Endlessness. It's the most intoxicating thing on earth: a place that goes on
for ever. Or seems to. While I was there, I felt as if there were no cities
left on earth, hardly any people, that civilisation had never happened. It
is both the beginning and the end of the world: a place of vicious, stinging
beauty, and has been called the Green Hell. I walked through it: flew across
it: loved it. How could anyone not?
Today an extraordinary agreement will be signed, not among the thorns and the
snakes and the jaguars, but in a lovely rose garden in Suffolk. It will
safeguard the future of the wildest place left on earth: the Dry Chaco in
Paraguay.
The deal will be signed by the Government of Paraguay, taking a step that
contradicts everything we believe about Paraguayan politics. It involves an
Argentine biologist who looks like a circus strongman, a group of fiercely
dedicated young Paraguayans, and a maverick genius of the conservation
movement who happens to live in Suffolk.
Last week I was flying over the Chaco in a light aircraft: can you believe how
big it is? It goes on for ever. And when the ink hits the paper today, one
million hectares of it will be safe. One million hectares is roughly the
size of Yorkshire.
I stared down in astonishment: this dense, frightening habitat could hide
absolutely anything. Anything. And please do not think that I say such
things for effect: there are uncontacted tribes down there. They know we're
out there, and occasionally they leave us messages in symbolic form:
gatherings of feathers that spell out the fact that uncontacted is how they
wish to stay.
A mammal the size of a miniature pony was discovered there as recently as
1975: the Chaco giant peccary, a chunky thing much like a pig. It was known
from fossils; nobody had a clue that the damn thing was still alive and
rootling about in the Chaco. But then, nobody goes there much, and even if
you do go, it's insanely hard to get about.
That's not just because the place is full of jaguars and pumas. It's also
because the dense thorn-scrub is impenetrable to the person on foot. It's a
ferocious place that lacks all human logic. It is the hardest country on
earth: and yet it was the site of the Chaco War, fought out in the 1930s
between Paraguay and Bolivia, in the mistaken belief that the place was
awash with oil. In a terrible conflict that lasted four years, more men died
from disease than fighting. This is a tough place: but it is also in-
finitely fragile. You can still see the scars of the war: not only the
trenches and the earthworks, but also the tracks of tanks. This is a place
very slow to heal.
Sir David Attenborough was there 50 years ago making Zoo Quest in Paraguay:
and much of the place has hardly changed. This is a special place for him:
and he has known a few places. “It's one of the great wildernesses,” he
said. “Back then, of course, places like that were of no interest to anyone.
Now, with the growth of human population, every wild place in the world is
under some kind of threat. It's marvellous that this place is being
preserved.”
Attenborough remembers the discomfort of day after day on horseback. “Oh, it
was the armadillos that I liked best. We were collecting them for London
Zoo: and when we caught them, we put them in the ox-wagon.” Times and
conservation priorities change, and Attenborough has done more than anyone
else to change the way we see the wild world. He doesn't lend his name and
his reputation lightly, but he is patron of the World Land Trust, because he
thinks that it has got it right. He will be at the rose garden this evening,
for it is the Suffolk-based World Land Trust that is part of this major
advance in Paraguay.
For most of us, Paraguay is famous for three things: dictatorships, runaway
Nazis and a footballer known as El Loco. It is instructive to learn, then,
that they finally got rid of the unspeakable Alfredo Stroessner in 1992
after 34 years in power. His vainglorious statue has been smashed to bits
and is part of an installation downtown, bits of dismembered statue stuck
dramatically between two blocks of concrete.
The country is properly democratic, and in the process of acquiring a full
understanding of freedom. These days, no one can hold office more than five
years. That includes the Minister for the Environment, Carlos Lopez: a
quietly spoken man, a natural dresser-downer, the sort you file at once in
the underestimate-at-your-peril category.
He is doing an unprecedented thing for a Paraguayan minister. He is giving
away power. He is giving away the Government's power. His own department
felt he was ceding control of Paraguay to Suffolk. Lopez told his
department, mildly, that it was going to happen with it or without it.
He is signing away control of three national parks. For the next ten years,
the three parks will be run by Guyra Paraguay, an independent conservation
organisation based in Asunción. I visited its headquarters many times during
my stay, and shook hands with the guard every time I entered. He is there
because the offices have been bombed twice, and Alberto Yanosky, the chief
executive, has had death threats. Conservation is a serious issue here.
Yanosky is the circus strong-man: an Argentinian who loves Paraguay. His
natural force can be a useful weapon against the more diffident nature of
the Paraguayans: he is an impressively decisive man. He is also deeply
ambitious, but for the organisation and what it can achieve. What's more, he
is also a hopeless navigator.
For four years, he had been trying to set up a meeting with John Burton, the
aforementioned maverick, co-founder and chief executive of the World Land
Trust. Burton, up to his ears in projects in other countries and naturally
suspicious of the Paraguayan track record of stable government, resisted his
overtures until Yanosky's persistence wore him down.
But Yanosky was four hours late. He got disastrously lost between Cambridge
and Halesworth in Suffolk. It should have been disaster. But when he and
Burton met, it was a meeting of minds. The trust was soon giving huge
support to projects in Paraguay: but never so huge as the one coming up.
Burton helped to found WLT in 1989. The organisation funds the purchase of
endangered habitat: for £50, you can, for example, buy an acre of
rainforest. Ah, but you can't keep it, you see. And here's the point:
neither will WLT. That would be neocolonialism and a Bad Thing. It would be
working against the countries they are trying to co-operate with. WLT buys
land on behalf of cash-strapped conservation organisations in the countries
concerned.
