AMBATONDRAZAKA, MADAGASCARIndris, at two feet tall the largest of Madagascar’s lemurs, are big sleepers. The primates awaken two or three hours after sunrise, forage for leaves high in the canopy during the day (amid frequent naps), and choose their spot for the night well before dark.

On our trek into the Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor, a protected area known by its French acronym, CAZ, photographer Adriane Ohanesian, translator-guide Safidy Andrianantenaina, and I often heard their calls. The sound, a bit like someone blowing a trombone for the first time, can carry up to a mile through the dense forest.

We were hiking deep into the CAZ, a 1,470-square-mile stretch of rainforest joining two national parks that enables lemurs and other animals to mingle their populations, maintaining the genetic diversity that’s essential to their survival. Our goal was to witness firsthand the effects of illegal gem mining on some of the last remaining habitat for wild lemurs.

Our immediate destination, though, was the makeshift village of Ambodipaiso, a staging place for illegal sapphire mines that have turned parts of the CAZ into scarred, treeless wastes. Sapphires were discovered here seven years ago, and by 2016, tens of thousands of Madagascans had flooded in, illegally uprooting trees and diverting streams in hopes of finding gemstones to help lift them out of poverty. (Madagascar ranks 161 in the world in human development, according to the United Nations Development Programme, and 70 percent of its people live in poverty.)

A hundred million dollars’ worth of sapphires and other gems were smuggled out of Madagascar in 1999 alone, according to the World Bank. (This remains the most reliable study; recent estimates suggest the value today is about $150 million a year.) Most of the gem mining is done illegally in reserves, says Christoph Schwitzer, co-vice chair of the Madagascar primate specialist group with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the organization that sets the conservation status of animals and plants. The CAZ and other reserves, he says, “don’t receive anywhere near adequate protection on the ground.”

Madagascar has the third-highest rate of biodiversity on Earth, after Brazil and Indonesia. Eight of every 10 of its plants and animals are endemic. It has 300 species of reptiles and 300 of amphibians, 99 percent of them found nowhere else. Chameleons: 62 species. And along with the nearby Comoro Islands, Madagascar is the only place on the planet that’s home to wild lemurs—fully 113 species, the newest identified just last year.

The charismatic animals are a magnet for roughly 250,000 visitors a year who directly account for more than 6 percent of the country’s GDP and 5 percent of its jobs. Yet nearly all the lemur species are endangered—38, including indris, critically—and 17 have already gone extinct. Now conservationists and primatologists are gravely concerned about the effects of gem mining on remaining lemur habitat, as much as 90 percent of which has been lost to tree clearing and human incursion.

“Gems mining can be a significant driver of habitat loss,” Schwitzer says. “It can break a protected area relatively quickly.”

“People don’t care if it’s a strict protected area,” Jonah Ratsimbazafy, Schwitzer’s co-vice chair with the IUCN’s Madagascar primate specialist group, told me before I arrived in the country. “They just go—and massively—to extract stones, and nobody can stop them. It’s linked with corruption and poverty, and the laws are not really enforced. Without forest,” he added, “the lemurs cannot survive. There is no long term.”

Government protections for Madagascar’s forests date to the 1700s, when King Andrianampoinimerina outlawed cutting live trees for firewood. But beginning in the late 1800s, French colonists began intensive logging to make way for export crops. Within several decades, some 75 percent of the country’s old-growth forest had been razed. In 1927, the French banned lemur hunting and created the first nature reserve in the African region, but by 1990, 30 years after Madagascar’s independence, half the remaining forests had gone.

In 2003 then President Marc Ravolamanana began a dramatic expansion of protected areas, quadrupling their acreage by 2016. Nevertheless, the eastern rainforest that encompasses the CAZ, with its indris and many other lemur species, kept contracting. From its original prehuman 27 million acres, it had shrunk to less than 10 million acres by 1985. Since then, according to research by Lucienne Wilmé, national coordinator for Madagascar at the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization, deforestation in some parts has been accelerating.

In 2012, Madagascar’s government, acknowledging that it didn’t have either the money or the manpower for effective environmental protection, engaged Conservation International, a Virginia-based environmental nonprofit, to manage the CAZ. Although clearing of old-growth trees for agriculture, logging, and mining has been banned since 2015, half of one percent of Madagascar’s vestigial protected forests are disappearing every year, according to Eric Rabenasolo, director general of forests for Madagascar’s Ministry of the Environment, Ecology, and Forests.

