About George Schaller

George Schaller has devoted his life to understanding and protecting Earth’s most feared and reviled creatures. He is the subject of Miriam Horn‘s new book Homesick for a World Unknown.

Born in Berlin just as Hitler came to power—to an American married to a German diplomat who soon joined the Nazi Party—George was exposed at a tender age to how readily humans can be stirred to hate the “other.” An enemy alien himself when he arrived in the US in 1947, he found an antidote to that darkness in the wilds of Alaska: meeting grizzlies, wolves and the love of his life, Kay Morgan, and helping at age 23 to create the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So began a life David Attenborough would describe as “impossible,” navigating the harshest places on Earth and most treacherous politics for the sake of wild animals and the traditional people who live alongside them.

In 1959, he and Kay went on what his scientific elders called a suicide mission, to live unarmed among Congo’s mountain gorillas. Finding not savage brutes but placid, sweetly curious vegetarians, Schaller remade our understanding of animals, laid the ground for followers including Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, and risked all to protect the endangered creatures from the violence that erupted when the Belgian colonial authorities abruptly fled. Settling next in central India, with Kay and now toddler sons, he made the first field study of tigers, going afoot to meet a truly dangerous carnivore.

Then came lions in the Serengeti, snow leopards and Marco Polo sheep in Pakistan and Nepal, jaguars in Brazil, pandas in China, wild camels in Mongolia, and the bears, antelope, wild asses and yak of the Tibetan Plateau, where for forty years he was given access no other westerner has ever had. Our last great adventurer, walking the most extreme edges of the planet before roads and technology tamed it all, Schaller saved more animals than anyone ever has, before or since.