Many years ago, when I was the editor of Shark Diver Magazine, I was invited to sit in on a meeting in Cancún, Mexico.
The room was filled with hotel owners and tourism stakeholders.
They were there to discuss a problem.
Sharks.
Specifically, the rise in shark encounters with people along their coast.
The question being debated was straightforward and deeply unsettling:
What should be done about them?
Culling was discussed.
More lifeguards were discussed.
Liability, and profit were carefully weighed.
What was not discussed was why the sharks were there in the first place.
Along that stretch of coastline, massive artificial reefs made of concrete structures had been placed offshore to prevent beach erosion.
The project worked. The beaches stabilized. Tourism thrived.
But those same structures also created habitat.
Small fish arrived.
Reef life flourished.
And behind them came the predators.
The sharks weren’t invading anything.
They were responding exactly as nature does when opportunity appears.
Yet in that room, the conversation wasn’t about coexistence, or about understanding the ecosystem they had altered.
It was about whether these animals, doing what evolution created them to do, should be killed because they had become inconvenient.
Sitting there, I felt helpless.
But it became painfully clear to me:
Nature no longer decides what gets to live or die.
We do.
And those decisions are often made far from the water, far from the forest, and far from the consequences… inside boardrooms where balance sheets carry more weight than ecosystems.
Sadly, this isn’t an isolated story.
Our oceans are overfished and polluted.
Forests are cut down faster than they can recover.
Species that once lived or died according to Nature’s Law are now subject to quarterly profits and corporate agendas.
We’ve convinced ourselves that we’re managing nature.
In reality, we’re breaking systems we barely understand.
There is nothing intelligent about destroying the ecosystems that keeps us all alive.
And yet, we continue.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers.
I don’t think anyone does.
This isn’t a call for perfection… It’s a call to care.
We may not sit in those boardrooms, but we live downstream from their decisions.
And when we protect our wild places, we’re not just saving animals or landscapes.
We’re saving ourselves.
