TIME Magazine

The Magic of Trees

Posted Monday, Aug. 26, 2002 Standing in the red earth courtyard of a simple Brazilian homestead, Suzana Padua looks with pleasure at the grove of trees that Valdomiro ("Miro") de Castro and his wife Ireni have planted near their farmhouse and, in the distance, the chartreuse fringe of saplings growing alongside the Morro do Diabo State Park. "Look around you!" she exclaims. "The Pontal is greening."

That's a remarkable statement, since the Pontal, a once heavily forested area in the far west of Sao Paulo State, has long been devastated by logging and ranching. But nature is making a comeback in this impoverished region, thanks largely to the Instituto de Pesquisas Ecologicas (Institute for Ecological Research), an organization co-founded in 1992 by Padua and her husband Claudio, a primatologist at the University of Brasilia. IPE's mission is as simple as it is ambitious: to protect--and insofar as possible--reconnect the last precious remnants of the Mata Atlantica, the great forest that once covered virtually the whole of eastern Brazil.

Initially, IPE was an extension of Claudio's work with black lion tamarins, a gravely endangered species of New World monkey found only in the Pontal and its vicinity. Soon, however, the couple realized that to save the tamarins, they would have to save the forest that sheltered them--and that turned into a huge challenge. In 1995, Brazil's Landless Movement decided to resettle thousands of poor people on land bordering the Morro do Diabo park and smaller patches of forest nearby.

The Pontal had already been so rapaciously deforested that less than 2% of its native tree cover remained. So when the landless settled next to the remnants of forest, Claudio feared they would chop down the trees for fuel and lumber and destroy animal populations through hunting. Instead, when he and Suzana began to talk with local leaders, they found allies rather than enemies. The landless, they found, were in desperate need of almost everything, including wood. Yet they were willing to try to fill that need in ways that were not environmentally ruinous.

What evolved was a collaboration that benefited not only settlers but the forest and animals that lived there as well. "Whenever we came up with ideas, people were willing to try them," says Suzana. One IPE plan called for planting trees around forested tracts, creating an abraco ao verde (literally, green hug) to ward off assaults by cattle, fires and windstorms. Another envisioned linking forest fragments with broad corridors of trees, along which jaguars, tapir and tamarins could travel.

To implement these ideas, IPE, with the cooperation of the Sao Paulo Forestry Institute, established a tree nursery in the Morro do Diabo park and started distributing free seedlings. It also began sponsoring courses in agroforestry. Miro de Castro is a graduate of the first of these courses, and to date he has planted 6,700 trees, from fast-growing cultivars (eucalyptus, acacia) that are useful for lumber and fuel to native forest trees that produce fruit and nuts.

For the Paduas, working with farmers like Miro validates the career switch Claudio made 24 years ago, shortly after turning 30. At the time he was the financial director of a pharmaceutical firm in Rio de Janeiro, and Suzana, then 27, was working as a designer and interior decorator. One day Claudio arrived home and announced that he wanted to work with nature. "Would you prefer a husband who's rich and miserable," he asked Suzana, "or one who's poor but happy?"

"I thought he was crazy," Suzana admits, when Claudio suddenly went back to school to study biology. She and their three children later followed him to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he got his doctorate, and to Morro do Diabo, where they lived for 3 1/2 years. It was there, walking along forest trails bathed in emerald light, that Suzana underwent her own metamorphosis, from urban sophisticate to champion of environmental education.

The effort to save the Pontal's forest is still evolving, and much work remains. But thanks to the Paduas, the future of both people and wild animals in this ecologically fragile region is looking more hopeful than hopeless.