Dan Simberloff’s warm remembrance gives us wonderful insight into Ed Wilson, the person, over and above the name-on-a-page with which all involved in conservation have been so familiar for so long (as students, we always used to chuckle over the academic citation to books edited by “E.O. Wilson, Ed.”) I was lucky enough to meet him a few times. The first was at the 1997 Biodiversity II conference at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, thanks to my PhD supervisor, Stuart Pimm; a particular highlight was the chance to witness Wilson and Simberloff at the podium together. Wilson was a long-time supporter of Conservation International, and so I had the chance to interact with him when working there in the early 2000s at the Centre for Applied Biodiversity Science. This included discussions of the role of “high-biodiversity wilderness areas” as complementing the conservation strategy of “biodiversity hotspots”, culminating in his editing of Russ Mittermeier’s paper on “Wilderness and biodiversity conservation” (https://www.pnas.org/content/100/18/10309.short). Fastforward another decade to my time with NatureServe, which as a Red List Partner was (and remains) deeply involved in supporting IUCN and SSC in establishing the “Barometer of Life” (https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1188606), and mobilising funds towards this. I had the chance to meet with Wilson there, too, jointly with NatureServe’s CEO Mary Klein, Chief Zoologist Bruce Young, and others, to brainstorm ideas on the taxonomic expansion of the Red List. In time, these led to a funding award from the US National Science Foundation “Dimensions of Biodiversity” Program (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1136586), to conduct the assessments of extinction risk for Americas reptiles for the IUCN Red List. So, thank you, Ed, for your inspirational leadership across conservation as a discipline, and for the support you gave me and hundreds of others like me over the years.