The Scientists Making the Case for Nature’s Rights

VICTORIA FALLS, Zimbabwe—On a bright and clear day, Gillian T. Davies reached the end of a winding dirt track where armed guards waited.

The ecologist from Massachusetts was attending an international conference on wetlands that would influence the future of the world’s fastest-disappearing ecosystems . The sessions were not going well.

So, on the conference’s break day, Davies hired a local guide and headed deep into the African bush to find one of the threatened species that frequent the wetlands she’s fighting for.

The guards, clad with AK-47-style rifles slung over their shoulders, were a round-the-clock team protecting a crash of white rhinoceroses from poachers. Davies felt a surge of gratitude for the men, but wondered: What had her species become that such a thing was necessary?