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Thoreau and the value of mangroves

June 3rd, 2009

There are no mangroves in Massachusetts. What brought me to New England was a mangrove expert at Harvard, a photographer in Lexington and a pond in Concord.

Harvard ecologist Aaron Ellison edited a major review of mangrove knowledge in 2008 and has as good a grasp of the big mangrove picture as anyone I’ve met. (He also bakes mean ginger cookies.) One of the subjects we discussed was the growth of ecological economics, a discipline which attempts to assign a monetary value to the ecological “goods and services” provided by organisms and habitats. Mangroves, for example, might be valued at so many dollars per hectare for their contribution to erosion control, so many dollars for fish nursery services, carbon storage, wave mitigation, crab food, migratory bird roosts, and so on.

KENNEDY WARNE
Site of Thoreau's hut at Walden Pond.

Aaron is wary of taking this utilitarian approach to conservation. He argues that treating nature as a resource—an apparently inexhaustible resource—is what has got us into the mess we’re in, so how can assigning a dollar value to nature’s various components get us out of it? He showed me an editorial from a recent issue of the journal Conservation Biology, in which Matthew Child contends that the conservation movement is becoming bogged down in “soulless financial rhetoric.”

“Conservation was never meant to become another latch in the ratchet of progress,” writes Child. “Its primary purpose has always been to transcend the notion of economic progress.”

Thoreau, says Child, “would have balked at the tragic incongruence of conservationists using an economic framework to justify the existence of the movement. He was an unapologetic and nonviolent freedom fighter for nature who decried the societal dictum that ‘fruits are not ripe until they are turned to dollars.’”

The gist of his argument is that if conservationists want to sup with the devil of capitalist economics they’d better use a pretty long spoon.

KENNEDY WARNE
How's the serenity?

Thoreau’s literal stamping ground was Walden Pond, and that very morning I had made a dawn visit to the pond with photographer Tim Laman. Tim was my collaborator on the National Geographic mangrove story that launched me on this journey. Catching up with him in Lexington was the first chance I’d had to see the hundreds of outtakes that weren’t published in the magazine: tigers in the Sundarbans, trees packed with scarlet ibis in Trinidad, mud crabs in Indonesia that are so large they have to be speared rather than captured by hand—they would take your fingers off.

We spent the evening savouring pictures and dreaming of publishing a coffee-table book of mangrove photography and got up early to visit Walden, just a few miles from Tim’s house.

I peeked in the windows of the replica cabin-in-the-woods with its three chairs—“one for solitude, two for friendship, three for company”—and added a stone to one of the memorial cairns near the site of the original hut, where an inscription over the old fireplace says, in typical Thoreauvian prose, “Go thou my incense upward from this hearth.”

KENNEDY WARNE
Tim stalking the elusive pink ladyslipper.

Walden is still a place of solitude, despite the hum of commuter traffic through the trees. The only people besides us were swimmers, wetsuited against the cold, and a lone sculler taking the morning freshness. We looked for pink ladyslipper orchids, which flower at this time of year, and Tim was pleased to find a photogenic pair of blooms not far from the walking path.

Thoreau’s contribution to the environmental movement is beyond measuring. It was he who wrote the call to arms for nature’s defenders, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” I am glad for the chance to visit the site that spawned such thoughts, before heading to Cuba to see the state of wildness and preservation in the mangroves there.

Tags: writing
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Pilgrim at Key West

May 31st, 2009

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

This sentence, the first line of The Old Man and the Sea, always thrills me—the simple way it sets up what is to come. Hemingway is one of the reference points I have as a writer. Like a GPS satellite, he’s someone I use to triangulate my position, to consider my direction, to consult when I’m lost. I don’t know how many times I’ve alluded to the “built-in, shock-proof shit detector” that Hem said is the most essential gift of a good writer. Or how many times I’ve recalled his advice to “write the truest sentence you know.”

KENNEDY WARNE
Seeking inspiration in Hemingway's house.

So I was happy to pay my $12 to have a look through his house in Key West. I had driven to the “Conch Republic” from Miami to catch up with my friends David Doubilet, the great underwater photographer, and Jennifer Hayes. The two of them were on assignment for National Geographic, photographing a story on artificial reefs. A really big artificial reef in the form of the ship Vandenberg had just been scuppered six miles offshore, and David showed me some spectacular images of the sinking from two remote cameras he and Jen had attached to the bow and the bridge.