The most arresting part of the dry Chaco is the palo borracho, the drunken
stick: that is to say, the great spine- covered, pot-bellied trees that
punctuate the landscape to remind you time and again of the place's singular
oddity. Gerald Durrell called it the drunken forest: its trees are designed
for water retention, for this place can hit 50 degrees C (122F) and hold it
for months at a time. The drunken trees add a jocular comment on a place of
massive seriousness. The Paraguayans always had the edge in the Chaco War
because they knew how to find water.
My strongest memory of the animals of the place is a soft one. A journey into
an area called Campo Iris, a seriously remote part of the world: but every
yard of the long drive across the Chaco was whirling with butterflies:
sometimes in dozens, sometimes in vast fluttering clouds: all china-white.
There are big animals concealed in the ferocious thorn-brush of the Chaco: the
big cats, tapir, deer, three species of peccary, giant anteater, and a great
adaptive radiation of armadillos, Attenborough's favourites. Any walk across
the Chaco involves tripping over armadillo holes. There are eight species
tunnelling their way beneath the surface.
There is also a gentler part of the Chaco. Away from the thorns, the humid
Chaco stretches out in the forest and the open marshland of the Pantanal:
here I paddled a canoe on the Rio Negro and wove my way past a caiman. There
are giant otter here: great monsters twice the size of our own.
But it was the tougher country that won me over entirely. There are 50-100
people still out there uncontacted, despite the best efforts of
missionaries: “An abuse of human rights,” said Benno Glauser of Iniciativa
Amotocodie, an organisation that seeks greater understanding of Paraguay's
indigenous people. “Their world view is still holding up: but it cannot hold
up once contact has been made. Their world is forest and they live in it as
in a womb. But they understand that always, they must work on the balance.”
Not just them. World Land Trust works on projects in Belize, Brazil,
Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, the Philippines, India. It operates
under the ancient principle that, since they ain't makin' it any more, land
is what conservation movement needs above all else. Land; and good people.
I've see it work, in Belize and Brazil: I've walked and talked with WLT
partners from all the other projects. But the scale of this latest move
surpasses anything that has happened before.
In the Chaco, there is invasion of the land for cattle grazing. People poach
the wildlife. There is illegal logging, and illegal mineral extraction. All
this goes on because there is not enough money, and not enough knowledge, to
maintain the park, to put people out there on the ground, to stop the
deterioration, to understand the ecology, to bring in tourists, to make the
place into something that a nation can be proud off.
And so the Paraguayan Government, Guyra Paraguay and World Land Trust will
sign this ground-breaking tripartite agreement today and the parks will be
run for ten years by Guyra, in consultation and with the financial backing
of WLT. And so it begins: the investigation, the understanding of the
problems, the management plan, its instigation.
But above all, the agreement is a statement that the Chaco is something
wonderful. It is not a shaming thing, a symbol of backwardness: of lack of
development: rather, it is something that a developing country can boast
about. In this country, we did our developing at ferocious environmental
cost: now we spend millions on restoration, on patching up our ruined
countryside. A developing country can fly by those nets: Paraguay, once
reviled and derided, is now showing the world the way it should be done.
As we drove to the plane to take us back to Asunción, a rhea, the South
American ostrich, 5ft tall and fearfully swift, galloped alongside us with a
mad Groucho Marx stride. The male incubates the eggs of several females at
once, and will be found wandering across the Chaco with 60 balls of fluff
around his knees.
It's all about taking responsibility for the vulnerable.
Land purchase: acts of pointless generosity? And why the World Land Trust
is different
The World Land Trust is not without its critics. The entire notion of buying
up land overseas for the purposes of conservation has come under savage
attack from various quarters, much of it justified.
Wealthy individuals have bought up large tracts of land of conservation
importance, often rainforest, in the sincere belief that they were doing the
planet a good turn. This practice has been called unethical, neocolonial and
unsustainable.
The point to recognise here is that WLT doesn't own a square inch of land
overseas. Rather, it has consistently supported partner organisations in
other countries: NGOs, along the lines of the Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds, but without the money. As a result, 350,000 acres of
land overseas are managed for conservation by organisations in the
appropriate country.
The RSPB buys up land in this country for conservation purposes: so do the
county wildlife trusts. WLT supports similar organisations overseas, and
funds them with our money, so that they can buy land and establish
high-quality and - here's the big word - sustainable reserves for the
conservation of biodiversity.
Most of the rich-man-buys-land deals do not establish a sustainable
infrastructure, because they are not associated with a local organisation.
As a result, the places they buy are subject to uncontrolled poaching,
illegal logging, invasion by clearing and grazing, unilateral land grabs and
all kinds of abuses. The purchase is a pointless act of flawed generosity.
But WLT's fundamental approach is sustainability. For a start, there is no
question of disturbing indigenous people. There is a strong policy of
involving local communities: it's about co-operation, not antagonism.
A WLT project in the Philippines won a government award, formal recognition of
another reserve was given by the Argentine Government, and the Ecuadorian
Government recognised yet another reserve as “the natural heritage of Quito
town”.
In Paraguay, at a project the other end of the country from the Dry Chaco, the
Vice-President spoke eloquently about the importance of support of the
international community. The aim of such support is not to recolonise the
developing world in the name of a new and different orthodoxy. Rather, it is
to give important places back to the countries that they belong to, so that
they will be safe from such things as the unceasing demand of multinational
companies: the true neocolonialists.
