Most of us want to preserve wildlife because we love being amongst it. However, in promoting conservation we need to convey the value of species to the wider population, and it is unclear how good a job we do at this, certainly less successfully than explaining threats from climate change. In this talk I hope to generate discussion on why the preservation of biodiversity is so important to humanity, and how that can be conveyed. I will illustrate problems and prospects by drawing on examples from the amazing birds of India (the eastern Himalaya are thought to be the 2 nd most biodiverse place in the world), where I have conducted research over the past 50 years.
Trevor Price is a professor in the department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. His primary research has been how bird species form, focusing on the Old World warblers. He has published two books: Speciation in birds (2008) and Ecology of a changed world (2022).