But back to Hemingway. The first surprise was how many people were queuing to take the tour. Not bookish types trying to get in touch with some literary ambience residual in the walls—or possibly in the cats, of which there are dozens lounging about the place—but standard-issue Hawaiian-shirt-and-suntan-lotion tourists. Either the man’s celebrity is undiminished, or the Hemingway marketing machine is highly effective—or, I suppose, both.

KENNEDY WARNE
Hem's house, a place of pilgrimage.

I stood at the steel grille blocking entry to the sanctum sanctorum, Hemingway’s study, and imagined myself tapping at the ancient portable typewriter on the desk, or reclining in the faded green lounger when the words weren’t flowing (probably more of the latter than the former), or strapping on the canvas backpack stashed under the window and heading for the snows of Kilimanjaro.

I glanced at the titles on the bookshelves in the main house. Danger is My Business, The Great American Novel, The Tumult and the Shouting. Muscular titles for a muscular writer. Though for Hemingway the inner tumult grew too great. Another title on the shelf gave me pause: When Night Descends.

KENNEDY WARNE
Ground zero: Hemingway's study.

According to a sign on the wall, half of Hemingway’s library is in Cuba, where the man’s memory is also revered. A Google search brought up a story about finding Hemingway in Cuba by Wright Thompson in the Kansas Star. He writes about a bar where Papa’s followers raise a glass to his memory:

“Yet they also know that this might be as real as it gets. The Hemingway McDonald’s isn’t here yet, and the drinks do go down easy. They’re made the same way as back then. The waiters probably dress the same. So what if the prices are higher. They don’t come for a historical dissertation. They come to feel adventure, something they’ve otherwise traded for the safety of a cubicle and a 401(k). They come for a feeling, for that one moment of one day when they get it. When the lights dim and the band plays and the smoke curls, this place delivers.”

In a week I’ll be in Cuba, looking for my own adventure, not in a bar, nor in a fishing skiff in the Gulf Stream, but among some of the best preserved mangrove forests in the Caribbean.

Correction: When I first published this post I got the name of the Kansas Star author wrong: it’s Wright Thompson, not Wayne Thompson (which happens to be the name of my solicitor). I also couldn’t get the link to work, but it seems to be OK now.

Tags: Florida, writing
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The path to restoration

May 29th, 2009

For the past two days I’ve been visiting mangrove experts and restoration sites. At Weedon Island in Tampa Bay I met Tom Smith of the US Geological Survey. He’s vitally interested in the question of how mangroves will cope with rising sea levels. On the one hand, their sediment-trapping ability means they can hoist themselves up by their bootstraps, keeping their heads above water by building up the soil around their roots. On the other hand, there are limits to how rapidly they can accumulate sediment.

KENNEDY WARNE
Robin Lewis at a restoration site he designed near Fort Lauderdale.

“If the rise is 1–2 mm a year they can keep up just fine. If sea level goes up 2.5–3 mm a year, they probably can’t,” Tom said. The average sea level rise recorded at Key West for the past century has been 2.2 mm/year—just within the threshold of what peat-building mangroves can accommodate. Is the rise increasing? Not recently, Smith says: “In the last 20 years sea level in the Gulf of Mexico hasn’t risen a lick.”

Southern Florida, being so flat, is especially vulnerable to rising seas. Much of the land has a gradient of 1 in 100,000. Each centimetre of tidal elevation pushes water 10 km inland. Would planting thousands of mangroves keep the waves at bay? Not necessarily, says Tom. Even a small escarpment would prove an insurmountable hurdle to mangroves moving inland. And in many places human infrastructure inshore of the mangrove fringe would arrest the mangrove retreat.

Another of Tom’s research interests has to do with the “ecological goods and services” of a mangrove forest. The relatively new field of ecological economics attempts to put a value on natural habitats such as mangroves based on the contribution they make to the biosphere—in oxygen production, carbon storage, fish nursery functions, substrate for shellfish, roosts for birds, and so on.

KENNEDY WARNE
Tom Smith at a Tampa Bay study site, where mangrove regeneration has been prolific.

