CAMBRIDGE PRESENT
CONRAD FEATHER
The
thin
green
line
Cambridge conservationists work across
the globe, often in
remote locations,
putting their ideals
into practice.
Sarah Woodward
spoke to some of them
Among the Nahua: Gregor MacLennan,
Conrad Feather and Aliya Ryan
Conrad Feather
(Jesus 1998) works in
the Amazon rainforest
with the Nahua
people, who have only
had contact with the
outside world since
the 1980s. Now almost
fluent in the Nahua
language, he is
helping protect their
traditional tribal
territory from illegal
logging. In 2004 he
won the US$30,000
St Andrews Prize for
the Environment
18
As a Cambridge anthropology
student I helped organise a university expedition to a remote
and beautiful village in lowland
Peru, a week away from Lima by
river. We came to look at the
social and environmental impact
of logging on the community.
I fell in love with Serjali and
the indigenous Nahua [pronounced Nawa] people who live
here. Although they have a reputation for being fierce, they are
actually very affectionate and
non-confrontational. Their language was the first thing to capture my attention. It is used so
delicately. It’s almost like handling crockery; you are frightened
that it might break. The Nahua
are also very autonomous. The
chief, who’s very imposing, still
finds it difficult to ask a five-yearold to sweep the floor, because the
child will simply ignore him.
The Nahua have been involved in a long conflict with loggers, who themselves are mostly
Peruvians displaced from the
highlands by economic necessity
or civil unrest, or mestizos, of
mixed race. Logging is very hard
work and also very risky, but of
course a lot of money is involved.
The Nahua are a small group
(Serjali is the main village and has
only about 260 inhabitants) but
their tribal lands extend over
200,000 hectares, and encompass
one of the world’s last remaining
natural stands of mahogany.
I returned to Serjali off my
own bat when I had finished at
Cambridge. To cut a long story
short, after filming thousands of
metres of logs floating down
rivers, trips to Lima with the
Nahua to denounce the corruption of local forestry officials, and
months of hikes and canoe rides
through Nahua territory using
GPS to map the impact of the
loggers, we managed to get the
Peruvian government to take the
issue seriously. An official commission was set up and after a year
the loggers were removed and
forced to pay the Nahua compensation. That was in 2002. Now
the Nahua manage their own control posts on the rivers to make
sure the loggers don’t come back.
I’d always been in thrall to
the romance and adventure of
the jungle, but Cambridge helped
me to believe I could do whatever I wanted. It also gave me the
ability to write a good proposal
quickly and efficiently (which is
very important in my line of
work). The University Expedition Society, which boasts alumni from David Attenborough to
Bill Oddie, was inspirational too.
Of the five of us who went
on that original student expedi-
tion, four – Gregor MacLennan
(Christ’s 1997), Aliya Ryan
(Newnham 1998), Dora Napolitano (Clare 1997) and me – are
still based in Peru.
I sometimes feel that the
Nahua have invaded my body,
almost consumed me. They are
very protective, although when
they call me at 5am from their
radio connection to my phone in
Lima I do sometimes wonder!
Together we have been through a
great deal, experiencing everything from death and treachery
to the sheer joy and wonder of
travelling – including a monthlong trek through totally uninhabited forest full of clouds of
scarlet macaws, with woolley
monkeys, giant caimans and even
baby jaguars.
The Nahua now have power
over their lands and the defensive
work is pretty much done, so I’m
hoping that together we can put
protective plans in place. In ten
years time – who knows? – they
may change their minds and
want the loggers back. The important thing is that the decision is
in their hands. Conrad and his colleagues have set
up an organisation called Shinai to
help indigenous peoples in Peru
defend their forests. For details, see
www.shinai.org.pe
CAMBRIDGE PRESENT
(Darwin 1982) studied
at the Scott Polar
Research Institute.
A keen oarswoman
at Cambridge, she has
subsequently rowed
over 25,000 miles
through the freezing
seas of the Arctic and
sub-Arctic with her
husband, Doug Fesler.
