Then came the bad news: the government owes them US$21,000.
I was reminded of the ancient Chinese curse: “May you get what you wish for.”
The Apo Island experiment showed that it is possible to simultaneously save nature and benefit people. But the path in Apo has not always been smooth.
Jesus Delmo was a happy man, having caught a five-kilogram octopus the morning I met him.
In a way, Delmo’s story reflects the change in attitude of the 750 people of tiny Apo Island, who were reluctant pioneers in a nature conservation experiment.
Jesus Delmo, 65, remembers the time in the late 1970s when Angel Alcala, then a biologist with Silliman University, and his colleagues first proposed setting up a community-managed nature reserve. “We thought they were crazy,” Delmo recalls. “We had no idea how reefs function. But at that point we had nothing to lose. We were already travelling 30 kilometers across the sea, at great personal risk, to fish off the coast of Mindanao.”
Liberty P. Rhodes, who was then barangay captain, or village head, remembers “they came with seminars; we were very innocent. We agreed to try it for two years.”
Angel Alcala, now director of the Suakcrem Marine Laboratory of Silliman University, remembers another problem. “The people of Apo were afraid we were going to take their land, for which they had no legal rights,” he says.
But after lengthy discussions in 1982 over numerous bottles of beer they went along with the two key components of the plan.
The first was the concept that all of Apo’s surrounding water would be designated as a marine sanctuary.
The second was the creation of a strict “no-take” reef sanctuary, an area approximately 500 meters by 500 meters encompassing about 10 percent of the golf course-sized island’s reefs, where no fishing at all was permitted.
And outside the “no-take” zone the community introduced stringent fishing regulations – no dynamite, no cyanide, no muro-ami drive net fishing with weighted scare lines, no spear fishing with scuba, no dynamite, cyanide, or gill nets with very small mesh nets. The community also prohibited fishermen from outside from entering Apo waters.
What made the plan unusual was that the entire coastal area was to be managed by the community, not the government – a revolution in conservation thinking at that time. In 1986 the reserve was given legal protection and declared a local reserve under the municipal authority of the mainland town of Dauin.
Before long, benefits started to swim in, first through scuba divers who paid a fee to dive in Apo’s pristine reefs, then by improved fishing in the areas surrounding the “no-take” zone. Economic benefits were estimated at more than US$126,000 annually.
Then, in 1998, the federal government, through a Presidential Proclamation, declared all of Apo Island a “protected seascape” and placed Apo Island within the National Integrated Protected Areas System. In 1999 a Protected Area Management Board, comprised of government and non-government representatives and Apo islanders, took over management of the reserve, including the job of collecting revenues. This might seem like good news – after all national recognition should provide better safeguards against intrusion, more visibility that would help lure tourists, and help with management – but it turned out to be a two-edged sword. A park manager employed by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, who is supposed to live on the island, rarely even visits. And since the national government got involved not one peso in tourist fees – some US$21,000 estimated by Angel Alcala – has made it back to the community.
Angel Alcala, who served a stint as secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources in the 1990s, isn’t surprised. “These bureaucrats sit in their air-conditioned rooms in Manila, and lose touch with the realities of the field.” Leila Peralta, an expert in community based management with the United States Agency for International Development, which supported the Apo Island sanctuary from the beginning, notes that “things were working fine in the community until this national law was passed, and now the community has been affected.”
Angel Alcala, 72, who based the Apo model on a similar experiment on Sumilon Island, is proud of the Apo initiative. “This all took place in 1974, which was a year before the Great Barrier Reef Authority was established in Australia,” he says. “Our reserves were the first marine reserves specifically intended to increase fishery yields.”
It’s clear that fishermen’s attitudes towards dynamite have changed.
“Before the reserve I ‘boom’, easy to get lots of fish,” he says. Today, the only boom he has in his life comes from pop music from the stereo.
Fishing has dramatically improved, and with it the cash income of formerly poor villagers.
Mario Pascobello, the village head of Apo, notes that before the sanctuary was established, fishermen were lucky to get two kilograms of fish a day, while today eight kilograms is an average catch. “The sanctuary became a breeding place, which meant better fishing outside the reserve,” notes Ronel Entia, 24, a divemaster working on the island. Tourism has brought some cash benefits, but, as elsewhere, comes with a price.
For example, two sisters have reportedly begun prostituting themselves, a rather audacious act on a conservative island where everybody knows everybody else’s business.
Mario Pascobello notes that tourism, which has doubled in the last three years, might be reaching the carrying capacity; he fears that coral is deteriorating. Paul Rhodes, who pioneered ecologically-sustainable commercial diving on Apo, notes that in 1998 there were 23 dive operators running dive trips to Apo, mostly from outside the region. Now there are about 40 bringing divers to these rich waters.
As I learned when I slipped into the water, those divers experience some of the better diving in the Philippines, viewing teeming schools of jack, their gleaming silver bodies dancing in synchronized choreography. There are turtles and small sharks, and of course tropical corals that reveal Mother Nature in her Daliesque mode.
But on land the situation is less idyllic.
“I’m scared,” Mario Pascobello admits. “The sanctuary could change character. Last week someone was seen fishing with a net in the sanctuary.”
