Earth Angels

One thing about people: no place on earth can hide from them. Human beings are the only species in history with the power to go everywhere in the world--and how we handle that capability may define our nature.Among us are a few who have assumed this responsibility with intelligence, valor, wonder and an appreciation that the earth is one intricate ecosystem by which all of life is shaped. They are Heroes for the Planet (though they would hardly think of themselves as such), and they have gladly taken on the task of protecting the natural world from stupidity, greed and careless commerce.In this first in a series of special reports, TIME honors those people and the beautiful, fragile place where they work. We begin in the forest.By ROGER ROSENBLATT Voltzberg DomeRUSSELL MITTERMEIER: Into the WoodsIt takes a moment to realize what I am seeing: a monkey in a tree. To be specific, it is a black spider monkey (Ateles paniscus) swinging through the topmost branches of a ceiba tree in the rain forest in Suriname, the former Dutch Guyana, north of Brazil. Thick-furred, with a red face, the monkey moves by sprawling out and brachiating from branch to branch through the high forest canopy; its long, prehensile tail functions as an arm. It pauses and looks down with the cool expression of a teenager. A monkey in a tree.But then the thought comes to me that this is the wilderness, not a zoo; the monkey is wild; the ceiba tree spreads its lush green cover in a vast tract of 1.6 million untrodden hectares that constitute the Central Suriname Nature Reserve. Except for the few of us in the camp, there are no other people within a radius of 80 km, nor is it likely that any people have even set foot in most of this land within the past thousand years. There are plenty of other species in evidence: rain forests contain a disproportionate share of the world's wealth of living things. Suriname's is the least troubled rain forest in existence, harboring 200 known mammal species (including monkeys in trees), 674 bird species, 99 amphibian species, more than 5,000 plant species, rivers, rocks, heat, darkness and a silence as deep as stars.That is the way Russell Mittermeier would like to keep this forest, and all the other forested areas of the world. The president of Conservation International, who is also a first-rate primatologist (B.A. Dartmouth, summa cum laude; Ph.D. Harvard), is part scientist, part activist, part barker and part kid. The kid, 49, is the same one who grew up in the Bronx and Brooklyn, New York, under the joint tutelage of a mother interested in the natural world, and Tarzan; Mittermeier continues to collect Tarzan novels and memorabilia. He and Peter A. Seligmann, CI's founder and chief executive, have gained an enormous amount of money, respect and attention for their 11-year-old organization, based in Washington. When Mittermeier is in barker mode, he makes the brashest p.r. man seem shy; a good portion of our week together in Suriname has been devoted to the problem of how to get Michael Jordan to visit the country and draw attention to CI's conservation efforts.Mittermeier the scientist is all seriousness and wonder. He has written or co-written several books, including a gorgeous, monster-size photographic work called Megadiversity, and hundreds of monographs on his beloved monkeys. A recent paper on a newly discovered species of marmoset, Callithrix humilis, shows the monkey at age two months: studious eyes, a tight, alert face and an aureole of gray and white hair. It looks a lot like Mittermeier, who would not mind the comparison.All his traits fuse with the activist to create a formidable force for the preservation of forest life, which needs protectors. Nearly 60% of the world's tropical rain forests have been lost, and what remains is under extreme pressure from logging and human population growth. More than 90% of the forests in the U.S. have been logged at least once. And once a forest is cut down, many of the living things it has harbored will be driven to extinction.Realizing that it's impossible to guard every tree in every place, Mittermeier and CI advocate a focused, two-sided strategy. One priority, based on the ideas of British conservationist Norman Myers, is to protect the world's hot spots, areas that are disturbed by human activity but still exceptionally rich in animal and plant species found nowhere else. CI has identified 25 hot spots where preservation efforts could have maximum benefit, such as the island of Madagascar and the Atlantic forest region of eastern Brazil. The other priority is to watch over tropical wilderness areas relatively untouched by people, including the upper Amazon region of South America and the Congo basin in Central