by
Steven Kotler |
Way Beyond
the
photograph by
Beth Perkins
Science
Few people ever win a MacArthur “genius grant.”
Even fewer can lay claim to helping find not one but
two new species of primates. And only one person
has helped preserve Madagascar’s legendary biodiversity
through all-night rum drinking ceremonies.
Meet Patricia Wright.
I
f 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
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rum-soaked meeting with tribal elders that lasted through the night,
occasionally for days. The rum, toka gasy, is a home-brewed jungle jetfuel 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 >>>