Jean-Gaël “JG” Collomb, CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Network, was recently featured in an article from GW Magazine. This article focuses on one of JG’s crucial beliefs, and a core tenet of WCN, which is that while humanity is the greatest threat to wildlife and wild places, it’s humans—and to be more precise, the thoughtful and sustainable choices that humans can make—will also be the solution to many of the problems that nature faces.
“It is really about addressing human behaviors, because humans are going to be the solution at a local level and global level,” Collomb said.
Long ago, JG earned his bachelor’s degree at George Washington University, and it was one of his professors Geza Teleki, that inspired JG to hold off on attending graduate school in order to get hands-on conservation field experience in Africa. This decision changed JG’s life and put him on a long conservation path, eventually culminating in leading WCN’s mission to ensure that wildlife and people can coexist and thrive around the world.
“I set on this path to work with wildlife in a new way,” Collomb said. “If I just studied them, then they would disappear because their environment was under threat. The only way to resolve that was to work at the intersection between people issues and wildlife issues.”
Read more about JG’s conservation journey and WCN’s strategies to safeguard our planet’s wildlife in GW Magazine.