Let Them Run Wild

By Terry McCarthy/Cardamom Mountains

A light morning mist hangs over the jungle as Peter Taggart sets a hornbill on a tree branch. Taggart runs an antipoaching station in the Cardamom Mountains in southwest Cambodia, and the hornbill, a black bird with a white breast and an oversize yellow beak, has been confiscated from a local villager. "The guy was keeping it as a pet," says Taggart, who works for Washington-based Conservation International. "He said he didn't know it was protected, but they all know, really."

The locals are hearing a lot about protecting the wildlife and the forests these days. For years the 2.5 million acres of rain forest and the wildlife that lives in it--including tigers, leopards, barking deer and gibbons--were left alone while Cambodia was at war. The Cardamoms were used as a sanctuary by the feared Khmer Rouge, who laid land mines and booby traps to keep people out. But when the civil war ended in the 1990s, loggers, hunters and farmers started moving in, slashing and burning the forest and eventually prompting environmental groups to scramble for a strategy to protect the region, one of the last wilderness areas in Southeast Asia.

Wilderness, in the elegant words of the 1964 U.S. Wilderness Act, is land "where man himself is a visitor and does not remain." Wilderness areas are critical for protecting biodiversity: tropical rain forests alone, which cover 6% of the planet's land area, are home to more than half of all known species. But many wild regions suffer from human encroachment, and species are vanishing at a rate not seen since the demise of the dinosaurs. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, along with Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, who set up the Whole Earth Catalog, among others, are raising money for a 25-year, $5 billion effort called the All Species Initiative to catalog every species on earth--perhaps 80% of which are still undiscovered. "Surely the rest of life matters," Wilson writes in The Future of Life. "Surely our stewardship is its only hope." Natural habitats provide priceless services to humanity, from climate control to water purification to the supply of our medicines. And what if future generations never have the opportunity to see a panda or humpback whale?

But all is not lost--at least not yet. Even as Wilson and others warn of an impending Armageddon, conservation groups and scientists are devising innovative strategies for preserving broad swaths of rain forest, grassland, tundra and coral reef before they are swallowed by the global village. All face the fundamental dilemma: how to balance man's economic urgency with nature's ecological vulnerability.

"It sounds counterintuitive, but you have to build economies around protection," says Gustavo Fonseca, senior vice president for science at Conservation International. With 6 billion people and counting, the world is too crowded to fence off wilderness areas and ignore the impact on human livelihood. Communities must be able to prosper alongside wilderness without encroaching on it. "The future of conservation can be described in one word: zoning," says Eric Dinerstein, chief scientist for the World Wildlife Fund-U.S. "We cannot stop development, nor should we. The most we can do is have it in places where it does the least damage."

In the Cardamoms, the most damage was being caused by hunting. Under an agreement with the Cambodian government, Conservation International pays for 125 rangers to patrol the area to stop poachers and protect against illegal logging. The group is also establishing agricultural and health projects to help local people replace lost income. "The people have been living off illegal forest activity, so going back to farming is less money," explains David Mead, who runs the program in Cambodia. "They don't like that." One plan involves buying draft animals to help locals plow rice paddies so that they will no longer need to practice slash-and-burn agriculture at the forest's edge.

To finance the reserve, Conservation International is setting up an offshore trust fund, using the annual returns to pay the reserve's running costs. In exchange for this long-term commitment, the government last month declared 1 million acres of the Cardamoms permanently off limits to logging, canceling six concessions that had been promised to foreign timber companies.

Efforts like these tend to work only when there is constant on-the-ground monitoring, environmental groups say. Otherwise, funding is often diverted to other projects or siphoned off by corrupt officials. "The difference between success and failure in protecting wild areas is presence," says Alan Rabinowitz, director of science and exploration at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. "The ones that fail are where a project is set up and walked away from."

How best to protect wilderness? Since each region is unique, strategies have to account for local conditions, says Rabinowitz, who helped set up a jaguar reserve in Belize and a national park in Myanmar. In Hkakabo Razi National Park in northern Myanmar, Rabinowitz discovered that locals were hunting wildlife, particularly red pandas and leaf deer, in far greater numbers than were needed for food. People were swapping the skins with Chinese traders for salt, which does not occur naturally in the area. So Rabinowitz instituted a salt-distribution program. At a cost of less than $5,000 a year, the 3,000 people in the park now get enough salt to make hunting for barter unnecessary.

Here are some of the most promising strategies being applied to conserve wilderness areas around the world:

DEBT-FOR-NATURE SWAPS Most countries with surviving wilderness also happen to be relatively poor and indebted to the developed world. In 1984 Thomas Lovejoy, then with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), had the idea of converting vice to virtue by buying off or forgiving debt if developing countries gave protected status to some valuable wild area. Conservation International implemented the first debt-for-nature swap in Bolivia's Beni Biosphere Reserve in 1987. The U.S. Congress gave the strategy a boost in 1998 with the Tropical Rainforest Conservation Act, which authorized the President to reduce some countries' debt in exchange for forest protection. Governments or private groups have engineered swaps with more than 30 countries.

