Many of the trees in his chacra bear fruits whose very names evoke luscious motions of lips and tongue: mango, guaba, aguaje, araza. The ungurahui’s purple fruit contains a seed that makes a chocolate-flavored drink; a garland of snail shells hangs from one of its branches. What are they for? I ask. “These snails have a ton of eggs,” Don Jorge answers through Jim. The snail shells, he explains, inspire the tree to fruit.
I can feel the scientists silently chuckle now. But there is a loveliness in Don Jorge’s gesture, a grace to it, like lighting a votive candle at church. The snail shells, in fact, may supply some calcium to the soil, an important nutrient; but we would be wrong, I think, to imagine that Jorge believes hanging snail shells works like spreading lime on a lawn. Rather, this is an offering, a sacred conversation with the plant, a living creature whom he likes and respects. For the relationship between Don Jorge and the plants here is quite different from the relationships between people and plants at home.
It is important, Don Jorge later told me, never to enter the chacra when you are not in the right frame of mind. No one should enter their chacra drunk, for instance. He handed a pepper to Dave’s nephew, who casually tucked it into his pocket. Don Jorge was upset. No, said Jorge, you mustn’t carry it in that way. It will bring bad luck. You must carry it in your hands, with respect.
Paul’s business partner, Suzy Faggard, who accompanied our group to the lodge, had made a wise observation about the people here when we’d spoken earlier. No wonder people here feel close to nature, she’d said, because in the rain forest, they are literally enclosed by it. In its twilight green glow, beneath a canopy of leaves that obscures the sky, one does not imagine the blue eye of God staring down at them from heaven; instead they live encircled by a leafy world, as if by a mother’s arms. Although, after two hundred years of evangelism, almost everyone here is nominally Catholic, their traditions are older, and closer to the earth. Miracles do not come from the sky, but they come commonly from the water: magic springs forth in the form of the dolphin, the anaconda, the whirlpool. And power dwells in the plants. For communion in church, the people have learned to drink the blood of Christ; but in a more ancient communion, they drink the blood of plants, to transport them back to the real world, the world that isn’t a dream, the world in which we can still hear the voices of animals and spirits speaking to us, and where spirits send canoes and spaceships to carry us on our travels.
In other cultures, spiritual ecstasy is induced by fasting, or song, dance, or ordeal. Here, ecstasy’s source is green. The vine snaking up this tree, Jorge tells us, is ayahuasca. He keeps it, he says, in order to see visions and dream dreams. To help it grow, he places in its boughs offerings of his wife’s hair.
We follow Jorge and Jim, the professors and biologists and other professionals taking notes. Our teacher is a man who offers snail shells to trees, who was nearly seduced by a dolphin, who can speak without words. And yet, Jim describes Jorge with words one might reserve for a scientist: He has learned by experiment. “Thanks to his ability to experiment,” Jim says, “he has been able to help me immensely.” For more than a decade, and throughout Jim’s doctoral work in agroforestry in Peru, Jorge has been one of his most important mentors. “He is not interested in money, but he’s a real expert, and he loves to experiment with plants.”
Over many years, Jorge has learned not only the uses of these different species, but also which ones thrive in different types of soils and under different methods of cultivation. He knows that an aguaje palm planted in the lower part of his chacra will grow five times as large as one planted in the upper part. Jim tested the acidity of the soil and discovered a difference in pH of only .5—a difference that can be profound. Because of his experiments, Jorge understands that guava fixes nitrogen in the soil in which it grows; he knows that spiny palms prefer the richest soils; he knows that ajo sacha is a bush in its female form and a vine in the male, and that the female form is more curative. But by offering his trees snail shells and human hair, he shows he understands something even more important: that the fates of the plants and the animals, the people and the dolphins, the land and the water, are all linked.
The plants in this chacra, Jim believes, are the trees that will save the forest. It’s a truth well illustrated by a tree he next shows us: the palm called aguaje.
Greg had told me about the aguaje before we left the States. I had tasted its fruit with Dianne on the previous trip. It is covered with many dozens of dark red scales, and looks rather like a hand grenade. The thin flesh covering the large seed is the color of Gouda cheese. Its taste is bland, but most people do not eat it; rather, they sell it in Iquitos, where it is used to flavor ice creams and drinks. “More aguaje comes through Iquitos today than did Hevea latex at the height of the rubber boom,” Greg had told me on the plane ride from Miami to Lima. The highest-quality fruits, he said, garner $10 to $20 per twenty-kilo sack—a price up to $2.20 per pound. So prized is the fruit that people come from all over the province to compete for the same stands of female trees in the forest.
The harvest is difficult and dangerous. The glass-smooth trunk of the palm is nearly impossible to climb and can soar for 130 feet before giving way to a starburst of spine-covered fronds and its clusters of scaly fruit. Collectors don’t wait for the fruit to drop; monkeys and birds would get to it first. Instead, the first collectors to arrive cut the trees down to prevent others from doing so—often before the fruits are even ripe. Unripe fruit sells in the Iquitos market for $1.50 to $3 for a forty-kilo sack—as little as 4 percent of the price of ripe aguaje. When, as a student in the 1980s (he now teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan), Jim began documenting this phenomenon with Richard Bodmer (now with the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology in Canterbury, England) and McGill University’s Oliver Coomes, they called it “the race for aguaje”—a race no one wins.
