Conservation is in no danger of being too effective. One means of enhancing effectiveness is via alliances, such as between conservationists and animal activists and others who have similar or common goals. By acting jointly to further campaigns to pass legislation such as an endangered ecosystem act, shutting down factory farms, strengthening what recovery means in the U.S. Endangered Species Act, protecting ecological function and interaction—and changing the broader political culture to uncompromisingly value animals the decline in various aspects biodiversity can be halted and reversed. Pressure can be more effectively brought on the right decision makers. Enhanced coordinated action will improve human of results toward the natural world.

In 2017, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries signed a second warning letter to humanity to caution against our continued wholesale destruction of global ecosystems (Ripple et al., 2017). Here, we reaffirm their message with a similar warning specifically focused on the ocean: humanity must immediately and significantly alter our harmful trajectory in order to avoid irrevocably damaging our oceans in multiple ways that will further affect ocean health for both us and future generations. The ocean is the world's largest realm, housing an astonishing array of biodiversity that provides critical ecological functions that ultimately support life on Earth. In this paper, we outline some of the significant ongoing and imminent activities that degrade ocean health, including destructive fishing practices, oil and natural gas extraction, seabed mining, coastal development, shipping, pollution, and greenhouse-gas emissions. We end by offering potential avenues to mitigate these impacts, including the cessation of particularly harmful activities, restoration of damaged habitats, strong protection of key and representative ecosystems, reduction in waste and emissions, and global policy shifts that prioritize ecosystem health.

Abstract Founded in 1993, the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) vision was one of the earliest large‐landscape conservation visions. Despite growing recognition of large‐landscape conservation strategies, there have been few tests to date of conservation gains achieved through such approaches. We tested for conservation gains in the Y2Y region of North America following initiation of the Y2Y conservation vision in 1993 using a counterfactual spatiotemporal comparison and tracking change in five different conservation metrics. First, we enumerated the area of land within Y2Y in designated protected areas. We then compared the rate of change of protected area growth before‐ and after‐initiation of Y2Y in 1993 and to two adjacent counterfactual regions. Protected areas in the Y2Y grew by 7.8%, increasing by 107,289 km2, exceeding the Aichi target of 17% of the area under protection by 2018. More importantly, the rate of protected area growth increased 90% following initiation of the Y2Y large‐landscape conservation vision in 1993, whereas protected area growth declined in adjacent regions, or remained constant throughout North America. Sustained growth in protected areas and private land conservation was complemented by expansion of endangered grizzly bears in the U.S. portion of Y2Y, the greatest global expansion from zero to at least 117 wildlife road‐crossing structures and growing mainstreaming coverage of the Y2Y vision. Our counterfactual comparison provides valuable evidence that large‐landscape conservation strategies such as Y2Y can enhance protected area growth and other conservation metrics. We conclude that large‐landscape conservation strategies may be a useful model for achieving global large‐landscape conservation and biodiversity conservation targets.

Life on Earth is in precipitous decline due to the behavior of human societies. As a species our numbers and consumption have displaced countless other species, stealing their habitat and persecuting them without limit. We behave toward nature as if it were our colony and become outraged when it is suggested that the Earth and its life are not ours to subjugate. Yet colonialism does not end well. Conservation is failing to check both causes and symptoms of the decline in the rich variety of living systems on Earth. It must become much more effective. The purpose of these papers is to suggest ways to do so; to fundamentally transform human societies as the IPBES says we urgently must.

To halt the extinction crisis and recover ecological integrity requires addressing the causes of both: human population growth and endless economic growth. It will be up to conservation scientists that care and know the most about each to bring about the necessary fundamental human societal changes. They will need to mobilize, organize, and build alliances with key constituencies and engage in transgressive action against the status quo to replace existing institutions. Like the US civil rights movement and the global anti-apartheid movement, the political struggle to end the violence of human domination and exploitation of the natural world will need to bring enormous pressure to bear. Resistance can be expected and will need to be overcome. New institutions will have to incorporate the interests of other species in human decision-making.

The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting all parts of human society. Like everyone else, conservation biologists are concerned first with how the pandemic will affect their families, friends, and people around the world. But we also have a duty to think about how it will impact the world's biodiversity and our ability to protect it, as well as how it might affect the training and careers of conservation researchers and practitioners. As editors of Biological Conservation, we have heard first-hand from colleagues, authors, and reviewers around the world about the problems they are facing, and their concerns for their students, their staff, and their research projects. Some of our colleagues have become infected with the virus. Field and lab work have largely shut down, while teaching and other communications have moved online, with consequences for training, data collection, and networking that are still unclear. Our colleagues and the media report some examples of reduced human pressures on natural ecosystems, cleaner air and water, and wildlife reclaiming contested habitats. Beyond the direct and immediate consequences of this particular virus, some have also started to think about emerging infectious diseases and their links with biodiversity loss, human activities, and issues of sustainability. As we write this, the pandemic is still accelerating in most countries, although there are hopeful signs of returns to normality in, for example, China. This editorial can therefore only be a snapshot of a quickly evolving situation. We hope, however, that we can offer some encouragement and insights for our colleagues in lockdown. Our world is changing, and the conservation community must be ready to respond.

