Charles Munn.

What work do you do?

I am chair of the board of Tropical Nature, a nonprofit conservation group specializing in conservation through ecotourism.

What does your organization do?

We run the world's largest network of eco-lodges in tropical rainforest -- in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil. We also consult for rainforest and tropical ecotourism companies and for government tourism ministries in a number of countries of Central America and the Caribbean, as well as in China and Gabon. We use ecotourism as an effective conservation tool to add value to tropical rainforests and thus make them worth more standing than cut.

We think that most so-called ecotourism has little to do with anything truly eco, and that most tourism in tropical rainforests is a boring, hot, sometimes buggy disappointment. But it does not have to be that way -- and that is why we created Tropical Nature. We specialize in offering the finest wildlife viewing in rainforests.

How do you get to work?

Half the time, I work out of a small office in my home in a forest near Baltimore, Md. The other half of the time, I am visiting one of our project sites, or possible new project sites, in the tropics.

What long and winding road led you to your current position?

Macaw shucks.

Photo: iStockphoto.

In the '80s I completed a master's in zoology at Oxford, and a Ph.D. in biology at Princeton. From there, I went immediately into field research on macaws in the rainforests of Peru, as a field biologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

From 1980 through today, I have tested and refined a series of techniques for making tropical forests come alive, through the electronic and print media, and through new models of ecotourism. Our ecotourism tests then became a conservation method, and we have expanded this successful method to create the network of tour lodges that we run today. By 2000, it was clear that applying our research findings about rare, attractive wildlife to create local jobs in ecotourism was a better conservation method than pure research alone. Research did not create enough jobs or alternatives for the local people, who often hunted rare wildlife and cut forest in national parks out of desperation rather than any malice. Tropical Nature was a direct response to our desire to create lots of high-quality, sustainable jobs in conservation-oriented nature tourism in tropical forests.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?

Baltimore. After decades of living in Peru and Brazil, I am back to my roots, based in Baltimore again.

What has been the worst moment in your professional life to date?

When a corrupt government minister in Peru tried to imprison me and destroy our conservation system to stop our team from organizing local forest peoples in the Peruvian Amazon to protect their forestlands from the minister's land grab.

What's been the best?

When that minister went to prison, in 2001 -- he remains in prison to this day.

Also, when the Connecticut-sized Tambopata-Candamo Reserved Zone in Peru and the adjoining New Jersey-sized Madidi National Park in Bolivia were declared (in 1990 and 1995, respectively). We spearheaded the effort to create both parks, which seemed outrageously ambitious at the time we proposed them. But they happened! These twin parks are the most biologically diverse protected areas on Earth -- full stop.

Who is your environmental hero?

Our Peruvian conservation executive, biologist Daniel Blanco, who ran our entire Peruvian system during the attacks on our conservation system by the corrupt minister. Daniel received frequent, telephoned death threats from the minister's goons. He stuck it out there and saved our system (through clever legal maneuvers) while I had to duck the direct attacks by leaving Peru for a year to keep from being imprisoned on trumped-up charges.

What's your environmental vice?

My work requires me to fly a lot on jets, thus generating a significant carbon footprint. But I hope our creation of 12 million acres of tropical forest parks in Peru and Bolivia and the protection of a few million more acres of parks through our ecotourism work offsets my jetting around. We hope that the parks we have established become ever more powerful nature fortresses that protect themselves through well-designed ecotourism, thus ensuring that this carbon stays locked up forever.

How do you spend your free time?

I go to see more national parks -- especially in Brazil, where they have such an amazing, and relatively poorly publicized system of parks.

Read any good books lately?

I am enjoying Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat.

What's your favorite meal?

Ceviche -- Peruvian-style raw fish marinated in lime juice with spices and hot peppers.

Which stereotype about environmentalists most fits you?

The ancient, rusting, sticker-covered Volvo wagon -- 23 years old. A rolling billboard promoting nature conservation.

What's your favorite place or ecosystem?

The luxuriant, forest-savannah mosaic known as the Pantanal, in central western Brazil. It is simply the biggest wildlife spectacle of Latin America. Harbors the world's largest jaguars, world's largest parrots (hyacinth macaw), world's largest snakes (anaconda), world's largest otter, and many other species of wildlife, often in incredibly high densities. What amazing clouds and sunsets there. No malaria or other nasty diseases. Closest thing to an East African photo safari in the New World.

If you could institute by fiat one environmental reform, what would it be?

That eating vegan be promoted and become the accepted norm. Eating lower on the food chain would allow us to save an enormous amount of nature around the globe.

Who was your favorite musical artist when you were 18? How about now?

Then: Dvorak. Now: Dvorak, Kjarkas.

What's your favorite TV show?

Green Acres.

Movie?

Motorcycle Diaries.

Which actor would play you in the story of your life?

Hugh Grant.

If you could have every InterActivist reader do one thing, what would it be?

Visit our websites -- Tropical Nature and Tropical Nature Travel -- and visit one of our South American lodges sometime.

Charles Munn, Tropical Nature.