“One of the questions we’re asking is how big a patch of mangroves do you need for these services to be noticeable,” he said. “How much of a contribution do you get from a 10-metre-wide mangrove stand compared with, say, a 100-metre-wide stand? How much support for fisheries do you get? Is there a linear relationship between stand size and ecological goods and services? We don’t know the answers yet.”

The same questions interest Robin Lewis, a mangrove restoration specialist who showed me two of his project sites near For Lauderdale, north of Miami. Robin trained as a fish biologist before turning his attention to mangroves in the mid-1970s.

One of the sites we visit, West Lake Park, used to be tomato fields in the early 1900s. An ambitious restoration project was commenced in 1986, involving restoring saltwater flow through the site, removing invasive casuarina trees and reshaping the land to mimic the natural topography of a mangrove wetland. Now boardwalks weave through lush stands of mangroves, all of which have self-seeded (“volunteers,” in restoration lingo).

KENNEDY WARNE
Mangrove awareness in Fort Lauderdale extends to mural-covered airport shuttles.

It takes about 30 years to produce trees of the stature and density of natural stands, Robin says, but the goal for ecological restoration (as opposed to simple reforestation) is not just a nice spread of trees but “functional equivalency” between the restored site and a natural site. That means that all the ecological components are present and accounted for. For mangroves, that can be a lot of organisms. Researchers have found that a typical cubic metre of mangrove mud contains between 20,000 and 40,000 visible organisms—critters bigger than 0.5mm.

We stop to watch the courtship rituals of small fish called mollies, which are circling in the muddy water under the mangrove canopy. The males have a bright blue patch on their tails, which they are flamboyantly displaying to the females. Robin says it takes as little as five years for fish populations in restored mangroves to match those of undisturbed ecosystems. Looking at the swirling mollies, I remark, “If you build it, they will come.”

Tags: Florida, restoration
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Panthers and airboats

May 27th, 2009

I’m standing in a marsh surrounded by frost-blasted mangrove shrubs, their foliage dead and chocolate-brown. Layne Hamilton, project leader of the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge, is pleased about this. Since freshwater flow was channeled and diverted by developers (see yesterday’s post), the salinity of the marsh has been increasing, and as a result mangroves have been creeping inland, altering the nature of the place.

KENNEDY WARNE
Which way now? Joyce, Andy and Layne ponder the best route to the next sampling station.

In the 1920s there were about 4000 ha of mangroves in the refuge area; now there are more than 7000 ha. The plan to restore the marsh includes restricting the mangrove invasion and burning off some that have already encroached. Frost is helping keep down the mangroves’ prolific regeneration.

While Andy From and Joyce Mazourek go about their data capture, Layne tells me about the history of the marsh, known as the Picayune Strand. It was developed for real estate in the 1960s as the Southern Golden Gates Estate, but it never took off, and by the 1980s had become a haven for outlaws, poachers and drug runners. The Fish and Wildlife Service bought out the property owners in the 1990s, and the area was turned into a state forest.

KENNEDY WARNE
Salt crystals on a mangrove leaf attest to the ability of many mangrove species to exude excess salt from their tissues.

“It was seen as a great restoration opportunity for the western Everglades,” says Layne, who has been managing the project for the past seven years. As well as providing an ecological asset, there’s the thought that a restored wetland could help mitigate sea level rise. Mapping the vegetation and researching the hydrology are part of the baseline study being done before freshwater flows are restored.

Thunderheads are moving in our direction, blackening the sky. Andy is ready to pull the plug on the trip if they get any nearer. For someone from a country where electrical storms aren’t a major threat, the prospect of lightning strike is new to me, but it’s a daily reality in Florida as the hurricane season draws close. No one on the boat is taking the billowing clouds lightly. “An airboat on a marsh is a lightning rod,” says Andy.

KENNEDY WARNE
Skimming across the marsh.

But the clouds come no closer, and we continue crisscrossing the marsh, occasionally getting stuck in the mud. When that happens, we all get off the airboat while Andy guns the big prop, waggling the rudders left and right, trying to move the machine into deeper water. In fact, we’re lucky to have been able to use the airboat at all. South-west Florida has had a drought this year, and a week ago the marsh was almost dry.

Late in the day, Layne finds panther footprints in the mud. As it happens, she also leads the Florida panther recovery programme, and tells me about the big cats. There are only about 100 of them left, she says—though that’s three times the number there were in the mid-1990s.

