How Can You Protect What Doesn’t Even Have A Name?

In many countries around the world, wilderness lacks formal status as a protected nature area. Sometimes it even lacks a culturally recognized word.

In such a context, how can a society truly appreciate the wild nature upon which all life depends? The World Wilderness Congress (WWC) launched over forty five years ago, sparked by Magqubu Ntombela – a Zulu elder and one of WILD’s two founders – and his sense of urgency that “more needs to be done.” Since then, the WWC has given rise to an international community that places the protection of wild nature front and center before world leaders. Occurring ten times in four decades, it has produced hundreds of practical outcomes, including:

• Pioneering true partnering between global conservation and traditional/Indigenous communities.
• Initiating the process that would lead to the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility.
• Establishing dozens of new public and private protected areas covering millions of acres of land.
• Multi-lateral efforts to restore and protect wilderness across national boundaries.
• Numerous new organizations to address new and urgent needs in conservation communications, regional protected areas, and global policy issues.
• Launched Nature Needs Half, the global vision and practice to protect and restore half of wild nature on land and sea, the necessary human-nature relationship called for by both contemporary and traditional science.

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Past Congresses