Wildlife conservationist Bill Konstant has spent more than four decades helping build species-conservation programs, connect field biologists with funding, and support threatened wildlife around the world.Konstant argues that successful conservation often depends on strong local leadership, committed species champions, diverse teams and relatively small, strategically targeted grants that can launch or sustain field projects.He sees the growth of career biologists and conservation organizations in primate range countries as one of the field’s most encouraging changes, even as habitat loss and wildlife population declines remain persistent problems.Konstant spoke with Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler in August 2026 about his career, his memoir Wrestles With Wolves, and what decades of species conservation have taught him about how conservation succeeds.
Russell Mittermeier has a running joke about Bill Konstant. The two have worked together, off and on, for more than four decades, and Mittermeier writes in the foreword to Wrestles With Wolves that Konstant seems to have a tolerance of roughly five years working directly for him before departing for another organization.
Konstant has an explanation for that pattern. He has never been much interested in becoming a “company man.” Instead, he has compared his role to that of a catalyst in a chemical reaction — something that helps raise the energy of the system but need not remain once the reaction is underway.
