservancy identifies threats to natural systems and prescribes actions to abate the threats and measure progress. The same methodology guides Nature Conservancy projects everywhere we work — from the American heartland to Australia to the Amazon. In Kenya, more than a dozen community conservancies now have management plans in place that unite efforts toward a common strategic conservation vision. As one of the local land managers said to me, “This is the knowledge we’ve been waiting for.”

But what was most inspiring to me was seeing The Nature Conservancy’s methodology being applied successfully in a place where wildlife conservation is so intricately fused with the well-being of local people. That’s the future of conservation — and science is leading the way.

Mark Tercek
President and CEO
The Nature Conservancy

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