**NEWS RELEASE** CONTACT: STEPHEN SAUTNER: (1-718-220-3682; ssautner@wcs.org) JOHN DELANEY: (1-718-220-3275; jdelaney@wcs.org)
Wildlife Conservation Society’s George Schaller Named “Hero of the Planet” by Time Magazine
NOVEMBER 13, 2007 – Renowned conservationist Dr. George Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society was recently named by Time Magazine as one of 60 “Heroes of the Planet.” He joins an elite group of environmental champions, including former Vice President Al Gore and former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev.Time’s editor’s honored Dr. Schaller for his five-plus decades of work to protect some of the world’s most beloved wildlife, including pandas, tigers, gorillas, lions and many other species. He is the Vice President of Science and Exploration for the Wildlife Conservation Society, the parent organization of the Bronx Zoo.
Dr. Schaller began his career in conservation in the mid 1950s in Alaska, culminating in wildlife surveys that led to the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. From there, he initiated the first-ever biological studies of mountain gorillas, paving the way for Dian Fossey’s crusade to protect these gentle giants. Then Dr. Schaller went onto to conduct seminal wildlife studies of tigers in India, lions in the Serengeti, pandas in China, and snow leopards in Tibet. He helped establish one of the world’s largest protected areas – the 115,000 square-mile Chang Tang Reserve in Tibet, created in 1993.
In recent years, Dr. Schaller has worked in the rugged trans-boundary region shared by Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and China. There, he hopes to establish a new protected area to safeguard the spectacular and highly endangered Marco Polo sheep.
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The Wildlife Conservation Society – Since 1895, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has worked to save wildlife and wild lands around the globe. Today WCS has field staff at work in over 60 nations, protecting many of the last wild places left on our planet. To bring the mission home, the Bronx Zoo based WCS is distinguished as the only global conservation organization that also operates the world’s largest system of urban wildlife parks, educating more than 4 million zoo and aquarium visitors each year about the importance of wildlife conservation.
-- Kim Murray Berger, Ph.D. Wildlife Ecologist Northern Rockies Field Office Wildlife Conservation Society 205 Natural Sciences Bldg. University of Montana Missoula, MT 59812 tel: 406-549-8866 mobile: 208-351-2431 email: kberger@wcs.org