When Henry David Thoreau wrote that most people live lives of quiet desperation, he clearly did not have in mind Bill ’72 and Amy Vedder Weber ’73. In the normal course of their professional working lives, one or the other or both of them have been detained by Idi Amin on suspicion of being counterrevolutionary mercenaries; hiked alone through unfamiliar montane rain forest while suffering from malaria-induced hallucinations; climbed trees to escape Africa’s most dangerous animal, the cape buffalo; had their house cut completely in half by a falling Hagenia tree; gone one on one with a 400-pound silverback gorilla; scaled a rugged 12,000-foot mountain while four months pregnant and without climbing gear; assisted in the murder investigation of a world-renowned animal behavioralist; had a $1,000 bounty put on one’s head; and set a world record by counting 353 Colobus angolensis ruwenzorii monkeys in a single group.

OK, some of those experiences could be classified as desperate. But “quiet”? Not hardly. And this is only the short list. Even a partial accounting of the couple’s adventures over the years would fill a book. In fact, it has filled In the Kingdom of Gorillas: Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land (Simon & Schuster, 2001; Touchstone, 2002), co-authored by Weber and Vedder.

The couple, who met and married at Swarthmore, joined the Peace Corps in 1973, spent two years teaching in what was then Zaire (now the Congo), and fell in love with Africa. Even before their Peace Corps days ended, they knew they wanted to come back. Within a few years, they found their way to Rwanda and the mountain gorillas of the Parc National des Volcans.

Vedder and Weber cover all of this in the book: how they came to work with the famed Dian Fossey and discovered a profoundly disturbed woman who had already outlived her usefulness to the gorillas she loved, how they struggled to save the rapidly dwindling mountain gorilla population in the face of overwhelming odds, and how they watched a country they loved get torn apart by civil war and the most intense genocide of a genocidal century.

It makes for something more than fascinating reading. Awesome reading is more like it, made all the more so by their understated writing. Much about Weber and Vedder must be found between the lines be-cause the couple is self-deprecatory to a fault: Mostly you are left to infer their physical courage in the face of constant challenges from both the natural and the human world; their moral courage in the face of constant challenges from Rwandan, U.S., World Bank, and other officials and fellow conservationists; their single-minded determination to save Rwanda’s mountain gorillas no matter what—even if it meant, as it often did, keeping their mouths shut in the face of provocation, obfuscation, and stupidity.

“We had heard that Fossey was difficult,” says Weber, “but we decided we were going to go [to Karisoke, Fossey’s research center], come hell or high water. We had no idea how high the water would get.”

“But the gorillas were amazing,” says Vedder, explaining why they stuck it out. “You look into their eyes, and there’s a thinking being in there. They couldn’t be left alone. They were not going to survive.”

“Fossey had won the global battle,” Weber adds, “but she was incapable of fighting the local battle. There was no one to do it but us.”

“We saw we could make a difference,” Vedder says, “And to walk away from that—we just couldn’t.”

During their first 18 months in Rwanda, Vedder spent much of her time with a single gorilla family, sitting among them day after day in the rain and cold at 10,000 feet, watching what they ate, studying not just their behavior but their nutritional needs and habitat use patterns. Meanwhile, realizing that “you couldn’t save the wildlife without addressing people’s needs as well,” Weber concentrated on the people side of the equation. “Here were impoverished local people,” he says, “who were being told to stay out of their own parks.”

Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa, and most people depend on farming for a living. Much of the Parc National des Volcans had already been lost to farming in the decade before the couple’s arrival in 1978. Weber set out to convince Rwandans that “Rwandan needs couldn’t be addressed by destroying the park” but would be better served by turning it into a tourist destination.

Thus was born the Mountain Gorilla Project (MGP), which by 1989 was attracting 7,000 tourists a year willing to pay $200 each to spend an hour with the gorillas as well as providing employment to local Rwandans hired as park rangers and guides, drastically reducing poaching and creating a great deal of indirect spending within Rwanda. It’s what has come to be called ecotourism, though there was no such name for it then. When the concept was finally developed, it drew heavily on Weber and Vedder’s pioneering work.

