The NCS claim that contemporary conservation has failed is overly simplistic, if not directly misleading.
First, it ignores how the creation of parks, innovative resource management regimens, and other conservation work has slowed the pace of biodiversity decline.
Although it is difficult to quantify averted declines and extinctions, several recent studies have concluded that, if the conservation community had not been trying for decades to protect land and water resources and biodiversity, losses would have been far greater than they have been to date [23–26].
Second, it ignores the creation of legislation and public support for nature conservation that set the stage for arguments over conservation and development [27,28]; the need to weigh tradeoffs between conservation impacts and economic gains is a central legacy of the conservation
movement.