On August 27, 2026, the President of Madagascar, Michael Randrianirina, awarded the National Order — the country's highest honor — to three conservation leaders with decades of work protecting Madagascar's biodiversity. Among them was Turtle Conservancy board member Dr. Russell A. Mittermeier, who was named Commander of the Order, its highest level, alongside Dr. Steve Goodman, founder of the Malagasy NGO Vahatra. Jonah Ratsimbazafy, Madagascar's best-known primatologist and president of GERP, received the title of Grand Officer. It's a rare recognition for outsiders to receive from the Malagasy government, and a fitting one: between them, the three honorees represent something like a century and a half of fieldwork in the country's forests, wetlands, and coastlines.

We couldn't be prouder to celebrate Russ, who has sat on the Turtle Conservancy's board for years and has shaped so much of our work in

Madagascar.

Who Is Russell Mittermeier?

Russ has been in Madagascar since 1984, and in that time he's become one of the most consequential figures in the country's conservation history — with a career-long emphasis on two groups of animals in particular: lemurs and tortoises. He currently serves as Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Primate Specialist Group and sits on the SSC Steering Committee, positions that put him at the center of primate conservation strategy worldwide. He's also Chief Conservation Officer at Re:wild (formerly Global Wildlife Conservation), where his focus on tropical forests, primates, and — always — turtles and tortoises has continued.

Russ's Madagascar work has never been confined to a single taxon or a single organization. He's helped identify new species, trained generations of Malagasy researchers and field staff, and pushed conservation funding and attention toward some of the island's most overlooked landscapes. It's the kind of sustained, decades-deep commitment that governments don't often recognize in outsiders — which is part of what makes this honor so meaningful.

Russ at the Turtle Conservancy

At Turtle Conservancy, Russ has long championed our work on the Ploughshare Tortoise (Astrochelys yniphora), the world's rarest tortoise and one found nowhere on Earth outside a sliver of northwestern Madagascar. Alongside our partners at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, TC has spent more than a decade protecting the species — supporting the breeding center at Ampijoroa, funding anti-poaching patrols and armed guards around Baly Bay National Park, and running a parallel assurance-breeding program at our Conservation Center in California, which became the first facility to successfully breed Ploughshares in captivity outside of Madagascar.

It's a species that makes the stakes of this work almost impossible to overstate. Nearly the entire world population of the Ploughshare Tortoise survives in Baly Bay, on Madagascar's northwest coast — found nowhere else on Earth. Their shell's distinctive golden color and shape have made them a prime target for wildlife traffickers, and poaching pressure has kept full reintroduction on hold even as the captive population continues to grow.

That's the backdrop for a warning Prime Minister Mamitiana Rajaonarison issued this past April, when he said that “any biodiversity lost in Madagascar would be lost to the world.” Baly Bay and the Ploughshare Tortoise are about as literal a test of that statement as exists anywhere in conservation. It's a commitment with teeth in places most people will never see.

It's also why the work Russ has championed at TC matters right now more than ever. The California-born Ploughshares in our assurance colony exist for exactly this moment — a hedge against extinction, built patiently over years, so that when conditions in Baly Bay allow it, there is a path for some of that biodiversity to come home. That is what Russ, Durrell, and Madagascar's own conservation community have been building toward together.

Congratulations, Russ — this honor from the government of a country you've given so much to is more than deserved.