Tropic of Answer

Ecotourism is promoted as a sustainable alternative to industrial development; however, ecotourism does not generate the same immediate financial returns as industrial development. How can activists formulate their argument when aiming to save pristine areas from mining through promoting ecotourism?    -- Jacqueline Obando, Pretoria, South Africa

Well, yes, a gold mine, diamond mine, or oil well is going to be hard to compete with in terms of gross revenues. But most places in the world don't have large gold deposits or oil fields, so it normally is not a problem we have to face. In general, we avoid areas where there is large potential for industrial development or mining, as we know we cannot compete there in terms of job creation and political power. If some amazing, unique biological feature lies in an area of major gold mining or oil production, we would still consider ecotourism-investment there. In such a situation, however, we would go into it knowing that at best we might be able to create just enough jobs and economic activity to prevent the mining or oil production from destroying the biological wonders.

How do you facilitate so that all in a community benefit from an ecotourism venture? Often men, the most vocal, and those taking leadership roles in a community benefit the most.    -- Jacqueline Obando, Pretoria, South Africa

We ensure that each family in the community is an equal shareholder in the lodge and that all qualified community members who complete job training then participate equally in work rotations at their own lodge. Some of the community members show more ability than others at harder, higher-paying jobs in their lodge, such as chef or forest guide, and they do receive a higher salary for this harder, more skilled work. But, in general, between the even shares owned by each family member and the meritocracy and universal right to work, the benefits are quite widely distributed.

I have grave moral reservations about traveling to "Third World" countries; that sort of tourism seems to encourage, if not racism explicitly, at least a certain sense that some races or nations do well to be servants of other races or nations. How do you defend ecotourism against such charges?    -- Mark Stephen Caponigro, New York, N.Y.

If you were to ask local Amerindians such as the Quichua of Napo Wildlife Center about their views of showing foreigners around their rainforest lands, they would tell you that they are proud to show off their homelands and make a living doing it. And they would also say that the alternatives (cutting the forest to sell the trees or to grow subsistence crops, or working wage labor for the polluting oil companies) are far less appealing and offer them much less chance to protect their culture. While we agree that the risk does exist of having racism creep into ecotourism, we are sure that it is a much more manageable risk than those faced by indigenous people who feel forced into either cutting the forest or working for callous oil companies.

Do you ever see a "budget" ecolodge in the future -- a place where the average family of four can afford to make a trip every year?    -- Jon Current, Hillsboro, Ore.

A family of four would find the airfare to be one of the most expensive items -- if you could go to Peru in its low-travel months (November, February, March, and April), or to Costa Rica in its low-travel months (September, October, and November), you could probably get much better prices on airfare and have enough money left over to visit a good ecolodge. Within the Tropical Nature system, for instance, Sandoval Lake Lodge, in Peru, would be affordable for you if you could find a good deal on off-peak air travel. And we offer discounts and deals for families, which also helps make our lodges affordable.

How can a newcomer get involved in ecotourism?    -- James Jedibudiah, Madison, Wis.

Read all about it, and if possible, volunteer at some sites where you feel comfortable learning the language. If you lack the financial ability to volunteer, try studying for and applying to guiding or ranger positions in the U.S. to build up some savings so you can then consider making the leap to other countries. If you want to be guiding in the field, you can study the fauna and flora of distant lands before you ever even reach them. In your case, not only could you benefit from studying guide books and nature handbooks in good science libraries (like the University of Wisconsin-Madison), but you also could benefit from studying the immense (off-display) biological collections and scientific libraries at leading natural-history museums (notably the Field Museum in Chicago, which is not too far from you).

I'm working in a town with no love for a well-educated environmentalist, and I'm looking for job opportunities elsewhere. Can I be of assistance?    -- Claude Chandler, Chesterton, Ind.

Perhaps, but the first question always is: Do you speak Spanish or Portuguese, and if not, what are your skills and job experience?

What is your opinion of certification systems for ecotourism? Are your lodges certified by any of the existing standards like Green Globe 21?    -- Michelle Knab, Santa Barbara, Calif.

I think that the certification idea is a good one, but I am not familiar enough with the different options. We will look into Green Globe 21 and see how it works. Some of the certification efforts we have examined in the past did not appear to verify at the ground level which lodges were truly green versus brown covered with green marketing facade.

Can eco-travel be accessible to the mildly disabled? I think of people like myself -- arthritic, ambulatory, but often slow and a bit clumsy. I'm a walker but have no interest in carrying all my own food and camping equipment in a backpack.    -- Rebecca Phillips, Marietta, Ohio

At Sandoval Lake Lodge in Peru and at Santa Tereza Lodge in the Pantanal of Brazil, we have made it easy for people with physical limitations to enjoy nature to the fullest. Neither requires much more than a five-minute walk (or even a 30-second walk or wheelchair ride in the case of Santa Tereza), and the outings at both lodges are by boat or car, so almost no self-propelled locomotion is required.

I operate a large nonprofit recycling organization in Colorado. When I travel, I see the world flooded with trash, especially plastics, even at "eco" locations. Is anyone working to help the ecotourism industry gets its act together so that there will never be another "ecolodge" without recycling?    -- Eric Lombardi, Boulder, Colo.

The question of recycling at ecolodges is an interesting and knotty one. Help us analyze this, please. Environmental Defense told us years ago that if we were going to have to consume significant amounts of fossil fuels to transport plastics or glass from our remote lodges to urban recycling sites or dumps, that it might be more justified to simply bury these items properly on site so as to prevent adding insult to injury. We do separate and recycle when feasible, but I don't think that makes sense all the time for lodges that are too distant from the closest recycling location.