The program has been so successful that the gorilla population is now up to about 360 animals from a low of 260 20 years ago. Even the terrible civil war did not destroy the program; though it languished for nearly a decade, tourists in the thousands are back again.

Long before the civil war, however, Vedder and Weber had turned to other projects. “I think people find it very hard to understand how we could move on from gorillas,” says Vedder. “We were very attached to them. But the MGP was an immediate success. And we felt we were leaving the project in good hands. And finally, there were such big challenges in other areas. The more we learned about the gorillas, the more we realized we had to leave them to save them.”

Weber says, “Every moment you spend with the animals, you’re not spending with the director of parks. To save the animals, you must deal with the forces that threaten them.”

Through the 1980s, the couple worked on a variety of projects in Rwanda while earning doctorates from the University of Wisconsin and raising their sons Noah and Ethan. By 1990, they were both working for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which, under its old name of the New York Zoological Society, had funded their initial research on mountain gorillas, Weber as director of WCS’s Africa programs, Vedder as Biodiversity Program coordinator. When Weber became director of the North America Program in 1993, Vedder took over as director of the Africa Program.

In fact, Weber created the North America Program. “I was very content to be running the Africa programs,” says Weber, “but meanwhile, I’m reading about spotted owls and wolves here in the United States. It seemed odd to me that we’re asking the world’s poorest people to live with tigers and elephants, but we won’t live with wolves. We’re asking other countries not to log while we knock down our own forests. I thought we should hold ourselves to the same standards we expect of others. We could be setting a better example for the world.

“This [current Bush] administration is particularly bad,” he continues. “They are so in bed with the vested interests, especially oil and energy. They’re sticking oil rigs all over the Rockies.”

“Bush has lifted the moratorium on building logging roads in our national forests,” adds Vedder.

Weber is especially contemptuous of the proposal to drill for oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). He describes a 10-day rafting trip he recently took with son Noah through ANWR, concluding, “And then to imagine oil rigs there. How do you tell Bolivia and Ecuador not to open their parks?” His tone shifts from incredulity to sarcasm: “All parks should be inviolate,” he says, “except ours.”

“I just came back from meetings in Bolivia,” says Vedder, “and I can tell you that the world is watching what we do. Ecuador. Congo. Gabon. Are we going to drill in the most pristine wilderness left in our country?”

Two years ago, Vedder left the Africa Program herself to become a WCS vice president as well as director of the newly created Living Landscapes Program. “I was really torn,” she says. “I hated to leave Africa, but the Living Landscapes Program sounded neat intellectually, and I wanted to help it work and make sure it was linked to on-the-ground programs.”

She hasn’t had to leave Africa entirely, however. The Living Landscapes Program has projects all over the world, and, despite dealing with much larger geographic areas and many more species of animals, it isn’t much different from those early efforts of Vedder and Weber to balance the needs of gorillas with those of people.

One Living Landscapes project in Congo- Brazzaville, for instance, involves the million-acre Nouabale-Ndoki National Park, which is abutted by multiple logging concessions, the Lac Tele Community Wildlife Reserve, and a legal trophy-hunting zone as well as the borders of Cameroon and the Central African Republic. The project is studying five key species of animals known as “landscape species” because if you can protect these, you can protect just about every other species in the area.

“If you don’t know how these animals behave,” says Vedder, “you’d think: ‘a million acres [the size of the park]—that’s huge.’ But the animals have ranges even larger than the park’s boundaries. Bongos [large antelopes] travel up to 75 miles, elephants 100. Dwarf crocodiles move back and forth between the park and the reserve. Chimpanzees disappear from areas that are logged. Nobody knows why. But you can’t just say to people, ‘No hunting. No logging.’ People need to eat; they need to make a living. What is sustainable?”

