OF COURSE NO ONE PAYS AMAZONAS FOR PROVIDING THAT FUNCTION

What do you want to know?

How did you end up here?

I was invited to, uh… I was given the job 36 years ago. And I’ve been working with INPA ever since.

We spoke with your colleague, Charles.

Uh huh.

And we’re in touch with Susanna. Something we had discussed with them are the challenges of biodiversity. How to manage these unknown quantities, put value on something we don’t know much about. How do you fund biodiversity management?

Well, from my end we have almost no money. Brazil’s in a crisis. But before Brazil was in a crisis we had very little money. We did a calculation and it came out to be something like 1 cent per hectare per year. It’s almost 1/100th of a cent per hectare per year for the most of the Amazon. People have trouble because they can’t comprehend how big the Amazon is, and just how few researches there are, and little access there is to it. People often think of a 1-million-dollar project, which is an awful lot of money for most studies people do in the US or Europe, where you’re talking about a couple of square kilometers, and there’s easy access to get there by road or trail. But here, when you spread that over 7 million square kilometers, it’s very little.

That’s our biggest problem—the scale of the area. Things can happen that you don’t know happen, because you’re not there. And local people don’t have the education. They have the laws, lots of things to back them up, but they don’t know their rights. So they tend to get walked over by big business and corporations in the Amazon.

And it’s hard to control that business, because of limited monitoring possibilities. You don’t know who accesses what, and what they do with that.

It’s still easy… well, it’s not easy. There are a lot of people in the Amazon. So if we could get that work force organized, then they would do a lot of protecting themselves. But at the moment they aren’t

thinking about that. They’re thinking about high technology themes. Thinking about going in and finding that leaf that will cure cancer. And very few people are thinking about the Amazon as a productive system, and that there are lots of people living off it. And other things like world climate are so popular.

What many people across the world consider the project of saving the Amazon has actually very little to do with the people who live here.

People think that there’s almost nobody in the Amazon, but there are millions of people here. And the sorts of agriculture they had done up until now had sustained them, and had sustained the ecosystem. If you replace that with large-scale monoculture and the amounts that the ecosystem has to process, you lose the people, and you usually don’t make a lot of money either. There are a whole lot of perks and strange business deals that go on. A few people make a lot of money. But for the area, there’s very little production.

There’s all these factories here in Manaus. We’ve been here for about 5 days. Electronics factories, automobile factories. We see them everywhere. How do you look at Manaus as a city that’s integrated in the rainforest, that works with it?

In a way it does. Manaus generates a lot of money. And that money can be used to sustain people and for education and all sorts of things. And Manaus effects a very small area in terms of the forest, because it makes little demands on the forest. It’s sort of a little enclave. There’s virtually no hinterland around Manaus. No agricultural production. Most things are flown in. The Free Zone—the original idea was put in by the military government. In order to attract a lot of people to the Amazon, they would cut down the trees. And the military also thought that communists wouldn’t be able to hide in the grass then either, so they would solve their problems. They wanted to get rid of the jungle. It didn’t work that way. But what it basically did was make an enclave that generates a lot of money, which is good in general. The State of Amazonas is one of the most preserved states within the Amazon. But it’s also one of the richest states. That’s because it’s living on a Free Zone. And so there’s all sorts of opportunities for high technology, and there’s also more opportunities for education and healthcare. Other states like Pará and Rondônia and Acre, they don’t have those benefits, so people try to make money by cutting down forest and putting in cows, soybean, and other things. I’m not against the Free Zone for very large reasons.

The Amazon stretches across 6 countries. And those countries all don’t have the same political or ecological agenda. There are also European and Asian countries coming in, interested in the hydropower possibilities, for example. What kind of environmental scope does scientific research have in and of itself with what you do?

One of our biggest projects at the moment is to do an environmental evaluation of all the sites where hydroelectric dams are planned. At the moment, the government requires an environmental impact statement. The problem is that they’re already putting in the dam when they’re doing the environmental impact statement. And it costs lots of money to take away the dam. So what we have to do is go in when they’re planning the dam, because they plan these dams 20 or 30 years before. So if we can go in and evaluate the biodiversity in one of these places, we might be able to determine the potential—the money potential—for the area, or the potential loss if the dam is built. And then the idea is to try to optimize, to get as much energy for the least loss of biodiversity. We have to do the surveys now, and that’s what we can’t get money to do. If we invest now, we save money later. But there are a lot of vested interests in not planning, and there are even vested interests by the biologists, because a lot of biologists get rich doing these statements that are used for nothing. So one of our biggest projects at the moment is to do the integration of environmental planning and biodiversity. But another big problem is in countries that supply the water to the Amazon. They’re putting in an enormous number of hydroelectric dams, and we have very little influence there. Though we are starting some training programs with countries like Ecuador, so we can influence what goes on in those other countries. But it’s much harder.

