Not trying to get a pissing match going but this is a very good read and if the people on the left coast want to dump huge amounts of money into some thing that is actually worth while, then this should be it, instead of buying parts of ocean to shut off the small fisherman. I don't usually read a whole article that is this long, but this one just seemed to keep me going....
Rescuing a jewel in Peru
Sun Apr 11, 9:40 AM
By William Mullen Tribune staff reporter
In all of his years wandering through Amazonian rain forests, Marcos Perez had never seen anything like the Cordillera Azul, a stunningly remote, mountainous world that had taken him days of river journeys and weeks of climbing to enter.
A logger in search of stands of hardwood, Perez was picking his way through this steamy, uncharted tropical region in central Peru in 1997 when he noticed something unusual: Monkeys had descended from their perches high in the triple-canopy forests so they could get a good look at him.
In the jungles where he normally works, animals don't act that way. They equate humans with hunting and death. But these loudly chattering monkeys came down to the lowest branches for a clear look at a species almost never seen in their forest--a human. Likewise the honking curassows--dark, long-tailed, ground-feeding birds the size of a turkey--fearlessly strutted up. Herds of piglike peccaries ambled by, paying Perez no attention.
"They had never seen a human before," he said.
Until a few years ago, the mere existence of the Cordillera Azul, with its spectacular 7,000-foot mountain peaks and fog-shrouded rain forest, remained a mystery to all but some local coca farmers and a few loggers and biologists.
The Cordillera Azul, or Blue Mountains, is so far from human settlements, its peaks so intimidating to climb, that few people had ever made the journey.
Still, human encroachment had ruined surrounding lands and threatened to spill into the pristine rain forests. Destruction seemed inevitable. But then two venerable Chicago institutions intervened, joining Peruvian conservationists to persuade the government to allow the creation of one of the world's largest national parks.
Now the vast, unsullied wilderness is the focus of a fascinating experiment on whether private institutions such as Chicago's Field Museum can help preserve and manage a nation's ecological treasures.
If the effort succeeds, it will mark a rare victory over the relentless human assault against the equatorial rain forests of Africa, Asia and South America, where commercial interests big and small kill off an average of 125 square miles of forest every day.
Chicago's involvement in the venture to protect a region of 5,225 square miles, larger than Connecticut, is a story of institutional and individual backbone.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation initially put up nearly $200,000 to fund a campaign launched by a small group of international conservationists who were trying to find some protection for the Cordillera Azul before human development moved in.
The MacArthur funding brought together the masterminds of the new park, Peruvian herpetologist Lily Rodriguez and Brazilian-born biologist Debra Moskovits, director of the Field Museum's environmental and conservation programs. Worried about plans by Peru to sell timber rights to forests on the eastern perimeter of the Cordillera Azul in 2000, the women wanted to lead an expedition into the uncharted region to inventory some of the biological riches that would be put at risk.
Highly diverse ecosystems
Scientists still only dimly understand the complex relationships of life in tropical rain forests teeming with monkey colonies, lethal vipers, exotic birds, poisonous frogs, mega-cities of deadly ants. They are the most diverse ecosystems in the world.
One Peruvian rain forest tree species has been found to accommodate 43 species of ants, as many species as live in all of Britain. Another hosts only a single ant species, which will viciously attack any other living thing that approaches. Differing monkey species share trees that tower like city tenements, each taking up residence at separate elevations, helping each other search for food and working in tandem like neighborhood watch teams in vigilance against dangerous predators.
Unraveling the mysteries of rain forests, such as the toxic chemistry of poison dart frogs or the bitter alkaloids manufactured by forest plants, could be of incalculable value to humans. Such rain forest chemicals already are used by Western medicine to treat everything from leukemia to Parkinson's disease.
Because of the Cordillera Azul's splendid isolation, it harbors uncounted communities of plants and animals still waiting for scientific discovery and examination.
"[The Cordillera Azul] is the genetic reserve of the world," said Carlos Amat y Leon, Peru's agriculture minister when Rodriguez and Moskovits began their quest to save the wilderness. "We got in [here] just in time, before migrant pressure overcame it. We have to learn how to manage biodiversity, and here is a place we can learn. As a national park, it is an important benefit, not just for Peru but for the world."
Experts had little more than a hunch of the region's ecological riches when the first known scientist entered the Cordillera Azul in 1998. Louisiana State University ornithologist John O'Neill had been studying tropical birds in Peru since 1963 and had heard tales of the Cordillera Azul.
"It's an area off the flight routes of commercial airlines," O'Neill said. "Every now and then I would hear about somebody's small plane that would get off course a little bit and they'd see all these mountains where the map showed nothing."
The Cordillera Azul's dramatic peaks, reminiscent of the Grand Tetons in the U.S., form the easternmost foothills to the Andes Mountains but are so remote that they escaped notice by mapmakers until the 1990s.
By the time O'Neill determined the Cordillera Azul's location in 1990, he couldn't go there. Colombian drug cartels and Peru's homegrown insurgent movements, the dreaded Shining Path and Tupac Amaru, ruled the adjoining regions, which had become the world's leading growing area for coca leaf, the key ingredient for cocaine. Violent struggles for supremacy between the various factions and Peru's military made travel in the vicinity perilous.
