SAN ANTONIO DE PINTUYACU, Peru: Women in this remote Amazon village can weave fibers from the chambira palm tree branch into almost anything they need - fishing nets, hammocks, purses, skirts, dental floss.
But for the past year they have put their hopes in baskets, weaving thousands to build inventory for export to the United States. Their first international buyers are the San Diego Natural History Museum and San Diego Zoo, and they plan to sell to other museums and home décor purveyors like the Field Museum in Chicago and Cost Plus.
The circuitous route these baskets have taken from the jungle to American store shelves started with a bird watcher's passion for natural habitats, passed through a regional government whose policies have become increasingly more environmental, and, supporters say, should end with better lives for the weavers and their communities.
The enterprise is one of many ventures here in the Amazon aimed at "productive conservation," a principle that advocates saving the rainforest by transforming it into a renewable economic resource for locals - just as some eco-tourism lodges and other ventures in places like Africa and Southeast Asia have tried to do.
The greatest challenge has been persuading residents of the communities along the river, who until now largely supported themselves by chopping down palm branches and fishing, that conservation is in their best interest.
The government of Loreto, Peru's densely forested and least populous state, organized the basket project, which is financed by grants from two nonprofit organizations, Nature and Culture International and the Moore Foundation.
"Having the government take such a role in a market-based approach is quite novel," said Amy Rosenthal, deputy director for projects with Amazon Conservation, a nonprofit that works in southern Peru and northern Bolivia, when told of the program. She said the state of Amazonas in Brazil had attempted a similar conservation-exploitation program. "It sounds like a well-thought-out program and something that could be wildly successful," she said.
But not without challengers.
Ivan Vasquez, the president of Loreto state, said he had made some enemies by supporting conservation in a region where fishing and logging have been the primary engines of revenue for decades and where oil and natural gas are seen as the next frontiers. He called himself "the Quixote of the Amazon."
"We are part of nature. When we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves," Vasquez said. He said big logging operations, not small farmers, continued to pose the greatest deforestation threat.
The changes in Loreto may correspond to a broader shift in Peru's attitude toward conservation. Last spring, the country set up an environment ministry, which has already started focusing on deforestation.
The basket project is the brainchild of Noam Shany, an Israeli agronomist and entrepreneur. A bird-watching trip in 2005 led him to a remote village on the Tahuayo River, an Amazon tributary. There, he said, he noticed striking local baskets for sale in a tourist lodge and thought, "That's some interesting weaving."
Shany, who had previously sold fake plants to Wal-Mart and cacti to nurseries in California and Australia, decided to put his retailing experience to an environmental use. He had come to Peru in 2002 to study exotic birds. Now, he wanted to protect their habitats, and the baskets were the perfect anchor for a productive conservation program.
In 2006, he helped found Procrel, a biodiversity program that has worked with the regional government to establish three vast protected reserves. The basket program is one of several conservation initiatives meant to help indigenous peoples benefit from the conservation efforts.
On the sales side, pitching Peruvian handicrafts to retailers in the United States was easy. "These baskets represent so much more than simply a basket," said Nancy Stevens, manager of retail and wholesale operations for the San Diego Museum of Natural History. "When I began to hear their story - from a local project into a story of sustainability, where they're being developed as a responsible use of the natural resources of this Amazon region - it just clicked so beautifully with the mission of this museum."
Pitching an international enterprise to the villagers was almost as easy. Shany turned a somewhat haphazard local craft - women making a few baskets, selling them in a local shop, then making a few more - into something more like mass production, with higher returns to the producers.
Artisans get between $10 and $12 for each basket, which sells for $40 in the United States. About a third of that goes into shipping and distribution, and the rest is retailer profit, meaning the company that sells the baskets gets a little more per unit than each maker. Procrel and Shany get nothing.
The artisan's cut may not seem substantial, Shany said, but it more than doubles previous monthly earnings. Two years ago, households in this region earned as little as $30 a month selling fish and palm frond roofing, he said. Today, experienced weavers can earn $100 a month.
Over time, urban Peruvian employees of the program have brought a whole new vocabulary to the river communities. Visiting every few weeks, they encourage the weavers to respect deadlines, quality control and inventory requests. On one such recent trip, Shany delivered a pep talk to his newest recruits, preparing them for the orders that could start coming in.
"These stores don't buy one hundred baskets," he said. "One hundred is nothing. Two hundred is nothing. They buy a thousand, ten thousand. You're all going to need to work together."
Since starting the program, he said the weavers have not been able to meet demand. "We can't keep up with the orders," Shany wrote in a recent e-mail message. "We are training more ladies to increase production and also to involve more people."
Rosenthal noted that there were considerable difficulties with any start-up operation like this, not the least of which was falling demand for all kinds of discretionary spending on the part of U.S. consumers as the recession in the country deepened.
Other than that, "quality assurance is probably their biggest challenge for selling something retail in the U.S.," she said. The arrangement, if successful, "can bring them much better profits and a much better source of income than in local terms."
Still, Trevor Stevenson, executive co-director of the Amazon Alliance, a nonprofit organization that focuses on indigenous populations, said it was vital for communities to diversify their income and not to count exclusively on crafts, which could be volatile, particularly in times like these.
The challenge has been teaching the river communities to shift mentalities from consumption to conservation, on a large scale.
"Here, today is today," Shany said. "Tomorrow is another day. It's an immediate mentality, so replanting, and not cutting the tree in the first place, is really revolutionary."
Eblis Chavez, from San Antonio de Pintuyacu, a village of Iquito Indians that is two days by motorboat from the nearest city, said residents had been slowly won over.
"We hesitated a bit originally," Chavez said, "but it makes much more sense to preserve the trees."
A year ago, villagers walked for hours to find irapay palms, whose fronds are used for the ubiquitous thatched roofs sold at markets, because they had chopped all the closer trees. "We were slaves of the irapay," Chavez said.
Since January of last year, villagers have planted chambira groves 10 minutes away, where young fibers used for basketweaving are ready for harvesting every six months.
