Mobilising support for biodiversity preservation needs to consider the interaction between expert knowledge holders – usually biologists, natural science and conservation researchers, policy makers and wider publics and communities. Understanding perceptions of biodiversity and the relevance of biodiversity to both people’s lives and to wider policy questions is significant. Bob Bloomfield OBE has worked in the interface of these three constituencies in a range of circumstances and explores some of the lessons learned. These include addressing underlying preconceptions which can undermine communications; understanding the wider role of biodiversity conservation initiatives in the context of social equity and justice and the importance of seeing how complex environmental questions can be reduced to limited and incomplete distillations in the policy process so that imaginative responses are still required to achieve successful outcomes even where policies are put into place.