O'Neill's expedition team spent a week traveling upriver in small boats to get into the park region. He and his crew then spent weeks working their way through forests to get to and climb the ridge they wanted to explore.
Rich with endemic animals and plants, the region's ridges have evolved for thousands of years in isolation. Unable to survive in the warmer, drier elevations lower down the mountains, wildlife and plants remained perched high above the forest floor in one-of-a-kind island populations. It was a biological treasure-trove nearly 60 percent larger than Yellowstone National Park. O'Neill had struck biotic gold and he knew it. But O'Neill was also aware that such areas constantly face destruction.
The Cordillera Azul is only a small part of the Amazonian system that once covered an area equal to the contiguous 48 United States. Nearly one-third of the Amazon system is now gone or irreparably damaged.
Rapid destruction
Every year, about 50,000 square miles of the world's equatorial rain forest belt, stretching across Africa, Asia and South America, are destroyed, a pace that, if maintained, would erase the last remaining forests by the end of the century.
Once gone, they don't grow back. The forests are great planetary machines that manufacture rain, clean water, fresh air and global weather patterns.
It is impossible to predict what the consequences of their loss will be. The best guess is that North America will become drier, its winters warmer, its springs and summers marked by extremely severe storms. Many northern tree and other plant species that need cold-winter dormancy could be killed off.
Rodriguez, the Peruvian herpetologist, first heard of the Cordillera Azul in 1994, when she was a member of a government commission assigned to compile a list of Peruvian wilderness areas in possible need of protection. O'Neill told her she should include the Cordillera Azul, and she did.
She got her first look at the place in 1999 when she led a small Peruvian expedition into the area at the request of the government to assess what resources might lie inside. Poorly funded, they barely got a glimpse of the vast region, taking boats up a river into its eastern perimeter and flying over the area in a small plane.
Rodriguez was struck by the sparse evidence of any human presence.
"I started thinking that, with nobody really living in there, why didn't we make this into a national park? . . . I was told that I was naive, that something like that would take decades to achieve," she said.
A year later, alarm bells went off within Peru's small conservation community and as far away as Chicago when Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (news - web sites)'s government solicited bids for timberlands adjoining the Cordillera Azul.
Rodriguez turned for help to a friend, Avecita Chicchon, a Peruvian-born anthropologist who is the MacArthur Foundation's South American program officer.
Chicchon introduced Rodriguez to Moskovits, whose Field Museum department specializes in assisting Third World conservationists. It was the start of a beautiful friendship, although no one would have guessed it at the time.
Rodriguez, 47, might reach 5 feet in high heels, which she seldom wears. With dark hair cropped short for ease of care in jungle camps, she prefers trousers and simple shirts whether in the office or when doing her renowned tropical frog research in rain forests.
Having done her doctoral work in Paris, the multilingual, gregarious, wisecracking Rodriguez has become a familiar face at international scientific meetings, where she is often sent to represent South America.
She now heads a small, private Peruvian conservation group she formed with two friends, the Center for Conservation, Research and Management of Natural Areas, known by its acronym, CIMA.
A professed night person who works into the wee hours, Rodriguez lets off steam over late dinners and pisco sours, Peru's potent national drink, with friends in fine restaurants.
When not doing fieldwork, she's at CIMA's modest offices in a rented house in Lima, Peru's capital, where she immerses herself in planning strategy, delegating day-to-day operational details to colleagues.
Moskovits, on the other hand, is tall, elegant and reserved. She, too, keeps her wiry, salt-and-pepper hair short for ease of care because of frequent forays into jungles. A University of Chicago graduate with a Princeton doctorate, Moskovits, 48, is a pioneer in behavioral studies of wild mammals in rain forests throughout the world.
A professed morning person, she is an early riser who worries over the details of her work all day, jumping from phone calls to e-mails to meetings wherever she finds herself. Her conservation work for the museum keeps her traveling constantly, to every continent save Antarctica.
Because she is on the road so much, she is used to having solitary dinners hunched over her paperwork, dining on candy bars in hotel rooms or, if she can find a good coffee shop, eating ice cream, chocolate cake or brownies.
Traveling constantly to Africa, Asia and South America, she oversees museum programs and argues for the museum's causes with government ministers, diplomats, corporate chiefs and heads of state.
A partnership is born
Moskovits' department includes a Rapid Biological Inventory unit, or RBI, a team of scientists who on short notice can ship out to assist Third World conservation groups struggling to save threatened wilderness areas.
"The idea is to amass relevant data very quickly when an environment seems threatened," said Thomas Schulenberg, a Field ornithologist who works with the RBI unit. "You have to prove something is worth saving, so you need good information, and that is not always available in Third World countries where conservationists struggle for funding."
The RBI unit had just completed a MacArthur-funded project in Bolivia when Rodriguez called for help. Chicchon took Moskovits to Peru and made a proposal: MacArthur would underwrite the cost of a biological inventory in the Cordillera Azul if the museum team and the Peruvian team did the work together.
There was just one problem: Rodriguez and Moskovits did not like each other from the start.
"Debby and I are very different people," Rodriguez said of their first meeting. "We have different personalities and we have different ways of doing work. We didn't have much in common to talk about."
"Lily is feisty," Moskovits said. She said she got the impression that Rodriguez regarded the RBI unit as "gringos on her turf. She wanted to make sure that this was going to be thought of as a Peruvian expedition, not an American project," Moskovits said.
