Leukemia and a broken heel won’t stop Alan Rabinowitz from saving the world’s endangered big felines

ALAN RABINOWITZ, a Brooklyn boy who stuttered so badly that he was happier speaking to animals than people, is now known as the Indiana Jones of conservation. The shy, often angry boy grew up to become a scientist and then spent much of his adult life crawling through jungles identifying species to be saved from encroachment, poaching, depletion or extinction. He has written numerous books and managed to convince countries from Costa Rica to Taiwan to set aside swathes of territory where wildlife can roam free. Most controversially, he has engaged the military junta in Burma to create a huge tiger reserve in the Hukong Valley in the country’s far north.

In 2006, after a long spell with the Wildlife Conservation Society, he became the president and CEO of Panthera, a conservation advocacy organization devoted to saving the world’s big cats – all of which are endangered.

Research on the migrations and genetics of jaguars led Rabinowitz to conclude that reserves aren’t enough. Animal species need to procreate across habitats (and borders) lest their populations become inbred. The idea of biological corridors was born and a new mission began.

Identifying critical corridors in Central and South America and in South and Southeast Asia, Rabinowitz again started crossing the globe. In Central and South America, he’s found a handful of countries willing to make sure that jaguars can cross from one side to the other. Asia, he thinks, will be a harder sell.

Rabinowitz’s toughest obstacle, however, comes from within. In 2002, he was diagnosed with leukemia. He responded with typical bravado and determination, increasing his activity level instead of slowing down. Last summer, though, he was forced to sit still. While working on the roof of his house, an hour outside New York, he fell and shattered his heel bone. Throughout the autumn and winter he healed at home, which is where power’s Phil Zabriskie found him, on a sunny day, the ground covered with snow and Rabinowitz raring to go.

How’s your foot?
Well, you see me walking better. I was using a cane for a while. Now, with the boot I can walk really well. My back, that’s painful. And my foot is weak. But it’s coming along.

Did your doctor say there will be any long-term effects?
He said I’ve lost permanently some of my sideways slippage. I said, “Fuck that. I don’t need sideways slippage except when I’m walking on streambeds and rocks. I’ll be careful, but tell me I’m going to be able to walk.” Because my plan is to walk the jaguar corridor, at least from Mexico to Panama. He said I could do that.

When?
That’s what I said! He said this spring. I got my first trip scheduled the first week of March.

You get checked every six months?
Every three or four. I don’t get chemo. But there will be a day, unless they find a cure, where I’ll need chemo. Once they start chemo, it’s a one-way street, unless they do a bone marrow transplant or something. And I don’t want that. I could have 10 years before I need chemo. The problem with this disease is that it’s not regular. It could slow down, it could speed up. They tell me that I should do anything I want in life, but my job is very weird. If I get something like malaria or dengue and kick my immune system into high gear, since it’s going to make a lot of white blood cells, it will probably speed it up.

I had to make a decision on whether or not I wanted to cut back on my travel, especially to places like Burma, which has one of the highest rates of death from malaria in the world. I spent the year sitting in this room thinking about what to do. I ended up deciding that I feel more of an urgency now than ever. Before I was diagnosed, I started having thoughts about retirement. I would slow up. Now all that’s gone. No retirement. Just get as much done as possible.
I’ve done a lot in my life. I’ve had a good life. And I’ve been near death several times. It’s not death that scares me. If I were to die tomorrow I would feel like I’d accomplished a lot. What terrifies me is a long, slow dying process.

The big push now is the genetic corridors, a big change in conservation.
It’s a whole paradigm shift. The traditional way you do conservation is look for the wild places, get an area as big as possible, protect it with hard boundaries, keep the animals in, keep the people out, or keep the people’s activities limited. That’s still a core of conservation. But what we have learned is that genetically, now and in the future, those just become mega-zoos. They become islands, and then comes the inbreeding. One of the largest factors leading towards extinction of a species is loss of genetic variability. So the push ended up being towards biological corridors.

Have you had any luck convincing people ?
Funny thing is, it’s not been hard so far. Tigers are going to be a huge challenge, but even the new king of Bhutan bought into it immediately. He wants a legacy. With jaguars, the reason it’s not a stretch is because almost every government in the world has land zoning. There are places zoned for local people, indigenous groups, protected areas, factories. We’re not going in there saying, “Create whole new protected areas or a new biological corridor.” What we’re asking from the government is, simply, put it into their land-use schemes. The key is to work with the government.
        
And you’ve had people sign on?
You go to the places that are going to be the easiest first. Costa Rica helped do that, because they wanted to do this anyway. But there are places, like in Honduras, where we call them “corridors of concern.” There are some places where we’re going to have to fight. What I can be less sure of is whether I’m going to be able, in the future, to save the jaguar, unbroken, from Mexico to Argentina. But we have a chance, which we don’t have with the tigers and the lion and any other large cat in the world. The jaguar right now is the only large carnivore in the world where we have seen no sub-species variation. They have maintained their own genetic corridor. But in some of these cases, like with the tiger and the lion, we’ll never be able to create a contiguous, unbroken line through the entire species.

In Asia, are you racing against growth and development?
Asia’s tough. Asia’s got lots of habitat left. There’s this unbelievable wild area running down the Thai-Burmese border [and] all the way from China through Laos. It’s where we’re finding all these new species. You’ve got a lot of wildness left. What you don’t have is a lot of wildlife left because of the wildlife trade, especially for the Chinese traditional medicine trade and especially with the tigers.

