Now the director of the international conservation organization WildLandscapes International, David Houghton ’88, describes himself as “a pretty good herder of cats.”

That descriptor is perfectly apropos of someone working on behalf of animals, of course. But it also gets right to the ability he says is most important in conservation work: helping humans with differing agendas to come together on large projects for a common goal.

A Sense of Purpose Helped Him Find His Way

By the time he arrived at UVM and enrolled as a Wildlife Biology major in 1984, he had a sense that he was on a mission. 

Even with strong motivation, some material is simply challenging – especially for people who learn differently. He says, “I’m horribly learning disabled, but I wasn’t diagnosed until I got to UVM. And I had picked a major that had me in hard science classes with pre-vet and pre-med students, giant auditoriums with incredibly bright and competitive people. I almost gave up.

He especially enjoyed ornithology, a wetlands class, and an endangered species class with Professor Hirth. The courses captured his imagination and intellect to such a degree that he says they “barely felt like school. Getting into environmental classes in the Aiken building, sitting down and talking about endangered species, that felt like ohh yeah this I can do. They were super fun and interesting,” he remembers.

He forced himself through it because he knew the work he wanted to do.

The actual learning disability also diagnosis made a huge difference. “Then I was able to stop feeling like there was something just wrong that I was supposed to be able to fix on my own. Back then, you were just called, you know, dumb.”

He began taking environmental and natural resource classes in his sophomore year. The further on he got, he says, the better it went. His own growing knowledge – and realigning his major to support it – helped his growing understanding that many sorts of knowledge and action are critical to the work of conservation.

“In an ever-changing world,” he says, “the complicated realities we face-- invasive species, extinction, biodiversity loss, climate -- are going to need many different kinds of expertise.”

Community Conservancy: An Approach Supporting Nature and People —and Helping Rhinos Recover

To the world’s intersecting challenges, David (and many collaborators) offer an alternative to the logjams and conflicts that bog down so many worthy projects.

He says, “There's another way forward and that’s Community Conservancy.” This approach means that local communities are involved in the design and programs supporting wildlife (often around a so-called ‘target species’), and human presence is planned and incorporated carefully. The resulting conservancies are “not national parks” with so-called pristine nature, we learned. “There's cattle-grazing and goat-grazing, agriculture, and communities. But it is done in a way that's sustainable. There are areas set aside for wildlife and potentially ecotourism. And increasingly, they're getting carbon money (because healthy biodiverse ecosystems can sequester carbon). So, it's just a win-win all the way around."

He pointed to rhinoceroses as an important example of how community involvement and careful attention to both ecology and human needs can out-maneuver financial profit motives.

Kenya has “pretty much put a halt to poaching, which is never easy,” he noted. This is especially true for rhino horns, which are the most expensive substance on planet Earth. David notes, “It's the most expensive substance on planet Earth because it's desired by huge groups of folks who believe that it has all kinds of properties which it does not have. It's just keratin.”

The example shows the wide-ranging effects of effective conservation. If you are successfully protecting rhinos, it's not about that single species, he says. “You're also protecting for elephant, lions, pangolins, all the little stuff in an extremely biodiverse area. Doing it well means that you're doing A-plus-plus conservation well beyond charismatic megafauna. It's also everything that comes along for the ride. And then you're doing it with local people in such a way that when someone shows up in one of the local communities and looks like they're up to no good, that community calls one of the local protectors and says, ‘Yeah, there's somebody here you probably want to come down and check out.’”

“So, you get a bad actor who shows up and wants to overturn all of this? And the answer is, ‘yeah, there may be some good money in the short term, but in the long term, this doesn't work for us because you're not going to supply healthcare, you're not going to bring in jobs. You’re not going to bring in scholarships. You're not going to build a lodge. You're not going to do all of these things, which our kids and our grandkids need.”

“Of course, communities are wise enough to do that cost-benefit analysis. To the local people that surround the protected area, the value of effective conservation is very high. And to me, that's full-on conservation.”

A Scalable Community Model

It works with rhinos, but it applies everywhere.

He shared, “We've got a project in India, where there are elephants and tigers, and where and our partners are working on community conservancies. The land contains in indigenous area, akin to a reservation here in the United States. It's a semi-autonomous area of Northeast India, but also outside of Manas, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site.”  It’s one that UNESCO describes as a “biodiversity hotspot.”

“What we see there, like we do in many places is the thing that megafauna create which I think is a motivator: human wildlife conflict. So, elephants are wonderful … until they raid your two hectares of corn that was going to feed your family for the next year and grizzly bears are great until they take somebody in your family or eat most of your baby calves.

“There are a lot of lessons that can come out of this approach with elephants or grizzly bears that apply pretty much all the way along. Particularly if you look at endangered species, and where more and more work that's being done on farms and ranches is collaborative instead of regulatory.” When the needs of families and businesses are a valued part of the dialogue. David says, “Sometimes that means spending money on ranches that allow ranches to continue to go forward or farms to continue to go forward. It’s working across the sides in a way that ranchers and farmers can allow for an endangered species. Who, ten years ago we might have been afraid to go on someone’s ranch, but I think that perception is changing a lot. There's a lot more collaboration. It's a very different way of doing business. A little less traditional, with fewer sort of rigid lines. And that means we can work all over the place to adapt to the needs of people and critters.”

“The kinds of projects that I do are very complex. Maybe it's just pure stubbornness that pushes me to bring them to closure,” he laughs before saying, “but the effects are very, very real.”

“It either happens or doesn't. Land becomes a park or it doesn’t become a park. The park either has rhinos or it doesn't have rhinos and so the work is very, very, goal- and objective-oriented.”

Wildlife Management at UVM, Then and Now

Motivating him are the benefits for both humans and other animals. He observes that, “people’s enthusiasm for finding solutions is a super-cool component of it. And because the people are so involved and so committed, you have these critters that have been around on planet Earth for millions of years, doing their thing and unmolested, which is just super fun."

He remembers that sense of fun in a different way from early in his studies.

“When you enter Wildlife Management at UVM, you think, ‘Oh great! I'm going to be jumping out of land cruisers and handling wildlife, and that seems fun and great. And it is.

“But along the way I realized that, really, it’s about people management: how do you manage people to allow the wildlife to be fine? And that’s why this approach is such a good one, around the idea of human beings and nature coexisting.”

He remembers that the idea of working together towards a healthy co-existence was, of course, “big in our time when we were at UVM. But along the way, people have gone much further, incorporating into the ecology, legal, sociological, technology, and more along with the needs and voices of local communities.”

It’s really important that the work stays grounded in the actual ecology, so we know what is working in natural systems and what isn’t, he says.

“I think that what surprises me the most is so much commonality between figuring out how to conserve a dairy farm in Chittenden County in Vermont and figuring out how to protect rhinos in East Africa.

Making Home, Making a Difference

Though he’s moved around a bit since graduation, he and his wife Phoebe now live in Williston, Tennessee.  David says he "really loves Vermont," while Phoebe “really, really loves the South,” and so they’ve compromised on a location that also has rolling green hills, is close to a major airport for easy travel – and has the benefit of being close to daughter Ali (Alexandra Coues Houghton ’16), a fellow RSENR alum who now works on environmental issues around the Latinx community.

He’s grateful for what his learning at UVM has positioned him to do.

“You know, whatever success I've had in the conservation world, and that success is always working in partnership with lots and lots and lots of people - I really look at my UVM background as the jumping off point for that. Without that, I wouldn't be in these places that I've been. So just huge amounts of gratitude to the faculty and students and to the Aiken building where so much of this happened.”