Requiem for Nature

John Terborgh has written a book that is a must read for anyone involved or interested in the protection of biodiversity through reserves and parks in the tropics. This book contains content that is tough to swallow but like a prescribed bitter pill hopefully it will have a salubrious effect. I am not a biologist or professional park administrator but as a member of a board of directors on a regional land conservation organization. I will be recommending this book to all on the board. Through my travels in Africa, Central America, and South America I can understand the plight of the parks that Terborgh describes. His experience and his passion for biodiversity show in the book and as I read it I found it hard to put down. Reading this was like attending an excellent lecture knowing that the speaker was presenting a clear assesment of the situation and a novel and important directive to solve the problems. Terborgh brings up startling facts in the book such as the entire funding for tropical conservation by all conservation organizations in the United States totals $200 million per year. This again is for every country, every continent, all the tropical parks. Yet within the United States the National Park Service has funding of 1.7 billion per year and is underfunded. If you consider the difference in species diversity in one park such as Manu National Park in Peru with a possible 1,000 species of birds compared to all of North America north of Mexico with about 700 species you can understand the significance of protecting these sites. I hope that many people will read this and that many more will take action to rectify the problems that Terborgh has written about.

This is a very interesting book. I was pleasantly surprised by the way the author presents his ideas openly, with a strong passion for wildness that can be felt page after page. The most outstanding feature of the book was the author's holistic approach to describing current environmental problems. He was able to articulate specific details without losing the book's overall "big picture" perspective. Written in a simple language, it is easily understood, and technical terms are kept to a minimum. His discussion of the environmental degradation processes all over the world allows readers to get a deeper understanding of looming threats to biodiversity, and the struggle of the different species for survival. Population growth and increasing competition for scarce resources are addressed as the main causes of today's environmental problems. His policy recommendations call for a top-down approach, which the author regards as the only alternative that could bring positive results in the long run. In his scheme, local population surrounding protected areas are only small players on the ground, powerless to influence conservation processes. I cannot but disagree with these statements. Having worked for several years with indigenous peoples and local communities in the Peruvian rainforest, my research has evidenced that local people are key stakeholders in this process, and their engaged participation is critical in conservation efforts. At the policy level, I would call for a nutcracker approach instead, where efforts at the top level are matched with bottom-up initiatives, as a more effective way of achieving conservation in the tropics. In my opinion, the biggest shortcoming of the book is the series of oversimplistic statements regarding the social dimensions of conservation. The author's arguments are basically explained from an anecdotal perspective, lacking a systematic analysis about the human potential for conservation. The book gives little credit to current sustainable development efforts, addressing them as merely "wishful thinking". For example, Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) are discarded upfront, based exclusively on assumptions about what ICDPs "frequently do", without single mention of concrete situations to back up his statements. In practice, however, sustainable development projects have been getting results on the ground. In the surrounding area of Manu National Park (1), the Pro-Manu Project (2) promoted different activities, including (3) a successfully land-titling process, enhancement of health care services including family planning education and responsible parenthood, environmental education, institutional strengthening of the parks' management system, besides small projects aimed to increase food security among local communities. After project completion, national NGOs (4) continued to support the local people, allowing certain continuity in the accompaniment process. Thus, it reduced significan

When John Terborgh publishes a book, anyone interested in the conservation of nature should read it. One of the world's foremost tropical ecologists, Terborgh writes in an unusually pleasing and, at the same time, provocative style. If the reader is only seeking entertainment or if a rigorously researched documentary of the context of personal experiences is sought, s/he will be disappointed; but, if the interest is in stimulating thought about the problems of nature conservation, the reward will be extraordinary. "Requiem for Nature" surpasses even Terborgh's own "Where Have All the Birds Gone?" as a intellectually challenging treatise.For me, the richest passages in "Requiem for Nature" are those in Chapter 2 that describe the ecological relationships that must be maintained if nature is to be conserved and the need for a coherent, long-term strategy to meet the challenges.As an anthropologist who has worked in areas near Manu National Park since 1971 --even before Terborgh arrived there-- I have long been following his work and thinking on tropical forest conservation issues. And I have many, many disagreements with his perspectives. However, no one can deny the value of his contributions in challenging current fashions in thinking about nature and its conservation. The weaknesses of "Requiem for Nature" include serious inaccuracies in Terborgh's information about the historical and political contexts of the places he describes on the basis of his own and others' work, particularly in Chapters 3 and 4. For example, the Summer Institute of Linguistics is said to have brought the Machiguenga into the Manu Park in the 1960s (p. 29); the Manu Park has been a Machiguenga homeland since at least Inka times and probably much longer. The purpose of Belgian linguist Marcel d'Ans's work is inaccurately described as "to open communication with uncontacted indigenous groups as a prelude to luring them out of the park" (p. 42).; d'Ans was there to develop policies for incorporating the indigenous peoples into park strategies, not to contact isolated Indians. There are numerous references to Amahuaca Indians in the Manu National Park (pp. 42-45). There are no Amahuaca in the Manu Park; they live along tributaries of the Urubamba and Ucayali Rivers farther north. The people referred to are Yora, a Yaminahua sub-group, in voluntary isolation until 1984. Terborgh attributes many of the Manu Park's problems to regionalization (p. 35). But the regional governments in Peru only existed between late 1990 and April 1992, when they were closed by the Fujimori government. The inept Park officials accurately described by Terborgh, although designated and with administration from Cusco, were representatives of the central government, like those who served during "the halcyon days of the park's early period" (p. 31). The inspired Agrarian University professors of that time were in Lima, not in the Manu Park. The Pa