One thing both women liked, though, was working in rain forest camps. So they developed a cool, businesslike cordiality as they put together an expedition of 18 Peruvian, U.S. and Swiss bird, mammal, fish and plant scientists.
The inventories are expensive undertakings, and the Cordillera Azul expedition had enough funding for just three weeks of work. The scientists settled on sampling three small areas to determine whether the region had unusual plant and animal communities worth saving.
The mountains and terrain of the Cordillera Azul are so rugged and trackless that traveling overland to their study sites would take almost their entire three weeks. So they arranged to fly in aboard two huge Russian M17 transport helicopters operated by the Peruvian National Police.
The helicopter police, who had to stay with the scientists during the inventory as armed security, were grizzled veterans of the extraordinarily dangerous, 20-year-old war against drug lords and revolutionaries in the Huallaga Valley, just a 20-minute helicopter ride west of the expedition site.
"We were dropped in different places for a week at a time," Moskovits said, "and four or five police were under orders to stay with us. We were not thrilled to have them, and they weren't too happy either.
"The first day we flew, they told us to stay in our seats in the choppers, but as we went over the forest, we were jumping all over, trying to get a better look, running to every window and the open door, we were so excited. The police were in their seats, asleep."
On the ground, the police thought the scientists would remain together in a base camp, but the researchers split up, going to different parts of the forest on separate missions, keeping their own camps. Angry, the police had to scatter with them.
"It was remarkable, once they got into the forest with us," Moskovits said. "They got to enjoying doing the work we were doing.
"At the end of the first week, when we were being choppered to our next location, it was the police who were the ones at the windows and doorway, looking and shouting and identifying what they were seeing. They were just transformed. They just fell in love with the mountains."
Scientists taken aback
The forest flabbergasted the scientists on the expedition too, beginning with the enchantment of encountering so many animals that obviously had never seen humans.
"Animals without fear of humans, to me that was fascinating," the Field's Schulenberg said.
"Monkey meat is a favorite of humans living in the tropics, both indigenous people and settlers," he said, "so monkeys normally flee and hide when people are present. We were such an oddity that the monkeys came down lower on the trees as we passed by to get a better look and to screech at us."
Peccaries, piglike animals whose meat is prized, also are terrified of humans in other parts of the Amazon.
"Where we were, herds of 100 or more peccaries would amble by us," Schulenberg said.
The inventory found 12 species of plants new to science. It documented 1,600 of the 4,000 to 6,000 plant species thought to grow in the region.
"I have never been on a trip from which so many new plants were discovered in such a short time," said Field botanist Robin Foster, who discovered one new palm species simply looking down during a helicopter ride.
Zoologists identified 71 mammal species, including a new squirrel, 500 bird species, one new to science, and eight new species of frogs among 82 amphibian and reptile species recorded. They found 10 new species of fish, including sucker-mouthed catfish that used their mouths to cling to and climb steep rock surfaces behind waterfalls.
The scientists spotted large flocks of birds that had been discovered only in the last decade, in extremely small numbers, in other widely scattered sites around Peru.
"Apparently this is their central area," Schulenberg said. "Some of them we presumed before to be extremely rare. They are much more numerous than we had thought.
"The soils seem to differ from one ridge to the next, so there were different plant communities from one ridge to next. That's when you find rare animal communities too. We found a brightly colored barbet, a small-billed toucan, that I can hardly believe, because it seems to be just on one mountaintop, this ridge running 5 miles long.
"When you get to the top of a ridge and find a bird species never seen before, you immediately want to climb all of them. We only got to the top of a couple, so it certainly left us with a sense that there is a lot more exploring to be done in the park. We really were excited because this could keep us busy for a long time."
There is no more complex web of life than what is found in tropical rain forests such as the Cordillera Azul, and science has only a bare inkling so far of how those complexities mesh together.
"Come here and look at this tree, but be very careful not to touch it," herpetologist and wilderness guide Guillermo Knell told two visitors in a triple-canopy forest along the Cordillera Azul's eastern boundary, near the Shipibo Indian village of Nuevo Eden.
"This," he said, "is a tangarana tree, home of these tangarana ants."
With its straight, smooth, gray trunk no more than 10 inches in diameter, the tree was a dwarf in this forest of giants, but it dramatically demonstrated the complexity of the rain forest.
"The tree, the ants and a small aphid that lives in the tree have a very nice, three-way symbiotic relationship," Knell said. "The aphids eat the tree sap and poop a sweet excretion. The ants patrol the surface of the tree and the ground underneath it for the excretion, which they eat.
"The ants are very territorial and ferociously protective of the tree. They keep the ground at the base of the tree clear of any competing plants. If they feel the vibration of any other animal climbing on the tree, they swarm out and attack it with thousands of painful bites."
Knell tapped the tree with his right forefinger. In a blink the tangaranas, roughly the size of carpenter ants, appeared at the very spot he tapped, one managing to deliver a swelling bite as he jerked back his hand.
"Natives who get mad at a really bad person will tie the bad one up naked to a tangarana tree and let him die," Knell said.
Medical possibilities
The potential for understanding the complex rain forest plant and animal relationships goes far beyond simply filling in blanks of academic knowledge about rain forest biology.