I noticed you said your favorite meal is ceviche. If you were able to institute an environmental reform where everyone was to become a vegan, would you include yourself and be able to give up ceviche?    -- Gill Brociner, New York, N.Y.

I agree that ceviche is a problem, and I realize that it contradicts my call to eat vegan. But, yes, if good vegan fare were easily available, I could give up ceviche.

What suggestions do you have for promoting a vegan or vegetarian diet?    -- Marylou Noble, Portland, Ore.

The main problem for me has always been lack of interesting spicing and preparation options. A chef from Lima who worked for our system amazed me with very tasty dishes made from texturized soy protein -- dishes that were quite delicious and interesting. It would seem to me that with proper spicing and preparation, vegan fare can rise to the level of the best carnivorous fare.

What are your thoughts on keeping macaws as pets?    -- Mark Stephen Caponigro, New York, N.Y.

I would not do it, but I know many people who do. I used to think keeping macaws was uniformly, universally bad. But now that I have seen how well many people treat their pet macaws, I have come to accept the practice on a case-by-case basis. The key is quality of life -- many, but not all, people take excellent care of their macaws. Nevertheless, I do not recommend that people get macaws as pets (too loud, too neurotic, too complicated). I will never own one myself.

If you are worried about your carbon lifestyle of jetting to South America and back, why not offset your carbon-producing flights with companies like Carbonfund.org, the Solar Electric Light Fund, NativeEnergy, TerraPass, or Sustainable Travel International?    -- Kim Fortin, Minneapolis, Minn.

Thanks for these useful suggestions, which I had not heard of before.

My husband and I recently returned from a trip to Peru and Ecuador. I was shocked to see the massive prevalence of Australian eucalyptus. What is your opinion of the situation in Peru?    -- Katherine Austin, Sebastopol, Calif.

Although not an expert on the issue of carbon sinks and eucalyptus, I feel that it is quite unfortunate that the amazingly diverse high-elevation forests of Peru and Ecuador have given way to this biologically sterile Australian monoculture. Our projects in the cloud forests of Manu (Cock-of-the-Rock Lodge) are protecting original cloud forest from conversion to eucalyptus.

I will be visiting Peru for two weeks this July. Hotel plans are already arranged, but I'd love to visit some of the lodges featured on your website. Are there any day trips available? Can you suggest any other great trips and sights to see in Peru?    -- Morgan Poncelet, Fremont, Calif.

You may have arranged hotels through our conservation system already and not even know it! Our conservation system has web portals and web pages that offer hotels in Peru. Anyway, yes, there are a number of good options for day trips, but please email us and we can talk to you about options, some just outside of Lima and others outside of Cusco.

I work in southwestern China's Yunnan province. One challenge faced by ecotourism in this area is effectively accommodating local culture and preferences; for example, many of the "best" destinations are sacred to local people. Has Tropical Nature faced issues of local cultural demands or protection of sacred lands in South America?    -- E. Pay, Kunming, China

We would not take tourists to any location that could not be visited while respecting the beliefs and customs of local cultures. So far this has not been an issue, but if the issue were to arise, we would try to design trips or outings in conjunction with leaders from the local cultures such that their culture is respected.

How do you really, truly, keep whole the soul of a place and a people who are connecting with tourists daily? No matter best intentions, people get burned out answering questions about their heritage or lifestyle, or they become envious of the outsiders' stuff -- their binoculars, their Ray-Bans, whatever. How has Tropical Nature dealt with the negative aspects of exploitation, even though that exploitation is welcomed by the people and needed for conservation efforts? This haunts me, as a sustainable-tourism expert.    -- Anne Markward, Durango, Colo.

An excellent question that also haunts us. It is hard to strike the balance, but we feel that indigenous people who have significant, reliable income from protecting and showcasing tropical biodiversity are in a much better position to design systems to prevent burnout and loss of their culture than are those who are desperately scratching out an existence by deforesting poor tropical soils and frantically hunting all the game animals to sell the meat illegally to restaurants and meat markets in tropical towns.

Over 20 years of working with traditional peoples in the Peruvian Amazon, we have found that the increased pride in being forest peoples and knowing a lot about the biodiversity and making good money from protecting that biodiversity leads Indians to push back against the loss of their language and culture. Rotation of workers and continual training in total quality and in new aspects of biodiversity service industries can keep people excited about their work rather than burned out. The great thing about the tropical rainforest is that it is so diverse that there always are new biodiversity frontiers to be explored, protected, and showcased.

We are heartened by the fact that some of the jungle executives in our system are traditional Amerindians who now have the wherewithal to promote their own culture much more than they did when they were poorly paid laborers for illegal mahogany loggers. They know we respect and value their culture and traditional knowledge, and rather than burn out, they are learning more Western techniques while teaching us more of their traditional jungle secrets. Typically, their jungle knowledge is more interesting and more useful commercially for ecotourism development than are our Western techniques, which already are both well-known and much easier to duplicate.

