Bruce Barcott.

In his new non-fiction book Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, environmental journalist Bruce Barcott follows Sharon Matola -- a former Air Force survival specialist and circus-tiger trainer turned zookeeper -- as she fights the construction of a hydropower dam in her adopted country of Belize, and attempts to save the nesting site of the country's last scarlet macaws.

During her years of battle, Matola -- known throughout Belize and beyond as the Zoo Lady -- wrestled with corrupt politicians, the habitual Belizean suspicion of outsiders, and her own impulsive nature. Though her campaign to stop the Chalillo dam ultimately failed, Matola remains a stubborn defender of Belizean wildlife. She's now working with the Peregrine Fund to reintroduce the harpy eagle, a gigantic bird Barcott describes as a "bear cub with wings," to the country's forests.

Barcott first met Matola in 2002, while on assignment for Outside magazine, and tracked her and her crusade for the next several years. Along the way, he discovered that reporting in the tropics requires discretion, persistence, and snakeproof boots. Grist recently caught up with Barcott to talk about his adventures, and about the surprising victory that emerged from Matola's messy international scuffle.

Sharon Matola.

Photo: Earth Expeditions

So what were your first impressions of the Zoo Lady?

My first impressions were immediate, vivid, and strong. That's how she is -- she's this strong-willed, outgoing, and very charming woman who started and runs her own zoo in the middle of the jungle, in a very tough atmosphere. Belize today really reminds me of Alaska in the old days: if you go down there, you have to make your own way, essentially build your own house, and survive by your wits. That's what Sharon is doing.

Tell us something about what Matola and her handful of allies were up against.

The government made a tiny announcement in the newspaper that it was going to let an energy company build this dam. Sharon was the only one who knew what was going on -- she was the only one who'd actually been back in the area that was going to be flooded, because she had been doing some fieldwork on the macaws nesting back there. She started looking into the dam quietly and privately -- she met with energy company officials, a couple of government officials, that sort of thing -- and they brushed her off, saying, "You don't know what you're talking about." She started fighting the dam by herself, and little by little she gained allies.

She also gained some very powerful enemies. The government spokesman said all sorts of outlandish things about her -- that she was an enemy of the people, that she was ruining the economy of Belize. Threats were made on her life and on the zoo -- at one point, the government, in an effort to get her to shut up, decided it was going to move the national dump from an area outside Belize City to a spot right next to the zoo.

You followed this story through government and corporate offices in four countries -- in some ways you must have been as absorbed in this battle as the players themselves.

I was. For me it was a microcosm of the environmental battles that are playing out around the entire planet. We were talking about a six-megawatt dam -- that's a tiny dam, not the Three Gorges. But it was part of the classic search for energy in a world of limits. In this case, the limits were the number of birds that are still alive in this tiny little country in Central America.

It was also a case of globalism coming up against environmentalism -- this energy company based in Canada that was putting in this fairly destructive dam down in Central America didn't really know all that much about Belize or what they were doing down there. The shareholders, who were essentially responsible for the project, just didn't care -- it was too far away.

Were you surprised by the final outcome?

Sadly, no. I mean, you know, if you've been reporting in these areas for any time at all you can't be surprised. At one point, Sharon says, "The odds are against us," and one of the environmental lawyers looks at her and says, "Sharon, the odds are always against us." Sometimes we get to hear about the victories that people like Sharon post -- they stop a destructive project now and then -- but most of the time these projects go on. It's money talking.

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, by Bruce Barcott

By the time someone like Sharon spots a destructive project like this and starts to battle to stop it, it's really too late. If you've got an area like the Macal River -- the river that was flooded by the dam -- that really should be protected, you have to protect it now, before oil is found, before it's a site for a dam. Once that money starts rolling in, it just speaks volumes and it's hard to overcome.

The Natural Resources Defense Council played a complicated role here, as an outside environmental group trying to stop the dam. Were there any lessons learned for U.S. groups working on international conservation projects?

Sharon could not have taken this battle as far as she did without the NRDC, but at the same time their role was very complicated. The people who came in from NRDC, Jacob Scherr and Ari Hershowitz, are very smart; they run international campaigns all over the world, and they know they can't just come in by themselves and start a fight. They try to come in and support local people. The problem in Belize is that it's such a small country -- at the time there were only 275,000 people -- that you have only a few people fighting these battles, and when you get an organization as large as the NRDC coming in, their footprint tends to be much bigger than they want it to be.

So the government and the energy company were able to use the NRDC name and image against itself. They framed the battle as outsider environmentalists coming in and telling Belize what they could and couldn't do -- which is ironic, because a similar thing could have been said about the energy company, that it was a foreign corporation coming in and essentially buying a Belizean river. That was a difficult thing for Sharon and the NRDC to overcome.