In June the U.S., working with three environmental groups, canceled $5.5 million of Peru's foreign debt. In exchange, Peru will extend protection to 27.5 million acres of tropical rain forest containing pink river dolphins, jaguars, scarlet macaws and giant water lilies. Nongovernment groups will monitor the protected areas to make sure the regulations are enforced. "It's a public-private partnership in the best sense of the word," says Stuart Irvin, an attorney with Covington & Burling in Washington who gave pro bono legal advice on this deal and similar swaps. "Everyone comes out a winner."

CARBON CREDIT OFFSETS Under the Kyoto treaty to combat global warming, Western Europe and Japan must reduce carbon emissions below 1990 levels. (The U.S. has refused to ratify the treaty.) One way to reach the target involves paying poorer countries to keep their land under forests, which absorb carbon from the atmosphere. For example, Japan could pay Peru not to log rain forest. The amount of carbon absorbed by those trees would then be counted as a credit on Japan's carbon-emission balance sheet. "This would reverse a trend in human history," says Irvin. "Suddenly land is more valuable with trees on it than logged."

CONSERVATION CONCESSIONS Conservation groups are leasing or buying timber concessions in endangered areas and placing them off limits to logging. They are surprisingly affordable, in part because profit margins on felled timber in remote areas can be low, which means there are few potential buyers. The Nature Conservancy bought the rights to 1.6 million acres adjoining Bolivia's Noel Kempff Mercado National Park in 1998 for $1 an acre--doubling the park's size. In 2000 Conservation International leased 200,000 acres of forest in southeastern Guyana for a $20,000 up-front fee and annual payments of 15[cents] an acre. Even where loggers cannot be bought out, the damage they do can be reduced. In the Congo the Wildlife Conservation Society has persuaded the German firm CIB to feed its workers beef and chicken instead of wild bush meat from its logging concessions next to Nouable-Ndoki National Park.

ECOTOURISM For environmentalists, ecotourism is a double-edged sword. It can educate people about the need for wilderness, but it can also introduce humans into remote, fragile ecosystems where they would not otherwise go. Some of the better-run ecotourist ventures have mastered low-impact tours, using income from the visitors to keep certain areas pristine. Programme for Belize, a nonprofit group, has bought 260,000 acres of forest in northwestern Belize--about 4% of the country's total land area--that had been destined for logging. Half of the area is now a reserve, surrounded by a buffer zone in which forestry and tourism are permitted. Ecotourism covers some 60% of the reserve's management costs. Saba Marine Park in the Netherlands Antilles and Nepal's Chitwan National Park have similar programs.

MARINE RESERVES Wilderness areas in the oceans are a relatively new concept. One of its pioneers is Bill Ballantine, a marine biologist in New Zealand with the University of Auckland who in 1965 raised the idea of "no take" reserves, which prohibit all fishing. New Zealand now has 16 marine reserves; others have been established in Australia, Belize, the Galapagos Islands and the Caribbean. In 2000 the Nature Conservancy purchased the atoll of Palmyra, 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, to preserve its 15,000 acres of pristine coral reefs.

WILDLIFE CORRIDORS Some large animals need big areas to live and mate in. Male Siberian tigers, for example, have home ranges extending up to 400 sq. mi. In many cases there are no longer large enough blocks of wilderness left for such species to maintain a viable breeding population. So scientists are looking for ways to establish corridors linking contiguous reserves or parks. One proposal would link Canada's Yukon to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to allow grizzlies to roam a larger area. A WWF plan calls for developing the Terai Arc across northern India and Nepal. The arc would link 11 national parks and reserves into a total area of 27,000 sq. mi., benefiting tigers and other large animals.

PHILANTHROPY Private purchases of wilderness areas received at least a temporary boost with the surging stock markets of the 1990s and the billionaires they created. One of the most spectacular deals was the 750,000-acre acquisition of temperate rain forest in southern Chile by Doug Tompkins, who has headed the North Face and Esprit clothing companies. Tompkins spent some $15 million to acquire Pumalin Park, which stretches from the Chilean coast to Argentina. He is now buying land on the coast of Patagonia in southern Argentina to establish a reserve there. Other big private purchasers include Alan Weeden of New York City's Weeden Foundation, who has bought some 200,000 acres in South America and Africa, and Peter Buckley, a former San Francisco lawyer and head of Esprit-Europe, who has bought rain forest in Latin American nations.

INDIGENOUS CONTROL The trend of recognizing indigenous peoples' claims to ancestral land sometimes can help preserve wilderness. In the republic of Yakutia in Russian Siberia, some 270,000 sq. mi. of arctic tundra are now off limits to all extractive industries except for the traditional hunting and fishing done by the Yakut people. In Ecuador the Awa people, after winning recognition as a communal federation, were given legal title in 1985 to almost 300,000 acres of Choco forest. Ten years later, despite pressure from logging companies, the Awa signed an agreement with the WWF designating 42,000 acres as a "life reserve" that will be kept uninhabited.

A survey by Conservation International found 37 wilderness areas left that have at least 70% of their original vegetation intact, are at least 10,000 sq km in size and have a human population of no more than 5 people per sq km. These "last wild places," as the group calls them, cover 46% of the land surface of the planet. With all the resources and strategies at our disposal, much of this precious territory can still be saved.