The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010

by Tim Folger

  Unlike the régulo of Canda, the samatenje of Sadjunjira lived well up the mountain, far from the last paved road, a four-and-a-half-hour journey from Chitengo. Along the way I learned from Inácio Júlio Tomás, a member of the Gorongosa forestry crew, who had agreed to drive and translate for me, that the samatenje I thought I was going to meet—the Facebook samatenje—had died in the past year, and that I was going to meet the new samatenje, his brother. Tomás wanted me to comprehend the incredible powers that this new samatenje and his other brother, the witch doctor of Sadjunjira, were believed to possess. There was even a local legend, he said, that the brothers had killed the Facebook samatenje by working some fratricidal magic on him. It sounded far-fetched to me, and Tomás allowed that the dead samatenje had spent a lot of time drinking at the tavern in Vila Gorongosa and fooling around with the ladies there, which was a more routine cause of death in the area. "But people here don't believe in AIDS," he told me, and Tomás himself was not prepared to discount the powers of the two surviving brothers: their father, he said, had had awesome powers.

  Not long ago, Tomás had had recourse to a witch doctor on account of a lame foot. He still wore the dark green fetish thread the healer had fitted his ankle with as he cast his spells, and Tomás had no complaints about the treatment: he had been up and walking again in no time. It seemed everyone had such stories, even the science-minded. Carr told me that every year at the end of the flood season, in mid-April, Gorongosa Park officially reopens, and all the local shamans convene under a hallowed "miracle tree" at Chitengo to call on the park's lions to show their favor to the park. Lo and behold, after one such ceremony Carr saw a lion stroll by the Chitengo restaurant—an unheard-of sighting in the fenced compound—and he found that five more lions had gathered by the camp gate.

  The day before my trip to Sadjunjira, I had made another long drive to visit a network of underground bat caves that were known to be guarded by spirits, one of whom took the form of a leopard. Shortly before we reached our destination, my guide had stopped so that we could stretch our legs and eat a sandwich. It was a stupefyingly hot, still day, but as we stood with our lunch by the tailgate of the car, the trees around us began to rattle in a burst of extreme wind that gathered suddenly into a slender twister, blackened with dust, and ripped between us, snatching a sandwich wrapper, which sailed a good seventy feet into the air and was gone forever. Later, in the caves, I stood on a ledge overlooking a deep black pool of water and a snake rose to the surface—some kind of cobra, at least five feet long—and stared straight at me until I turned away and it sank from sight. My guide had no doubt that both twister and snake were visitations. But as Tomás regaled me with similar stories of the powers of the samatenje and his brother—the brother, he said, was a very good doctor, who could give you medicine that would make you so rich that "you'll go to America and buy a helicopter"—he mentioned in passing that the samatenje had nevertheless lost two children the year before to cholera, by modern medical standards one of the most preventable, and treatable, maladies.

  After leaving the last graded road on the way to Sadjunjira, we spent the next hour climbing the mountain in four-wheel drive on a road that was properly a footpath, and a badly washed-out one, too. On either side, large patches of the mountain were stripped bare of trees, and ragged fringes of flame licked up the grassy slopes. Then for long stretches there was no grass to burn: the topsoil was entirely gone, and all that remained was a waste of boulder fields. The last few miles of our approach was made on foot, and for the final hundred yards we had to remove our shoes and socks, as we had entered hallowed ground.

  Tomás had been anxious that we were arriving around noon, for fear that we might not find the samatenje at home or sober so late in the day. But he was both—a slight, bearded man, clad in the ragged remains of several denim shirts and matching pants. He squatted at the sight of us, cupped his hands, and clapped them rhythmically—pock, pock, pock, pock, pock, pock, pock—finishing with a half-beat flourish. This was a ritual that he repeated frequently throughout our visit, and which we returned in kind each time. He gave us straw mats to sit on in the shade of a vast, fruit-laden mango tree and left us there for well over an hour before he commenced our audience. By then he had assembled an entourage of local elders to join us—because, Tomás explained, such a leader cannot meet alone with a white man lest he later be accused of having betrayed the interests of his community.

