This week’s dream: Joining the fight for Brazil’s rain forest
Performing hard labor and paying for the privilege doesn’t sound like much of a vacation, said Eric Weiner in Afar. But “voluntourism,” as it’s called, “can be a great way to forge a deeper connection to a place.” Just before the pandemic hit, I spent a week planting seedlings and monitoring mammal populations with a small team of volunteers in Brazil’s Mata Atlântica, a coastal rain forest that’s lost 90 percent of its habitat to logging. This was “not just any work,” but “demanding, dirt-under-your-fingernails, tropicalsun-on-your-head, mosquitoes-up-yournose work.” Still, “there was something oddly satisfying and rejuvenating about it,” because “I knew that in some minuscule way I had made the world a slightly greener, healthier place.”
My trip was arranged by Earthwatch, a 50-year-old nonprofit that connects lay people with scientists who genuinely need hands-on help. Julian and Manoel, the Brazilian ecologists leading our expedition,
“exuded enthusiasm for creatures large and small.” Each morning, my four fellow citizen scientists and I climbed into the bed of Julian and Manoel’s pickup and ventured into the Guapiaçu Reserve, home to, among other creatures, 468 species of butterflies and a “seemingly infinite” number of ant species. In intense heat, we set or checked traps for native rodents, such as the agouti, to help determine how well reforestation efforts were working. Whenever we found an animal in a trap, we measured and tagged it. “At one point, Julian reprimanded me for snapping photos rather than recording data, a reminder that this was not a vacation; it was serious work. We were needed.”
Our other task was to plant trees— about 300 seedlings a day. By Day 4, we volunteers were “all a bit loopy,” but “we had bonded, and more quickly and deeply than, say, passengers on a cruise ship might. We had bonded the way people with a shared purpose bond.” By the time we were celebrating the week’s end over caipirinhas—Brazil’s national cocktail—I felt I knew this corner of the world in a much deeper way. “The rain forest is not an abstraction. It is a place. A world unto itself, one I briefly inhabited, ministered to, and would like to see stick around for a long, long time.”
A seven-day rain forest expedition with Earthwatch (earthwatch.org) starts at $1,775.