Tropical rain forest plants, and to a lesser extent animals, have spent millions of years experimenting and developing chemical defense systems to protect them from predators.
Tropical frogs exude strong poisons from their skin to discourage birds of prey. Tropical bushes contain bitter alkaloids to fend off insects. The alkaloid in the coca bush that fends off leaf-eating ants is the active narcotic ingredient that makes cocaine both an anesthetic and an intoxicating social drug.
Such naturally evolved chemicals from rain forests are of interest to medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies for their potential to fight human diseases.
About 25 percent of Western medicines come from chemicals studied in rain forest plants and animals. They are used to treat malaria, glaucoma, leukemia, multiple sclerosis and Hodgkin's and Parkinson's diseases. They have provided chemical blueprints that are used in making birth-control pills and anesthetics.
Asked what benefits the Field Museum might derive from its work to save the Cordillera Azul, Moskovits cited the science.
"That's the museum's mission," she said, "to understand the biological and cultural diversity of life and to protect it."
At the end of the second week of the expedition, one of the police helicopter crews flew off to a repair base after the aircraft developed an electrical problem. It crashed en route, and the co-pilot was killed.
"The accident was tragic," Moskovits said, "and it brought everybody in the expedition closer together. It just made what we were doing seem all the more precious."
After the accident, Moskovits and Rodriguez decided to try to patch up their differences by camping and working together in the expedition's final week. It was an almost fatal decision.
The first day out, they hiked up a mountain all day until reaching its razor-edged peak. Two Shipibo Indian porters had carried their backpacks ahead of them, leaving the packs for the women to find on the mountaintop while the porters descended to another camp. When the women got to the packs, they discovered to their horror that somehow only their tents were in them, no food or water.
"It was too late to go to another camp," Rodriguez said, "so we found a pool of murky brown water in the forest. I had some purification tabs, so I made some cold coffee. Debby wouldn't touch it, but I always carry a little stock of cheese for emergencies, and that was our dinner."
After setting up their tents, just before dark, they started hiking back to the dirty pond to wash their faces for the night when a furious rainstorm blew up, crackling with thunder and lightning. As they ran back to their tents, the wind gusted so strongly that both said they feared being lifted and hurled over the side of the mountain.
"It was like an earthquake hit with every thunderclap. Even the insides of our tents collected pools of water," Rodriguez recalled. "I had a waterproof sleeping bag, so I finally was able to get some sleep, but Debby's tent was flooded, and she didn't get any sleep at all."
In the calm of the next morning, Rodriguez found the bleary-eyed Moskovits sitting in the sun and sleepily complaining in Spanish, a language in which she was not yet fluent, talking about her exhaustion, substituting Portuguese words when she couldn't summon Spanish.
"She said something about how her knees were beginning to look beautiful," Rodriguez said, "and I had to stop her. `No, no, no. You haven't got your words right,' I told her."
In fact, Moskovits was lamenting how the steep, brutal ascent up the mountain the day before had so mangled her knees that they were beginning to look old. But the Portuguese phrase she used in her Spanish sentence came out that she thought her knees were "becoming beautiful."
"We started laughing so hard, we could only be friends after that," said Rodriguez, recalling the moment.
"Since then, we hardly stop talking every day on the phone or in e-mails, wherever in the world we are. Debby travels even more than I do, but even when she's someplace in China, she calls me up on her satellite phone and we talk about the park and what is the latest thing to happen."
Quest becomes urgent
A few weeks after the expedition, in November 2000, the team was trying to figure out how much of the area it could dare to ask the Fujimori government to place under protection when a major political scandal forced the president to resign and flee into exile.
A spasm of political reform followed, and Valentin Paniagua, a respected constitutional lawyer, became acting president until a new government could be elected in about nine months.
Paniagua selected a number of highly regarded Peruvians for his Cabinet, which was headed by Javier Perez de Cuellar, who had served for a decade as United Nations (news - web sites) secretary general.
Believing that Paniagua's Cabinet was not beholden to any special interests, Rodriguez and Moskovits seized the moment, petitioning the interim government to make the Cordillera Azul a national park, protecting it forever from any sort of exploitation.
"Paniagua had to leave office after the July 2001 election," Moskovits said, "so any decision his government could make that would maintain its legitimacy had to be made by June 2001. That meant we had to put together a proposal for the park in March and April to meet the deadline.
"Lily knows everybody in Peru, and that made all the difference in the world. She pulled every string she had available to her, and we got an appointment with the president and the Cabinet in April.
"We were working so furiously, we were still collating the report on the way to the meeting."
Part of the presentation included watercolors by museum artist Peggy Macnamara, vivid paintings of all the animals new to science discovered in the Cordillera Azul. Moved by the artwork, Paniagua suggested an aerial tour of the forest.
With their good friends in the national helicopter police piloting the aircraft and some of the most formidable experts on tropical environments riding along, the conservationists gave the president and his Cabinet a memorable and educational excursion.
"Perez de Cuellar was soon identifying the palms we were flying over," Moskovits said. "When the flight ended, both he and President Paniagua were thanking us very emotionally."
Six weeks later, on May 21, 2001, Paniagua signed a law making the Cordillera Azul a national park. The Field Museum team and their Peruvian partners had barely finished celebrating when they learned that American oil giant Occidental Petroleum Corp. had sent a team into the new park. The company's geologists came out almost certain that important oil reserves lay under the park's rugged interior.