  Throughout our visit, fires crackled through the surrounding bush, and fine ribbons of sooty ash drifted down around us. A steep flank of the mountain rose behind the samatenje, bare and burning, and I asked him if it had been forest when he was a boy. He said, "Now it's worse, because people are destroying and cutting the trees." The ancestors felt the same way, he said: "They feel that something's going wrong. They're warning the people, but the people don't take care."

  So would it be a good idea to plant new trees?

  "No," the Samatenje said.

  Why?

  "Tradition."

  What about jobs?

  "No."

  So no more trees?

  "The trees will grow themselves."

  What if the police come and arrest tree cutters?

  "No problem."

  What if tourists come?

  "No."

  That was what the samatenje had to say. His power, it seemed, lay entirely in refusal. There was more clapping: pock, pock, pock, pock. Then we left. As soon as we were outside the shaman's sanctuary and had put our shoes back on, Tomás, who had spoken so admiringly of traditional ways on the journey in, erupted in a tirade against the samatenje's stonewalling of the modern world: his people needed trees, his people needed jobs—to deprive his people of trees and jobs was murder! "They're killing a lot of people," Tomás said.

  Back at Chitengo, I found Carr drinking gin and tonics with a new group of safari operators. "I don't think I would ever sort out the micropolitics—or that it really needs it," he told me when I described my excursion, and he said, "I see it more as just a we-give-them-opportunity, we-give-them-jobs, we-may-end-up-saving-Canda-and-losing-Sadjunjira sort of thing." It was the closest I ever heard him come to resignation.

  The novelist Mia Couto told me a story when we met in Maputo. During Mozambique's first national elections in 1994, he attended a campaign rally in a small village, where a politician from the city gave a speech. The politician said, "I'm here to save you, and we will bring hospitals, schools"—the usual boilerplate. When he got to the end of it, a villager stood up and said, "We are very happy, very touched, because you came from so far away to save us, and that reminds me of the story of the monkey and the fish." The villager didn't say anything more, and Couto realized that he and the politician were the only people there who didn't know the story. Finally, the politician confessed his ignorance, so the man told him the story, and it went like this: A monkey was walking along a river and saw a fish in it. The monkey said, Look, that animal is under water, he'll drown, I'll save him. He snatched up the fish, and in his hand the fish started to struggle. And the monkey said, Look how happy he is. Of course, the fish died, and the monkey said, Oh, what a pity, if I had only come sooner I would have saved this guy.

  "Anyway," Couto said, "this is the traditional point of view. But you cannot just say, This is wonderful and don't touch it. Because it is being touched. You can't avoid bringing modernity. It's happening."

  He was right that the story took the fish's point of view. But, I wondered, how could it be told to make the monkey look good? I got my answer the next day, when I met Terezinha da Silva, who runs a women's rights organization in Maputo. Nine years ago, da Silva was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, and later, when Carr told her that he was going to invest in Gorongosa Park, she said, she urged him to please be sensitive to the rights of the peasants. But this past summer she went to Gorongosa District to lead seminars, and she had to call into question all her assumptions about the sanctity of tra
ditional culture. "I was so shocked and depressed with what I heard during the course," she told me. Specifically, she was appalled to hear about a practice that was called "early marriage," but which she properly called "forced unions": impoverished parents in remote rural areas would give their five- or six- or seven-year-old daughters to middle-aged men in exchange for a monthly stipend. She said that she was told of schools that had no girls at all, because they were all married. Mozambique had good laws against such things, but they were often not enforced, out of respect for culture and tradition. And the thing was, da Silva said, she later learned that in the past in these same areas, the cultural tradition was for women not to marry until eighteen.

