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Time magazine CRADLES ONE
OF THE MANY MONKEYS HE HAS RESCUED
MARCH 13, 2000
Marc
van Roosmalen
A Rain-Forest Odyssey
BY TIM McGIRK | MANAUS
Three years
ago, an Indian from
the Amazonian backwa- ters arrived at the house in Manaus, Brazil, of biologist
Marc van Roosmalen holding a tin can with a little monkey shivering inside.
"'Oh, no. Not another one,' I thought," recalls the Dutchman. He
didn't need another monkey. Already he and his wife Betty, an artist, were
caring for 50 orphaned monkeys, who swung in and out of mischief in the garden.
Gingerly, Van Roosmalen poked a finger at the small ball of copper-colored
fur.
It squeaked fearfully.
Van Roosmalen, 53, nearly
squeaked back, with amazement. An expert primatologist, he was staring at an
unknown genus of pygmy marmoset. It was a remarkable discovery; the last time
any scientist had identified a new primate genus was in the late 19th century.
Trouble was, the Indian knew only that the marmoset had been trapped somewhere
near the Madeira River, a 2,000-mile stretch of water flowing into the Amazon
from the Bolivian Andes. This clue propelled Van Roosmalen on an epic,
nine-month odyssey in which he found far more than the elusive marmosets.
His quest led Van Roosmalen
into a previously unstudied region of the Amazon, bursting with biodiversity. So
far, he and his colleagues have identified seven never before seen species of
primates, a distinct species of peccary (a wild pig), a lost cousin of the
Brazil-nut tree and an anthurium with leaves bigger than elephant ears. And best
of all, Van Roosmalen stumbled on traces of an agricultural technique —
invented by Stone Age tribes around 10,000 years ago — that may help save the
Amazon from the damage caused by farmers who slash and burn the forest to clear
land.
The Dutchman eventually
tracked down his marmosets to a black-water branch of the Amazon, 200 miles
southeast of Manaus. A farmer pointed toward the edge of the forest, where five
marmosets happily snacked on the resin of a morototo tree. On later visits, Van
Roosmalen noticed that the soil of this farm was 3 1-2 ft. deep and richer than
any he knew of in the Amazon, where the earth is sandy and gives out after a
couple of years, forcing farmers to raze hundreds of square miles of rain forest
every year.
Intrigued, he found other
patches of this black earth elsewhere in the Amazon. Mixed into this loamish
soil was evidence of prehistoric man: charcoal, occasional stone axheads made
from meteorites, and a lump of manioc bread preserved in natural tree gum.
"If we can find out how these so-called primitives made this soil,"
reckons Van Roosmalen, "we can use it as an alternative to destructive
slash-and-burn agriculture." Unfortunately, since the river tribes that
knew the secret were all wiped out by European raiding parties 500 years ago,
the scientist must start from scratch.
Besides his monkey business,
Van Roosmalen specializes in medicinal plants (he even apprenticed to a shaman
of the Kamayura tribe) and in rain-forest conservation. He knew he wanted to do
fieldwork when he studied primates in Holland. There Van Roosmalen clashed with
his university professors over the value of observing lab monkeys. "It was
like putting a child in a cage and drawing conclusions about all Homo sapiens,"
he huffs.
He spent years in Suriname,
studying spider monkeys in their arboreal home. Often he survived on fruit
gnawed by monkeys and then tossed away. "I was quite hungry," he
recalls. "Spider monkeys are very economical eaters." On the strength
of doctoral research into tropical ecology, Van Roosmalen in 1987 got a
scientific post in Manaus with the Brazilian government. He is a leading
advocate of a 1996 environmental-protection law that enables Brazilian
non-government organizations to buy rain-forest tracts for eco-tourism and
research.
Inside the rain forest, Van
Roosmalen is an ethereal presence with his long, silvery-blond hair. He ghosts
through the foliage, hardly stirring a leaf. There's the sudden drum of
raindrops shaken off a tree high in the canopy, and Van Roosmalen trains his
binoculars upward. A branch bounces, and out pops a Titi monkey with black,
globed eyes and a pewter-colored beard. "It's a new species we just
identified recently," he says excitedly.
As the discoverer of
species, Van Roosmalen has the right to choose their scientific name. Instead he
may auction off this privilege to the highest bidder and use the proceeds to
protect the species in their original Brazilian habitat. Fame means less to him
than saving a pure, emerald swath of the Amazon. Otherwise, he warns, "the
rain forest will be destroyed before we even know what plants and animals are
out there."
http://www.time.com/time/reports/environment/heroes/heroesgallery/0,2967,roosmalen,00.html
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