are quite a bit bigger. Collectively, they represent one of the world’s
largest and longest-running experiments, the Biological Dynamics of
Forest Fragments Project or, for short, the BDFFP. Pretty much every
square foot of the BDFFP has been studied by someone: a botanist tagging
trees, an ornithologist banding birds, an entomologist counting fruit flies.
When I visited Reserve 1202, I ran into a graduate student from Portugal
who was surveying bats. At noon he had just recently woken up and was
eating pasta in a shed that served as a research station-cum-kitchen.
While we were talking, a very skinny cowboy rode up on an only slightly
less skinny horse. He had a rifle slung over one shoulder. I wasn’t sure
whether he’d come because he’d heard the truck I’d arrived on and
wanted to protect the student from possible intruders, or because he
sensed that there was pasta.
The BDFFP is the result of an unlikely collaboration between
cattlemen and conservationists. In the nineteen-seventies, the Brazilian
government set out to encourage ranchers to settle north of Manaus, an
area that was then largely uninhabited. The program amounted to
subsidized deforestation: any ranchers who agreed to move to the
rainforest, cut down the trees, and start raising cows would get a stipend
from the government. At the same time, under Brazilian law, landholders
in the Amazon had to leave intact at least half the forest on their
property. The tension between these two directives gave an American
biologist named Tom Lovejoy an idea. What if the ranchers could be
convinced to let scientists decide which trees to cut down and which ones
to leave standing? “The idea was really just one sentence,” Lovejoy told
me. “I wondered if you could persuade the Brazilians to arrange the fifty
percent so you could have a giant experiment.” In that case, it would be
possible to study in a controlled way a process that was taking place in an
uncontrolled fashion all across the tropics, indeed across the entire world.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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