Alexander von Bismarck ’94 (’02)—one of the Bismarcks, great-great-grandnephew of Otto von Bismarck—has been working undercover, at no small risk, trying to counter the enormous worldwide trade in illegal logging and timber smuggling. He does so as executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).
The organization, and von Bismarck's high-stakes work—in the snow-covered Russian Far East, in the wild commercial cities of Manchuria, on the North Korean border; in the U.S. Congress and the aisles of Wal-Mart—is vividly described in Raffi Khatchadourian's "The Stolen Forests: Inside the covert war on illegal logging," published in the October 6 issue of The New Yorker. The article is now available on line at the magazine's website. The EIA (“working undercover since 1984”), based in London and Washington, is explained at its website, where its "Forests for the World Campaign" is described in detail.
