Madagascar Nature Nonprofits

Madagascar broke away from Africa some eighty-eight million years ago and has been running its own evolutionary experiment ever since. The results are almost absurd: lemurs, found nowhere else, in a hundred varieties; baobabs standing like something imagined rather than grown; chameleons, tenrecs, and an entire flora of which the overwhelming majority exists on this island and no other. Roughly ninety percent of its wildlife is endemic.

It is also one of the poorest countries on Earth, and the forest is being cut and burned for charcoal and for rice by people with no realistic alternative. Most of the original forest is gone. The spiny forest of the south, the rainforest of the east, and the dry deciduous forest of the west are all reduced to fragments, and the lemurs are the most endangered group of mammals in the world.

The organizations here work on the only thing that can work: conservation that pays, through community forest management, ecotourism, and livelihoods that make a standing forest more valuable than a burned one. The stakes could hardly be higher.