The baskets are bringing staples, and stability, to the area. "Already, there's more money changing hands. Already we're buying more from the bodegas. Rice, sugar, soap," said Erika Catashunga, of Esperanza, another village, speaking by communal telephone.
Catashunga, 25, is now at the forefront of another venture. She has just received the first business license granted to a basket weaver with Procrel, establishing her as the manager of a nine-village "empresa comunal," or communal enterprise. Its name is Mi Esperanza, or My Hope.
Growing up, she never imagined she would manage a global business one day. "Not even in my dreams," she said.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=19225765
rainforestpower Headline Animator
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Rainforest report
Logging, clearing decline for now
Here is one positive result of a slow global economy: Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest slowed in the latter part of 2008.
Satellite images show that 245 square miles of forest disappeared in the last five months of 2008. That does not seem like such a good thing until it is compared with 2007, when 1,325 square miles vanished during the same period. That's a decrease of 82 percent.
Brazil Environment Minister Carlos Minc said that government policies slowed deforestation. Brazil has become more vigilant in protecting the rainforest and punitive in its policies. Farmers, ranchers and loggers who clear land illegally no longer are eligible for government loans, for instance.
But environmentalists point to another reason: the global financial crisis has reduced demand for wood, soy and cattle. Thus, there is less call to clear land.
Amazon trees cut by loggers or burned release 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
Such impact on the global climate should concern all of us. Whether Brazil's government is actually slowing the assault on the rainforest should be apparent once business picks up.
http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090124/OPINION01/301249964
Here is one positive result of a slow global economy: Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest slowed in the latter part of 2008.
Satellite images show that 245 square miles of forest disappeared in the last five months of 2008. That does not seem like such a good thing until it is compared with 2007, when 1,325 square miles vanished during the same period. That's a decrease of 82 percent.
Brazil Environment Minister Carlos Minc said that government policies slowed deforestation. Brazil has become more vigilant in protecting the rainforest and punitive in its policies. Farmers, ranchers and loggers who clear land illegally no longer are eligible for government loans, for instance.
But environmentalists point to another reason: the global financial crisis has reduced demand for wood, soy and cattle. Thus, there is less call to clear land.
Amazon trees cut by loggers or burned release 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
Such impact on the global climate should concern all of us. Whether Brazil's government is actually slowing the assault on the rainforest should be apparent once business picks up.
http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090124/OPINION01/301249964
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Fashion Rio – Eco Survivor Chic Rules
Anyone who suggests that Brazil has little to add in the global world of style should have spent Monday in Rio de Janeiro, where two cleverly crafted and artfully staged shows spoke loudly about our generation’s obsession with ecology and the threat our own species represents to the planet on which we live.
There were two contrasting collections, one by Redley, chock full of prints and staged in a tropical rainforest and the other print-free and austere by Mara Mac presented in the tented city of Marina Gloria, where all but four of the shows in this season of Fashion Rio are staged. But both spoke about our greatest modern fear – even greater surely than the specter of unemployment in the current downturn – and that is what life will be like if or when the polar ice caps melt.
Neither of these labels could be described as “designer brands,” i.e. an international label embodying one individual’s taste, which made the performances by these high-street brands all the more impressive.
Redley’s creative director Jurgen Oeltjenbrun's vision is surprisingly upbeat. Judging from this Fall 2009 collection, he expects people to party hearty after the ecological apocalypse and, more importantly for fashionistas to look good while doing so.
Staged before noon under the dappled light of the Tijuca rainforest, located, remarkably, as close to Ipanema Beach as the George Washington Bridge is to the West Village, the collection was a wonderfully counter cultural happening inspired by the novel “The Alternative” by William Hedgepeth, a cerebral commentary on Sixties optimism and communal living. Yet the looks that strutted along the leafy catwalk were all about survivor chic: people finding the residue and rags of a civilization and yet still managing to make them into cool clothes.
Made of macramé cuts and rustic fabrics mixed with eco graffiti prints, this show was an optimistic interpretation of the future in a country whose Amazon Forest is the lungs of our globe.
“It’s all about sustainability,” commented Oeltjenbruns, a German whose Portuguese language skills may be limited, but whose sense of what’s relevant and commercial are very much spot on.
Seven hours later before the local fashion top-hitting nomenclature - rival TV style hosts Lilian Pacce and Gloria Maria - Mara Mac presented more survivor's chic but for folks who expect to be able to attend classy dinner parties after global warming has turned the Alps into a muddy hill.
In the half light as the show was starting, one correspondent wondered out loud, “Is this Max Mara or Marky Mark?” But, what hit the red Formica catwalk was neither, but a darkly subtle view of how elegant women can throw together looks from simple fabrics like jersey, cotton felt and wispy wool. Shown in various shades of gray and off-white, the clothes had an international ethnic feel – with lots of drop crotch yet slinky dhoti pants and cunningly well-cut coat dresses, decorated with Japanese texts and symbols.
Arran sweaters so small they looked like scarves and elongated ballet slippers on models that weaved between mini mountains of wood pulp added to the quirky panache of a show that seemed both contemporary and, above all, relevant.
http://www.fashionwiredaily.com/first_word/fashion/article.weml?id=2343
There were two contrasting collections, one by Redley, chock full of prints and staged in a tropical rainforest and the other print-free and austere by Mara Mac presented in the tented city of Marina Gloria, where all but four of the shows in this season of Fashion Rio are staged. But both spoke about our greatest modern fear – even greater surely than the specter of unemployment in the current downturn – and that is what life will be like if or when the polar ice caps melt.
Neither of these labels could be described as “designer brands,” i.e. an international label embodying one individual’s taste, which made the performances by these high-street brands all the more impressive.
Redley’s creative director Jurgen Oeltjenbrun's vision is surprisingly upbeat. Judging from this Fall 2009 collection, he expects people to party hearty after the ecological apocalypse and, more importantly for fashionistas to look good while doing so.