Their journeys are
vividly evoked in
Rowing to Latitude
(2001), which won
the 2002 National
Outdoor Book Award
I’ve always been fascinated by
snow and ice, which is somewhat
inexplicable for someone raised
just outside New York City.
I have a picture of myself at age
seven holding a chunk of glacier
ice. The obsession stuck and
eventually led me to Cambridge.
Snow is a unique material. It
can flow like honey or fracture
like glass; it can be great fun one
minute and kill you the next.
I love the beauty, power and
variability of avalanches, which
have taught me to be perpetually
curious, to pay attention, to
anticipate and, above all, to keep
evaluating the world around me.
My Cambridge thesis in the
1980s was on ice cores as indicators of environmental change. It
was early days for that sort of
research. Now there is a tendency
to pin the blame for every patch of
freak weather on global warming:
for example, in his movie An
Inconvenient Truth Al Gore
implies that Hurricane Katrina –
the storm that devastated New
JONATHAN LITTLE
JILL FREDSTON
CONRAD FEATHER
Jill Fredston
Orleans in 2005 – was caused by
global warming. However, that’s
an oversimplified and somewhat
human-centric view: all we know
is that over time warming will
likely increase the intensity and
frequency of severe storms.
In the same way, as the snow
climate changes, the pattern of
avalanches will change. I have now
worked in Alaska as an avalanche
specialist for 25 years. Together,
Doug and I do a combination of
teaching, forecasting and hazardmanagement consulting, together
with stunt work for the movies
and rescues. I love avalanches
except for the unpardonable fact
that they kill people. I’ve dug more
than forty bodies from the snow,
including several friends, but
only once have I helped recover a
completely buried person alive.
For the seven or eight months
of winter Doug and I work seven
days a week, but in the summer
we disappear on long rowing
trips. We have rowed much of the
coast of Alaska, Canada and
western Greenland, and circumnavigated Spitsbergen. In 1995,
we rowed the coast of Norway
from Sweden to Russia.
That trip scared us – mostly
because of what we didn’t find. In
half an hour paddling in Alaska
we see more wildlife than we saw
in 2,500 miles and five months in
Norway. Yet in Norway we came
across people from more congested
parts of the world who thought it
was the wildest place on earth. It
made us feel the concept of shifting baselines in our guts: we will
not know what is missing if we
have never known it to be there.
Alaska remains uniquely wild,
perhaps because it has been
inhabited by humans for a shorter
time, perhaps because of the conservation measures that have been
put in place – or a combination
of the two. But I fear that we cannot understand the cumulative
impact of each new road, bridge
and house until it is too late.
Wild places cannot exist as
isolated islands. It is like expecting the passengers in seats 3A and
44F on a jumbo jet to survive as
the plane disintegrates at 30,000
feet. If we can learn to accommodate nature, we might just learn
to accommodate ourselves. In the
end conservation is nothing more
than an act of survival. Pete
Brotherton
(Downing 1987) lived
in Southern Africa
studying the evolution
of mammalian social
systems before returning
to Britain to join
Natural England.
He now manages
its species recovery
programme, working to
save many of England’s
most threatened
plants and animals
For my PhD I studied the behavioural ecology of dik-diks – tiny
antelopes – in Etosha national
park in Namibia. Never mind
Bambi, a baby dik-dik weighs just
700 grams and is the cutest thing.
Dik-diks are monogamous and
mate for life, which is unusual in
mammals because it leaves the
male with no proper parental role.
Quite honestly, the males turn out
to be fairly useless. The females
do all the feeding, and are just as
vigilant when it comes to protecting their young.
After three years in Namibia,
I did my post-doc working with
meerkats in the Kalahari, a project that recently got a lot of attention through the television programme Meerkat Manor. But for
the last seven years I’ve worked at
what until six months ago was
English Nature, and is now called
‘Natural England’. Essentially,
while working in Africa, I became
more and more interested in conservation and realised that the science of conservation was a long
way ahead of its application.
England boasts beautiful places
and beautiful plants and animals,
and I feel I can make a difference
by using the evidence scientists
collect to influence policymakers.
