She hopes to save forests with silk

Catherine Craig, an expert on spider webs, holds up wild silkworm cocoons that have been washed, flattened and glued.

In 1972, Catherine Craig celebrated her 21st birthday at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, while she was studying with the famed primatologist Jane Goodall. Thirty years later, Craig returned, this time as a conservation biologist with a focus on evolution and ecology and a very particular subspecialty - spider webs.

The Gombe she found was horrifically different from the one she had experienced in her youth. The areas bordering the park had been victims of the slash and burn agriculture that is destroying forests around the world.

"I couldn't blame the people who had destroyed that land because they're starving, they need to eat, and, to them, slash and burn makes absolute sense," Craig said recently as she walked through an Audubon preserve across the street from her Lincoln home. "But it still bothered me."

The farmers were destroying the forest to survive; to stop them, she needed to find an alternative, something that would compel the farmers to preserve the land. She thinks she has, and it's something she already knows a lot about: wild silk.

Craig, who's affiliated with Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, got "hooked on silk," during a year in Costa Rica after graduate school. She saw spider webs everywhere in the rain forest, and wondered how they worked, why so many different species of spiders were spinning similar webs, and why, after millions of years, insects had not learned to avoid them. She wrote her Ph.D on the materials and design of the webs, went on to a career in academia - including nearly a decade at Yale - and then, when she returned to Gombe six years ago, found a calling.

The forests that were being slashed and burned contained wild silk moths. If she could teach the farmers how to harvest the silk from their cocoons, to profit from that silk, to make a livelihood from that silk, then, she hoped, she could convince them to preserve, and even replant, the forests.

In 2003, Craig founded Conservation through Poverty Alleviation International, which took its seemingly simple idea - plant trees, raise larvae, earn income - to Madagascar, a biologically rich Indian Ocean island nation where deforestation is also a problem and which had a tradition of silk production and weaving on which to build.

There had already been projects similar to Craig's but because her whole point was to preserve the native forests, hers was the first to use wild silk.

"Silk is huge on the world market," Craig said. "But that's mostly silk from the domesticated silk worm. Wild silks are quite different structurally. One family [of moths] in Madagascar produces silk that is porous, which makes the thread more lightweight, it can dry faster, and it picks up dyes well.

The first five years of the project, Craig says with weary eyes, have been a personal and financial struggle. Her small organization - her team is all Malagasi - scrimped by with donations and small grants, falling short of their goal to make the project self-supporting.

And it's been short of a slam dunk convincing the locals to abandon habit in favor of the promise of something better. But Leslie Brunetta, a journalist who is working on a book with Craig about the evolution of spider silk, believes the project is turning a corner.

"When I was there in April, we took a boat upriver to this subsistence village where the people really had nothing," Brunetta said. "Not everyone was interested [in Craig's idea], but a core group was. They get that they're running out of time. They get that they can't keep slashing and burning. They see the erosion problems. They see that there's not much forest left, and that forest is important to their spiritual life. And they get that if they can make more of a living by keeping trees up, they're willing to commit the labor to do it."

Last year, the project opened its first demonstration site in Madagascar, which shows people how to grow the food plants for the moths and harvest the cocoons without destroying the pupa - thereby preserving the insect for another generation - and has plans for a crafts center next year that will teach people how to make products from the silk cocoons.

The daily challenges of trying to make the program work have clearly left Craig a little worn down. Her voice can slide into a tone somewhere between fatigued and frustrated when she describes the endless battles of the good fight. But, she says, she is far from worn out.

"This is what I have to do," she said. "I have no alternative, because I believe very strongly that people in developing countries need alternatives."

Fact sheet

Hometown: She grew up on a citrus farm in Ventura, California; lives in Lincoln.

Education: Studied human biology as an undergraduate at Stanford University, graduating in 1973; master's degree in zoology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1976; and earned a Ph.D from Cornell in 1985 for her research on the design and material of spider webs.

Family: Husband, Bob Weber, is a chemical engineer and tech consultant. They have two Maine coon cats, Mic and Mac.

Hobbies: Her main hobby is being outdoors and exploring new habitats related to her work.