A review of Crist, Eileen. 2019. Abundant Earth, Toward an Ecological Civilization. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Abundant Earth documents the Earth's plummeting abundance, analyzes its causes, and suggests a path for reversing that decline. The book brings together, organizes, and evaluates a wide-ranging literature from biology, human ecology, and other disciplines. It is organized into three broad sections, roughly dealing with the problem, its causes, and the steps that must be taken to deal with the causes. Whether one thinks an ecological civilization is a contradiction in terms, or not, Crist's book raises critical issues and analyses that anyone trying to address the current extinction crisis can benefit from. The first chapter catalogues the long list of human-inflicted violence on the biosphere and its residents. Although this “list” will be familiar to many, Crist offers insights into the many synergies among the causes, proximate and ultimate. Many come together, for example, in the industrial agricultural system: high energy use, overexploitation of soil and freshwater, conversion of land to more simplified ecologies, use of toxic chemicals, spread of invasive species, the growth of domestic animal populations, and plunder of the oceans to name a few. The current round of globalization (long-range trade goes back millennia) exacerbates the ability of wealthy places to export much of the damage they do to poorer areas. Leaning to philosophical idealism, Crist argues in the second chapter that anthropocentrism or notions of human supremacy is the cause of the destruction of the natural world. We are the center of the universe and the world is ours to use and exploit as we want. This view is mostly implicit making it difficult to target for refutation, though some thinkers and many religions throughout history have argued explicitly for human specialness and the right to dominate other species. Initially, a Western world view, ideas of human centrality, and self-importance have come to dominate global civilization, adding to its invisibility. At the same time, Crist argues that this world view emerged with agriculture and civilization, suggesting that efforts to control and conquer attendant on agriculture might be the causal factor or at least co-emergent. There is little reference to the anthropological literature on early agriculture or the emergence of hierarchy and the state (Johnson and Earle 2000, Flannery and Marcus 2012), which might have better grounded the discussion of whether the ideas are causal, a rationalization, or mutually reinforcing from the beginning. Probably one of the most important points Crist makes is in Chapter 3. She reminds us that human domination of other species and the Earth is violent. Most humans ignore the violence because its victims are not valued, but like the violence of human on human subjugation, there is injury to the perpetrator and perpetrator societies as well as the victims. Along with the blowback from efforts to control gone wrong (pollution, climate disruption, water, and other “resource” shortages) is emotional damage. Some see the consequences, but for the most part the institutional response is to reassert managerial domination and seek a technological fix. As David Ehrenfeld (1978) observed, every solution creates more problems and more complex ones, and there is less capacity to solve them. One of the primary problems she identifies is the pervasiveness of supremacist ideology which prevents alternatives from being seen, let alone developed or broadly acted upon. The second part of the book seeks to disentangle the mess humans have gotten themselves and the Earth into. She states in Chapter 4 that domination is so deeply engrained it appears natural. Crist focuses much on the proposition that belief in human supremacy is not hardwired, but is a product of socialization and enculturation. If seen as hardwired, no action is likely to be taken against this toxic world view, but she has little to say about its origin; understanding its origin (in agriculture and the separation of humans from other creatures?) might contribute to “deprograming,” questioning, and cultivating new views and behavior. Crist argues that when humans stop asking “How are we special?” the seeds of new possibilities will emerge. (A more interesting question might be why do we feel the need to be special?) In Chapter 5, Crist seeks to dismantle the many red herrings advanced to undermine the notion and importance of wilderness (self-willed lands and waters): that no place is free of human impact or has not been for a long time, that wilderness divides people from the natural world, and is a peculiar Euro-North American concept and is therefore suspect because of the mistreatment by Euro-Americans of those humans who arrived earlier. She examines each of these in some detail, has some fun poking at absurd claims such as the Amazon being a human artifact, and reminds readers that humans have been destroying wildlife for millennia but have greatly speeded up the process in recent centuries. Huge flocks of passenger pigeons are gone; wolves have been diminished from half a million to a