Catherine Craig arrived at Gombe Stream in Tanzania in 1972 as an undergraduate in a four-seat plane with Jane Goodall, watching chimpanzees move through forest above Lake Tanganyika—a moment that planted a question that would shape the next five decades of her life. How could habitat be protected in places where people had few ways to earn money?
That question haunted Craig even as her career took her to Yale's biology faculty, where she spent two decades studying spider webs, silk mechanics, and insect behavior at the fiber level. Yet the forest stayed with her. So did the sight of people living on its edges with limited choices, and the knowledge that even supposedly protected forests could vanish.
In 2004, Craig began fieldwork in Madagascar, eventually settling near Makira Natural Park in the northeast. She chose to work not inside the protected area but in the border forests where farmers actually lived—where conservation policy, subsistence needs, and economic uncertainty met every day. There, wild silk caterpillars thrived in edge habitats and secondary growth, creatures that belonged to the working landscape rather than requiring people to abandon it.
What emerged was Conservation through Poverty Alleviation, International (CPALI), a program built around native silk-producing caterpillars and the plants that fed them. Craig reasoned that if farmers could earn income from cocoons and the textiles spun from them, habitat might become something worth tending. But the work was far more complex than collecting cocoons. It meant finding caterpillars and their host plants, raising native species, planting trees, training farmers, and establishing a workshop where women could transform cocoons, raffia, and dyes into distinctive products that could reach buyers in wealthier markets.
Craig arrived with technical knowledge and confidence, but Madagascar taught her that conservation enterprise is not an extension of biology. Markets shift without warning. Equipment breaks. Electricity fails. A design that works in New York may not survive in Maroantsetra. She learned that demonstration sites mattered, that elders needed consultation, and that participation followed village rhythms, not project timelines. She had to listen across languages, cultures, and expectations shaped by past disappointments.
What held the program together was patience and the Malagasy leadership that formed around it. After more than two decades of work—weathering market changes, equipment failures, weather disruptions, and the shifting needs of communities—Craig stepped back from daily leadership. The program she left behind was financially secure and increasingly governed by the people who had built it locally. The silk caterpillars of Madagascar had become more than a conservation tool; they had become a proof of concept that habitat protection and economic security need not be opposing forces, but could be woven together by people willing to adapt, listen, and stay long enough to see it through.