Amy Lewis – Organizing for Wilderness, the Nature Needs Half Campaign, & Defending Indigenous Rights

In the first episode of Last Wild Places, our guest is Amy Lewis, CEO of the WILD Foundation (https://wild.org/), an international environmental NGO that for 50 years has been mobilizing international coalitions for the protection of wilderness through the World Wilderness Congress, the Nature Needs Half campaign and other initiatives. WILD works in more than 40 countries, with projects on the ground in Mali, helping to protect West African elephants, and the Brazilian Amazon where it is defending the indigenous rights of the Yawanawá people. Amy has worked over two decades in the environmental and human rights sector, and is now a key leader in the global movement to protect the world’s last wild places.

Among the topics, our conversation with Amy digs deep into the challenges of protecting the world's last wild places, which countries are leading the fight for wilderness protection, and her organization's role as a catalyst in that; how to build trust between indigenous communities and national institutions; and how her conservation work has personally changed her perspective on wilderness and her lifestyle.