Peru's incoming president urged Occidental to do whatever cutting, blasting and drilling was necessary.
Rescuing a jewel in Peru
Sun Apr 11, 9:40 AM
By William Mullen Tribune staff reporter
In all of his years wandering through Amazonian rain forests, Marcos Perez had never seen anything like the Cordillera Azul, a stunningly remote, mountainous world that had taken him days of river journeys and weeks of climbing to enter.
A logger in search of stands of hardwood, Perez was picking his way through this steamy, uncharted tropical region in central Peru in 1997 when he noticed something unusual: Monkeys had descended from their perches high in the triple-canopy forests so they could get a good look at him.
In the jungles where he normally works, animals don't act that way. They equate humans with hunting and death. But these loudly chattering monkeys came down to the lowest branches for a clear look at a species almost never seen in their forest--a human. Likewise the honking curassows--dark, long-tailed, ground-feeding birds the size of a turkey--fearlessly strutted up. Herds of piglike peccaries ambled by, paying Perez no attention.
"They had never seen a human before," he said.
Until a few years ago, the mere existence of the Cordillera Azul, with its spectacular 7,000-foot mountain peaks and fog-shrouded rain forest, remained a mystery to all but some local coca farmers and a few loggers and biologists.
The Cordillera Azul, or Blue Mountains, is so far from human settlements, its peaks so intimidating to climb, that few people had ever made the journey.
Still, human encroachment had ruined surrounding lands and threatened to spill into the pristine rain forests. Destruction seemed inevitable. But then two venerable Chicago institutions intervened, joining Peruvian conservationists to persuade the government to allow the creation of one of the world's largest national parks.
Now the vast, unsullied wilderness is the focus of a fascinating experiment on whether private institutions such as Chicago's Field Museum can help preserve and manage a nation's ecological treasures.
If the effort succeeds, it will mark a rare victory over the relentless human assault against the equatorial rain forests of Africa, Asia and South America, where commercial interests big and small kill off an average of 125 square miles of forest every day.
Chicago's involvement in the venture to protect a region of 5,225 square miles, larger than Connecticut, is a story of institutional and individual backbone.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation initially put up nearly $200,000 to fund a campaign launched by a small group of international conservationists who were trying to find some protection for the Cordillera Azul before human development moved in.
The MacArthur funding brought together the masterminds of the new park, Peruvian herpetologist Lily Rodriguez and Brazilian-born biologist Debra Moskovits, director of the Field Museum's environmental and conservation programs. Worried about plans by Peru to sell timber rights to forests on the eastern perimeter of the Cordillera Azul in 2000, the women wanted to lead an expedition into the uncharted region to inventory some of the biological riches that would be put at risk.
Highly diverse ecosystems
Scientists still only dimly understand the complex relationships of life in tropical rain forests teeming with monkey colonies, lethal vipers, exotic birds, poisonous frogs, mega-cities of deadly ants. They are the most diverse ecosystems in the world.
One Peruvian rain forest tree species has been found to accommodate 43 species of ants, as many species as live in all of Britain. Another hosts only a single ant species, which will viciously attack any other living thing that approaches. Differing monkey species share trees that tower like city tenements, each taking up residence at separate elevations, helping each other search for food and working in tandem like neighborhood watch teams in vigilance against dangerous predators.
Unraveling the mysteries of rain forests, such as the toxic chemistry of poison dart frogs or the bitter alkaloids manufactured by forest plants, could be of incalculable value to humans. Such rain forest chemicals already are used by Western medicine to treat everything from leukemia to Parkinson's disease.
Because of the Cordillera Azul's splendid isolation, it harbors uncounted communities of plants and animals still waiting for scientific discovery and examination.
"[The Cordillera Azul] is the genetic reserve of the world," said Carlos Amat y Leon, Peru's agriculture minister when Rodriguez and Moskovits began their quest to save the wilderness. "We got in [here] just in time, before migrant pressure overcame it. We have to learn how to manage biodiversity, and here is a place we can learn. As a national park, it is an important benefit, not just for Peru but for the world."
Experts had little more than a hunch of the region's ecological riches when the first known scientist entered the Cordillera Azul in 1998. Louisiana State University ornithologist John O'Neill had been studying tropical birds in Peru since 1963 and had heard tales of the Cordillera Azul.
"It's an area off the flight routes of commercial airlines," O'Neill said. "Every now and then I would hear about somebody's small plane that would get off course a little bit and they'd see all these mountains where the map showed nothing."
The Cordillera Azul's dramatic peaks, reminiscent of the Grand Tetons in the U.S., form the easternmost foothills to the Andes Mountains but are so remote that they escaped notice by mapmakers until the 1990s.
By the time O'Neill determined the Cordillera Azul's location in 1990, he couldn't go there. Colombian drug cartels and Peru's homegrown insurgent movements, the dreaded Shining Path and Tupac Amaru, ruled the adjoining regions, which had become the world's leading growing area for coca leaf, the key ingredient for cocaine. Violent struggles for supremacy between the various factions and Peru's military made travel in the vicinity perilous.
O'Neill's expedition team spent a week traveling upriver in small boats to get into the park region. He and his crew then spent weeks working their way through forests to get to and climb the ridge they wanted to explore.