A big problem has been inbreeding. When a species hits a population bottleneck like the panther has, all kinds of debilitating diseases and deformities crop up, jeopardising recovery. “As a subspecies, they were just about to blink out,” says Layne.

The heart of the recovery programme has been to introduce the panther’s close relative, the western cougar, from which it is physically indistinguishable. “We brought in eight females from Texas, and they are helping fill in the holes in the genome of the panther.”

Further obstacles in the way of recovery are a disease called feline leukaemia, which jumps from domestic cats to panthers, and pseudorabies, which panthers pick up by eating feral hogs, and which kills them almost immediately. But Layne says the top cause of mortality is intraspecific aggression. Male panthers need about 200 square miles of range, and if they don’t get it they attack and kill females and kittens.

KENNEDY WARNE
Andy sees the panther; I see the sign :(

The public hasn’t exactly embraced panther recovery with open arms. It’s a fearsome predator, and seeing road signs advising motorists to watch out for panthers no doubt causes unease among some Floridians. “It will take a lot of outreach and persuasion to get communities to be comfortable with a larger panther population,” Layne says.

That night, driving back to the house where we’re staying, Andy suddenly shouts, “Look! Panther!” Of course, I am looking in the other direction, and by the time I look where he is pointing the cat has slunk into the shadows. It’s the first time Andy has seen one in all the years he’s been coming here, and I don’t begrudge him the sighting for one minute, but I can’t help thinking that it follows the well-known Law of Journalistic Avoidance that is part of the wildlife creed. I have to make do with photographing the sign.

Tags: fauna, Florida, panther, Ten Thousand Islands
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(Don’t) have a banana

May 26th, 2009

We are barely out of the marina, heading into the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge for a day of research in the mangroves, when Joyce Mazourek, the refuge manager, gets a “rescue-me” call from one of her staff. Her outboard has died. Can we give her a tow? We motor over to the boat, listen while the motor is fruitlessly cranked, agree sagely that it is definitely not starting and tow it back to the boat ramp.

We set out a second time, idling through the manatee protection zone (boat propellers are one of the chief causes of manatee injury and death), then Joyce pushes the throttle down for a high-speed slalom ride through the mangrove-fringed islands that make up the refuge. Ten Thousand Islands, adjoining Everglades National Park, has some of the best preserved mangrove habitat in the US.

Ten thousand islands? Well, no. More like a few hundred, but who’s counting? I first came across this island maze off Florida’s south-west coast while scouting for mangrove sites on Google Earth. From the air, the islands looked like cells under a microscope.

KENNEDY WARNE
Andy From changes batteries in one of his water-level recorders.

Then I found out that Andy From, a GIS (geographic information systems) guy with the Fish and Wildlife Service, would be spending two days in the refuge downloading data from his water level monitoring sites. He invited me along.

This first day is devoted to checking the island sites; tomorrow we will go into the marshes by airboat. Andy occasionally consults a satellite map, but mostly navigates by memory—this is his 17th trip to collect data. His monitoring equipment consists of a PVC pipe sunk into the mud, with mesh-covered holes near the surface so that water can flow into them, and an ultrasound distance recorder in the top of the pipe.

GOOGLE EARTH
Sunglint creates this optical illusion in a satellite image of part of the Ten Thousand Islands wildlife refuge.

While Andy downloads the sea level data to a handheld device, Joyce sucks up groundwater from three different depths to measure temperature, salinity and electrical conductivity. All this data provides baseline information for a coming restoration project. Decades ago, canals were dug in the watershed north of the refuge as part of a massive real-estate development that never got off the ground. Those canals deprived the marshes of fresh water, disrupting the natural hydrology and changing the flora and fauna. The plan is to restore sheet flow of fresh water across the refuge, and Andy’s data will allow environment managers to measure the effects.

I busy myself with the mangroves themselves. It’s high tide, and tree-climbing crabs have clustered around the trunks of the trees, some of them several metres up. I try to photograph them, but as soon as I get within range they sidle to the opposite side of the trunk. When I move around that side they scuttle back to their starting point. I keep up this game of hide and seek for a while, then give up. They are too nimble for me.

