Watching the ongoing deforestation in Madagascar is difficult for Mark Downey ’09, an environmental studies major working toward his master’s degree in forest resource management at Duke University.

Painfully aware that the rainforest that once ran the length of the island now covers only about 30 percent of the land, he notes that as farmers continue to slash and burn, they contribute to the country’s already devastating soil erosion, exposing more and more ground to the wet season’s cyclones.

Volunteering with a nonprofit called Friends of Madagascar, he originally planned on spending only six months in the island nation constructing two fruit tree nurseries, training local growers to propagate and plant fruit trees, and creating a terraced orchard demonstration site.

“An environmentally sustainable source of income and nutrition, exotic fruit trees are less likely to be deliberately burned,” he says. Now extending his stay for another six months, Mark hopes not only to plant more fruit trees, but also to set up partnerships with village conservation groups and train his Malagasy replacement so the work of reforestation will continue long after he has left.

“This is what I’ve been studying for and dreaming of throughout college and graduate school: to practice stewarding God’s creation, both because God treasures it for its own sake, and because the land is a vital component of human life,” he says.

Helping people like Emile propagate fruit trees on his family’s land is exactly the work Mark hoped to accomplish. “After we plant, I’ll train Emile and his family to propagate their own trees, so they can plant more next year,” he explains, adding that he is also preparing a sitespecific, fruit tree care handbook— a training guide for his Malagasy replacement.

“I am finding real ways to help communities out here re-envision their roles as Creation caretakers, and that’s why I came,” he says.

In addition to his forestry work in Madagascar, Mark has also joined studies on prey species availability, and on hedgehog- like animals called tenrecs.

Environmental issues haven’t always been a passion for Mark. In fact, he came to Wheaton as an English major, after disliking science classes in high school. Then everything changed after he spent a summer at Wheaton’s Science Station in the Black Hills.

“I couldn’t leave that magical place unchanged,” he says. “I wanted to see the world as God sees it, not just as a collection of people—in God’s image though they may be—but as an entire symphony—art, moving poetry, the hands of God changing hearts while subducting tectonic plates and manufacturing sugars from sunlight in a leaf!”

With plans to complete his master’s in 2012, Mark’s first order of business upon graduation will be to lead a wilderness canoe trip down the Mississippi River with Time Machine Outfitters, a guide company he and his friend, Jeff Nelson ’09, began several years ago.

After canoeing the Mississippi, he hopes to blend his passions for travel, writing, and ecosystem management, but mostly, he says, “I want to radically change the way people, especially Christians in America, view our connection to the natural world and to God the Creator.”

by Katherine Halberstadt Anderson '90