Avatar on Earth
by BOB PAYNE
Conde Nast Traveller
February 17, 2010
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THE CRISIS The world's rain forests?its lungs?are vanishing fast: logged, burned, farmed, mined.
THE HOPE To find ways of making live trees more valuable than dead ones.
THE PIONEER Tiny Guyana, whose forest is one of the few considered to be nearly intact, has plans for development that won't ruin its?and our?greatest natural resource.
THE REPORTER Bob Payne, who sets out to learn firsthand about rain forest survival?as well as his own.
THE PROBLEM Payne's Makushi tribal guides have dropped him off alone in the middle of nowhere, promising to pick him up "soon, maybe"
Shortly after sunup on the Burro-Burro, a cocoa-colored river that meanders through the heart of a nearly pristine rain forest in the South American country of Guyana, one of the other occupants of the battered outboard-motor boat we have just edged up onto a steep, muddy bank gives me some last-minute advice.
"As long as you have a fire, it's okay," he says. "You'll have no bother from the mosquitoes, the spiders, the snakes, and"?he pauses with what I hope is not uncertainty?"the jaguars."
The speaker, Lionel James, whose name and fluency with English are legacies of now-independent Guyana's British colonial past, is a member of a tiny group of indigenous people known as the Makushi. For the past week, I have been in the rain forest with a half dozen Makushi hunters as they have tried to teach me to survive without the conveniences?and even, some might argue, the necessities?of modern life.
Now, to see if I have been paying attention, they are leaving me on my own for a night or two along a section of river far from our already remote camp. I am without food or shelter, and have with me only a machete, a few fishhooks, a flint for starting a fire, a bow made of forest hardwood, and a small bottle of iodine to kill (most of) the undesirables in the river water I'll be drinking. For life-threatening emergencies, I also have a two-way radio; but what timely assistance I will be able to summon if, for example, a jaguar has me clamped by the neck is unclear.
As I ascend the bank, my machete drawn and my steps tentative, an overhead limb almost immediately snags the Indiana Jones-style hat that I thought looked so cool when I first tried it on at a post-Christmas sale at a mall in the States. I suppose I should consider it my first victory that the branch isn't a snake.
"See you soon, maybe," says Lionel as they push the boat back out into the river.
"Maybe," reluctantly agrees the boat's driver, Sparrow, who, I can't help but observe, has the cover off the outboard motor, as if there is some problem that might signal its approaching demise.
The insects are buzzing, and the ripped piece of old T-shirt I am wearing as a sweatband is already soaked. But except for these minor discomforts, which I have come to ignore, it is a beautiful country the Makushi have set me down in. The scent of orchids perfumes the air. The leafy canopy is alive with flashes of color from birds and butterflies?red-and-green macaws, blue morphos, tiny, almost iridescent, hummingbirds. Somewhere not too far off, howler monkeys are holding a lively discussion, probably about me.
The question is why anyone would willingly let himself be left alone out here, and?what most puzzles my new friends the Makushi?even pay for the opportunity.
Guyana, once known as British Guiana (not to be confused with its neighbors, Suriname?which is the former Dutch Guiana?or French Guiana, of Devil's Island fame), is one of the poorest and smallest countries in South America. If outsiders know anything about it, they most often have only a vague recollection of an infamous (and no longer existent) community called JonesÂtown. In 1978, more than nine hundred members of a religious cult committed mass suicide at Jonestown by swallowing a lethal potion. The act has the dubious distinction of being credited as the source of the expression "Don't drink the Kool-Aid."
But Guyana, too, has a distinction: Ninety percent of the population, including the people living in the capital, Georgetown, are crowded onto a narrow, Atlantic-facing coastal strip already so prone to flooding that it would undoubtedly be among the first places to fall victim to a rising sea level caused by climate change. But most of the rest of the country, where only the Makushi and a handful of other Amerindian groups live, is covered by one of the few rain forests in the world considered to be nearly intact. (Papua New Guinea and the Congo are among the other sites.) And Guyana's president, Bharrat Jagdeo, is determined to keep it that way, even if it means turning over almost all of his country's rain forest to the supervision of an international body.
I am here because I feel that if I am to understand the solution Jagdeo has suggested well enough to write about it, I must first experience the rain forest in the most unfiltered way possible.
This is a point, I admit, that I am having trouble keeping focused on just now, because as I am pulling at the branch that has snagged my hat, something drops softly onto the back of my neck and I am instantly, painfully bitten. When I slap my assailant to the ground, I see that it is a hairy brown spider only an inch or so around but with legs so thick that if it had been a professional baseball player I would have immediately suspected it of using steroids.
