NEW YORK —To most people in the magazine business, hardship is trying to get a cab on Sixth Avenue in the rain, and risk means ordering sushi from a sketchy takeout place. For conservationist Mike Fay, those words mean something else. An explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, Fay estimates he’s spent more than 20 years out of the past 25 in Africa, documenting the devastation of the continent’s ecosystems, and doing what he can to reverse it. In 1999, he undertook the Megatransect, a 1,200-mile trek through Congo, Cameroon and Gabon documented extensively in the pages of National Geographic. The purpose was to study, at ground level, how the rainforest is standing up to human encroachment. More recently, he’s been flying over Africa in a single-engine plane, using aerial photography to measure the extent of human impact on the environment and determine where investment can do the most good. If all this sounds a bit dry, rest assured: In the course of trying to save the planet, Fay has been mauled by an elephant, forced to crash land in the jungle and laid low by malaria. WWD interviewed him at a posh Manhattan restaurant, where he seemed surprisingly in his element for a man who spent the previous night sleeping on an office floor.
WWD: Is it true you never sleep in a bed?
Mike Fay: I haven’t slept in a bed for I can’t remember how long.
WWD: Just because you don’t like it?
M.F.: Let me say that I stopped wearing underwear when I was about 12, and I’ve never worn pajamas. I sleep naked, and over the years I got to that point with beds. If I get in a bed, I feel like I’m swallowed up. [Editor’s note: Fay has no permanent home; when in the U.S., he typically spreads his sleeping bag on the floor of National Geographic’s offices, or camps in a public park.]
WWD: Tell us about your most recent project, the aerial map of Africa.
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M.F.: The objective was to look at the human footprint in as many ecosystems as I could. The question we’re asking is, if we go to the wildest places, will we still see human activity? And overwhelmingly, the answer is yes.
When you get into more arid areas, like the Sahara desert, you have to be very careful about habitability. The Sahara has a very low habitability for life in general, so if humans use that desert a thousand times less than a very rich tropical forest, they’ve already had probably a thousand times more impact on that environment than in the forest. If you see one person per 1,000 square kilometers in the desert, that’s already high.
What’s surprising to me is everyone was talking about desertification in the Seventies, when the first big drought hit, after humans were abundant enough to make it a human tragedy. We kind of forgot about it because we got a good period of rainfall, but if you go to northern Chad or northern Niger or Mali today, those places are desperately dry, and creating conflict like you see in Darfur. Darfur has been a place where marauding horsemen have been for hundreds of years. The problem is in 1984 they had a severe drought, and when that happens, people start getting ugly.
WWD: How can you reverse overexploitation of ecosystems?
M.F.: It’s a national thing. If you look at Africa, take a country like Zambia compared to the Central African Republic: Zambia has about five times more people per square kilometer, and it has about 20 times the wildlife. Same habitat, same rainfall, same type of vegetation. The variable you can identify quite easily is human management of landscapes. This flight teaches you that management really can make a difference. It’s a great realization. It’s not rocket science.
WWD: But don’t a lot of the countries you’re working in have dysfunctional governments?
M.F.: Yeah, but wherever you go on earth, humans organize themselves in some way. I find often the less national influence there is in the management equation, the more successful you are, because you’re dealing with local warlords. You can go right to the guy in charge and say, “Hey, we’re seeing way too much decrease in vegetation here, way too much willy-nilly burning here, let’s do something about it.” That guy can make that decision right there. He doesn’t have to ask the president, he doesn’t have to ask some minister. I think you can make progress more easily there than you can in this country. That’s for sure.
WWD: I take it you’re not a big George Bush fan.
M.F.: If you look at the climate-change debate in this country, these guys have their heads in the sand. The Bush administration is doing this country an incredible disservice by not recognizing what scientists are telling them. If you look at the national debt, the average individual is seeing $200 per month leave this country that doesn’t come back. How long do you think that can go on?
I think countries like Tanzania and Zambia and the Central African Republic are potentially a thousand times more stable than the United States. They have abundant resources; they have low human populations. As long as they don’t get invaded — which they may well — their long-term perspective is pretty good. Ours is precarious.
WWD: Given the trends, how do you keep from giving in to pessimism?
M.F.: What do you get from being pessimistic? Why would you even entertain that? One thing people don’t recognize, and it’s important that we do very quickly, is when humans are faced with abundance, they waste way more than they use. But when humans get pressed, they start to manage their resources much more wisely, so in that sense, it’s not counter-evolutionary. It’s just that humans, in the past, they didn’t even predict what was going to happen. They just let it happen and then they would react. But we now have the ability to predict — not perfectly by any means, but in a pretty sophisticated way. Humans, they’re smart. They’re ingenious. They can survive.
WWD: Speaking of survival: You’ve had plenty of brushes with death. What’s the closest you’ve come?
M.F.: I had two attacks of cerebral malaria, and both of those damn near took me out. One time, I was sitting there in a semicoma, and miracle of miracles — this was in the Central African Republic, in a very isolated part of the country — a French military contingent shows up. The doctor examined me, and I could actually hear the guy say to my then-wife, “He’s definitely not going to make it.” (Laughs) “He’s done.” And I’m thinking, “No, I’m not! Don’t kill me!”