Y2Y cofounder and advisor Harvey Locke has witnessed nature’s “great decline” firsthand. Now he’s co-authoring a book on what it will take to build a nature positive society.
As our organizational advisor and co-author of Becoming Nature Positive: Transitioning to a Safe and Just Future, Harvey joins a coalition of 27 major conservation organizations and business leaders exposing a critical short-coming when it comes to preparing for the future, such as:
- Trees gain market value only when cut for lumber — not for the oxygen they produce or soil erosion they prevent while alive.
- Fish are valued when caught — not for contributing to healthy rivers and seas that generate massive economic benefits.
- Water gains value only after extraction and pollution — not for sustaining all life on Earth.
This market failure is costing us everything. But there’s still time to turn it around.
More about Becoming Nature Positive
As humanity sits at an existential crossroads, this book introduces the need to build a nature-positive future to secure the functioning and stability of Earth systems essential to the survival and wellbeing of present and future human generations as well as the rest of Earth’s amazing diversity of life.
Alongside the change in climate, a more silent but equally terrifying crisis is unfolding: the loss of nature and biodiversity. These twin crises are in fact interconnected.
After decades of ignoring our impacts on the natural world, we are beginning to realise that nature conservation is a security issue for humanity, and an imperative for intersectional and intergenerational justice. For these reasons, we must embrace a transition from a nature-negative to a nature-positive society, one that ensures human development and addresses today’s inequality, while conserving, restoring and sustainably benefiting from nature’s resources and services.
A Nature Positive future is one with more nature than today: more forests, more fish, more pollinators, more soil biodiversity, with benefits for the Planet and for us. In this book we define what becoming Nature Positive means from a variety of perspectives, what it takes to deliver it and why it is possible and, most importantly, necessary.
This book is essential reading for those concerned with conserving nature and securing a safe future for humanity in the face of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and ecological collapse. The future can be bright. The choice is ours.
Becoming Nature Positive was written by a broad set of authors with diverse expertise covering social, economic and ecological perspectives including Joseph W. Bull, Leroy Little Bear, Harvey Locke, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, Marco Lambertini, Dorothy Maseke, Eva Zabey and others.
The book, published by Routledge and out now, is backed by the global Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework and sets the concrete goal: More nature in 2030 than 2020.
Harvey and his co-authors aren’t just diagnosing the problem — they’re providing the economic roadmap already being implemented by forward-thinking leaders.
The choice is now. The window is closing.
