Designing Nature’s Half Is Coming to Kickstarter
DNH’s Kickstarter launches September 1, but….
The Designing Nature's Half pre-launch page is now live. Click “Notify me on launch” to be notified when the campaign begins.
Go to the DNH campaign page on our website for more info.
Bringing Designing Nature’s Half: An Architecture for Conserving 50% by 2050 into the world begins the same way conservation does: by building a community around a shared purpose.
The campaign launches September 1.
The world faces three interconnected environmental crises: pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Together, they form what is commonly called the Triple Planetary Crisis.
Pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss are often treated as separate problems, but across landscapes they interact and reinforce one another. Pollution contaminates air, water, and soil while greenhouse gas emissions intensify climate change. A changing climate then alters temperatures, water availability, disturbance regimes, and habitats, compounding stresses already created by pollution. Together, these pressures accelerate biodiversity loss, while the loss of species and functioning ecosystems reduces nature’s capacity to absorb carbon, filter pollutants, regulate water, and withstand further change. What appear to be three separate crises are interconnected parts of the same planetary emergency.
Yet the conservation systems we rely on to conserve nature remain fragmented across jurisdictions, organizations, land ownerships, and economic sectors.
That mismatch is the problem at the heart of Designing Nature’s Half.
The book asks what conservation would look like if it were organized at the scale at which nature actually works. It proposes a landscape-scale, multi-stakeholder approach that enables agencies, organizations, landowners, businesses, communities, and others across jurisdictions, institutions, and sectors to work together toward a shared future for people and nature.
And after years of work, that case is finally becoming a book.
The manuscript has completed technical and professional editorial review. The figures and tables are finished. The landscape photography is in place. I’m working through my editor’s revisions one chapter at a time, and we’re developing the final cover before the manuscript moves into proofreading, layout, and production.
It’s really starting to feel like a book.
On September 1, I’ll launch a 30-day Kickstarter campaign to help cover the remaining costs of producing, printing, and distributing it. Go to the pre-launch campaign page here, or learn more about the campaign on the DNH website here.
There is something fitting about turning to a community to help carry Designing Nature’s Half through these final steps.
One of the book’s central arguments is that no single agency, organization, landowner, business, community, or sector can conserve a landscape alone. The challenges are too interconnected, landscapes cross too many boundaries, and responsibility for their future is widely distributed. Transformational conservation requires people to work across those boundaries around a shared purpose.
A book can help bring a community together around an idea too.
The Kickstarter has a practical purpose: helping cover the remaining costs of putting Designing Nature’s Half into readers’ hands. But I hope it does something more. I hope it begins bringing together people who believe conservation can—and must—work differently: people who will read the book, challenge its ideas, talk about them, and perhaps carry some of them into their own landscapes and communities.
That community can begin forming now.
The Kickstarter campaign officially launches September 1 at 2:00 PM Mountain Time, but the pre-launch page is already live.
Click “Notify me on launch” now.
Kickstarter will let you know the moment the campaign begins and you’ll be able to view the various rewards I’m offering supporters of the book’s publication.
After years of writing, research, conversation, and revision, Designing Nature’s Half is almost a book.
Now it’s time to start building the community that will help put it into the world.
Thanks for your help!
—Rob
