Here’s what the authors had to say about their amazing experience:

You left everything behind, went to Africa, and lived in some of the most remote places on the continent. What drove you to do that?

As young graduate students back in 1972, we heard a lecturer talk about how Africa’s wildlife was disappearing. We worked for several years, sold some of our wedding presents, and left with one-way tickets and backpacks to conserve African wildlife.

Your book is written on several levels. Tell us about that.

On the surface, Secrets of the Savanna is a true-adventure story of how we stopped officially sponsored ivory poachers, who were operating like a drug cartel in an untamed remote African wilderness. So it is a thriller as well as the story of a great win for wildlife and for local village people. But on another level the book reveals how much we learned about humans by studying social animals like elephants and lions — such things as risk taking in males and the genetic basis for girls having close female friends. Wild animals show us why we need our natal troops and a real home and what we lose when these basic social units are fragmented for whatever reason. This book is as much about people as it is about elephants.

How did you stop the poaching?

The carrot-and-stick approach. First we developed the stick by supplying destitute government game scouts with equipment, training, and transport so that they could capture poachers. But we realized that we could not stop the poaching unless we found alternative jobs for the poachers and villagers. Ivory smugglers organized like a drug cartel — including high-level corrupt officials, who made a lot of money from the sale of ivory — paid indigent villagers as little as ten dollars to kill an elephant. They yanked children from school and paid them a mere lump of meat to carry their contraband. A lot has been said about how commercial poaching adversely affects wildlife, but not much has been said about how it corrupts and demeans rural people and steals their future. We set up a program that offered jobs, training, loans, health care, improved agriculture, and education to the people in villages where poaching was rampant, so that they could have legal jobs that were safe and provided a better livelihood to their families. That was the carrot.

Did this stop the poaching?

Mark: Not for a long time. Eventually I had to adopt some unconventional techniques. With permission from the government I flew at night with an assistant who shot firecrackers at the poachers’ camps. The firecrackers were harmless, but the poachers didn’t know that. They made a loud bang and a flash of light when they exploded. Poaching decreased. But then I began finding poachers’ camps at night using night-vision goggles, a GPS, and a helicopter. I landed game scouts virtually anyplace and at any time. But flying at night without lights to avoid being shot was extremely dangerous. One very dark night I descended into a deep ravine without knowing it and struck some trees with my main rotor. I had quite a number of near misses.

When did the poaching finally get better?

It took about six years, but finally the fish farms we had helped villagers start began producing lots of fish, the millers made a profit, and the beekeepers produced honey. The villages had schools and better health care. When the United Nations enacted a moratorium on the trade in elephant parts in 1990, black-market ivory became nearly worthless. A man could make more money as a fish farmer than he could as a poacher. The poaching stopped. When we started, they were shooting a thousand elephants a year; in 1996 they shot none.

So the elephants were finally safe, but were you?

When we shut down the poaching completely, we put very powerful men as high up as the president’s office out of the illegal ivory business. Somehow they had to stop us. So one year while we were in the States on home leave, the paramilitary stormed our compound in town and our bush camp and put our staff under house arrest, including a Peace Corps worker who had been seconded to our project. They didn’t even bother to produce a counterfeit warrant. Officials from the American embassy and the British High Commission flew a plane to rescue our staff. There were some pretty tense days and nights, but eventually our staff was set free. A lot of our equipment was confiscated, though, and the ambassador warned that it was not safe for us to return. We thought we had lost the project and that poaching would flare up again.

What happened to prevent that?

This is where the real hero of this story comes in. Hammer Simwinga was the Zambian coordinator of our village work. When corrupt officials took over our project in the main village and seized the office, the fax, the phones, our bank accounts, the trucks, and even our mailbox, we could not get in touch with Hammer. The officials had taken his motorbike, so to keep the project going he walked to remote villages and encouraged the people not to lose their trust in our work and its ideals. With no revolving fund, he kept the project going on the strength of his character alone. He made no salary. Finally, we got a letter from him with a new postal address and sent him money to start over.

And how are things today?

