'Godfather of biodiversity' says it's time to manage Earth as a whole system

Dr. Thomas Lovejoy coined the term “biological diversity” in 1980 and his work since has helped establish the preservation of global biodiversity as one of the most important conservation issues of our time. We discuss this and some of the most important environmental issues we currently face and why he believes the next decade will be the last decade of real opportunity to address those issues: 

“We really...need to think about managing the entire planet as a combined physical and biological system,” he says.

Dr. Lovejoy is a conservation biologist, a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation, and director of the Center for Biodiversity and Sustainability at George Mason University. In the late 1970s, he helped launch one of the longest-running landscape experiments in the Brazilian Amazon to examine the consequences of fragmentation on the integrity of tropical forests and the biodiversity they harbor.

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