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The mass disappearance of colorful harlequin frog species in Central and South America has long puzzled biologists, but research published in the latest issue of Nature fingers a culprit: global warming. (When in doubt ...) The deadly chytrid fungus that's killing off the tiny amphibians is flourishing in places where it's gotten warmer at night and cooler during the day -- conditions the study's authors say have most likely been created by increased cloud formation due to large-scale, human-caused global warming. The fungus is implicated in amphibian die-offs around the world. "Disease is the bullet killing frogs," says lead researcher J. Alan Pounds, "but climate change is pulling the trigger."

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In his drab office in the fashion-obsessed chaos of downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, Edmundo Defferrari cuts a farmhand's figure in a corporate man's world.

Soy is growing up down south.

Photo: USDA/Keith Weller.

The 28-year-old industrial engineer, in cap, jeans, and scruffy beard, taps through a PowerPoint presentation choked with graphs, statistics, and cartoon renderings of how his prototype biodiesel plant can help farmers become self-sufficient. Then he opens a dark brown bottle filled with soybean diesel. "When it burns," he says, "it smells like there's a McDonald's in the field."

Backed by Don Mario, an Argentine seed company, Defferrari has developed what he hopes is a bit of methadone for global oil addiction: a localized way for soybean farmers to turn part of their harvest into homespun fuel. And this entrepreneur is far from alone. Kick-started by high oil prices and talk of peak oil, South America is making an incipient push to reshape the future of fuel.

It's not an easy task. "International financial institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to the Inter-American Development Bank, have loaned with a favorable bias upon extractive industries, and little effort on renewables," says Mark Langevin, a politics professor at Chapman University in Santa Maria, Calif., whose work focuses on Brazil. Observers also say that politics and economies of scale currently mean more noise than payoffs for the South American biofuel industry.

But that's not stopping engineers in the continent's agricultural powerhouses, particularly Brazil and Argentina, from exploring how to make and export cleaner fuels. And as the U.S. prepares to take its own biofuel production to another level, some are wondering if the global market will end up smelling more like salsa or apple pie.

Defferrari hopes his $152,000 prototype plant in Chacabuco, about 145 miles west of Buenos Aires, will herald a trend that will become as common as cow dung. The plant can churn out about 360 gallons of biodiesel and 10 tons of animal feed from 12 tons of soybeans per day. Not only does it produce fuel that's about half diesel's market price, it's automated, requiring humans only to load the contraption and turn it on and off.

"This is about farmer protection, about making them self-sufficient," Defferrari says. "This is the kind of plant that three or four farmers could invest in together." He's got interest -- and not just from farmers. His work has landed him in local magazines, in wire stories, and on CNN. And though he won't give details, the budding entrepreneur says he is planning a trip to Chicago for meetings with a big energy firm.

In Argentina, which reaps high volumes of soybean and sunflower seeds, biodiesel is often pitched by industry watchers as the alternative fuel with the most national potential. But production in the country is currently at an "artisan level, of little volume," says Claudio Molina, head of the Argentine Association of Biofuels. According to AgroDiario, an Argentina-based agriculture magazine, an estimated 20 plants are operating in the country, but they are not legally registered.

Some hope tighter regulation and legal subsidies will help cultivate the fledgling industry here. Argentine lawmakers are mulling a bill that would mandate a 5 percent mix of biodiesel with regular diesel, creating an annual demand of 660,000 tons by 2009. But the bill is stuck -- unlike in Brazil, whose young biodiesel industry is helped by a mandated 2 percent mix by 2008, and 5 percent by 2013. Brazil opened its first commercial biodiesel refinery in March.

And South America's biggest country is a leader in another important fuel. Last year, the global production of ethanol displaced about 3 percent of the 317 billion gallons of gasoline consumed on the planet, according to a report from the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century. Nearly 40 percent of that global supply came from Brazil, the largest ethanol market and maker in the world.

It's easy to imagine Eduardo Pereira de Carvalho as a loud-talking channeler of Henry Ford, whose 1920s enthusiasm for crop-based ethanol was eventually drowned by cheap oil. As head of the Sao Paulo Sugarcane Agroindustry Union, Carvalho speaks with a revolutionary's flare, ticking off reasons why his country is the Saudi Arabia of ethanol.

Brazil produced 4 billion gallons of ethanol in 2004, some 37 percent of the world total, while the U.S. churned out 3.4 billion gallons, 31 percent of the world's share. The country also exported 634 million gallons -- 112 million of that to the U.S. -- and its government is pushing to clear more land for production. Its vast size and tropical climate are perfect for the production of sugar cane, which is said to have better energy conversion rates than corn, the primary source for ethanol in the U.S. What's more, Brazilian producers burn cellulosic stalk of sugar cane to make energy that fuels the entire industrial process. "That is why our production costs are half that of corn," Carvalho says.

While Brazil builds its ethanol empire -- eyeing customers from Venezuela to China -- other South American nations are also getting on board. Most are embracing mandatory fuel mixes for cost, security, and environmental reasons, but some hope to become bio-fountains spilling into a global fuel revolution.

In September, Venezuela -- which now mandates ethanol blending in some parts of the country and may require a 10 percent mix nationwide in the future -- said it will spend $900 million over five years to bring 15 new plants online. Colombia passed a law requiring a 10 percent ethanol mix in cities with populations over 500,000, but geography restricts its sugar cane production, meaning it will likely have no exportable surplus. Peru is pushing ethanol, with California as a potential market, while Argentina is putting its ethanol empanada in the mix too. It has become the world's 17th-biggest ethanol maker, producing 42 million gallons last year, according to F.O. Licht (though its output goes mainly to agrochemicals, drinks, and cosmetics). And tiny Paraguay and Uruguay are also seeking to get involved.