Yngve’s from Norway. And we know that Norway invested 100 million euros or something into saving the rainforest.

We also heard quite a lot of joking around about what’s happening with that money. Charles said that he went down to Brasilia to this meeting where there were… people were brainstorming about how to use the money. And he said if you’re going to save the rainforest, why don’t you just build a fence around it, with guards? Why invest in a bio pepper seed?

Why invest heavily in the extraction economy? Why not just put a fence up?

I talked to the Norway people, but they were really interested in investing in carbon. And carbon trading. And that’s a good example of the size of the problem we have. So they have all the money, but they may spread it around so thinly that they end up not being able to do anything. Because what you have to do is integrated planning for the whole of the basin. And they end up forking out bits of money here and there, to this and that, and although it might be very useful from the point of view of a normal academic program, it’s not… What we need is a lot of planning over the whole of the basin. And it has to be integrated.

And what about this fence?

I think that they’re not against… they want to work with the people, give them other opportunities to make money. It’s just, as we don’t have a good plan for the whole of the Amazon, we don’t know where it’s best to invest. So people have been putting lots of money into the Amazon for quite a long time now, in terms of billions of dollars. But it just seems to disappear. It’s not going into a system that builds for the long-term. So I don’t know how this Norway money will finally come out, but we certainly haven’t seen any of it.

There seems to be a lot of unknown aspects of the Amazon.

Yeah, that’s the thing. There’s a movement within the biodiversity section of the Ministry of Science and Technology that’s trying to be more efficient in that way. But that movement came just at the time when Brazil went into a crisis. When we had a little bit of money, there was no planning, but now that there’s no money, we’re getting around to the planning.

How do the Amazonian people feel about monoculture?

You see, there’s very little organization and there’s no communication. So people then see it. These things just eat away the Amazon, and those local ideas and knowledge. These people are all very poor, need money, and they don’t have very much employment. So cutting down the forest looks good to them for a while. And then they find that when monoculture goes in, there’s no more forest. They can’t live there anymore, so they might go to the periphery of the city and become city dwellers. People don’t see it happening. It just sort of creeps up on them.

So there’s no real economic alternative to chopping down the rainforest?

It’s not going to happen, because we’ve got a lot of poor people out there, and they’re worried about the health of their kids and better conditions. And the only

way they see they can do that is to have tire roads and cell phones. And they don’t see what’s happening. It just keeps nibbling away. The only place that you sort of have grassroots resistance is way back when they tried to go into the rubber cutters and take them over, and cutters refused people from going in.

Chico Mendes, in the 80s.

Yeah, but that’s 30 years ago. That sort of thing is not happening now at all really.

We’ve been hearing that they’re trying to create more economy through extraction products. Brazil nut, açai.

Well that was… The idea then and now is that the people would have standing forest products. And basically they’ve never had the support. They’ve never had the government doing those tests in those production systems. Because it’s very different to invest in a lot of very small-scale farms, which produce a small amount each. You have to have an organization to get that going. Each person working individually doesn’t work. You could say the same thing about Europe. You could say the small farms in Europe, they’re trying to keep them going in Europe, but in order to do that they have to have some sort of government intervention. And here it’s even more difficult. And so the Sustainable Development Reserve in the other reserves, the people don’t have the lifestyle, the basic education and health requirements, and it’s really hard to make that work in the long term.

We spoke with a chef who has this restaurant in São Paulo. A fancy restaurant. It also has this social-ecological branch, called ATA. And they help the Baniwa produce this really delicious pepper in the Northwest.

