The world’s lemurs are going extinct. This is the only way to save them.
On a cloudless morning in September, sunlight poured through the canopy of a banyan tree near the banks of the Onilahy River, which runs from southwest Madagascar to the Indian Ocean. The tree grew on the edge of a small karst cliff. Its roots spilled over the side like melting candle wax. I scrambled up […]
A group of ring-tailed lemurs just waking up in a tree near the village of Ifanato in southwest Madagascar.
On a cloudless morning in September, sunlight poured through the canopy of a banyan tree near the banks of the Onilahy River, which runs from southwest Madagascar to the Indian Ocean. The tree grew on the edge of a small karst cliff. Its roots spilled over the side like melting candle wax.
I scrambled up the cliff for a better view of the canopy, when I saw something staring back at me: a lemur. It had scruffy white fur, a black face with bug-eyes, and a tail that was at least the length of its body. This wasn’t just any lemur; it was a Verreaux’s sifaka: a critically endangered species that I’ve spent much of my life longing to see.
This story is part of a series
This fall, Vox is publishing a three-part series on conservation in Madagascar, supported by the BAND Foundation. This story is part 2.
Madagascar, an island nation east of continental Africa, is the only place on Earth where lemurs exist. There are more than 100 lemur species, and nearly all of them are at risk of extinction, including the sifaka. Their foe is deforestation; all lemurs depend on trees for food and shelter, and half or more of the country’s forests are now gone.
In Madagascar, unlike in many other forested nations, the bulk of deforestation isn’t caused by the industrial-scale farming and cattle ranching that often enriches big corporations. Forests here are primarily felled by individual families who cut trees to grow crops or collect cooking fuel. That’s how many people feed themselves and make money. They often have few other options; Madagascar ranks among the top five poorest countries in the world, and people here have few economic opportunities that don’t rely on exploitation.
Against this dim reality, the lemur before me represented something hopeful. The only reason it was here was that this tree was still standing. And this tree was still standing, because nearby villages have worked hard against tough odds to protect the forest they all share.
Working alongside the World Wildlife Fund, one of the world’s largest environmental organizations, those villages created new economic opportunities for themselves that don’t destroy the forest. Together, they demonstrate a crucial element of what makes conservation work in the poorest parts of the world: first, meeting the needs of people, and then, stepping out of the way to let them take charge.
The lemur I saw lives in the Onilahy River basin of southwest Madagascar, not far from the coast and the largest city in the region, called Toliara. It’s a strange landscape — a collision of desert and forest, where spiny shrubs grow nearby tall trees. The south of Madagascar is arid, yet there’s an abundance of water here that flows from the river and a series of natural springs.
On a warm morning towards the end of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, I traveled from Toliara to a small village near the river called Maroamalo. The road was mostly dirt and spotted with crater-sized potholes, which — along with several goat-related traffic jams — turned a 15-mile trip into a three-hour, butt-bruising adventure.
Maroamalo is one of several communities helping protect the lemur-filled forests of the Onilahy River basin. Working alongside staff from WWF, they manage a protected area called Amoron’i Onilahy. The park is only around 250,000 acres — making it a little smaller than New York City — yet it envelops a wide variety of ecosystems, from wetlands to spiny thickets and a huge number of rare species, including eight kinds of primates.
In some ways, Amoron’i Onilahy is Madagascar in miniature. The island nation is packed full of different habitat types, which is one reason why it has a higher proportion of endemic species than any other place on Earth.
Protected areas — which typically restrict certain activities that degrade ecosystems and endanger biodiversity — have a mixed record of success. This is especially true in Madagascar. Studies have found that people clear trees even within parts of the country that are formally protected, including those that are managed by communities.
One reason is that most of Madagascar’s parks lack the funds to monitor vast areas for illegal woodcutting. But a bigger challenge is that few protected areas confront the reason why people cut trees at all: their own survival. When the choice is between breaking the law and feeding your family, people choose survival. “Deforestation and illegal exploitation are still impacting nearly all protected areas despite 30 years of intensive conservation efforts,” as the authors of one study put it.
What just happened to Madagascar’s government?
On September 25, the day I left Madagascar to return to the US, the capital city of Antananarivo erupted in protests, then led by Andry Rajoelina, against the government. Demonstrators — largely led by Gen Z — expressed outrage over water, electricity shortages, and a lack of economic opportunities.
The protests continued for days, supercharged by broader grievances including corruption and poor governance. And on October 14, Rajoelina was impeached, and the military seized control of the country. Col. Michael Randrianirina is now in control of a transitional government that’s meant to organize elections within two years.
The government upheaval highlights the deep level of human need in Madagascar, which drives people to exploit free natural resources. Events like this also tend to fuel deforestation and make it even harder for conservation to work. Political crises weaken law enforcement, allowing more illegal logging, and hamper scientific research and tourism that support conservation.
Amoron’i Onilahy, however, appears to be an exception.