Rich with endemic animals and plants, the region's ridges have evolved for thousands of years in isolation. Unable to survive in the warmer, drier elevations lower down the mountains, wildlife and plants remained perched high above the forest floor in one-of-a-kind island populations. It was a biological treasure-trove nearly 60 percent larger than Yellowstone National Park. O'Neill had struck biotic gold and he knew it. But O'Neill was also aware that such areas constantly face destruction.
The Cordillera Azul is only a small part of the Amazonian system that once covered an area equal to the contiguous 48 United States. Nearly one-third of the Amazon system is now gone or irreparably damaged.
Rapid destruction
Every year, about 50,000 square miles of the world's equatorial rain forest belt, stretching across Africa, Asia and South America, are destroyed, a pace that, if maintained, would erase the last remaining forests by the end of the century.
Once gone, they don't grow back. The forests are great planetary machines that manufacture rain, clean water, fresh air and global weather patterns.
It is impossible to predict what the consequences of their loss will be. The best guess is that North America will become drier, its winters warmer, its springs and summers marked by extremely severe storms. Many northern tree and other plant species that need cold-winter dormancy could be killed off.
Rodriguez, the Peruvian herpetologist, first heard of the Cordillera Azul in 1994, when she was a member of a government commission assigned to compile a list of Peruvian wilderness areas in possible need of protection. O'Neill told her she should include the Cordillera Azul, and she did.
She got her first look at the place in 1999 when she led a small Peruvian expedition into the area at the request of the government to assess what resources might lie inside. Poorly funded, they barely got a glimpse of the vast region, taking boats up a river into its eastern perimeter and flying over the area in a small plane.
Rodriguez was struck by the sparse evidence of any human presence.
"I started thinking that, with nobody really living in there, why didn't we make this into a national park? . . . I was told that I was naive, that something like that would take decades to achieve," she said.
A year later, alarm bells went off within Peru's small conservation community and as far away as Chicago when Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (news - web sites)'s government solicited bids for timberlands adjoining the Cordillera Azul.
Rodriguez turned for help to a friend, Avecita Chicchon, a Peruvian-born anthropologist who is the MacArthur Foundation's South American program officer.
Chicchon introduced Rodriguez to Moskovits, whose Field Museum department specializes in assisting Third World conservationists. It was the start of a beautiful friendship, although no one would have guessed it at the time.
Rodriguez, 47, might reach 5 feet in high heels, which she seldom wears. With dark hair cropped short for ease of care in jungle camps, she prefers trousers and simple shirts whether in the office or when doing her renowned tropical frog research in rain forests.
Having done her doctoral work in Paris, the multilingual, gregarious, wisecracking Rodriguez has become a familiar face at international scientific meetings, where she is often sent to represent South America.
She now heads a small, private Peruvian conservation group she formed with two friends, the Center for Conservation, Research and Management of Natural Areas, known by its acronym, CIMA.
A professed night person who works into the wee hours, Rodriguez lets off steam over late dinners and pisco sours, Peru's potent national drink, with friends in fine restaurants.
When not doing fieldwork, she's at CIMA's modest offices in a rented house in Lima, Peru's capital, where she immerses herself in planning strategy, delegating day-to-day operational details to colleagues.
Moskovits, on the other hand, is tall, elegant and reserved. She, too, keeps her wiry, salt-and-pepper hair short for ease of care because of frequent forays into jungles. A University of Chicago graduate with a Princeton doctorate, Moskovits, 48, is a pioneer in behavioral studies of wild mammals in rain forests throughout the world.
A professed morning person, she is an early riser who worries over the details of her work all day, jumping from phone calls to e-mails to meetings wherever she finds herself. Her conservation work for the museum keeps her traveling constantly, to every continent save Antarctica.
Because she is on the road so much, she is used to having solitary dinners hunched over her paperwork, dining on candy bars in hotel rooms or, if she can find a good coffee shop, eating ice cream, chocolate cake or brownies.
Traveling constantly to Africa, Asia and South America, she oversees museum programs and argues for the museum's causes with government ministers, diplomats, corporate chiefs and heads of state.
A partnership is born
Moskovits' department includes a Rapid Biological Inventory unit, or RBI, a team of scientists who on short notice can ship out to assist Third World conservation groups struggling to save threatened wilderness areas.
"The idea is to amass relevant data very quickly when an environment seems threatened," said Thomas Schulenberg, a Field ornithologist who works with the RBI unit. "You have to prove something is worth saving, so you need good information, and that is not always available in Third World countries where conservationists struggle for funding."
The RBI unit had just completed a MacArthur-funded project in Bolivia when Rodriguez called for help. Chicchon took Moskovits to Peru and made a proposal: MacArthur would underwrite the cost of a biological inventory in the Cordillera Azul if the museum team and the Peruvian team did the work together.
There was just one problem: Rodriguez and Moskovits did not like each other from the start.
"Debby and I are very different people," Rodriguez said of their first meeting. "We have different personalities and we have different ways of doing work. We didn't have much in common to talk about."
"Lily is feisty," Moskovits said. She said she got the impression that Rodriguez regarded the RBI unit as "gringos on her turf. She wanted to make sure that this was going to be thought of as a Peruvian expedition, not an American project," Moskovits said.
