EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES
Ambition: The Power of a Big Idea…and Sticking to it by VANCE MARTIN It was the final day of WILD9 in Mérida, Mexico 2009 and we were closing a highly successful 9th World Wilderness Congress. Suddenly we received the news that our featured closer, a high-profile conservation leader who had promised a substantive announcement to close the Congress, had to cancel and offered no replacement. Harvey Locke and I were in the Congress cafeteria as 1,800 delegates began to stream into the nearby plenary hall for the closing session. We quickly conferred, considered options, and decided to make our own, and unexpected, announcement. Months before, Harvey had raised with me the proposition that protected area targets needed to be much more ambitious and scientifically-based than the politically-correct targets the conservation establishment was using (at that time still 10% terrestrial and 0% marine, and soon to be 17% terrestrial and 10% marine). We both knew that the best conservation science and traditional knowledge insisted that approximately half of the earth’s lands and seas needed to be protected and high-functioning if we were to assure continuation of the ecological services that support all life on earth. In addition to the science, and as our indigenous elders tell us, relationship is also important. We need a reciprocal relationship with wild nature that gives us everything. This was amply illustrated a few years before at the 8th World Wilderness in Alaska in 2005 when Herb Norwegian, Grand Chief of the First Nations Dehcho in Canada, called for all traditional peoples to advocate for protection of at least half of their territories (Cajune, Martin, and Tanner 2008).
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International Journal of Wilderness | August 2021 | Volume 27, Number 2
Vance Martin