“It was a lose-lose situation,” Jim explained. “Every year people worked harder and harder to further extinguish a valuable resource.”
For forest animals, the destruction of aguaje was a disaster. Not only do these fruits feed monkeys and birds, but they are also surprisingly crucial to hoofed animals. For his doctoral thesis, Richard Bodmer discovered that fruit, and not grasses or leaves, provides a full 87 percent of the diet of the gray brocket deer and well over half the diet of collared and white-lipped peccaries. Aguaje alone, he found, comprises nearly a third of the diet of the lowland tapir. Finding a way to protect the fruiting palms, he wrote, was a project needing “urgent attention.”
Ironically, only a generation or so ago, local people grew aguaje in their chacras. But most people had abandoned the old way of farming. “The government-sponsored programs tell people the way they live is backward and savage,” Greg had explained. “The way to be part of modern Peru is to have cattle and corn.”
Even the conservation organizations backed the cattle-and-corn schemes. If the local people could be “civilized” into farming cattle and corn, the idea went, they wouldn’t need to go out into the forest, cutting the trees and killing its animals.
The idea seemed to work at first. Corn and cattle will thrive here for two or three years—at which point the aid workers move on, satisfied with their success. But within five years, it all falls apart. The crops fail, exhausting the soils in which they were never meant to grow, the cattle sicken and die, and the land, spent, may never recover. The destruction spreads like a cancer. Brazilian and American researchers, working under the leadership of American ornithologist Thomas Lovejoy, have found that small cleared patches lose up to 36 percent of their biomass soon after being isolated from surrounding forest, when large trees near fragment edges die. And to continue to farm, the family must cut and burn more virgin forest.
Under the seductive spell of the foreign scheme, the people abandoned their chacras at the edge of the rain forest. Once this land was no longer used, it was up for grabs. The government began to cede these lands, which no one
seemed to own, to land-seekers, oil workers, and police. Outsiders burned the land and then brought in hundreds of head of cattle and set themselves up as landlords, or patrones. Lumbermen came from the city to cut the trees. Merchants from Iquitos flooded in to hunt game.
By the time Jim and Richard Bodmer began their studies in the early eighties, most of the local people had all but forgotten the old way of farming. But a few, like Don Jorge, remembered. And they remembered that when the aguaje did not have to compete with other trees for light, when they grew in the fallow lands of the chacras and in the villages, the trees often grew no higher than sixteen feet—short enough that the fruits could be easily harvested without cutting the tree down. The fruits could be plucked ripe, at the peak of their flavor and value, and the tree would continue to produce for decades more.
And so, in March 1992, with $2,500 in funds Jim solicited from the Rainforest Conservation Fund in Chicago, he began the first agroforestry program in South America to concentrate on local, native species.
“We’re trying to instill a pride in methods they already know,” Jim explained later. “We didn’t show anybody how to plant. We worked on a way to use what they already knew.”
Jim is monitoring the 6,000 aguajes that 33 families have planted in their chacras (a number that would swell to well over 7,000 aguajes grown by 54 families by 2008). Tall and thin, his skin growing redder with each hour, Jim works side by side with the farmers, swinging a machete and a hoe under the hot sun, his body covered with mosquitoes. He could be working on forestry in the United States, cool and orderly, as he did for reforestation projects for International Paper. But no; summers he paints houses, and he works here when he can. “My hope,” he says, “is that I can contribute to people here. I have family here. I want to keep working on the aguaje,” he says, “because it would be immoral if I didn’t.” He states this as simply as if he were noting the acidity of the soil.
He is helping other families to experiment with other forest species: the tart, acidic carambola, or star fruit, as well as copuaçu, a fruit the size of an orange that tastes like a mango crossed with a guava that is now in great demand from ice-cream producers in Brazil. Fruits like guanábana, camu-camu, and sapote, as well as medicinal plants, bring premium prices at the market in Iquitos.
The trees thrive in the chacras because they are meant for this place. Many species, like the inga, fix nitrogen in the soil, enriching instead of depleting it. Because the chacras are planted with mixed species, not just rows of one kind of plant, a variety of nutrients are constantly recycled. A chacra of native species produces for twenty, thirty, forty years—possibly more, Jim explained. Because these chacras are planted on fallow land, formerly used to grow manioc and bananas, there is no need to clear wild forest. And should the family eventually abandon the chacra, they leave behind, instead of a charred clearing, a young, mixed forest of native trees.
But they still need the wild rain forest—and the chacras help them to guard it. For, contrary to many environmentalists’ notions, it is not, Jim insists, the local people who threaten the rain forest, but the greed of outsiders whom locals often feel helpless to evict.
“If we don’t protect our resources, who’s going to do it?” Raúl Huanaquiri, the municipal agent, an elected community leader, is speaking to us in Spanish in front of the single classroom of San Pedro’s mud-floored collective school. Around the school stand San Pedro’s wood and thatch houses, perched on stilts at the river’s edge. Once again, as at the wake for Mario’s son, ours is the only canoe with a motor moored to the mud bank.
