When you consider who is truly carrying out the heavy lifting, it’s difficult to ignore the way the language of environmental work has been changing. Once a uniform of grey-haired scientists wearing field vests, the face of conservation has evolved. People who are unable to rent a car in some countries now own it more and more.
Even before you read a name tag at a recent IUCN meeting in Abu Dhabi, you can feel the change. Fourteen young leaders out of about 1,500 applications advanced to the pitch stage, where they each had a few minutes to persuade a jury that their idea was worthwhile. That ratio has a subtle, remarkable quality. It indicates that you have a huge appetite and that the gatekeepers are finally taking notice.
Take Elisa Harley, who started her biodegradable plant pot company at nineteen, frustrated by the absurd contradiction of planting trees inside disposable plastic. Her firm, Enivo Pots, now chips away at a problem most people in horticulture had simply accepted as the cost of doing business — roughly 350 million plastic pots used every year in New Zealand alone. She has presented to 10,000 people while raising more than $120,000. It’s the kind of trajectory that seems made up until you realise that’s precisely the idea. Teenagers frequently show up to refute industries’ presumptions that things cannot change.
Then there’s Iman Ebrahimi, who founded the AvayeBoom Bird Conservation Society in Iran at twenty-one. He’s spent more than a decade on something most policy circles barely register — the emotional bond between humans and birds. It sounds soft until you realise emotional connection is, perhaps, the most underrated tool in conservation. People don’t fight for things they don’t care about. He seems to have an innate understanding of that. You get the impression that he is developing a quiet philosophy rather than managing a project when you listen to him discuss birds in the Arjan Wetland.
Geographically, the pattern is consistent. Indigenous ecological knowledge is incorporated into urban biodiversity work by Justin Langan of Swan River, Canada, who rejects the traditional dichotomy that pits modern science against traditional wisdom. Silvia Montilla in Colombia is pushing solar energy into low-income communities through her company Unergo, where the conversation isn’t really about kilowatts; it’s about whether the energy transition will leave certain people behind, again.
Ambition is not the only thing that unites these tales. Many young people have aspirations. It’s the structural support that’s quietly emerging beneath them — initiatives like ChangemakerXchange, programmes like WYSE Global Change Makers offering coaching for nine months at no cost, the IUCN’s deliberate decision to spotlight youth at flagship events. Young environmentalists used to be photographed, cheered, and then dismissed. The door is beginning to remain open for longer.
The question of whether all of these scales exist remains unanswered. The cynicism of older institutions hasn’t completely subsided, attention spans are shorter than the timeframes required for climate work, and funding is still uneven. However, the ground now feels different. There’s a feeling that those who are getting close to retirement won’t be designing the next ten years of conservation in conference rooms. People who have grown weary of waiting their turn are drafting it in clumsy, flawed, and incredibly human ways.