As the day proceeds we have some lucky critter sightings. We startle a spotted ray, jet black polka-dotted with white, and watch it wing away through the murky water. Crossing a shallow area, we see horseshoe crabs, those ancient armoured arthropods which have changed very little in 400 million years. The air temperature is in the 90s Fahrenheit, and I’m eyeing the water for a dip, but change my mind when a two-metre bull shark swirls around the boat. The area is known for them. They are an unpredictable species, and the turbid water pretty much rules out swimming with them. I don’t want to end up a case of mistaken prey identity. Bulls don’t have the megadentition of great whites, but no way would you want to have their pearly whites sunk into your leg.

KENNEDY WARNE
Joyce Mazourek, a victim of Cumulative Banana Syndrome.

We stop for lunch. Andy has made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for him and me, and is alarmed to see Joyce eating a fruit salad with banana. Like many fishermen, he considers bananas to be bad juju on boats. “Oh, oh,” he says. “We’re in trouble now.” Joyce says she’s been eating bananas on trips into the refuge ever since she started as manager a few months earlier, and has never had boat trouble. “But maybe it’s a case of CBS—Cumulative Banana Syndrome,” I suggest. “All that pent-up banana karma is about to be unleashed.”

I spoke truer than I knew. As we started for the last site of the day the motor started making a gnashing noise, and eventually cut out completely. Something had seized in its innards. We ended up paddling the last mile to the marina, past the mansions of the Port of the Islands resort, watching for manatees and listening to the chattering call of a bald eagle.

It was a pleasant way to end the day, but we agreed that, tomorrow, no bananas!

Tags: Florida, Ten Thousand Islands
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Over Amazonia

May 23rd, 2009

It is by turns exhilarating and depressing to fly across Brazil. I took off from Salvador and stared down on a mosaic of farm and forest as the plane tracked north-west, bound for Panama. I closed the window shade and dozed, and when I slid the shade up again an hour later we were still crossing the same landscape. Huge fields with ruler-straight boundaries, red-dirt roads connecting them them, and islands of rainforest adrift in that agricultural sea.

This was the sobering part, to see the diminishing remnants one hears about whenever the statistics of rainforest loss are mentioned.

Then the exhilaration of crossing a swathe of untouched Amazonia. The cliché about the “lungs of the planet” smacks home when, at 30,000 feet, you inch across this enormous expanse, with its tapeworm rivers riddling the somber forest. Not a road, not a village, not a house for as far as the eye can see. I found myself whispering the word “untrammelled” for the sheer pleasure of it, because how often do you get to say that about a landscape any more?

KENNEDY WARNE
Not much of a shot, to be sure, but flying over Amazonia was impressive.

The forest itself is sculpted into whorls as if by an oil painter’s palette knife. You see the ghosts of rivers past, now recaptured by the land and reforested with the next generation of trees. The rivers twist across the landscape in tight oxbows, with dozens of spindle-shaped islands dotting their course. On the upstream edge of each island, and on the tighter bends in the river, is a splash of white, a sandbar, that beckons as a potential campsite. What wouldn’t I give to be on a raft down there, like in a Werner Herzog movie, with a pack of chattering monkeys on board.

Speaking of Werner, during a stopover in Manaus I paid a visit to the opera house made famous in his film Fitzcarraldo. Opened in 1896, during the rubber boom, Teatro Amazonas is a magnificent Renaissance-style edifice. Wikipedia provides some construction details:

ELAINE CORETS
A touch of a cappella outside Teatro Amazonas in Manaus.

“Roofing tiles came from Alsace while, from Paris, came furniture and furnishings in the style of Louis XV. From Italy came Carrarra marble for the stairs, statues, and columns. Steel walls were ordered from England. The theatre has 198 chandeliers, including 32 of Murano glass. The curtain depicts the junction of the Rio Negro and the Solimões to form the Amazon. On the outside of the building, the dome is covered with 36,000 decorated ceramic tiles painted in the colors of the national flag.”

This year’s opera season, held annually in April, was over by the time I arrived, but I sang a snatch of “Pie Jesu” outside the pink-and-white walls to mark the visit.

On the 25th, Memorial Day in the USA, I will be in Florida for the next stage of the journey: the Ten Thousand Islands.

Tags: Brazil
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Leave the suntan lotion, take the umbrella—2

May 22nd, 2009

I am typing this in the middle of a lake. The lake isn’t very deep—about an inch—but it forms over the kitchen floor of my son Jeremy’s apartment whenever it rains in Salvador. It has been raining in Salvador solidly for a month, according to the taxi driver who brought me here from the bus station. Seven people have died and several houses have been washed away.

