Prologue
The hum of the plane engines overcame the drone of the cicadas. A troop of howler monkeys perched in the upper branches of a cecropia tree looked up at the low-flying plane while they continued to stuff whole leaves into their mouths. A strange white powder like smoke trailed the plane on both sides. The alpha male looked perplexed when the smoke turned into a shower of seeds landing all around them. He picked up a few that had fallen into a bromeliad nearby, and cautiously chewed them. They tasted both familiar and strange--he spit them out.
The screen displayed a false color satellite image with resolution to about 10 meters of an area in Limón Provence, Costa Rica. His proprietary 3D interpolator had already started to build the wire frame model based on the topo codes and soon he could see the area as clearly as looking out an airplane window.
One floor below Rocky, Mary S. Cariot, Ph.D.. was also celebrating. "I think this deserves a new hat for my collection," she grinned to herself. Her coworkers had already nicknamed her "Hatty Mary" because she liked to wear hats, even while she was working, and had quite an eclectic assortment to choose from. Her sartorial eccentricity did not detract from her work as a biogeneticist, however. The source of her glee was the successful transplantation of axi1, a non-auxin dependent growth gene, into a species of ficus. Her little fig trees, essentially bonsai size three weeks ago had already tripled in size in normal potting soil and standard lighting conditions. Mary was pleasantly surprised that her boss, Dr. Hull, had "dropped in" to check on her progress and seemed very enthusiastic, especially since the old codger rarely even cracked a smile about anything. But today, when she had shown him the growth curves, he positively beamed and said, "I'm glad I didn't listen to the advice of those Neanderthals on my Board of Directors when they questioned your credentials. And I think I know just the place to field test this new genetic material." He reached inside his Armani coat and withdrew an envelope, proffering it to her. "Here's a little recognition of your efforts. Take tomorrow off and go to my club for a little pampering." The envelope held a gift certificate for an entire day of facials, manicure, pedicure, massage, etc. at the spa in Dr. Hull's very exclusive club. Mary had never in her life treated herself to anything like this and was really surprised and pleased that the old fart would have thought of it. "W-w-why thank you sir!" Mary stammered as the older scientist briskly exited with a wave of his hand, as if to say "think nothing of it."
"Truly astounding," John Hull thought to himself as he took the stairs
two at a time up to his penthouse. "If only Schultes had seen this,
it would have blown his mind." He thought of his professor of ethnobotany
at Harvard who became world-renown for discovering hallucinogens in plants
of the Amazonian jungle among other things. Hull's own scientific
accomplishments, up 'til now, had been much more modest. He had worked
on plant viruses for the Army biological warfare department at Fort Dietrick
and hadn't even come close to creating the variant of tobacco mosaic virus
he hoped would attack chloroplasts. His only real success had been
in getting rhus to increase the production of urushiol. He
had astutely invested in drug companies that made remedies for poison oak
and ivy before the Army performed its top-secret trials in the woods of
the Adirondacks in New York and in Marin County, California. He had
parlayed inside knowledge into a personal fortune over the years, but this
time would make the others look like a church bake sale. While Mary
was being pampered at his club he would do some sampling of her materials.
He reminisced as he trudged up the muddy hill toward his aunt's house about those days as a boy when his father, a revered awa, took him alone into the forest for "medicine walks." He was taught not only how to recognize and prepare the fifty or so commonly used medicinal plants his people had depended upon for generations, but also the songs to sing, the ceremonies to perform to enhance the healing power the plants possessed. In fact he carried in his pouch the dried red stems and roots of the sás he had peeled several days ago to dry in the sun. Now he would make a tea to help his aunt's sore joints and muscles.
Along the path he touched the trunks or larger branches of many of the trees in a familiar way with his machete. He did not hack at them, rather he caressed them in greeting, like a handshake. That was what his machete seemed like--a part of his hand. He giggled to himself as he stepped over a busy line of leaf-cutter ants, hustling down their fastidiously clean trail with their carefully cut sails of leaf to feed to the fungus in their colonies on which they depended for their own food. Juan was not laughing at the ants, whom he respected greatly, but at the legend about the origin of the white people, who were descended from the leaf-cutter ants. His people were made from maize by Sibö; this reminded them of the need for them to take care of plants so that they might eat. The white people bustled about cutting things down, building roads and hoarding their treasures, just like the leaf-cutters.