One thing both women liked, though, was working in rain forest camps. So they developed a cool, businesslike cordiality as they put together an expedition of 18 Peruvian, U.S. and Swiss bird, mammal, fish and plant scientists.
The inventories are expensive undertakings, and the Cordillera Azul expedition had enough funding for just three weeks of work. The scientists settled on sampling three small areas to determine whether the region had unusual plant and animal communities worth saving.
The mountains and terrain of the Cordillera Azul are so rugged and trackless that traveling overland to their study sites would take almost their entire three weeks. So they arranged to fly in aboard two huge Russian M17 transport helicopters operated by the Peruvian National Police.
The helicopter police, who had to stay with the scientists during the inventory as armed security, were grizzled veterans of the extraordinarily dangerous, 20-year-old war against drug lords and revolutionaries in the Huallaga Valley, just a 20-minute helicopter ride west of the expedition site.
"We were dropped in different places for a week at a time," Moskovits said, "and four or five police were under orders to stay with us. We were not thrilled to have them, and they weren't too happy either.
"The first day we flew, they told us to stay in our seats in the choppers, but as we went over the forest, we were jumping all over, trying to get a better look, running to every window and the open door, we were so excited. The police were in their seats, asleep."
On the ground, the police thought the scientists would remain together in a base camp, but the researchers split up, going to different parts of the forest on separate missions, keeping their own camps. Angry, the police had to scatter with them.
"It was remarkable, once they got into the forest with us," Moskovits said. "They got to enjoying doing the work we were doing.
"At the end of the first week, when we were being choppered to our next location, it was the police who were the ones at the windows and doorway, looking and shouting and identifying what they were seeing. They were just transformed. They just fell in love with the mountains."
Scientists taken aback
The forest flabbergasted the scientists on the expedition too, beginning with the enchantment of encountering so many animals that obviously had never seen humans.
"Animals without fear of humans, to me that was fascinating," the Field's Schulenberg said.
"Monkey meat is a favorite of humans living in the tropics, both indigenous people and settlers," he said, "so monkeys normally flee and hide when people are present. We were such an oddity that the monkeys came down lower on the trees as we passed by to get a better look and to screech at us."
Peccaries, piglike animals whose meat is prized, also are terrified of humans in other parts of the Amazon.
"Where we were, herds of 100 or more peccaries would amble by us," Schulenberg said.
The inventory found 12 species of plants new to science. It documented 1,600 of the 4,000 to 6,000 plant species thought to grow in the region.
"I have never been on a trip from which so many new plants were discovered in such a short time," said Field botanist Robin Foster, who discovered one new palm species simply looking down during a helicopter ride.
Zoologists identified 71 mammal species, including a new squirrel, 500 bird species, one new to science, and eight new species of frogs among 82 amphibian and reptile species recorded. They found 10 new species of fish, including sucker-mouthed catfish that used their mouths to cling to and climb steep rock surfaces behind waterfalls.
The scientists spotted large flocks of birds that had been discovered only in the last decade, in extremely small numbers, in other widely scattered sites around Peru.
"Apparently this is their central area," Schulenberg said. "Some of them we presumed before to be extremely rare. They are much more numerous than we had thought.
"The soils seem to differ from one ridge to the next, so there were different plant communities from one ridge to next. That's when you find rare animal communities too. We found a brightly colored barbet, a small-billed toucan, that I can hardly believe, because it seems to be just on one mountaintop, this ridge running 5 miles long.
"When you get to the top of a ridge and find a bird species never seen before, you immediately want to climb all of them. We only got to the top of a couple, so it certainly left us with a sense that there is a lot more exploring to be done in the park. We really were excited because this could keep us busy for a long time."
There is no more complex web of life than what is found in tropical rain forests such as the Cordillera Azul, and science has only a bare inkling so far of how those complexities mesh together.
"Come here and look at this tree, but be very careful not to touch it," herpetologist and wilderness guide Guillermo Knell told two visitors in a triple-canopy forest along the Cordillera Azul's eastern boundary, near the Shipibo Indian village of Nuevo Eden.
"This," he said, "is a tangarana tree, home of these tangarana ants."
With its straight, smooth, gray trunk no more than 10 inches in diameter, the tree was a dwarf in this forest of giants, but it dramatically demonstrated the complexity of the rain forest.
"The tree, the ants and a small aphid that lives in the tree have a very nice, three-way symbiotic relationship," Knell said. "The aphids eat the tree sap and poop a sweet excretion. The ants patrol the surface of the tree and the ground underneath it for the excretion, which they eat.
"The ants are very territorial and ferociously protective of the tree. They keep the ground at the base of the tree clear of any competing plants. If they feel the vibration of any other animal climbing on the tree, they swarm out and attack it with thousands of painful bites."
Knell tapped the tree with his right forefinger. In a blink the tangaranas, roughly the size of carpenter ants, appeared at the very spot he tapped, one managing to deliver a swelling bite as he jerked back his hand.
"Natives who get mad at a really bad person will tie the bad one up naked to a tangarana tree and let him die," Knell said.
Medical possibilities
The potential for understanding the complex rain forest plant and animal relationships goes far beyond simply filling in blanks of academic knowledge about rain forest biology.
Tropical rain forest plants, and to a lesser extent animals, have spent millions of years experimenting and developing chemical defense systems to protect them from predators.