Exactly how much clearing is for gemstone mining isn’t knowable because it occurs almost entirely under the blanket of the “informal economy”—jobs and activities not regulated by government. Gem deposits are shallow and easily uncovered, making identifiable industrial-scale operations unnecessary.

Local people switch opportunistically among mining, farming, and other kinds of work, so it’s impossible to ascertain how many people are involved in illegal mining. One estimate, published a decade ago in The Journal of Modern African Studies, by Rosaleen Duffy, professor of politics at the University of Sheffield, in the United Kingdom, put the figure at as many as half a million. That would make illicit gemstones Madagascar’s second largest employer after agriculture.

AMBODIPAISO

It was shortly before dusk when we arrived in Ambodipaiso. Although the village is far from any public water supply, power line, or cell phone tower, hundreds live here, providing goods and services for area miners, portering gear, and themselves digging for gemstones.

That night Andrianantenaina and I bunked in a tiny shelter made of sticks, and Ohanesian slept in a tent. Before dawn I was roused by crowing roosters, banging pots, and a crying baby. I wondered if these sounds bothered the snoozing indris. When the darkness lifted, I emerged to see a woman feeding two lemurs a banana.

Méline said she bought them from a hunter who had killed their mother for meat. She’d named one, a common brown lemur, Bridola, and the other, a black-and-white-ruffed lemur, Roki. The IUCN lists brown lemurs as “near threatened.” Black-and-white ruffed lemurs are “critically endangered.”

Méline runs a shop with her husband, selling everything from rice and garlic to ramen and amoxicillin. “I have maybe four customers a day,” she said. “We don’t make any profit.”

In the forest, her lemurs would be eating young leaves, flowers, fruit, and insects, but Méline feeds them mostly bananas and rice. I noticed that the fur on their tails was sparse, indicating a dietary deficiency, according to Patricia Wright, a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, in New York State, and executive director of the university’s Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments. That bad diet would cause their premature death, Wright said.

As more trees are cleared, lemur groups come into contact with one another, sparking fights for resources—another ledge in Wright’s cascade. And, she said, mine clearings make lemurs even more vulnerable because people don’t have to go so far into the forest to hunt them.

One man I spoke to in Ambodipaiso, Banjindray Elys D’Antoine, said he used to eat lemur when he worked in mines south of the CAZ. The meat is tough, he said, and must be boiled for a long time, then fried. I asked him how it tastes. “Like a cat,” he replied.

From Ambodipaiso, Ohanesian, Andrianantenaina, and I—accompanied by two off-duty police officers hired for security—set off on the seven-mile trek to the largest gem mining area in the CAZ. Local people jokingly call the site Tananarive, the French name for Madagascar’s capital, Antanarivo.

Within half an hour we heard the now familiar whoop of indris. Orchids grew in profusion beneath the thick canopy of trees, some as tall as a hundred feet, and on the path, we saw giant millipedes and a worm as long as my arm.

Four miles on, we came to Bemainty, where some 80 people live with no running water, electricity, sanitation, health care, or communications. Village leader Randriamatody (who like many Madagascans uses one name) told us about the night in 2016 when criminals attacked the village, stealing money that had been collected as fees from passing miners and killing Bemainty’s previous headman.

“Nothing like this happened here before the mine,” said a woman named Farah, who told us she’d been injured in the attack. Mining in the area, she said, brought the village “no advantage. All I got was this scar on my forehead.”

TANANARIVE

After two more hours on the trail, we came down a hill, and Tananarive opened up before us—a wasteland of mud, small shacks, and holes in the ground. Evidently, most of the sapphires here had already been extracted. Many miners, we were told, had returned home or gone to Ilakaka, a mine site some 400 miles to the southwest near Isalo National Park; others had gone to a new mine in the CAZ about 80 miles away near the village of Lakato. But some artisanal mining was still under way at Tananarive.

After a patch of trees is cleared, a log is laid across a nearby stream to divert it toward the target area. Water washes away the top layer of dirt, and a team of four or five miners gets to work digging. It can take several weeks to excavate a pit perhaps 30 feet in diameter and 12 feet deep. When the hole is about three feet deep, groundwater rushes in and is suctioned out with a mechanical pump. The excavated soil is washed through a sieve, which traps small stones that are examined for gems.