Another Living Landscapes project involves Madidi National Park in Bolivia, and, of course, the lands and animals and people all around the park. Here, however, the primary conflict is not over hunting or logging but between the indigenous Tacana people of the lowland forests and developers backed by the provincial government, with additional conflict in the mountains be-tween farmers and spectacled bears.

Two of Vedder’s Living Landscape projects involve Weber’s North America Program: Greater Yellowstone and the Adirondacks, both just now in the process of selecting landscape species. “People ask us, ‘How can you work with each other day in and day out?’ But it’s all we’ve ever done,” says Vedder. From all appearances, they’re about as durable and compatible a couple as ever was, even commuting together daily from their home in Yorktown, N.Y., to WCS headquarters at the Bronx Zoo.

Nevertheless, over the years, they have spent a great deal of time apart—on a few occasions, as much as six months but much more often for shorter periods, ranging from days to weeks. Vedder recently missed the couple’s 30th wedding anniversary because of a trip to Bolivia and followed that almost immediately with another to Alaska.

Through it all, however, one or the other parent has always been home with the boys. Weber says: “One thing about WCS is that they let us kill ourselves at our own pace.” Vedder translates, “We have incredible flexibility in shaping our schedules.”

Weber adds, “We don’t have a life outside of work, family, and sports.” The boys—Noah is now a senior at Washington & Lee, and Ethan is a senior at Yorktown High—have always taken after their athletic parents, who between them won varsity letters at Swarthmore in football, lacrosse, softball, and swimming.

For many years, both parents coached community youth soccer and lacrosse, and Vedder still coaches the girls’ lacrosse team she founded 10 years ago. She missed two games in June because of her trip to Bolivia, but Weber covered for her.

“Sometimes one of the girls or a parent will ask, ‘Where’s Amy?’ I’ll say, ‘She’s in Bolivia. She’ll be back for Saturday’s game.’ I’m not sure that fully registers.”

It probably doesn’t. To all outward appearances, Vedder and Weber look like just another middle-class couple from the ’burbs, not like folks who have dodged rampaging elephants or confronted poachers armed with machetes and axes—though Vedder still wonders what impression she made on neighbors when the couple first moved to Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and she immediately began hacking away at an old tree stump in the front yard with a wicked-looking machete, whose Rwandan name translates roughly into “the peacemaker.”

Whatever the neighbors may think, this is decidedly not an ordinary couple. Though you are not likely to get them to say as much themselves, together they have helped to revolutionize the way the world thinks about and deals with conservation issues.

But the myriad forces arrayed against conservation success seem at times overwhelming.

“There’s never been a rate of extermination like we’ve seen since the turn of the last century,” Vedder says. “There has to be something of higher value than consumption. The world cannot survive at the level that we [in the United States] are living. This is just not sustainable.”

Weber adds: “We’re just totally dependent on our addiction to oil—on sticking that hypodermic needle into the ground, on this thing that is killing us. And we’re losing the population battle.”

“And the corruption battle,” Vedder interjects. “You’ve got to have your eyes wide open.”

Yet Vedder and Weber remain positive. “The great success of the Mountain Gorilla Project made us optimistic really for all of our lives,” says Vedder. “It showed us what you could do. There was a lot of doom and gloom around, but we made it work. We came away feeling that we really could make a difference.”

Weber says, “You have to fight the fight. I don’t know what the alternative is. And there are good things happening. Moose are coming back to our national forests. Beaver, martens, fishers. It looked like wolves were finished in the lower Forty-Eight, but now they’re represented in eight different states.”

“We do win battles,” says Vedder. “You can make a difference. It’s just really important to have wilderness in our lives. We need that. To remember that this world is more than just ours. Just be aware. That’s the first step.”

W.D. Ehrhart teaches English and history at the Haverford School. His newest book is The Madness of It All: Essays on War, Literature and American Life (McFarland & Co., 2002).