Summer 2010 Issue No. 3

In This Issue ...Feature: New markets, opportunities for copal and crafts ............................................................ 1Connection Profile: Peruvian Research Institute ............................................................................ 2Artisan spotlight ................................................................................................................................. 2Michael Gilmore: Connecting plants and people ............................................................................ 3Amazon field volunteer in action ...................................................................................................... 5Volunteer form and Thank-yous ....................................................................................................... 6

New markets, opportunities for copal and crafts

By Natalya Stanko and Campbell Plowden

It’s been a busy year at the Center. The Center is advancing its research on the ecology of copal resin, developing new projects to turn copal and other plants into sustainable sources of income for forest peoples in the Peruvian Amazon, and establishing strong relationships with several indigenous communities. In the summer of 2009, the Center and its team in the Bora native village of Brillo Nuevo gathered and distilled hard, black copal resin into a golden, sweet-smelling oil, which has commercial potential in the fragrance industry. The Center continued to collaborate with several communities of artisans and began to build an online store that will market handicrafts and other items from the Amazon. Center President Campbell Plowden also joined a team of researchers committed to working with Maijuna native communities to preserve their culture and natural resources. This spring Plowden returned to Brazil to check in with Tembé and Ka’apor Indian villages and other traditional communities as potential Center partners.

IN THE FIELD The Center’s laboratory is a network of small communities in the Peruvian Amazon. There are few roads here, and most days are hot, humid and buzzing. To get around,

the Center team travels by boat and peque-peque, an elongated motorized canoe. Here is a whirlwind tour of the team’s travels and accomplishments this year.

THE BORA OF BRILLO NUEVO Brillo Nuevo is a village of about 425 people and 82 families in the Ampiyacu River region. It is blanketed with thatched roofs, about a quarter mile of sidewalk, a cinder-block school, and two soccer fields. The villagers speak both Spanish and their native language, Bora. The Center began working with Bora woodsmen and artisans in 2008. It is now developing a two-part non-timber forest product project in partnership with the Federation of Native Communities

of the Ampiyacu (FECONA) and the Instituto del Bien Comun (IBC) with financial support from The Rufford Small Grants Foundation and the Marjorie Grant Whiting Center. . The copal project began in the summer of 2009 when

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Plowden and Bora elder watching copal distallation. © N. Stanko/CACE

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Artisan Spotlight

Monica ChichacoAge:36Community: Brillo Nuevo “Well of course I´ve seen an anaconda,” Monica Chichaco says, as she weaves an anaconda design from memory. “It´s three, maybe four, meters long,” she adds. Monica´s husband, Beder, has prepared her workspace by banging a few nails into the floorboard in the living room. Monica uses these nails to secure her chambira fibers for the maroon and white anaconda belt. Beder says that he and his wife always work together. “Of course, she is the master,” he adds. “I just help.” As she weaves, Monica nurses her six-month-old baby, Mayronela. When Mayronela cries, Monica swings her to sleep in the hammock and then returns back to work. Monica´s 11-year-old son, Willy, and four-year-old daughter, Darcy, peer over her shoulder. The entire family is gathered in the living room, sitting on the floor beside a baby stroller, a boat motor, and a pile of palm leaves that Beder will use to fix the roof. Ten pairs of baby jumpers hang overhead on a clothesline. This is where Monica works and lives with her family, together. Romelia Huanaquiri HuaillhuaAge:52Community: Chino/Tahuayo River Romelia has gentle, knowing eyes that inspire immediate trust. She offers visitors cool drinks from her closet-size bodega (general store) and happily shows them the trees, bushes and herbs she grows around her house to heal various ailments. Romelia was already a veteran artisan when the Amazon Adventure company opened an upscale ecotourism lodge less than a mile from Chino. Her attention to detail inspired others in the village to start making crafts to sell to guests at the lodge. They began making typical baskets and then began weaving rainforest seeds into their creative baskets, which are now sold in gift shops in Iquitos and San Diego. Romelia sells about 20 baskets a year and also makes bags, woven vases (“tinajas”), and woven pots with tops (“mocawas”). She sometimes puts a piece of shell from the fruit of a calabash (“wingo”) tree in the center of a decorative basket. The green fruits are dyed a lustrous black with a liquid made from the bark of the cumaca tree. Romelia’s husband Jorge is also an accomplished artisan who weaves frogs from chambira fiber and carves jungle animals from wood.

