My working life has unfolded across a period of unusually rapid change – ecological, institutional, and technological -and much of my thinking has been shaped by moving between worlds rather than staying within one.
I first came to conservation through pioneering work on urban nature restoration and expedition field research. Early on, this included leadership roles in bird conservation, most notably directing the BirdLife Indonesia programme, where I learned how cultural values, livelihoods, and ecosystems interlock at landscape scale. These experiences taught me that durable ecological change requires not only ecological insight, but also sustained engagement with the human systems that shape nature’s possibilities
Later, I entered academia, gaining a doctorate in Conservation Governance and holding research and teaching positions at the University of Oxford over nearly two decades. During this period, I worked to extend conservation theory and methods by building conceptual bridges between policy, ecology, technology, culture, and geographic context. This involved working across natural and social sciences, and contributing to emerging dialogues on rewilding as both a scientific practice and a practical approach to systems change.
Alongside scholarship, I have been drawn to the challenge of translating ecological potential into economic and institutional forms. This led to innovation roles in ecosystem analytics and nature finance, most recently founding and shaping work at CreditNature, where we sought to design metrics and digital platform infrastructures capable of making ecosystem recovery investable.
Throughout, I have remained a birder and traveller, attentive to place in both ecological and socio-economic terms, and curious about how people engage with nature: the worldviews they bring, their attitudes to recovery and change, and how new ideas are received, resisted, or reshaped in practice. Through conversations, interviews, field visits, and writing, I try to understand these dynamics and to test and refine concepts with different people in different contexts.
I now find myself in a phase of semi-retirement, less constrained by organisational roles and more free to think creatively, independently and with long-term perspective. This space allows me to revisit enduring questions in the light of contemporary challenges, including how ecological insight might inform new technological frontiers and contribute to more resilient and equitable futures.