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It’s not just humans that are suffering from the Trump administration’s destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development. For nearly 40 years, USAID was one of the top global funders of international conservation. In December 2024, shortly before its demise, then-USAID director Samantha Power launched the agency’s sweeping new biodiversity policy, which emphasized locally led development and climate resilience as guiding principles for a $350 million annual conservation portfolio.

The seeds of the idea that protecting endangered species is a shared international obligation were planted in the same heady, optimistic era that gave rise to USAID. The early 1960s saw the founding of USAID, the Peace Corps, the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund, and the United Nations Development Program, which became another major backer of conservation. In 1964, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature released its first list of globally threatened species, later known as the “red list,” which remains the benchmark for classifying species as endangered today.

It’s not just humans that are suffering from the Trump administration’s destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development. For nearly 40 years, USAID was one of the top global funders of international conservation. In December 2024, shortly before its demise, then-USAID director Samantha Power launched the agency’s sweeping new biodiversity policy, which emphasized locally led development and climate resilience as guiding principles for a $350 million annual conservation portfolio.

Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller, Miriam Horn, Penguin Press, 640 pp., $40, April 2026

The seeds of the idea that protecting endangered species is a shared international obligation were planted in the same heady, optimistic era that gave rise to USAID. The early 1960s saw the founding of USAID, the Peace Corps, the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund, and the United Nations Development Program, which became another major backer of conservation. In 1964, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature released its first list of globally threatened species, later known as the “red list,” which remains the benchmark for classifying species as endangered today.

In those same years, as journalist Miriam Horn recounts in her new biography, Homesick for a World Unknown, a headstrong biologist named George Schaller began work that laid the foundation for later global efforts to save species by becoming the first scientist to perform detailed, sustained field studies of once-inaccessible animals in the wild. From Serengeti lions to mountain gorillas, Schaller revealed the lives of creatures long thought monstrous or mysterious. He lived in rustic camp sites for years to document daily behaviors and looming threats, and his work informed later conservation policies as well as today’s spellbinding documentaries.

Schaller, who was born in 1933 in Berlin and moved to the United States in 1947, is widely recognized as the father of modern conservation biology. His work was among the first to tackle, as Horn notes, “the question fundamental to conservation: What does this animal need?” Like a foreign correspondent arriving in a new land and quickly learning the language, customs, and daily rituals, Schaller approached his assignments with near-total immersion, birthing a global movement by peering closer into animal worlds than anyone else had before.

Schaller........

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