Staged before noon under the dappled light of the Tijuca rainforest, located, remarkably, as close to Ipanema Beach as the George Washington Bridge is to the West Village, the collection was a wonderfully counter cultural happening inspired by the novel “The Alternative” by William Hedgepeth, a cerebral commentary on Sixties optimism and communal living. Yet the looks that strutted along the leafy catwalk were all about survivor chic: people finding the residue and rags of a civilization and yet still managing to make them into cool clothes.
Made of macramé cuts and rustic fabrics mixed with eco graffiti prints, this show was an optimistic interpretation of the future in a country whose Amazon Forest is the lungs of our globe.
“It’s all about sustainability,” commented Oeltjenbruns, a German whose Portuguese language skills may be limited, but whose sense of what’s relevant and commercial are very much spot on.
Seven hours later before the local fashion top-hitting nomenclature - rival TV style hosts Lilian Pacce and Gloria Maria - Mara Mac presented more survivor's chic but for folks who expect to be able to attend classy dinner parties after global warming has turned the Alps into a muddy hill.
In the half light as the show was starting, one correspondent wondered out loud, “Is this Max Mara or Marky Mark?” But, what hit the red Formica catwalk was neither, but a darkly subtle view of how elegant women can throw together looks from simple fabrics like jersey, cotton felt and wispy wool. Shown in various shades of gray and off-white, the clothes had an international ethnic feel – with lots of drop crotch yet slinky dhoti pants and cunningly well-cut coat dresses, decorated with Japanese texts and symbols.
Arran sweaters so small they looked like scarves and elongated ballet slippers on models that weaved between mini mountains of wood pulp added to the quirky panache of a show that seemed both contemporary and, above all, relevant.
http://www.fashionwiredaily.com/first_word/fashion/article.weml?id=2343
Monday, January 12, 2009
Enslaving the Amazon
The wonder of the world's largest river, and what Europeans have done to it
Images of ants both open and close this wonderful book. In the early chapters the unforgettable opening scene of Werner Herzog’s historically inaccurate but utterly compelling film Aguirre: Wrath of God is evoked – columns of soldiers and bearers descending ant-like down the Andes towards the Amazon river to attempt the search for the mythical riches of El Dorado. The closing chapter describes the incredible richness of organisms found in the Amazon ecosystem, with ants probably the most species-rich group of all. Both descriptions call up teeming multitudes and suggest wealth; therein lies the story of the Amazon itself, one of the most fascinating forest regions on the planet. The fixation of the first Europeans who entered the Amazon with the mythical land of gold beyond measure – El Dorado – led to the destruction of the indigenous people in a greedy search for the wrong sort of riches. All the while, the true riches of the Amazon were destroyed and plundered without consideration of their value beyond mere economics. John Hemming’s Tree of Rivers is not about the Amazon ecosystem itself – so it is not the place to find out the why and how of Amazonian ecology – but instead it is a powerful chronicle of the effects European and European-derived cultures have had on this most diverse and fascinating of river basins.
Hemming has constructed a brilliantly coherent history of man’s exploration of and influence on the Amazon Basin, home to the largest river on Earth, whose drainage area covers a land area almost the size of the continental United States (minus Alaska) and that is so large that for more than a thousand kilometres inland one cannot see the opposite bank. The Amazon itself is superlative, but its effect on the human psyche has also been profound – if you ask people to name a rainforest or to tell you where life on earth is at its most diverse, nine out of ten will name the Amazon rainforest. The region has become more than a real place; it has become a symbol for the richness of life itself and for its fragility in the face of human exploitation.
Because the enslavement of generations of indigenous Americans did not touch cultures (after all, it all went on deep in the Amazon itself), it is in general an unwritten chapter in the litany of man’s inhumanity to man. In 1500, when Captain Vicente Yáñez Pinzón crossed the Atlantic for the second time – he had captained Columbus’s caravel La Niña in 1492 – and came on the muddy outpourings of the mighty river Amazon, he thought he had found the mouth of the Ganges, and had reached India after all. He was greeted with great friendliness, but skirmished with the natives and took some thirty back to Spain as slaves – not a good start for the peoples of the Amazon. Some forty years later, Gonzalo Pizarro, the younger and more dashing of the Pizarro brothers (Hemming describes him as “brave, impetuous and cruel”), led a party of conquistadores from Quito in an attempt to discover El Dorado – the source of the coveted gold of the Incas.
They should have realized how difficult it would be, but the lust for gold drove them on. Eventually, a smaller group led by Francisco de Orellana continued downriver, encountering group after group of indigenous people in large, well-kept villages all along the river; some were friendly and others not, but the overwhelming impression was of a land densely and productively populated. The group descended the entire length of the Amazon and two years later ended up on the island of Margarita off the coast of Venezuela, back in land under Spanish control. Their travellers’ tales brought back the legend of the Amazons, a tribe of women who fought like men and fuelled the desire of Europeans to exploit the region.
The “mad Basque” Lope de Aguirre (“hero” of Herzog’s film) went down the Amazon a few years later, and warned all others that the river was cursed and a “fearful lake” – all Europeans should avoid it like the plague. But he was wrong about who should be afraid: the first Europeans were indeed daunted by the vast and frightening (for them) forests on either side of the river, but the people who suffered from the “conquest” of the river basin were those in the villages seen lining the banks by Orellana and his men.
By the time the French scientist Charles-Marie de La Condamine travelled down the river in 1743, he saw a completely different picture – an uninhabited land where there was “no warrior nation hostile to Europeans on the banks of the Amazon; all have submitted or retreated far away”. This depopulation was due to a variety of nefarious practices, detailed by Hemming with matter-of-fact horror. His is a detailed and compelling account of how nation after nation was destroyed.
