About this item
The remarkable story of the heroic effort to save and preserve Afghanistan's wildlife-and a culture that derives immense pride and a sense of national identity from its natural landscape.Postwar Afghanistan is fragile, volatile, and perilous. It is also a place of extraordinary beauty. Evolutionary biologist Alex Dehgan arrived in the country in 2006 to build the Wildlife Conservation Society's Afghanistan Program, and preserve and protect Afghanistan's unique and extraordinary environment, which had been decimated after decades of war.Conservation, it turned out, provided a common bond between Alex's team and the people of Afghanistan. His international team worked unarmed in some of the most dangerous places in the country-places so remote that winding roads would abruptly disappear, and travel was on foot, yak, or mule. In The Snow Leopard Project, Dehgan takes readers along with him on his adventure as his team helps create the country's first national park, completes the some of the first extensive wildlife surveys in thirty years, and works to stop the poaching of the country's iconic endangered animals, including the elusive snow leopard. In doing so, they help restore a part of Afghan identity that is ineffably tied to the land itself.
About the Author
Dr. Alex Dehgan has worked on wildlife conservation and foreign policy in settings as diverse as Saddam Hussein's poolhouse in Iraq while under fire, in the western reaches of the Himalayans in post-conflict Afghanistan, the leech and predator-filled rainforests of southeastern Madagascar, Central & South America, the chaos of the collapsing halls of the Kremlin, former Soviet weapons labs in Central Asia, and the conservative and staid halls of the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History. As a scientist, he has had the opportunity to work on an equally diversity of subjects ranging from predicting species extinction in lemurs, interspecies heart transplants, links between infectious diseases and forest fragmentation, and addressing development challenges around the world. He is now using his scientific acumen to rebuild ecosystems destroyed by man, and human societies destroyed by politics and war. Alex Dehgan is the CEO & co-founder of Conservation X Labs, an innovation and technology startup focused on conservation, where he is working to transform conservation. Under Alex's leadership, Conservation X Labs has developed new technologies, launched the first set of Grand Challenges for Conservation on aquaculture, water, cooling technology, and fungal pathogens, developed the first mass collaboration & engineering platform for new sustainability solutions, and ran the first conservation technology accelerator. Alex is the Chanler Innovator in Residence at Duke University where he teaches technology innovation for addressing the sustainable development goals. Dr. Alex Dehgan recently served as the Chief Scientist at the U.S. Agency for International Development, with rank of Assistant Administrator, founded and headed the Office of Science and Technology, and created the vision for and helped launch the Global Development Lab, the Agency's DARPA for Development. As the Agency's first chief scientist in two decades, Dr. Dehgan implemented the President Obama's promise to restore science and technology to its rightful place within USAID. Alex was the architect of a number of new Agency institutions, including the Grand Challenges for Development program, Agency partnerships with universities (HESN) and federal science agencies (PEER) , the independent office of science and technology (OST) , the position of the Agency geographer and the GeoCenter, and data for development programs, and the Global Development Lab. In less than four years, Alex built OST from scratch to an 80-person office, a $100 M dollar research program, and leveraged or raised $500 million dollars from other donors and partners. Alex was also part of the founding team for the Policy, Planning, and Learning Bureau (PPL) . Alex rebuilt technical capabilities in the Agency by putting scientists, physicians, and engineers directly into USAID missions and technical bureaus, and led efforts for the Agency's research policy and firs