  The traditional position—the fish's position—was: don't save us from ourselves. But what if the tradition itself was corrupt, or if the culture had already been lost? Carlos Pereira, Carr's director of conservation in the park, said of Gorongosa District, "This is a terrible place psychologically. To keep alive, in the morning they had to help RENAMO, in the afternoon they had to help FRELIMO. That was every day. Now imagine this person that had to collaborate with one side and the other side. What does he do in life? That's what he tries to do in life. He says yes on this side, but says yes on that side. He goes in the middle, talks a lot, says nothing. You can never be entirely loyal, you never entirely trust."

  "So what are my choices?" Greg Carr said. "Absolutely do nothing, never go anywhere near the mountain in twenty years? OK, fine, what do you have then? A bare, stripped mountain washed away. We lose half of the perennial water system of the park. But I respected them and didn't go there, because there's old RENAMO-FRELIMO wounds and old colonial wounds, so I didn't go there. OK, so that's Plan A. That's just really bold on my part. What's Plan B? Go there and start talking to them. Gosh, can we put up some nurseries? OK, let's do it. Gosh, can we do tourism? No, we don't want you on the Sadjunjira side doing tourism. OK, we won't. What else am I supposed to do?"

  After all, he said, "that Gorongosi culture is gone when the last tree gets cut down up there. And furthermore, you've got people up there—the kids don't have schools, the women are basically slaves, and the régulos are not looking out for their people a lot of the time. We all know that traditional societies look out for themselves. What are my choices? I'm a human-rights guy and a conservation guy trying to do both at the same time. The best idea I've come up with is those nurseries. I like it, I think it was a good thing, I'm proud of myself and my team for doing it."

  Carr hasn't given up hope that the mountain will become part of the park, but he told me recently that it might be just as well if the mountain were designated a "forest reserve"—a status that insures higher conservation status but makes greater allowances for human habitation. "That's a change in tactic, not a change in goal," he said, and he added, "But if 'forest reserve' is still so politically sensitive, look, I can keep my goal and continue to change my tactics." At the same time, he has asked the park's conservationists to draw up contingency plans to insure that water keeps coming in even if the mountain is lost. His staff talks about diverting the flow of nearby rivers to feed Lake Urema or drilling wells to supply watering holes for animals. Carr didn't like the prospect, but he liked grappling with the problem. "It makes it interesting for me—a person who could be anywhere in the whole world," he said.

  One afternoon at Chitengo, as we sat by the pool, where tourists were splashing, Carr told me that he has made provisions for the park in his will. He had said repeatedly that before he found Gorongosa he had lived in dread of becoming "a dabbler." Now he told me, "The way I see it is this: I may not be a serious person, but Gorongosa is a serious project." When his friends speak of his hunger for purpose, they always tend to mention that he was once a Mormon, although they generally can't say how or why this is significant. But Larry Hardesty took a stab at it. "When you've been that committed to a religious ideal when you're young, I think that that kind of gives you a taste for what it's like to have some big thing in your life that organizes it and gives it meaning," he said. "I think he was looking for that thing again, trying to replace that monolithic thing at the center of his life."

  I told Carr what Hardesty had said, and he said, "I think that's right." Sometimes when he felt that everything was going well in Gorongosa, Carr said to me that he might have to find something else to do with himself in a few years. But then he said, "I have a lot of these weird things in my life where I've gone headlong into something and later I look at it and just go, That was strange. But I get the fever, right? You know, I like getting older and calmer. I don't really want a lot more of those fevers. It's just too much. This is my last fever."

  PART SIX

  The Environment: Big Blessings

  RICHARD MANNING Graze Anatomy

  FROM OnEarth

  WILL WINTER AND TODD CHURCHILL have a plan. It's simple, it's workable, and if enough people do it, it will shrink our carbon footprint, expand biodiversity and wildlife habitat, promote human health, humanize farming, control rampant flooding, radically decrease the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and—for those of us who still eat the stuff—produce a first-class, guilt-free steak. Their plan: let cows eat grass.

