The second recipient of the Thomas E. Lovejoy Prize, launched in 2024, was announced Sept. 23 at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, during New York’s climate week. Martín von Hildebrand, an ethnologist and anthropologist, won the award for his decades of work with Indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon, helping them secure their rights and protect their forest. “I have spent 50 years with the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon, speaking about land, laws, and their own governments or intercultural governments,” von Hildebrand said in a press release. “I never fully understood their culture, nor did they mine, but we built trust, held hands, walked together and changed the history of the region.” The Lovejoy Prize honors the legacy of Thomas E. Lovejoy, often called the “godfather of biodiversity.” Lovejoy was a renowned ecologist and passionate advocate for science and conservation, especially of the Amazon Rainforest. “The prize honors his dedication to the Amazon by acknowledging the achievements of individuals who embody that same spirit and dedication,” the press release notes. Von Hildebrand first arrived in the Amazon in the early 1970s, when he started living with Indigenous groups in Colombia. During his decades there, he worked with the communities to ultimately secure roughly 26 million hectares (64.2 million acres) of Indigenous territory, building one of the world’s largest community-led conservation systems. In 1990, Hildebrand founded the Gaia Amazonas Foundation (GAF) to support Indigenous-led conservation. The organization’s guiding principle is that Indigenous peoples, as the original inhabitants of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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