If there were one more thing I could do,

it would be to go on safari once again.

—Isak Dinesen (1961)

Craig S. Harrison is a biologist and environmental lawyer. With a lifelong passion for adventure and nature, he has traveled the remote parts of all seven continents to experience and photograph wildlife. Dreams of a Vanishing Africa recounts his year-long journey in Africa that stimulated his interest in the earth’s wild places.

Craig wrote the first draft of his travelogue in spring 1972 in Nice, France, and toyed with it occasionally during the next several decades. But education and career constraints kept him from turning that draft—plus various notes, letters, photographs, and memories—into a cohesive narrative until now.

After earning a graduate degree in biology, Craig studied seabirds in Alaska and Hawaii for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He did aerial and zodiac surveys and learned their natural histories and conservation problems while staying on remote, mostly uninhabited Pacific islands. This led to his Seabirds of Hawaii: Natural History and Conservation published by Cornell University Press.

He later earned a law degree and practiced environmental law. During his thirty-year legal career, Craig remained a naturalist on weekends and vacations. He has served on governing boards of wildlife-conservation groups during most of his life. He was a founder of the American Bird Conservancy, and for over twenty years advocated for seabird conservation on behalf of the international Pacific Seabird Group. The Pacific Seabird Group sponsors the Craig S. Harrison Conservation Fund Grants Program https://pacificseabirdgroup.org/grants/.

His ten trips to Africa and Madagascar have included over forty parks and reserves. Since the 1990s, Craig’s interests have focused on southern Africa. He and his wife Marina have made many photographic safaris to South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar. Craig and Marina live in rural Santa Rosa, California, in the midst of oak savannahs and vineyards.