Politics And Culture Pose Hazards In Global Rain Forest Exploration

By Frederic Golden

Nationalism is major issue in much of developing world as U.S. scientists seek to learn more about this endangered ecosystem
When Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson thinks about the 1950s, his recollections are tinged with more than a little nostalgia. Not because life was necessarily better then, he explains. But his kind of science was certainly easier to do.

Wilson, a noted authority on tropical ants and widely recognized as the "father" of sociobiology, the study of how biological traits influence human behavior, recalls fondly his visits to Amazonia as a young field biologist. "You could go to a country like Brazil, collect specimens without worrying about permits, and not have to deal with suspicious government officials who might impede your way," he says.

Not anymore. Although the need is greater than it has ever been, modern scientists face several obstacles in their quest to conduct research in the world's rain forests. Wilson and others acknowledge that some things have changed for the better: Jet aircraft and the greater availability of funding, for example, have greatly simplified their ability to reach the area. But this improved accessibility must be balanced against a rising tide of bureaucratic red tape, increased nationalistic suspicions of foreign investigators, and unstable political conditions.

The new obstacles come at a particularly critical moment in history. With the rain forests under increasing threat from clearcutting and slash-and-burn agriculture, scientists are more eager than ever before to collect and study their rich panoply of fauna and flora. Many of the rain forest species, although still unknown, are in danger of vanishing from the face of the earth. While some governments are willing - indeed, eager - to call on visiting scientists to inventory this natural treasure, others are making it more and more difficult for foreign investigators to work in the threatened areas.

Yet, as any good scientist understands, one's point of reference is an important element in assessing a problem. The attitudes contained in the recollections of Wilson and others have themselves contributed to the current distrust between scientists from the industrialized world and their counterparts in the developing world. Nowhere is that more evident than in the current debate about an issue that barely existed a decade ago: how to prevent a potential global warming triggered by the introduction of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels.

"We want to learn from our visitors. We don't want to have to teach them."
So says Herbert Otto Roger Schubart, general director of the National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA). In spite of tensions between the United States and Brazilian governments over issues of debt and ecology, American scientists are still very welcome at Brazil's largest center for rain forest research. But some are more welcome than others.
"As a country in development, we prefer senior scientists, leaders in their fields who can help us improve our own expertise and raise the level of Brazilian science," Schubart told The Scientist in a telephone interview. "We also want scientists who are able to interact with students taking graduate courses here."
A 36-year-old zoologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Kiel, West Germany, Schubart directs a staff of about 1,000 people, of whom some 250 have degrees at the doctoral or master's level. About 10 of these are Americans, including such veteran rain forest specialists as Philip Fearnside, who does computer models of forest burning. Another dozen or so Americans are usually found in temporary residence as guest investigators, working on INPA's collaborative projects with such U.S. organizations as the Smithsonian Institution, the World Wildlife Fund, the University of Maryland, and the University of Washington in Seattle.
By the standards of American science, INPA operates on a lean diet. Government funding amounts to the equivalent of about $10 million a year, and is continually being eroded by Brazil's runaway inflation. Still, with foreign support, INPA manages a broad spectrum of rain forest research, ranging from such basic questions as the chemistry of tropical plants to more applied subjects like forest and freshwater fisheries management, as well as extensive investigations into such tropical ailments as leishmaniasis and malaria.
Schubart says that Brazilian scientists are well trained but that most developed countries have many more skilled researchers. That shortage, he says, is why "it's important for us to receive scientists from whom we can learn, who can raise the capabilities of Brazilian science."
He does not close the door entirely on younger scientists. But he says he feels "uncomfortable" with those who are not sufficiently creative or flexible enough to cope with severe tropical conditions that can ruin scientific equipment and cause considerable personal discomfort.
--F.G.

Nigel Smith, a University of Florida geologist who has worked extensively in Brazil, cites as an example the barrage of criticism over the torching of the rain forest. Much of it, he says, is couched in highly simplistic terms.