Aesthetic industries are never going to be efficient enough to justify the fate of the Amazon. Basically, the Amazon does provide all of the water to all the agricultural growing regions of the southern part of Brazil, and there’s all these carbon things. The world wants the Amazon standing, so the Brazilian government wants the Amazon standing. But they don’t want to invest the very small amount that’s necessary to make the lives of the local people better. So the local people don’t see any alternatives except cutting down the forest. So what’s really needed is strong government planning to maintain the forest. The state of Acre even subsidizes the rubber, because it’s better to subsidize the rubber than have people cut down the forest. But we don’t have that on a larger scale. We need it, but we’re not going to get it. Instead of people saying, we’re going to open up new roads into the Amazon, make new places to get more money… what we need is for the government to consolidate the places where there are people, consolidate the infrastructure, consolidate the health and education. And that wouldn’t take that much money, instead of wasting money making new roads. You can see the same sort of thing in the south of Brazil. 40 percent of Brazil’s agricultural production is just wasted. It never actually gets to the table, because of the very bad infrastructure. They’re always trying to start something new instead of investing in consolidating infrastructure that’s already there.

Maybe some kind of longterm partnership with an outside investor? One of the energy partnerships? Or is that asking too much?

There is big hydroelectric potential in the Amazon, and there’s no way that people aren’t going to use it. It’s just to use it sensibly. They put in Belo Monte, but in a few years there won’t be enough water to run it. And so they’re going to say, we’ve invested all these billions, and the problem is the Indians who won’t let us put the other dams upstream. They won’t let the water flow into it. And then they’ll want to go into the Kayapo lands and destroy those. And this frontier mentality… Instead of saying yes, you’re not going to be able to preserve the whole Amazon. People are going to want it, and they’re going want to use it in new ways. But we should go carefully, consolidating. And part of that consolidation is the products, the small agriculture, the standing crops, the tree crops. And putting it in the system so they function, instead of trying to expand. We have to get rid of the frontier mentality. That’s the problem.

So what is the Amazon if it’s not a frontier. If we think about it globally?

Firstly it’s a mitigation system. It stores 1/4 of the total carbon.

Hence the carbon trading.

Well, yeah. To not get too complicated… we’ve been discussing dams. The Amazon is a giant water pump. Basically, the northeastern trade winds, as they go past, they collect water vapor. And that brings water to Latin America. The rain falls in Uruguay, Paraguay, the plains of the basin. Argentina. Mato Grosso. All these areas that are the grainery of Latin America.

These agricultural economies are worth something like 1 trillion dollars. Of course getting rain to those regions is necessary for those economies to function. Of course no one pays Amazonas for providing that function. And that of course is a problem we have globally of not recognizing public goods and services.

It’s also the North-South issue.

Globally, yes.

Nice caiman head. And that crocodile over there. Where does your fascination come from? Are you from Australia?

Yes.

Because we went to the floating forest, near Tefé. And we saw caimans for the first time and they were terrifying creatures. What’s attractive about them?

Everyone’s attracted to seemingly terrifying animals. Tigers, elephants. There are all sorts of things that are terrifying. But I don’t know. I had an opportunity to work with them when I was in Australia. Caimans—like this one—are pussycats compared to crocodylidae. If you were up by Tefé, you saw these caimans that were up there floating around the lodge. But if they were crocodiles, they would eat people. It’s very different. So I just… there was a time when it seemed like it would be a good opportunity for local people to hunt caiman. They’ve always hunted caiman. They’ve always eaten caiman. Not so much in the State of Amazonas, but they export it to the State of Pará. For a long time they sold the skin to the luxury industry, and it seemed like for a long time that it would be a good industry for the people. But they’ve run into all sorts of problems, mainly from the agricultural industry, which wants us to kill them like cows. Take them to a slaughter house, and hang them up. But that doesn’t work for a wild animal. Although it does work for some wild animals, but not for these. They just become inedible if you do that. It’s the only country in the world that requires that. All the other countries in the world—like Australia, the US—where they hunt crocodilians, they treat them like fish. So there’s a big opportunity for the local people to have… to make money out of these caimans, but we’re not making much use of it yet.

You can make more money from the skin than the meat probably.

Both. The skin has a reasonable value, but it’s the meat that makes it worthwhile. If

you can’t sell the meat, it’s not worthwhile to hunt. It’s also ethical, to go out there and kill a big animal like that. Just taking the skin and throwing the meat in the water.

They have an amphibious style.

Well, yeah, in the sense that it lives in the water and it nests on land. It can walk on land. They’re not amphibians. They’re pretty interesting animals. The can do all sorts of things. They have the most complex vertebrate heart. They can do all sorts of things that birds and mammals can do, and they can do all sorts of things that amphibians can do. They can swim like a fish, gallop like a horse. Their eyesight is much better than ours. They see well at night, in black and white. They also can see more colors than us. They have color vision like birds. So a crocodile looking through our eyes would think that he’s color blind. They do all sorts of amazing things. They’re special creatures. And they’ve been around a long time. They used to feed on dinosaurs, and they’re still feeding on us, and they’ll still be feeding on whatever dominant group there is on the earth 50 million years from now.

