Saving a Living Treasure of Asia

China has emerged as the world's largest market for smuggled endangered animal species. Just as some of our own environmental transgressions are born of the Western notion of man's hegemony over the natural world, China's destruction of its natural heritage is rooted in social and cultural mores that include the role of animal parts in traditional Chinese medicine. The freedom to spend currency abroad and the rise of the Chinese middle class have, despite government avowals to the contrary, increased trade on protected and threatened species worldwide. Tigers, rhinos, and bears are some of the most publicized and emblematic victims of smuggling and butchery, but there is another, nearly silent extinction epidemic underway in Asia -- the decimation of Asian turtles.

Included among these is the Giant Asian Forest Tortoise, Manouria emys, which occurs as far south as the Indonesian Island of Sumatra, and as far north as the Chinese border with Burma. Reaching as much as 100 lbs., but more typically half that, the Giant Asian Forest Tortoise -- the largest tortoise in Asia and fourth largest terrestrial turtle in the world -- is losing habitat daily, and is wantonly slaughtered for both medicine and food. Despite its bleak outlook, the species (both the smaller, southern, lowland race and the rarer, darker, larger, mountain variety) may ultimately owe their survival not to sweeping law enforcement or local fieldwork, but to the passion of unlikely conservation hero living not in Asia, but in a small town in North Florida.

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