Remembering Fossey, Murdered Author of “Gorillas in the Mist”
“When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.”
The last entry in Dian Fossey’s diary is poignant enough without its proximity to the primatologist’s brutal murder in 1985. Fossey was killed in her cabin in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, where she had observed and lived among the silverback gorillas for decades. The killer was never satisfactorily identified – poachers? gold-smugglers? Fossey’s own assistant? – but let’s “dwell less on what is past” and remember her life this week, when she would have turned 91.
Mentored by paleontologist Louis Leakey, Fossey studied the daily lives of gorillas by slowly gaining their trust, mimicking the great apes’ behaviors and sounds. Her work was the basis of her book Gorillas in the Mist, published two years before her death and later realized in a film featuring Sigourney Weaver.
In her 20 years in Rwanda, Fossey was a staunch conservationist who opposed not only poaching but tourism, which she believed encroached on delicate wildlife habitats. Fossey was a member of the “Trimates,” a group of three women scientists recruited by Leakey to study primates that included Jane Goodall (chimpanzees) and Biruté Galdikas (orangutans).
Fossey’s research and conservation work was instrumental in slowing the population decline in the endangered mountain gorilla. Her legacy lives on in Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, an offshoot of the conservation organization she had launched in 1978. (Unlike Fossey, the Fund promotes responsible, conscientious tourism.) This week the group remembers another important aspect of Fossey’s legacy – the profound influence she had on women and girls looking to enter a scientific field.
“Despite the fame of Fossey and the other Trimates, women, and particularly African women, are still underrepresented in science,” says Tara Stoinski, president and chief scientist of the Gorilla Fund. “We are taking numerous initiatives to strengthen our programs for women in science, including establishing a scholarship fund, as well as aiming to have equal representation of women in our livelihoods and food security work that takes place in the communities living near the gorillas.”
Visit the Gorilla Fund at gorillafund.org, and by all means “concentrate more on the preservation of the future.”
Photo credit: Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund
