When Catherine Craig first went to Gombe in 1972, she was not thinking about silk. She was an undergraduate in a four-seat plane with Jane Goodall, flying over the Tanzanian forest where Goodall’s work on chimpanzees was changing how scientists understood animals. Craig spent six months there, learning to recognize individual chimpanzees and helping track mothers and infants through the steep woodland above Lake Tanganyika. The forest stayed with her. So did the sight of people living nearby with few choices, and the later realization that even forests thought to be protected could disappear.
Her path back to conservation was indirect. Craig became a biologist of spiders and silk, earning a Ph.D. in ecology and evolution from Cornell and later joining the biology faculty at Yale. For two decades, she studied webs, foraging behavior, insect flight, and the properties of silk. It was work at the level of fibers, mechanics, and evolution. Yet the question that had formed at Gombe remained: how could habitat be protected where people had few ways to earn money?
The answer she pursued was both plain and difficult. If farmers could earn income from native silk-producing caterpillars and the plants that fed them, then habitat might become something worth tending. The idea drew on her scientific expertise, but it also required skills that science had not taught her: product design, marketing, patience, and the ability to listen across languages, cultures, and expectations shaped by past disappointments.
Craig first examined wild silk projects in India, Indonesia, and Madagascar. India showed that silk, enterprise, and conservation could be linked. Indonesia showed the importance of product development. Madagascar offered the combination she was seeking: extraordinary biodiversity, deep poverty, and a cultural history of silk textiles. It was also a country where many conservation projects had struggled, often because local people had been asked to carry the costs of conservation without seeing enough of its benefits.
In 2004, Craig began fieldwork in Madagascar, first at Ranomafana and later near Makira Natural Park in the northeast. She focused on border forests rather than the protected area itself. That distinction mattered. The farmers she hoped to work with lived outside the park, in places where conservation policy, subsistence needs, and economic uncertainty met each day. Wild silk caterpillars were often found in edge habitats, secondary growth, and small farms. That made them suitable for a model built around people’s existing landscapes, rather than around keeping people out.
The program that emerged, Conservation through Poverty Alleviation, International, or CPALI, was never just about collecting cocoons. It involved finding caterpillars and their host plants, raising native species, planting trees, training farmers, and building a workshop where women could turn cocoons, raffia, dyes, and other materials into saleable goods. The products had to be distinctive enough to reach buyers in wealthier markets. The enterprise had to return enough value locally to justify the effort. None of this happened quickly.
Craig is candid about the limits of her early assumptions. She arrived with technical knowledge and confidence. She had to learn that conservation enterprise is not a tidy extension of biology. Markets shift. Equipment breaks. Electricity is unreliable. Shipping is costly. A design that works in New York may not be practical in Maroantsetra. A project that seems logical to an outsider may not fit the rhythm of village life. Farmers needed to see a demonstration site. Elders needed to be consulted. Participation had to happen on local timelines.
Much of the project’s endurance came from the Malagasy team that formed around it. Mamy Ratsimbazafy, first hired as a field assistant and translator, became a central figure and later the director of the local partner organization, SEPALI Madagascar. Lalaina Raharindimby helped lead the women’s artisan program and product development. Over time, the work expanded beyond silk to include raffia, natural dyes, weaving, agroforestry, and biochar. When vanilla prices rose, some farmers left silk for the more lucrative crop. When vanilla prices later fell, the cocoon market offered a fallback for those who remained. The episode showed the fragility of rural livelihoods, and the value of working in a biodiverse landscape with more than one possible product.
Craig’s story is also one of institutional humility. She came to believe that many conservation programs falter because they fail to ask people what they need, or because they treat communities as instruments of a biodiversity plan. In her telling, respect showed up in daily choices. It meant spending money locally, working without project vehicles or boats, renting village houses, using public transport, and remaining long enough for people to believe the project would not disappear after a few years.
After more than two decades, Craig stepped back from day-to-day leadership. She concluded that her management had begun to limit the program’s independence. The transition is among the most important parts of the story. Many founder-led projects weaken when the founder leaves. Craig says she is proud that the work is now financially secure and governed by Malagasy leadership, with CPALI’s role shifting toward fundraising, advising, and helping connect the team to markets.
Craig’s upcoming book, Nature’s Threads, offers an account of what it took to make a small conservation enterprise persist. The work survived market shocks, cyclones, a coup, floods, a pandemic, and the slow work of building trust. Its lessons are hard-won: conservation linked to livelihoods needs time, local authority, product development, and a market willing to pay for more than a raw material. It also needs people willing to stay after the first plan proves incomplete.
Mongabay: What drew you into conservation and development work?
Catherine L. Craig: I have worked in the field for over 30 years on research projects from chimpanzees to woodpeckers, to ctenophores, spiders and silkworms. I have always loved doing field work since my first days at Gombe in East Africa and it has given me a very broad perspective on animal habitats and habitat loss. When working in forests in Costa Rica and Panama, I found a sense of peace and joy I have not achieved in any other environment. I strive to contribute to forest and habitat health and animal conservation in any way that I can.
Mongabay: Was there a particular moment or experience that shaped your decision to focus on linking livelihoods with conservation?
Catherine L. Craig: When working in the tropics it was clear that poverty was a major factor driving habitat loss and animal exploitation. For example, people living in isolated areas have no means of earning income. that can be used for health care, purchasing goods or food, When I initiated our program, I hoped that income from silk would provide these funds. Although it took a long time to get the program off the ground (20 years!), we seem to have achieved those early goals, and my successor has been able to expand our income generation programs to include biochar, raffia production and weaving.
When I arrived in Maroantsetra I introduced a project that could provide new livelihoods for farmers and future artisans. I planned to work in the park’s border forests but not in the parks. I knew it would “work” because silk production was very successful in Asia. I had already spent a field season at Ranomafana where we identified possible silk caterpillars and their host plants. But I had no idea how long it would take to implement the project and develop a business. I had no idea of what products we could produce that would be profitable enough to support the local people. For some odd reason none of those problems discouraged me and I simply blundered ahead.
Mongabay: What led you to Madagascar specifically, rather than another country or region?
Catherine L. Craig: I wanted to design a conservation-enterprise to ensure long-term biodiversity protection that was sustainable and not dependent on grants and donor funding. I was looking for a site that had both high biodiversity and high poverty. Madagascar is a biological hotspot as well as one of the 10 poorest countries in the world. Hence, both of my criteria were met.
Mongabay: When you first arrived, was there anything that surprised you? And how did your thinking evolve over time?
Catherine L. Craig: I was surprised to find that all of the conservation organizations were located in Antananarivo with local offices at their field sites. Most of the researchers were PhD students working on their thesis and not trained conservationists trying to implement programs. I was surprised to learn that millions of dollars had already been spent by USAID but the loss of species had continued unabated. I was also surprised to learn that most of the people introducing programs did not seem to respect local communities or include locals in planning field programs.
