My introduction to the Amazon came in 1990 when I was a research assistant, fresh out of college and living elbow-to-elbow with a team of scientists aboard a floating raft on the Amazon River. Every day brought the promise of new discoveries, and many mornings I found myself waiting impatiently for the first glimmer of dawn to peek through the canopy, fading from deep indigo to soft gold as it filtered through the leaves and revealed a slumbering world come to life. Lowland tapirs grazing on the riverbank, their long, flexible snouts half-buried in the grass. Pink river dolphins gliding through murky waters. A tableau of life in all its forms, rich and full and astonishingly fragile.
Within a year of my arrival, much of that pristine forest had vanished, felled to make way for human settlements. Back then the Brazilian government was trying to entice families to leave overcrowded urban favelas and make their homes in the forest. One governor handed out chainsaws to newly minted landowners with the gusto of Oprah handing out car keys to a studio audience. In the process, species like the dolphins and the tapirs, were driven from their habitats, their numbers rapidly dwindling.
Flash forward to present-day and we find the same tragic story unfolding around the world. According to the 2024 Living Planet Report released today by World Wildlife Fund (WWF), where I serve as chief scientist, globally monitored wildlife populations have plummeted by 73% in just 50 years, driven mostly by habitat destruction, overexploitation, and climate change. This decline has a dangerous ripple effect. Earth’s wild places cannot long survive the loss of its wildlife. And human civilization, despite its undeniable progress and technological wonders, remains bound to the health of the one planet we all call home.
The path we’re on now leads to catastrophic tipping points—thresholds where harmful changes to nature and the climate become potentially irreversible. The…
