Over Christmas weekend 2021, the planet lost two of its most precious moral leaders in Archbishop Desmond Tutu and conservationist Dr. Thomas Lovejoy.
For those of us dedicated to saving nature, the loss of a giant like Lovejoy is profound. Forty years ago, his insights led him to coin the phrase biological diversity, shortened in today’s efficiency-oriented world to the familiar word biodiversity.
A member of BirdLife’s Global Advisory Group, whose last meeting he joined just this November, Lovejoy wrote an Op-Ed that month in The New York Times. He said, “Finding our way through the climate crisis also requires that we remember how our home planet works — as a linked biological and physical system with a beating, photosynthesizing, rainmaking heart of wild woods.”
With the recent Glasgow Climate COP finally recognising the inextricable link between nature and climate, two sides of the same coin if we are to successfully address both existential crises, Lovejoy’s legacy is again evident.
If you take care of birds, you take care of most of the environment problems in the world.
Dr. Thomas Lovejoy