Africa.In both hot spots and wilderness regions, CI pushes for the demarcation of key reserves that will forever be off limits to agriculture and industry. But just as important is the nurturing of other territories where healthy forests and human enterprise can coexist. CI has a simple message for developing countries: your forests are more valuable intact and alive than they are chopped down and dead. Profits could come, for example, from the marketing of exotic foods, chemicals and medicines found only in the rain forest and from the largely untapped potential of ecotourism.No place is wilder--or more worth saving--than Suriname, a country with only 400,000 people in a territory the size of New England. Mittermeier holds a special affection for this remote wedge-shaped corner of South America. It is where he did his doctoral research, and lately it's the site of his greatest success. Last spring, at CI's urging, the government decided to create the Nature Reserve--about one-tenth of the entire country. CI set up a private trust fund, with contributions from around the world, to help Suriname guard and manage the protected area. Outside the reserve, CI has worked with local Maroon tribes to limit farming to certain slash-and-burn areas and not disturb most of the forest surrounding their villages.It takes barely 15 minutes for a small prop plane to carry Mittermeier and me from Suriname's capital city of Paramaribo south into pure wilderness. We survey enormous stretches of green, both breathtaking and monotonous. The green is in fact multicolored--brown-green, gray-green, yellow, smoke, even red. There are no roads, no human signs. We land at the base camp at Raleighvallen, where, with two guides from CI, we take a corjal--a long, slender canoe--to a point downriver. There we begin the five-kilometer trek to a camp near the Voltzberg Dome, a high eruption of granite that looks like an elephant half buried in trees, from whose summit one may gaze out over the wilderness.I soon discover how awkward I am on this kind of walk: if Mittermeier is Tarzan, me Jane's grandmother. I stumble frequently and cut my hand on a rock, but eventually I turn clumsiness to my advantage by forcing everyone to slow down. I am seeing the jungle for the first time. Here alone are 300 species of trees. They are at once the pillars and the superintendents of the rain forest, the frame of the house and its chief occupants. The spiny understory palm trees make baskets from branches growing out of their trunks, which become compost machines for falling leaves, which in turn sustain the trees. Since the soil is not deep enough for roots to penetrate, the larger trees like the ceiba have buttresses that lie flat on the platform of the forest; some of the narrower trees are supported by stilt-roots at the base that look like whisk brooms. The Parkia tree rises to the sun and spreads a flat umbrella over the others. There is full employment. Trees support lizards and insects, which themselves support birds and monkeys. Army ants bivouac and hang from tree limbs in living nests, with their pupae asleep in the center. Sometimes the trees become food; they can be devoured by strangler figs, which grow from seeds dropped by birds, then rise and surround a tree like a parasitic vine, swallow it whole and take its place.If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, according to Mittermeier, he would be better off. He tells me that the scariest sound he ever heard in the rain forest was the explosive crack of a dead trunk, followed by a rush of plummeting branches so loud it might have been a storm.The sound of the moment is the screaming piha, a dull brown-gray bird whose sex appeal lies in its voice--specifically a three-syllable whistle that cuts through the air. As a mate getter it is evidently as attractive as the brilliant orange-and-black plumage of the cock of the rock, the cock of the walk of Suriname's birds. We catch sight of one preening on a high branch. Its head has a flattened crest that looks like a fan from the side, with an eye at bottom center. It makes its nest on the sides of rocks like the Voltzberg, where predators cannot get at it.I see my first wild monkey, a squirrel monkey, small and elfin-faced. One hears a monkey in order to see it: it rustles branches or drops a piece of fruit. One's senses grow keener after a while; the idea of coming to one's senses takes on new meaning. I pick up a scent that the others identify as that of a tapir, a large, smooth, big-nosed mammal the size of a small cow. An electric blue butterfly flutters by my ear. Mittermeier snags a vine snake, green and camouflaged in its habitat. Everywhere are signs of life and death. We pass gaping holes in the earth