In a world of quick wins and impatient headlines, Martin Goebel is playing the long game.
Now Director for Mexico at LegacyWorks Group, a U.S.-based nonprofit, Goebel has spent five decades navigating the complicated terrain where conservation collides with community, politics, and development. Most of that time has been in Mexico, where he has witnessed—and helped shape—some of the country’s most ambitious environmental efforts. The challenges are as persistent as they are familiar: water scarcity, habitat loss, mismanaged tourism, frayed social trust. But Goebel and his collaborators are betting on a different kind of conservation—one that doesn’t begin with maps or mandates, but with conversations.
The region he currently focuses on, the Pacific coast of Baja California Sur, may be among the most stunning and biologically rich stretches of North America. But it is also among the fastest growing. Coastal oases like La Paz and Todos Santos are rapidly morphing into tourism and retirement enclaves. With that growth come the usual pressures: overdrawn aquifers, degraded ecosystems, rising inequality. The solution, in Goebel’s view, lies not in top-down decrees but in patient, trust-based relationships with local communities.
LegacyWorks, where Goebel has worked since 2016, is not your typical conservation outfit. Originally founded to support watershed restoration in Wyoming, the organization now operates across five geographies in the U.S. and Mexico, stitching together a mix of environmental protection, rural development, and what it calls “community readiness.”
In Baja, its flagship effort is ResiMar—short for Regeneración Sierra a Mar, or “regeneration from mountains to sea.” Through a loose alliance of local partners, ResiMar aims to restore watersheds, strengthen food systems, and align ecological goals with community aspirations. The idea is as old as hydrology but seldom practiced with this degree of social patience: Take care of the uplands, and the benefits will flow downstream.
Such projects are rarely linear. Goebel describes a four-part framework for change that begins with convening and listening. Only later—after shared purpose and trust are established—does the work move into funding, metrics, and measurable outcomes. One of the initiatives under ResiMar, for example, took five years just to secure federal approval for a locally proposed fisheries refuge. That timescale may seem glacial, but to Goebel, it reflects the real pace of durable change.
Goebel is no stranger to the hard lessons of conservation. He helped establish the Upper Gulf of California Biosphere Reserve in the 1990s, a protected area aimed at safeguarding the critically endangered vaquita porpoise. But the process, rushed and top-down, alienated many local fishers. The result was backlash that still lingers. That experience, he says, underscored a central principle: social legitimacy is not optional.
Goebel is cautious about narratives that frame conservation as merely a technical or ecological endeavor.
“Environmental challenges are not as hard as the social ones,” he says. The real obstacles are about trust, governance, and competing visions for the future. For that reason, LegacyWorks emphasizes humility—what Goebel calls the practice of “underpromising and overdelivering.” In a sector prone to grand ambitions, that approach is surprisingly uncommon.
But even amid the slow churn of community meetings and capacity-building, Goebel sees reasons for hope. A new generation of local leaders is stepping up—many of them women—who see conservation not as an external imposition but as a pathway to self-determination. They are not waiting for permission or perfection. They are learning as they go, and building something that might, over time, last.
In the conversation that follows, Goebel reflects on the arc of his career, the missteps that shaped his philosophy, and the emerging models of community-driven conservation that give him reason to keep going. It is not a blueprint for rapid transformation—but it may offer a roadmap for those willing to stay in the fight a little longer.