few hundred, and beavers, otters, and many populations of fish also decimated. Wilderness (lands and waters free from human domination) are vitally important to maintaining and recovering many species. If wilderness is indeed a North American idea, it is because its destruction was so rapid and therefore visible in North America. Throughout human history, not only has habitat been routinely stolen from other species and converted to human uses, but it has been fragmented, denying its use to others. In the modern era, human movement via roads, railroads, and other means has been, Crist observes, at the cost of nonhuman movement. Not only does human infrastructure create obstacles but also results in the slaughter of millions of creature. Roads allow access by poachers, pollution, and ongoing conversion of habitat. Human control of geography extends, Crist summarizes, to the oceans. Ship traffic, noise from ships and seismic exploration, and pollution from runoff and oil extraction constrain fish, marine mammals, and other species. Protected areas also constrain nonhuman movement in an effort to protect nonhumans from humans. The third part of the book seeks to chart a path forward, away from destruction, and toward a rewilded Earth. In the seventh chapter, Crist documents the fantasies of those who think we can feed billions more without doing harm. This magical thinking is predicated on a belief that humans do not have a carrying capacity because we have limitless power to rearrange the planet to suit ourselves. We do possess great rearranging power but it comes at a cost, to other species and to ourselves. Industrial agriculture not only displaces natural systems and wildlife, but also makes humans dependent on turning the food supply over to large-scale enterprises that drive smaller farmers to ruin, poison the air, water, and soil, exhaust topsoil, and ignore a variety of ethical issues from toxins in food to turning the planet into a feedlot for one species. Crist addresses the issue of human population in the eighth chapter, an issue which is finally returning to the conservation agenda from which it was misguidedly banished decades ago. The right human population is one that does not steal the livelihood of wild species, allows for rewilding, and can be fed with organic food production. (She says nothing about the relationship of population size to hierarchy and the division of labor which generates many problems among humans and between humans and nonhumans.) That number, she says citing others, is probably around two billion. She also notes that while a growing developing world middle class is diminishing differences between global north and global south, migrants cannot be ethically excluded from richer countries for ecological reasons because those countries export ecological harm. The last chapter is necessarily the most speculative. It describes what aspects of an ecological society might be like, but has little to say about how to make it happen and avoid bad alternatives. Crist calls for direct protection of 25% to 75% of the Earth, after Reed Noss (1992). Some groups, such as the Wildlands Network and Marine Conservation Institute, are working on this; the Ecological Society of America called for large-scale protection in the 1920s. Creating islands for civilization in a wild matrix is preferable to the reverse, and Crist notes that others have called for island civilization as well, for example, historian Rod Nash and former US Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt. She sees the future of human society in bioregionalism modeled on some Native American cultures and societies. Why political devolution should lend itself to this rather than less appetizing adaptations such as warlordism or the conflict many chiefdoms engage in is not clear. Crist describes what she considers the attributes of desirable (ecological) societies (transcendence of nationalism and fundamentalism, roots in the regional but also cosmopolitan) but does not say how to get there or why humans are likely to take this direction rather than ones more typical of our species over the last 12,000 years. Some might consider Chief Joseph's statement that the Earth and he are of one mind to be an arrogant project; many make claims about the Earth that are self-serving. Perhaps it needs to be tempered with some Robinson Jeffers: He writes that it is time to kiss the Earth but also warns us to “be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master” (1925: 95). Crist has given us an extraordinarily thoughtful book, addressing many pressing issues. In the course of that she fashions an impressive synthesis of much of the relevant literature. There is too much weight on the cognitive, and although she herself is passionate about the living world, there is little about emotion as a prime human motivator, and what has gone wrong with our emotions. Likewise, more emphasis on the structural and societal dynamics would greatly strengthen the book and aid those looking for a way out of the current predicament. As conservation is increasingly compelled to deal with causes of biodiversity decline rather than just symptoms, this book contributes much.

