Nicolas Polunin will be long remembered for two unusual achievements. First, he founded and was first editor of not one but two influential journals, Biological Conservation (founded in 1967 and edited from that year to 1974) and then Environmental Conservation (founded in 1974 and edited from its inception through 1995 when he was in his mid-eighties). Second, the readers of either journal, but particularly the latter, will remember the vivid language Polunin used in numerous editorials and other articles and texts to urge readers to start paying attention to the impact of human activities on other species on earth and on the natural environment.

Polunin credited his very public concern about such issues to a small UNESCO Conference in Finland in 1966, where he "had a sudden realization, amounting to a kind of vision, that if the world's populations went on growing and acting as...