The spider bite, it turns out, is not fatal, causing only a lopsided swelling of my neck and a welt that will last several weeks. So, to continue . . .
For the world to keep breathing, rain forests, which are in effect the earth's lungs, must survive. They absorb carbon dioxide and either store it, thus helping to moderate the greenhouse effect, or convert it, through photosynthesis, into air we can breathe.
In most parts of the world, however, rain forests are being gobbled up by development?logging, mining, farming, and, in the Amazon especially, cattle ranching?at such a rate that their loss contributes as much to the annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide as worldwide emissions from cars, trucks, and buses combined.
Guyana's rain forest, though, remains almost untouched, the reason being the difficulty of getting at it. Innumerable rivers tumbling off the interior highlands have presented a so-far insurmountable challenge to the building of any but a few roads and bridges.
But as technologies advance and economic pressures mount, developers are beginning to cast covetous eyes. Plans are in the works to turn the main road into a true transportation link through the heart of the rain forest, one that would allow industries in northern Brazil access to the port in Georgetown. Such a link would bring unprecedented change.
Of course, in the natural way of things, change was already happening. I can see that in the tiny village of Surama, in a savanna-like clearing at the edge of the forest, where my Makushi companions live. Although still mostly thatched-roof, dirt-floored huts without running water or electricity, the village of about 225 people has a community center from whose sometimes-functioning TV the villagers learned that a black man, Barack Obama, is president of the United States. And they think they learned (the BBC election coverage having been a bit confusing on this point) that a woman, Hillary Clinton, is vice president.
Hunters from the village have been offering guided forays into the forest for several years, and there is a community-owned lodge where travelers who don't mind having only intermittent electricity, and are untroubled by the occasional bat flying in through the unscreened windows, can be quite comfortable.
As a result, it has been some time since the Makushi painted their faces in preparation for a hunt or stalked the forest in nothing but loincloths. Instead, one Makushi?Hendrix, who is Lionel's brother?favors a black T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a guitar and the words the jimi hendrix experience. Another, Harold, the oldest and most versed in forest lore, carries, possibly with an intentional sense of whimsy, a Barbie backpack.
That growing awareness of the outside world, says Ian Craddock, a forty-two-year-old former British special-forces army officer who owns Bushmasters Amazon, a Guyana-based adventure company that takes a handful of clients into the rain forest each year to learn from the Makushi, is a good thing. It means that culturally the Makushi are at the only stage which makes possible the kind of exchange we are having: modernizing but still skilled in forest survival.
Whatever form change takes, President Jagdeo, an economist who has become an international voice calling for the need to halt deforestation, believes that Guyana can develop without having to destroy its rain forest. The answer, he and many others believe, is to convince the world that living trees are worth more than dead ones. The global community must recognize that a standing rain forest, which provides such "ecosystem services" as generating rain and regulating climate, is a giant natural utility whose services all of us have been getting for free but should now start paying for.
Exactly how we would pay is uncertain. At the moment, the most often mentioned possibility is through a new United Nations program, REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), the support of which was one of the few relatively bright spots in the otherwise disappointing outcome of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this past December.
The program is a variation of cap and trade schemes such as those found in the European Union Emission Trading System and the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Industrialized nations that are emitting carbon dioxide above certain limits, or caps, would be able to buy credits from rain forest nations that could show they'd reduced or avoided deforestation. In simple terms, industrialized nations would pay rain forest nations for locking away carbon dioxide.
Within the framework of REDD, President Jagdeo has offered his own plan. Calling it Guyana's Low Carbon Development Strategy, or LCDS (because what is a government program without an acronym?), he has proposed it as a model for rain forest countries across the globe. Essentially, developed nations would pay rain forest countries an amount that would "out-compete" what they could make for clearing forest land and putting it to some other use (one study commissioned by Jagdeo estimates that this amount, in the case of Guyana, is $580 million annually).
The rain forest countries would then use the money to invest in "low-carbon opportunities," which for Guyana might include aquaculture, fruit and vegetable production on non-forest land, and India-style "business process outsourcing." To insure that illegal cutting didn't continue, the forests would be put under the supervision of an international body.