The government in Lisbon had technically outlawed slavery, but Lisbon was a long way away from the Amazon Basin, and it suited the Portuguese to have colonists sending income back home – so the persecution continued. Whole villages were transported to “aldeias”, or official communities, where they worked for payment in cotton cloth that they grew, harvested and spun themselves. These people were not characterized as slaves, but as “free”. Other peoples were “ransomed”. This insidious practice involved the putative rescue of indigenous peoples from other indigenous groups, ostensibly because they ran the risk of being cannibalized. Expeditions dedicated to ransoming people were common and successful: indigenous groups were understandably intimidated by Portuguese guns. The brutality with which the slavers hunted down indigenous groups appalled some of the clergy who came to the region – one quite correctly referred to them as no better than murderers, but others collaborated with the enslavers, intent on saving souls at whatever cost.
Slavery went on well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fuelled by the rubber trade. The discovery of white gold, the sap of the rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis, launched another rush for El Dorado. The tapping of rubber trees was undertaken by indigenous people, who in some places were enslaved, in practice if not officially. In the no-man’s-land of the Colombian Putumayo, the rubber baron Julio César Arana ran an empire of unbelievable brutality, totally dependent on indigenous labour to fell the trees of Castilloa elastica, an alternative and inferior rubber source. The methods used were similar to those used in the Congo that so horrified Victorian England; for quotas not met, children were executed, hands or limbs cut off, and the inhabitants of whole villages murdered. The atrocities practised far from prying eyes were exposed by a young American, Walter Hardenburg. His reports inspired Roger Casement, then British consul in Brazil, who had previously exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo, to travel to the region in 1910 and 1912. His official reports eventually led to the removal of Arana’s companies from the London Stock Exchange.
South America had long fascinated naturalists; Alexander von Humboldt saw no human beings at all in his trip along the Casiquiare Canal (the stretch of river connecting the Amazon and the Orinoco), where he observed that “Here, in a fertile country, adorned with eternal verdure, we seek in vain for the traces of the power of man”. Although Spanish scientists had explored the edges of the basin, and Portuguese biologists had penetrated some distance into the southern reaches, their work was not widely disseminated and often not even published, leaving the documentation of the natural history of the Amazon to others. Charles Darwin’s famous image of the “tangled bank” certainly owes its origin to his impressions of tropical forests, but it is the impressions and experiences of Alfred Russel Wallace and his contemporaries that truly brought the natural history of the Amazon to the attention of science. Wallace and his friend Henry Walter Bates travelled to the Amazon in 1848 to explore “the origin of species”; inspired by Humboldt and Darwin, they came up with a scheme to sell specimens, mostly birds and butterflies, in order to finance their travels. Wallace stayed in the region for four years, travelling up the Rio Negro to Venezuela, while Bates collected for eleven years and went upriver on the Amazon itself almost as far as the border with Peru. Shortly after they had begun their journey another young Englishman, Richard Spruce, was encouraged by the authorities to go to the Amazon to collect plants. He had shown great promise collecting in the Pyrenees, but was of feeble health and only given a few years to live; he wanted to do something to advance botany before he died. Fourteen years later, after ascending the Amazon to the Andes and ultimately being employed by the India Office to collect seeds of Cinchona (the source of quinine and the cure for malaria), he returned to England, reinvigorated.
Hemming chronicles how, in 1850, Spruce, Wallace and Bates met in Manaus, surely proving the small-world adage; how on earth could these three have managed to be in the same small place at the same time in such a vast region? Wallace spent the next several years collecting up the Rio Negro, and produced an amazingly accurate map of the river, using only a compass, a sextant and a bucket of water (in which to reflect the moon) – it was still in use decades later. He suffered terribly from malaria high up on the river and vowed to return to England and never to travel alone again. Return he did, but in the middle of the Atlantic his ship caught fire and all his collections were lost. Undeterred, Wallace wrote a book about his travels, then immediately set off for South East Asia, from where he sent a famous letter to Darwin enclosing an essay entitled “On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type” – which goaded Darwin into completing his masterpiece On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.
Spruce was utterly entranced by the Amazonian forests – “the largest river in the world flows through the largest forest” – and his collections were wonderful indeed. They are prized by botanists both for their quality and completeness: many plants he collected were not collected again until the late twentieth century. In the mid-1980s I lived in Tarapoto on the Río Huallaga, one of the three great tributaries of the Amazon in Peru, and I discovered for myself some of Spruce’s great localities – among them Guayrapurima and Cerro Pelado. I was told that a fern I found was the first collection since Spruce: there is still so much to discover in the tropical forests of the Amazon. Spruce crossed over the Andes to Ecuador and spent several years collecting seeds of Cinchona for the India Office so that the tree could be established in the British colonies to provide a reliable source of quinine. Seeds of Hevea brasiliensis had earlier been planted with great success in Malaysia, and establishing a source of quinine was deemed equally important. Some might characterize this as stealing or, more hysterically, as “biopiracy”, but plants of importance have always been taken by people wherever they go. Coffee, for example, now the mainstay of many Amazonian economies, was taken from Ethiopia – I suspect if you asked many people where coffee was native, they might say Brazil.
On his return from the Amazon, Bates wrote what has to be one the true classics of travel writing, A Naturalist on the River Amazons. His turn of phrase and talent for bringing the region to life made his name, as much as did his discovery of unique phenomena in natural history such as Batesian mimicry – where palatable butterflies mimic unpalatable ones so well that predators are fooled and leave them alone. Bates read Darwin’s book while in the Amazon, and framed all he observed in the light of evolution by natural selection. His observations from the field were among the first to really support the theory, now so strongly supported by weight of evidence that it has become scientific fact. In London, Bates was known as “Bates of the Amazon”, and fascinated all with his tales of “a region which may fittingly be called a Naturalist’s Paradise”. He became the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (for which post he competed with his old friend Alfred Russel Wallace).
Biodiversity studies in Amazonia today are very different from the collecting and documenting of the Victorian naturalists. The sheer diversity of life in the region means it has long fascinated those exploring mechanisms of speciation. Hemming only touches on the scientific study of Amazonian diversity: he focuses instead on the accelerated destruction of this rich and complex set of habitats. Recent research has suggested that about 40 per cent of rare tree species are likely to become extinct over the next decades – perhaps, to some, a small loss among so much diversity. But the intricate workings of tropical forests are not clearly understood even today; how the extinction of even a single species will affect an ecosystem is a subject of much current debate. The Amazon forest is more than a collection of species. The sheer vastness and exuberance of tropical forest growth led generations of European colonists to assume that once it was cut down, cultivation could be similarly exuberant and lush. Not so – the richness of the forest is locked up in the trees. These trees, too, absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide per year – global warming without the Amazon would be of far greater magnitude.