I’m responsible for a range of
conservation issues, but particularly biodiversity action plans. At
the moment we have 391 in place,
ranging from the Lady’s Slipper
Orchid, which was down to one
individual in the mid-twentieth
century, to the recovery of otters.
Otters are important indicators
for our own health as they live in
our drinking water. Their numbers were in steep decline because
rivers had become so polluted by
pesticides from farming and PCBs
from industry, but now thankfully
their numbers are back on the up.
Conservation is largely about
managing the way people interact
with wildlife and the countryside.
It used to concentrate on protecting what we have left but now the
focus has shifted to putting plants
and animals back. For example,
we are reintroducing dormice to
some areas and reinstating coppicing in woodlands.
Skylarks highlight the intimate relationship between British
wildlife and agriculture because
they rely for their existence on
spring-sown cereals and other
low-intensity farming practices.
We therefore work with farmers
and try to put incentives in place
that will encourage such activity.
Of course, there are EU implications as well. But these days the
Common Agricultural Policy is
shifting its emphasis from farmers
being paid for how much they
produce to being paid for how
well they look after the land.
At the moment we’re planning
for conservation in a period of
climate change, and we simply
don’t know how species will
adapt. That creates a challenge all
its own. On average, plants and
animals in Britain are shifting
their ranges northwards at about
15km per year. Some are moving
much more quickly: a dragonfly,
the common darter (Sympetrum
striolatum), has already moved its
northern boundary by 300km.
Already the speed of change is
frightening. And thanks to the
time lag between the carbon dioxide being emitted and the Earth
actually getting warmer, the fact is
that we have forty years of global
warming ahead of us, whatever
action we take now. 19
CAMBRIDGE PRESENT
dull or unfashionable by many
students. But if course organisers
respond to student sentiment by
cutting taxonomy out rather than
trying to make it more interesting,
we will have a problem. Where
in the future will we find people
obsessed by the study of beetles
or lichens who can actually tell
one species from another? MICHAEL DERRINGER
Keisha Garcia
(Girton 2001) studied Zoology at the University
of the West Indies before taking a Cambridge
MPhil in Environment and Development.
She now works in Trinidad, co-ordinating
a socio-economic survey of the island’s
forested northern hills and educating
the public about environmental issues
I originally came to Cambridge
as a result of the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment, a UN
project designed to establish a
global framework that would
allow us to measure ecosystem
change more accurately. More
than 1,500 scientists and policymakers were involved, but it was
always part of the deal that
I would return to the Caribbean.
Last year the World Conservation Monitoring Centre asked
me back to Cambridge to develop
a manual laying down best practice for ecosystem assessments –
the idea being to help standardise
how people tackle them. And it’s
been a fascinating four months.
Trinidad and Tobago are an
ideal test-bed for conservation
practice, which is why the
Northern Range was chosen for
our pilot scheme. Thanks to oil
and natural gas, Trinidad is the
most rapidly developing country
in the eastern Caribbean. The
problem is that the education
20
and value system hasn’t kept up
with the boom. We are therefore
especially interested to see how
the formal school curriculum,
especially at sixth-form level, can
be adapted to meet the needs of
environmental education.
My own work involves amalgamating the findings of thousands of documents on the environment, and then working out
how their conclusions can be most
usefully employed. The findings
of environmental assessments are
often ignored when funding and
policy decisions are made, so I’m
essentially taking stock: trying to
bridge the gap between work on
the ground and policy-making.
I’m unlikely to see the fruits
of my labour because, on average,
scientists believe it takes at least a
generation to change behaviour.
But what no-one doubts is that
economic development anywhere
in the world must in future go
hand-in-hand with conservation
management. Ed Turner
(Girton 1998) is
a post-doctoral
researcher in the
Department of
Zoology. He is also
Chalk Grassland
Bio-diversity Officer
for the Bedfordshire,
Cambridgeshire,
Northamptonshire
and Peterborough
Wildlife Trust
I’ve always been interested in what
most people write off as creepycrawlies – I must have been an
appalling child as I used to collect
them by the bucket load. I recall
how excited I was when I bought
my first imperial scorpion (which
is as long as your hand). I kept
tarantulas and used to catch butterflies, get them to lay eggs and
then raise the larvae. And I had
lots of newts and terrapins. I still
have scorpions at home, and confess that my girlfriend wasn’t too
pleased recently to discover that
I’d been ordering caterpillars on
the internet.
