“If the pope is interested, everyone is interested,” said Alexandre Roulin, accepting the 2019 Environmental Peacebuilding Research Award in Irvine, California. The University of Lausanne professor’s project—on how conserving barn owls in the Middle East brings together people in Israel, Jordan, and Palestine across political divides—is certainly unique and intriguing. (Also, cute owls!)

The spiritual leader of the world’s 1 billion Catholics reached out to Roulin because the “Barn Owls Know No Boundaries” project promises a possible way to build peace in one of the world’s most intractable religious conflicts. A tremendous story, right?

But despite having all the hallmarks of a great tale, a quick Google search finds only a handful of stories about it. This lack of media attention is unfortunately an ongoing challenge for what I have long viewed as “the greatest story never told.”

In 2003, a scabies skin disease outbreak affecting mountain gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park was traced to people living around the national park—people with limited access to basic health and social services. To protect the people and wildlife of this special park, we launched Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), an NGO that promotes biodiversity conservation by enabling people, gorillas, and other wildlife to coexist harmoniously through improved health and wellbeing.

Last summer, I stood on a cliff 100 feet above the Madre De Dios River, in Southern Peru near the Bolivian border, to watch the rosy gift of an Amazon sunset. It was quiet, in a tropical rainforest way, with the light clamor of parrots, macaws, and cicadas. Then, a peke-peke motorized canoe broke through the soft din. It arrived from the east, carrying a new supply of diesel fuel for the gold miners who were prepping the generator that would operate a suction-pump and dredge for gold across the river and around the bend. Before nightfall, the fuel ignited the baritone of a diesel generator. It moaned all night and all day, barely stopping. In subsequent days, instead of a light clamor of birds and primates, the thrum of a gold mining operation seemed like all I could hear.

Early scholarship on environmental peacemaking recognized the important role that local civil-society can play in promoting regional cooperation while, at the same time, pressuring governments to protect the environment. For example, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Union for Defense of the Aral Sea and Amu Darya in Uzbekistan and the Dashowuz Ecological Club in Turkmenistan, were at the forefront of the fight to restore the Aral Sea and protect the region’s biodiversity.

“Having a planet that is suitable for us has taken a very long time, like four and a half billion years,” said Sylvia Earle, Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, in a podcast interview with Ambassador David Balton before a recent Wilson Center event on marine protected areas. “It’s taken us about four and a half decades to significantly unravel, deplete, [and] modify those precious systems that really have little margin of error.”