We met three young men, Mbola, 30, Soasite, 25, and Zanry, 20, who were noisily engaged in this final task. Soasite shoveled dirt from a pile onto a screen atop a wooden supporting structure. A hose attached to a pump in the diverted stream spewed water onto the dirt. The other two then shoveled the mud back up to the hose to be washed through the screen again. Mbola and Zanry wore empty rice bags with cut-out armholes to protect their clothes from the splashes. Mud covered their faces. The trio laughed constantly, and Andrianantenaina explained that they were having fun at the foreigners’ expense. During the half hour or so that we watched them work, they found no sapphires.

On the slope above, a woman called out to us. It was Laurence Asma, wearing leggings under a denim skirt, flip-flops with a U.S. flag motif, and a long-sleeved t-shirt that read “precious lovey dovey” in sequins. Her pet common brown lemur, Ani, crouched on her shoulder.

Asma said she’d moved here two years ago from Toliara, a city in the southwest. She said she runs several small mines at Tananarive that employ 20 men, down from the hundred miners who worked for her in 2016, at the peak of the sapphire rush.

“Too much stones here before,” she said. “Now, little.” Nevertheless, she said she intended to stay in Tanarive a bit longer. “I wait. I wait for Allah. Sometimes he bring me big stone, and I take to my village.” Her biggest find so far had been a sapphire that earned $3,500, a fortune in a country where the per capita income in 2016 barely nudged above a dollar a day. She split the proceeds evenly among the team of four or five who found it.

Asma said she has a Sri Lankan backer in Antananarivo who sends money over the Orange mobile money network to buy rice for her employees and fuel for her three pumps. Every few weeks she travels to the capital to sell him the gemstones her team has found. The Sri Lankans, she said, “sell to Thai people, Dubai people.” Somebody, she added, gets a good price, but, no, she doesn’t, she said with a laugh.

Sri Lanka has been a source of sapphires for 1,500 years, and Sri Lankans, who have developed unrivaled expertise in grading, cutting, polishing, and trading the gems, dominate the trade in Madagascar. Murshid Mohammed, 29, is a dealer in Ambatondrazaka, the nearest substantial city to the CAZ and the main trading center for sapphires mined there. He says a high-quality blue sapphire of 25 carats from Tananarive costs him 300,000 Madagascar ariary—about $90.

A few months ago I saw a five-carat sapphire, cut and polished but not heat treated, listed online by a Florida jeweler for $19,600. Because of the way the international gem market works, almost none of the thousands-of-dollars-a-carat retail value of sapphires goes to the miners of Tananarive, and very little to local mine bosses like Asma.

Meager though her take is, Asma considers herself lucky to be running a relatively successful operation. “Too many people no eat three times” a day, she said. “You have no stone, no job.” She blames the government for failing to attend to the needs of Madagascans. “My president no good,” she said, referring to Madagascar’s leader at the time, Hery Rajaonarimampianina, who was voted out of office last November.

“I WAS ANGRY”

Given both the seriousness of the threats to wildlife in Madagascar’s protected areas and the government’s lack of capacity for robust enforcement, grassroots groups have stepped into the breach. Elected members of volunteer community-based forestry organizations known as VOIs are now managing protected areas under the aegis of Conservation International and other environmental nonprofits.

After saying goodbye to Asma, we hiked back to the village where we’d left our car and drove to Moramanga, 70 miles to the southwest. We wanted to talk to Jean Yves Ratovoson, a VOI vice president accused of killing 10 critically endangered lemurs—nine indris and one diademed sifaka—in the CAZ. Police arrested Ratovoson, 51, early last year at a hunting camp near Andasibe, and he was in prison in Moramanga awaiting trial. If convicted, he faces four years in prison.

Ratovoson and I talked in the prison warden’s office. This was his first arrest, he said. He was a farmer, and he and his wife, a schoolteacher, have nine children.

He said he went on the hunt because he was angry. He had stood for election to the post of vice president of the Firaisankina VOI “to improve my community,” he said. But during patrols of the portion of the CAZ under the VOI’s stewardship, Ratovoson discovered that large-scale illegal logging was occurring, and he couldn’t get anyone to do anything about it. “Five trucks a day were coming out loaded with wood,” he said. “Pretty much the whole [area] was cut.”

