Author’s Note

Miriam Horn & George Schaller in the US-Mexico borderlands. Photo credit: Beth Wald

Miriam Horn introduces her new book Homesick for a World Unknown and her fascination with field biologist George Schaller.

I have loved wild animals ever since I was first introduced to them in elementary school by my best friend’s father, a lepidopterist named Don MacNeill who took Lindy and me on expeditions in California’s tidepools and temperate rainforest and chaparral. I never forgot how, when we found a Western fence lizard doing push-ups, Don pointed us to the female we’d overlooked, looking impressed as intended by her suitor’s bright blue belly. I knew then how I wanted to spend my life. I got close, working on habitat at the US Forest Service and Environmental Defense Fund. But when I saw the chance to ask actress Jane Alexander, a lifelong champion for wildlife, what more I could do, she answered without a moment’s hesitation. You must write the biography of George Schaller.

I knew Schaller as the “GS” who had led Peter Matthiessen on his quest for The Snow Leopard, and from Year of the Gorilla. But when I looked at the entirety of his work, it seemed impossible that no one had yet written this gigantic life, so full of romance and danger and meaning. Soon enough, I learned the reason. As he had to previous petitioners, Schaller turned me down. Only after many months did he relent—because of Jane, and because (he later told me) of my experience on the ground in conservation. And perhaps because I told him I hoped to tap something like the transitive property: persuading readers to care for him and through him for the other beings he loves.

Wildlife biologists George Schaller and Santiago Espinosa hike through the dense rainforest, looking for signs of jaguars, in the northern part of Yasuni National Park, near the Maxus Road, Orellana Province, Ecuador. Photo credit: Beth Wald

I didn’t begin to foresee what I was getting myself into: that I would be the first to read some 20,000 pages of his field journals and 100 years of family correspondence; that colleagues in 16 countries would want to tell me how time in the field with Schaller had changed their lives; that we would travel together to India to see the tiger reserve where he and Kay raised their toddler sons; that I would be granted so many hours and such candor by him and all his family.

Posted in Schaller’s journals and other sources