I read somewhere that the crocodile was around when the mammal was still extremely small. It hadn’t evolved into a large order.

Mammals were pretty small back then, skidding around. They didn’t take off until the dinosaurs died out. Though all of the archazoes died out at the end of the Jurassic Period, except for the crocodilians and the birds. And the birds are dinosaurs. They’re just dinosaurs. But all of the other dinosaurs died out. Only the crocs and birds survived.

Is there any explanation?

Nobody really knows. There are a whole lot of freshwater things that survived. Possibly because things that live in freshwater, they can feed on dead things that fall into the water. They think that basically a meteorite hit the earth, and cut out all the sunlight for years. So there were no green plants producing anything. And so the animals eating the green plants died out. How the birds did it, with their high metabolic rate, nobody knows. But perhaps they were able to migrate to find the little bits of food that were left.

Felipe told us to be in touch with you. Do you have any relationship to his restaurant? I know that INPA and the restaurant are trying to work together. Do you have a food passion?

I coordinate a very large project called CENBAM. It’s the National Institute for Science Technology and Innovation for Amazonian Biodiversity. And one of our researches is Noemia Ishikawa. And Noemia studies the fungi. And she’s interested in that. She’s descended from Japanese immigrants. And she had a lot to do with—I think it was her grandfather who started growing shiitake in Brazil. And so when she came here, she’s been trying to promote the use of the Lentinus strigosus species. She just spent some time in Roraima, with the Indians up there. The Yanomami. And they have dozens and dozens of species of mushrooms that they eat. So it looks like it could be an industry. Either an extracting industry for the Indians, or an opportunity to grow them. Noemia’s been working with the people who have the brazil nut plantations, and they have to cut off the excess branches from the brazil nuts, and they use those excess branches to grow shiitake. With all of that, it’s no good having production unless you can sell it. So people like Felipe have been helping out by looking at what the economic potential of those things could be, because you need a whole production chain. It’s not enough to just go there, and say, someone can grow it, someone can harvest it, and someone can sell it. You have to make sure you have a whole system that will keep going and be consistent. So that’s why we work with Felipe.

What kinds of technologies are used to map biodiversity?

Well, there’s been some advancement. And people of course are looking into ways to better map species. Mosquitos, for example. Which are very dangerous, and very expensive to get rid of.

Didn’t the Americans kill them off with gasoline when they were building the Panama Canal? Just drenched the whole landscape with gas.

They’re still trying to commit specicide on around 30 different kinds of mosquitos worldwide. But there’s thousands of different species of mosquitoes, and if we get rid of a few, the landscapes will hiccup, and who knows if something better or worse will then emerge. We’re still a long way away from knowing the extent and complex behavior of these ecosystems.

What about smartphones? Bird apps? Those are being developed too. [Laughs]

Is it like sleep? With all these apps we can now test sleep patterns more generally.

Nature doesn’t use the same apps as us. People are really interested in these things. Things like the food and the small industries and what not. We do work with that. But it’s not going to make a big difference over the whole of the Amazon. The mosquito technology is useful immediately, but that’s a whole other story. Our technology is about environmental impact statements, and how you can do biodiversity surveying, and put it into a system where you can do conservation planning. So the system that we developed is on biodiversity monitoring. That system, the repel system, is used as a basic-impact evaluation system for dams. It’s used by Obama. We work both with the federal government and the private sector. We do a lot of training. We’re developing that. Each one of these little industries that comes up is really interesting, and everyone likes to do it. If you can stand there and hold out: I’ve developed this tomato. It’s something that’s palpable. But it’s harder to get people interested in long-term planning. Because nobody sees it. If you plan well, everyone expects what you should have done. If you plan badly, everyone complains. If you do it well, everyone thinks it’s normal. That’s our main line of attackget people planning between the various sectors, like mining, the energy sector, the transport sector. So that we can integrate that with biodiversity.

How is the political sphere responding to this?

Surprisingly well, but slowly. There’s not much money. That’s the whole problem. As we were starting to get there, the money dried up. There’s often resistance from places you wouldn’t expect. Like from biologists, who have been used to doing their own little research and not having to interact with anybody, and they publish it in some journal, and it has very little impact. So it’s really changing culture. And scientific culture is very entrenched. We actually have… it’s not more difficult to work with politicians than it is to work with the biologists.