Each year, global temperature records are broken. Wildlife populations continue to collapse. None of the United Nations’ biodiversity targets for 2011 to 2020 were met.
Globally, we lose hundreds of thousands of acres of thriving ecosystems daily, while two truckloads of plastic enter the ocean every minute. Microplastics are now found in human placentas and breast milk.
Hostile
There are victories such as the recovery of the ozone layer, the bald eagle, and the global ban on commercial whaling, but these single-issue successes do not address the systemic forces driving degradation.
For every hard-fought conservation win, extractive economies, weak enforcement, and short-term politics drive several losses.
We need not simply more laws, funding, or advocacy to accelerate familiar results, but a reimagining of our relationship with the living world. Conservation must become an act of reciprocity and repair, not control and exclusion.
A clear example of conservation’s fragility is the US today, where policies hostile to environmental protection are dismantling decades of progress.
Among many examples, the Trump administration gutted the Clean Water Act, withdrew from the Paris Agreement twice, reinterpreted the Antiquities Act to revoke protections, and advanced sweeping deregulation within the Environmental Protection Agency, all within a system supposedly designed to uphold those very gains.
Responsibilities
This is not an isolated problem. Around the world, protected areas are chronically underfunded and poorly enforced. Protections rarely reflect how ecosystems function or honour the people who have sustained them for millennia.
At best, the conventional conservation model offers an incomplete response to today’s challenges. Yet our collective mindset has been to double down, to do more of the same, only faster. We continue to hesitate to reassess the fundamental limitations of our conservation model.
There is another way. Indigenous worldviews, and those of many historically excluded communities, offer a fundamentally different understanding of our place in the world.
In these traditions, nature is not separate from people. The world around us is a living web of relationships among human and non-human beings, each with reciprocal responsibilities.
In many Indigenous languages, there is no word for ‘nature’ as something apart, nor ‘wilderness’ as an empty space ‘where man is a visitor who does not remain.’
Relationship
There is relationship. Within these knowledge systems, conservation is not about setting land aside for life to exist without us.
It is about living in right relationship with our surroundings, both near and far: consistently tending, nourishing, harvesting, restoring, giving back, and using fully and wisely.
This way of understanding our place in the world, as relations and as kin rather than commodities, is not merely philosophical. It works.
Lands managed or co-managed by Indigenous Peoples or local communities hold higher biodiversity and greater resilience than conventional protected areas.
Indigenous stewardship has safeguarded ecosystems for millennia, long before Western laws and practices arrived to “save” them.
Transformation
From these perspectives, the world around us is not a commodity for extraction, economic gain, or even protection, but a source of health, nourishment, joy, and fulfilment. These are the true measures of wellbeing and progress.
Human activity is not inherently at odds with “nature”; it can be regenerative when guided by reciprocity. Wealth is measured not in profit but in the ability of communities to thrive in their surroundings.
To truly protect ‘nature’, we must de-commodify it. Protecting ‘nature’ cannot mean drawing boundaries, passing regulations, or rewilding ‘unnatural’ spaces. It must mean living, personally and collectively, in good relationship with our surroundings and with all our companions, human and non-human alike.
The conservation ethic we need is a transformation of how we understand our place in the web of life.
Practice
Here are some guiding principles for equitable conservation grounded in kinship and care rather than exclusion and control.
Centre Indigenous and historically excluded communities as leaders, not implementers: trust and fund Indigenous and local institutions directly, or through partners rooted in or trusted by, the communities they serve.
See us as the powerful visionaries and change-makers we are, not as endorsers of the next “great conventional conservation idea.” Transformation begins when those closest to the problem lead.
Redefine nature as relationship, not commodity: let go of the outdated idea that nature is something out there to be owned or saved.
Redefine it as our living relationship with the world around us. Conservation should mean health, joy, and shared wellbeing, centring the relationship between people and place— from city parks to farmlands, from forests to coastlines and the open ocean.
Prosperity
Anchor conservation in daily life and local economies: make conservation a daily reality. Support regenerative economies that centre collective wellbeing over profit.
Reconnect with the food, water, and materials that sustain us. Conservation should bring abundance to our communities, not restrictions to our wellbeing.
Recognize relationships across scales: local acts of care ripple outward. When kinship and reciprocity are restored in our communities, global systems are strengthened.
Fund transformation abundantly and without delay: stop waiting for perfect metrics. The cost of inaction is far greater. Fund bold, community-rooted models now, because when communities lead, we achieve better ecological and social outcomes.
Invest for the long haul, not the annual report: deep change takes time. Trust the process and the communities leading it. Measure success through long-term cultural vitality and ecological health.
Redefine prosperity: a thriving balance sheet on a dying planet is not prosperity. Integrate measures of environmental health, equity, and cultural vitality into how we define and pursue prosperity.
Commitment
Conventional conservation has fallen short because it protects fragments of nature while ignoring the whole. It treats ecosystems as objects and communities as instruments.
Lasting solutions arise when we embrace the full range of human knowledge, especially that of those who have lived in reciprocity with land and water for hundreds or thousands of years.
To safeguard life on Earth, we must move from protection to relationship, from object to kin, from control to care, from scarcity to shared being. Conservation must become not a profession or a policy but a practice of belonging.
The work ahead is not about saving nature from humanity. It is about restoring our humanity through renewed relationship with the world that sustains us.
If we are serious about addressing the crises that threaten all life, we must reimagine conservation as inclusive, community-rooted, and courageously collaborative. Only then can conservation fulfil its promise.
This Author
Bray Beltrán is a multicultural Colombian ecologist living in the United States with over 20 years’ experience advancing systemic solutions, and inclusive conservation across North America and the Global South.