Acclaimed zoologist David Macdonald to grace Fairway Galle Lit Fest 2017

Among the many celebrated international authors slated to attend the Fairway Galle Literary Festival (FGLF) in January 2017 is Scottish zoologist and conservationist Professor David Macdonald.

Having been awarded the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Best Documentary in in 1976 for his film Night of the Fox, Prof. Macdonald went on to found the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) at the University of Oxford in 1986 on which he now serves as Director. He is Oxford’s first Professor of Wildlife Conservation, holding a Senior Research Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall.

An active wildlife conservationist since graduating from Oxford, Prof Macdonald He has done much to popularise biology with the general public. He is known for his documentary films and his popular books, for which he has twice won the Natural World Author of the Year award. His book Running with the Fox won the Natural History Book of the Year award for 1987, and Meerkats United won the Wildscreen 1988 award. His films include the popular BBC seven-part series The Velvet Claw, a natural history of carnivores.

“My scientific background is in behavioural ecology, with an emphasis on carnivores, although my research has spanned published studies on organisms from moths to penguins and even, occasionally, plants. As both the WildCRU, and the whole field of conservation, have evolved, our work has become inter-disciplinary. More recently my biological writings are increasingly enmeshed in issues of environmental policy, economics and research strategy,” says Prof Macdonald on the official WildCRU website.

Wildlife conservation, he says, is a dynamic, highly technical and rapidly-changing field that embraces problems spanning the challenges faced by particular species some charismatic, others obscure, some imperilled, others pestilential to the grand global linkages of the 21st Century, between biodiversity, livelihoods, food security, health and climate change.

“Whether the focus is on species or ecosystems, on protection or sustainable use, on wildlife or people, my vision for WildCRU is to produce the science that builds the policies that deliver the solutions. More personally, the quest to deliver that WildCRU vision has enabled me to keep the spark of natural history alive, with the wind in my face and mud under my fingernails, while nonetheless venturing through the slippery corridors of policy, and having a lot of fun,” he adds.