2 | TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
page two
Timothy Means, a conservationist who
was on the leading edge of ecotourism in
the Gulf of California and helped win
permanent protection for hundreds of
islands off the Baja Peninsula in Mexico,
died on Aug. 13 at a hospital in San
Diego. He was 75.
His son, Carlos, said the cause was
complications of diabetes.
Mr. Means was immersed in the natu-
ral world for most of his life. He spent
decades working to protect the fragile
desert ecosystem of Baja and the Gulf of
California, also known as the Sea of
Cortez, a body of water so teeming with
life that Jacques Cousteau called it “the
world’s aquarium.”
Inspired by environmentally con-
scious tourism on the Galápagos Is-
lands, Mr. Means set up Baja Expedi-
tions in 1974. It was one of the first major
low-impact nature tourism companies
in Mexico.
The remote southern Baja Peninsula
is a region of rough, pristine beauty, with
abundant flora, fauna and marine life.
Mr. Means derived enormous pleasure
from showing it off to groups of 15 to 20
tourists at a time, many of whom be-
came donors to his nonprofit projects to
help keep the area under federal protec-
tion.
The region also proved attractive to
developers, including one who in the
early 1990s wanted to build a resort casi-
no on the rocky Espiritu Santo Island in
the Gulf of California.
Mr. Means led the way in stopping the
project.
He organized a coalition of philan-
thropists, business owners and local
fishermen in opposition to it and raised
money on both sides of the United
States-Mexico border. He personally
purchased the land in the middle of the
proposed casino site, and the coalition
subsequently bought the entire island
for more than $3 million. The island was
given as a gift to the Mexican govern-
ment, which then granted it permanent
protection.In 2005, UNESCO designated 244 is-
lands, islets and coastal areas in the Gulf
of California, including Espiritu Santo, a
World Heritage Site — an area of eco-
logical significance legally protected by
international treaties. In 2007, Mexico
named the Espiritu Santo Island Archi-
pelago a national park.
Timothy Irwin Means was born on
March 18, 1944, in Beaver Falls, Pa., to
Melvin and Flora (Heineman) Means.
His father was an electrician, his mother
a homemaker.
When Timothy was a child he had a
heart condition, and the family moved to
Phoenix in the hope that the dry climate
would help. Over time, the problem cor-
rected itself.
Timothy studied geology at Phoenix
College but never graduated. He
worked as a raft guide on the rapids of
the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.
A brief marriage to Judy Fredrickson in
the mid-1960s ended in divorce.
He later met Nora White, a young
woman from Santa Barbara who had
sailed to La Paz in Baja. She soon joined
him in running the tourist expeditions.
In 1980 they held a somewhat impromp-
tu (and unofficial) wedding ceremony
on a sand dune during one of their eco-
tourism trips; the marriage was legal-
ized in 1982. They separated in 1996 and
were divorced in 2012.
In addition to his son, Mr. Means is
survived by his mother; his daughter,
Magdalena Means; his sister, Marilyn
Means; his brothers, Wayne and Dean;
and a granddaughter.
Mr. Means came to love his adopted
country so much that in 1993 he became
a Mexican citizen.
Ms. White, his former wife, said that
she had initially been skeptical of eco-
tourism. She had felt that bringing tour-
ists to a fragile ecosystem was self-de-
feating and not environmentally sus-
tainable.
She said she came to change her
view: The groups were small, they trav-
eled with minimal impact on the land
and water, and, most important, their
eyes were opened to how much the area
needed protection, especially from ra-
pacious developers.
“Tim raised awareness of the envi-
ronment and used the business as a
mechanism to find donors for conserva-
tion,” she said. “He got people to see
what was important and to donate to the
cause.”Pioneerin protectinga fragileenvironmentTIMOTHY MEANS
1944-
BY KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Timothy Means in 2012. He established a
major low-impact tourism company.BAJA EXPEDITIONS ARCHIVE
Portugal has scrambled to find solutions
to the wildfires that have ravaged the
country in recent years. It has tested
high-tech tools like drones and used sat-
ellites and aircraft to fight the fires. It
has grappled with long-term policy
changes to improve land management
that could prevent them.
