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Cox is more than a healer's apprentice. He knows that if the rain forests of Samoa continue to disappear, hundreds of potential drugs hidden there may never be found. So he spends much of his time between Brigham Young semesters trying to preserve the acreage that remains. More than 80% of the lowland rain forest has already been logged. Cox's aim is to offer cash-poor Western Samoans an alternative to selling out to loggers.

Samoans have traditionally used the forest for hunting, collecting medicinal plants, harvesting wild fruits and cutting trees for their dugout canoes. In this crucible of nature and culture, Cox believes, lies hope for conservation and the future of ethnobotany. "We can't save the forest without saving the culture," he says, "and we can't save the culture without saving the forest."

In 1988, Falealupo almost lost its 30,000-acre forest. The government told the villagers to construct a new school. It would cost $65,000, and the village would have to foot the bill. Ironically--or tellingly--a logging company arrived in the village shortly afterward and offered to pay $65,000 for permission to cut down the forest. The villagers, their hand forced, submitted.

Cox intervened just in time. He offered to raise enough money by mortgaging his home in Utah. But while in the U.S. to make arrangements, he pleaded the case to his students and two Mormon businessmen. Within six weeks they had raised the money, and Cox, back in Samoa, formalized an agreement with the villagers to protect their forest for 50 years.

It was during this period that the villagers informed Cox that they wanted to name him heir to the goddess Nafanua. When he declined, fearing that the title would interfere with his research, the villagers refused to sign the preservation agreement. Cox relented. "Being a deity is not my cup of tea," he says, "but Nafanua stands for conservation and rain-forest ecology, so I said to them, 'O.K., I'll take the cards I've been dealt.'" Now chiefs and children alike respectfully address him as Nafanua.

As a result of this work, Cox and a chief who helped him shared one of the six prestigious Goldman Environmental Prizes for 1997. Each received $37,500. Since then Cox has expanded his preservation efforts by establishing the Seacology Foundation, based at Brigham Young. Some of the foundation's funding comes through Cox's ethnobotanical success with medicinally, or in this case cosmetically, valuable plants. When Nu Skin International, a Utah-based personal-care company, wanted to hire Cox as a consultant, he charged a $40,000 fee that he plowed into the foundation. He also asked Nu Skin and Nature's Way, another Utah cosmetics firm, each to match his Goldman Prize award. Subsequently, Nu Skin began using extracts of a plant with anti-inflammatory properties in a foot cream. Seacology receives 25[cents] for every tube of the cream sold.

The foundation has since provided money for the Western Samoan village of Tafua to preserve its 20,000-acre rain forest. It helped persuade Congress to authorize the National Park of American Samoa--about 10,000 acres of forest and 420 acres of coral reefs in the neighboring archipelago. And it has helped villages build schools, medical clinics and cisterns to catch rainfall, the main source of drinking water.

In Falealupo, the foundation paid for the construction of a series of connected platforms and a walkway 200 ft. high between two huge trees at the edge of the forest. Administered by villagers, the aerial complex has brought in about $1,000 a month from tourists and school groups since it opened, profit that the villagers use to maintain the forest. "This is the first time these people have made money from the forest without destroying it," says Cox. "If they keep making this kind of money and other villages hear about it, the forests will be saved."

Cox dreams that one day soon the people of Western Samoa will see the benefit of preserving not only the rain forests surrounding their villages but also the vast cloud forests that still cloak the sides of the volcanoes that form the spine of Savai'i. Here he hopes the villagers will agree to "make the biggest national park in the whole world," before the chain saws get there too. He wants them to become as excited about the project as he is, rather than have the impetus come from outside. Behind this goal lies a philosophy that runs through Cox's work: helping native people understand the wealth of their heritage so that they will want to preserve it rather than sell it. Since it's no less than Nafanua who is urging them on, that seems a reasonable goal.