Jacob talks about the lessons that he and the NRDC learned from the Chalillo battle, and one of the main ones is that they really have had to ramp up their alternatives program. They're fighting similar battles in Chile -- there are a couple of huge hydro projects going in in Patagonia -- and in Costa Rica, and one of the things they're doing now is really working to not just be critics of these energy projects, but partners with the governments and energy companies in developing alternatives for energy conservation and production, so that they don't say, "Well, you can't do this." They're trying to say, "Hey look, this alternative is much cheaper and more efficient, and it doesn't damage the environment."

This battle took a huge personal toll on some of the players.

It took a heavy emotional and physical toll on Sharon and on the zoo. She's a person who's very attached to wildlife -- she runs a zoo, its animals are her life, and she was very attached to those scarlet macaws. It was personally painful for her to have come face to face every day with the fact that those birds and their nests were likely to be drowned.

Fighting this battle also cost her a lot of friendships. In a country that small, there are basically 1,000 people who run things -- they're all related, and everyone knows each other. For most, politics are just politics -- at the end of the day, you all go out and have a drink. But for Sharon it was really personal, and that cost her friendships -- she's still working on building those relationships back up.

Why do you think she was willing to pay such a price?

Over her lifetime, especially over the 20 years that she'd lived in Belize, she'd seen animals slowly go away. In Belize, there used to be reports of scarlet macaw overflights and feeding flocks in many different parts of the country, but slowly those reports stopped being heard. A patch of forest here or there would be cut down, and a feeding site would be lost. She'd seen this happen with jaguars, with tapirs, with other animals around Central America. With the macaws, I think it was finally time for her to put her foot down and say, "Enough." If you don't stand up and say something at that point, when for her the issue was so clear, then you're not going to do it for any animal, any piece of habitat. So it was a culmination of a lifetime of watching these animals slowly disappear.

This is, at least on the surface, a sad story. Did you find reasons for hope?

The reason for hope in the book is Sharon herself. Species are dying out because we're losing habitat acre by acre -- not slowly but quickly -- but there are also people like Sharon who are fighting every day to save habitat, and they're doing it. Before she came along, Belizeans really didn't know what the wildlife of Belize was like -- they had all sorts of myths about how a tapir or a jaguar would make your dog go crazy or your children go blind. Over the course of 20 years, she essentially turned the scary wildlife of Belize -- that people would either run from or shoot to kill -- into the national treasure of Belize. She runs every schoolchild through the zoo every year, and she's got an entire generation of Belizeans who grew up loving wildlife. That's the result of one woman doing this work every day.

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Discovery of oil in Belize leads to craziness all around

A few years ago, a Mennonite farmer in Belize dug a well looking for water and found something else entirely: Black gold. Texas tea. Oil, that is, in a country where it had never before been discovered. This brought on a private firm, which hit the jackpot: three wells of petroleum so sweet and light that tractors could run on the unprocessed crude. The government's share from production of 60,000 barrels a day could cover the debt-strapped country's national budget. How much oil is in them thar hills? Nobody knows yet, but greens are disconcerted by the economy's turn from eco-tourism to petro-biz. They fear spills and land degradation. Meanwhile, the 1,700-strong Mennonite community, which owns the oil-rich land, fears its way of life may be disrupted -- you think? -- and has hired as an adviser an American who once served time in the slammer for bankruptcy fraud. Let the downward spiral begin.

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Joy Grant was born in a house with no indoor plumbing in the tiny Central American country of Belize. That was 52 years ago. Last year, she accepted one of the top positions at the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy. For both parties, the marriage is a calculated gamble.

Joy, oh, Joy.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

I spent a morning with Grant recently in Belize City. Her voice has a throaty roughness to it, softened by the Belizean Creole lilt. She founded Programme for Belize, a private nonprofit conservation organization that during her 12-year tenure acquired 300,000 acres of forest land -- 4 percent of the country.

Impressive as that was, the organization operated in a country the size of Massachusetts with an annual budget of just $2.5 million. The Nature Conservancy, by contrast, is a $250 million-a-year organization, and Grant was brought on as program director for one-third of its global operations: the U.S. mid-Atlantic and southern states, the Carribean, and Central America. "I had to think about that," she said, "moving onto the world stage."

To show me her roots, Grant drove me around Belize City. She steered with unflappable precision through its crammed streets: cars parked along either side, narrow or nonexistent sidewalks, bicycles, pushcarts, pedestrians, vendors selling bananas on the sidewalk. We passed the unpaved alley where the house in which she was born once stood (it burned down a few years ago) and the drugstore around the corner where her father worked 60 to 70 hours per week as a pharmacist.

