Cover Stories
Paradise Lost?
Experience the natural beauty of these conservation sites while there’s still time.
We can fly halfway around the world — Newark to Beijing — in 12 hours. With the exception of a few far-flung villages, we can almost always find someone who understands English enough to translate our needs to the local shopkeeper. The Internet and global cellular telephone service have made communication almost instantaneous. But what are we losing?SOUTH AMERICA: THERE’S OIL IN THE RAIN FOREST
The Rio Madre de Dios – the River of the Mother of God – takes you to one of the last remaining undisturbed tracts of Amazonian rain forest, Peru’s renowned Manu Biosphere Reserve. But corporate interests have staked claims inside the reserve, risking its precious biodiversity and the lifestyle of its indigenous people.
The reserve boasts the world’s highest level of biodiversity. Covering more than 7,263 square miles, it shelters a significant portion of untouched habitat in the Amazon basin — puna grasslands, elfin forests, cloud forests and lowland rain forests. The forest teems with life — jaguars, anteaters, giant armadillo, monkeys and sloths. At 1,000 and counting, it is home to more bird species than the entire United States.
“Even though the Manu Biosphere is supposed to be protected, it is being invaded by a Chinese oil exploration company,” said Marianne van Vlaardingen, a Dutch primatologist who runs Pantiacolla Tours with her Peruvian husband, Gustavo Moscoso.
She’s referring to China Petroleum Corp., which recently signed an $83 million contract with the Peruvian government allowing it to explore for oil amid the rain forest’s bounty — including inside the reserve’s multiple-use zone, set aside as indigenous tribal lands.
The reserve is divided into three zones: a national park, open only to scientists and natives who live inside with no modern contact; a reserved zone, used for ecotourism; and a multiple-use zone, where semi-modern indigenous tribes live in pocket communities that combine their primitive pasts and the modern world.
Pantiacolla Tours pioneered community-based tourism by initiating a partnership with the Yine Indians that provides an economic incentive for them to preserve the rain forest rather than harvest timber or hunt to excess.
“Ecotourism can benefit the rain forest and its people, as long as it is done small scale and in a very respectful and cautious way,” said van Vlaardingen.
Highlights of Pantiacolla tours include village visits during which participants make pottery, learn to paint tribal designs or ride in a traditional dugout canoe. The project encourages the Yine to appreciate that their culture — and the rain forest where they live and subsist — has value to the rest of the world. But more than that, it becomes a tool enabling the Yine to interact with modern society and gain an understanding of Peruvian contractual law — a fact of life they will increasingly encounter. As oil companies negotiate deals that directly impact their native lands, they may have to fight through legal means to preserve their culture, their rain forest and their way of life.
Only a few operators, including Pantiacolla Tours (www.pantiacolla.com) and InkaNatura Selva (www.inkanatura.com), have permits to take tourists into the reserved zone, the most pristine part of the rain forest.
AUSTRALIA: THE GREAT BARRIER REEF IS LOSING ITS LUSTER
Three waves of bleaching in the last eight years have turned the world’s biggest living — and decidedly technicolor — organism bone white. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, an underwater paradise alive with jewel-toned tropical fish, sharks, sea turtles and manta rays, stretches some 1,200 miles along the northeast coast of Australia, covering 135,000 square miles within the Coral Sea. Up to 6 percent of the reef has been affected by coral bleaching, the result of excessively high water temperatures.
Environmental stressors — in this case, hot water —
cause tiny algae that live inside coral reefs to abandon ship. The algae — living in a symbiotic relationship with the reef — give the corals their color.“Corals turn white when they are stressed by unusually warm water, and they can die if the warming persists for more than a few weeks,” said Terry Hughes, director of the Center for Coral Reef.
