MY STORY

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.

But the bat issue was somehow different. On reflection, I think it was due to the bats themselves, and their reassuring homeliness. There was something authentic about them as they unconsciously lived their lives and, in so doing, benefited all the world by planting rainforests, pollinating crops, and devouring mosquitoes.

For the first time, I fell in love with an entire order of mammals. And I vowed to defend them from the threats that besieged their survival. With the fervor of the newly converted I launched my first environmental campaign.

Save the bats!

And yet . . . no matter how many facts I recited or photos I shared portraying the utility and beauty of the order Chiroptera, it seemed I could rarely move others to donate even a few dollars to groups dedicated to the study and protection of this keystone species. Quickly, I became frustrated and confused.

How could bats ever have a future if facts alone could not move people to take action?

It was this experience that propelled me on a life-long pursuit of answers to some of the toughest conservation and environmental communication challenges. It is my privilege to be able to share with you the observations and discoveries accrued over the last few decades. What experience started you on the path of your expertise?