Walking through the neat village I could see obvious signs of prosperity that certainly didn’t exist 20 years ago. Most houses now have electricity, and dozens of television antenna sprout from the roofs. Many homes are concrete, and zinc roofing, a universal sign of tropical upward mobility replacing common sense, has replaced cooler and cheaper thatch. Homeowners proudly grow orchids in their front yards.
I sat with Delmo and his aging buddies in the village and asked what improvements he has seen.
“There’s more fish,” he says, with a similar smugness to Bill Clinton telling his campaign staff “It’s the economy, stupid.” “And the village is improved.”
How so?
“Well, we now have the village highway,” he says, referring to the meter-wide concrete path we’re sitting on.
The Apo experience illustrates the different ways conservationists are fighting to save coral reefs and the pitfalls they face.
Conservationists are running out of time to find effective solutions. At an international conference in Bali, Indonesia in 2000, scientists released the startling estimate that more than a quarter of the world’s coral reefs have been destroyed and most of the remaining reefs may be dead in 20 years.
Some 90 percent of the 33,700 square kilometers of reef in the Philippines (an area half the size of Ireland) are dead or deteriorating in the wake of human abuse.
Immediate direct threats to reefs worldwide include blast fishing, and, to a lesser extent, use of cyanide, in fishing for rare reef fish. Other human induced problems include sediment runoff from land-based construction and deforestation, and poor anchoring of boats.
Mark Erdman, of the United States Agency for International Development Natural Resources Management Program in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and Lida Pet-Soede of WWF-World Wide Fund for Nature-Ind
onesia, argue that in Indonesia, just next door to the Philippines, “blast and cyanide fishing, are indisputably the biggest threats to coral reefs.”
Longer-term threats come particularly from global warming. United States President George W. Bush’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming is likely to further frustrate coral reef conservationists.
Global warming is a greater threat to coral reefs than local environmental damage, according to Clive Wilkinson, a marine biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and editor of Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2000, which was released at the 2000 Bali conference. The report documents a sudden and steep jump in damage stemming from the 1997–1998 El Nino-La Nina event, in which sea temperatures were higher than normal. Scientists believe that El Nino events are linked to global climate change. Wilkinson says “in the latest event we had bleaching all the way from Brazil to the Indian Ocean. It was a wake-up call for reef scientists.”
What happens to corals when water temperature increases?
The odd biology of corals may prove to be their undoing. The tiny corals, which are invertebrate animals, capture single-celled algae and force the plants to make their food “like galley cooks on a slave ship,” according to one biologist. Global warming speeds the algae’s metabolism, increasing the rate at which photosynthesis takes place. At about 30 degrees Celsius, the algae produce so much oxygen that the coral cells begin to suffer from oxygen poisoning. The corals then spit out their symbiotic algae, which give corals their brilliant colors, leaving the animals chalky-white. This transformation is called bleaching, and if the water remains warm the corals eventually die.
Australian marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said water temperatures, particularly in the tropics, are likely to have risen to the point where corals will be sitting in a “hot soup” and unable to survive.
“Sea surface temperatures throughout the tropics have shown dramatic increases over the last two decades, as much as half a degree per decade. This is ten times what we are observing globally,” said Alan Strong, of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “As a result, the concern for coral reefs is how much of this increase will continue over the ensuing decades.”
The sensitivity of reefs to rising temperatures makes them “silent sentinels of global warming,” adds Strong.
In some of the areas worst hit by global warming, such as the Maldives and Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, up to 90 percent of coral reefs have been killed over the past two years by an increase in water temperature
Hoegh-Guldberg argues that if global warming continues as expected “there’s a very good probability that coral reefs as we know them now will be gone in 30 to 50 years.” However he takes a practical view when asked whether more emphasis should be placed on the immediate threat of blasting or the longer-term threat of climate change. “If you’re being charged by a rhino at 20 meters and a bull elephant at 100 meters you have to pay attention to both,” he warns.
Will the Apo community get their money? Leila Peralta, with the U.S. Agency for International Development, fears that “the Philippine government coffer is bankrupt and the government might have already spent the money earned by the community of Apo. Probably, they will return the money, but when? In the meantime, how are the people of Apo going to maintain their sanctuary?” Angel Alcala is more optimistic: “I’m confident the money the government owes the villagers will go back to them.”
Regardless of whether the villagers get their cash to maintain their sanctuary, the one sure thing is that they’ll continue to have plenty of tasty jack at the end of a day’s fishing. That evening I enjoyed the rich white-fleshed fish steamed with soy sauce, ginger, garlic and onions.
Chapter 8
PRAYER FLAGS OVER RIO
Should we trust the eco-bureaucrats or the farmer in Bhutan for eco-solutions?
JANGTSIKHA, Bhutan
I was cleaning up my office when I stubbed my toe against the printed version of Agenda 21, some 700 pages, 2,079 recommendations, guidelines and treaties resulting from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio – the largest eco-bureaucratic gathering ever held. I hefted the volume to my desk and felt tired just reading the table of contents. All that political energy, all that money. All that effort aimed at saving the world. But it’s hard to keep a party going. In spite of at least eighty major international conferences scheduled since Rio to encourage follow-up, the environment seems to have been usurped as everyone’s favourite cause by the economy, the economy and the economy.