Guyana is already implementing several such projects. For an undisclosed sum, a British firm, Canopy Capital, is underwriting the maintenance of Iwokrama, a nearly million-acre reserve and research center north of Surama, in exchange for profits someday, when forest services begin to carry a price tag. Norway agreed to contribute a "substantial and sustained" amount toward developing Guyana's LCDS model.
With us as we departed Surama?a harpy eagle circling overhead?were three other Bushmasters clients, all men in their thirties looking for adventure. At least there were three to begin with.
On the first day, while setting up the camp where we would live for a week with such luxuries as hammocks and cooking pots, we lost Steve, a Londoner, who early money had pegged as the toughest of the Bushmasters. He decided he'd had enough when the Makushi, for a little joke, wrapped the tiniest of deadly?but dead?snakes around the rope from which he'd suspended his hammock. "I've learned all I need to know," he said and headed, we think, for Barbados. I wasn't sure that Phil, another Brit, would last long either. He seemed so unsure of himself, at first jumping at the rustle from every leaf pile, which in the rain forest will keep you very busy indeed. Yet he made it through the week despite neglecting, just once, the Makushi's admonition to shake out his boots before putting them on, crushing a tarantula with his socked foot. Vlado, a Slovak living in New York, was, on the other hand, irritatingly competent. While the Makushi struggled to show Phil and me how to build a fire, Vlado would have a three-foot-high blaze going, and would be roasting piranha on a stick as if they were marshmallows.
Piranha were a staple of our diet, supplemented by military-style MREs (meals ready to eat). Catching the fish, using machetes to crack nuts to get at the undulating grubs we used for bait?and knew we had to eat if the fishing didn't go well?was one of the survival skills the Makushi taught us.
"You really eat these?" I asked Lionel after he convinced me, for the experience of it, to bite into a grub.
"When we have to," he said.
"And when did you last have to?"
"Oh, ten, fifteen years ago."
By the end of a week, we had familiarized ourselves with how to build a shelter; how to start a fire with flint; how to hunt with a bow and arrow; how to trap various?and I so wish this weren't so?large rodents; and how to minimize the greatest danger: severing a limb with one's own machete. In the evenings, we'd cool off in the river.
"Why don't you worry about the piranha?" I asked Hendrix one night, recalling a story in which the fish had skinned a horse alive. "Or the caiman?"?a member of the alligator family that reportedly grows up to twenty feet long. "Or the anaconda?" which can be large enough to make wrestling with caimans seem like the preferred alternative.
"Because it's better to worry about the electric eel," he answered.
And I have to admit, as the puttering of the outboard fades until it is masked by the sound of flapping wings, that I can see their point. All around me, in perpetual twilight because of the thick canopy overhead, is a seemingly endless rain forest of extraordinary biodiversity, with plant and animal species numbering in the thousands.
Among my neighbors are plants that have played a role in the development of anesthesia. There's a bird, the hoatzin, so primitive that it is born with claws at the end of its wings. And of course there is the jaguar. They're out there. The biggest cat in the Western Hemisphere isn't necessarily using a figure of speech when it thinks, I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.
I remember the admonition to keep my bow with me at all times, my arrows always at the ready?since you never know when a large rodent will amble by?and take a few tentative steps into the gloom. To survive in the Guyana rain forest, you need know only a half-dozen plants. One, which I spot right away, is the water vine, a tree-climbing plant that looks like rope. After a few whacks with my machete, it produces a fountain of water sweeter than any iodine-laced river brew.
Just beyond the water vine I spy a manicole palm, which has a pulpy heart that tastes like cabbage would if you were really hungry. This particular tree also has, about six feet up the trunk, the distinctive striations the Makushi have taught me to recognize as scratch marks made by the claws of a jaguar?one that, I hope, was cleaning its claws and not marking its territory.
My most valuable discovery, though, is a kokerit palm. Not only do the nuts that fall to the ground host the grubs that are such an inspiration for finding other sources of food but its big leaves are perfect for the roof of the shelter I will build: a thatched-roof sleeping platform just high enough off the ground that snakes and peccaries (a wild pig whose razor-sharp tusks and nasty disposition make it more feared by the Makushi than jaguars) can pass underneath without being put in a confrontational mood.
As I select four trees for the corner posts and start trimming them, I remember a warning not to get carried away with home building. "Simple, simple," Hendrix had repeated, clearly understanding, as President Jagdeo apparently does, that once development gets started it is not easy to stop.