Far from being a great emptiness to be exploited and profited from, the Amazon must be appreciated for what it really is – a reservoir of natural richness from which we can learn much about how our planet works. The Peruvian Congress’s recent repeal of land laws aimed at opening up areas of the Amazon managed by indigenous peoples to oil and gas exploration is an indication that the region is no longer regarded as “el gran vacio Amazónico”, but as a place with a future to be managed in partnership with those who were so exploited in the past. The future of the Amazon lies in partnership. In this rich and important tapestry of a book, John Hemming has written a history of this most fascinating of regions that clearly shows why past ways will not work, but that the lessons we learn from the past can help to save a functioning, complex and rich Amazon for the future.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5465028.ece
Images of ants both open and close this wonderful book. In the early chapters the unforgettable opening scene of Werner Herzog’s historically inaccurate but utterly compelling film Aguirre: Wrath of God is evoked – columns of soldiers and bearers descending ant-like down the Andes towards the Amazon river to attempt the search for the mythical riches of El Dorado. The closing chapter describes the incredible richness of organisms found in the Amazon ecosystem, with ants probably the most species-rich group of all. Both descriptions call up teeming multitudes and suggest wealth; therein lies the story of the Amazon itself, one of the most fascinating forest regions on the planet. The fixation of the first Europeans who entered the Amazon with the mythical land of gold beyond measure – El Dorado – led to the destruction of the indigenous people in a greedy search for the wrong sort of riches. All the while, the true riches of the Amazon were destroyed and plundered without consideration of their value beyond mere economics. John Hemming’s Tree of Rivers is not about the Amazon ecosystem itself – so it is not the place to find out the why and how of Amazonian ecology – but instead it is a powerful chronicle of the effects European and European-derived cultures have had on this most diverse and fascinating of river basins.
Hemming has constructed a brilliantly coherent history of man’s exploration of and influence on the Amazon Basin, home to the largest river on Earth, whose drainage area covers a land area almost the size of the continental United States (minus Alaska) and that is so large that for more than a thousand kilometres inland one cannot see the opposite bank. The Amazon itself is superlative, but its effect on the human psyche has also been profound – if you ask people to name a rainforest or to tell you where life on earth is at its most diverse, nine out of ten will name the Amazon rainforest. The region has become more than a real place; it has become a symbol for the richness of life itself and for its fragility in the face of human exploitation.
Because the enslavement of generations of indigenous Americans did not touch cultures (after all, it all went on deep in the Amazon itself), it is in general an unwritten chapter in the litany of man’s inhumanity to man. In 1500, when Captain Vicente Yáñez Pinzón crossed the Atlantic for the second time – he had captained Columbus’s caravel La Niña in 1492 – and came on the muddy outpourings of the mighty river Amazon, he thought he had found the mouth of the Ganges, and had reached India after all. He was greeted with great friendliness, but skirmished with the natives and took some thirty back to Spain as slaves – not a good start for the peoples of the Amazon. Some forty years later, Gonzalo Pizarro, the younger and more dashing of the Pizarro brothers (Hemming describes him as “brave, impetuous and cruel”), led a party of conquistadores from Quito in an attempt to discover El Dorado – the source of the coveted gold of the Incas.
They should have realized how difficult it would be, but the lust for gold drove them on. Eventually, a smaller group led by Francisco de Orellana continued downriver, encountering group after group of indigenous people in large, well-kept villages all along the river; some were friendly and others not, but the overwhelming impression was of a land densely and productively populated. The group descended the entire length of the Amazon and two years later ended up on the island of Margarita off the coast of Venezuela, back in land under Spanish control. Their travellers’ tales brought back the legend of the Amazons, a tribe of women who fought like men and fuelled the desire of Europeans to exploit the region.
The “mad Basque” Lope de Aguirre (“hero” of Herzog’s film) went down the Amazon a few years later, and warned all others that the river was cursed and a “fearful lake” – all Europeans should avoid it like the plague. But he was wrong about who should be afraid: the first Europeans were indeed daunted by the vast and frightening (for them) forests on either side of the river, but the people who suffered from the “conquest” of the river basin were those in the villages seen lining the banks by Orellana and his men.
By the time the French scientist Charles-Marie de La Condamine travelled down the river in 1743, he saw a completely different picture – an uninhabited land where there was “no warrior nation hostile to Europeans on the banks of the Amazon; all have submitted or retreated far away”. This depopulation was due to a variety of nefarious practices, detailed by Hemming with matter-of-fact horror. His is a detailed and compelling account of how nation after nation was destroyed.
The government in Lisbon had technically outlawed slavery, but Lisbon was a long way away from the Amazon Basin, and it suited the Portuguese to have colonists sending income back home – so the persecution continued. Whole villages were transported to “aldeias”, or official communities, where they worked for payment in cotton cloth that they grew, harvested and spun themselves. These people were not characterized as slaves, but as “free”. Other peoples were “ransomed”. This insidious practice involved the putative rescue of indigenous peoples from other indigenous groups, ostensibly because they ran the risk of being cannibalized. Expeditions dedicated to ransoming people were common and successful: indigenous groups were understandably intimidated by Portuguese guns. The brutality with which the slavers hunted down indigenous groups appalled some of the clergy who came to the region – one quite correctly referred to them as no better than murderers, but others collaborated with the enslavers, intent on saving souls at whatever cost.
