Way beyond the science
Fri, Feb 01 2008 at 10:40 AM EST
Read more: CONSERVATION
Photo: Beth Perkins Inside this Article
| 1. Intro | 4. Search for the extinct |
| 2. First meeting | 5. New frontiers |
| 3. Welcome to the jungle |
If you ask field researcher Patricia Wright how she managed to create Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park, which last June was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, the 63-year-old will say: “I took long walks, drank a lot of rum, and threw a lot of parties.” Ranomafana is located on the southeastern side of Madagascar, at the edge of what is called the “High Plateau,” a steep, mountainous region so inhospitable it remained mostly unexplored before Wright began taking walks there in 1986. There are eighteen Malagasy villages surrounding Ranomafana, and to found the park, Wright needed the cooperation of every villager. So back in 1987, she decided it was time to tour the local communities. This was not easy walking. It took up to ten days of rugged jungle bushwhacking to reach each village and ten days more to return. She was working at Duke University back then, and the year she completed her tour, “What the hell does this lady have on her leg?” became question 33 on the medical school’s tropical medicine final. The answer was leishmaniasis, a parasite transmitted via the bite of a sand fly; it’s also called “black fever” for what it does to the skin. Wright also had hookworm, tapeworm, and by her own estimation, “just about every other tropical disease known to man.
Trekking was only part of the challenge. Every visit required a rum-soaked meeting with tribal elders that lasted through the night, occasionally for days. The rum, toka gasy, is a home-brewed jungle jet-fuel that burns going down and feels worse the next day. So not only was she hiking over mountains to reach these villages, she was doing it dog-sick and occasionally sporting a king-size hangover.
It’s been two decades since those long walks from Ranomafana. In that time, with the help of $6 million from the United States Agency for International Development and the support of a variety of conservation groups, Wright’s labors have protected 106,000 acres of land and produced a first-class field research station, seven newly built schools, seven renovated schools, four health care centers, and a roving health and hygiene team. Today, 164 villagers work inside the park, and Wright has trained almost 500 Malagasy scientists, mostly for work at universities and conservation agencies. The park gets about 30,000 visitors a year, and villagers who live around its borders receive half the revenue generated from entrance fees.
Currently a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, a member of the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration, and the executive director for the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments, Pat Wright is one of the world’s leading conservationists and primatologists. Having received a MacArthur Fellowship (aka the “genius grant”) in 1989, along with Madagascar’s National Medal of Honor in 1995, she is known as “one of the very few researchers who doesn’t just do the work, sit on their arse, and let others deal with the repercussions,” says Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm. “Pat takes things way beyond the science.”
Wright was born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania in 1944 and raised on a small farm in Lyndonville, New York. She credits her early interest in nature to the reading that helped her endure Lyndonville’s near-endless winters. She carried this interest to Maryland’s Hood College, where she majored in biology and met her husband, James Wright. After graduation, with James still finishing his degree at Brown, Wright left her first and last lab job in the immunology department of Harvard Medical School, where, she recalls, “What I had to do wasn’t the most pleasant experience for me or the mice.” In 1967, she and her husband moved to New York. Wright looked for biology work, but without a PhD, the available positions didn’t cut it. Instead, she took a job with the Department of Social Services, part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. And though she had never lived in New York City before, Wright was assigned tough cases in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville neighborhoods. “What did I know?” she says. “I was this innocent, little farm girl. I didn’t realize that most of the social workers who were assigned cases in the ghetto didn’t actually go into the ghetto at all.”
But Wright would spend her lifetime going places women have been told never to go alone, and Brooklyn was no different. Because this was the late 1960s, Wright also recalls showing up wearing “the most amazingly short miniskirts.” But it wasn’t the minis that people remember—it was her diligence. “I really wanted to get things right,” Wright explains. “I allotted a whole day for each person and really got to know what the government was offering.” The job required her to write detailed reports, which turned out to be her introduction to field research. “I was recording how people lived, but primate behavior is primate behavior — it doesn’t matter if you’re in Brooklyn or the Amazon.”
NEXT: First meeting
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