I, unfortunately, do get carried away. I make my sleeping platform king-size, build a tower annex up which I can climb at the first foul whiff of an approaching peccary, carve a sign reading camp jaguar. all welcome except snakes, and drag a felled tree down to the river, where I plan to cut it into sections I can use as the foundation for a boat dock with which to greet the returning Makushi.
By the time I finish, I am exhausted and soaked in sweat. I pour a few hatfuls of river water over my head to cool down, and lie on my sleeping platform for a brief rest. In a minute, I tell myself, I'll begin gathering wood and getting a fire started.
Only my short rest turns into an afternoon nap. When I awake, the light is already fading, not because it is dusk but because it is about to rain?a torrential rain that lasts until it really is dusk, leaving me with having collected hardly enough firewood to roast a hot dog, if I had one. Not that it matters. Despite all the tutoring on how to strike a spark to the paper-thin kindling I've shaved off the inner layer of dead but still-standing hardwood trees, and despite having set up my fire area under the shelter itself, the rain has so saturated everything that I couldn't start a fire now with a blowtorch.
Then very quickly it is dark, can't-see-the-end-of-your-nose dark. (Wish my survival skills had included smuggling in a flashlight. . . .) And I am back on my sleeping platform, because even the Makushi don't like to be afoot on the forest floor in the night.
At first, every time I hear something moving through the undergrowth I reach for my machete, which I've hung within arm's reach from the nub of a lopped-off branch on one of the shelter posts. A couple of times, when the rustling gets close, I pull the machete out of its sheath and bang it against the post, wishing I knew whether such an unnatural ringing is more likely to serve as a deterrent or something to home in on.
Soon, though, I realize that what I am probably going to accomplish by waving a very long, very sharp blade around in the absolute darkness is to sever one of my own extremities. So I lie back, my hat pulled over my face to discourage mosquitoes, and try to think pleasant thoughts, such as that Phil and Vlado might also have failed to get their fires started because of the rain.
I am about to nod off when I am jolted fully awake and grab for my machete again. Loud enough to make me wish I too were in Barbados, I hear the distinctive sound, almost like a loud cough, a jaguar makes. Knowing they like to go for the back of the neck, I use one hand to hold my hat tightly to it, hoping the smell of the hat's sweat-soaked brim will be as offensive to the jaguar as it was to Phil and Vlado. But when I hear the sound again it is fainter, as if the big beast (they can weigh up to 350 pounds, this one being all of that, I am sure) is on the other side of the river and moving away from me.
I drift in and out of sleep, once dreaming of a waterfall?not because of Freud, I am sure, but because a fresh burst of rain comes up in the night. It is Kaieteur Falls, a spectacular but little-known natural wonder we visited by air from Georgetown a day or two before heading to Surama. Its torrent is so powerful that, by comparison, the output of a far more famous neighbor, Venezuela's Angel Falls, looks likes the drool off a baby's chin.
Finally, though, accompanied by a rising chorus of howler monkeys, frogs, and unknown insects, the black of night rapidly turns to the dark gray of dawn. When I can see beyond the shelter posts, I am struck again by how beautiful my surroundings are?this time all soft, fresh-washed shades of green, each leaftip ending in a crystalline liquid globe. But with the sound of thunder promising more rain, I see little chance of getting a fire started. I think about that, think about it a while longer, then dig out my radio and ask Craddock to send the Makushi for me.
It's not, I tell myself, that I particularly fear spending another night in the forest without a fire. It's just that I've had that experience, and, like Steve, I've learned all I need to know, which is that one night is enough.
When the boat arrives, preceded by the sound of its outboard motor, I am surprised to find that along with Lionel and Sparrow, Vlado, our most competent Bushmaster, is sitting in it.
"I came back last night. There was no problem, but I was lonely. For my girlfriend," he says.
He doesn't volunteer anything more. And although I seem to recall his telling us that he'd broken up with his girlfriend, I don't ask, for fear it will bring the conversation around to his inquiring about how I got on with my fire.
We wait a day, a night, and part of another day before the Makushi go after Phil, telling him we really need to be getting back.
When we are united again, Phil, all bright and cheery, says that being alone in the rain forest, sitting around his fire, nibbling on a piece of piranha he'd smoked, was such an incredible experience he's going to ask Ian if he can stay and work for him.
"Great idea," I say. Then I turn to Vlado and ask if he wants to trade for the spaghetti and meatballs in his meals ready to eat.
Later, Craddock tells me you never know who will stick it out alone in the rain forest and who won't. Just like you never know, I suppose, when the planet is in trouble and the rain forests must be saved, who will step up and take the lead.
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