Slavery went on well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fuelled by the rubber trade. The discovery of white gold, the sap of the rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis, launched another rush for El Dorado. The tapping of rubber trees was undertaken by indigenous people, who in some places were enslaved, in practice if not officially. In the no-man’s-land of the Colombian Putumayo, the rubber baron Julio César Arana ran an empire of unbelievable brutality, totally dependent on indigenous labour to fell the trees of Castilloa elastica, an alternative and inferior rubber source. The methods used were similar to those used in the Congo that so horrified Victorian England; for quotas not met, children were executed, hands or limbs cut off, and the inhabitants of whole villages murdered. The atrocities practised far from prying eyes were exposed by a young American, Walter Hardenburg. His reports inspired Roger Casement, then British consul in Brazil, who had previously exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo, to travel to the region in 1910 and 1912. His official reports eventually led to the removal of Arana’s companies from the London Stock Exchange.
South America had long fascinated naturalists; Alexander von Humboldt saw no human beings at all in his trip along the Casiquiare Canal (the stretch of river connecting the Amazon and the Orinoco), where he observed that “Here, in a fertile country, adorned with eternal verdure, we seek in vain for the traces of the power of man”. Although Spanish scientists had explored the edges of the basin, and Portuguese biologists had penetrated some distance into the southern reaches, their work was not widely disseminated and often not even published, leaving the documentation of the natural history of the Amazon to others. Charles Darwin’s famous image of the “tangled bank” certainly owes its origin to his impressions of tropical forests, but it is the impressions and experiences of Alfred Russel Wallace and his contemporaries that truly brought the natural history of the Amazon to the attention of science. Wallace and his friend Henry Walter Bates travelled to the Amazon in 1848 to explore “the origin of species”; inspired by Humboldt and Darwin, they came up with a scheme to sell specimens, mostly birds and butterflies, in order to finance their travels. Wallace stayed in the region for four years, travelling up the Rio Negro to Venezuela, while Bates collected for eleven years and went upriver on the Amazon itself almost as far as the border with Peru. Shortly after they had begun their journey another young Englishman, Richard Spruce, was encouraged by the authorities to go to the Amazon to collect plants. He had shown great promise collecting in the Pyrenees, but was of feeble health and only given a few years to live; he wanted to do something to advance botany before he died. Fourteen years later, after ascending the Amazon to the Andes and ultimately being employed by the India Office to collect seeds of Cinchona (the source of quinine and the cure for malaria), he returned to England, reinvigorated.
Hemming chronicles how, in 1850, Spruce, Wallace and Bates met in Manaus, surely proving the small-world adage; how on earth could these three have managed to be in the same small place at the same time in such a vast region? Wallace spent the next several years collecting up the Rio Negro, and produced an amazingly accurate map of the river, using only a compass, a sextant and a bucket of water (in which to reflect the moon) – it was still in use decades later. He suffered terribly from malaria high up on the river and vowed to return to England and never to travel alone again. Return he did, but in the middle of the Atlantic his ship caught fire and all his collections were lost. Undeterred, Wallace wrote a book about his travels, then immediately set off for South East Asia, from where he sent a famous letter to Darwin enclosing an essay entitled “On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type” – which goaded Darwin into completing his masterpiece On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.
Spruce was utterly entranced by the Amazonian forests – “the largest river in the world flows through the largest forest” – and his collections were wonderful indeed. They are prized by botanists both for their quality and completeness: many plants he collected were not collected again until the late twentieth century. In the mid-1980s I lived in Tarapoto on the Río Huallaga, one of the three great tributaries of the Amazon in Peru, and I discovered for myself some of Spruce’s great localities – among them Guayrapurima and Cerro Pelado. I was told that a fern I found was the first collection since Spruce: there is still so much to discover in the tropical forests of the Amazon. Spruce crossed over the Andes to Ecuador and spent several years collecting seeds of Cinchona for the India Office so that the tree could be established in the British colonies to provide a reliable source of quinine. Seeds of Hevea brasiliensis had earlier been planted with great success in Malaysia, and establishing a source of quinine was deemed equally important. Some might characterize this as stealing or, more hysterically, as “biopiracy”, but plants of importance have always been taken by people wherever they go. Coffee, for example, now the mainstay of many Amazonian economies, was taken from Ethiopia – I suspect if you asked many people where coffee was native, they might say Brazil.
On his return from the Amazon, Bates wrote what has to be one the true classics of travel writing, A Naturalist on the River Amazons. His turn of phrase and talent for bringing the region to life made his name, as much as did his discovery of unique phenomena in natural history such as Batesian mimicry – where palatable butterflies mimic unpalatable ones so well that predators are fooled and leave them alone. Bates read Darwin’s book while in the Amazon, and framed all he observed in the light of evolution by natural selection. His observations from the field were among the first to really support the theory, now so strongly supported by weight of evidence that it has become scientific fact. In London, Bates was known as “Bates of the Amazon”, and fascinated all with his tales of “a region which may fittingly be called a Naturalist’s Paradise”. He became the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (for which post he competed with his old friend Alfred Russel Wallace).
Biodiversity studies in Amazonia today are very different from the collecting and documenting of the Victorian naturalists. The sheer diversity of life in the region means it has long fascinated those exploring mechanisms of speciation. Hemming only touches on the scientific study of Amazonian diversity: he focuses instead on the accelerated destruction of this rich and complex set of habitats. Recent research has suggested that about 40 per cent of rare tree species are likely to become extinct over the next decades – perhaps, to some, a small loss among so much diversity. But the intricate workings of tropical forests are not clearly understood even today; how the extinction of even a single species will affect an ecosystem is a subject of much current debate. The Amazon forest is more than a collection of species. The sheer vastness and exuberance of tropical forest growth led generations of European colonists to assume that once it was cut down, cultivation could be similarly exuberant and lush. Not so – the richness of the forest is locked up in the trees. These trees, too, absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide per year – global warming without the Amazon would be of far greater magnitude.
