In memoriam: Eleanor Jane Sterling (1960–2023)

Over a lifetime of commitment to conservation, Eleanor Jane Sterling tirelessly dedicated her time, expertise, and brilliant mind to sustaining biodiversity and people's relationships with nature. Eleanor's work transcended disciplines and had a profound impact on biological and social sciences, field research, and community engagement and collaboration around the globe, with direct application to conservation action. She pioneered new ways of achieving just, equitable, and effective conservation, emphasizing the need to place Indigenous knowledge and cultural norms, traditions, and customs at the heart of conservation practice. Her passion for inclusive communication, education, and mentoring and her catalyzing role in collaborations among researchers, practitioners, and community members across the world have been instrumental in bridging ways of knowing. Her pioneering work on advancing biocultural approaches to biodiversity conservation, placing cultural concerns at the forefront of engagement with local actors, in particular in British Columbia, Hawaiˈi, and Solomon Islands, led to influential publications on well-being, the importance of connections between people and place, and how to integrate this new understanding into environmental policy tools and metrics, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Her outstanding efforts were recognized through her numerous awards and prestigious appointments, including the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) Distinguished Service Award (2013), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy inaugural Meritorious Research Award (2016), and most recently, the IUCN Fred M. Packard International Parks Merit Award (2023). Ever modest, Eleanor often preferred to highlight the contributions of her collaborators and colleagues rather than the success of her own endeavors. Active on the SCB board for many years, Eleanor placed a high priority on advancing more inclusive, equitable, and diverse conservation workplaces, professional societies, and networks. She was a founding member of the Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity (EID) Committee at SCB, and the committee itself was formed in direct response to activities she convened at SCB conferences and a paper she published with colleagues in this journal (Foster et al., 2014). Eleanor facilitated key initiatives at the highest levels of SCB based on high-impact and data-driven evaluation and training to inform the society's decisions and approaches related to diversity, equity, inclusivity, and belonging. The new governance structure and Vision 2026 of SCB reflect many of the tenets that Eleanor advocated tirelessly, including creating more localized, diverse, equitable, and distributed leadership and decision-making structures. Through these efforts, and throughout her life, Eleanor worked to better recognize her own privilege and leverage it to advocate for change and center those with less power in the spaces where change is made. Eleanor launched her career at Yale University, in a joint doctoral program between the Department of Anthropology and the School of the Environment. Her doctoral research focused on the ecology and behavior of the aye-aye, a reclusive nocturnal lemur that was once thought to be extinct. This research entailed following aye-ayes through the rainforest at night with a team of Malagasy research assistants on Nosy Mangabe, a small, uninhabited island in the Bay of Antongil. She went on to study the distribution patterns of biodiversity in tropical regions, leading behavioral and ecological studies of primates, whales, and sea turtles and of many other species in many different landscapes. She coauthored the monograph Vietnam: A Natural History, the first comprehensive natural history of Vietnam, and contributed to research on the ecosystem engineering of Galapagos tortoises. For more than 20 years, Eleanor was a generous and visionary leader at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), guiding and growing the conservation programs of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC). She became well known as a science communicator and made powerful use of the museum's platform for public outreach through exhibits and events. Eleanor curated landmark traveling exhibits that advanced public understanding of the environment, including Water H20 = Life (November 2007 to May 2008), Our Global Kitchen (November 2012 to August 2013), and Yellowstone to Yukon (July 2006 to March 2007). She also spearheaded an influential, annual conservation symposium for over a decade and the Living with Nature series, a set of public events and freely available materials relating to everyday actions that citizens can take to reduce their impact on the environment. In 2022, Eleanor and her husband, Kevin Frey, moved to the island of Oahu, where Eleanor was the director of the University of Hawaiˈi at Mānoa Hawaiˈi Institute of Marine Biology. She was only in the position for a year, but her contributions to sustainable funding and strategic planning were instrumental to the long-term success of the institute, centering on place-based research and building relationships with the local community. Through affiliations with higher education institutions in New York, Hawaiˈi, and beyond, Eleanor contributed to the training and mentoring of (quite literally) thousands of emerging conservationists across the United States through direct supervision as a thesis sponsor, committee member, or professor and through the establishment of the Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners (NCEP). NCEP works to make conservation training and education more effective and accessible by developing teaching and learning materials and professional development programs. It has reached close to 5000 educators and practitioners in over 20 countries, increasing conservation capacity worldwide. Eleanor challenged our discipline to grapple with the complexity of conservation science as one that was prefaced on unacknowledged histories, subject to ongoing identity-based biases and riddled with unintended consequences. She advocated for a bolder transformative vision for the study and practice of conservation. She continued to recast her recommendations to create meaningful change as she deepened her appreciation of the ways systemic and structural forces affect conservation and broader society. Eleanor will be deeply missed by her colleagues and friends in conservation. Her extraordinary and creative mind, tireless and visionary efforts to broker collaboration and catalyze action, and advancement of equity and inclusion will continue to inspire us, always. Photo by Michael Appleton.