BY the time Cohn-Haft and I got back to Camp 41, several other people
had arrived, including Cohn-Haft’s wife, Rita Mesquita, who’s an ecologist,
and Tom Lovejoy, who was in Manaus attending a meeting of a group
called the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation. Now in his early seventies,
Lovejoy is credited with having put the term “biological diversity” into
general circulation and with having conceived of the idea of the “debt-for-
nature swap.” Over the years, he has worked for the World Wildlife Fund,
the Smithsonian, the United Nations Foundation, and the World Bank, and
in good part owing to his efforts something like half the Amazon
rainforest is now under some form of legal protection. Lovejoy is the rare
sort of person who seems equally comfortable slogging through the forest
and testifying in front of Congress. He is always looking for ways to drum
up support for Amazon conservation, and while we were sitting around
that evening, he told me he’d once brought Tom Cruise to Camp 41.
Cruise, he said, had seemed to enjoy himself, but, unfortunately, had
never taken up the cause.
By now, more than five hundred scientific papers and several
scientific books have been written about the BDFFP. When I asked Lovejoy
to sum up what had been learned from the project, he said that one had to
be cautious extrapolating from a part to the whole. For example, recent
work has shown that changes in land use in the Amazon also affect
atmospheric circulation. This means that, on a large enough scale,
destruction of the rainforest could result not just in a disappearance of
the forest but in a disappearance of the rain.
“Suppose you ended up with a landscape cut up into hundred-hectare
fragments,” Lovejoy said. “I think what the project has shown is that you
basically would have lost more than half the fauna and flora. Of course,
you know, in the real world it’s always more complicated.”
Most of the findings from the BDFFP have indeed been variations on
the theme of loss. Six species of primates can be found in the area of the
project. Three of these—the black spider monkey, the brown capuchin
monkey, and the bearded saki—are missing from the fragments. Birds like
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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