Terborgh: his quest is to preserve and conserve photo:Jim Wallace

ust to reach his longtime biological Shangri-la, John Terborgh must travel for days in a motor-driven dugout canoe. He describes the remarkable site in his 1999 book Requiem for Nature: "To my left, a towering forest looms over my lakeside office, its edge a tapestry of vines and branches that offer thoroughfare to throngs of monkeys. Long accustomed to the benign presence of humans in their midst, they parade before my view, hardly more than an arm's reach away on the other side of the screening."

For more than a quarter-century, Terborgh, James B. Duke Professor of Environmental Science at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, has been coming to this strikingly pristine place, the Cocha Cashu Biological Station within Peru's Manu National Park. He returns each year because the huge park contains more biodiversity than any other on Earth. Encompassing the watershed of the Manu River from the 13,000-foot heights of the eastern Andes Mountains to the Amazon jungle lowlands below, the park boasts more than 200 species of mammals, almost 1,000 different kinds of birds, and up to 200 different tree types per each 2.4 acres.

Terborgh believes that places like Manu are crucial for preserving this biodiversity, defined as the variety of plant and animal species still living on the planet. Conserving biodiversity, he writes starkly, means "establishing conditions that will serve to minimize future extinctions." His elegaic Requiem for Nature (Island Press) is not so much a celebration of nature and an exceptional park as it is a tale of developing tragedy.

Throughout a professional career that began in 1963, he has combed various tropical settings like this one--because most of the planet's plants and animals live there--to study birds, primates, herbs, trees, and the interactions among them. Through his research, his advocacy, and his often lyrical writing, he has sought both to understand and protect what is left of the natural world. In the process, he has also had to bear repeated witness to the general destructiveness of humans.

Earthmoving machines seem to have dogged his every step--an inevitable symptom, he says, of the inexorable pressures of too many humans seeking work and a better life. Too many times, the result is the destruction of forests and grasslands and the pollution of streams and waterways. Such destruction can be the result of primitive slash-and-burn agriculture as well as advanced corporate farming, road building, and development.

In country after country, Terborgh has also borne witness to what he calls inadequate government efforts to create sanctuaries for the nature that remains. He dismisses many of the results as "paper parks." He has started a monitoring program, with so-far inadequate funding, to improve some of these places.

At age sixty-five, this MacArthur Fellowship winner and National Academy of Sciences member, who also co-directs Duke's Center for Tropical Conservation, remains as engaged in battles to fund his conservation efforts as he is to produce scientific papers that challenge the conventional wisdom. He also continues to turn out books. His next one, Making Parks Work, will be, he says, uncharacteristically optimistic about the prospects for nature reserves.

Nature out of whack: one of the smaller islands' landscape of defoliated trees from ecological imbalance of leafcutter ants and howler monkeys; photo courtesy of Brad Balukjian

Born in Washington, D.C., Terborgh was raised in a version of Arlington, Virginia, that no longer exists. "I remember when it was mostly farms," he says. "The farm scene in Arlington disappeared between 1946 and '48." Before that green bubble burst, "my whole formative period was devoted to biology. Its attraction just pulled me in, a fascination for nature, organisms, and natural places."

By age five he was already studying snakes. Then he took up bird watching and plant collecting. His early career choice, he says, had much to do with "being able to walk out my back door and walk all the way to the Potomac River without passing another house."

In Requiem, he describes what happened to Arlington during the post-World War II building boom. "Seemingly overnight, the forests vanished. Broad red scars in the Earth, the future streets and lanes of middle-class suburbs, bespoke the agony of the land. For me, the experience was shattering."

Nevertheless, Terborgh recovered from the sad plight of his hometown and kept going. In 1958, he received a bachelor's degree in biology with honors from Harvard. He followed that in 1963 with a Ph.D. in plant physiology.

As he noted in another of his books, Diversity and the Tropical Rain Forest (Scientific American Library, 1992), he was first drawn to tropical ecology just after earning his doctorate when he and a colleague made a "celebratory expedition" to South America. What continues to draw him back to the jungle year after year? "If I had to choose one word, it would be peace," he writes. "Being daily witness to the endless cycle of life and death brings a reassuring sense of symmetry and continuity. The lives of the plants and animals that share the forest are inextricably linked in a web of interactions--a web held together by a system of checks and balances that we are only beginning to understand."

Terborgh not only went on expeditions. From the beginning, he also taught the next generation of biologists and conservationists. For five years, he was an assistant professor of botany at the University of Maryland before moving to Princeton, where he eventually became the Class of 1877 Professor of Biology. In 1989, he moved to Duke as the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of Environmental Science.

In 1991, he became a James B. Duke Professor of Environmental Science. The next year he received a $335,000 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a "genius grant." Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann of Caltech broke the news to him. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announcement noted that he would use the money in an on-foot "vegetation mapping" survey in Manu National Park and another Peruvian site.

Terborgh wrote in Requiem that he "discovered" the Manu park in 1973 after having to flee "the most beautiful place I had ever seen," Peru's Apurímac Valley. He was chased out of that valley after a road-building project funded by the U.S. program Alliance for Progress (implemented during the Kennedy administration) had paved the way for waves of human invaders, who chopped down trees and fomented illicit cocaine production and trafficking. Since that year, he has directed Manu's Cocha Cashu Biological Station under the auspices of the Peruvian government, supporting it with fees charged to the investigators who use the site.

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