Lemurs are at risk. So are the people protecting them.

Founder s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Patricia Wright arrived in Madagascar nearly four decades ago to look for a lemur thought to be extinct. She found it, along with a new species, and then ran headlong into a broader reality: protecting wildlife would depend on the well-being of the people living alongside it.

Her discoveries eventually led to the creation of Ranomafana National Park, today a UNESCO site. Yet the forces that threaten the island’s forests have only grown more entangled. “Poverty is the enemy of conservation here in Madagascar,” she says. It is not a line delivered lightly.

Roughly four out of five Malagasy live in poverty, and for many families forests are still the last resort when the economy falters. In a year marked by political turmoil and a slump in tourism, Wright says she has seen the pressure intensify. Empty planes mean empty hotel rooms, and eventually empty stomachs. When that happens, people fall back on slash-and-burn agriculture or small-scale logging, even inside protected areas.

The conservation gains built over decades start to fray. Wright’s argument is that any lasting strategy must braid together conservation, health, and education rather than treat them as separate fields. “Both health and education are very important… but it has to be connected to the fact that [people] have forests,” she says. Jane Alexander and Wright in Madagascar.

Photo courtesy Jane Alexander Her research station, Centre ValBio, has tried to model...This article was originally published on Mongabay