My latest feature for Wired, “Law of the Jungle,” is out in the June issue. Seven months in the making, it’s the story of how an internationally renowned primatologist named Marc van Roosmalen went from being hailed as an environmental hero to being labeled Brazil’s foremost environmental criminal — sentenced to more than a dozen years in a dank prison in Manaus. Roosmalen, a Dutch-born researcher and naturalized Brazilian citizen, worked for a Brazilian government institute studying both the plants and primates of Amazon, and made a name for himself over the past two decades by discovering a half-dozen or more new species of large primates and other mammals. In an effort to link his science to conservation, he ran primate rehabilitation operations (including out of his backyard, in downtown Manaus), and set up non-governmental organization to raise money to buy and protect the habitats of his discoveries.
Along the way, however, he engendered a variety of enemies, some of them with the power to collapse his life’s work. The environmental authorities spent half a dozen years pursuing him for a shifting collection of environmental crimes that coalesced under one label: biopiracy. Released temporarily from prison, Roosmalen lives on the run in fear for his life. His final appeal is still to be decided.
Posted at 11:37 am | Filed under Environment/Energy, Recent stories, Wired |
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