And then there is the goat.
Part of Portugal’s problem, as in other
southern European countries, is that in-
land villages have shed their popula-
tions. The absence of shepherds, goat-
herds and farmers has left forest lands
overgrown, allowing fires to spread and
burn faster. Steep slopes are out of reach
for a tractor and are very costly to tend
by hand, difficult in any case for an ag-
ing population.
A simple, low-cost solution, Por-
tuguese officials now hope, may lie with
the humble goat, which feeds on the un-
derbrush that fuels fires, if only enough
goatherds and shepherds can be found
and supported in a way of life that is dis-
appearing.
Leonel Martins Pereira, 49, is his vil-
lage’s last. Increasingly, he may also be
Portugal’s first line of defense against
wildfires.
He is now part of a pilot program
started by the Portuguese government
intended to help goatherds in an ardu-
ous and isolated job that may prove es-
sential to his country’s ability to adapt to
a future defined by climate change.
His hilltop village, Vermelhos, in
southern Portugal, is surrounded by
strips of barren land, as if a powerful
lawn mower had driven across the area.
That is a credit to his 150 Algarve
goats, an indigenous breed with dark
spots on a white coat, that have nibbled
away the underbrush that can fuel a fire.
The goats feed off all the local plants,
including the strawberry tree, a bush
that is turned by villagers into a liquor
called aguardente de medronhos.
The strawberry tree’s leaves also
have a sticky protective film that
catches fire easily. But for the goats it is
food worth scaling the mountainsides
for.
The goat project was started by a gov-
ernment forestry institute last year with
a budget of just a few thousand euros.
So far, it has enlisted 40 to 50 goat-
herds and shepherds across the country,
with a combined livestock of 10,
goats that graze across about 6,
acres, in selected areas that are more
vulnerable to fire.
“When people abandon the country-
side, they also leave the land extremely
vulnerable to fire,” said João Cassinello,
a regional official from Portugal’s Agri-
culture Ministry. “We have lost a way of
life in which the forest was seen as valu-
able.”
There is no doubt that poor govern-
ment land management has worsened
Portugal’s fires. The project is part of the
country’s effort to recover. But chal-
lenges remain.
Nuno Sequeira, a board member for
the forestry and nature conservation in-
stitute that runs the project, said the dif-
ficulty was not funding but finding
enough goatherds in Portugal.
“It’s just become very hard to find
people willing to do this hard work and
live in such areas,” he said.
Vermelhos itself has shrunk to about
25 residents, from over 100 when Mr.
Martins Pereira was growing up.
The primary school he attended
closed 20 years ago. When he started
looking after goats once tended by his
great-grandfather, Vermelhos still had
about 10 people doing such work.
Antonio Barbara, a 93-year-old who
used to be a shepherd, listed three
things that had changed since his youth:
less rainfall, more roads and many more
burning bushes and trees.
“We really never had so many fires,”
he said, while sitting on a village bench,
talking to a neighbor and enjoying the
shade.
Although the roads have improved
significantly, it still takes one hour to
drive the twisty 30 miles between Ver-
melhos and Faro, the main airport city of
the Algarve region, a major tourism des-
tination.
But the tourists congregate at the
coasts. They rarely make their way to
inland villages like Vermelhos, where
the heat and winds sweep across the
hills in the summer like air from a blow
dryer.
People like Mr. Martins Pereira em-
phasize that what they do is more than
just a job. Like many other villagers, he
left Portugal as a young man for a few
years to work in France, but eventually
returned to a family village lifestyle that
he was missing.
To beat the heat, which can reach
above 110 degrees Fahrenheit, or more
than 43 degrees Celsius, in the summer
months when the country is most prone
to fires, Mr. Martins Pereira sets off for
the hills at dawn and returns late at
night.“Living and working with animals is a
24-hour job,” Mr. Martins Pereira said.
By his own calculations, the govern-
ment program gives him an extra €3, or
about $3.35, per day, on top of what he
can earn from selling his animals and
their products, compared with the €
per hour it would cost to operate a trac-
tor to clear the land.
