Andrew Balmford

 
Faced daily with gloom-and-doom headlines about the environment, we might think our hope for conservation and a greener planet is naive, if not futile—that ecological disaster is inevitable. But is there any good news about the environment? Yes, there is, says Andrew Balmford in Wild Hope, offering powerful examples of successful conservation to prove it. 

Each chapter of Wild Hope takes us to extraordinary places around the world to meet conservation’s heroes and foot soldiers—and to discover the ideas they are generating about how to make conservation work on our hungry and crowded planet. The journey starts in the floodplains of Assam, where rangers and villagers have cooperated to bring Indian rhinos back from the brink of extinction. In the pine forests of the Carolinas, we learn why land owners came to resent the legal restrictions put in place to conserve rare woodpeckers—and what persuaded them to change their minds. In South Africa, Balmford investigates how invading alien plants have been drinking the country dry, and how the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest conservation program is now simultaneously restoring the rivers, saving species, and creating tens of thousands of jobs. The conservation problems Balmford encounters are as diverse as the strategies people have devised to meet them, but together they offer common themes and specific lessons on how to win the battle of conservation—and the one essential ingredient, Balmford shows, is always hope.
 

Andrew Balmford is professor of conservation science in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge. He is coeditor of Conservation in a Changing World, and he lives in Ely, England, with his wife, two sons, and a lot of animals.