TMC PULSE

22 t m c » p u l s e | a p r i l 2 0 1 9 LEE EHMKE is the president and CEO of the Houston Zoo, which welcomes approximately 2.5 million visitors annually. He arrived in Houston in 2015 after leading the Minnesota Zoo and, before that, working for 12 years at the Bronx Zoo in New York. Ehmke spoke with TMC Pulse as the zoo was finalizing its Texas Wetlands exhibit, part of a major transformation in which half of the zoo will be redeveloped by its 100th anniversary in 2022. Spotlight Q | From what I've read about you, you seem like you're doing exactly what you've wanted to do since you were a kid. A | I think that's absolutely accurate. There were a couple of detours along the way. But for as long as I can remember, I've loved animals and was interested in learning about them and going to zoos. My earliest memory in life was actually going to the zoo in Fresno, California and seeing a rhino. I was just instantly fascinated by zoos. I read every book I could find on zoos. I had supportive parents. We'd go on cross country trips all summer long to national parks and zoos in a VW van. Q | You started your career as a lawyer and quickly pivoted to designing zoo exhibits. Why the change? A | I was doing environmental law, which was mostly about trying to stop bad things from happening. It was rewarding, but I saw what was starting to happen in zoos. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a movement in the zoo world to create new, natural habitats, and there was a new focus on conservation and conservation education. That was an interest of mine, and I knew there were people who did this for a living. That was the trigger for me to go back and study landscape architecture. the environments that support them. That's the implicit message of these natural habitat exhibits. Even if people don't read a word at the zoo, they're hopefully getting a sense of that. Q | It used to be that zoos grouped animals by species, but now they're increasingly grouped by habitat. Why are zoos making that change? A | That's certainly one direction zoos have taken, and we're doing that here. It's moving away from what's called "taxonomic exhibitry," which is basically an encyclopedia-style or museum-style way of showing lots of similar animals together. That's interesting, but in terms of teaching the things that are really important for people to understand—the interconnections of animals with the world, including their environment, plants, Q | Zoo exhibit design is a pretty niche field to study. A | It is, and it was especially small at the time. None of the professors I studied with knew much about zoo design. There were probably 100 people in the world doing it, if that. I networked a lot. I met everyone who was doing the kind of work that inspired me. Before I even graduated from my master's program I was offered a job at the Bronx Zoo doing exhibit design. I finished the program, drove across the country and never looked back. Q | I read a book that described your approach to zoo exhibits as "sensitive and imaginative." What does that mean? A | When you're designing exhibits in a zoo, you are really thinking about three different user groups and their needs, which aren't necessarily the same. First and foremost are the animals. But you're also creating spaces for guests to appreci- ate the animals, as well as spaces for the people who care for the animals. It's about finding the happy medium between all three of those sets of clients. It's also really important that all the animals be seen in the context of their natural environ- ment. Animals taken out of that context become caricatures. People should understand that if you want these animals to survive, you need to have

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