Designing Nature’s Half:
The Blog
News and education about landscape conservation and design.
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.
The Planet Has Already Changed. So Must We.
The United States has just experienced the second-warmest winter on record. Viewed over a longer time horizon, however, this moment is part of a much larger story. Within a single lifetime, winter temperatures across the country have risen dramatically, illustrating the accelerating pace of environmental change. As the planet’s ecological systems shift, the institutions historically responsible for conservation are also coming under strain. These converging trends raise a critical question: what kinds of regional institutions and planning approaches will be needed to design and steward sustainable landscapes in the decades ahead?
Designing the Future in the In-Between Time
In times of upheaval, long-term thinking becomes even more important. This update on the development of Designing Nature’s Half explains what’s behind the book, where the manuscript stands today, and how its focus is shifting from landscape conservation design toward governance and implementation.
Designing the Energy Transition at Landscape Scale
Renewables have overtaken coal globally. China is reorganizing its energy system at historic speed. Rare earth extraction is leaving visible scars across landscapes. The energy transition is accelerating, but who decides where its burdens fall? Land is being converted. Minerals are being extracted. Water is being withdrawn. Infrastructure is expanding. The question is no longer whether the transition will proceed, but whether the landscapes that sustain it are being deliberately designed — or altered one permit at a time.
Landscape conservation design offers a framework. Ecoregional Cooperatives offer a mechanism. The durability of the transition will depend on whether regions use them.
When Federal Climate Policy Unravels: Ecoregional Cooperation and Landscape Design
When centralized climate policy unravels, landscape-scale institutions matter more than ever. This article makes the case for ecoregional cooperation and design approaches that embed durable decision authority across regions.
Planning and Design in Conservation: Why the Distinction Matters
Conservation is often described in terms of plans—but planning is only part of how conservation decisions come into being. This post explains why design matters, why landscape scale changes the problem, and how landscape conservation design (LCD) operates upstream of planning.
Why Legitimacy, Not Precision, Determines Conservation Outcomes
At large landscape scales, conservation is limited less by the precision of its analyses than by the legitimacy of the decisions those analyses support.
Why Conservation Keeps Falling Short at Scale
Conservation increasingly falls short not because of missing science or ambition, but because the systems meant to govern decisions were never designed to operate at scale.
Book Development Status — Week 2
An early, pre-announcement status update marking Week 2 progress on the Designing Nature’s Half project, including manuscript development and initial system setup, published as part of a long-term development record.
What This Blog Is (and Is Not): Notes on How Designing Nature’s Half Is Being Built
A brief orientation to the Designing Nature’s Half blog, explaining its purpose, boundaries, and role as a public record documenting how the project and book are being built over time.
🌎Ecoregional Cooperatives: A Conceptual Approach to Landscape-Scale Conservation
What if conserving biodiversity at scale requires not just better projects, but new institutional forms? This essay examines Ecoregional Cooperatives as a design hypothesis for rethinking conservation, governance, and regional economies.
🌎The Future of Landscape Conservation: Participatory Multi-Sector Design of Sustainable Landscapes, with Dr. Amanda Sesser
Dr. Amanda Sesser, the Coordinator of the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS) Partnership, discusses the need for inclusive design and decision-making processes that involve diverse stakeholders and empower communities.