There are a few things you notice right away in Maroamalo: Many of its homes are made of mud, rock, and plant fiber; chickens, ducks, and goats seem to be wandering around everywhere; and just behind the village center, where the land slopes into the river valley, there are acres of verdant farmland, which pop against the surrounding brown Earth. It was as if a patchy green quilt had been laid across the valley.
Worldwide, agriculture is the number one threat to biodiversity. To meet the rising global demand for food, agrobusinesses often clear natural habitats for crops and livestock. But here in Maroamalo, farming is actually helping keep the forest intact.
Only about one in three people in Madagascar have access to electricity, and even fewer people use natural gas. That’s why nearly everyone cooks with either simple firewood or, in more urban areas, charcoal — a carbon-rich fuel source produced from tree branches. Around cities like Toliara, making charcoal is how many people earn money to pay for food, school supplies, and medical bills. One 110-pound (50 kg) bag sells for $2 to $3. In Madagascar, that’s enough to buy a few meals.
Charcoal production was once common among villages in the region like Maroamalo, said Nanie Ratsifandrihamanana, who leads WWF’s work in Madagascar. That’s one reason why the river basin has lost so many of its trees. Shifting cultivation, better known as slash-and-burn agriculture, further eroded the forests here. People would burn one plot of forest to clear the way for crops, and then, once the soil was exhausted and weeds took over, do the same thing in another. Across nearly all of Madagascar, and much of Africa, these are among the two largest forces that raze forests.
WWF has long been aware of these problems. So, more than a decade ago, staff from the organization began talking with communities here about how they could earn money without cutting trees. This idea had appeal. Speaking with me under the shade of a large neem tree in Maroamalo, members of the village said they, too, had seen the problems that deforestation had caused. Without roots to hold the soil in place, the ground started to erode, making it harder to grow crops, they told me. Losing trees also made the landscape drier and more likely to flood.
Top: A fishing boat known as a pirogue transports bags of charcoal in a lagoon in southwest Madagascar. Bottom left: An aerial view of the village of Maroamalo. Top right: Green farmland in the background of Maroamalo. Garth Cripps for Vox.
WWF later worked with villages along the river — which are now part of the protected area — to build out economies that don’t exploit the remaining tracts of forest. And in Maroamalo, that economy was vegetable farming, as counterintuitive as this approach may seem.
Instead of only growing staples like cassava and corn, the village would cultivate a wide variety of vegetables to sell in Toliara. WWF would provide seeds and training on how to farm the crops more efficiently and without burning and taking up more space in the forest. They’d also help connect farmers to buyers in the city, including hotels. The idea was that if people could earn more money from farming, they wouldn’t need to clear forests for charcoal.
And that’s exactly what’s happening.
Top left: Many homes in Maroamalo are made of stone, mud, and plant fiber, like those shown here. Top right: A forest patroller in the village of Ifanato scans the trees for signs of lemurs. Bottom left: Maroamalo farmer Mme Lalao in her home. Bottom right: Residents of another village called Ambiky plant saplings like this one to restore the forest in the protected area. Garth Cripps for Vox.
Later that morning, Mme Lalao, a resident of Maroamalo who oversees farming in the village, walked me through the vegetable fields. She showed me ten or so different crops — including eggplant, cabbage, and onions — all planted in neat rows, like what you might see in California.
Nearly everyone in Maroamalo now works in agriculture, she said, which has grown into the main economy here. One vegetable farmer can earn about $21 per month, according to Mercie Ramilanajoroharivelo, a WWF employee who works with the communities. That’s far more than people typically make from selling charcoal, Ramilanajoroharivelo told me.
“We didn’t have the agriculture skills before, so people would go into the forest for charcoal,” Lalao said that morning. “But now they are working here.”
Creating new economies only goes so far in protecting the forests and lemurs of Amoron’i Onilahy. While villagers inside the park now seldom bake charcoal or burn the forest, people who migrate here from other areas are still cutting trees. This is a common problem in Madagascar. When deforestation, droughts, and floods make it hard to farm or find wood in one area, people move to another in search of a better life. And climate change is making those sorts of moves more common.
“If you’ve lost everything, you migrate to the places where you can get resources for free,” said Charlie Gardner, a researcher and writer who studied conservation in Madagascar. “That’s two places: the coast where you can do beach seining, or the forest where you can produce charcoal. Things like charcoal production are a livelihood of last resort.”
That means that to keep the trees in Amoron’i Onilahy standing, the local communities still need to monitor the forest for woodcutting.
Later that day, after spending the morning in Maroamalo, I traveled along the dirt road deeper into the protected area to a village called Mahaleotse. Here, the forest was more impressive. It had bigger trees, denser undergrowth, and lots of life. On a walk in the woods that night, I saw chameleons hiding in the trees; fruit bats flying overhead; and, of course, hissing cockroaches (which do, I confirmed, actually hiss).