That said, nobody holds a caipirinha to Brazil, whose confluence of geography, economics, and politics has spawned an industry that, unlike the U.S.-based ethanol sector, is now capable of standing without the crutch of tax subsidies. And its fortunes rose three years ago when Brazilian automakers began churning out "flex-fuel cars" that run on a combination of power sources, including ethanol. Carvalho says the country's car industry is heading to 100 percent flex fuel, and predicts that "within a year or so there will be no more new gas cars made in Brazil." In early November, automakers rolled out a flex-fuel car that will be sold in the U.S. next year. While all that makes some U.S. ethanol makers nervous, Carvalho and others say there's room for collaboration. In April, Brazil's minister of development, industry, and foreign trade, Luiz Fernando Furlan, traveled to California on an ethanol cheerleading tour. While there, he suggested that U.S. and Brazilian companies could jointly market their products to China, widely considered to be the globe's emerging mega-consumer of energy.

Such a partnership would be a new spin on an old story. Thanks to geography, Uncle Sam has historically been a fossil-fuel friend of its Latin American neighbors, buying black gold from oil-flush nations like Ecuador and Venezuela, which provides some 10 percent of all U.S. oil imports. For many, those historic relations and proximity make bio-imports a no-brainer. But will the U.S. ethanol industry, which some see as a subsidy-heavy pet project of farm-belt politicians, fight that flow? Early signs point to yes.

For instance, U.S. ethanol makers now have their corn boiling over plans by U.S.-based Cargill to build a refinery in El Salvador. The ag giant will take advantage of a trade-law loophole in the Caribbean Basin Initiative: by processing Brazilian ethanol in a CBI signatory country, Cargill can export the fuel duty-free into the U.S. The Central American Free Trade Agreement could have closed the loophole, but didn't.

Cane you dig it?

Photo: iStockphoto.

In reports and position papers, the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a think tank, claimed CAFTA could let millions of gallons of Brazilian ethanol into the U.S. without tariffs. "CAFTA stands to destroy thousands of jobs created by the U.S. ethanol industry and make the U.S. dependent yet again on foreign fuel supplies," says Ben Lilliston of IATP.

And what about the U.S. biodiesel industry, a neophyte with production rates of only 30 million gallons last year? South America will not likely find new amigos there, especially after a boat full of South American biodiesel docked in Florida last month, qualifying for a U.S. biodiesel tax break. The American Soybean Association immediately called on Congress to eliminate a loophole in the 2004 law in question.

Some things are going well for the U.S. biofuel market, like the odd assortment of environmentalists, evangelical Christians, and conservatives running around Washington pitching it as a key to America's fuel security. Lawmakers are drumming up ways to protect ethanol makers from a deluge of imports, and the energy bill President Bush signed this summer requires the country to use an annual 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol and biodiesel by 2012.

But America's homespun biocombustibles industry, especially ethanol, is still in a knot over South American competition. Um, samba lessons anyone?

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The latest issue of the journal Nature has three new studies on the likely impacts of climate disruption. Turns out it's gonna be a cakewalk! Ah, sadly, we kid. Millions who depend on mountain snow and glaciers for their water supplies -- especially in Asia and South America -- are expected to face shortages as rising temperatures turn snowfall into rain and melt snowpack and glaciers faster than normal, according to one study. Another study forecasts dramatic changes in worldwide streamflow patterns, with many regions unprepared to handle the abnormally timed droughts or surpluses. And a third finds that warming trends have likely led to 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses every year for the past 30 years, and that climate change is likely to increase infectious disease outbreaks, respiratory illnesses, flooding, and other calamities -- with poorer countries the hardest hit. "Those least able to cope and least responsible for the greenhouse gases that cause global warming are most affected," said University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Jonathan Patz. "Herein lies an enormous global ethical challenge." And you know how well we handle those ...

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Burgeoning soybean market transforming South American environment

The global market for soybeans is exploding, largely driven by massive demand from China, and the resulting modern-day agricultural gold rush is transforming the landscape in South America. Farmers are chopping down rainforests, colonizing savannahs, damming rivers, and digging canals, all in an effort to get more land to raise the crop, which has lifted many of them out of poverty in an astonishingly short period of time. Argentinean acreage devoted to soybeans went from about 17 million in 1997 to more than 34 million today, Brazil from 32 million to 57 million. The boom in farming is driving down prices, meaning that American soybean farmers are relying more and more on federal subsidies ($1.6 billion this year) and may soon be driven from the market entirely. South American governments welcome the economic boost and largely look the other way as forests are cleared illegally.

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Native Peoples Speak Up for Their Lands

Indigenous peoples are rallying for their lands and their rights this week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where a major U.N. convention on biodiversity is taking place. Representatives of native peoples are demanding the right to reject development projects on their ancestral lands, saying that multinational companies should not be able to plunder these areas for profit. Indigenous groups are also speaking out against governments that force natives off their homelands in order to create national parks and nature preserves, and criticizing pharmaceutical companies that try to patent generations-old medicinal and agricultural practices. An estimated half million indigenous people have been displaced in Africa, and plenty more in Asia, South America, and Europe, say activists. "We are linked to our land," said Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of the Mbuti pygmies of Congo. "We must not be ordered to leave for money or material compensation."