He emerged into the clearing where his Aunt Gloria's house perched on
a ridge. Juan smiled when he saw the thatched roof of his aunt's
house. He had helped carry the long uko leaves down from
the Talamanca mountains last year when her roof needed to be replaced.
The walls and floors of the house were made of kuk and
tied together with lianas. He remembered the saying his grandfather taught
him, "to make a house you need only two tools: an axe and a machete. Everything
else you need comes from the forest." His reverie was broken by his aunt's
smiling face in her doorway, saying, "I was hoping you were coming today,
my joints are killing me!"
"Gentlemen, I have good news for WRI and all of us
in this room," he began. "Our researchers have uncovered a unique
opportunity for development which could potentially fund all of our operations
by itself in five to ten years." The directors were riveted to their
CEO; they knew the full amount of the budget, both the public one and the
clandestine work they did for the government. Hull flashed a slide
on the screen of a computer-enhanced map with no identifying place names.
In a roughly rectangular area on the map were dotted icons of gold ingots
and oil wells.
"In no other single location of such small geographic
size have we ever found the likelihood of both gold and petroleum reserves
of this magnitude." There was an audible intake of breath in the
room.
"Due to the extremely sensitive political nature
of this discovery, we must ask for no discussion of this project with anyone
outside of this room. As additional security precautions, even the
researchers and field workers do not fully realize the nature of the project
they are working on. We may also need the special expertise of the men
in this room to help with any potential international obstacles which might
impede our progress." Hull knew several of his board members had worked
in the CIA and others had been successful implementers or thwarters of
international business spying.
"Until the preliminary negotiations for purchase
of the land and its mineral rights have been accomplished, detailed information
will be available only on a need-to-know basis. What I am asking
for at this time is the board's approval to proceed. Please refer
to the proposed budget, income and expense sheet and graphic projections
of revenue in the folders in front of you. I await your questions."
Hull paused patiently as the men tore into the leather bound notebooks
at each of their places on the table. The first page read:
As they passed through the corn and plantains growing around the iguana
nursery, Juan wondered to himself whether these people could be trusted.
He had heard of people from large drug companies coming to the forest to
learn about medicinal plants so they could take them back to their country
to turn into expensive drugs that his people would never see. Neither
had the native people received any credit or payment for the knowledge
they had freely and naively given to the outsiders. He silently asked
Sibö to give him a sign whether he should share his knowledge with
these people or just give them a "standard" tourist walk. He whacked
a pejibaye palm with his machete to show the couple where "heart of palm"
came from, but as he raised the machete back up to peel the stalk, the
woman reached for the plant. Even though his reflexes were quick,
she had sliced her index finger on the edge of the machete, leaving about
a half inch line oozing red.
"Ow! oh I'm sorry," Suzy cried, "I just wanted to
touch the palm, but I didn't know you were going to slice it."
"No, I am the sorry one," Juan apologized, tenderly
holding the woman's hand.
"Isn't that a cacao pod over there?" Jack interrupted,
quite inappropriately. Juan glanced in the direction the gringo was
pointing.
"Yes," Juan replied, "much of this area had been
a cacao plantation at one time, but now the forest is coming back."
"Isn't the cacao pod a treatment for machete cuts?"
Jack continued. Now it was Juan's turn to be surprised. How did this
gringo with his fancy electronic video camera and his expensive boots know
about using cacao for cuts?
Juan showed no sign of his surprise as he answered,
"Yes, let me show you." He pulled a green pod the shape of a swollen cucumber
off the trunk of the nearby small tree. Next he scraped the skin of the
pod and took the scrapings from the edge of the machete and pasted them
over Suzy's laceration with his finger.
"Hmm, it doesn't even sting," she mused, now more
curious than hurt.
"Oh, I almost forgot," Juan said as he gave them
each samples of the fresh cut heart-of-palm.
"It's good," Jack said between bites, "kind of a
nutty flavor, but a texture more like coconut."
As they trudged through the mud, Juan explained about the various uses of the plants along the way. He showed them which were used for thatch, for basket-making, for building, what parts were edible, which ones animals or birds liked. He pointed out a sloth sleeping in a tree overhead. "Thanks, I never would have seen him otherwise," Suzy commented after Juan demonstrated the fuzzy shape that blended into the canopy. Juan talked about how his people used the secretions from frogs to paralyze prey with poison darts. Jack and Suzy were amazed that he could capture and display the small but potent amphibian so casually.
