Biodiversity Without Boundaries 2010
Featured Speaker
Will Stolzenburg
Wildlife Journalist and Author
Keynote Speaker, Tuesday, April 27
Will Stolzenburg is a wildlife journalist who for the past twenty years has been heralding the planet's sixth mass extinction while celebrating its survivors.
It is an occupation that typically has him portraying nature's grandest spectacles against backdrops of destruction. He has profiled barefooted park guards fighting organized gangs of timber poachers in Amazonia. He has described evolutionary marvels from atop a Venezuelan spire never before visited by humans, while watching the forests below slashed and burned by the advancing masses. On a cliff in the middle of the Bering Sea, he has witnessed one of the world's mightiest gatherings of seabirds, above beaches where one of the mightiest gatherings of seals is mysteriously vanishing.
After 15 years as science editor for Nature Conservancy magazine, Stolzenburg moved on to pursue the story now told in his first book. Where The Wild Things Were follows a band of scientists awakening to the critical role of Earth's great predators in the web of life, their discoveries raising new concerns for the beasts' ongoing disappearance from every corner of the biosphere. He has since written a movie script of a similar theme, in Green Fire Productions’ Lords of Nature: Living in Land of Great Predators.
As a journalism fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, Stolzenburg is lately focused on the endangered fauna of oceanic islands, and what may amount to the world’s greatest wildlife rescue now underway. (Yes, there are predators key to this story, too.)
Stolzenburg writes from his home in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, a state where one in 57 motorists will collide with a deer this year, and where wolves and cougars have been missing for nearly a century.