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Farmed Salmon Contaminated With PCBs, Other Nasties

Consumers, still struggling with the news that bovine spongiform encephalopathy-laden beef will make your brain melt and mercury-laden tuna will make your children stupid, were met today with more bad news: A new study in the journal Science claims that fish-farmed salmon contain enough contaminants (primarily PCBs and pesticides) to pose a serious health risk, more or less nullifying the health benefits of fish that other group of scientists told you about in that other study. Salmon lovers can take some consolation -- researchers say that wild salmon contain just a 10th of the cancer-causing contamination found in farmed varieties, and that South American farm-raised salmon are safer than the European variety. Grist's prescription: Forage for roots and berries in uninhabited wilderness areas and catch your fish from streams high in the mountains. Bon appetit!

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Development, Tradition on Opposite Sides in South American Energy Battles

Given its vast reserves of oil and natural gas, the Amazon basin should be heaven for extractive industries. Instead, the people who make their home in the basin are trying to make life hell for energy companies. Over the years, Amazon natives have become both more sophisticated and more forceful in efforts to protect their pristine homeland -- efforts that include everything from protests and lawsuits to vandalism and kidnappings. At issue is the struggle to balance national growth with traditional culture, and the stakes could scarcely be higher: millennia-old ways of life on the one hand, and South America's future role in the international economy on the other. A short list of proposed projects in the region includes 800 miles of pipeline in Peru, a $1 billion project to pipe gas through the rainforest in Brazil, and an all-out effort by Ecuador to tap as many of its 4.6 billion barrels of oil as possible.

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Four elderly Pehuenche Indian women have thrown a big wrench into plans for a $570 million hydroelectric dam in southern Chile. Arguing that the hydro project would flood sacred land and destroy their traditional way of life, the four have refused to sell 103 acres they own along the Bio Bio River, land that would be submerged if the dam were finished. The Chilean government and the Endesa power company insist that the hydro project, which is 90 percent complete, is needed to meet Chile's energy needs and stimulate economic growth, but Indians and environmentalists have battled the project in court, saying it would destroy old-growth forests and habitat for endangered species as well as Pehuenche communities and ceremonial grounds. The four indigenous women and their lawyers vow they'll fight to the bitter end. "I'll only leave here when I'm dead," said 78-year-old Berta Quintreman. They've turned down offers of more than $1 million for their land.

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Women who were exposed to the pesticide DDT while in the womb had more difficulties getting pregnant as adults than did those who had no exposure, according to a new study published in the British medical journal Lancet. "This is the first research that shows it is possible that these exposures can cause problems 30 years down the line," said lead researcher Barbara Cohn, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Berkeley's Public Health Institute. The U.S. banned DDT in 1972, after many years of campaigning by environmentalists and health advocates who said the chemical killed birds and other wildlife and harmed humans. However, some nations in Africa, Asia, and South America still use the pesticide, often to fight malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This new study bolsters some scientists' beliefs that fetuses and children may be especially vulnerable to environmental chemicals.

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This week was for the birds -- in a good way: Two previously endangered species seem to be enjoying a rebound. The population of the once desperately rare Polynesian Megapode has doubled and the bird could soon be removed from the list of critically endangered species maintained by the World Conservation Union. The species is the Pacific's last megapode -- a large-footed bird that uses hot volcanic ash to incubate its eggs. The successful rebound of the Polynesian Megapode is due to a concerted conservation effort begun in 1993. Meanwhile, scientists in Guyana have discovered a previously unknown population of red siskins, which were thought to be approaching extinction in the wild. The species was once common in the coastal mountains of Venezuela and Colombia, but was decimated by trapping in the 1800s. The Guyana population of red siskins numbers in the thousands -- several times the known population of the birds elsewhere in the wild.

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At international talks underway on protecting endangered species, the Bush administration has announced that it is "neutral" and "undecided" in the debate over whether to restrict trade in big-leaf mahogany from Latin America. The U.S. position since the time of George Bush the Elder had been to call for stricter limits on trade in the wood. The chief U.S. negotiator attending current negotiations in Santiago, Chile, at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species said the shift would better allow the country to broker a deal with countries that export mahogany. But Curtis Bohlen, who was assistant secretary of state for environmental affairs in the first Bush administration, said the current decision "would be viewed as backsliding" and would undermine any attempts to limit mahogany trade. The U.S. is the world's number one importer of mahogany.

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Here's another victim of Enron: the Chiquitano Dry Tropical Forest, one of the two most valuable forests in Latin America and one of the 200 most endangered eco-regions in the world, according to the World Bank and the World Wildlife Fund, respectively. The forest was the largest remaining undeveloped land of its kind in South America -- until Enron built a 390-mile natural gas pipeline directly through it. Perhaps even more horrifying, the project was given the go-ahead and $200 million by a U.S. agency, Overseas Private Investment Corp., that is charged with protecting sensitive forest areas. Enron needed OPIC's backing because no commercial bank would finance the project; OPIC needed Enron because of a congressional battle to eliminate the agency. Enron successfully lobbied against the elimination, and OPIC backed the pipeline project even though one of its environmental reviewers is said to have exclaimed that there was "no way in hell" it should be funded.