They had landed, bleary-eyed, two days earlier at Juan Santamaría International Airport, breezed through customs and were met with their car by a contact WRI had arranged for them. After a brief orientation to the city, they had ditched the rather stodgy middle-aged "guide" and explored the bars and casinos of San Jose on their own. Rocky had been surprised to find most of the locals to be so fair-skinned. He couldn't have told them apart from Europeans or even Americans (without hearing them speak Spanish.) The girls were flirtatious and friendly; not at all like the bovine tortilla-flippers he had imagined. When they awoke, hung over in their hotel room the next morning, they still felt the previous evening had been worth it.
Rocky actually felt pretty lucky to be here for another reason: the roads in this country really sucked! It wasn't too bad around the cities of San Jose or Cartago, but once they crossed the mountain range and headed down the Atlantic coast, the roads got progressively worse. Due to the heavy rainfall, occasional small bridges along the way were washed out and they had to bushwhack up temporary detours to a hastily constructed bypass bridge where the stream wasn't quite so wide. It took them a while to learn the etiquette on these one-lane bridges: namely get out of the way of the trucks and buses regardless of who supposedly had the right-of-way. Once they got to Olivia, Rocky could hardly contain his excitement. They had taken an unmarked path up into the trees and proceeded on foot from there. Rocky had expected to continuously carve their way through vines & underbrush, but the forest floor was surprisingly open. He made notes on his laptop and entered the handheld GPS coordinates at different locations where they stopped. The soil and core samples were really just window-dressing the way Rocky saw it. He had no doubt they would show low grade gold ore and signs of crude oil.
Juan Semanas was angry at the two young men in the red car with the green letters for more than just splashing him. He had watched them as they thrashed through the forest, hacking unnecessarily with their shiny new machete and packing the soil into bags and metal canisters. He was particularly annoyed when they picked up some of the white sacred stones from the stream bed to take with them. He had watched, unnoticed, as they defiled his ancestors' land and religion. He wandered if Sibö ever punished such ignorance and insolence.
Little known to the board, Hull had hedged his bets about the land purchase. He knew how stubborn some of these primitive people could be when it came to leaving their ancestral lands. In some cases no amount of money or other perks could tear them away from their subsistence living on some godforsaken plot of jungle. He knew if some "natural disaster" befell the forest, they would have no choice but to leave. It would take longer to wait for the mutant strangler figs to choke off the diversity of the reserve, but the price of the land would be even cheaper at that point and nobody could object to an environmental quarantine of this dangerous parasite. Finally, of course WRI would offer to clear the land entirely of the menace at no cost to the government, just ownership of the land. To defray their costs they might just have to try their luck at mining once the forest was gone.
He was hiding behind bushes and watching a gathering of his people on the beach. He knew this must be a special ceremony, because his people treated the ocean with great fear and respect. They stood in a semicircle on the beach facing the water. As Herman looked around the bush, he saw a group of white men in glittering clothes and hats rowing onto the shore in a wooden boat. They carried flags and spoke strangely in a foreign language. Then two girls, one about eight and the other fourteen years old, were given to the man who was the leader of the white shiny men. The man smiled through the fur on his face and fondling the two girls, directed the boat to return to a larger vessel hovering on the sea.
Herman blinked slowly, as if night and day depended on his eyelids. When he looked up again there were black men arriving on the same beach. This time the native people stayed in the bushes and simply watched as the black men made camp and started building shelters with driftwood. Although he wanted to see more, Herman could not help blinking again at that moment.
When his eyes reopened there was nobody on the beach, but he heard clanging
metallic noises in the bush and ran back up the creek bed. Many men,
black and indigenous, were hammering together a bridge for the railroad
that the United Fruit Company was building to transport the bananas to
Limón so they could be shipped overseas. Herman looked more
closely at the working men, besides sweat, they had sores and bruises covering
their skin. He overheard the men whispering,
"They burned my house and my crops."
"Mine too, so they could have more land to plant
bananas."
"But now they have murdered Antonio Saldaña,
because he dared to oppose them."
"The UsekLa says we must all go on the sacred diet
to purge these people from our lands."
