ECO-WARRIOR WOMEN
Tanya Farber meets four female scientists honoured for their commitment to saving the environment
IT was splashed across the newspapers as a monster of the sea. It weighed 900kg and had become tangled in the net of a Peruvian fisherman who quickly got dollars in his eyes when friends told him he’d get $4 000 (about R56 000) for it.
A crane was hired, and the giant manta ray — one of the most placid and harmless creatures on Earth — was hauled to land. The fetching price? Just $100. Now, a young biologist in the area, Kerstin Forsberg, is helping fishermen earn a livelihood in ecotourism, and has brought them on board to protect rather than kill the giant manta rays.
She has also trained local communities and ecotourists to collect data on the rays, and runs awareness programmes in the community.
It was in fact her tireless lobbying that resulted in a government ban on giant mantas being captured not long after that.
She was also the one who asked the fisherman who made the big catch — Edgardo Cruz — to be an ambassador of the mantas’ protection.
“We approached him and invited him to be part of our project. He is now leading the boat trips that carry international volunteers and tourists. I don’t want him to stop fishing — this is an additional source of income for him but he is now the leading ambassador of manta rays. It is easier for him than doing such demanding work, so it is a winwin.”
The success of her approach is underscored by how she brings the community on board.
“I ask community members what they think first. They are the experts. I don’t want to just come in there and say, ‘This is how we should do it’. It’s the other way around. I ask what issues they have seen and how we can work together.”
This approach has helped Community engagement, trust across the generation gap, innovation, and scientific prowess are giving female eco-warriors the edge. This year, four of those honoured at the Rolex Awards for Enterprise are female scientists who are doing everything in their power to protect the environment, writes Tanya Farber Forsberg forge close friendships with grassroots leaders, work closely with school girls, and immerse herself in the day-to-day mechanisms that have brought her ideal to life.
“I actually feel empowered as a woman,” she says. “I know it is a big issue in other places but I feel it is a strength that works in my favour.”
Another strength is the passion she has had for marine life since she was a child.
“From a very early age I loved marine species and had a huge interest in endangered ones. I think rays are often overlooked — they are highly passive, intelligent creatures and they are very vulnerable and need our attention. Sharks also do.”
Earlier, she had run a project to protect sea turtles.
“This taught me how communities are strictly related to marine environments and how those environments are under threat.”
Another milestone came when a lost tag taught her the importance of collaboration.
A manta ray that had been tagged by another researcher was moving between Ecuador and Peru. “It lost its tag and the researcher put out a Facebook post. I reached out to her and said, ‘I know it is like finding a needle in a haystack but I can tap into the communities I am close to’. Two days later a fisherman called and said, ‘We found your tag’. That helped us think about collaborations with Ecuador because the rays were protected there and not here in Peru at the time.”
Forsberg’s long-term vision covers many other species: “The manta ray project is a very important flagship of my work but what I really want is marine conservation in general, and I feel that this project is a model that we can share worldwide and not just for marine environments.”
RURAL WOMEN FIGHTING WATER POLLUTION IN CHINA
AFTER travelling frequently to China with her immigrant parents, Americanraised Christine Keung saw the good, the bad and the ugly of the rural areas of the country from which her parents had come.
“It was amazing to see cave dwellings my father had experienced as a young man — but I also saw haphazard dumping of used medical supplies and pesticides in the large tributary of the Yellow River.”
For Keung, the first university graduate in her family, this was inspiration enough to take action — and bring the community on board in the process.
She says as men become migrant workers in urban centres, women and children “are left to bear the disproportionate cost of environmental degradation”.
She has her eye on bringing everyone to the table: rural stakeholders whose voices are frequently ignored in environmental discussions, and government representatives who hold the key to change.
Only then can hazardous waste be stopped in its tracks.
For Keung, the stepping stones on that path are made up of close and careful work with women in the rural communities themselves.
“I see transformed communities where women have the knowledge, the motivation and the ability to preserve, protect and invest in their land,” she says.