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Even 16,500 feet in the air, perched on the steep slope of a volcano in Ecuador, French glaciologist Bernard Francou moves gracefully. Hopping among ice blocks and jagged rock debris, he stops suddenly before a boulder with blue letters painted on its surface.

The thinker: Bernard Francou.

Photo: Bernard Pouyaud, Ecuador Instituto
Nacional de Meteorologia e Hidrologia.

"This is where the glacier stopped when I first came here seven years ago," Francou explains, oblivious to the cold and the drizzle. He then points more than a football field's distance uphill, where a wall of blue ice marks the present-day terminus of Ecuador's Antizana glacier.

All over South America, glaciers are meeting the same fate as Antizana: Within the next 15 years, all of the continent's small glaciers -- about 80 percent of the total -- will disappear, according to Francou. He should know: As director of research for the French government's Institute of Research and Development, Francou has been researching tropical glaciers for 15 years, making him one of the foremost experts in the field.

"The trend is so clear that you can't argue with the numbers," Francou claims.

Antizana glacier in 1994 (top) and 2000
(bottom).

Photo: Bernard Francou, Eduador Instituto
Nacional de Meteorologia e Hidrologia.

And sure enough, the numbers are sobering: Between 1996 and 1998, the Antizana glacier shrunk 100 yards and lost 8 percent of its area. Smaller glaciers are melting even faster; the Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia lost nearly half of its area and two-thirds of its volume during the mid-1990s alone.

The disappearance of these glaciers is bad news for South American cities that rely on them year-round for water and hydroelectricity. Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, gets fully half of its water from the Antizana glacier. Concerned about maintaining the supply, the municipality is jointly sponsoring Francou's monitoring of the Antizana glacier with the Institute for Research and Development. "For me, this glacier study is about climate change," explains Francou. "For the government of Ecuador, however, it is about economic impact."

The government has ample reason to be concerned: The other half of Quito's water supply comes from the paramo, a high-altitude ecosystem of thick, matted plants that will most likely disappear when the glaciers do. "We know that the glaciers cause passing moisture from the Amazon to fall as rain," explains Edgar Ayabaca, head of Quito's municipal water utility. "The paramo absorbs this water like a sponge and releases it slowly. What we are studying is whether the paramo will become a desert when the glaciers melt."

To see first-hand what is happening to South America's glaciers, I accompanied Francou and his Ecuadorian counterpart, Bolivar Caceres, on a monitoring trip to Antizana. Our mission was to take measurements both at the bottom of the glacier and at the mountain's 19,000-foot summit.

Antizana.

Photo: Bernard Francou, Eduador Instituto
Nacional de Meteorologia e Hidrologia.

Francou's team visits their glaciers every other week, so it's handy that Anizana is just an hour and a half drive from Quito. The last part of the journey is on a deeply rutted track that winds through acres upon acres of barren paramo, broken only by a herd of goats and the crystalline white cone of Antizana. On the other side of this massive volcano, the land drops down into the Amazon basin; water from the region drains into Brazil and beyond.

Along the way, I asked Francou, who has similar teams working in Bolivia and Peru and is hoping to start a new project in India, why he studies climate change in the tropics, when most of his colleagues focus on either the Arctic or the Antarctic.

"After the poles, the tropics are perhaps the area most heavily affected by climate change," he explains, pointing in the direction of the nearby Pacific Ocean where the cycle of ocean warming known as El Nino is born. "As the frequency and intensity of the El Nino cycles increase, these glaciers respond immediately."

Although Andean glaciers have been retreating since the end of the Little Ice Age (around 1870), the pace of melting skyrocketed with the warm El Nino conditions of the 1990s -- which was also the hottest decade in recorded history. The Antizana glacier shrunk seven to eight times faster than normal during that 10-year span.

When we arrived at the end of the road, we put on climbing boots and began to ascend a series of moraines, huge rock piles that were bulldozed into shape by the glacier in centuries past. After a half-hour walk, we strapped on crampons and climbed onto the glacier, where dozens of plastic tubes jutted out at odd angles from the icy surface.

"A glacier has two parts," explained Francou as he approached the first tube. "On the top half, snow accumulates and pushes the glacier downhill. On the bottom half, the ice melts and causes the glacier to shrink. The line between these two is the equilibrium line."

Measuring ice thickness.

Photo: Bernard Francou, Eduador Instituto
Nacional de Meteorologia e Hidrologia.

By calculating the average of the distance the tubes protrude from the surface of the ice, scientists can determine how much snow has melted from the bottom half of the glacier. The counterpart of this measurement -- which we planned to do the following day -- involves digging snow pits in the upper half of the glacier to determine how much snow had accumulated in the year. The difference between how much snow has melted and how much has accumulated is called the glacier's mass balance.

In the course of checking tubes, we also stopped at two aluminum tripod-like structures laden with instruments and looking very much like NASA space probes. "These stations tell us the glacier's energy budget," explained Ecuadorian scientist Luis Maisincho. "These instruments calculate how much energy enters the glacier via sun and wind and how much leaves via evaporation and sublimation." Data is stored in a miniature hard drive, which Maisincho pulled out and replaced with a fresh unit.

