What am I trying to illustrate in the above photo (a picture of cattle and elephant dung)? That conservation planning is a pile of poop?
No. But this mixture of excrement does show why such planning needs to incorporate extreme events like drought or flooding – especially for the impacts of those events on local people.
In [...]

Bogdkhan Uul, just south of Ulanbator, Mongolia, is the oldest national park in the world. That’s right — it predates Yellowstone by over 100 years. Established by the Mongolian government in 1778, it was originally chartered by Ming Dynasty officials in the 1500s as an area to be kept off limits to extractive [...]

Ecotourism is often presented as the savior for wildlife and wild places — providing local communities with financial incentives to preserve nature while also reducing poaching and development pressure.
But, lately, others question whether rich Westerners jetting around the world really help much at all: They disturb animals, create demands for new development and only employ [...]

Yes, global warming is a big deal and a big challenge. But sometimes I get so frustrated by conservation and environmental NGO’s for not being able to chew gum and walk at the same time — in other words, for failing to appreciate the real lesson of greenhouse gas emissions.
The real lesson is there is [...]

Of course this year’s Nobel Peace Prize got all the press — as that prize nearly always does. The Nobel Prize in economics, by contrast, went almost unnoticed.
That’s a double shame. First, because it was given to Dr. Elinor Ostrom of the Indiana University and Arizona State University — the first woman ever to win [...]

Late October brings a slight chill to the air and shadows fall early as we dare to tip-toe through the bat trailer. Secreted within a dark corner of The Nature Conservancy’s 12,000-acre Disney Wilderness Preserve in Florida, this trailer is not for the timid.
A rare maternity colony of southeastern big-eared bats has claimed the trailer as home. They [...]

Thirteen years ago, The Nature Conservancy teamed up with Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza, American Electric Power Company, BP America and Pacificorp to buy out four logging concessions adjacent to Bolivia’s Noel Kempff Mercado National Park.
In addition to protecting almost 832,000 hectares of forest habitat and doubling the size of the national park, this purchase [...]

How do you convince people that a river they’ve known their whole lives is not the river it once was…or could be?
That turned out to be my challenge last week, when I traveled to Zambia in support of The Nature Conservancy’s new project to restore the Zambezi River.  After several days of meetings with our [...]

Tom Cassidy is director of of The Nature Conservancy’s federal land programs.
America’s national parks are a constant in my life, both with my family and my work as the Conservancy’s director of federal land programs.
And sometimes the parks, the Conservancy and my work and family come together…as in June 2008, when I traveled to Badlands [...]

Editor’s note: Charles Bedford, the state director for The Nature Conservancy in Colorado, is living and working in China for the next year and will be writing about conservation issues there. Read all his posts.
How are U.S. perceptions of China sadly out of date? One example lies in how China’s first national park was created.
China [...]