Gorilla conservation advocates to speak at UW-Madison

Two UW–Madison alumni credited with helping rescue the world’s largest apes from the brink of extinction will give a free public lecture at 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 10, in 145 Birge Hall, 430 Lincoln Drive.

Amy Vedder and Bill Weber will discuss the challenges of protecting mountain gorillas in poverty-stricken, war-torn central Africa, as detailed in their new book, “In the Kingdom of Gorillas: Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land,” (Simon & Schuster).

Vedder and Weber, who are married and work for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, both earned their doctorates at UW–Madison. While conducting their dissertation research in the late 1970s, they co-founded the Mountain Gorilla Project in hopes of halting a precipitous decline in the population of Africa’s rarest gorilla subspecies.

At the time, only about 250 mountain gorillas remained in Rwanda’s Parc des Volcans national park, one of just two small pockets of rainforest where the reclusive animals live. Twenty years earlier, the gorillas had numbered roughly 450. Poaching was rampant, but loss of habitat was the biggest threat.

Vedder and Weber recognized that the gorillas were doomed unless something was done to save their land. Over the objections of Dian Fossey, who became famous for chronicling the lives of these gorillas in the wild, Vedder and Weber set out to educate Rwandans about the primates and the importance of conservation while establishing an ecotourism program, with gorillas as the main attraction, to bring desperately needed revenue to Rwanda.

Largely because of their efforts, the mountain gorilla population in the Virungas has risen to about 320. But the animals’ long-term survival is still threatened by natural changes and disasters, hunters and poachers, and the chronic political instability that swirls around the edge of their forest home.

The Institute for Environmental Studies and Department of Zoology at UW–Madison are co-sponsoring the lecture by Vedder and Weber.