that giant armadillos call home, and the shell of an armadillo that a jaguar called lunch. A microteiid lizard shoots along a palm leaf lying close to where a column of golden ants marches across our trail.Here's a remarkable structure: a kiddie pool, perfectly round, dug by a Hyla boans tree frog as a nest and nursery for its tadpoles. The pool's sand walls look as if they have been carved and smoothed by a sculptor; they hold the tadpoles until they are transformed into froglets.All this hectic biology occurs under cover of trees, which creates a darkness equally serene and oppressive. When we finally walk out onto an open granite ledge, I am glad for the light.That night in camp, Mittermeier laments the general ignorance of this terrain. The marine biologist Sylvia Earle made the same point to me some months ago about life in the oceans; we yearn for Mars, a planet as good as dead, and know so little of life on Earth. To date we have identified between 1.5 million and 1.7 million species, but the best guesses put the total number of the planet's species at between 5 million and 15 million, and it could be as high as 100 million. How can we talk about extinction rates, Mittermeier asks, unless we know what we're dealing with?I ask him why one should not accept the extinction of species as an inevitable natural occurrence. He answers that we are not accepting it; we're inducing it. I could argue for the economic value of preservation--the biotechnology that leads to the discovery of medicines and so forth, he says. But if you push me to the wall, I'm for zero deforestation, zero extinction. I believe we have a moral obligation to other species. The only real reason for saving them is that it's right.Our beds are hammocks tied to posts in a shed with a thatch-and-tarpaulin roof. If you need to take a leak during the night, watch out for snakes, Mittermeier tells me. I'll do that, I say, and drink nothing before bedtime.I lie in my hammock draped with white mosquito netting and become a cocoon. I try to sleep but am kept in a semiwaking state by our guides talking softly in Sranan Tongo, a mixture of English, Dutch, Portuguese and West African languages, and by the chirping of frogs and birds. Insects make a sound like an endless marimba. There are showers of natural debris--rodents tossing away shells and bits of fruit. I am certain that I hear an animal poking around under my head. Mittermeier confesses that even after all his years of experience, he has never become accustomed to the night sounds.At 4 a.m. I am fully awakened by the mournful and menacing wail of the howlers--large red monkeys that make a new-day announcement that they are in charge of all the forest's primates. The collective howl begins like a low siren in a fire station, rises to swallow the sky, then ebbs again. It makes you feel alone in the world, like the first human being ever to hear it.Later, we head back to base camp and go for a swim in the river, where Mittermeier proves that scientists are different from you and me. He remembers to warn me to stay clear of the rocks where electric eels play, but he neglects to mention that piranhas are sharing the water with us. When this finally occurs to him, he adds, Not to worry. Piranhas only go after open wounds. I hold up my hand with the cut on it. Oh, yeah, he says.Except for its lethal possibilities, his distractedness is charming. His mind is simply oriented to the world he has chosen. Nothing makes him happier than looking at it. In the evening he goes out for a while and comes back with two frogs and a toad, in part to show me their characteristics (one is poisonous), but mainly because he is still a kid who likes to go out and get frogs. In the morning, one of our guides spots a parrot high in a tree, a Fransemadam, so called because it spreads a scarlet frill when excited, like the gaudy costume of a French madam. I admire, take note of the bird and am ready to move on, but Mittermeier could stand under the tree for hours lost in the intellectual pleasure of seeing.Then we are off again, to fly farther south and east to the Maroon Saramaccan village of Asindopo in the region of the Upper Suriname River. Asindopo means sit down and hope--a welcome thought to its original settlers, runaway slaves from Dutch plantations in the 18th century. We go by corjal to visit their descendants. Some are swimming; some are washing clothes in the river; some are staring at us. The faces of the children are a cross between innocence and gravity. On a far bank, a glorious ceiba rises to the sky. It is called the house of the spirits and is never cut down.At the village, custom requires that we hold a krutu, a sort of formal palaver, with the granman--grand man, the paramount