Like it or not, politics is the solution.

Over the 20-year life of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) huge strides in biological understanding have been made. Michael Soulé, one of SCB’s founders, recently noted that prior to the mid-1980s “there was virtually no awareness of edge effects, fragmentation effects, ecological sinks, extinction vortices, inbreeding effects in natural populations, habitat destruction in the seas, endocrine disruptors, island effects, ecological cascades, or top-down regulation and structuring of ecosystems by strongly interacting species,” to name only a few areas of advancement in conservation science. Soulé argues that we have enough biological information about species and ecosystems to propose effective conservation solutions in most cases. Even if this is an overstatement, two questions remain: Why has not this huge growth in biological knowledge made more of a difference? And what can be done to make more of a difference? When confronted with obstacles to conservation goals, the tendency of most natural scientists—the bulk of SCB’s global membership—is to generate more scientific findings in the hope that these findings will better persuade decision makers or otherwise guide the way. I believe this strategy is not working well because our inability to slow or halt the extinction crisis stems not from a lack of biological understanding, but from a lack of political understanding and will. Powerful interests are arrayed against conservation, and they are deeply embedded in the organization of most societies. Virtually all societies are structurally committed to material growth and hence the transformation of ever more of nature into commodities. Many studies have documented that when humans take more, less is left for other species, and when ecosystems are domesticated or obliterated, they are no longer available to realize their autonomous evolutionary potential. There is no technological fix that will allow over 6 billion humans to generate commodities from nothing and leave nature intact. Conmen have been hard at work on making something from