"The foreign press will ask, `Why aren't the Brazilians doing more?' " Smith says. "But the fact is that the overwhelming contribution of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere comes from fossil-fuel burning in the industrial countries. You have to keep things in perspective. Actually, many Brazilians are equally concerned about burning and deforestation."

Even so, many scientists say that Brazil's bureaucracy has been especially hard on foreigners. Notes Lynn S. Kimsey, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis, who has worked throughout Latin America, "Their attitude is that, if a Brazilian scientist isn't doing it, it isn't worth doing."

Last August the Brazilians expelled a team of French researchers using balloons to survey the Amazon after officials discovered that they hadn't taken out the required permits. Two years earlier, the American ethnobotanist Darrell Posey found himself in more serious trouble (The Scientist, Sept. 18, 1989, page 1). He was arrested as he returned from a conference in Miami and charged with agitating against Brazilian sovereignty. At the conference he had spoken out against funding by the World Bank for a large hydroelectric facility that would have flooded the ancestral lands of Brazil's Kayapo Indians in the central Amazon region and, not incidentally, destroyed the region's rich diversity of life. Although Posey was released quickly, the incident prompted Posey to temporarily suspend his work in Brazil in favor of a zoological research post in Munich. Fortunately, such serious confrontations are rare. Many foreign investigators have worked for years in Brazil without incident. But Brazil's new hard line takes on special significance in light of the country's biological importance. Its sprawling territory encompasses about a third of the world's surviving rain forests, and much of the region's rich life is still scientifically unplumbed. Its rivers alone are a cornucopia of many hundreds of species of fish that have not been classified by scientists.

But Brazil is by no means the only nation that has been erecting roadblocks for investigators who want to work in the rain forests. In central Africa, the encounters of veteran primate researchers Jane Goodall and the late Dian Fosse with guerrilla bands and poachers have been widely publicized. Less well known are the restrictions on visiting researchers imposed by once highly accessible Kenya. Foreign investigators are often required to spend months and even years negotiating with officials determined to maintain control over their country's precious resources before granting the necessary permits to undertake field studies.

"Officials are getting more suspicious and less tolerant of outsiders," says University of Florida geographer Abe Goldman, who recently completed a three-year stint in West Africa. "They don't want you to do research without a local partner."

More dangerous hazards confront scientists in the highlands of Colombia, northern Ecuador, and Peru, as well as in some of the mountainous regions of Mexico. Many of these areas are under the control of local drug lords, or revolutionary bands, who don't want any foreigners in their territory. "And they won't hesitate shooting at a visiting American, even if he or she happens to be a scientist," says Kimsey, the UC-Davis entomologist who has made many trips to Latin America. Her latest expedition was a happily uneventful jaunt through the mountains of Argentina and Chile to collect specimens of stinging wasps from the family tiphididae.

But hostility in some countries can even come from fellow scientists. "When I traveled in Peru I kept encountering people who insinuated I was with the CIA," says geographer Robert Voeks of California State University at Fullerton. An anti-American stance is quite fashionable among certain circles of intellectuals in Latin America, says Voeks. And it's understandable, scientists admit, given patterns of United States military and economic interventions into the hemisphere.

Given that uncertainty, Kimsey says that it's wise for scientists to add local politics to their list of things to do before traveling abroad. "When you're going to a place you don't know about," she says, "you should always call the local U.S. embassy. They can alert you to dangers that you might not learn about from officials based in Washington."

Yet in spite of the political and bureaucratic perils that face scientists in the tropics, many foreign investigators continue to do highly useful research there. One particularly successful American is Richard Bieregaard, a University of Pennsylvania-trained ornithologist who has just returned to the U.S. after spending eight years in Brazil conducting a renowned long-term investigation dubbed "the biological dynamics of forest fragments project." Its aim is to determine the minimum critical area that would have to be set aside as a forest preserve to retain most of its flora and fauna. (The indications are that it would probably have to be at least 2.4 million acres, he says.) During Bieregaard's years in Brazil, says a colleague, "he worked so well with the Brazilians he practically became a Brazilian himself."

