There is a tuft of gray fur hanging in the barbed wire. “A family of badgers lives not far from here. Sometimes I see them in the evening when I am running. Lighting eyes in the dark.” For Sander Turnhout (1974), nature begins as soon as he walks out the door: from his house, east of Nijmegen, straight up the Ravenberg.
“Here in the area you can still clearly see how nobility and poor people used to live separately from each other. The high lords in their villas on the moraine, the farmers down in the swamp.” Landscape and identity cannot be seen separately, he wants to say. “This is too often overlooked by policymakers. They design new nature on the drawing board or sacrifice areas without talking to local residents. Naturally, this creates bad blood, because” – hand on his heart – “that affects people here. You have to seek dialogue.”
Turnhout is a master at initiating that dialogue. As a strategic advisor at the KennisenNL knowledge network and nature monitoring expert at Radboud University in Nijmegen, he navigates effortlessly between politics in The Hague, nature conservation and hardcore biology. “A outsider“, he calls himself modestly, but he is more of a jack-of-all-trades, a spider in the web. He studied literary theory and eventually obtained his PhD with a scientific-philosophical treatise on monitoring a species of dragonfly, the river broom.
Photos Annabel Oosteweeghel
His latest book was published at the end of 2025, To survive (subtitle: what extinction can teach us about nature recovery)a collection of columns that previously appeared on the websites of The Green Amsterdammer and NatureToday. In this he emerges as a biographer of, among others, the Batavian river mussel, the yellow-bellied fire toad and the black-blue rapunzel. Based on 27 species living in the Netherlands that balance on the edge between life and death, he reflects on what works and what does not work in nature conservation.
Living dead, you call them.
“Yes, if you look at the nature we still have in the Netherlands, you can safely call it comatose. Zombie nature. The nature protection that is applied resembles artificial respiration rather than real life. Most people do not even know that these rare species exist. They are only still there thanks to individuals who work for them with heart and soul, as dedicated nurses.
“Yet it is To survive not a pessimistic book. By portraying those 27 plants, animals and fungi, I want to give the dying species a face, so that more people will care about them. Because as long as extinction happens anonymously, hardly anyone cares. Only when we all start to feel love for the wig fungus and the tidal moss can we actually save them. Because that love for nature, together with knowledge of nature, leads to deep insights and involvement. Or, as I describe it in my book: biophilia + biology = biognosis.”
How many times have I heard that as a scientist involved in nature conservation you are not allowed to have emotions…
A calculation as the future of nature conservation?
“Broadly speaking, yes. In addition to nature, the relationship between people and nature must also be restored. But that does not mean that there is one ready-made solution to save every species. Just as extinction is a death by a thousand cuts, with causes ranging from fragmentation to pollution, from corruption to excessive recreation and from warming to nitrogen deposition, survival is tailor-made. There are a multitude of problems and a multitude of solutions. We will only see these when we pay more attention to the species around us, instead of ourselves always central.”
After a short silence: “I once heard the former Thinker of the Fatherland, the late philosopher René Gude, say that after the age of man, the age of the octopus would begin. Compared to those nine brains, we are simple beings. It is time for us to become a little more modest. Homo sapiens – the very name that we humans received from Linnaeus is pretentious. We consider ourselves the measure of all things, but we have a toddler consciousness compared to other species.”
Exit Homo sapiens?
“That name will not disappear anytime soon. The influence of Linnaeus is persistent, as you can see, for example, in the way in which many biologists still cling to his classification system. Even now that DNA research is turning the entire taxonomy upside down, his classification remains in use. People like to put things in boxes. And it is not that I am against boxes, but you have to dare to be flexible. Continue to discuss, even if the classifications and definitions are already there. No hard lines draw with permanent marker, but with pencil.”
So you can still erase.
“Science scientists still too often cling to their sobriety, their supposed objectivity. That is a dangerous illusion. Recognize that things are changeable, that people are changeable. How often have I heard that as a scientist who is involved in nature conservation, you are not allowed to have emotions… Why should that not be? And how is it at all possible not to feel anything about such a subject? You can be a scientist and a human being at the same time, in fact: in my opinion, it makes you that leads to a better scientist. Grief processing is an important theme in biology, especially with the current biodiversity crisis. It is time that we face up to this.
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