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| Profile |
Fearful Symmetry
Louise Kramer
02/01/2007
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Burning Bright
Last year, Cline did just that. He took time away from his
office in Manhattan and his wife and five children in Greenwich, Conn., to
attend a five-day meeting staged by WCS in Nagarhole National Park in Karnataka,
India. The organization has worked there for the past 20 years in an effort to
save tigers. The big cat population has grown by 400 percent at the site, says
Cline, tapping an encyclopedic command of tiger statistics.
The
philanthropist wants to see that kind of success repeated at all wild tiger
preserves. One of the challenges is getting researchers to explore new
approaches. For example, Cline says that most tiger experts are so entrenched in
the issues that they miss a glaring hole in their work: They do not have
accurate tiger counts. “Believe it or not, they never had the objective to
measure the problem in terms of the populations,” he adds. Moreover, Cline says
that there is little collaboration among tiger projects in different countries.
This insight became the basis for Tigers Forever. The organization—Cline
came up with the name—brings a business approach to hard science. Another big
cat enthusiast and supporter of WCS, Tom Kaplan, a former hedge fund manager and
mining industry investor, has donated $5 million to the effort. WCS allocates $2
million to $2.5 million per year to the work. “Ours is an overlay to really make
it effective,” Cline says.
Cline believes philanthropists must take a long
view, lest a project become sidetracked reacting to short-term crises. His
donation is intended to be allocated over the next decade as first-stage funding
for the very specific work of tiger counting. He is also seeking support from
other tiger philanthropists to make sure their funds are all being used toward
the same goal. “I am the catalyst for getting the money going,” he says.
Alan
Rabinowitz, a leading big cat expert and executive director of the science and
exploration program at WCS, says he has never seen this kind of interest from a
funder. “Sometimes we get wealthy people who are retired who want to give up
their job and come in the field with us, but not someone like Michael who is
still completely engaged in his own world,” he says. Of their recent meeting in
India, Rabinowitz explains: “This wasn’t going out sightseeing. It was sitting
in a meeting all day long every day, and being 100 percent engaged in
strategizing for our programs.”
Cline has loved animals since he was a boy
growing up far from the jungle in a middle-class family in what he describes as
a “nothing town” 28 miles north of New York. He began traveling the world to
take pictures of tigers and other big game as a bachelor pursuit. His real
commitment to the big cats began a decade ago after he attended a lecture on the
sorry plight of tigers given by Rabinowitz at the Bronx Zoo. Cline was so
impressed by Rabinowitz’s passion and intelligence that he sought to work with
him in some way. Today, they talk tigers several times a week.
Cline’s home
in Greenwich shows little evidence of his passion for tigers and trips to the
jungle, save for a photo of him on an elephant that he keeps behind the desk in
his study. He jokes that his wife made him put all his mementoes in the basement
to keep the house looking nice. As his children run up to him for hugs and
attention after school, it is difficult to imagine how Cline can devote so much
time and energy to his philanthropy. “I think about how I have to raise x
million dollars, and that I’ve got to get help in a bunch of areas,” he says.
“It would be much easier to be retired, go to a couple of board meetings, tell
them to raise more funds for tigers, and then go home. But that is not who I
am.”
Louise Kramer is a freelance writer based in New York.
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