Born in Brooklyn in 1953 and raised in Queens, Alan Rabinowitz had a stutter so severe it locked him out of ordinary conversation, pushing him toward animals as the one audience that never judged his speech. He turned that early isolation into rigorous training, earning degrees in biology and chemistry and a doctorate in ecology, then joined the Wildlife Conservation Society for nearly three decades.

He established the world’s first jaguar sanctuary at Cockscomb Basin in Belize and protected reserves in Taiwan and Thailand. In Myanmar’s Hukawng Valley he discovered four new mammal species, including the leaf deer, and leveraged the findings into vast new protected areas. Diagnosed with leukemia in 2001, he co-founded Panthera in 2006 to protect all wild cat species and pioneered continent-spanning wildlife corridors before his death in 2018.

• How a childhood stutter forged world-class powers of observation
• Translating ecology into economics to win over foreign governments
• The first jaguar sanctuary and the reserves that followed
• Why isolated parks fail and the case for connected corridors
• Founding Panthera under a terminal diagnosis and racing the clock