File:Tom Lovejoy on Biological Diversity.png

Thomas 'Tom' Lovejoy

Known as the “Godfather of Biodiversity,” Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy is a world-renowned champion for global conservation efforts and conservation biology research grounded in sound science. He is credited with having brought the global tropical deforestation problem to the fore as a public issue, and was the first person to use the term “biological diversity” in 1980 (along with Edward O. Wilson).

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uV1svO-pZU

• https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/thomas-e-lovejoy-iii-an-ecologist-who-dedicated-his-career-to-preserving-the-amazon-rainforest-dies-at-80

• https://news.mongabay.com/2021/12/tom-lovejoy-prominent-conservation-biologist-dead-at-80/

• https://www.amazonbiodiversitycenter.org/founder-tom-lovejoy

Tom and Ed, Pioneering Conservation Biology

Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wilson

The two scientists first met in the mid-nineteen-seventies. At that point, Wilson was in his mid-forties, and teaching biology at Harvard. Lovejoy, a dozen years younger, was working for the World Wildlife Fund. Over lunch, they got to talking about where the W.W.F. should focus its efforts. They agreed that it should be in the tropics, because the tropics are where most species actually live. There wasn’t a good term for what they were trying to preserve, so they tossed one around—“biological diversity”—and put it into circulation. “People just started using it,” Lovejoy recalled, in an interview in 2015. (Later, the phrase would be shortened to “biodiversity.”)

• https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/honoring-the-legacy-of-e-o-wilson-and-tom-lovejoy

~‎