By the time I was reading
Zoology I knew I wanted to pursue a career that combined conservation and insects. So I was
very lucky when an opportunity
came up to work in Malaysia,
examining the ecological impact
of converting rainforest into oil
palm plantations. Sabah is a biodiversity hotspot but it’s losing its
diversity as fast as anywhere in the
world. Using a canopy fogging
machine, which makes insects
drop off vegetation, we collected
and catalogued insects from three
different types of ecosystem: primary tropical forest, logged forest
and oil-palm plantations. In all,
we had over 150,000 arthropods
from the forest floor, ferns and the
canopy in all three habitats.
Insects are facing an extinction crisis worldwide and it’s a real
cause for concern. The challenge,
though, is not so much to protect
individuals as protect their habitats. In Sabah, we found a particular variety of fern, the Bird’s Nest
Fern, that encourages insects by
providing a nice, cool, moist habitat. Currently rainforest is being
lost to oil palm plantations, but
MICHAEL DERRINGER
I do also wonder where the
next generation of naturalists will
come from, and whether universities are living up to their
responsibilities to produce graduates with all the skills needed to
meet emerging conservation challenges. Fewer and fewer undergraduate courses cover taxonomy,
perhaps because it is now seen as
Bird’s Nest Ferns could be used as
an ‘ecosystem engineer’ to increase
insect biodiversity in plantations
– something the plantation manager was very keen to know about.
Back in England the research
I’m conducting now is on chalk
grasslands, where we are examining three endangered species of
butterfly: the Duke of Burgundy,
the Small Blue and the Chalkhill
Blue. Ecologically they have different needs but they somehow
manage to coexist.
It’s all a long way from Sabah,
but in many respects the projects
are similar. We think of temperate
regions as managed environments
and the tropics as wild, but in fact
the tropics are much more managed and temperate regions much
less artificially controlled than
you might imagine.
Whereas I used to work in an
extraordinary tropical forest, I now
spend a lot of time on a wonderful
site in the Chilterns, at Totternhoe. This summer, with a team of
students and volunteers, I will be
outdoors almost every day catching butterflies. There’s a technique:
it’s all about a flick of the wrist,
using a soft net. We record each
insect’s GPS co-ordinates and
then draw on its wings with felttip pen so that we can track its
movements if we catch it again.
As an environment it is just as
I imagine England might have
been fifty years ago. I’ve seen more
individual butterflies than I did in
the tropics, and been surrounded
by a cloud of thousands of the
very beautiful Chalkhill Blues. CAMBRIDGE PRESENT
Kim Beasley
(Darwin 2005) is a PhD student in the
Department of Geography. She is investigating
the impact the rush to conserve animals in
developing countries can have on human
beings who live in the same area
To find out how people feel about
being displaced from their homes
to make way for animals, I originally planned fieldwork at Kanha
tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh,
where the fauna is said to have
inspired Kipling’s Jungle Book.
Then I discovered that the last village displacement there took place
seven years ago – too long to hope
to capture accurate recollections.
When the opportunity came
up to work in central India, at the
Tadoba Andhari tiger reserve in
Maharashtra, you can imagine
how delighted I was. Here two villages were relocated in the 1970s,
two are being moved now, and
four more are due to be displaced
in the future, all to make way for
a reserve set up in 1995 by the
government-backed Project Tiger.
Earlier relocations were so
resented that poaching in the reserve may actually have increased,
with villagers killing animals out
of spite. People have lived alongside the tigers for generations,
accepting as inevitable the occasions when crops are destroyed or
villagers attacked. Many therefore
feel that being required to move
home simply proves that the government is ignorant of their lifestyle and blind to their views.
The recent Scheduled Tribes Act
may change all this, but in the
past local Gond villagers have felt
powerless and ignored by the
authorities just because they lived
within a national park.