I remember where I was during the Earth Summit. I had elected to look for an environmental experience instead of bathing in Rio’s environmental spectacle. I spent Earth Summit week sitting on top of a mountain in Bhutan while the leaders of just about every country on the planet gathered in Rio to figure out how to save the world. When I think of Rio an image of a Bhutanese farmer named Gyeltsnen comes to mind.
The diverse mixture of diplomats and eco-activists who gathered in Rio (including a Bhutanese delegation which was led by the king’s sister) were looking at the big picture and posturing for the small screen. These men and women debated serious issues. Global trade patterns. Sustainable development. Transfer of technology. How to move big bucks from the people who have them to the people who don’t. How to appear selfless to the press while nevertheless getting what they, and their constituents back home, really want. Eco-politics, enhanced with more than a little eco-babble.
I sat on top of a mountain overlooking a Buddhist dzong. The air was thin at 4,200 meters, and my synapses performed cosmic helicopter whirls. Prayer flags blew in the wind. While people met in Rio I looked down on a valley perhaps two kilometers wide and eight kilometers long. I counted three houses. I saw nothing but trees blanketing the hills.
I’d guess that there can’t be more than several hundred Bhutanese who were aware that the world’s most important eco-conference was being held that week. The rest of the country’s 600,000 people live and will likely die without recognizing the importance to their well-being of eco-bureaucrats strolling down Ipanema and Copacabana.
During Rio week I descended 1,500 meters and visited Jangtsikha village, where I had a discussion with a farmer, whose name was Gyeltsnen. It was very Aristotlian. He looked at my Swiss Army knife, my French backpack, my Italian trekking shoes, my American tent, my Australian pants with zippers at the knees to turn them into shorts. He concluded, as any sensible person from a developing country would, that I was rich. It took him no time at all to point out that the reverse was also true. He was wearing woolen homespun, he could write no language and could speak only one, his family’s most important possessions were six cattle, assorted pigs and chickens, a house he had inherited from his ancestors and his wife’s turquoise jewelry. He therefore concluded, sensibly, that he was poor.
“You’re wrong. You’re not poor at all. You’re rich,” I said provocatively. Gyeltsnen looked skeptical. “You are totally self-sufficient,” I argued with Euro-pragmatism. “Not to mention the fact that the king provides your family with free medical care and your children with free schooling.”
Gyeltsnen did not look convinced.
“You are totally self-sufficient,” I repeated. “If there’s ever a war, it’s guys like you who will survive.”
Gyaeltsnen said nothing.
“And the most important things are all around you,” I said, waving my arms. It was easy to get carried away in Bhutan’s pine-scented hills. This is roughly what I said: “You have the most important things anyone can have. Because you’ve got forest you’ve got clean, fresh water. You’ve got a set of spiritual beliefs that provides psychological support for however many lives you may have. You have built-in conservation safeguards – you yourself just told me that the tree we’re sitting under is sacred. And you’ve got a family that stays together. People in the west don’t have those things any more. This forest and these prayer flags and these children make you a rich man.”
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bsp; “You can afford to travel to Bhutan,” Gyeltsnen said with finality. “I cannot travel to visit you.”
I had no answer for him. And I’m sure that he probably wasn’t convinced that he was richer than most other people. No, the only way to show the people of Bhutan how rich they are will be to bus them over to Nepal so they can see how some 19 million people have wiped out their forests, how without forests the Nepalese are forced to endure regular landslides, how they suffer a chronic shortage of firewood and clean water. The coup de grace would be to show him what critics call “tourists’ prayer flags”, a euphemism that describes colourful strips of used toilet tissue adorning the most popular trekking routes. He would see how the Nepalese have modified their traditional cultures of Hinduism and Buddhism in order to accommodate a third religion, Tourism. How farmers can’t grow very many crops in the hills and how urbanites can’t breathe in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu.
Bhutan is an economic anomaly, and it would be wrong to assume that all is well. Based on statistics like GNP per capital (US$425), low life expectancy at birth (48.9 years), adult literacy (30 percent) and numbers of doctors in the country (42 in 1988), Bhutan lies in the bottom third on the UN’s list of countries. It also has a long way to go in the technology sweepstakes – 285 people per telephone, compared to say ten people per phone in Brazil. Yet in terms of nature it’s in pretty good shape. Bhutan maintains, by Royal decree, 60 percent of its land as forests. Protected areas cover twenty percent of the country’s surface. These forests provide water, but riches like regular clean water are rarely factored into the UN lists that judge how well-off a country might be.
Because there are only 600,000 people in this Switzerland-sized kingdom, and because the king’s word is law, and because outside cultural and trade influence is tightly restricted (a maximum of 4,000 tourists are allowed in annually; they must pay US$250 a day for the privelege), and because the government is fiscally cautious (positive foreign exchange reserves, no debt, balanced budget), this land the people call “Land of the Thunder Dragon” may continue to go its own, pine and oak-blessed way.
The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen Page 17