Dune Lankard: Scream of the Little Bird

DAVID S. JACKSON CordovaIt takes a special kind of courage to take a stand against your friends and neighbors--especially if you're a member of Alaska's proud Eyak Indian tribe. But that's what Glen (Dune) Lankard, 39, had to do to help preserve the last remaining coastal temperate rain forest in North America.The opportunity was born of a disaster, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. After Exxon agreed to pay a $1 billion settlement, environmentalists had a great idea: Why not have the U.S. and Alaska governments use the funds to buy development rights to some of the 17.8 million hectares of land held by native Alaskans? Then tracts could be set aside as protected forest. Native Alaskans could invest the proceeds, and forests would be saved for hunting, fishing and tourism. But the natives would have to forgo income from logging. Advocates of the plan needed a native Alaskan to help sell it, so Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska biologist, and David Grimes, a fisherman from the village of Cordova, recruited Dune Lankard.At the time, Lankard was a commercial fisherman who sat on the board of the Eyak Corporation, which administered the tribe's land rights. He had grown up fishing for salmon and herring in Cordova and never identified with environmentalists. I used to call them 'granolas,' he says with a laugh. But then he became concerned about how runoff from logging operations was polluting the streams fish use to spawn.When he first proposed the idea of forest protection to Eyak Corp., his fellow board members voted him down, 8 to 1. They called me a greenie and a tree hugger, he recalls. Undeterred, Lankard gave up his fishing business, set up the Eyak Rainforest Preservation Fund and began lobbying politicians and native Alaskans throughout the state. Indigenous people have thousands of years of being preservationists, he would argue. We need to become stewards of the land again. In Lankard's view, not only the trees and streams were endangered; so were the native cultures that depended on them. But he was taunted on the street and cursed at sea. An Indian logger pushed him against a wall in a Cordova bar and threatened him with a pool cue. He was voted off the Eyak Corp. board and sued twice.Lankard took his fight all the way to Washington, where lawmakers would oversee the land deals. He became a familiar sight in the Capitol with his battered leather backpack, laptop computer and a small, smooth stone from his beloved Copper River that he always carried. The chief of the Eyak tribe renamed him Jamachakih. Translation: little bird that screams really loud and won't shut up.The lobbying finally paid off as other native Alaskans warmed to conservation. By 1998, nearly 285,000 hectares of coastal habitat from Kodiak Island to Prince William Sound were protected, giving a windfall of $380 million to the native corporations.Now Lankard wants to stop the building of a road across the Copper River Delta Basin, a rugged wetland where bald eagles still soar. This is the last refuge, says Lankard. Our way of life is gone if they build that road. His opponents had better prepare for a long, noisy battle.PAGE 1|||By CHRISTOPHER HALLOWELLThe old shaman placed a bamboo shoot filled with hallucinogenic snuff against Mark Plotkin's left nostril and blew into the tube. Plotkin's head snapped back, he recalls, as if he had been hit with a war club. Little men began dancing before his eyes. He asked the shaman who they were. They are the hekuri, the wise man replied, the spirits of the forest.That was 1987, and Plotkin was deep in a Venezuelan rain forest. Then director of plant conservation for the World Wildlife Fund, he had heard of a hallucinogen used by Yanomamo medicine men. Made from the leaves, sap and seeds of various plants, the potent snuff might have medicinal benefits, he thought. After all, aspirin came from white-willow bark, which North American Indians relied on to relieve pain. In fact, plants were vital in the development of 25% of all prescription drugs.The study of plants used by indigenous peoples is called ethno-botany, and Plotkin had been steeped in the subject ever since his college years at Harvard a decade earlier. He had taken a course taught by Richard Evans Schultes, a pioneer ethnobotanist who had spent years in the Amazon rain forest. During the first lecture, Professor Schultes showed a slide of what appeared to be three Indians in grass skirts and bark-cloth masks dancing under the influence of some kind of potion. The one on the left has a Harvard degree, the professor said, pointing out how far some ethnobotanists will go to pursue their research. That was when Plotkin, now 43, decided he had found his calling.After graduating in 1979, he headed for the Amazon and began visiting shamans, some of whom let him stay for a while as a student medicine man. He slept in thatched huts, ate delicacies like boiled rat, suffered vampire-bat bites and was nearly electrocuted by a giant eel. And he collected, as fast as he