Wild Lives by Lori Robinson

Author:Lori Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

Schaller’s comfort in remote, little-known landscapes is rooted in a childhood during which he always felt like an outsider. Born in Berlin in 1933, he grew up in wartime Germany. His father was a German diplomat, his mother an American, and he clearly recalls that the other kids didn’t trust him. After the war in 1947, when his mother brought him and his younger brother to St. Louis, Missouri, he was once again distrusted. In his book, A Naturalist and Other Beasts (2007), Schaller recalls, “Coming from a country that had inflicted unspeakable horrors on the world, I was not cordially received by everyone.” He then describes how feeling like an outsider shaped him: “Being forever itinerant and burdened with the melancholy of an outsider, I became perhaps an internal exile with a detached and reticent character.”

Being reticent and detached may have originated in Schaller feeling like an outsider, but they are the very characteristics that later came to help him in long, arduous, and often solitary hours of fieldwork. “You need certain personality traits to be willing to go into silence and loneliness, and you have to be willing to adapt. I find my emotional center and am comfortable,” he says of his work in some of the most remote places on earth. “Certainly it suits my inner landscape, reflecting a certain self-contained spirit.”

Perhaps because he felt like an outsider, Schaller found connection with animals. “Ever since I can remember I liked roaming forests and meadows,” he says. “In high school I collected snakes and lizards for my terrarium, and I kept wild pets such as raccoons and opossum. Not until I went to the University of Alaska in 1955 and got to help in the wildlife department did I become aware that one could make a living observing animals and roaming around.”

Schaller didn’t just get to help in the wildlife department. In 1956 he got to join the team of renowned biologist and legendary conservationist, Olaus Murie, and his wife Mardy on an expedition in northern Alaska’s Sheenjek River Valley along the south slope of the Brooks Range. Throughout the summer, this small group of biologists canoed and hiked through the valley, studying, observing, and cataloging the region’s prolific flora and fauna. Armed with evidence of the vast biological diversity and importance of this ecosystem, they returned home and spent four years campaigning to protect the great stretch of wilderness. In 1960, President Eisenhower set aside eight million acres as the Arctic National Wildlife Range, which later expanded to become the twenty-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—a region that today is still under constant threat from the oil and gas industry.

On that first of many major expeditions, Murie taught Schaller two important lessons that continue to drive Schaller’s work. His first lesson was about conservation. “The basic knowledge of any species I collect has to lead to conservation,” he explains. “I feel a very strong moral obligation to help protect what I study.” He has abided by this lesson

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