Species in Trouble

Stuart Pimm and His Students Seek Out the 'Hottest of the Hot Spots' in Their Efforts to Stem Global Loss of Biodiversity

by Monte Basgall

As he bustles through the Nicholas School's corridors carrying papers and files, or hunches over his computer doing sophisticated modeling, or begins yet another trouble-shooting, problem-solving trip with his students to Southern Africa, Brazil, Southeast Asia, Central America, Florida's Everglades, or Washington, D.C., Stuart Pimm telegraphs the feeling that he's in the right place at the right time.

"I think Duke affords such a wonderful opportunity," said Pimm, the school's peripatetic Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology. "I'm in the School of the Environment, and that's very much the way I want it to be. We're not just interested in doing science for science's sake," he said in one of several interviews. "The hottest of the hot spots are the places we work. We are looking for places that are tough and difficult, where we, as hopefully smart scientists, can bring some important ideas to the table."

Pimm is sitting in his high-ceilinged office, a converted sunroom where Nicholas School students used to gather. Students still parade in and out, only they're now his own graduate students, a number of whom have followed him to Duke from Columbia University, some even from his previous years at the University of Tennessee. On Pimm's office wall, across from a potted palm tree that thrives in the ample light, is a special world map. It highlights places, mostly in the tropics, where species are considered to be in trouble, mostly from the actions of humans. These, he says, are the "hot spots" - "not just the places where species are born, but also where species are dying."

His Nicholas School Web site notes that his expertise "lies in species extinctions and what can be done to prevent them." He likewise "studies the loss of tropical forests and its consequences to biodiversity." You can read lots more about his approach to population biology in his 2001 book, The World According to Pimm, published a year before he arrived at Duke. Its 285 pages take readers on a worldwide hot spot tour and also measure the world's assets. Readers may be startled by how many assets are being diverted to human use.

His book's final page, "About the Author," notes that he's written more than 150 scientific papers, numerous articles for general audiences, and a total of three books. It also notes his extensive media exposure. For many scientists, "being an advocate is really a dirty word," he said. But Pimm believes that talking to reporters as well as politicians is a crucial part of his efforts to save the natural world from deforestation and land conversion, overhunting and overfishing, excessive extraction of water resources and air and water pollution. "Am I being an advocate when I go to Capitol Hill and talk to the media? The answer is no!" he exclaims in his Derbyshire, England accent. "I think the severity of the ecological crises that we face requires us to do that."

Pimm hails from "the countryside of All Creatures Great and Small," he said. "It was a wonderful place to grow up as a naturalist, with lots of hiking trails. His parents included camping in every holiday. And "my interests in the outdoors, which I shared with my parents, really came through watching birds," he said. Sick at home on his 12th birthday, Pimm viewed a television show on birdwatching. When he got better, he sleuthed out birds with a classmate and "was completely hooked," he said.

His youthful hobby grew into a lifelong avocation as he was introduced to ecology during undergraduate years at Oxford University and graduate school at New Mexico State University. He chose New Mexico for graduate study because two summers in Afghanistan had piqued an interest in desert ecology. After graduating he was ready for research experiences in a variety of settings - be they deserts, mountains or remote tropical rain forests - as long as they were pristine. I felt as an ecologist that was where I would learn how nature should work," he said. "So I definitely remember thinking I would never go to Hawai`i, because it had been so severely damaged."

page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4