MY STORY
WHEN BEING SMART ISN’T ENOUGH
“I’m writing my story so that others might see fragments of themselves.” ~ Lena Waithe
I discovered my passion for wild
nature in April of 1989. I was nine years old when I found it on the glossy pages of a Zoobook, a monthly wildlife magazine for children. The April issue, dedicated to bats, was not my first Zoobook. In the months prior I had cynically skimmed through others featuring far more charismatic creatures – tigers,
dolphins, and gorillas – sensing that some adult somewhere harbored an agenda and was deploying these particular celebrities of the animal kingdom for the sole purpose of transforming me into some kind of environmentalist. My undomesticated soul would not be swayed by such obvious adult machinations. 2
