Living World / Endangered Species

“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote the 19th-century American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau. The quotation is a favorite of George Schaller, considered the finest field biologist of our time and the most powerful voice for conservation in more than 100 years. Indeed, Schaller has described himself as “a 19th-century wanderer with a scientific bent…on an intangible and elusive search.”

Schaller, who was born in Berlin in 1933 and came to the United States with his mother and brother in 1947, has loved animals and the outdoors for as long as he can remember. He was in graduate school in the mid-1950s when one of his professors asked him, half jokingly, “How would you like to study gorillas?” The 26-year-old was happy to settle deep in the forests of central Africa. There, he wrote rhapsodically and painstakingly about gorillas in the wild, changing public perception of the animal forever. He went on to study tigers in India, jaguars in Brazil, snow leopards in Pakistan, and lions in the Serengeti. His account of the latter, The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations, won a National Book Award in 1973.

In time Schaller came to view his early work as “a careless rapture” compared with another, more pressing concern: saving species from extinction caused by man’s aggression. Schaller calls the work of conservation “a gigantic, continuous headache,” explaining that “instead of just being a biologist—something for which I was trained—I must also be a fund-raiser, diplomat, politician, sociologist, anthropologist, everything at once.”

His results as a conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society have been spectacular nevertheless. In 1980 he began working with the Chinese government to save the giant panda from extinction, and since then he has helped establish more than 20 wildlife parks and reserves around the world. Today, at 74, he is pursuing his most ambitious goal yet: building the Pamir International Peace Park at the junction of four countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, and Tajikistan—in the process saving the spectacular spiral-horned Marco Polo sheep. In his latest book, A Naturalist and Other Beasts (Sierra Club), Schaller ponders his career of more than 50 years, although the mood is hardly retrospective. “I am not in search of memories,” Schaller writes at the outset. “My interests lie in the future.”

Do you have an earliest memory of feeling deeply connected to nature and wildlife?
I can’t remember being interested in anything else. You start as a child: You like to ramble around and watch birds, turn over rocks, pick up snakes. I had a little zoo of salamanders and opossums and other creatures. Basically, I’m still doing what I did as a kid.

When did you first recognize the danger that people pose to the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants?
One of my first projects—I was 26—was studying mountain gorillas in central Africa. Humans were overrunning their habitat, and I realized the gorillas wouldn’t have a future unless we saved that habitat.

Your field studies of beautiful animals won you recognition, yet your focus shifted to conservation biology. Why?
When I began my work, most of the big animals had never been studied, so when I sat with the gorillas, almost anything I observed was new and gave people an idea of what their lives were really like. But how can you watch the few hundred gorillas left in the world and not feel guilty about their precarious existence?

How do you choose a particular place for your next round of conservation efforts?
In recent years, I’ve looked at places where nobody’s doing anything and try to see what I can do. For example, there are lots of nongovernmental organizations sitting in Nairobi, worrying about wildlife. But who goes to Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Iran? There, I think I can have an impact.

What do you do to gain the trust of the local government in countries where Americans are often viewed with suspicion?
They don’t trust you until they know that you have no other agenda. I go in there, I’m focused on wildlife, and that’s it.

How do you begin effective conservation in these countries?
I go in and get facts about the wildlife, the people, the condition of the habitat. You give the officials the information you’ve gathered; you give them suggestions and see what their response is. It’s extremely important to have one local person—a chief or some local leader—who really cares and can do something about it.