Dispatches From The Field

7 June 2003 -- Luke Dollar

Today is a special, historic day. In 1996, thirty friends and I, led by Dr. Patricia Wright (formerly of Duke, now at SUNY Stony Brook), sat down in the Three Villages Inn at Stony Brook, Long Island. For three days, we dreamed and brainstormed. We all put our heads together and made a wish list. It became our design for what would be a perfect field-based research center.

Today, a little more than seven years later, we are inaugurating that dream, come to fruition. The VALBIO center is the first major field-based international research and training center in Madagascar. It represents nearly a decade of work and a million dollars of donor funding. It also represents an incredible beacon of hope for the future of science and conservation in Madagascar.
(click here for an article in the Madagascar National Newspaper)

I was honored to speak at this inauguration alongside the Madagascar Minister of the Environment and the Provincial Governor, among others. There were more than a thousand people in attendance, the vast majority of them local Malagasy. They are as proud of this center as the scientists who sat down seven short years ago. Look at the pictures from this event; I'm sure you'll get a sense of what an invigorating cross-cultural experience today has been.

I hope to bring field classes of Duke students here in the near future, helping to create a whole new generation of field-based and reality-grounded conservation scientists and professionals. In fact, I can't wait to share this place, among others, with as many people as possible. Special things are happening in Madagascar - and we may be just in time. Places like Ranomafana (here) and Ankarafantsika (that you'll hear about soon) are the true Frontiers of exploration, adventure, and ecology. It is up to us to learn about them while simultaneously ensuring those Frontiers are not in their Final stages of existence.