Ask Steve McCormick


CEO of The Nature Conservancy



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?
    Frankly, the first thing I would think about is how we could use this money to generate a 100 billion dollars!

    I would use this money as an investment in experimenting with approaches that would demonstrate how various types of human activities such as agriculture, forestry, and mining could be done in a way that was compatible and harmonious with the preservation of biological diversity.

    So looking how this investment of 10 million could produce a 100 million and that a 100 million could yield results that could be applied in all kinds of different situations and thus become invaluable!

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    How did you get involved in conservation? What path did you take?
    I’m from California, San Francisco, so I grew up in an environment that was connected to the outdoors. So my interest developed at a very early age… going camping, hiking, fishing and even hunting.

    I then went to the University of California at Berkeley and got a degree in economics - though I was most interested in the application of economics for the wise use of natural resources.

    After that, I went to a law school. I was interested in using the law as a way of shaping policy, rather than working law in the private arena. After working for a couple of public agencies in California, I went to work for The Nature Conservancy. And that’s where I’ve been for the last 27 years.

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    What advice would you give to someone who wanted to work for your organisation?
    We need a really broad spectrum of skills.

    We need people who have very strong competency in conservation biology because our work is grounded in understanding how a natural landscape works and all our decisions and conservation action is based on continuous assessments of what’s necessary to ensure that the biological systems are sustained. So we need conservation biologists.

    We also need people who have very strong backgrounds in business, law, and finance because increasingly we’re taking on projects and strategies that require good negotiating talent, a good understanding how to make high impact use of available funds, and how to leverage private contributions by getting funding from multilateral institutions and government agencies.

    We need people who are very, very good managers who can help build the talent of and take advantage of the people they manage and put them into high impact use! So we are really looking to a degree for “generalists” but at the same time people who are absolutely dedicated and passionate about working on preserving biological diversity.

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