Our project is twenty years old this year. We have helped more than twenty thousand rural Zambians. From the original fourteen villages, the project has been expanded to fifty-two. The people now make one hundred times more money than they did while poaching elephants. Food security has more than doubled, and malnutrition has been eliminated. Our Rural Health Care initiative is still the only health care program in most villages. Elephant poaching is nil. Hammer Simwinga still directs the project, and now he contacts us from the Internet Cafe in Mpika!

How did you study the elephants?

We darted one cow from each of sixteen herds and put radio collars on them. Mark would fly our helicopter — around trees and through canyons — to within ten feet above the elephant; the vet would hang out of the door and shoot it with an immobilization gun. We would sometimes mistakenly dart a cow with a calf. Baby elephants weight 225 pounds or more shortly after birth, and they often charged us. One calf stood on Mark’s foot and butted him in the stomach, flattening him. The other way we studied them was to calculate the ages of most of the population by measuring their footprints. To do this, I (Delia) walked most of the rivers of the park every year. I took off from camp with a tracker (the first one was an ex-poacher) and several carriers, and we would walk for days along the rivers in completely wild areas. Not once in all those years did we come upon another person.

What was the most exciting thing that happened during your walks to study elephants?

Delia: I always insisted on camping about eighty yards away from my team of trackers so that I could have some privacy. One night I was reading by the campfire and heard a noise. I looked up to see a lioness circling in the grass; she would not go away and was unafraid of me. That’s a bad sign. Eventually she came within about ten yards of me, so I shouted to the men, and they rushed over with flashlights. We moved my tent over to their camp.

You found yourselves in very stressful situations: poachers shooting at you, assassination attempts in your camp. How did your marriage survive this?

Delia: Well, frankly, our marriage almost didn’t survive the stress. Poachers often shot at Mark when he flew at night. He flew low level, in the dark, among the mountains. I thought he was taking too many risks. I finally set up my own camp some distance away. I think every woman should have her own camp. During those bad years, occasionally we would get together in some neutral and peaceful corner of the wilderness to enjoy a pod of hippos in a pool or a mountain peak. This kept us together, but it was not easy.

What are the secrets of the savanna?

We studied the social structures of wild animals for years — Kalahari lions, brown hyenas, and elephants — and in so doing left our own families and groups behind. What we learned was this: our natal troops are extremely important. It is not so much that the herd, troop, or pride is incomplete without all its members, but that the individual elephant, baboon, or human is incomplete without the group. When we live in a society of strangers, we lose a great deal: feelings of security, self-esteem, confidence, and a sense of home. In the modern world we have lost so much of this, but the elephants can teach us how to get it all back again.

Why a book on the Dust Bowl now?

The story of the people who lived through the nation’s hardest economic depression and its worst weather event is one of the great untold stories of the Greatest Generation. To me, there was an urgency to get this story now because the last of the people who lived through those dark years are in their final days. It’s their story, and I didn’t want them to take this narrative of horror and persistence to the grave. At the same time, this part of America – the rural counties of the Great Plains – looks like it’s dying. Our rural past seems so distant, like Dorothy’s Kansas in the Wizard of Oz. Yet it was within the lifetime of people living today that nearly one-in-three Americans worked on a farm. Now, the site of the old Dust Bowl – which covers parts of five states – is largely devoid of young families, and emptying out by the day. It’s flyover country to most Americans. But it holds this remarkable tale that should be a larger part of our shared national story.

Do you see any parallels between the Dust Bowl and Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster of our time?

There are so many echoes of what happened in the 1930s and the hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005. For starters, there were ample warnings that a large part of the United States could be rendered uninhabitable if people continued to live as they did – in this case, ripping up all the grass that held the earth in place. In one sense, the prairie grass was like the levees around New Orleans; the grass protected the land against ferocious winds, and cycles of drought and storms. Then after the big dusters hit, you had a massive exodus: more than a quarter million people left their homes and fled. Never before had so many Americans been on the move because of a single weather event – until Hurricane Katrina. And finally there was the whole restoration effort: President Franklin Roosevelt thought he could restore the land to grass, plant trees, and maybe bring it back.

What about the people? Did they ever return?