With the village men I can
communicate in Hindi, but most
of the women speak only Marathi,
for which I need a translator. Being
a woman has not been an issue
but my colour has. As a westerner
I am accorded respect because I
stand outside the caste system, but
I worry that this respect is purely
an aspect of our colonial legacy.
My biggest difficulty working
in India has been keeping faith
with all my research participants.
I obviously need to stay on good
terms with the Indian authorities,
who hold documents crucial to my
research and could easily remove
my work permit. But it’s difficult
to do this and win the confidence
of the villagers I am interviewing.
People need to see me as someone
they can trust, rather than just as
an extension of the authorities.
Many factors influence how
people feel about being moved,
from the land and crops they have
to the likely standard of healthcare
and schools in the new villages.
Fear of the unknown is a problem,
as is the very real pain people feel
at being forced to abandon their
family home and all the memories
and associations it contains.
A gulf exists between academic
research and government policymaking, not just in India but
throughout the developing world.
I really hope that my research will
help bridge this divide, and make
tomorrow’s conservation strategies
much more socially sensitive. (Selwyn 1987) is based
in Melbourne, where
he runs conservation
projects for BirdLife
International. After
exploring a series
of tropical island
archipelagoes on
undergraduate
expeditions, he
specialised in bird
conservation in the
south-west Pacific,
working initially
in Fiji
My father first aroused my interest in birds. Despite all my time
in the tropics, I still feel a strong
draw to the south-west of England, particularly the Dorset and
Devon coast around where I grew
up. I was already an avid birdwatcher and nascent conservationist by the time I came up to Cambridge, but unsure if I could make
a career out of my hobby. I studied veterinary science, but spent a
lot of time organising expeditions
to survey birds in places like Papua
New Guinea, the Solomon Islands,
the Philippines and Indonesia.
In 1997 I took a year off work
to research birds in the south-west
Pacific. And that was the turning
point. I slowly phased out my vet
work and after a few years had
raised enough money for BirdLife
International to send me to Fiji
to establish an office and set up a
23-year project. That office now
employs eleven staff, and undertakes valuable conservation work
with local communities.
The people of Fiji have a
strong spiritual affinity with the
land. Each tribal group has an
ancestral totem, usually a forest
animal that they ‘own’. Typically
this would be a bright, noisy bird
such as the shining parrot, whose
feathers are used to adorn Fijian
headdresses. These birds nest in
holes in trees, and logging has
damaged their environment. Yet
the villagers still own the forest,
which they need for water, building materials and food, so by persuading them to re-assess the
costs and benefits of logging, we
have been able to make a difference. In Britain the conservation
GUY DUTSON
KIM BEASLEY
Guy Dutson
work I’ve done has been much
smaller scale, but in the Pacific it
is possible to influence important
decisions over large tracts of land.
On the island of Vanua Levu
in 2003 we rediscovered the longlegged warbler, Trichocichla rufa,
above, which hadn’t been seen
since 1894 and was feared extinct.
It’s a secretive species that ecologically appears to need dense vegetation beside mountain streams.
We turned up twelve pairs in a
remote forest reserve and recorded their beautiful warbling song.
I was incredulous when I realised
that this was the bird we’d spent
so long searching for: excited, and
delighted for my Fijian colleagues
who made the actual discovery.
In Fiji what I was doing was
hands-on conservation: spending
lots of time talking, drinking kava
and encouraging community leaders to become conservation advocates, making links between traditional and modern lifestyles, and
between people’s economic and
spiritual needs and the natural environment. Now I’m in Australia,
in Victoria, pulling together the
databases we need to present hard
scientific evidence to government.
You have to make a practical case
for conservation. We still talk to
local communities and landowners directly, but to justify government funding we need the best
science. Conservation may be all
about changing individual attitudes, but it is still ruled by politics and finance. That’s the way of
the modern world. For Fiji, see
www.birdlife.org/action/science/site
s/pacific_ibas/fiji/index.html/ or
www.environmentfiji.com/docs/iba
Flyer.pdf/ For Australia,
www.birdsaustralia.com.au/ibas
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