Many conservationists count their wins in acres saved or species brought back from the edge. Gary Tabor counts them differently: he measures whether the system holds when pressure builds.
Tabor is an ecologist and wildlife veterinarian whose career has been shaped by a single, quiet insight—that protecting a place means nothing if that place is cut off from everything around it. The relationship between landscapes matters as much as the landscapes themselves.
He learned this as a child. Nine summers at a rustic camp in New York's Adirondack Park taught him to climb the 46 peaks above 4,000 feet, to navigate the portages between lakes, to move through wilderness with intention. The landscape he explored was protected by design—New York's "Forever Wild" clause gave it legal armor—and by a civic agreement that wilderness and people could share the same place. He has returned to those same mountains for decades. The woods remain relatively unchanged, much as they inspired the founders of the Wilderness Society a century ago. The lesson took root early.
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But a child's sense of scale can only stretch so far. Tabor's real education came later, in East Africa. He spent nearly a decade living and working in places like Lake Nakuru, watching the limits of what conservationists call the "island model"—the idea that you can fence in a park and call it protected. The park was iconic. It was also entirely cut off from the broader landscape. Wildlife didn't recognize those boundaries. Elephants and zebras moved by instinct across lines drawn on maps, and when they did, they left the protection behind.
That gap between how nature works and how governance works became the central question of his career. If animals need to move across landscapes, then conservation can't stop at a park boundary. It has to think in systems.
Building for a hundred years
This shift—from thinking about protected islands to thinking about connected landscapes—is reshaping how conservation actually happens on the ground. Large landscape conservation, as it's now called, isn't new in theory, but it's becoming new in practice. Organizations are learning to coordinate across borders, to work with indigenous communities who have stewarded these lands for centuries, to build governance that bends without breaking.
Tabor's work has been central to that evolution. He co-founded the World Wildlife Fund's Wildlands and Wetlands Program, and his fingerprints are on conservation strategies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But the real measure of his influence isn't in job titles or organizational charts. It's in the shift itself—the growing recognition that a hundred-year vision for conservation can't be built on islands. It has to be built on systems that hold.
The Adirondacks taught him that much. They're still there, still wild, still shared between people and nature. That's not an accident. That's architecture.
