Ask Peter Seligmann


CEO of Conservation International



The CEOs and Presidents

  • If you had US$10 million to spend on a conservation project - what would you spend it on?
  • How did you get to where you are now?
  • What advice would you give to someone wanting to work for you?

    • If you had US$ 10 million to spend now on a conservation project – what would you spend it on?
    My answer is 10 million dollars isn’t nearly enough. I’d like to have 30 billion dollars. In fact, give me 7 billion dollars of private money and that should be enough to get the balance.

    With that amount of money I think you can finance a lot of effective conservation activities. You can build local support for conservation organisations; you can secure new protected areas; you can engage communities so that they can make a living out of conservation; you can build an economy around conservation in the most important places. So rather than 10 million, I’d like to have 30 billion.

    And I think the most important investment that we can make is building capacity of local organisations and it really means assisting conservationists to become better leaders, more able managers, inspiring others. It also means training heads of State and ministers of finance and ministers of planning on understanding why thoughtful, wise conservation is the key to any developing nation’s future.

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    How did you get involved in conservation? What path did you take?
    I started out as a forester, working for a logging company, a small one in the Rocky Mountains, and my job was to mark trees to be cut. However, my boss did not appreciate the fact that I would never mark trees that had bird nests in them. And was soon fired.

    My next job was to do a study on grizzly bears in the Yellowstone Park. And out of that I ended up going to forestry school, getting a job with The Nature Conservancy, and later going overseas and living in Peru and Costa Rica. I was struck by the enormous wealth of the nation of Peru in terms of biodiversity and at the same time its cruel poverty. And it just didn’t make sense that a country so rich could be so poor. And it inspired me to think on how to link conservation with the economic path.

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    What advice would you give to someone who wanted to work for your organisation?
    Two answers to that question. Any young person that contacts me and asks for an internship would get one. I think youth is the answer and we’ve never turned down a young person asking for an internship. This is a standard policy. And I believe that should be the approach of all the conservation groups.

    For a professional position, it is a difficult question to answer. We are looking for people who have the passion, the determination, the belief in the cause. People bring their own skills to a job and whatever those skills may be, you build on their strengths and abilities. I think that people who want to make a contribution to conservation need to figure out what they love to do. And if they love something, they should pursue that and figure out how that fits into conservation.

    Any particular skills you are looking for?
    What you need in conservation is you need smart, strategic people who look at issues and understand how to solve problems. You need communicators who can communicate and write using the appropriate words. You need educators who can influence a community in a school room. You need business people who can actually convert business leaders into understanding that conservation is a sound investment. And then you need scientists who can work in the right places and make the right decisions.

    Anybody with a passion and a determination to excel can be involved in conservation and should be! There is nothing as shared around the world today as dependence on a healthy environment. Not everybody knows that… but drinking water, planting crops, breathing, listening to birds – we all share it. It’s the common bond.

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