As a child, Grant conducted much of the family's banking and shopping, because she always negotiated the best deals. We passed her old high school, where in her senior year she was selected as "head girl" based on her grades and leadership. Her parents had the highest expectations for their three daughters, within the constraints of the world as they knew it: "Since we had only girls, my father would say, 'I want you to be the best secretary Belize has ever seen,'" Grant told me.

After high school, Grant worked for a year for Barclay's Bank, then went to Alberta, Canada -- "a cold shock" -- where she earned a bachelors degree in commerce and a masters in business administration. From there, she went to Barbados for eight years, where she worked for the Caribbean Development Bank. She approved loans for development projects in 13 Caribbean countries, but back then, she says, no one ever considered the environmental impact of a project. "For an Antigua fisheries project, we considered how many people can you employ, will they be able to pay the loan back. Whether the amount of fish you were taking was sustainable never entered into the equation."

Grant next went to work for the Belize Embassy in Washington, D.C., where one day some people from the Massachusetts Audubon Society made a presentation to the prime minister of Belize about a proposal to buy 110,000 acres of land in Belize and turn it over to a local entity for conservation. It was Grant who kept asking questions, and the next day, she recalls, Massachusetts Audubon called her and said, "'You caught onto this concept. We have money for a salary for three months. Would you like to start an organization to protect this land in perpetuity?'"

Sustainable logging on land
owned by Programme for Belize.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

At the time, Grant knew nothing about environmental issues. She was intrigued, however, by the idea of creating something from scratch, something that would last, as she put it, "beyond me." She returned to Belize in 1989, assembled a board for her new organization, and got herself out into the "bush," where she learned about birds, snakes, and red-eyed tree frogs. With help from a number of U.S. scientists and funders, including the Nature Conservancy, she aggressively acquired additional land and embarked on projects that she hoped would use a portion of the land to produce local income and jobs in an environmentally friendly manner.

Back then, the idea of sustainable development was not yet well-known, let alone well accepted, Grant says. One of her projects involved logging mahogany by cutting a limited number of trees and removing them carefully from the forest to limit damage to the surrounding ecosystem. She won two different sustainability certifications for the operation, but in the end, could barely sell the logs at all, and certainly not for any premium. She also pursued ecotourism, building cabanas and dormitories that now house visitors and school groups.

At the Nature Conservancy, Grant is the only member of the seven-person top management team who was born outside the U.S. She sees part of her role as getting her fellow managers out "in the mud." She took the organization's information systems manager into the jungle in Guatemala, by helicopter, foot, boat, and car, then by boat to Belize. Now, she says, he understands why people in the field can't be online monitoring their email all day. She took the human resources manager to Costa Rica, where they released turtle hatchlings and went into the forest to learn about the local trees. "It's crucial," she said, "if we are to be a global organization that the leadership understand what global means."

The ecotourism project run by
Programme for Belize has created
jobs for locals.

Photo: Deborah Knight.

"Certain things I would take for granted that everybody knows, they don't know," she said. For example, in the U.S., the Nature Conservancy has long followed the model of owning land to protect it -- but in developing countries, this model often doesn't work. "I know that if you try to set large tracts of land aside in the developing world, you have to get buy-in of the local people. You cannot police it," Grant said. Rather than recreate its original model everywhere, Grant says, the Nature Conservancy must work with local partners to develop conservation methods that involve the community. "People," she said, "are the key to everything we do."

Dan Campbell, the director of the Nature Conservancy's program in Belize, worked with Grant for years when she ran Programme for Belize. He sees her entry into the Nature Conservancy's top management as a reflection of a larger change in the organization, from simply buying land and setting it aside to a more varied approach that encourages greater involvement of local community members such as fishers, ranchers, and indigenous people. This change, he says, is occurring in the U.S. as well, although it has been driven by the organization's international work. In this sense, he says, the tail is wagging the dog, because just 20 percent of the Nature Conservancy's work is international. "We have an organization that sometimes tries to reduce things to models that don't fit the culture of the nations where we work," Campbell says. "Joy can hold up a mirror and say, 'This doesn't work.'"

Grant is leading the charge on a new project: development of a greater Caribbean basin marine program that would stretch from Cuba to Venezuela. The program will require the cooperation of at least 20 countries; in many of those, the Nature Conservancy doesn't yet have a presence. "I am taking a huge risk," Grant told me. When I asked her if she'd consulted with groups in all these countries first, she seemed surprised. No, she had simply seen the need and launched herself into the project. Now, though, she is spending a lot of time involving local people in planning the program. That, Dan Campbell told me, is vintage Joy Grant: someone willing to launch into something new, but rooted in cautious, methodical implementation.

On the wall in Grant's part-time office in Belize hangs a line drawing of a tropical tree draped with vines. Young sprouts erupt from its trunk, but a thick buttress holds it solidly in place. "I think I know that tree," Grant told me. "It's a mahogany." I couldn't help but see a resemblance.

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