As an eighteen year-old Arts Academy graduate, Steve Goodman bought a car, packed his bags and headed east for what seemed to be a dream job. With the help of Jean Parsons, his visual arts teacher and mentor, he had landed a job as a designer with the Bennington Potters in Vermont. It was a lucky break for anyone - but especially a recent high school graduate.

He carefully planned his route east to include a number of stopovers at wildlife preserves and forests - he had always had a passion for observing animals and hoped to see something new along the way. At a stop near Seneca Falls in upstate New York, Goodman came upon a colony of black-crowned night herons. Mesmerized, he quietly constructed a makeshift blind and stayed for hours. He watched the birds return to the young in the nest and spectacular courtship rituals.

"It was absolutely fascinating," he explained. After sitting in the dirt for hours, he had a realization. "This is what I want to do. I want to understand these types of things and why they happen."

He finished his trip to Vermont - but only stayed in his new job for one week before repacking his bags and leaving. His trip back to Michigan was the first leg of a winding journey that would ultimately take this artist around the world and make him a leading voice in the global discussion about the world’s changing ecology.

Learning how to see

A self-described "country-bumpkin," Goodman grew up on a Michigan farm and preferred to be outside whenever possible, even sleeping outside in a sleeping bag on frigid winter nights. Goodman’s unconventional approach to life and talent for sculpture soon brought him to the Arts Academy where he still preferred the outdoors and could often be found in the pine forests that surround campus. But his wandering was not aimless - he was preoccupied with understanding the movement of animals and how to capture that in his work.

Goodman enrolled in ecology classes taught by Mike Chamberlin, who regularly took his students into the woods. Chamberlin still remembers how his student’s fascination developed and evolved. "The interest in movement came from his artistic background. He wanted to watch the fluidity, the pattern and the choreography of movement. But when you observe movement, you observe behavior - in essence body language - because animals use so many cues other than a spoken language to communicate."

Goodman’s interest extended far beyond the classroom and he took every opportunity that Chamberlin provided. They explored islands around the Great Lakes and studied the gulls and terns that nest in colonies of thousands on islands and beaches.

Chamberlin quickly noticed something exceptional about Goodman. In the classroom, in the field and in the studio - he had a tendency to throw his entire being into a project. "To do the sort of research projects he did with me took tremendous amounts of self-discipline." He had amazing patience. He endured cold, rain, swarming mosquitoes and other discomforts that would make most people walk away. "It was the same self-discipline that would keep him at a potter’s wheel for hours and hours. He would just get so interested in something that it would become an all-consuming part of who he was. He had to know everything about it - and everything that has anything to do with it. I think the word ‘passion’ gets overused - but sometimes there is just no other word that you can use." said Chamberlin of his former student.

The art of inquiry

After returning from Vermont, Goodman enrolled at the University of Michigan and planned to study ornithology. His undergraduate career lasted six and a half years, but the duration was not due to typical undergraduate vices. Like his trip to Vermont, detours through his college career were reflections of an unbounded curiosity.

"I was a very lousy student because I was interested in too many things outside my classes," he explained. One such outside interest developed with the help of a friend, Peter Meininger, who was studying Egyptology. The two students quickly developed a common curiosity about wildlife in ancient Egypt. How had early civilization affected the surrounding plants, animals and birds? What animals thrived at the time of the early Egyptians? What animal and bird populations were decimated by human behavior? Did any species benefit from the growth of the Egyptian civilization? No one had ever done a systematic study of these questions, but they knew that the answers were waiting for them in the extensive Egyptology collection contained in the libraries at the University of Michigan. Not willing to leave the questions unanswered, they set out to do some extracurricular research.

"Every moment we had, we spent in the library. We started in one corner of the library going page by page and book by book, through tomb documentation and artwork." Goodman and Meininger pored over ancient depictions of birds to see what they could learn about the gradual environmental impacts of the ancient civilization. Instead of completing their regular coursework, Goodman and his partner wrote a paper and submitted it to a prominent Egyptologist. After reviewing the well-researched paper, the puzzled academic called the authors. "He asked us ‘who are you guys?’ And we told him we were just a couple undergraduates from the University of Michigan."

Impressed with their work, he helped them obtain a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue their research in Egypt. They traveled to Egypt and continued their research on tombs, ancient artwork and mummified bones. When Goodman realized that his understanding about wildlife in modern Egypt was limited and he could not make clear comparisons with ancient records, he set out to explore. He wandered into remote areas and traveled with Bedouins and finally published a book in the academic press.

Despite his unconventional undergraduate career and nearly eight years in Egypt, graduate school seemed to be the next logical step and he was easily accepted. He arrived with impeccable credentials - having already conducted ample research and published a book in the scholarly press. "It worked out fine in a way - but the problem was that I became even more interested in research. So for two years, I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing as a graduate student - namely taking courses. So they finally came to me and said ‘either be a graduate student or be a researcher.’ So I said ‘thanks, I’ll be a researcher,’ and I left."

For the next several years, Goodman was essentially a freelance scientist, a situation that would likely terrify most of his colleagues. Never certain where his next project was going to come from, he wandered the world and followed his own interests and lived off whatever grants he could find to support himself. Over the next several years, he conducted multiple expeditions to tropical Africa, learning new languages and dialects and publishing books and research papers as he went.

Discovering a life’s work

Although he had been able to follow his own interests for several years, Goodman yearned for another opportunity to be entirely immersed in something. In 1989, the Chicago Field Museum asked Goodman to conduct a wildlife survey on Madagascar, a Texas-sized island in the Indian Ocean. Roughly 300 miles off the eastern coast of Mozambique, the land split from the African continent around 160 million years ago. In its isolation, Madagascar gave rise to a tremendous diversity of plant and animal life, much of which is unique to the island - and still unknown to science.

