The Wildlife Conservation Society's Living Landscape Program is based on a simple reality: animals do not recognize park boundaries, particularly wide-ranging species such as elephants, bears and jaguars. Indeed, while parks are essential for conservation, the larger landscape adjacent to protected areas, with both humans and animals living within it, is often as important as the protected core. To protect these "Living Landscapes," WCS has created an approach that involves not only parks and protected areas, but neighboring people, governments and the private sector.

Today, the Wildlife Conservation Society is using this approach in some 28 land-and-sea scapes across Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America. While creatively resolving threats to wildlife and wild places while minimizing the costs to humans, WCS is creating a landscape that is sustainable for both.  

Conservation in the real world is not only about establishing preserves to protect Earth’s diversity, but going beyond them to save wildlife on all fronts.