Late that afternoon, we descended the glacier in a rain storm and huddled inside our Land Cruiser, where we drank hot soup before heading to bed. I found sleeping at 15,850 feet to be challenging, so I was not exactly jarred out of a deep slumber when Francou woke me at midnight. By 3 a.m., we had climbed past the tubes we'd measured the day before. We had also passed the equilibrium line -- the point at which melting stops and accumulation begins, where ice turns to snow underfoot.

Base camp.

Photo: Robert Galliare, Eduador Instituto
Nacional de Meteorologia e Hidrologia.

There are definitely challenges to being a glaciologist, and all of them were readily apparent during our pre-dawn trek. We trudged endlessly uphill into the thinning air in pitch black, all the time working against 40 miles-per-hour wind gusts and knee-deep snow. Everyone on the expedition was roped together in case someone fell into the snow-covered crevasses that crisscrossed the slope in front of us.

Around 5 a.m. Francou stopped dead in his tracks on a steep slope and plunged his ski pole into the snow. He gathered the rope between us and shouted against the wind into my ear. "This snow is too unconsolidated and the risk of an avalanche is rising," he said, scanning the blackness above him. "Too many people have died in conditions like this. We must turn around."

So much for the snow pits; Francou placed a few more tubes and vowed to return the next month with Caceres to try again to reach the summit. It was now raining well above the snow line, which seemed a fitting illustration of the kind of atmospheric warming that is causing this glacier to retreat by leaps and bounds.

We were back in camp by 9 a.m., but before returning to Quito we had the final task of checking the two hydrological stations. These stations measure the amount of water melting from the glacier -- the final piece of the puzzle that is the glacier's behavior. Armed with the data from the tube measurements, the snow pits, the energy stations, and the water flow, Francou and Caceres can build a surprisingly accurate model of what the Antizana glacier has been up to in the last month --and what it will likely do in the future.

Sadly, as these models become more accurate, the grim truth they tell becomes more apparent: At the current pace of climate change, tropical glaciers are not long for this world. Talking for a moment to the human rather than the scientist, I ask Francou if he has a personal response to the apocalypse that is unfolding in the high mountains of South America.

The normally tireless man looks down for a moment, seemingly exhausted, and then says, "I have spent most of my life in the high mountains and I am also an alpinist. I regard all of this with much sadness."

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In what conservationists hope will serve as a model for future projects, Colombia has set aside a 167,960-acre park in the Amazon basin and granted the indigenous people who live there control over its management. Formally established late last month after years of negotiations between the government, indigenous people, and environmental groups, Indiwasi National Park is located in the most biologically diverse region of Colombia. In addition to being home to rare and endangered animals and plants, the park is sacred territory to the Ingano tribe, which will manage it. Colombia has 46 other national parks, but none is managed by indigenous groups. The likelihood of the park attracting a significant number of tourists is questionable, however, given the endemic violence stemming from civil war and drug trafficking that troubles Colombia.

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At an environmental summit being held this week in Rio de Janeiro, Latin American and Caribbean countries are forging an alliance to pressure developed nations to foot most of the bill for the planet's ailing ecosystems. During the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, industrialized nations pledged to spend 0.7 percent of their gross domestic products on sustainable development in the developing world, but that promise has gone unmet except by a handful of European nations. Representatives at this week's summit say that in the last decade, Latin America has matured politically and is ready to demand fulfillment of the pledge. The coalition plans to make its case during the 10th anniversary of the Earth Summit, to be held next year in South Africa.

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Despite a judge's order to temporarily cease fumigating coca and poppy plants with the herbicide glyphosate because of environmental and health concerns, Colombia said yesterday it would not stop the antidrug operation. The judge on Friday asked the Colombian government to explain what it knows about the effects of glyphosate on people and the environment. His final ruling on a petition by indigenous groups to halt the American-backed spraying is expected within 10 days. Both Colombia and the U.S. deny that the spraying might be causing harm. Colombia's antinarcotics chief, Gen. Gustavo Socha, said spraying would continue, except in the Amazon; American officials said they interpreted the ruling to suspend the fumigation in all of Colombia.

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Nearly all residents in Villaseca, Chile, cook with solar power --pretty nifty in a country where firewood is a big source of energy, contributing to a steep loss in old-growth forests each year. Villaseca in sunny northern Chile has only 300 residents, but proponents of the solar technology hope the gizmos will spread across the region. Pedro Serrano, an environmental activist and one of the Villaseca project's original planners in 1989, estimates that 300,000 potential users of solar ovens live in northern Chile. If all of them made the switch, he says, 2 million tons of wood would be saved annually.

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A federal appeals court yesterday rejected the U.S. government's bid to loosen the standard for "dolphin-safe" tuna. The U.S. wanted to open its dolphin-safe market to Mexican and Latin American fishers who catch tuna in large purse-seines and promise to set free dolphins trapped in the nets. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling, preventing the U.S. Commerce Department from moving forward with the new standard until it conducts more studies on whether dolphin populations would be hurt by the change. The issue has split the environmental community. The Earth Island Institute, which filed the suit, said the new standard would lead to more dolphin deaths. But World Wildlife Fund and others argued that the standard would create economic incentives for foreign governments to make sure tuna fishing doesn't harm dolphins.

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