“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.”