could, hundreds of plants that supplied ingredients for the shamans' medical arsenal.He was racing against time, as Western influences seeped into native villages. Thatch roofs were giving way to tin, while shorts and T shirts were replacing breechcloths and feathers. The shamanistic tradition was fading because missionaries brought in modern medicine's pills--many developed from rain-forest plants in the first place. Most ominously, the Amazon rain forest was dying around the edges, torched and slashed by farmers and loggers. Somewhere in the jungle might be a cure for aids or cancer that would be lost forever before it could even be discovered.Plotkin soon realized that his work could play a role in saving the rain forest. The key was to help persuade indigenous peoples and their governments that they stood to gain more in the long run if they preserved their trees and cultures than if they let timber companies strip the land. The knowledge of the shamans--and the secrets that new generations of shamans might uncover--could be worth a fortune, especially since herbal medicine is booming in developed countries. Interest in medicinal plants is real sweet right now, Plotkin says. Indians are potentially the best conservationists out there, but only if they understand the value of the forest around them.To help nourish that understanding and preserve the wisdom of the shamans, Plotkin founded the not-for-profit Ethnobiology and Conservation Team in 1995. Working from offices in Arlington, Virginia, Plotkin and his wife Liliana, a Costa Rican conservationist, have forged a network of Internet sites that enables researchers to share information about indigenous peoples. More important, the organization, newly renamed the Amazon Conservation Team, has created what might be called the first shaman network. The idea is to encourage younger members of indigenous groups to become shamans' apprentices. This year the act will help sponsor a Colombian rain-forest gathering at which 40 shamans and apprentices from nine South American tribes will share secrets.Plotkin has done a skillful job of reaching a broader audience. He is featured in Amazon, a large-format IMAX film nominated for an Academy Award. His 1993 book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, is in its 16th printing, and a children's book, The Shaman's Apprentice, co-authored by Lynne Cherry, came out last year. This year he plans to publish Healer's Quest: New Medicines from Mother Nature. Among the remedies described: an antibiotic from a tropical daisy and a painkiller from the skin of the South American poison-dart frog.And what of the hallucinogenic snuff that made Plotkin's head swim a decade ago? French scientists are studying the ability of one ingredient from the potent mixture--sap from a nutmeg tree--to fight fungal infections. That's just one power of the spirits of the forest. If those spirits were to vanish, the world would be a much poorer place.|2||By DAVID LIEBHOLD JakartaTo hear Emmy Hafild describe it, her childhood was a kind of Jungle Book experience. Raised in rural Sumatra, the daughter of a plantation executive, she played in an abandoned rubber tract grown wild again. You could still see tigers, elephants, panthers, she recalls. I was an outdoor child.But in 1968, when Hafild was 10, the enchanting forest was plowed into a golf course--a trauma that eventually turned her into one of Asia's gutsiest environmentalists. She has taken on an American mining giant and the regime of former President Suharto. Mindful of the risks, she made arrangements for friends abroad to care for her young daughter in the event of her arrest. All this to help Indonesia from going the way of her former playground. Even now, says Hafild, 40, I still miss that forest.After earning a degree in agronomy from Bogor Agricultural University in 1982, Hafild joined the Green Indonesia Foundation and by 1985 had become active in the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (known by its Indonesian acronym WALHI), a fledgling environmental group that has since mushroomed into a coordinating center for 368 nongovernmental organizations. Hafild now runs it. A three-year master's degree course in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin gave her new contacts around the world and exposure to the U.S. political system. That period made me more political, she says, and I was more outspoken in criticizing Suharto. Indeed, when WALHI led a court action against Suharto in 1994 for transferring $183 million in reforestation funds to an airplane project headed by current President B.J. Habibie, Hafild was one of the few people acting publicly against the regime. Suharto couldn't do anything to us because we did it through the courts, she recalls, adjusting her steel-rimmed glasses. But he was very angry. Two years later, Suharto transferred another $102 million of reforestation funds to a pulp and paper company owned by one of his associates. WALHI filed another lawsuit. In that same year Hafild's group was blamed for the riots and kidnappings in the Irian