One Last Stand

Alan Rabinowitz has spent nearly three decades in a pitched battle to save the world's few remaining havens for predator cats. He's turned the Coxcombe Basin in Belize into the world's first jaguar preserve, and built the largest nature reserve in Taiwan, the first national park in the Himalayas, and the world's largest tiger reserve in Burma. Nevertheless, he knows he is losing.

The problem, Rabinowitz and other leading biologists now know, is that the classic conservation strategy of preserving habitat is in fact no defense against extinction. Twenty years ago, the devastation of natural forest was a visible danger. What went unseen was the damage sustained on a larger field of battle: the gene pool. A reserve may be a refuge for wildlife, but it is also a genetic sink. When a population of large predators is confined to pristine island of wilderness over time, they fall to inbreeding, leaving the species with weaker young and fewer defenses in an environment increasingly distorted by climate change. This is the deepening lesson of wildlife conservation from the post-industrial age to the genomic age: you can't save animals without saving their homes, and you can't save species without saving their genes.

Now Rabinowitz, a long-time director at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in New York, is taking a new approach to cat conservation. Not only is he working to bring back the world's vanishing tiger populations, he is establishing passageways for those populations to mix and preserve genetic diversity. Two years ago, Rabinowitz partnered with philanthropist Tom Kaplan to form Panthera, a nonprofit firm devoted to cat conservation. Their first objective is constructing "genetic corridors," which will traverse wilderness and cultivated land alike to connect existing habitats and allow individual cats to seek new territory for prey and new populations for breeding. Think of these as a kind of underground railroad for tigers: the conductors are the cats themselves, and the endangered cargo they bear is their genes.

The task is urgent, especially for tigers. The world tiger population, estimated at 100,000 a century ago, now totals fewer than 5,000; if Rabinowitz does not identify potential corridors now, in a few years development may make planning impossible. "Twenty years from now you won't have a chance to do anything," he says. "Eventually, this forest won't exist."

The model debuted in Latin America—jaguar country—for which Rabinowitz first had the idea. Significant swaths of yet undisturbed habitat and a largely consistent political climate make Latin America relatively hospitable territory for negotiating corridors. Despite the loss of more than half of the jaguar's habitat and a poaching binge that spanned more than a century, populations have resurged and the cats are still on the move. Costa Rica led the adoption of genetic corridors last year, followed by Honduras; Panama signed corridors into law last month. Rabinowitz estimates that maintaining the corridors will give jaguars access to more than 80 percent of their historic range.

Asia, by contrast, is more peopled, more pressed to grow out of its extreme poverty, and more rigidly divided up by dissonant governments wary of their neighbors. To join eight individually willful South Asian countries by a thread of tigers will be Rabinowitz's greatest act of diplomacy. He'll need to convince governments and ordinary people that a tiger migrating across a rice plantation is only the return of a natural ecological process—and no obstruction to development.

Territory outside of official wildlife reserves belongs to what Rabinowitz calls "the human landscape," and this radical approach to saving dwindling genes is "landscape-level conservation." What sounds like a logical updating of an evolving field is in fact a rewriting of conservation's first principle: people and wildlife cannot share the same space. Where there are people, wildlife is at risk. With a combination of dogged field work and diplomatic persistence, Rabinowitz has tried as hard as anyone to make the old model work, carving out parks and reserves in countries that had no prior interest in environmental protection. "I grew up in the traditional sense of thinking that was the endpoint," he says. "You go out, set up a park, people are outside, animals are inside, and you're successful. Outside, people can do anything they want; inside, people can't do anything. For the big animals, that's not going to work for the future." The British paleontologist Richard Leakey put it more grimly earlier this year: in forcefully keeping the two worlds apart, he said, we have issued "the death certificate of far more species than we've ever realized."