Raúl stands in front of one of the school’s five green chalkboards, which hangs suspended from bamboo poles lashed together by lianas. Behind him, a map of the reserve, drawn in blue chalk, shows the waterways, the villages, the northeastern frontier of the reserve, near the border with Brazil. The scientists sit hunched in the wooden chair-and-desk sets—just as in elementary school, learning from the teacher in front of the room.
“These people know more about conservation than all the gringos combined,” Jim says as he introduces Raúl. “We have a lot to learn from them—of how to live as a community, as a peaceful, sustainable community, in a peaceful way.”
Jim translates as Raúl, wearing high rubber boots as protection against snakes, explains his neighbors’ understanding of the reserve. “At first when the reserve was created, there was a lot of debate,” he said. “Still two or three people don’t like it. But everyone knows about it now. Everyone realizes we must protect our own resources. We must do it, not the government.”
This the people know well. Last spring, they saw rafts of logs leaving their forest reserve, towed behind big boats from Iquitos. RCF’s site manager, César Reyes, discovered that, despite the law prohibiting lumbering, Iquitos officials had formally granted nine lumber concessions inside Tamshiyacu- Tahuayo—all with official paperwork and with full knowledge of the Peruvian Institute of Natural Resources and the agriculture department. But with César serving as their professional liaison to the authorities in Iquitos, local people protested. The signatures on the official documents allowing the concessions were officially erased, the papers revoked, as if they had never existed. Only forty-eight logs were extracted before the timber concessions were formally annulled.
The people need the forest whole. They depend on it for their lives. Some thirty-five families regularly hunt in the reserve. They take the big rodents like pacas, the piglike peccaries, and occasionally monkeys and larger game like tapir. They eat the smaller animals and sell the peccaries, deer, and tapirs, as well as the pelts, in Iquitos for cash. Thanks to Richard Bodmer’s studies of the populations of wild animals, they realize these resources are vulnerable—not just to outsiders, but to local pressures as well.
So now, before the professors and biologists gathered humbly in the classroom, Raúl outlines some of the changes the people of his village have recently instituted: They have prohibited the hunting of monkeys, giant armadillos, and tapirs, and restricted the take on hoofed animals like peccaries to three animals every two months per family. Locally elected hunting inspectors at two checkpoints along the river register every animal taken from the reserve; only local subsistence hunters are allowed to pass. And although the area is vast, there are no roads, only waterways, so it is difficult to pass unnoticed.
They have organized group work days, or mingas, to plant native trees in the chacras at the western border of the reserve. “The idea also,” he tells us, “is to teach our kids, so in the future, they will know what a white-lipped peccary is, and also know the forest plants.
“With village protection, peccaries and large rodents are beginning to visit us again,” Raúl reports, to murmurs of approval from the Americans. “We are trying to coordinate with other communities.”
In fact, the reserve’s methods were highlighted at a conference sponsored by the Institute of Natural Resources in Iquitos the month before. The agricultural techniques developed for the reserve were adopted for a $5 million, four-year project in Pacaya- Samiria. Jim and César would like to hire two more Peruvian agro-foresters to work in the villages at the reserve’s northern borders along the Yavarí- Miri River. And as Greg, Gary, and Jon discuss later, with another $50,000 they could finally afford to pay their Peruvian site manager, César, what he’s worth, and give Jim, for the first time, a salary.
“The reserve has become an example,” Raúl tells the board as he closes his careful, formal speech. “International people should come to see the reserve, to benefit not just the people here, but the entire country.”
As the information session concludes, from his little desk in the classroom, a professor raises his hand. Jon waits for Raúl to call on him.
“I’m delighted,” Jon says, “to meet such great minds in San Pedro.”
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
The opera house in the jungle, the Teatro Amazonas.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
The underwater city
of Belen.
ANDRESEAL/IMAGEQUESTMARINE.COM
Botos look so unlike other dolphins, but many see in them a strange beauty—the beauty of a creature poised on the brink of becoming something else.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
The author watching for dolphins.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
Researchers from INPA discover an eel unknown to science.
SY MONTGOMERY
Dianne Taylor-Snow with camera and cigar.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
The Meeting of the Waters, where dark and light waters flow side by side.
ANDRE SEAL/IMAGEQUESTMARINE.COM
With their wing-like flippers and extraordinary flexibility, pink dolphins can fly through the drowned branches of trees like birds.
SY MONTGOMERY
Time traveler: evolutionary biologist Gary Galbreath.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
Moises Chavez: our guide on the Tahuayo.
GREG NEISE
While paddling his canoe, Don Jorge Soplin was nearly seduced by a dolphin.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
A man with a woolly monkey at the Iquitos market.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
A red uakari monkey.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
Several fishing spiders, Moises told us, worked all night to create this giant web, which stretches as long as a badminton net.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
Flooded forest by day.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
A rare baby tamarin awaits illegal sale in Iquitos.
DIANNE TAYLOR-SNOW
View from up the machimango tree. Below, people are fishing for piranhas.
Journey of the Pink Dolphins Page 15