Paul Spencer Sochaczewski
Paul’s international career began when he joined the U.S. Peace Corps in 1969, following graduation from George Washington University with a degree in psychology. He served as an education advisor in Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. He then worked as creative director of an advertising agency and as a freelance journalist in Singapore and Indonesia, living 13 years in Southeast Asia.
Paul joined WWF International as head of creative services in 1981 where he created international campaigns to protect rainforests, wetlands, plants and biological diversity; then he managed the WWF Faith and Environment Network. From mid-1992 to mid-1993 he took a leave of absence from WWF to write articles on environmental problems in the Pacific for the Environment Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu (under a MacArthur grant). Paul now writes, and advises international NGOs on fundraising and communications. He also runs the Wake Up Communications workshops which help people in non-governmental organizations tell a technical or scientific story to general audiences. Clients include: WWF, IUCN, USAID, University of Hawaii, Ogilvy and Mather advertising.
Paul worked as communications director of the International Osteoporosis Foundation, and during his ten years he helped to build the organization into one of the leading global health NGOs, with a budget of USD 7 million, 175 members in 87 countries. He has developed effective international campaigns, created a “take responsibility for your bone health” positioning that has been recognized through numerous international awards, restructured the program and successfully sought and nurtured new sources of corporate funding.
He has lived and worked in some 60 countries, speaks Bahasa Indonesia and French.
Affiliations: Fellow, Royal Geographic Society, member PEN International, member American Society of Journalists and Authors, World Conservation Union commissions on protected areas and education.
In 1992 he changed his name from Paul Spencer Wachtel to Paul Spencer Sochaczewski.
Paul specializes in environment (sustainable fishing in Philippines for tropical aquarium fish, impact of miracle rice on Bali's coral reefs, disappearance of Bruno Manser-a Swiss forest Robin Hood - in Sarawak), Asia (Alfred Russel Wallace in Asia - and how Darwin ripped him off, how a Borneo longhouse took on the government and Big Timber and won, sacred forests in India, boom times in a village of amulet providers in the Philippines), golf, things he doesn’t quite understand (the sultan and the mermaid queen in Java, importance of white elephants in Burma, intelligence of orangutans, the renaissance of the European medicinal leech) and things that go bump in the night (tiger magicians in Sumatra, a lost tribe of giant, white cannibals in Halmahera).
He’s had more than 600 by-lined articles published in the International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, CNN Traveller, Geographical, Reader's Digest, Travel and Leisure Golf, BBC Wildlife, GQ and many other publications. He co-authored Soul of the Tiger: People and Nature in Southeast Asia (Doubleday, Oxford University Press, University of Hawaii Press) - George Schaller, Director of Wildlife Conservation International, said this was "a marvelous book, unique, intelligent, attuned to cultures and filled with stimulating ideas....") and Eco-Bluff Your Way to Instant Environmental Credibility. Redheads, his comic conservation novel set in Borneo, is about tribal uprisings, corrupt government officials and schizophrenic orangutans. Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael, said “Redheads does for the struggle to save the rain forests of Borneo what Catch 22 did for the struggle to stay alive in World War II.”
In January 2005 he won first place in the Asean Tourism Forum journalists award for my article on the Sarawak Rainforest World Music Festival, which appeared in Cathay Pacific “Discovery”. He has won two North American Travel Journalists Association awards.
He created and runs the “Write What You Feel, Feel What You Write” workshop, which helps people explore their personal journeys, and the “Wake Up Writing” workshop for technical people who want to write for general audiences. He runs these workshops worldwide -- every summer at the University of Hawaii, Manoa; for private groups in Zimbabwe, Spain, and Switzerland; for journalists in China, Venezuela, Indonesia and India; and for clients including Ogilvy and Mather advertising, Roche, WWF-World Wide Fund for Nature, IUCN-World Conservation Union, CIFOR-International Forest Research Center based in Indonesia, and the International Osteoporosis Foundation.
Paul plays at Maison Blanche Golf and Country Club, in Echenevex, France