Whenever I sense the need for a bracing dose of cynicism, I turn to Ian Frazier’s 2019 essay, “
In Billionaires Is the Preservation of the World.” Rereading these seven paragraphs is not as comforting as petting the cat, but Frazier’s sentences remain both cogent and funny about the present-day plight of international conservation organizations: “Any billionaire left untapped equals a part of the Earth that will consequently die.”
Such thoughts are a trap, of course, a diabolically human device to capture our hopes and kill them before they can be transformed into incremental gains. Which is why I am grateful for all the evidence of good work that I witnessed in the past year—by
The Nature Conservancy, the
Wild Salmon Center, the
Mongolia Fish Research Project,
Tight Loops, and others. Cynicism can be entertaining but it’s a thin liquor compared to the real intoxicants of our natural world.
You can find the story of our visit to Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains in
Current Conservation. That’s where the inspirational artist and architect Bill Bensley has created
Shinta Mani Wild, a resolute
anti-poaching and social welfare initiative cunningly camouflaged as a luxury resort.
Bill Bensley, The Secret Forest Keepers, 2025; acrylic on canvas, 120 × 120 cm
Two months after our return from Cambodia, I was honored to take the stage at The Explorers Club in New York, in conversation with Randy Cohen of the public radio program Person Place Thing. You can watch a recording by following this link (fast forward to 7:45 for the introductions), or listen to the podcast here.
The many turns of events that placed me in front of that audience are too fantastical to comprehend even now, so I’ll just note that, as a fourth-grader at Brooklyn’s Immaculate Heart of Mary School, I produced one book report after another about explorers from Ferdinand Magellan to Meriwether Lewis. I was nearsighted, asthmatic, a nonbeliever in a world where everyone else seemed certain about something. More than a half-century later, only my bronchial passages have cleared.
In April 2025, I joined Mike Fay, leader of the legendary MegaTransect, on an exploratory trip to South Sudan’s Nimule National Park and its associated buffer zone, to assess fish populations—especially Lates niloticus—in the Nile River. What we found was both heartening and frightening: it’s a profoundly fragile place, scarred by war, and yet a fount of undeniable abundance.
In August, Mike and I joined two more friends in Mongolia’s Altai Tavan Bogd National Park to collect data on two relatively little-studied fish: the Altai osman (Oreoleuciscus potanini) and the Mongolian grayling (Thymallus brevirostris). According to one recent study, vehicle entries in the park rose from 719 to 13,192 between 2018 and 2024, an astonishing increase of more than 1750 percent. While existing populations of osman and grayling now seem adequate to attract and entertain visiting anglers—the combination of scant historical data and a limited understanding of their life histories and ecology renders both species vulnerable to decline.
I’ll write more about those trips and those fish soon. (For the record, the Nile perch was so integral to ancient Egyptian culture that it had its own hieroglyph, while sight-casting to osman cruising in shallow water is equally as addictive as chasing bonefish on a tropical flat.) In the meantime, you can find my “Confessions of a Poacher” in Issue 17.2 of The Flyfish Journal.