Far from being a great emptiness to be exploited and profited from, the Amazon must be appreciated for what it really is – a reservoir of natural richness from which we can learn much about how our planet works. The Peruvian Congress’s recent repeal of land laws aimed at opening up areas of the Amazon managed by indigenous peoples to oil and gas exploration is an indication that the region is no longer regarded as “el gran vacio Amazónico”, but as a place with a future to be managed in partnership with those who were so exploited in the past. The future of the Amazon lies in partnership. In this rich and important tapestry of a book, John Hemming has written a history of this most fascinating of regions that clearly shows why past ways will not work, but that the lessons we learn from the past can help to save a functioning, complex and rich Amazon for the future.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article5465028.ece
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Acai has gone from staple of the Amazon to global wonder-berry
It's been touted for its antioxidant properties and green pedigree, but now some worry that the fruit's surging popularity could spell trouble for the rain forest.
BELEM, BRAZIL — A frenzy overtakes the teeming harbor here as a wooden-hulled riverboat chugs into port.
"It's here!" cries an expectant buyer, one of many shoving his way toward the craft in a sweaty mercantile crush. "The gold! The purple gold!"
The cargo is acai (pronounced ah-sigh-EE), the unassuming fruit of a jungle palm that has gone from Amazonian staple to global wonder-berry: a much-hyped ingredient in smoothies, sorbets, nutrition bars and countless trendy treats from L.A. to London to Tokyo.
Acai's cachet derives not only from the berry's antioxidant traits and supposed Viagra-like powers of vitality, but from its green pedigree: It has been acclaimed as a renewable resource that provides a sustainable livelihood for tens of thousands of subsistence harvesters without damaging the expanses of the Amazon. Because of acai, the jungle is more valuable standing than felled.
With acai a global sensation, however, some fear the berry's runaway success may spell trouble for the rain forest -- a prospect that dismays even the Southern California brothers who are credited with launching the craze in the U.S.
International conglomerates are elbowing their way into the acai trade, while traditional cultivators are intensifying production at the expense of other trees. Conservationists worry that acai could succumb to the destructive agribusiness model: clear-cut lands, sprawling plantations and liberal application of pesticides and fertilizer.
"There's a kind of 'green deforestation' to plant acai," says Alfredo Homma, agronomist with the Brazilian Company for Agricultural Research, a publicly funded institute. "They don't bring down all the trees and leave the area deforested. They bring down diverse forests and replace them with one single culture -- acai."
An everyday food
In the stifling Amazon delta, acai is less a hip superfood than a poor man's staple: Downtown Belem even features an acai drive-in.
Many people here eat acai every day, typically as an accompaniment to river fish or sprinkled with toasted cassava, a widely consumed tuber. Fresh acai, served at room temperature, is a tart, earthier version of the frozen, pasteurized and inevitably sweetened incarnation marketed abroad.
"It makes you grow," says Vital Vieira, who owns one of the many retail storefronts where acai berries are shelled, separating the large, inedible seed from the prized pulp and purple skin.
The slender acai palm typically thrives on the margins of the forest -- along rivers and streams, where some sunlight filters through the canopy. For generations, men such as Domingos Bravo Rosa have harvested the berry in the dense forests across the river from downtown Belem, a onetime rubber boomtown that is now the capital of the Amazonian state of Para.
"We don't destroy the forest," says Rosa, 44, a lifetime acai harvester like his father before him, as he maneuvers his boat to his home on nearby Combu island. Rosa knows where to find the acai; a single palm is often hidden among a score or more of other trees. He hires two harvesters, who must shimmy up and down palms sometimes 60 feet or more in height, a dangerous job.
"Acai has allowed my family to live well," he says. An electric generator powers a stereo and two TVs in his family's two homes. This is a rain-forest clan with five cellphones.
A different model of acai harvesting is found on neighboring Murutucu island. Here, Ben-Hur Borges, a forest engineer turned acai entrepreneur, proudly displays the 1,350 acres of elegant groves that supply his firm, Amazon Fruit, a major exporter of acai to the United States and Europe.
The rows of acai trees stand in sharp contrast to the occasional palms that Rosa and others seek out in the jungle. Here, small rail cars carry harvested acai on wooden tracks to Amazon Fruit's processing and freezing plant.
'Mono-culture'
The sprawling plantation resembles the kind of acai "mono-culture" that is anathema to conservationists. But Borges argues that his success demonstrates how more than one version of acai production can thrive, with both environmental and social benefits. He says his hard work draining and reshaping the island brought back a "degraded" forest -- the fate of much of the Amazon, which has been ravaged by loggers, developers and cattle ranchers.
"When we got here, we found only riverside peoples living on an island where everything that could be reaped had already been taken away," says Borges, who began developing the island 13 years ago. "There was no acai, no timber, nothing. There were bushes and trees with no economic value. . . . We enriched and rebuilt the island, with an emphasis on acai.
"Acai," he concludes, "is the ideal native plant to help rebuild degraded forests."
California link
Acai might not be such a global sensation today were it not for a pair of Southern California brothers, Ryan and Jeremy Black, who co-founded Sambazon, based in San Clemente. The company now boasts sales of $25 million a year in juices, powders and other acai products. But it all started with a surfing trip.
Ryan Black returned from a millennium-marking surfing visit to Brazil blown away by acai. In the 1990s, acai had spread from the Amazon to become a staple in surfer shacks, juice joints and weightlifting clubs along the heavily populated Brazilian coast. Now it's a common sight at major supermarkets and health food emporiums the world over. Among the retail chains selling acai products are Whole Foods Market, Vons, Albertsons, Gelson's Markets, Jamba Juice and Juice It Up.
This year, Black says, Sambazon plans to process 11,000 tons of acai from its Brazilian production base, making it the world's leading supplier.
All of it comes from individuals such as Rosa picking the fruit from wild acai palms, according to the Black brothers, who have won praise internationally as "green" business pioneers.
"The whole idea is to protect the biodiversity of the forest," Ryan Black says. "The idea is not to clear-cut everything on the land and plant acai trees."
But a growing concentration of acai plantings amid rising demand has Black worried about a "dangerous cycle": transformation of bio-diverse forests into proliferating stretches of acai palms. That means removing other tree species to make way for acai. His hope is that consumer preference for certified organic acai, picked in the wild, will help preserve the forest and support harvesting families.