The next morning, around sunrise, I met up with a group of men from Mahaleotse known as polisin’ala, or forest rangers. Villages in Amoron’i Onilahy that work with WWF have a team of paid patrollers. They walk the forest 10 times each month, receiving about $2 per patrol from WWF. If they spot illegal woodcutting, they’ll try to stop it and report the infraction back to their community and environmental authorities. In some cases, the perpetrator will have to pay a fine.
It’s a complicated job. Outsiders who come here to cut wood are often desperate for money, but local villagers don’t want to lose the surrounding forest and the benefits it provides. “It was their decision to destroy their own forest, so that doesn’t mean they get to destroy ours,” Renama Zatompo Mahinty, one of the patrollers in Mahaleotse, said of migrants from outside villages. “If I tear my own T-shirt, that doesn’t give me the right to take someone else’s.”
While there was still a morning chill in the air, I followed the men on a patrol. A ranger named Ramilison Roland paused in front of a large fig tree a few minutes into the walk and pointed up. Through a tangle of twigs and leaves, I saw four ring-tailed lemurs snuggled together on a branch. They were wrapped in each other’s fluffy black-and-white tails and hardly moving, because, as Roland said, they had just woken up.
Ring-tailed lemurs are endangered, yet, in just an hour that morning, we saw two different troops of them — a sign that something here is working.
These rangers are paid, but they told me they’d still surveil the forest without financial support. The benefits of trees are too important to lose — building materials for homes and schools and a lower chance of droughts, flooding, and erosion. “It’s not really a matter of money,” Roland said that morning. “We have advantages of protecting the forest, not only for us, but for the future generation.”
Madagascar is among the most challenging places on Earth for wildlife conservation. Political unrest hampers the flow of foreign aid, weakens law enforcement, and disrupts tourism, which is a vehicle to fund environmental protection. Poor governance also deepens poverty. And poverty leaves people with little choice but to depend on activities that erode the forest. Those are some of the reasons why a lot of non-governmental organization (NGO) projects fail, as I wrote in October.
But I’m convinced this one is succeeding.
Villagers in Amoron’i Onilahy told me that, by most measures, the landscape here is improving; there’s more forest, more lemurs, and more water. Data from WWF is limited and more mixed. The group’s satellite analysis shows that deforestation fell dramatically within the park between 2015 and 2020, rose again between 2021 and 2023, and then dropped once more in 2024. Amoron’i Onilahyn hasn’t lost any forest cover this year through June, the most recent months of data, WWF says. (WWF has not measured natural forest recovery.)
The density of ring-tailed and sifaka lemurs, meanwhile, has improved since 2003, according to the group.
To be clear, a lot of this success would be hard to replicate elsewhere in Madagascar. Amoron’i Onilahy has benefited from decades of investment from WWF. That’s rare, said Gardner. Donors tend to be drawn to projects that sound new and exciting rather than funding the same activities for years and years, he said. Plus, the park sits atop an aquifer; in some places, freshwater literally gushes from the ground. That makes large-scale farming possible here. Elsewhere, it’s just too dry.
What’s also worth pointing out is that strategies to restrict charcoal production in Amoron’i Onilahy don’t quell demand for it nationwide. If people stop cutting trees in this forest, they might just do it elsewhere.
Yet, Amoron’i Onilahy does offer important lessons on how to help conservation succeed in other challenging parts of the world. Investing in non-exploitative economies is essential, even if building businesses doesn’t sound like “conservation.” Even more important is that local communities lead the work themselves and don’t forever rely on external organizations like WWF for help, said Ranaivo Rasolofoson, a researcher at the University of Toronto and an expert on forest conservation in Madagascar.
Large environmental NGOs don’t have a great track record of yielding control to people who live in the environments they’re trying to protect. WWF, for its part, has made some grave mistakes that put conservation at conflict with human rights. But here, the communities are choosing how they want to conserve the forest, and WWF is just there to provide support.
“They are responsible for what they do and what they decide,” Ratsifandrihamanana said of the local communities. “We really want them to be in charge, to take charge.”
From Mahaleotse, we drove to another village, stopping along the way at a shrine to Saint Theresa. It consisted of a short statue of Theresa inside a rock cutout on the side of a cliff, just above a small spring-fed pool. Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination in Madagascar, and ardent observers, I was told, will sometimes make pilgrimages to this spot.
It was here that I saw the sifaka, which was a spiritual experience in its own way.
I first encountered these animals in a BBC nature show more than two decades ago. They were mesmerizing, flying from tree to tree with incredible speed, like ping-pong balls bouncing between paddles. I still hear David Attenborough’s voice in my head when I think of them.
Back then, I imagined that wildlife in a place like this lived — as nature shows made it seem — within vast stretches of wilderness, far from human life. Yet, that’s not how these animals really exist, and it never has been.
I came face-to-face with this critically endangered lemur at a roadside shrine between two villages. Humans and animals share the landscape here, so it’s only logical that, for conservation to work, it must consider the needs of both.
