Designing Nature’s Half:
The Blog
News and education about landscape conservation and design.
🌎Making Room for Everyone & Book Update
World Habitat Day reminds us that people need places to live. Nature needs space too. The challenge is not choosing between them, but designing connected landscapes that can support human communities, biodiversity, and climate action together.
🌎You Can't Conserve Wildlife Without Conserving Habitat
Wildlife cannot survive without habitat, yet we continue shaping landscapes one development project at a time. What if we started with a different question: what should the whole landscape become? Landscape conservation design offers another way.
🌎How Much Room Will Nature Need?
How much room will nature need? Conservation science suggests roughly half the Earth as a precautionary benchmark for ecological sufficiency, giving ecosystems the space to function and species the chance to persist. Climate change adds another dimension to that ambition: the same landscapes that let nature thrive also store and remove carbon, buffering communities and the climate. Two sides of the same coin. 50x50.
🌎Conservation Beyond 1.5°C
The world is increasingly likely to exceed 1.5°C of warming. For conservation, that alters more than the urgent need to protect nature—it also changes the very goals of protection and what effective stewardship must accomplish. As landscapes transform under climate and other pressures, species and ecosystems will require space to move, reorganize, and adapt over time. Are we providing them with enough room and the right conditions to persist and thrive?
🌎From Designing Landscapes to Keeping the Doors Open
Fifteen years ago, the National Wildlife Refuge System was helping to pioneer a landscape-scale approach to conservation in a changing climate. Today, the USFWS is rapidly losing people, expertise, and essential institutional capacity at an extraordinary rate. After 25 years in federal conservation, I believe the lesson is clear: we must protect what we've built—and begin building conservation institutions that are durable, well-resourced, and adaptable enough for the challenges that lie ahead.
🌎Nature Works Across Landscapes. Conservation Should Too.
Pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss are reshaping landscapes while conservation remains divided across many of the boundaries nature crosses. Designing Nature’s Half asks how we can organize conservation differently—and its 30-day Kickstarter campaign is now live.
🌎Conservation Can’t Wait For The Next Election
America’s environmental protections are being steadily dismantled while climate change and accelerating biodiversity loss continue reshaping the very landscapes conservation seeks to protect. Defending what generations before us built remains essential, and honoring that legacy requires sustained political will, long-term investment, and community stewardship. But defense alone is not enough. Conservation must also build durable institutions, practical skills, and broad community capacity to proactively design and manage landscapes that are resilient, equitable, and able to sustain both people and nature into the future.
🌎Designing Nature’s Half Is Coming to Kickstarter
Designing Nature’s Half is almost a book. On September 1, a Kickstarter campaign will launch to help carry it through production and into readers’ hands. Like conservation itself, bringing this book into the world begins by building a community around a shared purpose. The pre-launch page is live now.
🌎Every Book Has a Story: How Designing Nature's Half Came to Life
Behind every book is a community of people whose ideas, expertise, and generosity helped shape it. As Designing Nature's Half moves toward publication, I found myself reflecting on the remarkable people who transformed a manuscript into a book—and why that journey reflects one of the book's central ideas about conservation itself.
🌎Beyond Defense
The conservation movement has always won by organizing. But in an era when governments can dismantle protections as quickly as they created them, defense alone is no longer enough. The next chapter of conservation must include building durable, democratic institutions capable of stewarding landscapes across political cycles and generations.
🌎The In-Between Time
The dismantling of the Bears Ears Commission reveals a deeper problem: conservation institutions remain vulnerable to political change. This essay introduces The In-Between Time—the period when people must build the collaborative decision systems and democratic institutions needed to make the 2050 vision of living in harmony with nature achievable.
🌎Lasting Landscapes Require Lasting Institutions
What do peaceful societies and sustainable landscapes have in common? More than we might think. Inspired by the United Nations' International Day of Cooperatives, this essay explores why transformational conservation requires not only better landscape design, but also democratic institutions intentionally designed to sustain shared stewardship over time.
🌎AI Is Infrastructure: From Project Planning to Landscape Design
Artificial intelligence is often described as software, but a new United Nations University report argues that it is also physical infrastructure. If AI will reshape our landscapes through its demands for energy, water, transmission, and land, are project-by-project decisions still enough? This essay explores why the future of conservation may depend on moving from project-by-project planning to intentional landscape design.
🌎World Oceans Day: What Strong Marine Protected Areas Require
What makes a marine protected area strong?
World Oceans Day 2026 focuses on the importance of strong marine protected areas, but the answer extends beyond oceans alone. Drawing on firsthand experience from the management planning process for Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, this reflection explores why conservation depends not only on protection, but also on continuity. From marine protected areas to landscape-scale conservation, transformational conservation ultimately requires the institutions, governance systems, and decision processes capable of sustaining conservation across social-ecological systems and through time.
🌎A World Environment Day Reflection: Designing Nature's Half and the Work Ahead
More than fifty years after its creation, World Environment Day continues to raise awareness of environmental challenges. But as climate, biodiversity, water, and human systems become increasingly understood as interconnected, a deeper question emerges: how should society organize decisions across the systems that shape environmental outcomes? This reflection explores that question while marking an important milestone for Designing Nature's Half.
🌎International Day for Biological Diversity: From Land Protection to System Design
Biological diversity depends on connected social-ecological systems, yet many decisions affecting those systems remain fragmented across landscapes, jurisdictions, and time. This International Day for Biological Diversity, the deeper question is not only what conservation protects, but how conservation must be organized to sustain life across the systems it depends on. From protection to system design, biodiversity increasingly reveals the need for more integrated conservation at ecological scale.
🌎World Migratory Bird Day: What Migration Reveals About Conservation at Scale
Migratory birds connect continents, ecosystems, and human landscapes into a single, functioning system. Their decline reveals a deeper problem: conservation decisions are still made separately, while the systems they affect are not. This World Migratory Bird Day, what migration shows us is clear: if conservation is to work, it must be organized at the scale life actually moves.
🌎Earth Day Edition: Designing What Comes Next - Ecoregional Cooperatives and the Architecture of Landscape Governance
As environmental governance falters, the question is no longer whether coordination is needed, but how it can be rebuilt. This Earth Day essay explores Ecoregional Cooperatives, landscape conservation design, and ecosocialism as democratic, place-based approaches to organizing decisions at the scale ecological conditions demand.
🌎Earth Day Edition: From Federal Failure to a New Conservation Movement
The system built in response to Earth Day is no longer holding. As the EPA turns away from the science that once defined its role, people across the country are beginning to organize and build what comes next.
🌎From Protest to Governance: Designing conservation systems for a changing planet
The climate system that shaped modern conservation no longer exists. Protest is necessary—but it is not enough. What comes next depends on whether we can build the systems needed to govern, coordinate, and sustain conservation at the scale the moment demands.