"We want to look back [in] 20 years and see that acai has been a positive force in the Amazon," Black says, "not just a fruit that became domesticated and found success at the price of the local people and their environment."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-acai21-2008sep21,0,1217678.story
BELEM, BRAZIL — A frenzy overtakes the teeming harbor here as a wooden-hulled riverboat chugs into port.
"It's here!" cries an expectant buyer, one of many shoving his way toward the craft in a sweaty mercantile crush. "The gold! The purple gold!"
The cargo is acai (pronounced ah-sigh-EE), the unassuming fruit of a jungle palm that has gone from Amazonian staple to global wonder-berry: a much-hyped ingredient in smoothies, sorbets, nutrition bars and countless trendy treats from L.A. to London to Tokyo.
Acai's cachet derives not only from the berry's antioxidant traits and supposed Viagra-like powers of vitality, but from its green pedigree: It has been acclaimed as a renewable resource that provides a sustainable livelihood for tens of thousands of subsistence harvesters without damaging the expanses of the Amazon. Because of acai, the jungle is more valuable standing than felled.
With acai a global sensation, however, some fear the berry's runaway success may spell trouble for the rain forest -- a prospect that dismays even the Southern California brothers who are credited with launching the craze in the U.S.
International conglomerates are elbowing their way into the acai trade, while traditional cultivators are intensifying production at the expense of other trees. Conservationists worry that acai could succumb to the destructive agribusiness model: clear-cut lands, sprawling plantations and liberal application of pesticides and fertilizer.
"There's a kind of 'green deforestation' to plant acai," says Alfredo Homma, agronomist with the Brazilian Company for Agricultural Research, a publicly funded institute. "They don't bring down all the trees and leave the area deforested. They bring down diverse forests and replace them with one single culture -- acai."
An everyday food
In the stifling Amazon delta, acai is less a hip superfood than a poor man's staple: Downtown Belem even features an acai drive-in.
Many people here eat acai every day, typically as an accompaniment to river fish or sprinkled with toasted cassava, a widely consumed tuber. Fresh acai, served at room temperature, is a tart, earthier version of the frozen, pasteurized and inevitably sweetened incarnation marketed abroad.
"It makes you grow," says Vital Vieira, who owns one of the many retail storefronts where acai berries are shelled, separating the large, inedible seed from the prized pulp and purple skin.
The slender acai palm typically thrives on the margins of the forest -- along rivers and streams, where some sunlight filters through the canopy. For generations, men such as Domingos Bravo Rosa have harvested the berry in the dense forests across the river from downtown Belem, a onetime rubber boomtown that is now the capital of the Amazonian state of Para.
"We don't destroy the forest," says Rosa, 44, a lifetime acai harvester like his father before him, as he maneuvers his boat to his home on nearby Combu island. Rosa knows where to find the acai; a single palm is often hidden among a score or more of other trees. He hires two harvesters, who must shimmy up and down palms sometimes 60 feet or more in height, a dangerous job.
"Acai has allowed my family to live well," he says. An electric generator powers a stereo and two TVs in his family's two homes. This is a rain-forest clan with five cellphones.
A different model of acai harvesting is found on neighboring Murutucu island. Here, Ben-Hur Borges, a forest engineer turned acai entrepreneur, proudly displays the 1,350 acres of elegant groves that supply his firm, Amazon Fruit, a major exporter of acai to the United States and Europe.
The rows of acai trees stand in sharp contrast to the occasional palms that Rosa and others seek out in the jungle. Here, small rail cars carry harvested acai on wooden tracks to Amazon Fruit's processing and freezing plant.
'Mono-culture'
The sprawling plantation resembles the kind of acai "mono-culture" that is anathema to conservationists. But Borges argues that his success demonstrates how more than one version of acai production can thrive, with both environmental and social benefits. He says his hard work draining and reshaping the island brought back a "degraded" forest -- the fate of much of the Amazon, which has been ravaged by loggers, developers and cattle ranchers.
"When we got here, we found only riverside peoples living on an island where everything that could be reaped had already been taken away," says Borges, who began developing the island 13 years ago. "There was no acai, no timber, nothing. There were bushes and trees with no economic value. . . . We enriched and rebuilt the island, with an emphasis on acai.
"Acai," he concludes, "is the ideal native plant to help rebuild degraded forests."
California link
Acai might not be such a global sensation today were it not for a pair of Southern California brothers, Ryan and Jeremy Black, who co-founded Sambazon, based in San Clemente. The company now boasts sales of $25 million a year in juices, powders and other acai products. But it all started with a surfing trip.
Ryan Black returned from a millennium-marking surfing visit to Brazil blown away by acai. In the 1990s, acai had spread from the Amazon to become a staple in surfer shacks, juice joints and weightlifting clubs along the heavily populated Brazilian coast. Now it's a common sight at major supermarkets and health food emporiums the world over. Among the retail chains selling acai products are Whole Foods Market, Vons, Albertsons, Gelson's Markets, Jamba Juice and Juice It Up.
This year, Black says, Sambazon plans to process 11,000 tons of acai from its Brazilian production base, making it the world's leading supplier.
All of it comes from individuals such as Rosa picking the fruit from wild acai palms, according to the Black brothers, who have won praise internationally as "green" business pioneers.
"The whole idea is to protect the biodiversity of the forest," Ryan Black says. "The idea is not to clear-cut everything on the land and plant acai trees."
But a growing concentration of acai plantings amid rising demand has Black worried about a "dangerous cycle": transformation of bio-diverse forests into proliferating stretches of acai palms. That means removing other tree species to make way for acai. His hope is that consumer preference for certified organic acai, picked in the wild, will help preserve the forest and support harvesting families.
"We want to look back [in] 20 years and see that acai has been a positive force in the Amazon," Black says, "not just a fruit that became domesticated and found success at the price of the local people and their environment."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-acai21-2008sep21,0,1217678.story
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