Amazon Connections: Newsletter for the Center for Amazon Community Ecology

Editor: Campbell Plowden Writers: Natalya Stanko, Campbell PlowdenLayout: Natalya Stanko

To receive the newsletter by e-mail, send the message “subscribe to Amazon Connections” to amazonecology@comcast.net. Newslet-ter may also be downloaded from www.amazonecology.org.

By Natalya Stanko

We’ve all heard the statistic: One football field of rainforest is cleared every second. But have we considered who is doing the cutting? We picture loggers or ranchers branded with corporate labels, or maybe we don’t dare let ourselves think about it at all, lest it be linked to us. Dr. Dennis del Castillo Torres, an agronomist by training and conservationist by experience, pictures his parents. Torres grew up in a village in the rainforest of San Martin Province, Peru with 17 brothers and sisters. His parents used slash and burn agriculture, which is the cutting and burning of forests to create fields. “Environmentally, it was devastating,“ says Torres. “But it was also an economic necessity for us.” Torres, 61, now works to provide new economic opportunities for rural Peruvians, so they don’t have to choose between providing for their families and conserving their forest. Torres is the former president of the governmental Peruvian Amazon Research Institute, or IIAP, and the current director of its Terrestrial Research Program. IIAP operates the Jenaro Herrera Research Station, a natural laboratory in Loreto Province where the Center has conducted most of its copal research since 2006. Before joining IIAP, Torres worked with the United States Agency for International Development (AID), the World Bank, and the European Commission. He has lived in Madagascar, West Africa and Bolivia. Torres got one chance to go to school, and he took it. On a recommendation of a priest passing through his village, Torres applied for a highly competitive scholarship to attend college in the United States. And he got it. First, he headed to Washington D.C. for one year to learn English. In 1984 he earned his PhD in soil science from Mississippi State University. Torres traveled the world, learned French, Malagasy, and Kreole, and raised four children. And then, ten years ago, he went home.

Connections Profile: Dennis del Castillo

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Monica Chichaco. © C. Plowden/CACE

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Gilmore: Connecting plants and peopleBy Natalya Stanko

Who is Michael Gilmore? Michael Gilmore is an ethnobotanist—or a scientist that studies the relationship between plants and people—and an assistant professor at George Mason University’s New Century College. He has collaborated with the Maijuna of the Peruvian Amazon for more than 10 years. Gilmore is currently completing a four-year project that maps the Maijuna’s natural resources and their cultural significance. He is collaborating with Plowden and other researchers to preserve the biology and culture of the Maijuna. Gilmore is a key Center advisor and board member. Gilmore believes in community-driven research. He doesn’t ask what he needs, but what the community needs. “Right now the Maijuna children only know a small fraction of what the elders do. They don’t know the important plant species,” he says. That’s why Gilmore’s next goal is to set up an ethnobotanical garden that facilitates this type of learning in the Maijuna community. Gilmore has a big laugh accompanied by a hearty handshake and boundless energy. Who are the Maijuna? The Maijuna are a group of about 400 people in four villages in Loreto Province, Peru. In the last few years, the villages have united to form a federation in an effort to block the development of a proposed road that would destroy their ancestral lands. The Maijuna trust Gilmore, and they have appointed him an official advisor to their federation, FECONAMAI. Gilmore likewise greatly respects the Maijuna. “The Maijuna said, ‘We’re saying no to this road, and that’s final,’” said Gilmore. “Indigenous people in Peru have been incredibly marginalized. They’re not looked at as people by some in Peru, but as animals. For them to get up, to say something really powerful, that takes a lot of guts.” The future of the road—and of the Maijuna—is still unknown. Why ethnobotany? Gilmore said that something was missing from his undergraduate biology curriculum at Colorado State University. He wanted to learn about the human component of biology.