What’s your selling point in Asian countries, where governments desperately want to deliver growth?
I have never had a government person tell me, “I don’t care if we lose all our tigers.” Losing them often is seen as a failure, a major political failure. To be the president of a country when you lost the last tiger is not a great selling point.

Where they really do care – whether it’s completely selfish or not, who cares? – we can work with that country. I’m opposed by people in my field who are against China, China’s tiger farms and wildlife trade. They try to embarrass the country by calling it primitive and stupid. That’s from people who have no idea of how to work with Asians.

For instance, China is a huge vacuum cleaner in terms of sucking up wildlife and killing it. As their economy has boomed that’s accelerated the process. They want to bring back the South China tiger, which except in captivity is virtually extinct. They want to build a South African-style protected area and I don’t think that’s a bad idea. They want to put up a fence and bring back the wild South China tiger. I said I would help them. All that doesn’t mean shit to me in terms of tiger conservation, but it means a lot to them.

And if you help you’re in a better position down the road?
I wouldn’t do it without a quid pro quo. It’s we do that and you help us save your other [species] of tigers. And they’re very open to it, if it’s done quietly, if you don’t get a lot of press saying, “I made the Chinese do this!”

You’ve said you get angry when someone tells you something can’t be done. Do you control that when dealing with governments?
I don’t get angry with governments. What I do, and I did this with the Burmese, I talked, I let them talk. I try to find out what’s most important to them and I try to show them what I can do to help. It doesn’t take a lot of brains because conservation is a positive force. The only problem is how to help people get it and not sacrifice their well-being, their way of life, their political standing. I’ve never been somewhere where there can’t be a balance.

You found the Burmese rulers to be, at least in this case, somewhat rational?
It’s funny. The government is such an interesting mix. People say the Burmese dictators act as if they’re one. I mean, it basically all comes down from [junta leader] Than Shwe, and he’s a bizarre character. But the generals under him – I’ve met about five of them and I feel close to two or three – are reasonable people, much more moderate than they can outwardly say. They know they’re at the end of a one-way road, and many would welcome moderation, talks and a mixed government.

You took a lot of heat for your Burma work.
It’s actually made my job a lot easier, getting blasted. There was an article saying I was getting funds from US Fish and Wildlife Service for our Burmese work. So they sent out a guy from Bangkok to meet with [opposition leader] Aung Sung Suu Kyi. He asked her about people like me and other groups coming giving out anti-AIDS medicines, as these were the two big controversies at the time. She said, “When things change, we need forests left and we need healthy people. I have nothing against those people and those organizations working in this country, as long as their money doesn’t flow to the military.” And ours doesn’t.

You’ve said that animals don’t have any say in a country’s leadership, but the argument is that engagement validates their rule.
I am no apologist for this government. They are an illegal government. They should be out of power. But I’ve been working in that country for 20 years. I’m sure that there’s stuff that I’ve never seen, but I’ve seen worse human rights abuses in Thailand in the garment industry. Girls sold by their parents and locked up to sew day and night. I’ve seen worse abuses in China. And I’ve seen worse abuses in Indonesia.

I’ve been able to publish two books about Burma where I compliment them on their conservation achievements but I am a critic. I talk about the army going in and cutting down the wood in the sanctuaries and the local military commanders and the opium trade. They’re okay if you give a balanced picture. They know things are not great in their country. Nothing’s black and white. It’s all shades of gray. Asia is the ultimate shade of gray.

Where’s that come from in you, the practicality?
I don’t know. I think it comes from being a stubborn kid. When I was young, I stuttered so badly that I just stopped talking. Back then, in the New York school system, they thought I was retarded. At the very least, they said I didn’t fit in. I knew I was normal but I decided that if they thought this way I was just going to stop trying. So I stopped talking.

I didn’t learn how not to stutter until I was a senior in college. I had to start talking, but all my earliest years as a child I was in my own world. I remember only thinking, “Why can’t they see it? I’m getting straight A’s in school. Why can’t they see it’s just that I can’t talk the way they can?”

I would talk to small animals because I wouldn’t stutter when I talked to them. Even the little turtles and chameleons and snakes I had – they had feelings, they hurt, but people would flush them down the toilet if they got tired of them and not shed one tear. And the only reason was because they didn’t have voices. If they had voices or cried or made noise, people would respond.

Obviously, that had a big impact.
I decided early on in my life that I would never take no for an answer. I knew I could do anything I wanted. One of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to encounter, because I felt I couldn’t fight it, was the leukemia. If it was stuttering, I could try to work with my jaw. This [his foot] has bothered me, but I knew I would get over it. I’m still going to walk in the jungle with the jaguars. The leukemia is this bigger uncertainty. I’m lucky in that it’s slow and I don’t have to think about it day to day. But I want to fight it.           
           
It often sounds like everything is getting worse. Does that make it harder to take some satisfaction in your role in all this?
I love it. I love it when it all comes together. I know lions and tigers are alive that wouldn’t have been. I am happy about preserving life. It has been a great pleasure to know lots of animals are walking around that wouldn’t be walking around if we hadn’t gotten involved. But it doesn’t let me pause one bit because conservation is never over. It’s an endless series of battles. My peak is past. I know that. I need new young people, new warriors, who will do the work in the future.