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Russ Feingold is on a new mission: preserving nature to save the planet.

Russ Feingold has seen the headlines about how the Trump administration is abandoning the struggle to save the planet. Each one is more dire than the last: “Trump’s Latest Plan to Undo the ‘Holy Grail’ of Climate Rules: Never Mind the Science”; “Trump’s Anti-Green Agenda Could Lead to 1.3 Million More Climate Deaths”; and “One Year After Trump’s Inauguration, the Damage to Environmental Policy Is Unprecedented.” The former US senator from Wisconsin, who served for almost two decades as one of the chamber’s most ardent advocates for climate action, publicly rebuked Trump’s January 7 withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): “Nothing in the Constitution grants the president any such power.” That cry of frustration echoes the sentiments of many environmentalists in a moment when the Trump administration seems to be reversing all the progress that Feingold and others fought to achieve after the awakening that Americans experienced on the first Earth Day in 1970. Not only has the president distanced the country from global initiatives to battle climate change and other forms of environmental degradation, but politically and economically powerful figures, such as Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, have been sending mixed signals about existential environmental issues. Feingold refers to the current state of affairs as “this horrible nightmare that we’re going through.”

Yet he has not given up on the prospect of building international coalitions to save the planet. In fact, he is actively forging them as a globe-trotting citizen diplomat on behalf of one of the most underreported yet strikingly successful environmental initiatives of our time. As the chair of the global steering committee of the Campaign for Nature—an international effort based on the tenet that “the rapid loss of biodiversity threaten[s] the very existence of humanity on Earth”—Feingold has emerged as a high-profile advocate for the ambitious agenda outlined in the somewhat clumsily named yet vital Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). This framework was agreed to in 2022 at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The GBF, which aims to formally protect at least 30 percent of the world’s land and water by 2030, has been described as the “Paris Agreement for nature”—a reference to the better-known 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, the landmark international treaty that pledges “to limit the [global] temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

The history on all this goes back a long way, to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where 108 heads of state and government laid the groundwork for what they hoped would be sustainable environmental development. That meeting outlined the UNFCCC and the Convention on Biological Diversity, and it began the discussions that led to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), proposals that were designed to address the interconnected concerns of what has been described as a “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. These agreements did not represent the end of the fight for sustainability, but rather the beginning of processes that would seek the formal ratification of treaties and the international buy-in to implement them. In the wake of the Paris Agreement and the work that extended from it, progress on climate change would grab headlines for many years. But now the headlines announce, as The New York Times did on February 9 of this year, “Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation.”

While many climate activists despair at how Trump and his international allies are stymieing serious responses to the climate crisis, the Campaign for Nature and its allies have had considerable, if far from complete, success in pursuing the GBF’s global target.

The campaign was founded in 2018 in partnership with the Wyss Campaign for Nature, a $1.5 billion conservation project under the umbrella of the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss’s eponymous foundation. (Wyss is one of the world’s most prolific donors to environmental causes.) The Campaign for Nature has focused squarely on efforts to get world leaders to support and fund the “30 by 30” goal—an ambitious target at a time when only 16 percent of the world’s land and 8 percent of its seas are under formal protection. It has also emphasized the importance of including Indigenous peoples and local communities in these initiatives, a longtime concern of Feingold’s. The campaign’s organizers and allies are not naïve. “If we are to meet the 30 by 30 goal,” the group explains on its website, “world leaders need to dramatically increase and expand protected and conserved areas, ramp up funding and ensure the full inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in conservation measures in order to protect the natural world.”

And yet they must continue to advance toward the goal by attracting support not just from more historically progressive nations with records of leading on environmental issues but from countries that—even if they do not embrace Trump’s most extreme stances—have been uneven in their commitment to address the climate crisis.

How can the cause of nature be advanced at a time when efforts to address interconnected environmental crises are being so aggressively blocked by right-wing politicians and fossil-fuel-industry apologists? “Somehow nature still has not become a dirty word, believe it or not,” Feingold told me. “They managed to turn climate into a dirty word. And, of course, they are interrelated, and they are both essential. But there is an interesting way in which a lot of people feel comfortable working on the nature issue........

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