After college, Gilmore and a friend “wandered about Indonesia” for four months. They visited small indigenous communities where they learned to make loincloths and bows and arrows from local plants. “I was impressed by how integrally involved plants were in these people’s lives,” Gilmore said. After his trip, Gilmore knew what he wanted to study—the relationship between plants and people. True to his character, Gilmore thought big and wrote a letter to Richard Evans Schultes, the father of modern ethnobotany. “And he wrote me back!” said Gilmore, still surprised and flattered today. Gilmore earned his PhD in botany from Miami

University. He first visited the Maijuna with his advisor, ethnobotanist Hardy Eshbaugh, and then returned a year later after learning basic Spanish. Gilmore now also speaks basic Maijuna. What have the Maijuna taught Gilmore? Sebastian, Gilmore’s best Maijuna friend, has taught him what friendship means. “I feel like, on the most basic level, he really has my back,” Gilmore said. “He’s really taking care of me.” The Maijuna have also let Gilmore experience a different way of life. “In the U.S., we get swallowed up by our fast-paced life,” Gilmore says. “Take a deep breath. Take life one day at a time. Slow things down. Appreciate everything.”

From Page 2: Connections profile, Dennis del Castillo “Peru, the forest, this is my place,” says Torres. He is currently studying carbon sequestration, or the capacity of forests to store carbon gasses. Climate change -- and the gasses that

contribute to it -- Torres’ greatest environmental concern. He’s also studying alternate ways to harvest aguaje, a popular palm fruit with a scaly shell, large seed, and thin orange-yellow pulp. The city of Iquitos, the marketplace of the Peruvian forest, consumes two tons of aguaje per day. The fruit is used in many beverages and foods,

especially ice cream. Most aguaje is currently harvested by chopping down the tree. IIAP is encouraging harvesters to climb the trees instead. It’s also breeding shorter aguaje trees that will produce more accessible fruits in fewer years. Torres says that it’s essential for Peruvians to start exporting products with added value, rather than just raw materials. That’s why The Center’s project to develop copal and other non-timber forest products has potential, he says.

Michael Gilmore and Maijuna discuss community map. © C. Plowden/CACE

Torres. © C. Plowden/CACE

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From Page 1: Copal and handicraft projects progress in Peru

Plowden, agronomist Yully Rojas, and six Bora woodsmen conducted a five-day rapid inventory of copal trees on about 95 hectares of upland forest near Brillo Nuevo. The Bora team learned to measure the girth of the copal trees and to record their location with a GPS device. The team harvested about half of the resin lumps, leaving the other half containing young weevils to continue producing the next generation of adult weevils and resin lumps. The team then distilled four batches of resin into a pale-yellow oil using a copper alembique, or a traditional distillation pot. According to Haley van Oosten, president of the L’Oeil du Vert fragrance company, copal oil could become a unique and valuable ingredient in some blends of fine perfumes. Producing this oil could then give the communities a profitable source of income. Project manager Rojas and local coordinator Rolando Panduro are now leading monthly searches for copal in the region and distilling the resin from different species to find the varieties, ages, and techniques

that produce the best aromas. If the first phase of the project is successful, the Center will work with the communities, non-governmental partners, and government agencies to implement a sustainable harvest system for the resin and to develop a self-sufficient local enterprise. The Center is also working with the Bora and their Huitoto and Ocaina neighbors by encouraging several dozen skilled artisans to brainstorm new crafts and ideas in a series of workshops. Inspired by the patterns of local snakes, the Bora women are weaving chambira fibers into elegant belts with stunning, colorful designs. They are also creating snake patterns for custom guitar straps and spider web designs for shopping bags. The Center will help market these items buy exhibiting them at presentations, craft fairs, reptile club meetings, and its online Amazon Forest Store.

