Tara and I thought it was a great idea, and with the help of Barbara Zimmerman, the Toronto-born herpetologist who had worked in the Amazon for years and invited us to the Manaus research station, we began to set it up. To pay for it, we organized small, exclusive tours to Aucre and its fledgling station fifteen miles upriver, starting in 1990. People could experience a traditional Indian community and a tropical rain forest. Barb is a remarkable woman and scientist, the only person we could imagine who could pull off this research station project in so remote a place. She handled the Brazilian end of the visits, and Tara looked after the complex arrangements at home.
Using the money brought in by these tours, the first scientific research station in the eastern lower half of the Amazon watershed was successfully established. After the David Suzuki Foundation was born, we transferred the project to the foundation. But it was a huge drain on Tara's time and energy, and when Conservation International, a well-funded American environmental organization that works to protect wilderness, offered to take charge of the project, we were happy to hand it over.
IN 2001, SEVERN RECEIVED a research grant from Yale University, where she was a junior, to study a species of tree in the Amazon rain forest in that same research station her mom and I had helped get going, now called Projeto Pinkaiti. With the funding of Conservation International and under the supervision of Barbara Zimmerman, the station was flourishing, with a steady stream of scientists and students from Europe and North America.
After hearing Sev's stories about being back in the Amazon, I decided to return to Aucre to see Paiakan while we were in Brazil filming for The Sacred Balance. Paiakan was heavier, and the village too had changed since my last visit. For some unfathomable reason, the thatched roofs had been replaced with metal. A dispensary with a concrete floor had appeared, staffed by a Brazilian who gave out medical drugs; a solar-charged television set was turned on for a few hours a night to show soccer while I was there, and a hut had been built for people who were coming and going to the research station upriver. In Aucre, I woke to the tap, tap, tap of metal devices being used to shell Brazil nuts for the Body Shop chain, which uses the extracted oil in its cosmetics. The plane we had delivered in 1989 still linked the Kaiapo villages together.
The cook for the camp at Aucre was a Brazilian who had a genuine affection for the Kaiapo and had been adopted by them as a Kaiapo, which is a tremendous honor and act of trust. To be adopted, he had to fast for a day, have his hair shaved off, and undergo an entire day of ritual dancing and painting.
Another big change was that Paiakan's daughters were being educated away from the village, in Redenção. Paiakan allowed mahogany trees to be selectively logged for the money he needed to keep the girls in town, and Juneia Mallus is disillusioned by this, but Barb Zimmerman believes such selective logging has a relatively small ecological impact. Paiakan still hopes to rally more outside supporters for preservation of the Amazon, but time has gone by and he has been stuck in the village, marginalized, forgotten by the media.
While I was there, Paiakan and I went fishing again. Unlike our summer visit of 1989, this one took place right after the rainy season and the river was quite high, flowing over the banks and into the forest. As we started off, Paiakan drove the boat right into a bush overhanging the river and began picking the walnut-sized orange fruit and dropping them into the bottom of the craft. When he had accumulated quite a large pile, he backed the boat away and, as we began our trip downriver, he told me to bait up with the fruit. If I hadn't known any better, I would have thought he was playing a trick on this gringo, and I was a little skeptical, but I dutifully pushed a hook through the skin of the fruit.
“Cast it out,” he urged me, so I began to cast in a half-hearted way. I just couldn't imagine fishing with a fruit on my hook. What if someone saw me? Paiakan killed the engine, baited a hand line with another fruit, and began to throw it toward the trees along the river's edge. Right away he was hauling in a huge, flat, silvery fish. Well, I began to cast in earnest then and immediately hooked a fish, which broke my line. Paiakan caught three fish, while I hooked several and lost them all. We drifted down to a place where there were large rocks and pools; Paiakan jumped out and cast a hand net, pulling in several of the same species at each throw. In the end, we had ten beautiful fish, and once again I was awed by Paiakan's skill and knowledge. I caught no fish that day.
All too soon, my short visit was over, and I began to prepare to leave. Irekran offered to paint my body, which I had always hoped for, but I knew I would have to be filming again in a few days. “Not my face,” I told her, with mixed feelings. Severn had been painted and I would love to have had that experience, but it would also have made me stand out and be subjected to stares in airports, which did not please me. So Irekran painted me up to my chin, with long, vertical stripes of dark-black dye. When I asked her how long the paint would last, she answered, “About ten days.” Wrong. It lasted a month and created a buzz when I went to the gym back in Canada.
The day I left Aucre, I was wakened by a horrendous racket, which I learned was the pharmacist spraying insecticide around the village — malaria had come to this part of the forest. It seems there is no way to escape the forces of change, even in the deepest part of the Amazon.
TEN
DOWN UNDER
WHEN I WAS A BOY, another magical place I dreamed of visiting was Australia, home of the fabled duck-billed platypus. The platypus was the sort of creature that fired the imagination of an animal nerd like me, and I yearned to see a live one. With a flat, wide bill like a duck's tacked on to a furry body, webbed feet for swimming, and a poisonous spur on the male's hind legs, the platypus is an egg-laying mammal that suckles its young on modified sweat glands that drip milk onto hairs from which the young can lap it up. In North America, zoos might boast kangaroos or even a koala, but never a platypus.
In the 1960s, when I was starting out at the University of British Columbia, I met Jim Peacock, a brilliant young Australian doing groundbreaking work on chromosome replication in plants. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oregon, and we would meet at conferences. We became friends. Unknown to me, he put my name forward for a position at the University of Sydney. Out of the blue, I received a request to apply for a genetics position. I was flattered to receive an unsolicited inquiry right at the beginning of my career, so I sent my very short curriculum vitae, hoping that at least I might be invited to visit and give a talk.
Instead, I was offered the position. I knew the university was the home of an eminent chromosome expert, Spencer Smith-White, which made the institution an attractive place to be. But my marriage was breaking up, and I could not imagine being so far away from my children, so I turned down the opportunity without even mentioning it to the head of my department to try to chisel a raise. I have often wondered what might have happened had I accepted that job.
In 1988, I finally went to Australia, and I immediately fell in love with it. The environmental movement was at a peak of energy and public support around the world, and Australia had recently established the Commission for the Future, a government-funded organization to look at the role of science in Australian society and its place in the country's future. It was a good idea, similar to the Science Council of Canada, which Brian Mulroney dismantled in 1993 during his second term as prime minister.