That agreement, known as the High Seas Treaty, outlines a groundbreaking strategy to protect ocean life in international waters. The plan was finalized under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea by an intergovernmental conference at the UN in 2023. It was part of a broader global effort to protect marine biodiversity and maintain the integrity of ocean ecosystems in an era of overfishing, climate change, and ever-expanding resource demands. Greenpeace hailed the initiative as “the biggest conservation victory ever.” But to seal the deal, the treaty needed to be formally ratified by 60 countries in order to come into force. The process moved slowly, and by February 2025, only 18 of the 60 countries required had signed on.

That’s where Feingold and his colleagues on the global steering committee stepped up, along with other members of the High Seas Alliance, an international coalition of environmental groups (including Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund) that focuses on protecting what it calls “the 50 percent of the planet that is the High Seas—the global ocean beyond national jurisdiction.”

The former senator traveled exhaustively to capitals and conferences around the world in 2025, visiting South Korea, Singapore, Guyana, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and other locales. It was an exercise in international diplomacy that was designed to jump-start the work of getting governments to sign on. In country after country, on continent after continent, his simple yet direct message was “OK, let’s get this thing ratified.”

Feingold goes out of his way to emphasize that he was part of a broader initiative, one that relied on the many networks built over many years by conservation and environmental groups. Unlike other political figures, he does not suggest that he was the only force for progress. Yet he brought something powerful to his conversations with the elected and appointed officials who needed to be brought on board. He wasn’t meeting with them as an environmental expert or a scientist, but as a former legislator and diplomat who spoke the language of geopolitics and used humor and even references to the historical and cultural ties between particular countries and his home state of Wisconsin to build relationships. At the heart of every conversation, though, was an emphasis on how essential the treaty was to those countries whose support was needed to ratify it: “Two-thirds of the surface of the earth wasn’t regulated at all by international law. There was no treaty. There was the Law of the Sea, which we [the United States] are not a party to, unbelievably, but that really only has to do with extraterritorial waters around the country, about 200 miles.”

Feingold brought this sense of urgency to every one of his meetings with environmental and finance ministers, spelling out how, after two decades of negotiations and piecemeal progress, it was time to get cracking. “And sure enough, we went from 21 countries ratified when I went to Korea [in the spring of 2025] to getting to the 60 needed to ratify [the treaty] at [the UN General Assembly] in September.”

Four months later, on January 17, in what UN Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed as a “historic achievement for the ocean and for multilateralism,” the High Seas Treaty became a legally binding international agreement. When Feingold and I spoke a few days later, he was enthusiastic about the news that the treaty had gone into force. But he was not taking a victory lap. In fact, he was headed for New Zealand and Australia—still working, with his allies in the Campaign for Nature and the High Seas Alliance, to broaden the international coalition. “In the last few months,” he said, “we’ve been working together and managed to get up to 83 countries, and we think we can get to over 100 before the first conference of the parties, COP. It’ll be COP1 for the High Seas Treaty.”

Getting broad buy-in for the treaty, and for other components of the GBF, is vital, Feingold adds, pointing to the need for increased financing to support the GBF’s ambitious targets—which include mobilizing at least $30 billion annually for developing countries by 2030. These efforts need to accelerate because, as Tom Dillon, the senior vice president for environment and crosscutting initiatives at the Pew Charitable Trusts, explains, “Achieving the global 30-by-30 goal requires not just ambition but equally bold investment in nature.”

The United States is unlikely to help with the financing or to ratify the High Seas Treaty anytime soon. But many countries whose leaders have often allied with Trump, such as Hungary and the Philippines, have signed on, which Feingold sees as a critical accomplishment.

After all, he knows a thing or two about unexpected political and policy breakthroughs. Feingold made a name for himself during three terms in the Senate as the rare politician who understood how to overcome partisan and ideological divisions. Born into a progressive Wisconsin family, the Rhodes Scholar and Harvard-educated lawyer was elected to the state Legislature at age 29. Ten years later, he defeated an incumbent Republican to win a US Senate seat in 1992. Over the next 18 years, he developed a reputation as an ardent defender of civil liberties (he was the only senator to oppose the Patriot Act in the days following the September 11 attacks) and a stickler for ethics. Often regarded as a maverick, Feingold formed a cross-party alliance with the Arizona Republican Senator John McCain in the 1990s and led a national movement to regulate money in politics that culminated in the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (better known as the McCain-Feingold Act).