THE MAIJUNA OF SUCUSARI AND NUEVA VIDA The Maijuna are a native group with about 400 people who live in four villages in the Napo River region of Peru. The group has formed the Federation of Maijuna Native Communities (FECONAMAI) to halt the loss of their land and language and improve basic conditions in their communities. Michael Gilmore, an ethnobotanist from George Mason University and Center board member who has collaborated with the Maijuna for eleven years, invited Plowden and other researchers to attend the 2009 FECONAMAI Congress in the village of Sucusari. With the enthusiastic approval of the Maijuna, the researchers formed a team to support federation efforts to preserve the biological and cultural diversity of the Maijuna. The team includes German Perilla, a veteran bee-keeper who will teach the Maijuna how to produce honey for sale, and Christine Beier, a linguist who will document the Maijuna language and encourage its teaching in schools. Gilmore is currently finishing a project that maps the interaction between plants and people on Maijuna lands. Rojas and Maijuna woodsmen who surveyed the lands around the Maijuna village of Nueva Vida were encouraged by the abundance and diversity of copal trees and resin in the region. The Center also interviewed about three dozen Maijuna women, who said they were interested in selling handicrafts through the Center, but would first like to attend workshops to increase their craft-making skills. Rojas again attended the FECONAMAI Congress in 2010 and won formal approval for a Center project with Maijuna villages when funds become available.

CHINO The artisans of Chino are talented basket-makers. Their paneras, or flat baskets, are tightly woven and elaborately decorated with rainforest seeds and carved wooden pieces. In addition to paying artisans individually, the Center returns 20 percent of its handicraft sales from that community to support needs in the areas of health, education or conservation. With almost $600 in craft rebates received so far, Chino has chosen to buy notebooks and pencils for school children, desks for the school, medicines for their pharmacy; electric wires and lightbulbs for village common areas and food supplies for women replanting chambira palm trees.

RESEARCH AND HANDICRAFTS AT JENARO HERRERA Jenaro Herrera is a town of about 5,000 on the Ucayali River. It has a few paved roads, motorcycle taxis, several convenience stores, and many water buffalo, whose milk is used to make the town’s famous cheese. The Center conducts most of its copal research at the Jenaro Herrera Research Station, which is an internationally recognized outdoor laboratory operated by the Institute for the Investigation of the Peruvian Amazon (IIAP). Project

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Yully Rojas and Maijuna colleagues measure copal tree. © C. Plowden/CACE

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manager Angel Raygada, who is an agronomy student at the National University of the Peruvian Amazon (UNAP), and the local resident brothers Italo and Melaneo Melendez have been monitoring over 300 study trees in the station’s arboretum, natural forest and copal plantation for the last three years. They have been learning about the development of resin lumps and observing how weevils and bees interact with the copal tree. They recently completed a two-year study about the yield of resin produced through the manual wounding of copal trees – the most common technique for collecting resin in Central America. The Center has begun to collaborate closely with Dr. Paul Fine, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, to determine how many weevil species are involved in this fascinating system and to explore how these weevils stimulate more or less resin on some trees depending on the chemical and physical features of its resin and bark. The team has encountered many challenges. The research station is legally protected, but intruders have still harvested resin lumps, destroying years of data. The town of Jenaro Herrera is home to many artisans that create jewelry and belts out of chambira and local seeds. The Center now works with several small cooperatives including Artesanias Huicungo, which specializes in making earrings with carved coconut shells. Jenaro Herrera also has also benefited from Center sale of handicrafts from its artisans. The school principal has used these funds to buy many basic materials for the school, including first aide and cleaning supplies, paper, a printer, a volleyball net and a soccer ball.

