Profile of Daniel H. Janzen

Abstract

When Daniel Janzen gave his acceptance speech for the 1997 Kyoto Prize, he disappointed many people who had come to hear a preeminent biologist discuss iconic studies, from ant–acacia mutualism to seed predation (1, 2). “They expected a talk about science, but I’d switched to conservation,” explains Janzen, DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Janzen, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992, and his wife, tropical ecologist Winnie Hallwachs, have spent 35 years reframing the idea of national parks into that of collaboration between forests and societies. “The biology is easy, but we have to study society,” explains Janzen. “For me, it’s all human ecology.” Together with thousands of partners, they have developed and expanded Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG) in Costa Rica into 168,000 ha of land and sea that, Janzen notes, protect 2.6% of the world’s biodiversity, and are now using DNA barcoding technology to create a library of species (3). Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs. Image courtesy of Maureen A. Donnelly (Florida International University, Miami, FL). Growing up in Minnesota in the 1940s, Janzen quickly became comfortable in nature. “I shot my first pheasant off the back steps, but I could get the bus off the front steps to the Minneapolis public library,” he recalls. “I had the best of both worlds.” The son of a wildlife management administrator, Janzen’s fascination with the tropics began at the age of 14 on a butterfly-collecting trip to Mexico. In 1962, with a BS degree from the University of Minnesota and having entered the entomology PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, Janzen returned to Mexico, looking for a thesis project. “In those days, rule number one for ecology graduate students was that you did all your own research,” …