Into the Woods

It takes a moment to realize what I am seeing: a monkey in a tree. To be specific, it is a black spider monkey (Ateles paniscus) swinging through the topmost branches of a ceiba tree in the rain forest in Suriname, the former Dutch Guyana, north of Brazil. Thick-furred, with a red face, the monkey moves by sprawling out and brachiating from branch to branch through the high forest canopy; its long, prehensile tail functions as an arm. It pauses and looks down with the cool expression of a teenager. A monkey in a tree.

But then the thought comes to me that this is the wilderness, not a zoo; the monkey is wild; the ceiba tree spreads its lush green cover in a vast tract of 4 million untrodden acres that constitute the Central Suriname Nature Reserve. Except for the few of us in the camp, there are no other people within a radius of 50 miles, nor is it likely that any people have even set foot in most of this land within the past thousand years. There are plenty of other species in evidence: rain forests contain a disproportionate share of the world's wealth of living things. Suriname's is the least troubled rain forest in existence, harboring 200 known mammal species (including monkeys in trees), 674 bird species, 99 amphibian species, more than 5,000 plant species, rivers, rocks, heat, darkness and a silence as deep as stars.

That is the way Russell Mittermeier would like to keep this forest, and all the other forested areas of the world. The president of Conservation International, who is also a first-rate primatologist (A.B. Dartmouth, summa; Ph.D. Harvard), is part scientist, part activist, part barker and part kid. The kid, recently turned 49, is the same one who grew up in the Bronx and Brooklyn, N.Y., under the joint tutelage of a mother interested in the natural world, and Tarzan; Mittermeier continues to collect Tarzan novels and memorabilia. He and Peter A. Seligmann, CI's founder and chief executive, have gained an enormous amount of money, respect and attention for their 11-year-old organization, based in Washington. When Mittermeier is in barker mode, he makes the brashest p.r. rep seem shy; a good portion of our week together in Suriname has been devoted to the problem of how to get Michael Jordan to visit the country and draw attention to CI's conservation efforts.

Mittermeier the scientist is all seriousness and wonder. He has written or co-written several books, including a gorgeous, monster-size photographic work called Megadiversity, and hundreds of monographs on his beloved monkeys. A recent paper on a newly discovered species of marmoset, Callithrix humilis, shows the monkey at age two months: studious eyes, a tight, alert face and an aureole of gray and white hair. It looks a lot like Mittermeier, who would not mind the comparison.

All his traits fuse with the activist to create a formidable force for the preservation of forest life, which needs protectors. Nearly 60% of the world's tropical rain forests have been lost, and what remains is under extreme pressure from logging and human population growth. More than 90% of the forests in the U.S. have been logged at least once. And once a forest is cut down, many of the living things it has harbored will be driven into extinction.