OLD AND NEW PARTNERS IN BRAZIL Center director Campbell Plowden did his first studies on non-timber forest products with the Tembé Indians in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. During a recent month-long trip to Brazil, Plowden reconnected with many Tembé and Ka’apor colleagues he once worked with in the Gurupi River region. He learned that many things have changed in these communities in the past ten years. On the positive side, greater support from state governments has improved health and education services through better staffed clinics and schools. On the down side, the same roads that were built to facilitate these improvements also led to the expansion of illegal logging into the heart of the indigenous reserves – now often with the support of community leaders. Unchanged is the community’s need to generate revenue without causing severe damage to the forest. Plowden visited an old friend who lives in the Ka’apor village of Xi’e and found that this group is now making a range of beautiful necklaces, bracelets and rings from the carved nuts of the tucumã and inaja palm trees. The Center is now exploring ways to help market this natural jewelry

From Page 4: Copal and handicraft projects progress in Peruin the U.S. Some Tembé are still making beautiful crafts, but since many of these contain feathers from macaws and other wild birds, the Center cannot buy nor sell these items. Plowden said, “One highlight of the visit to Xi’e was jumping into the back of the community pickup truck one afternoon with a bunch of kids and the seedlings of the ipê tree that they had grown in a rustic nursery. We drove out to an area that had been occupied by some illegal colonists and planted the seedlings there in a first effort to encourage the recovery of the natural forest.” One

other project the Ka’apor are investigating is collecting seeds that may be sold to other reforestation efforts. Plowden also spent time in several caboclo (traditional forest dwellers) communities along the Tapajós River to learn about the progress of their furniture-making enterprise. Instead of logging, the six communities are trying to generate income by selling hand-crafted benches, tables and animal figures from downed wood or carefully cut trees. Since some of their designs are woven from vine roots, the Center may work with the project’s lead organization, the Amazon Research Institute (IPAM in Portuguese), to help communities develop a plan to sustainably harvest this non-timber resource.

Ka’apor Indian girl planting ipê seedling © C. Plowden/CACE

Amazon Field Volunteer in Action Natalya Stanko, a recent journalism graduate from the Penn State University Schreyer Honors College, spent six weeks in Peru during the summer of 2009 as an Amazon Field Volunteer with CACE. She accompanied Center director Campbell Plowden on visits to Chino on the Tahuayo River, the Jenaro Herrera reserach station and the Bora and Maijuna native villages. Natalya posted a running account of her experiences on her blog at: http://amazonecologyns.blogspot.com. She also reflected on her time in the essay “What makes a journalist,” which you can download at the Center homepage: http://amazonecology.org. She is now working as a writer for Sierra Magazine in San Francisco. Please contact the Center at amazonecology@comcast.net if you are interested in learning more about this program.

Center for Amazon Community Ecology1637 B North Atherton St. #90State College, PA 16803

AMAZON SUPPORTER FORMPlease send completed form or check to: Center for Amazon Community Ecology, 1637 B North Atherton St. #90, State College, PA 16803Volunteer form may be downloaded at: www.amazonecology.org/support/volunteer.htmlOn-line donations may be made at: www.amazonecology.org/support/donate.html.

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Thank You!

To our recent interns and volunteers: Newsletter writing and editing: Natalya Stanko, Campbell PlowdenOn-line store preparation: Alejandra Santamaria, Lauren Herwehe

Photography: Samantha Shal, Monika KlodaMarketing support: Penn State Marketing Association, Rachel Darville

Research support: Lindsey and John SwierkVideo production: Greg Harriott

For sponsoring Intimate Views of Amazonia: Elk Creek CaféTo our major donors and funders: Katherine Alden, Sheri and Dayton Coles,

The Rufford Small Grants Foundation, Marjorie Grant Whiting Fund

CACE Directors: Katherine Alden, Jim Finley, Michael Gilmore, Laura Piraino, Campbell Plowden CACE Advisors: Stephen Althouse, Virginia Hubbs, Peter Kostishack, Denny Moore,

Patricia Shanley, Christopher Uhl, Denice Wardrop