Not really. The southern plains never fully recovered from the ravages of the Dust Bowl. There was a fascinating debate within the Roosevelt administration about whether to even try to lure people back. Many thought it was futile, that the whole settlement of the area had been a mistake. One pundit, H.L. Mencken, said the people who lived there were too stupid and should be sterilized. “They are simply inferior men,” he wrote.

But there was another, more optimistic impulse – reclaim the land to its original state, and then get people to farm in a different fashion. At one point, Hugh Bennett, who led the soil conservation effort, told his restoration army “we are not merely crusaders, but soldiers on the firing line of defending the vital substance of our homeland.”

Beyond the hurricane, what is the relevance of the Dust Bowl to our times?

Remember what Lincoln said: We cannot escape history. That goes for the natural world as well. The Dust Bowl story is a parable, in a way, about what happens when people push the limits of the land. Many people think what happened in the 1930s – with drought, endless hot days, white skies, plants dying and the earth blowing – is a precursor to what could happen as the climate continues to change and the earth heats up.

Yes, you hear a lot of references about a “New Dust Bowl.”

But thus far, there has been nothing like the one that took hold of a big part of our country 70 years ago and lasted nearly a decade. Some of these folks I interviewed, they fought in World War II, saw the worst kind of carnage that human beings can inflict on each other, and they say the Dust Bowl was more traumatic.

Why is that?

I think it was because of the uncertainty. The world they had known was changing before their eyes, dying, being swept away. They didn’t know what has happening. Many thought the end was near, and not just the Biblical end. It was a risk to your life just to step outside on some days. It was risk simply to take a breath. People wore masks and rubbed Vaseline in the noses as filters. At the same time, 25 percent of adults were out of work. If you could find a job, you were lucky to make $2 a day, which is barely enough to feed a family.

What do you mean when you call the Dust Bowl “the great untold story of the Greatest Generation?”

We know a lot about the Dust Bowl refugees, the so-called Okies and Arkies who migrated West to California and into the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s. Much of this we know from John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, “The Grapes of Wrath,” and from the government photographers and writers who did a terrific job of recording this migration. But very little is known about the people who did not leave the Dust Bowl. And as it turns out, most people never moved away. Nearly two-thirds of the Dust Bowl inhabitants hunkered down and lived through the Dirty Thirties. How did they get by? There was no food from the land, no jobs during the Depression, no money from the government until much later. This was my starting point.

And what kind of story is it?

It’s a story of survival, of perseverance, of the most corrosive poverty. Of days when the sky turned ink-black at noon, and times when parents gave up their children because they feared they would starve. Of days with no Social Security, no accurate weather forecasts. Most of the Dust Bowlers didn’t even have electricity. They ate things like tumbleweeds – salted and canned – or roadkill, cooked over an open fire. And when they would slaughter a pig, as one woman told me, “We ate everything but the squeal.”

What kind of peril did they face?

Everything the sky could throw at them, it did. In addition to the usual horrors – violent thunderstorms that produced hail the size of baseballs, wildfires that swept over the prairie, tornadoes that could level a town in the blink of an eye – there were these massive, almost otherworldly dust storms. A typical duster was a corrosive mix of sand and high-velocity air that could make cattle go blind and people cough until it hurt. The sky would blacken as these great waves of dust rose up and fell. Sometimes the leading edge of one of these storms was a mile-high. Charles Lindbergh, the greatest aviator of his age, got stuck at the edge of one of these storms and had to make an emergency landing. He said it was the most frightful thing he ever saw as a pilot. And the storms could be lethal. Makeshift hospitals were set up in school gyms for children who fell ill and then died suddenly from something the doctors called “dust pneumonia.”

What caused the Dust Bowl?

Most of the people who lived through it say it was a human tragedy – one part hubris, one part greed, one part bad luck – not some freak of nature. When you look at the relevant weather data and compare it to the historical record, it’s very revealing. The wind speeds were about the same as always. The high temperatures in summer and the lows in winter were not that much out of the norm. Yes, there was a terrible drought. But the Great Plains has always had these elements – high winds, heat, cold, and drought. There was not some extraordinary combination of rare and traumatic weather.

So what was different?

The grass – “North America’s characteristic landscape,” as the poet Walt Whitman called it – was wiped off the face of the southern plains. This great sea of green had anchored the Great Plains for eternity, covering nearly one-fourth of the continent.