  The two men share a background in conventional farming. Winter came of age in the heart of the Midwest, starting his veterinary practice in the 1970s when industrial-strength livestock operations were gaining a full head of steam. "I had a syringe of antibiotics in this hand and a syringe of steroids in the other hand and I thought I was going to go cure the world," he says. "But I left conventional farming practice because it was so crude and so cruel. The cruelty drove me nuts." In the feedlots where cattle are stuffed with corn to produce almost all the beef Americans eat, he explains, "we were weaning [the calves], hot-iron branding them, vaccinating them, castrating them, dehorning them, and shipping them in one day. These are vets doing this, shooting them with ten-way vaccines, giving them ten different diseases in one day."

  For Churchill the epiphany was less dramatic but no less wound up in the realities of industrial-scale farming. He grew up on a large, efficient corn and soybean farm near Moline, Illinois. "I spent all my summers as a child ripping out the fences, and we'd bulldoze all the trees and make one big cornfield. And then I thought: where do the birds live? The birds' job is to eat the aphids, but since we don't have trees anymore, we don't have birds, so we have to spray the aphids. Does that really make sense in the long run?"

  Winter left his veterinary practice and became a foodie, promoting and distributing raw milk products in Minnesota and working as a consultant for graziers. He is the sort of fellow to have several irons in the fire at all times, and he offered up some free-range pork, his latest venture, when I met him at his Minneapolis home for breakfast.

  Churchill became an accountant, also in southeast Minnesota. He had heard the heretical claims of a few contrarian farmers who were finishing beef on grass pastures instead of feedlots. It seemed an anachronism, defying the conventional wisdom that only the feedlot system can yield the economic efficiencies that leave Americans amply supplied with cheap beef and milk. But criticism of that system has escalated exponentially and for a host of different reasons: rapidly rising energy prices, concerns about global warming, and feed costs that leave poor people begging for the grain that Americans use to fatten livestock.

  After sampling some grass-fed beef—some of it excellent, some inedible—Churchill decided to go into the business himself. He started the Thousand Hills Cattle Company in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, in 2003. A year later he met Winter, and the boots-and-jeans cattleman wannabe invited the jovial, generation-older vet-foodie to join him. Thousand Hills is now a substantial business, buying, slaughtering, and selling about 1,000 grass-fed cows a year to whole food stores, co-ops, restaurants, and three colleges in the Twin Cities area. Churchill buys his cattle from a small network of regional farmers able to meet his standards for quality.

  Thousand Hills is part of an evol
ving nationwide web. The Denver-based American Grassfed Association was founded by just 8 members in 2003 but now claims 380. Carrie Balkcom, the group's executive director, says companies like Thousand Hills have sprung up throughout the country. At one end of the spectrum are large operations like White Oak Pastures in Georgia, which sells to the Whole Foods Market chain throughout the Southeast and Publix Supermarkets in the Atlanta area. At the other end are hundreds of small farms that sell directly to consumers, says Balkcom. Theo Weening, global meat coordinator for Whole Foods, says grass-fed beef is available in virtually all of his company's stores, and demand is growing.

  Grass-fed beef, in other words, is poised to move out of the niche market and into the mainstream—as long as farmers can make it profitable.

  Winter points out that for agriculture to be "sustainable," it must have a sustainable business model. "Todd says you have to earn the right to be here next year," he says. This was hard at first for operations like Thousand Springs, but the grass-fed system has matured to the point where significant chunks of the nation's corn-ravaged landscape can be converted into far more sustainable permanent pastures—without a loss in production.

  At the heart of this shift lies a humble leap in technology, a fencing material called polywire, which you are sure to notice when you walk into a field with Churchill. A polywire fence is short and flimsy, composed of a single strand that resembles yellow-braided fishing line. This makes cheap, easily movable, and effective electric fences, and it is the key to the whole operation.