Making the world safe for big cats
Explorer Alan Rabinowitz creates havens for tigers, jaguars, and leopards.
from the May 23, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
During his recent Burma visit, Rabinowitz trekked to the remote hamlets of Lisu, Dawang, and Kachin tribespeople around the Hukawng Valley Wildlife Sanctuary. Rabinowitz had been key in convincing Burma's secretive and intractable government to set aside the land in 2001. A triangular wedge between northeastern India and southwestern China, it's the linchpin of his conservationist masterpiece – the Northern Forest Complex. Exceeding the size of Maryland, it links four protected biodiversity hot spots.
His work hasn't endeared him to human rights campaigners. Burma is a pariah state under international sanctions thanks to its government, which jails pro-democracy activists, oppresses citizens, and engages in the ethnic cleansing of its minority populations. Advocacy groups like the US Campaign for Burma, which calls for the complete isolation of the country, accuse Rabinowitz of providing the government with an excuse to further dispossess minorities by appropriating their lands under the pretext of creating a wildlife reserve.
A new report, "The Valley of Darkness," from the Bangkok-based Kachin Development Networking Group insists that the Hukawng Valley Wildlife Sanctuary is an environmental mess. In the previously isolated valley, the report claims, roads and bridges built by the government have facilitated a major gold rush that has destroyed forest and rivers and caused social turmoil among minorities.
By implication, Rabinowitz is an unwitting accomplice. Not so, he counters. Corrupt officials don't need him as cover to exploit natural resources; they can do that anyhow. Rather, he argues, it's his trademark brand of relentless, on-the-ground engagement that may stop both the government and locals from full-scale despoliation. In conservation, he says, "you take whatever you can get under whatever conditions are mandated. I have a job to do – save an ecosystem."
And that's hard enough as it is. Rabinowitz discovered this year that since his last visit to Burma two years ago, two land concessions – 300 square miles each – had been granted to tapioca and sugar-cane growers inside the sanctuary's putatively inviolable interior. So off he stormed to the country's new capital, Naypyidaw, a secluded bunker-barracks of a town built by the nation's generals. "I was furious," Rabinowitz says. "If I'm gonna raise millions of dollars and risk my reputation, then the government has to show me it means business, too."
Officials blamed the concessions on an oversight. So he returned to the valley to coax a promise from the concession's beneficiary, a local Kachin developer, not to encroach unnecessarily on wildlife.
Rabinowitz remains relentless. He'd hardly emerged from the Burmese jungles before he flew to Brazil, where he's working on another project – the establishment of a "genetic corridor" for jaguars from Mexico to Argentina. He aims to combine intact forests with the edges of nearby cultivated land so that the roving predators can pass undisturbed along the entire distance between the South American and lower North American continents.
"While everyone's declaring gloom and doom for big cats," Rabinowitz insists, "I say we can still save them."
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