How does Bieregaard, a researcher at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., account for this success? "You have to develop patience and a very high tolerance of frustration," he says. "You can't expect everybody to act like everyone back home."

Few scientists have been more successful in Brazil and in other tropical countries than the proteges of recently retired University of California geographer Hilgard O'Reilly Sternberg. Born in Rio de Janeiro, and a teacher there before he came to Berkeley 25 years ago, Sternberg has trained a whole cadre of investigators to study everything from land use to fishing practices in the rain forests.

What's his explanation for their remarkable record? "One, don't get mixed up in local politics. Two, if aspects of your research happen to be critical of the government, make sure you state it in a scholarly rather than polemical way."

Bieregaard's work is being done in collaboration with Brazil's National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA), based in the old rubber capital of Manaus at the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio Negro rivers. Though the Brazilians "made it hard for gringos to work in the Amazon" a few years ago, Bieregaard says, about a dozen Americans continue in INPA's employ. Among them is computer modeler Philip M. Fearnside, who does simulations of the capacity of the Amazonian region to support human populations when the forests are cleared by slash-and-burn agriculture to grow such crops as corn, rice, and manioc.

Though Fearnside has been an outspoken critic of the government's environmental policies, he has enjoyed good relations with the Brazilians - mainly, says Bieregaard, "because he's so well respected as a scientist." Bruce Bunting, the World Wildlife Fund's vice president for its Asia Pacific program, adds that even such countries as Malaysia, whose extensive tree-cutting in Sarawak has been spotlighted by the fund, will tolerate criticism. "If you're telling the truth, not trying to exaggerate, they'll listen, even if they don't like what you're saying," he says.

Florida's Smith, who is one of Sternberg's students, found himself in just such a potentially awkward position when he published a book that analyzed the environmental impact of the Transamazon Highway. Although the book, Rainforest Corridors (University of California, 1982) cited the damage that the highway had caused, it didn't put a damper on Smith's research. "It was a balanced, analytical study," he says. "It didn't preach or propound ideology. It attempted to illuminate the policy implications of the roadbuilding."

Smith took the courtesy of showing his work to the Brazilians and letting them criticize it before the book was published. Not only did they not object to the work, but also they were so impressed that he was hired by INPA, for whom he worked from 1976 to 1980.

The hypersensitivity of Brazil and other tropical countries to what foreigners say about them, or even to the presence of foreign investigators on their soil, has historical roots. It is a reaction to an era that Harvard's Wilson admits was rife with "scientific imperialism." In those days, which Wilson believes are long gone, scientists from the U.S. or Europe would descend upon the tropics, haul off specimens at will, then publish their scholarly reports without even a bow to the help they may have received. "They'd depart without leaving anything behind, without making any contributions to local science," says Wilson.

Geographer Voeks, who has investigated, among other things, the use of herbal medicines from the rain forest by descendants of African slaves in Brazil, is even more specific in his indictment. "The old colonial practice was that you'd have local assistants do your research but never acknowledge them in your publications," he says. Even today, he adds, American scientists can be so preoccupied with their own agendas that they avoid cooperation with scientists in their host countries.

Wilson urges American researchers who want to operate in the tropics to enter into working arrangements with scientists, museums, universities, and other institutions in these countries. He cites as an example the agreement between Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, his base in Cambridge, Mass., and the zoological museum at the University of Sao Paulo. "We are constantly exchanging materials and visitors," says Wilson. "We borrow from what they have, and they can get specimens from our collection. It works beautifully."

Walter P. Falcon, director of the Food Research Institute at Stanford, which has many Third World research involvements, notably with Indonesia and Pakistan, says a major issue is the attitude of the visiting scientist. "Some arrogance, some of the Yankee can-do spirit, may be desirable, but there's a fine line you don't want to cross," he says. "After all, you wouldn't expect a scientist from India to go to Washington and try to change American policies."

Frederic Golden is a freelance science writer based in San Francisco.

The Scientist 4[2]:6, Jan. 20, 1990