With his meticulous research four decades ago and the resulting scientific treatise on India's wildlife titled "The Deer and the Tiger" (Chicago University Press), Dr. George B. Schaller significantly influenced India's first major conservation policies. As Vice-President of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society he now steers its international conservation programmes covering wild species that range from rare sheep in the Pamir mountains to tigers in tropical forests and cheetahs in the Iranian desert.

What is India's conservation record since your path-breaking work?

I made a very small first step, and described what I actually saw in the forest. Since then the best tiger biologists like Ullas Karanth have put tiger studies on a firm basis. How to census them, how to monitor them... Raghu Chundawat and a whole lot of others are adding to the knowledge. Now you have a really solid background so you know what must be done and what government policy there should be and how local people can be involved. That's how it is normally. You start science with small questions and other people continue and it spreads out. It is satisfying to see Indian knowledge and so many good biologists. The Wildife Conservation Society has been funding projects here for years. We have two projects in Ladakh and one in Arunachal. [WCS has] set up a very good model for tigers in South India. So when tigers are in trouble in other places, you can see in Bandipur and Mudumalai that they are not heavily poached.

Is there hope that we can save much of what is left of natural spaces, given the pressure for economic growth?

You can have development but it has to be done carefully. The Government has to have its policies. It has to decide that this area we are going to save, we are going to guard it and work with local communities. But Governments tend to want to make money right now. Politicians don't think of the future almost by definition and so there is very little long term planning. A country like India, or for that matter any country, must have a land use plan. Certain areas should be designated as part of the natural heritage. Countries are at a critical point. Consumption is increasing far faster than population. They cannot afford that. They need leaders. Indira Gandhi did a tremendous service by raising awareness on environment and wildlife. The U.S. had Teddy Roosevelt a hundred years ago.

China and India experience severe pressure on the environment. We have lost a lot.

You have lost a lot, but you still have a lot. You still have quite a bit of forest. You still have tigers and leopards. But the problem has been in the last few years, the Government has been quite lax. They sat back and said, okay, things are pretty good. Meanwhile, how many thousands of leopards have been killed just to send skins to Tibet? There needs to be much more detailed monitoring.

In China, the outlook is open for most species. For tigers it is questionable and it is on a downhill slide, almost at the bottom, but for most species and habitats, they can do it. The Chinese Government has been extremely supportive. When I started work there in 1980 there were about a dozen reserves, now they have about 2,000, totalling about 15 per cent of the country.

Talking about development, many view this as an economic versus environment question...

That is a far too simpleminded way to look at it. What you need to measure among other things is the services that the natural environment provides. Cleaning the air, cleaning the water, the genetic background to rehabilitate areas... you can in rough ways actually measure it. The billions of rupees the forest provides for free that would cost you otherwise.

What are you currently pursuing in field biology?

Most of my research at present has a larger aim. I work with Marco Polo sheep in the Pamirs. The sheep have these gorgeous big horns...

You have suggested the creation of a wildlife sanctuary there.

Yes. This includes Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, and Tajikistan and I have been working in all those countries making censuses. I find that the Marco Polo sheep move across international borders. But these are animals that attract attention. Trophy hunters like to shoot it and everybody knows about it. Therefore, it is a good symbol on which conservation can be based. I am trying to get the four countries together to make a land use plan for that part of the Pamirs.

In China I am doing something similar in the Tibetan plateau. You have the Chiru, the Tibetan antelope that has the finest wool and India is involved in the trade — the Shahtoosh business. The NGOs have been working very hard to reduce it, but the wool still comes from Tibet. China has worked hard to control poaching and it is down a lot, but it still continues.

What is the state of the tiger?

The only country where the tiger population has increased recently is Russia. The Wildlife Conservation Society and others had an intensive programme there. They have tried to increase prey numbers by reducing poaching. That looks hopeful. Whereas next door in China, it is in absolutely dismal condition. The Siberian tiger from Northeastern Russia is the occasional visitor and as far as anybody knows there are no residents. We don't know of any breeding populations left in China, just some scattered individuals. But in countries like Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, yes, most definitely they can increase with protection and monitoring. Ullas Karanth has set up the Tigers Forever programme of the WCS in some areas. In Laos, in most places the tigers are gone, but there are patches where they can be maintained and definitely increased. Nepal has been doing all right, except now there is political turmoil and poaching. Sumatra still has a few large reserves.

What would you say to someone who said extinction is nothing new and that it happened in the past?

That statement is perfectly true. But the problem is it has been calculated that extinction rates are a 100 to a 1,000 times greater than they were in the past. In other words it is so fast that things don't have much time to adapt. We are dealing with tens of thousands of species. Most of the insects, the soil nematodes and so on ... what is their function? How many of those species can you lose before the whole thing collapses? When you don't understand something, the best thing to do is to save all the pieces so that you have an option in the future.

Edward Wilson (the naturalist) said that the earth's sustainable capacity was exceeded by population demands in 1978...

That certainly sounds reasonable considering the consumption. The population curve may well level off in the middle of this century but the consumption curve will keep going up because you have well over two billion people in India and China alone who want to consume more.

Look at the cell phone. The phone has a little mineral in it called coltan. It is a capacitor that intensifies the energy that enables this little machine to send signals. Coltan is mainly mined in the eastern Congo, by thousands of people living and digging in the forest. They need meat. Therefore they eat gorillas and elephants. So your little cell phone helps kill gorillas. Then you had a cup of tea this morning. Somewhere rainforest is falling to plant more tea.

What is your experience with conservation in the U.S. ... the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge?

I was on an expedition in 1956 that made a biological survey and in 1960 it became the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It is now nearly 20 million acres in size. It is the finest wilderness area in the U.S. — no roads, nothing but mountains and wilderness, and huge migrating herds of caribou. The northern part has some oil and for years both Bush Presidents, particularly the current one wanted to drill for oil there. We have already got that whole region leased for oil, except for four per cent, which is in the ANWR. There is no excuse, it is simply ecological vandalism to go in and drill up, ruin that four per cent just for some more oil even though the U.S. has no energy policy, no energy conservation policy at all.

You have a project in Iran. Are the cheetahs still there?

That is what we [the WCS] are working on. I went to Iran several years ago and asked them what they wanted done. They said they would like to have help with the cheetahs. We don't know how many there are, maybe 50 or 60.

Genetically, the African and Indian population [of cheetahs which are extinct in India] are very close. You would expect minor differences because of the isolated populations. The Indian government at a high level approached the Iran government asking for cheetahs for cloning and Iran very wisely said `no.' Besides, if you want to play with cloning, you first practice with something less rare. There are lots of African cheetahs raised in captivity that you could use. You don't have the habitat [in India] that has enough blackbuck and gazelles to support a population of cheetahs today.