Because they don’t own the land, Keung says, the way to get buy-in from the women is to tap into something they care deeply about: the health of their children.
Keung has already travelled to more than 60 villages to interview farmers and doctors and bring them on board to fight water pollution.
She is also training local women to collect data.
“I knew I could use my education either to insulate myself from the problems of the world or to become a force to address them,” she says.
ACACIAS TO THE LANDSCAPE’S RESCUE
SARAH Toumi grew up in France, but every year she would travel to her grandparents’ home in a village in the interior of Tunisia.
Over the years, she began to notice something distressing: “I could tell the climate was changing — there was more drought and trees were dying. I thought about my grandparents’ village and wondered how we could change things to solve this issue and socioeconomic problems at the same time.”
Within a single decade, drought had led to an estimated 75% of Tunisia’s agricultural land being threatened by desertification, she says.
From here hatched a dream to plant thousands of acacias — a tree that brings fresh water to the surface, creates a green belt to protect land from wind and sand and produces gum arabic, which brings money into communities.
In 2012, when her father died, she decided it was time to commit herself entirely to the country he had come from. “I had just finished my master’s degree in Paris and had a job in communications lined up. But instead I moved to Tunisia to start planting acacias. People began asking: ‘at age 25, how can she change the agricultural system?’”
Today, her initiative is called Acacias for All. Alongside planting thousands of trees, she also runs an NGO to help women and youth realise their potential.
She says farmers survive by planting sustainable crops, using new technologies for water treatment, and focusing on natural products and fertilizers.
But it wasn’t an easy road to make the dream come to fruition.
“At first I thought there is no ways I can actually do this. I was even getting death threats from people,” she recalls, but then an NGO gave her funding and she committed herself to the project “1 000 percent”.
“I was alone in my mission in the village. I said, ‘Where can we plant acacias?’ and people responding by saying, ‘Are you mad?’
“Today, a few years later, I have local ambassadors in each community to spread the idea and train farmers,” she says.
Being a woman has helped her build these symbolic bridges into a community that was so suspicious at first.
“If I was a man, I would only meet other men because of social norms — but because I am a woman, I automatically meet each farmer’s wife and daughters, too. We talk about education, health, and their aspirations. I can connect easily with them as a fellow woman, and they are grateful to have their voices heard — so being a female social entrepreneur has definitely worked in my favour.”
Her vision for 20 years from now?
“I see farmers using permaculture and efficient irrigation systems. I see farmers in co-operatives using solar energy. desalination systems for water, and sharing resources efficiently. I see local transformation units employing young people who missed out on education. I see the land being saved from desertification and the community being saved from poverty.”
PROTECTING LIFE FAR DOWN BELOW
IT’S not called the end of Earth for nothing. Patagonia — which spreads over the south of Chile and Argentina alike — brings together the most extreme conditions that any explorer could hope to endure.
Wild storms, punishing winds, icy fjords, rugged mountains . . .
For some, a snooze under a coconut tree in Mauritius might be preferable, but for German scientist Vreni Häussermann, this is the stuff dreams are made of.
She is painstakingly documenting life at the bottom of the sea in three remote areas of the Patagonian fjords, in the hope that raising awareness will stop the damaging effects of human activity in its tracks before it ruins the area.
She says of the fjords: “They have highly saline to extremely fresh water. One goes from intense sunlight to dark shadows, from protected bays to wavebattered shores”.
The result is highly diverse species living side by side.
Tragically, the fjords under her gaze are also under threat.
Salmon farming, which has always mainly been in northern Patagonia, has been creeping south and the industry now earns $2.5-billion from salmon exports every year.
This pollution is partly responsible for “destabilising the ecosystem”, Häussermann says, and is probably contributing to an alarming rise in mass die-offs of animals.
Last year alone, her team discovered 337 dead whales on an expedition to a remote area.
Häussermann’s ultimate goal is to get government officials to declare parts of the fjords marineprotected areas.