As his efforts to reach across the aisle grabbed headlines, Feingold gained a reputation within the chamber, and among environmental groups, as a champion for clean air, clean water, and conservation who was determined to take on the fossil-fuel industry. Proud to hold the seat once occupied by Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, Feingold brought Nelson’s conservation ethic into the 21st century. He took a leading role in Senate efforts to prevent oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness and championed the protection of pristine regions in the Lower 48, such as Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, Wisconsin’s Apostle Islands, and Utah’s wilderness. Feingold eventually organized the Senate Wilderness and Public Lands Caucus, drawing both Democrats and Republicans into the conservation fight—often appealing to senators based on their personal and regional attachment to endangered lands. “I’ve had the good fortune to sea kayak the Apostle Islands, to canoe the Boundary Waters, and to hike in Utah wilderness,” he once told Grist magazine. “My interest was always there.” And as his work as a legislator and a diplomat took him to more remarkable natural places, Feingold recalled in our own conversation, nature “became an enormous passion for me. I always think of that line in [John Denver’s] ‘Rocky Mountain High’: ‘He was born in the summer of his 27th year, comin’ home to a place he’d never been before.’ And that’s what it felt like—it felt like home, but I had not been there. And to me, it’s about the most positive thing you could be doing right now at this very, very horrible time. So it does fit in with what I consider to be some of the favorite parts of my career that I was lucky enough to have.” It also gave him a perspective on how to build unexpected alliances with his more conservative colleagues, at least some of whom shared his passion for protecting these places. That’s a lesson he would eventually carry into his work with the Campaign for Nature.

After Feingold lost his bid for reelection to the Senate in 2010, he went on to teach and lecture on law at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, serving for a time as a senior fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and for five years as president of the American Constitution Society. But it was Feingold’s diplomatic service that drew the attention of the Campaign for Nature. Then–Secretary of State John Kerry, who had noticed Feingold’s work on the African-affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee while he was in the Senate, tapped the Wisconsinite to serve as US special envoy for the Great Lakes region of Africa during the later years of Barack Obama’s presidency. The connections Feingold made on the continent interested strategists looking to forge genuinely global and grassroots-focused networks for the protection of unspoiled wilderness and oceans.

“It was a combination of having had a high profile in Africa as a senator and then doing this work as an envoy,” Feingold says. “And that’s why this Campaign for Nature contacted me, because they said, ‘OK, we don’t really know enough people in Africa. We understand you can help us.’ So the first thing I did was get them through to people like [former president] Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and [former president Oluṣẹgun] Ọbasanjọ of Nigeria and [former prime minister] Hailemariam [Desalegn] of Ethiopia. It started with me trying to help get those folks on board. And that worked out. And then they asked me to do a more global assignment, which is what I’ve been doing ever since, and it’s what I’m doing now.”

Brian O’Donnell, who previously worked with the Wilderness Society and the Conservation Lands Fund and now serves as the director of the Campaign for Nature, says, “Russ has made a real difference in helping us broaden our reach and message beyond scientists and environmental advocates to the decision makers who can make land and water protection a reality.”

That will be even more important in the months and years to come, as Fein- 
gold works to get more countries to ratify and support agreements. Noting that “much of the world’s remaining biodiversity is located in developing countries who will bear a disproportionate share of the responsibility and costs of saving precious biomes,” the Campaign for Nature is pushing developed countries to contribute “their fair share of an internationally agreed commitment to provide $20 billion per year in biodiversity finance to developing countries.”

As Mary Robinson, Feingold’s colleague on the steering committee, has said, “The world is already spending $1.8 trillion each year on subsidizing industries that are destroying nature. The pledge of $20 billion a year is equivalent to only 1.1 percent, or about four days, of those subsidies. Wealthy governments have no excuse but to act with greater urgency.”

Feingold shares this view, even as he recognizes that the United States is very much on the sidelines at this point. He maintains contact with many current and former US officials, such as Kerry and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who are enthusiastic supporters of environmental causes. But he knows that’s not where the powers that be in Washington are currently at; he acknowledges that getting US buy-in for nature or the climate is “still obviously a great struggle.” At the same time, he holds out hope that progress on the international front—and perhaps US election results—could influence even some Republicans to come to the “commonsensical” conclusion that Trump’s approach is not just shortsighted but isolating—and dangerous—for the United States.

“I’m not a scientist [or a] leading environmentalist. But what I do know how to do is connect people [despite their] different philosophies—especially when they come together on something like nature,” Feingold says. “Pope Francis had an encyclical—Laudato si’—10 years ago, where he referred to nature and the planet as our common home. And that’s sort of my byword for this work: I’m appealing to people of all kinds who think of this as our common home.”