JEREMY WARNE
Bucketing down in Salvador.

I have been amazed by my good luck with the weather so far. In two weeks of travelling through Brazil and Ecuador I have not had a day of rain. I arrived in Parnaiba the day after the torrential rains stopped, on May 6, and left Caravelas yesterday under blue skies. During the 10-hour bus ride north, I moved from one climate zone to another, and now it’s emphatically umbrella time. The cloud is so low the tops of the church steeples are disappearing into grey.

Salvador’s colonial architecture is stunning. The twin bell towers of the Convent of Carmo, 50 metres from the kitchen window, are crusted with lichen and wear the black patina of age and decay. The hands on the tower’s two clocks look as if they haven’t moved in a hundred years. I lean out the window to watch people hurrying down the cobbled streets, holding newspapers or jackets over their heads in the rain.

KENNEDY WARNE
View from the kitchen window.

The whole purpose of coming to Salvador is to prove to those who think otherwise (are you there, Heather?) that I can take a day off. In this case, two. I fly to the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge in Florida on Sunday, but I’ve diverted to Salvador to see Jeremy’s last day of capoeira training before he returns to New Zealand.

Salvador is Mecca for anyone who is serious about capoeira Angola, the more traditional of the two forms of the game. Capoeira is crudely described as “ritualised mock combat,” a label that gives no hint of the subtlety and complexity of the game. Encounters are backed by singing, the twanging of berambaus—single-stringed instruments made of a gourd, a stick, and a piece of wire excavated from the rim of a truck tyre—and the beating of drums and tambourines. It is an intense, vibrant experience. Jeremy has been training here for three months. Last year he was here for six. I watch him play with a parent’s pride and an outsider’s bafflement. After a game he will explain some nuance to me—a particular gambit that paid off, a stylish move his opponent made—but I’m in smile and nod territory. I find the moves as difficult to fathom as the jumps my figure-skating daughter used to perform. Was that a single Axel or a double Lutz?

KENNEDY WARNE
Jeremy prepares to play Mestre Valmir.

There’s something about the switching of roles between parent and child that I find deeply satisfying. For 20-odd years you play, however erratically, the part of the sage, the teacher, the Decider, and then you’re the one who’s being taught, who’s being taken in hand, being guided through an exotic city, with its exotic tastes.

Acarajé was number one on the must-eat list of street foods. Mashed black-eyed peas formed into a ball and fried in palm oil, then filled with shrimp paste, these little flavour bombshells are a Salvador speciality. So, too, açai, the pulped crimson berries of the açai palm, sweetened and served ice-cold mixed with granola. Unbelievably good. One night we ate the classic Brazilian fish stew called moqueca, brought to the table bubbling in a clay dish that has been blackened through soaking in a decoction of the bark of the red mangrove. (See, even on my days off, mangroves find me!)

It was my great good fortune to catch an exhibition of the work of Carybé, an artist I had never heard of, but will now never forget. This astonishing genius could work equally powerfully in paint, sculpture, mural and stage design. His sketches of capoeira capture the elegance of the game far better than a camera can.

KENNEDY WARNE
The old burro can still eat.

At the end of the roda I attended—the three-hour capoeira session—the mestre (literally master, the leader of the capoeira school) made some comments which resulted in everyone looking amusedly in my direction. Jeremy explained that he had joked that since I was clearly the oldest person in the room I should have the last word. “Say something in Portuguese,” Jeremy said. Reaching into my paltry stock of one-liners, I came out with “Beleza!” (Beautiful!) Everyone clapped. Which goes to show the truth of a sign I saw in a Salvador junk shop: The old burro can still eat.

PS The fact that I’m posting this on the 22nd and it is now the 29th is probably as confusing to readers as it is becoming to me. Lately I have been putting in long hot days in the field and have lacked brain space to write, and internet access to post. I hope that the posting date and the actual date will start to be more congruent soon.

Below: a striking sculpture outside Salvador’s museum of modern art, which was hosting the Carybé exhibition, and one of Carybé’s capoeira paintings.

