Mammal Conservation: Old Problems, New Perspectives, Transdisciplinarity, and the Coming of Age of Conservation Geopolitics

I review the shocking current status of terrestrial mammals and then describe an approach to solving it, embracing a continuum of spatial and intellectual scales, from groundedness to geopolitics. Starting with an illustrative arena, the interface between agriculture and wildlife, I then outline the litany of threats to mammals and some successful approaches to their conservation, and document some broad-scale patterns regarding ecosystems, the mammalian communities within, and some implications for conservation. Observing that the battle for mammalian conservation is being badly lost, I dedicate the third part of this article to a combination of top-down and bottom-up, interdisciplinary studies, aspiring to a holistic approach that sets conservation in the wider sphere of the human enterprise and that I term transdisciplinary conservation.