Whilst the science of conservation biology is thriving as a discipline, ultimately global conservation is failing. Why, when the majority of people say they value nature and its protection? David Johns argues that the loss of species and healthy ecosystems is best understood as human imposition of a colonial relationship on the non-human world - one of exploitation and domination. Global institutions benefit from transforming nature into commodities, and conservation is a low priority. This book places political issues at the forefront, and tackles critical questions of conservation efficacy. It considers the role of effective influence on decision making, key policy changes to reduce human footprint, and the centrality of culture in mobilising support. It draws on political lessons from successful social movements, including human anti-colonial struggles, to provide conservation biologists and practitioners in scientific and social science disciplines and NGOs with the tools and wider context to accelerate their work's impact.

Fungi are key organisms in terrestrial ecosystems, functioning as decomposers, pathogens, and symbionts. Identifying the mechanisms that shape metacommunity patterns is likely to be critical for predicting how ecosystems will respond to global environmental change. Using fungal occurrence data and a hierarchical approach that combines three elements of metacommunity structure—coherence, turnover and boundary clumping—we identified the structures that best describe metacommunity patterns. We related these patterns to underlying environmental and spatial variables known to influence fungal distribution, and determined the relative importance of the environment and geographic distance in structuring fungal metacommunities. Fungal metacommunities had Clementsian and quasi-Clementsian structures, indicating that species distributions were compartmentalized along a dominant environmental gradient. This gradient was strongly associated with annual precipitation, precipitation seasonality and pH for the entire metacommunity. Variance partitioning revealed that the environment was relatively more important than geographic distance in explaining metacommunity patterns, indicating that niche-based processes are crucial in shaping species distributions among sites. However, the strength of the relationship between the latent gradient and environmental factors and the relative contributions of the environment and geographic distance to metacommunity structure varied across groups, suggesting that interactions among habitat, dispersal and life-history might be driving these differences.

Lotic ecosystems harbor a disproportionate amount of global biodiversity, but continue to experience extinction rates greater than terrestrial. Alpine rivers and streams are especially threatened due to high rates of warming, glacier melt impacts, landcover change, and impoundment. Lack of monitoring, however, hampers conservation efforts in many regions. The Hindu-Kush Himalaya (HKH) is experiencing rapid environmental change, but impacts on aquatic biodiversity are unknown. Using a unique long-term dataset, we investigated changes to local (alpha) and regional (gamma) fish species diversity across 38 sites on Nepal's Kaligandaki-Narayani River (KNR), and evaluated potential impacts of climate change. Our results indicate a significant decrease in mean abundance and local species richness, although regional diversity did not decline. Species ranges contracted between the 1990s and 2010s, with lower bounds and weighted means shifting to higher elevations. Range shifts coincided with water temperature warming between the 1990s and 2010s, particularly at more speciose lower elevation sites. Although widespread species loss has not yet occurred, decreasing abundance and contraction of species' ranges point to increased extirpation risk in the near future. Our results suggest that effective conservation strategies must identify and preserve thermal refugia, maintain habitat connectivity, manage terrestrial protected areas so that aquatic biodiversity also benefits, and establish sustainable fishery harvests to protect species diversity in the KNR and other threatened, under-studied alpine biodiversity hotspots.

Rewilding is a type of large-scale biological and ecological restoration that emphasizes recovery of wide-ranging native species, top carnivores, and other keystone animals in their natural patterns of abundance to regain functional and resilient ecosystems (Noss, 1992, Noss and Cooperrider, 1994). The term was coined by Dave Foreman (first used in print by Foote (1990)), a long-time trail blazing (path-breaking seemed slightly less of a cliché than trail-breaking, but either is fine) conservationist, founder of the Rewilding Institute, and cofounder of the Wildlands Network (originally The Wildlands Project). The founding of the Wildlands Network was an effort to create a North American system of connected, strictly protected areas able to support ecologically effective populations of all native species. This level of protection requires very large-scale rewilding. The term is now widely used, but its meaning has expanded to include restoration generally, restoration of Pleistocene species, and in some cases creation of urban greenways.

Fire suppression policies and "active management" in response to wildfires are being carried out by land managers globally, including millions of hectares of mixed conifer and dry ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests of the western USA that periodically burn in mixed severity fires. Federal managers pour billions of dollars into command-and-control fire suppression and the MegaFire (landscape scale) Active Management Approach (MFAMA) in an attempt to contain wildfires increasingly influenced by top down climate forcings. Wildfire suppression activities aimed at stopping or slowing fires include expansive dozerlines, chemical retardants and igniters, backburns, and cutting trees (live and dead), including within roadless and wilderness areas. MFAMA involves logging of large, fire-resistant live trees and snags; mastication of beneficial shrubs; degradation of wildlife habitat, including endangered species habitat; aquatic impacts from an expansive road system; and logging-related carbon emissions. Such impacts are routinely dismissed with minimal environmental review and defiance of the precautionary principle in environmental planning. Placing restrictive bounds on these activities, deemed increasingly ineffective in a change climate, is urgently needed to overcome their contributions to the global biodiversity and climate crises. We urge land managers and decision makers to address the root cause of recent fire increases by reducing greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors, reforming industrial forestry and fire suppression practices, protecting carbon stores in large trees and recently burned forests, working with wildfire for ecosystem benefits using minimum suppression tactics when fire is not threatening towns, and surgical application of thinning and prescribed fire nearest homes.