He said he reported the logging to Conservation International’s director of the CAZ, Hantanirina Ravololonanahary. “They came to the forest to see but did nothing,” Ratovoson said. He paused, then said, “Why are people cutting trees not sent to jail like me? The law is the same.”

So when an acquaintance approached Ratovoson proposing that he join a lemur hunt in the CAZ, he said he figured, why not? “I thought, if they can [cut trees], then I will not have any problem. I knew hunting lemurs is bad, but I was angry about this situation.”

A letter Conservation InternationaI’s Ravololonanahary sent to Joanita Ndahimananjara, Madagascar’s environment minister at the time, describing action the organization took following the arrest makes no mention of the illegal logging report Ratovoson said he’d sent Ravololonanahary before the alleged lemur hunt.

Conservation International told me that Ravololonanahary wasn’t available for an interview and instead referred me to Tokihenintsoa Andrianjohaninarivo, the organization’s regional biodiversity scientist in Toamasina, a city on the east coast. I phoned and asked what happens when a report of tree cutting comes to Conservation International from VOI officials.

“We report to local authorities and organize a patrol to see the facts,” she replied. Then I asked about Ratovoson’s allegation that Conservation InternationaI’s director of the CAZ knew about his report of tree cutting and failed to act.

There was a long pause.

“Conservation International is the manager of the protected area but has not the ability to put people in jail,” Andrianjohaninarivo said. “All we have the right to do is talk to the forest service, and then they have to react. We have reported to authorities every infraction, but most of the time they’re not able to respond for lack of budget, or their people are somewhere else. If we don’t have the support of the authorities, we can’t do anything.”

When pressed, spokesperson Jenny Parker McCloskey later acknowledged that Conservation International had received a report of logging from members of the VOI with which Ratovoson was involved but that Ratovoson was not among those who made the report. She said Ravololonanahary referred the matter to officials in the forest service, who did not respond to repeated requests to verify that they had in fact received Conservation InternationaI’s report.

Andrianjohaninarivo’s explanation seems plausible. Police who arrested Ratovoson hoped to go after his accomplices, who’d fled during the raid, but the police chief, Yvan Randriamiarana, told me they lacked the necessary resources. The village where the suspects lived was some way up a dirt path, and they had no means of getting there, he said. “We don’t have a car or motorcycle. We have 10 gendarmes in Andasibe, and we should have at least 15 because the area is vast and the population is high.”

Given that the alleged lemur crime was by a VOI leader, says Steig Johnson, professor of anthropology at the University of Calgary and co-vice chair of the IUCN’s Madagascar primate specialist group, this incident “is particularly demoralizing. There’s a fundamental lack of adequate training and engagement with some of these communities. Nobody wins just if someone is prosecuted for the crime—we need to get at the root cause of this kind of wildlife crime in these communities.”

I asked a VOI volunteer, Abraham Rajotonirina, how the CAZ can be protected if its protectors themselves are hunting lemurs? It was Rajotonirina who, during one of the regular patrols he conducts looking for signs of illegal activity, had come across Ratovoson’s hunting camp. He reported it to a VOI vice president, Toto Jean Etienne, leading to Ratovoson’s arrest.

“Maybe someone needs to pay us to protect the forest,” he replied. “We’re working for free, but we do that because we love the forest. We need a better road so tourists can come and love the forest also.” With money, he said, the community would be able to pay “people to go out as scouts.” (A similar program in Tanzania, called TACARE, is showing results, bolstering local communities while conserving vital chimp habitat.)

“FAKE NEWS”

After returning to the United States, I spoke with Vincent Pardieu, a gemologist who in 2016 brought the Tananarive sapphire rush to the industry’s attention with a presentation at the Gemological Institute of America, in Carlsbad, California. The institute identifies and evaluates stones and trains gemologists. Since 2012, Pardieu has been spreading the messageto the gem industry that illegal mining in Madagascar is not harmful to lemur habitat.

“Fake news” was how he characterized reports emphasizing sapphire mining’s ill effects.

“I could hear lemurs every morning—that’s proof lemurs are still alive,” he said, referring to a trip he took to Tananarive in 2017. “If lemurs are being attacked by miners, I don’t think you’ll hear them.” He insisted that despite news reports of deforestation around the site, “miners are not destroying the forest. They’re too busy mining—why would they go chop the forest? Again, a very good example of fake news.”