The Last Clouded Leopard: WildAid’s Wildlife Conservation Goes After The Poachers

Outside Magazine May 2004

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See the Last Clouded Leopard (Cont.)


	Galster tracks aloe-wood poachers with one of WildAid's rangers in Khao Yai National Park. (James Nachtwey)

ACCORDING TO A 2001 REPORT issued by the United Nations Environment Program, the illegal global wildlife trade is a $5-billion-a-year industry. So it's no wonder such exotic species as the clouded leopard and the Malayan sun bear—whose skins and gall bladders, respectively, can sell for $1,000 apiece—are being hunted to the vanishing point in their last remaining habitats: the national parks that Galster calls the "Fort Knoxes" of the animal world.

Unfortunately, the forts keep getting plundered. Some 900 of the earth's plants and animals are considered so close to extinction that their sale is prohibited by the Geneva-based Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a UN treaty organization that regulates the world's legal wildlife traffic. Another 24,600 species are threatened to such a degree that CITES controls their trade through quotas. That doesn't help the 762 plant and animal species that, according to the Red List, a survey of threatened species compiled in 2003 by the World Conservation Union in Switzerland, have been wiped out over the past 500 years. As Edward O. Wilson noted in his 1999 book The Diversity of Life, "The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is upon us, grace of mankind. Earth has at last acquired a force that can break the crucible of biodiversity."

Galster took terrible risks when he infiltrated the Chinese rhino-horn trade. "He's got guts," says one American official. "They definitely would have popped him if they knew what he was doing."

WildAid was founded in 1999 to turn back this tide. It's the brainchild of Galster and three colleagues: Suwanna Gauntlett, 40, who previously ran the Gauntlett Group Inc., an eco-consulting firm that helped industrial giants such as Nike and Alcoa make their factories run cleaner; and Peter K. Knights and Steven Trent, two 40-year-old trafficking experts from Great Britain who previously worked for the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a nonprofit that specializes in exposing environmental crime. WildAid has three broad aims: hunting down and stopping poachers; exposing and eliminating black-market trafficking operations; and using public-awareness campaigns to stop the human consumption of exotic plants and animals.

The group received its initial seed money—$1 million—from the Barbara Delano Foundation, a San Francisco–based green fund created by the late Barbara Delano Gauntlett, Suwanna's mother and the heir to the Upjohn Pharmaceutical fortune. These days, the foundation provides 38 percent of WildAid's $5 million annual budget; the rest comes from institutional grants and public donations, 100 percent of which go directly into international field projects, which will cost about $4 million this year.

A significant part of WildAid's appeal to donors is its fast-and-light approach. The group operates out of small offices in Phnom Penh (where Gauntlett is based), London (Trent), San Francisco (Knights), and Bangkok (Galster). While larger groups such as the World Wildlife Fund (with an annual budget of around $300 million) continue to rely mainly on a scientific approach—studying animal populations, monitoring species, and relaying the results to the public—WildAid attacks poaching and trafficking hot spots with 48 staffers who are not primarily biologists but activists, undercover investigators, economists, and law enforcement officers. Each office is manned by a mix of locals (like Krisana Kaewplang, 32, who speaks Khmer and specializes in community outreach and ranger training in Thailand) and globe-trotting professional activists (like Tim Redford, a 43-year-old Brit who built endangered-animal sanctuaries for the Thais before joining WildAid).

"Rather than spending a lot of money on U.S. infrastructure and holding workshop after workshop, we believe in direct spending in the field," says Gauntlett. "There are 30,000 parks in the world, most of which are not protected at all. That's why we dedicate ourselves to direct protection of wildlife preserves in developing countries, which have the will to fight animal crime but not the funds or the expertise."

WildAid has put this theory into practice in Thailand, setting up the Southeast Asia Environmental Law Enforcement Training Center, in Khao Yai, an 867-square-mile national park that's home to endangered Asian elephants and sambar deer; in Cambodia, where the 560 square miles of Bokor National Park are now patrolled by WildAid-trained rangers who carry AK-47s; in Russia's Far East, where anti-poaching teams are fighting to save Amur tigers and leopards; and in Ecuador's Galápagos Marine Reserve, where they built two new ranger bases to help expand protection of the islands and surrounding waters. Last year, when the actress Angelina Jolie volunteered to put up $1.5 million for the protection of a 240-square-mile Cambodian forest that was overrun with freelance gold miners and marauding game hunters, she turned to WildAid for help. Gauntlett helped assemble a 50-man force made up of former Khmer Rouge soldiers for what became known as the Maddox Jolie Project, named after Jolie's adopted Cambodian son. Galster calls them "Jolie's Rangers."

In the four years that WildAid has operated in Cambodia, the group has helped confiscate 17,300 live animals, two tons of body parts, and two tons of bushmeat. In Thailand, they've helped the government rescue more than 35,000 live animals just in the last nine months—from six tigers caged in a private home to 1,000 crocodiles in a private zoo—and park rangers in Khao Yai have confiscated some five tons of aloe wood. In the Galápagos, WildAid has trained rangers to halt illegal turtle poaching and stop fishermen who supply shark fins to Asian markets, where an environmentally destructive delicacy called shark-fin soup is a prized dish.

Methods like these have put the conservation world on alert that there's a cutting-edge group out there with a revolutionary new approach. "I'm an ecologist, and we freely think we can tackle any problem," says John Seidensticker, chairman of the Save the Tiger Fund Council and a senior scientist at the Smithsonian National Zoo, in Washington, D.C. "But sometimes we ecologists should just sit back and listen to the people who know about security. As far as I'm concerned, Steve Galster is the best conservation-security expert operating in Asia today."

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