As a kid, Charlie Knowles begged his parents for a dog—and more. He tended cats, puppies, turtles, gerbils, lizards and at least one duck. “I grew up watching National Geographic, wanting to be Jane Goodall,” he says. When he was 8, he observed a red fox in the woods near his rural Illinois home. “That fox made a strong impression.”
Knowles came from three generations of engineers—and he followed in the family footsteps. Two degrees and several jobs later, he launched a technology company, built it up to great success, and sold it. “I’d heard somewhere that people typically have three distinct careers in life, and I had the chance to step back and actually ask myself, if I could do anything in the world, what would it be?” Knowles says.
He thought of Goodall. What if he could use what he’d gleaned from 10 years in Silicon Valley to help wildlife conservationists in the bush? He’d do the fund raising, the grant writing, the marketing and the schmoozing, and they could focus on their fieldwork.
Knowles co-founded the Wildlife Conservation Network in 2002. He became a sort of wildlife yenta—introducing “conservation entrepreneurs” to high-end donors. “It just seemed like a natural fit. I could find these incredibly focused, talented, passionate individuals in the field, and then I could give them the resources to take things forward.”
His first collaboration was with Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, which grew from a shoestring operation run out of a Namibian farmhouse into one of the world’s biggest single-species conservation programs. Since then, Wildlife Conservation Network has supported everything from Sumatran rhinos to Nepalese snow leopards, elephants to okapi.
Wildlife conservation is difficult and dangerous work. Three Wildlife Conservation Network specialists died in a car accident on a Ugandan road, “returning from a meeting with military leaders to try to secure a reduction in violence in the area of the Congo where we work,” Knowles says. “We have four airplanes and all four of them have crashed within the past year.” (Three had mechanical problems and the fourth crashed when a zebra darted across the runway.) The ultra-light planes that are quiet enough to glide scientists into the jungle without disturbing animals also are slow enough to be easy targets for angry poachers.
Still, Knowles eagerly spends about a month in the field each year. “I’ve sat with Buddhists way up in the Himalayas. I ate in the middle of the Congo with a group of Pygmies. I got interrogated by the KGB; that was exciting!” he says.
Knowles went to a Nepalese village where herders had lost 55 livestock to a snow leopard three nights before. “Through the translator I said, ‘You lost 70 percent of your village’s net worth. Do you wish that snow leopard was dead?’ And the translation came back, ‘No. We’re Buddhists.’ Moments like that show there really is hope."
