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I learned my ethic of care for and stewardship of earth from growing up in
Davis, California,
but I also had really influential teachers,
science teachers at the sixth grade level who really got me thinking about
the world in a different way
as well as teachers at the university level. I was an undergraduate at Yale
College and I went in thinking I wanted to be a comparative linguist, at
the time I probably had learned six to seven languages and I adored languages
and I just wanted to do that for the rest of my life
and then I have to take a distribution requirement in science and when I did do
that, I realized that I loved science. I'm the director of the Center for
Biodiversity and Conservation
and the Center's mission is to mitigate critical threats to biological and
cultural diversity around the world.
So we work in many many places around the world
and in each place we try to tailor the activities that we do to the needs
of
communities, governments, decision makers
about biodiversity conservation. I think one of the most important projects that we've put
together since I came here to the museum is a project that we have in building
capacity around the world
and the idea behind the project, which is called the network of conservation
educators and practitioners,
is that many of us get trained at the university level
about what the ecological or evolutionary system might look like from a
theoretical perspective
and then you we're in the field and we have to make a decision and we don't
actually know what happens on the ground, we're not trained in the practical
application of some of those ideas, techniques
and so what we tried to do is to reunite people who are doing the teaching
and training of future practitioners
with the people who are currently on the ground doing biodiversity conservation
work.
I first went to Madagascar as a doctoral student, I was at Yale
University and I was getting a degree in environmental studies and
anthropology and I was studying one of the
primates that lives in Madagascar, a nocturnal animal only comes out at night
and I was living
on a tiny uninhabited island off the coast of Madagascar int a tent for two years
I was studing a lemur called the aye-aye which is one of the
most unusual animals in the entire world it has bat like ears and a fox like tail.
A couple times
the animals would cross across the canopy when two trees would meet
the animals would be able to either just walk from branch to branch or have a tiny
little jump from branch to branch
where the canopys are meeting high above, but we are down on the ground
and on
these mountainous areas often there would be a huge cavern that you'd have to jump
across with all the
telemetry equipment and everything on your back. Sometimes we'd go back in the
daylight to measure the trails where we went because this was before there was
GPSs. We just basically would mark our trail like
Hansel and Gretel and we would look down into these
ten
feet, twenty feet deep, deep canyons on the morning afterwords and say
all my gosh are you kidding, I jumped that in the middle of the night,
but that was the only way to keep up with them.