A Dark Place in the Jungle

Book excerpt: Follow writer Linda Spalding to Borneo's threatened jungles on the trail of orangutan researcher Birute Galdikas, who together with Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall formed the famed trio of angels Louis Leakey encouraged to study great apes in the wild. She went into the jungle in 1971 and emerged decades later with a run-down empire crumbling around her. Spalding confronts the sad failure of a woman trying desperately to mother a species to survival; the dangers and temptations of eco-tourism; and the arrogance of our inclination to alter the things we set out to save.