Sighting Jane Goodall in Chico's Jungle

D.C. woman to be honored for work with Congo's bonobos

Offbeat nonprofit group hopes to use carbon credits to protect habitatBy Susan Kinzie

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 16, 2009

It wasn't long after Sally Coxe started learning about bonobos -- the chimpanzee-like primates that many scientists believe could be humans' closest evolutionary ancestors -- that she quit her job to try to save them.

Her family thought she was crazy. For years, with a brutal war raging around the bonobos' habitat in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it was difficult to find people who worried about the apes as she did, or to raise money and travel there to help.

But somehow, Coxe and the small, offbeat nonprofit group she co-founded in a Woodley Park apartment have done some remarkable things. They forged alliances with villagers and Congolese leaders, and have implemented a grass-roots model for protecting endangered species.

Wednesday night in Copenhagen, the Bonobo Conservation Initiative will be honored by the Coalition of Rainforest Nations and conservation groups, along with people such as Jane Goodall, the internationally known primatologist. BCI will announce an experimental effort to protect the rainforest where bonobos live -- an area bigger than Belgium -- supported by the Congolese president and local partners, and financed, they hope, with carbon credits.

Negotiators in Copenhagen are working on a deal that would, in an effort to offset emissions, pay countries for protecting forests.

"Much in the way that Jane Goodall is the chimp lady and Dian Fossey the gorilla lady," said Robert Booth, former managing editor of National Geographic magazine, "I've always thought of Sally as the bonobo lady."

The tale of BCI is a love story. First Coxe fell for the bonobos. Then she met Michael Hurley. In 2002, after a particularly nasty bout with parasites, out of money and wondering how she was going to keep the nonprofit going, Coxe was introduced to Hurley by a friend. He was one of the few to really get the whole complicated, spiritual vision of the thing, she said. He came over and, essentially, never left.

In their living room, decorated with African drums and books, they finish one another's sentences. Coxe, a slight, beaming 50-year-old with long, sun-bleached hair, is the president of BCI. Hurley, leaning forward and talking fast in a Mexican woven hoodie, is the vice president and executive director. They have a second small apartment next door, the BCI office: three desks and a bed where visitors crash.

Hurley's longtime friend Bill Duggan, owner of the Adams Morgan bar where Coxe and Hurley often hold their business meetings, said, "Michael's your swashbuckling Irishman . . . sort of a throwback to the African explorer, charging ahead. And Sally's just an angel. She's so idealistic, she's blinded to the dangers because of her belief." “