Word: hukawng
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more than a decade Rabinowitz has traveled back and forth from Burma - which the junta now calls Myanmar - meeting with everyone from high-level generals in the former capital of Yangon to local rebels in jungle camps, all in a painstaking effort to create and preserve the Hukawng Valley Wildlife Sanctuary...
Rabinowitz makes clear just how painful the process was in his new book, Life in the Valley of Death. (Watch Alan Rabinowitz talk about the Hukawng Valley reserve, and the changing nature of wildlife conservation, on the new video Greencast.) First there was the forbidding Hukawng Valley itself, a remote chunk of mountainous jungle on the border with India, dubbed the "Valley of Death" by British refugees fleeing the Japanese advance into Burma during World War II. When Rabinowitz hiked deep into the Hukawng in 1999 - braving carnivorous leeches, among other trials - he was the first scientist to visit...
...wide in their habitats, if you can stake out enough land to protect them, you'll also be protecting all the smaller animals that occupy the lower rungs of the food chain. (It's called the "apex protection" strategy.) Tigers will likely always remain endangered in the Hukawng Valley, but turning the area into a well-protected reserve would safeguard one of the world's great remaining biodiversity hotspots...
...wildlife reserves grow in size, however, they need to change. Pristine sanctuaries without human interference are simply impossible - endangered animals and people need to learn to live with one other. In the Hukawng Valley reserve, which would eventually grow to an area the size of Vermont, that meant Rabinowitz needed to enlist the help of local people. Over years of meetings, he managed to convince many of them to stop hunting tigers and the wild game that is the animals' main source of food. At the same time, Rabinowitz didn't stand in the way of some economic development...