Tags: Brazil, Salvador
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Home ground

May 21st, 2009

Again today I have met people for whom mangroves are their “home ground,” the material and spiritual centre of their lives. Raised as children in the mangroves, they raise their own children the same way. “Father to child to grandchild,” said Janilson, 49, who talked to us with a friend who goes by the nickname Piaba, a type of fish.

Janilson said there were 150 families around Caravelas who live in the mangroves. They don’t have regular jobs. The mangroves are “their industry, their business, their life,” he said.

KENNEDY WARNE
Piaba takes us upriver to a mangrove community near Caravelas.

These men were acute observers of nature. Their eyes lit up when they talked about creatures they’d seen in the mangroves over the course of their lives. Snakes weighing 7 kg. Fiddler crabs whose local name means “call the tide,” because that’s what they seem to be doing when the males wave their supersized pincer. Crab-catching raccoons. That’s right—at low tide raccoons go into the mangroves and catch crabs by inserting their tails into the burrows and waiting for a crab to latch on. Piaba delightedly mimicked the yelps of the raccoon as it withdrew its prize.

Some of their stories crossed over from the natural to the supernatural. They claimed that fishermen sometimes catch in their nets the spirits of dead children, which refuse to show their faces. Piaba said that one night in the mangroves he had once seen a ball of fire which pulsated among the trees as he watched.

KENNEDY WARNE
Seu Silvano, 86, raised 21 children in a mangrove community near Caravelas.

Later, Piaba took us up the river bordering Caravelas to meet 86-year-old Seu Silvano and his wife. They live in a mud-walled hut in which they have raised 21 children. Silvano came to the land as a young single man, cleared and planted it with fruit and shade trees, built the house and will live in it until he dies.

It was some of his upriver neighbours who sold their land to Coopex for a shrimp farm. One of Silvano’s sons told us, “They were crazy to sell.” Crazy because they knew what the farm would do to those who remained. “The effluent would have affected everything. Once it was contaminated, the river wouldn’t have served anyone,” said the son.

I asked Seu Silvano if he still collected food from the mangroves, but he said his body was too tired now. But he still knows how to sweeten crabs for market. As we walked back to the river he lifted a wooden slat from a box under a mango tree. Several dozen blue crabs scuttled away from the light. Silvano feeds them plantains, leaves and coconut to improve their flavour before his children take them by boat to Caravelas.

It’s a process that has been happening forever, down among the mangroves.

Below:
Below: Protesters against Caravelas shrimp farm proposal carry placards saying “It’s a lie,” “Respect my nature,” “We don’t want [shrimp] nurseries, we want to live,” “Our mangroves need help” and “Foreign shrimp stay out.”
Photo by Elaine Corets

Tags: activism, Brazil, Caravelas, shrimp farms
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Brothers in arms

May 20th, 2009

Dó, Dedê and Jaco Galdino Santana are three brothers who work to promote the Afro-Indigenous culture of Bahia, on the eastern seaboard of Brazil. They live in Caravelas, a quiet colonial town near the southern border of Bahia state.

KENNEDY WARNE
Dó Galdino Santana with the first letter of a magnrove font he designed.

Ten years ago, it would not have occurred to them that mangroves could disappear. Mangroves were part of their life, as they were for everyone in Caravelas. “We couldn’t imagine living without them,” said Dedê. Then came Coopex, a consortium with a plan to build a 1500 ha shrimp farm on land between two rivers adjacent to the town. It would be Brazil´s largest shrimp farm yet.

The developers claimed that the farm would not have a negative impact on the mangrove ecosystem, but bitter experience elsewhere in Brazil suggested otherwise. A delegation from shrimp-devastated communities in Ceará visited the Caravelas community to urge them not to allow shrimp to get a foot in the door.

The threat of environmental degradation and mangrove loss caused the brothers to evaluate their priorities. As well as helping mobilise the community to oppose the shrimp project, the brothers decided what was needed was an affirmation of cultural identity. It was not enough to be against something from the outside that threatened their way of life, they wanted to assert what made Caravelas unique.

KENNEDY WARNE
Teaching Afro-Indigenous culture to the children of Caravelas.

They had already started a cultural centre offering the children of the community classes in everything from drumming to carving, silk-screening to sculpture. A fourth member of the family, brother-in-law Itamar dos Anjos, taught drama and dance. They decided to explore the artistic possibilities of mangroves.

“We saw a need for cultural education to strengthen the idea of preserving the environment,” said Itamar. “Instead of offering intellectual argument, we chose artistic expression.”