That is not enough, he said, adding
that he was unlikely to sign up again, un-
less the pay increased and forestry engi-
neers gave him more leeway to decide
where his goats should graze. Forestry
inspectors, he said, wanted him to focus
on clearing roadside areas, which must
be protected from fire but where there is
not always the best vegetation to feed
his goats.
“The state has been wasting taxpay-
ers’ money for years by mismanaging
forests and is now saving some money,but without compensating the shep-
herds properly,” he said.
“Being a shepherd is a vocation, but I
don’t think this is worth the extra work
and hassle,” he added.
Mr. Sequeira said that he would take
account of such complaints, but noted
that a pilot phase allows for some fine-
tuning before the project is expanded.
“We’re pleased so far, but the goal is to
learn before doing this on a larger scale,”
he said. “We are trying to change a
whole system to prevent forest fires,
and that takes time.”
Until then, Portugal is likely to face re-
peated tragedies.
Hotter summers and more frequent
and recurrent heat waves have
spawned a proliferation of wildfires
around Europe. Last year, forest fires
destroyed about three million acres of
European land, an area larger than Cy-prus, at a cost of €10 billion. But almost
no country has been hit harder than Por-
tugal, which has lost more of its forest to
fires since the start of the decade than
any other southern European country,
including Spain, Italy and Greece, ac-
cording to the European Commission.
In July, 30 people were injured as fires
destroyed vast tracts of forest, and this
month about 500 firefighters were
needed to put out a major blaze near the
central town of Tomar.
Two summers ago forest fires killed
more than 100 people.
The worst occurred outside Pedrógão
Grande, in central Portugal, where 66
people died. The flames cut off a road,
leaving drivers stranded in their burn-
ing vehicles.
The Pedrógão Grande fire provoked a
fresh round of soul-searching in Portu-
gal and highlighted a history of political
inaction, deficient land management
and giving priority to firefighting over
fire prevention. This year, Portugal is
spending almost half of its rural fire-
fighting budget on prevention, com-
pared with only 20 percent in 2017.
“I think we finally understood that we
cannot just fight fires but must also pre-
vent them, by working hard in the forest
during the months before the summer
heat arrives,” said Paulo Dias, a forestry
engineer who has been monitoring the
goat project.
In the case of Vermelhos, Mr. Martins
Pereira and other villagers fought in
2004 against a fire that burned for a
week and destroyed the cork trees that
form one of Portugal’s main industries.
Firefighters, he recalled, arrived a
day after the blaze started and the au-
thorities issued contradictory instruc-
tions.
He ignored their advice to let his goats
run into the hills, he said. Instead, he
kept them instead inside his stable, en-
suring their survival.On the front line against fires: The goat
VERMELHOS, PORTUGAL
Portugal is fighting
blazes by using animals
to devour their fuel
BY RAPHAEL MINDER
Some of the 150 goats that the goatherd Leonel Martins Pereira puts out to pasture every day to nibble on the underbrush near Vermelhos, Portugal.PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOSÉ SARMENTO MATOS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mr. Martins Pereira, second from left, meeting with friends. The problem with using
goats for fire prevention has not been funding, but finding enough goatherds.“When people abandon
the countryside, they also
leave the land extremely
vulnerable to fire.”
Giraffes are a threatened species and
many of their populations are endan-
gered and declining.
But until now, no international regula-
tions governed their trade. On Thurs-
day, at a conference in Geneva, coun-
tries overwhelmingly agreed to add gi-
raffes to the list of animals protected by
the Convention on the International
Trade of Endangered Species of Wild
Fauna and Flora, or CITES.
While trade in giraffes will still be al-
lowed, countries will be required to take
measures to ensure it does not detri-
mentally affect populations.
“Giraffes are one of the most emblem-
atic species in Africa, but until now, they
were not protected on the international
level,” said Col. Abba Sonko, head of
Senegal’s CITES delegation. Senegal,
along with the Central African Republic,
Chad, Kenya, Mali and Niger, nominated
giraffes for inclusion in the convention.
“We realized their populations are de-
creasing year to year, so we wanted to
list the species in CITES to increase pro-
tections,” he said.
Some experts question, however,
whether regulating trade will make a
meaningful difference for giraffes.