Tropical frogs exude strong poisons from their skin to discourage birds of prey. Tropical bushes contain bitter alkaloids to fend off insects. The alkaloid in the coca bush that fends off leaf-eating ants is the active narcotic ingredient that makes cocaine both an anesthetic and an intoxicating social drug.
Such naturally evolved chemicals from rain forests are of interest to medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies for their potential to fight human diseases.
About 25 percent of Western medicines come from chemicals studied in rain forest plants and animals. They are used to treat malaria, glaucoma, leukemia, multiple sclerosis and Hodgkin's and Parkinson's diseases. They have provided chemical blueprints that are used in making birth-control pills and anesthetics.
Asked what benefits the Field Museum might derive from its work to save the Cordillera Azul, Moskovits cited the science.
"That's the museum's mission," she said, "to understand the biological and cultural diversity of life and to protect it."
At the end of the second week of the expedition, one of the police helicopter crews flew off to a repair base after the aircraft developed an electrical problem. It crashed en route, and the co-pilot was killed.
"The accident was tragic," Moskovits said, "and it brought everybody in the expedition closer together. It just made what we were doing seem all the more precious."
After the accident, Moskovits and Rodriguez decided to try to patch up their differences by camping and working together in the expedition's final week. It was an almost fatal decision.
The first day out, they hiked up a mountain all day until reaching its razor-edged peak. Two Shipibo Indian porters had carried their backpacks ahead of them, leaving the packs for the women to find on the mountaintop while the porters descended to another camp. When the women got to the packs, they discovered to their horror that somehow only their tents were in them, no food or water.
"It was too late to go to another camp," Rodriguez said, "so we found a pool of murky brown water in the forest. I had some purification tabs, so I made some cold coffee. Debby wouldn't touch it, but I always carry a little stock of cheese for emergencies, and that was our dinner."
After setting up their tents, just before dark, they started hiking back to the dirty pond to wash their faces for the night when a furious rainstorm blew up, crackling with thunder and lightning. As they ran back to their tents, the wind gusted so strongly that both said they feared being lifted and hurled over the side of the mountain.
"It was like an earthquake hit with every thunderclap. Even the insides of our tents collected pools of water," Rodriguez recalled. "I had a waterproof sleeping bag, so I finally was able to get some sleep, but Debby's tent was flooded, and she didn't get any sleep at all."
In the calm of the next morning, Rodriguez found the bleary-eyed Moskovits sitting in the sun and sleepily complaining in Spanish, a language in which she was not yet fluent, talking about her exhaustion, substituting Portuguese words when she couldn't summon Spanish.
"She said something about how her knees were beginning to look beautiful," Rodriguez said, "and I had to stop her. `No, no, no. You haven't got your words right,' I told her."
In fact, Moskovits was lamenting how the steep, brutal ascent up the mountain the day before had so mangled her knees that they were beginning to look old. But the Portuguese phrase she used in her Spanish sentence came out that she thought her knees were "becoming beautiful."
"We started laughing so hard, we could only be friends after that," said Rodriguez, recalling the moment.
"Since then, we hardly stop talking every day on the phone or in e-mails, wherever in the world we are. Debby travels even more than I do, but even when she's someplace in China, she calls me up on her satellite phone and we talk about the park and what is the latest thing to happen."
Quest becomes urgent
A few weeks after the expedition, in November 2000, the team was trying to figure out how much of the area it could dare to ask the Fujimori government to place under protection when a major political scandal forced the president to resign and flee into exile.
A spasm of political reform followed, and Valentin Paniagua, a respected constitutional lawyer, became acting president until a new government could be elected in about nine months.
Paniagua selected a number of highly regarded Peruvians for his Cabinet, which was headed by Javier Perez de Cuellar, who had served for a decade as United Nations (news - web sites) secretary general.
Believing that Paniagua's Cabinet was not beholden to any special interests, Rodriguez and Moskovits seized the moment, petitioning the interim government to make the Cordillera Azul a national park, protecting it forever from any sort of exploitation.
"Paniagua had to leave office after the July 2001 election," Moskovits said, "so any decision his government could make that would maintain its legitimacy had to be made by June 2001. That meant we had to put together a proposal for the park in March and April to meet the deadline.
"Lily knows everybody in Peru, and that made all the difference in the world. She pulled every string she had available to her, and we got an appointment with the president and the Cabinet in April.
"We were working so furiously, we were still collating the report on the way to the meeting."
Part of the presentation included watercolors by museum artist Peggy Macnamara, vivid paintings of all the animals new to science discovered in the Cordillera Azul. Moved by the artwork, Paniagua suggested an aerial tour of the forest.
With their good friends in the national helicopter police piloting the aircraft and some of the most formidable experts on tropical environments riding along, the conservationists gave the president and his Cabinet a memorable and educational excursion.
"Perez de Cuellar was soon identifying the palms we were flying over," Moskovits said. "When the flight ended, both he and President Paniagua were thanking us very emotionally."
Six weeks later, on May 21, 2001, Paniagua signed a law making the Cordillera Azul a national park. The Field Museum team and their Peruvian partners had barely finished celebrating when they learned that American oil giant Occidental Petroleum Corp. had sent a team into the new park. The company's geologists came out almost certain that important oil reserves lay under the park's rugged interior.
Peru's incoming president urged Occidental to do whatever cutting, blasting and drilling was necessary.
