Botany professor Paul Cox knew his marriage was working when he announced to his wife he was ready to sell their home to save a rain forest in Western Samoa and she said, "What a good idea!"
Barbara Cox knows what makes her husband tick. For him to stake their house against the logging of an island village's forest was not out of character at all. Nor is the fact that he's planning to donate the thousands he's won back to the preservation effort.Cox, dean of the honors and general education program at Brigham Young University, is widely known for his work in saving rain forests in the South Pacific and Caribbean. He's even regarded by the Samoans as the spirit of an ancient goddess, the "voice of conservation." The villagers have named him a chief.
He founded the Seacology Foundation dedicated to "saving the world one village at a time." The foundation helps the island communities get schools and wells and civic improvements without having to sell their precious rain-forest timber.
And he's just been named one of the world's most effective environmentalists. Cox has been awarded the Goldman Prize for grass-roots environmentalism offered by Richard and Rhoda Goldman of San Francisco. The award, referred to by Time magazine as a sort of Nobel Prize for environmental heroes, carries with it a $75,000 cash prize. Nominations are accepted only from 19 internationally known environmental organizations, and the award is endorsed by 107 heads of state.
Cox intends to donate his half back to an endowment fund set up to keep protecting the forest.
He gets half because he shares the award with Chief Fuiono Senio, who he says really deserves the award. "My own role is small," he said.
Senio and Cox saved the 30,000-acre forest the villagers of Falealupo were ready to sell for the price of a school. Loggers were offering less than $2 an acre for the forest but the villagers didn't see another way to get a school for their children.
Cox, in Samoa for his ongoing study of the rain-forest plants and their potential for medicines, offered to sell his house to raise the $65,000 needed to top the loggers' offer.
Senio, the 60-year-old head of the village of Falealupo, first convinced his village to take Cox's offer seriously and then ran six miles to stop the bulldozers. The logging company had already started clear cutting a section of the forest next to Falealupo. Senio chased them away and waved a machete in the logger's faces.
"He told the loggers if they ever came back, they would be `as the dust,' " said Cox.
"He is truly the hero. He shows that one single person can make a difference."
By taking on the fight, Senio made saving the forest an issue the island people saw as their own.
His actions are already legendary throughout the islands, said Cox. Senio, along with two other island chiefs, has set up a preservationist organization that 50 villages have joined and successfully protested French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
Ultimately, Cox didn't have to sell his home and car. Ken Murdock, founder of Nature's Way, and Rex Maughan, founder of Forever Living Products of Phoenix, along with a number of BYU students and interested Utahns, raised the money in a few weeks' time.
"When we returned to the village with the money and paid the loggers off, I heard the villagers cheer," said Cox. "It was one of the greatest days of my life."
The logging companies are paying a pittance for the tropical trees, said Cox, in addition to robbing the world of a precious and little-understood resource.
"They're basically paying a penny for every 10 trees. They're making a huge profit, akin to drug dealers."
Cox and the villagers want the forests preserved so they continue to benefit the islanders as they have for centuries. He's excited about the endowment fund, which will guarantee stewardship over the forest stays with the local people.
"People endow chairs and professorships and institutions," said Cox. "There's never to my knowledge been a rain forest endowed. I do hope it starts a trend."
NuSkin International and Nature's Way have both matched Cox's contribution to the endowment, something no one's done before for a Goldman prize winner. That's put more than $100,000 into the fund.
Cox will return to Samoa in May to help dedicate an aerial canopy walkway that can charter "eco-tourism" to the rain forest and help raise money off the forest without harm.
"Part of what we've been told is if we can show companies how to make money off the rain forests, they will leave them alone. If suddenly the rain forest starts yielding money, it's seen as an asset."
With control in the hands of the islanders, Cox feels the rain forests are safe.
"These villagers have demonstrated the ability to protect and conserve rain forests for over 2,000 years. In fact, in their culture, they've learned how to do something that still seems to be beyond our grasp, which is how to use a resource without destroying it," said Cox.