“Many people have talked about this
being a nice political move with a lot of
emotions behind it, but it doesn’t appear
to be as scientifically robust as maybe it
should be,” said Julian Fennessy, co-
chair of the International Union for Con-
servation of Nature’s giraffe and okapi
specialist group and a co-founder of the
Giraffe Conservation Foundation, a non-
profit organization based in Windhoek,
Namibia. “We need to focus more on
boots and resources on the ground, es-
pecially in East and Central Africa, to
stop giraffe decline.”
Giraffe populations have decreased
by 40 percent across Africa since 1985,
with about 100,000 left today. Senegal,
like many West African countries, has
lost all of its giraffes.
“Maybe giraffes lived in Senegal 40
years ago, but it’s been a long time,”
Colonel Sonko said.
Divided into nine subspecies, giraffesare primarily threatened by habitat loss.
In Central and East Africa, they are also
vulnerable to poaching for domestic
consumption.
What role, if any, international trade
plays in the species’ decline is less cer-
tain. No one knows how many live gi-
raffes or giraffe parts are traded inter-
nationally each year, because countries
previously were not required to track or
share data.
A United States trade database, one of
the few sources of information, indicates
that about 40,000 giraffe specimens rep-resenting at least 3,700 animals were
imported between 2006 and 2015. Most
were bone carvings, followed by hunt-
ing trophies and skins.
More than 90 percent came from legal
sources, according to Fred Bercovitch,
an ecologist at Kyoto University in Ja-
pan and executive director of Save the
Giraffes, a nonprofit based in San Anto-
nio.
But about 50 of the imports came from
Nubian giraffes, a critically endangered
subspecies, said Dr. Bercovitch, who
served as a scientific adviser on the
CITES proposal.
“It’s pretty shortsighted for conserva-
tionists to say illegal trade is not a big
deal because it’s only killing a few ani-
mals each year,” he said. “These are en-
dangered species.”
Not all of Africa’s giraffes are in trou-
ble. Southern African populations have
doubled since 1985 and are stable. Much
of that success is attributed to trophy
hunting and the financial incentives it
provides to set aside land and protec-
tions for animals, said Francois Deacon,
an ecologist at the University of the Free
State in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
About half of South Africa’s 30,000 gi-
raffes, for example, live on private game
farms. “Trophy hunting has helped to in-
crease our numbers,” he said.
The new CITES listing, Dr. Deacon
added, might scare away hunting clients
who interpret it as meaning all giraffes
are in trouble. “With the emotional side
of it, people don’t think logically,” Dr.
Deacon said.
At the CITES conference, representa-
tives of Southern African countries —including Botswana, South Africa, Na-
mibia and Eswatini (formerly Swazi-
land) — spoke against the CITES pro-
posal, arguing that their giraffe popula-
tions are not endangered and are al-
ready being sustainably managed.
“I think they felt they were being ac-
cused of having threatened populations,
but nobody said that,” said Sue Lieber-
man, vice president for international
policy at the Wildlife Conservation Soci-
ety in New York City. “You have to look
at the species as a whole.”
Of the 127 parties who voted on the
proposal, 83 percent supported it, in-
cluding the United States. “We believe
this to be a common-sense approach
that will ensure that trade is sustainable
and legal and that these iconic animals
can continue to persist for generations
to come,” said Barbara Wainman, assist-
ant director of external affairs at the
United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Trump administration indicated
last spring that it was reviewing
whether giraffes should be listed as en-
dangered or threatened under the En-
dangered Species Act, but no decision
has been made. More recently, the ad-
ministration moved to weaken the act’s
protections overall.
More will be needed to stop the de-
cline of giraffes, Dr. Lieberman said, but
the vote is a step in the right direction.
“Adding giraffes to CITES is not going to
‘save’ the species, because there’s lots of
threats like habitat loss,” she said. “But
this will help us get a handle on the trade
issue and draw attention to the fact that
in large parts of Africa, giraffes are re-
ally declining.”Nations regulate giraffe trade but stop short of a ban
BY RACHEL NUWER
A stuffed giraffe in the National Wildlife Property Repository outside Denver, where 1.
million pieces of animal contraband — including items made from giraffes — are stored.