Jaya mining concession of the U.S. firm Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. Hafild was expecting the military to toss her into jail but, she says, the generals backed down when she threatened to go public with embarrassing revelations of their intelligence operations in the area.With Suharto gone and Hafild nursing a newborn second child, she should feel triumphant. The opposite is true: to her, Indonesia's current political and economic chaos is more environmentally threatening. Natural resources are all we have now, she says. Palm oil is big. There will be big new plantations. In the Indonesian context, that presages huge forest fires to clear the land, a cloud of smoke across Asia, wholesale environmental degradation. I am very pessimistic, she says, but we have to do something. We have to stop the destruction. As Suharto learned, stopping Hafild is no easy task.||3|By CLIVE MUTISO NairobiOne morning three months ago, 30 helmet-clad riot police wielding automatic rifles were arrayed in front of a hastily erected steel gate that barred the way into Karura Forest, on the outskirts of Nairobi. They stood guarding the site of what many Kenyans were calling an environmental outrage. More than a third of the 1,000-hectare forest had been sold to land developers for a luxury housing project backed by President Daniel arap Moi, and 20 hectares had already been cleared--less than a kilometer away from Nairobi's world headquarters of the United Nations Environment Program. A week earlier, protesters had invaded the site and burned $1 million worth of bulldozers and tree-cutting equipment. Another demonstration had been scheduled, and the police were ready for trouble.A rickety bus rattled up the road, halted at the edge of the forest and disgorged 28 passengers--all of them old women. Then came a pickup truck carrying their weapons--not clubs or rifles but gardening tools and watering cans. Finally a small car pulled up, and out strode their leader, Wangari Maathai, an imposing 1.7-m-tall woman in a long blue dress and a red-and-black polka-dot head scarf. She picked up a pot containing a 60 cm Meru oak seedling, but the police refused to let her carry it into the forest. In a soft but determined voice she spoke directly to Chief Inspector Paul Muluma: Since you are illegally preventing us from planting trees in the forest and I do not want this one to die, I am going to plant it at the gates of the U.N. Environment Program. Do you think you can stop me? As Muluma just shook his head, Maathai led her troop of grandmothers in a procession to the UNEP gate and ceremoniously planted and watered the tree. UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer, meanwhile, issued a statement condemning the clearing of Karura Forest and let it be known that his staff would water the young Meru oak every day.Only a strong person would defy the iron regime of Kenya's President Moi, and Maathai, 58, fits the bill. An anatomy professor at the University of Nairobi and the first Kenyan woman to receive a Ph.D., she founded the women's Green Belt Movement, which has planted 7 million trees in Kenya and inspired similar efforts around the globe. In 1989 her protests forced Moi to abandon his plan to erect a 62-story office tower in a Nairobi park. And in 1991 her activism became a political force when she helped start an opposition group called the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy. Once she was teargassed and clubbed unconscious by police. Another time she was arrested and put in a jail cell overnight with no mattress. Always her popularity and idealism have stayed intact.This time, though, she may have gone too far. No one is saying whether Maathai encouraged the burning of the bulldozers or overzealous followers acted on their own initiative. She claims that thugs were hired to beat up members of her movement and then destroyed the machinery in a fit of anger when they were not paid what they were promised.Whatever the truth, Moi has made no move to punish the influential Maathai, who has won environmental awards from countries all over the world. In an October speech at National Stadium on Kenyatta Day (honoring Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta, and other independence heroes), Moi declared, There are mothers in this country who have no respect for public property. They burn other people's property. But when Kenyatta's daughter Beth Mugo, who was taking part in the ceremony, tapped the side of her head with her forefinger and grimaced at Moi, the crowd roared its approval.Since then police have given up trying to stop Maathai's indefatigable followers from planting tree seedlings in the cleared portion of Karura Forest. And because most people rich enough to buy a home in the proposed development would now be embarrassed to do so, the project is expected to collapse.While Maathai appears victorious, she has received threats since the bulldozer destruction. A man called to say that I would pay for the damage with my life, she says, but so far nothing has happened. So far.|||4