"There was so much to discover and learn about - but two things were abundantly clear. The first was how little we knew about the island. The second was how few Malagasy scientists were working in the domain of field biology." It also did not take long for the ever-restless Goodman to realize that Madagascar might represent a life-long challenge. To this day, he continues to make new discoveries.

In order to identify new species, Goodman and his colleagues must reach some of the most remote areas of the island. Some trips are as short as ten days and others take up to four months. Traveling into areas without roads, they cut trails and carry equipment and supplies for extended stays. Because there is no such thing as an easy trip into remote Madagascar, each newly documented species represents not only a scientific accomplishment - but a logistical and physical one.

If there is any glamour in Goodman’s job, it is offset by a steep physical toll including frequent bouts with malaria, parasites, other sicknesses - and biting animals of all shapes and sizes from flies to lemurs. But thirty years after Chamberlin first noticed Goodman’s determination to know a subject inside and out, the same drive sends his former student on repeated journeys into the woods of Madagascar.

"There are many people who work to make money. After work they have their real life and getting up in the morning is not the most pleasant thing for them. I do what I do because of my interests and this passion for life in a certain way. It is the same passion that I felt when I was working directly in the arts. We are in all of this for very personal reasons."

Goodman and his partners set elaborate traps that capture animals alive. Once the trap is set, the team waits."Even now, as I am getting to be much older - on the first night out, I am unable to sleep because I have no idea what will happen. I have so much anticipation about what might be in the traps."

"A number of years ago we had been working in a block of forest for six or seven weeks. And as we went to higher elevations, we had to cut 20 or 30 kilometers of trails. We finally got to the top of the mountain and came into a lovely little dwarf forest with a huge amount of moss and very wet. It was a fairyland."

Most of the animals are nocturnal so traps are put out and the team waits through the night. In the early morning hours, they wake up and quietly make coffee but don’t depart because they don’t want to scare away any animals.

On this occasion, Goodman set out and came upon one trap that clearly contained an animal. "I found a trap that was closed but I could smell it as I approached. Based on the smell I knew that what was in the trap was unknown to science. There is an intuition - by looking carefully and understanding - using sight, sound or smell - to assimilate a lot about your environment in a very artistic way." Goodman’s intuition was correct. Not only was the animal a new species, it was an entirely new genus of animal.

A global citizen

In Madagascar, as in many regions around the world, the pressures of population growth and subsistence agriculture have destroyed wildlife habitat and the clock is ticking for many species. According to the World Wildlife Fund, as much as eighty percent of the island’s forests have been cleared. "It’s now or never for our world - and Madagascar is symbolic of that."

Each time he or one of his colleagues travels into the forest and pulls a new species out of a trap, they must consider the reality that this might be the first and last time the animal is observed. These creatures may be recognized and classified by science only in the final gasp of their existence.

"It is saddening - but now is not the time for the light-hearted. You have to swallow hard, put your head down and move forward. That’s the only thing you can do. You have to understand the reasons why it happened and do your best to make sure that those factors that gave rise to the extinction are eliminated or subdued."

In an effort to raise awareness and reverse the causes of the extinctions, Goodman founded and leads the Ecological Training Program (ETP), which has groomed generations of new Malagasy scientists, researchers and conservationists. "A lot of students are absolutely fascinated when they realize that their island has one of the richest natural patrimonies of any place on earth. They experience something between curiosity and pride about this." The program has allowed Malagasy experts to take the lead on conservation efforts and has served as a model for other ecologically threatened regions around the world. In 2005, the MacArthur Foundation recognized his innovative grassroots efforts and inexhaustible energy with a "Genius" grant.

Increased expertise and motivation is beginning to reverse direction in Madagascar. Much of that change can be traced back to the people trained and inspired through the ETP. "We work at a pace that is almost frantic trying to discover what exists there now and may not in the near future. We do this to advance Malagasy conservation biologists and also to use this data to conserve an important aspect of the world’s patrimony."

Witness to extinction - a new mission

In more than 400 scientific papers published in leading scientific journals and a dozen books, Goodman has helped the scientific community begin to understand parts of the world that remained hidden in plain sight, including an under-explored island in the Indian Ocean.

Scientists and artists attempt to answer questions about who we are and how we fit into the world around us. From his days watching birds and scanning tomb drawings Goodman recognized that the human condition has always and will always be shaped by the world and life around us. To the amazement and wonder of all those who share his passion, the world around it - whether in Michigan or Madagascar - remains full of mystery. It shocks one’s imagination to consider the planet teaming with life that we have never witnessed - much less understood.

Many years ago, Goodman described his role on Madagascar as that of an archivist. In a detached and scientific way, he raced to identify and document as much as he could before it disappeared forever. While a small number of animal species capture our attention when they are threatened with extinction, the vast majority of threatened species on Madagascar and around the world cease to exist with little or no fanfare - they are simply here one day and gone the next.

Over the course of Goodman’s many years in Madagascar, however, Chamberlin noticed a change in his former student. He has transformed from an archivist to an activist. Today Goodman considers Madagascar his home. Generations of Malagasy scientists and researchers have been inspired and trained through the Ecological Training Program. This may represent an even more important contribution to science and conservation than his impressive body of research - a group of people that are inspired, knowledgeable and determined to conserve what is left of the island’s unique life. Like Goodman, they realize that the first step in conservation is understanding what is being lost.

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