In the essay, “Where the Wild Things Were: How Conservation Efforts Are Faltering,” currently appearing in Foreign Affairs, Dr. Steven Sanderson, President and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), asserts the world’s political institutions have failed the planet but “realism cannot turn into defeatism.”

Sanderson, who published an essay with a similarly dire assertion in 2002, concludes these seven years later: “There have been landmark foreign policy acts in the past that managed to satisfy both domestic and global interests, and there could be again in the future.”
   
Sanderson sees as one road to progress policies that connect biodiversity and climate change.

Writes Sanderson: “In short, the time is ripe for a new vision, one that takes both biodiversity and climate change seriously and explores the crucial connections between them. The Copenhagen process is already moving in this direction, and some new global financial mechanisms are also emerging.”

Read the Foreign Affairs essay.