The southern plains was a frontier well into the 20th century. It was the last place to be truly settled by Anglos during the western expansion. Then suddenly came a gold rush of sorts – a gold rush for grain. The price of wheat doubled, tripled, and quadrupled, prompting a stampede to rip up the prairie grass and replace it with wheat. When grain prices crashed, people walked away, or stopped planting. Then the land was barren, with no grass, and it started to blow.

By 1935, more than 850 million tons of topsoil had blown off the southern plains – nearly 8 tons of dirt for every resident of the United States. More than 100 million acres, an area about the size of Pennsylvania, lie in ruin. One of these storms fell on New York, and another one blew dust into the White House and out to ships at sea in the Atlantic.

Do you blame the people who farmed the Southern Plains for bringing this disaster on themselves?

No. The people who dug up this hard sod, who lived in dirt houses for awhile, or underground in homes they called dugouts, who built churches and schools from the raw scraps of the ground, who raised large families and prospered, for a time – these people were doing what Americans have always done. These were Last Chancers: persecuted Germans from Russia, Scots-Irish from the South, Mexicans who platted out homesteads. The southern plains was the last chance for them to own something. But they were encouraged by the railroads and the government to take unrealistic risks. They were told to take out cheap loans and plant as much wheat as possible as a patriotic act. In the same way that people in the cities were speculating, wildly, in the stock market, these farmers took a gamble that the price of wheat would only go up. They took land that was suited for grass and animals that eat grass and turned it into something else. Only a few cowboys and some defeated Comanche Indians tried to warn them off.

Tell us a little bit about the people in your story?

There’s a part-Apache cowboy family we follow throughout the story. The father loved horses and empty sky and the grasslands. What happened to the land broke his heart. Some days, he’d come home to see his wife in tears, trembling in the corner of their tiny house, muttering “the dust, I just can’t take it anymore.”

There’s a woman named Hazel Lucas, with southern charm and a big heart. We see her first as a teenage bride, teaching kids in a one-room sodhouse, and then we watch her try to raise a family and keep her dignity through these awful storms.

There’s a hero of the New Deal, Big Hugh Bennett, a farm boy from the south who tried to save the grass in the Dust Bowl and convince people that the grasslands could be restored.

There’s an extraordinary, pioneering Jewish family, the Herzsteins, who tried maintain the rituals of daily life even after they lost a beloved uncle to a gunslinger.

There’s a town booster and newspaper man, John McCarty, who tried to make a virtue of the dust storms.

And there was free-spirited kid, one of nine children living hole in the ground, whose only goal was to make it to his senior year in high school.

There are some strange things that people do during the worst years. Tell us about that?

The land was sick, and I think that had an effect on how people lived and acted. Towns would hold rabbit-clubbing rallies. Basically, they’d get everybody out on a Sunday afternoon with clubs, and round up thousands of rabbits and club them to death. Strangely, rabbits flourished during the Dust Bowl, living on bugs. And speaking of bugs, some states had to call out the National Guard to try to control the locusts and other pests that descended on this desperate land.

Your write a lot about the Pacific Northwest, where you live. What was it like to shift your focus to the southern plains?

Like going from one planet to the other. I’m used to green – forests, rain country, grass that never turns brown but for the driest month of the year. When I was in the southern plains, I suffered from brownshock! But it’s fascinating. For me, like visiting a foreign country. The Plains have a wondrous, savage beauty, but you have to take the time to let it get in your bones, to feel a little bit of the haunt and tease and risk of the land. In some respects, it has the worst weather in the world – tornadoes, whiteout blizzards, flash floods, soul-sapping heat waves. But it’s lovely, in its way, especially in the early part of the day before the wind kicks up. I also like the drama of the land – the thunderstorms that come out of nowhere, the sky the stretches to infinity, the sense of being alone, even lost in the eternity of the flatness.

What about the grasslands? Is there anything left?

Yes. And this was one of the big surprises. The land really has healed – in places, at least. When I used to see a “national grassland” on the map, I wondered if it was some kind of joke. It’s heartening to see some restoration, but the scars of the Dust Bowl are big, and deep and lasting.