chief--and his council, before we wander about. We gather in his hut with the village leaders. He is a compact man, with a slightly sad expression and a tuft of white beard clinging to his chin. During the krutu, one never addresses him directly, nor does he speak directly to others. All questions and responses go through the bassias, high-ranking assistants who serve as intermediaries, a custom that prolongs the meetings but also gives them a formality that suggests authentic goodwill.Mittermeier is introduced, and he asks if I may put a question to the granman. I ask what the forest means spiritually to the Maroons. The granman passes my question to a captain, who says that it goes to the heart of our society. Their whole existence, he says, is a result of the integration of the physical and the spiritual. Then he offers me a parable. If you go into the woods, he says, and you look for a new plot to farm, you have to put a marker down; otherwise you won't be able to find the plot when you return. He asks me, What will be your mark, to ensure your return? by which he clearly means, Are you here for a moment or for the long haul? It is the question no journalist wants to hear. I see that I am out of my league.We go walking about the village, which looks like Africa in South America. What strikes one is how at ease the people are with themselves and their environment. They have a way of standing that seems to put no stress anywhere on their bodies, as if they have arranged all their parts to hang in perfect balance. Doing laundry or picking things up off the ground, the women bend not at the knees but at the waist, and with a fluidity that suggests there is no better way to bend. They do a musical performance, a seketi, in which they clap rapidly and make instruments of their hands. Their comfort is mirrored in their faces; their eyes are keen and uneager, yet charged with authority.The women run the place. A mother in her early 30s with bright gold earrings and bright gold teeth talks teasingly with Mittermeier. He asks to take her photograph. She poses, sitting on the steps of her hut. As Mittermeier raises his camera, she gets a saucy look in her eyes, drops her colorful blouse, which was tied at her neck, and shows herself in full, confident power. Everyone laughs, but everyone also gets the picture.We walk the hot, sun-splashed pathways of the village, past the wooden huts with ornate carved doors--they look like Swiss chalets--and a shrine, a flakapau, which displays blue wooden figures, the size of large chess pawns, that represent ancestors. A medicine man sits in his doorway; he cannot rise to greet us because his right leg is greatly swollen from a snakebite. He has treated his wound successfully. Some children follow us as we go, but most are too self-possessed to become groupies. When approached, they respond to questions politely, but mainly they seem to be studying us.I watch Mittermeier watching everything. He is wholly comfortable here, and one sees why. There is nothing to be uncomfortable about in the villages, or in the surrounding forest, except some physical inconveniences. One calls this the wilderness, but it hardly seems wild to its residents. Pilgrims to America used to fear places like this; now people fear what has replaced them. I ask Mittermeier how all this affects him personally, apart from his sense of mission.He tells me, When you're alone in the forest, you're aware that life is everywhere around you. I feel a part of it. At the same time, I realize that I am just one more form of life in a very complex system. This is as close to a religious experience as I get--which is why, when I see a rain forest being bulldozed to make a few dollars for a logging company, I feel like I'm watching Notre Dame or the Louvre being hit with a wrecking ball. It's strange, but wherever I am in the forest, I feel that I'm home.When he climbed to the top of the Voltzberg the other day, I, lacking the energy and the equilibrium, did not follow. Instead I sat at the base of the rock and stared into the soft and hazy thicket of the forest. I could not get the panoramic view, but I was able to take in the interior sounds and the overarching silence by which they and I were subsumed. Something momentous was about to happen, or had already happened, 10 million years ago. I could hear the air. Everything became important--the flesh of the leaves, the braided vines, a macaw overhead, the smallest insect. A bug the size of a piece of dust crawled across my hand as I wrote about it crawling across my hand.After an hour or so, Mittermeier returned from what must have been his hundredth climb up the Voltzberg to gaze at the rain forest. How was it? I asked him. Incredible, he said.