“Nature is integral to the Afro-Indigenous identity,” said Itamar, and because mangroves and marine life were directly threatened by the Coopex proposal, the brothers and community members, in collaboration with the Mangrove Action Project, decided to make a short film celebrating the spiritual and cultural significance of mangroves. The film evokes the three orixas, or African deities, which are jointly responsible for mangroves: the goddesses of fresh water (Oxum), salt water (Yemanja) and mud (Nanã).

A current of mysticism runs through the film. As well as the orixas, there is a mythological figure called Caipora, who lives in the mangrove branches, protects wildlife and comes to the aid of people who are lost. In the film his cackling laughter terrifies the businessmen who expect their briefcases of money to sweep all opposition before them.

KENNEDY WARNE
Dedê Galdino Santana helps a young student with his drawing.

In reality, opposition from the community caused Brazil´s federal environmental agency to reinvestigate Coopex’s proposal, and to rule that the siting of the farm was an inappropriate land use. The proposal has now been abandoned.

“The shrimp farm proposal re-awoke in the community the importance of mangroves,” said Itamar. The outcome has been not just a threat averted, but a deeper vein of cultural identity revitalised.

Tags: art, Brazil, Caravelas
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A stone in the shoe

May 17th, 2009

Peter Segura had been in hiding for a month when I met him. His home is in Olmedo, where I had stayed while visiting the giant mangroves of Majagual, but it wasn’t safe for him to meet me there. So he came to the capital, Quito, and told me his story.

Peter Segura opposes shrimp farming. He is, as Pedro Ordinola had said, “a stone in their shoe.” When a powerful person has a stone in his shoe, he likes to get rid of it—which is why this quietly spoken 40-year-old Afro-Ecuadorian and his family were in hiding.

KENNEDY WARNE
Peter Segura—a marked man.

What is interesting about Peter is that for 10 years, from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, he worked on shrimp farms, so he knows something of the inside story. The work, he said, was difficult, dangerous and low-paid, and the living conditions were spartan. Typical tasks included cleaning algal scum off the pond walls and water filters, keeping down weeds, spreading food and agrochemicals and hand-harvesting the shrimp. The workers handled hazardous materials such as fuels, growth hormones and the preservative metabisulphite without protection. If a worker complained, he was down the road.

Peter worked for several farms in both Guayaquil and Esmeraldas, and came to the conclusion that they were operating outside of the law. Farms were supposed to be a maximum of 250 hectares, he said, but by creating multiple subsidiaries a shrimp owner could achieve a spread of 3–4,000 ha. Many shrimp operations had politicians, ambassadors and councillors as partners or directors. The alliance of business and government “could do whatever it wanted with the laws, the ecosystem and the people,” he said.

And what it was doing was frightening. Peter began hearing of mass fish die-offs, the causes of which were never established, but were considered by locals to be the result of chemical spills. One of the farms he worked for stopped mangrove fishers such as crab and cockle collectors from entering the mangroves adjacent to the farm on the pretext that they were thieving shrimp. There were reports of trespassers being killed. Peter claimed the number was as high as 300 across three provinces. And mangroves themselves were being laid waste as the farms proliferated.

In 1996 he renounced the industry and returned to his home in Olmedo. He started working with the community to protect their health, livelihoods and environment, and this put him at loggerheads with the shrimp farm that had been built adjacent to the village. He claimed that the shrimp farm had ordered the destruction of community gardens, that its activities were contaminating the village water supply and poisoning fisheries and even that it had tried to exterminate green iguanas on the grounds that they were digging nest holes in the pond dykes and weakening them.

Protest action against the farm made him a marked man. Friendly messages began to reach him, saying he needed to be careful or something might happen to him. Four times since 1997 he has been obliged to leave the community because of such threats.

The threat to him is direct, but Peter believes the wellbeing of his entire community is at risk. The laws relating to environmental protection are explicit, but there is no institutional will to apply them, he said. “Big business can buy anybody off.”

I asked him what he thinks the future holds for him. “My future is decided,” he said. “It is to fight for mangroves and for the thousands of forcibly displaced families in the poor provinces where the industry flourishes.”

Peter Segura remains a stone in the shrimp farmers’ shoe.

Tags: Ecuador, Esmeraldas, shrimp farms
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