In the steaming lowlands of Veracruz and the Yucatán, where strangler figs knot the canopy and howler monkeys bellow at dawn, a man with a field notebook kept noticing what others overlooked. Arturo Gómez-Pompa believed tropical forests were not untouched wilderness but “landscapes of memory,” shaped for millennia by Indigenous hands. Long before “biodiversity” became a rallying cry, he documented how local communities enriched and tended the jungle, and argued that conservation should do the same. Few scientists did more to upend the idea of the rainforest as a pristine museum and recast it as a living archive of stewardship. He had not meant to be a botanist. Born in Mexico City in 1934, he dutifully enrolled in medicine, his parents’ wish, until a teenage visit to a cousin’s ranch in Tamaulipas altered his course. Coyotes, rattlesnakes and hawks proved more compelling than anatomy texts. He switched to biology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he completed his doctorate in 1966. By then he was already a familiar figure in the selvas, cataloguing barbasco yams for a state pharmaceutical firm and learning from local guides whose names he later insisted on including in his papers. From those muddy trails grew a career devoted to bridging science and society. In 1975 he founded Mexico’s National Institute for Research on Biotic Resources (INIREB) in Xalapa, one of the first efforts to decentralize biological research from the capital. There he helped establish agroecology as a discipline, showing that traditional farming…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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