"How can those old-fashioned ways prevail against
the machinery of the Company?" asked another.
Herman struggled to keep his eyes open a little longer, but they burned
terribly. He squeezed them shut hoping his tear glands could soothe
their drought. He heard the rumble before he had them all the way
open again. A wall of water roared down the creek bed he had been
standing next to and swept him far out to sea. Although he could
not swim, and knew he was drowning he had the calm satisfaction of seeing
a locomotive engine slowly sinking into the waves. He gave out his
breath slowly and opened his mouth and nostrils expecting seawater to rush
in, but tasted only a few drops of fresh water. He opened his eyes
as daylight trickled into the forest and a few drops of rainwater ricocheted
from the leaves. Juan was curled up a few feet away snoring.
The couple had begun reforesting their land in Alajuela Province, planting native fruit and hardwood trees as well as some of the medicinal plants they had discussed with Juan. In addition to cacao, they had planted hombre grande, gavilana, indio desnudo, and sorosi. They knew these plants, in addition to long use by the indigenous people, were commonly used by the Ticos as folk remedies. They hoped to encourage their neighbors to look for similar renewable crops which did not depend on cutting down native trees, but grew among them. Already they had made contacts with an herb exporter who sold both locally and overseas.
In addition to the excitement of learning a whole new business, Jack and Suzy were planning to build a retirement home on their property in Costa Rica. They wanted it to fit in esthetically with the local plants and scenery and have minimal impact on the environment. Fortunately, solar power was abundant in the tropics and the ridge at the top of their property was a likely location for a wind generator. Rainwater collection for their water supply should provide enough for their needs since it averaged about eighty inches per year. Of course they had to have a uplink dish system so Jack could surf the internet even when the local phone company was out of commission. Their contacts in the medical and pharmaceutical fields assured them that if they could show any significant clinical activity in any of the traditional plant medicines that they could get chemical analyses done as part of a research grant.
Naturally, Jack and Suzy were dismayed when they received the email
from ATEC that outlined the attempts by a mysterious transnational
corporation to buy up all the property around and including the Reserve.
Even more disturbing was the rumor that the same company was paying for
squatters to infiltrate the forest and build shacks that they could say
they had occupied long enough to qualify for property rights under Costa
Rican law. The couple knew they had to do something to help, but
what?
Hull was in a reflective mood as well. Without being too obvious he noted the predominance of the mutant strangler figs among the vines hanging from the larger trees. "These ignorant buffoons don't know they're playing hardball with a pro," he chuckled to himself. His VP for International Relations and his Spanish speaking attorney were meeting with the various chiefs and self-appointed tree-huggers in Puerto Viejo, trying one more time to hammer out a deal. Hull knew if they wouldn't go for this package, it was hopeless. "Oh well, at least plan B seems to be succeeding beyond our wildest dreams," he mused.
In Puerto Viejo, the WRI negotiating team was being grilled by angry
members of the audience.
"Tell us once and for all that your company has
nothing to do with the dozens of squatters that just showed up recently
to invade our land!" one irate man shouted.
"Tell us why your company wants this land so badly,"
another added, "We don't believe the hogwash about building a luxury hotel
and resort in this area. Both you and we know it's too far for the
rich tourists to travel on our roads.
Juan Semanas asked quietly, "Tell us what we are
to do when the birds of the trees, the animals we hunt and the plants that
feed us are all gone."
"I'm glad you asked that question," the WRI attorney
responded with an insincere smile, "With the improvement in the standard
of living for the whole community, nobody will worry about going hungry
again. We are prepared not only to build you your own local community
school and soccer field, but a supermarket which will provide all the staples
anyone could want. In the same building will be small shops for your
artisans to sell your baskets, jewelry and iguana products to the tourists.
We will provide space to anyone who is willing to work with us rent-free
for the next twenty years." A few of the less convinced landowners
looked thoughtful after this interchange, but the zealots still controlled
the conversation.
"In all the centuries our people have tried to work
with your people, we have died and you have prospered. Why should
this time be any different?" Gloria left the question hanging in the air
as she walked out of the room.
"What the fuck!" shouted John Hull as the branch
he casually stepped on sank its fangs into his fleshy leg.
"Holy shit," Gordo exclaimed, "It's a fer-de-lance!
a terciopelo! Get away from him,
"Worst bothrops envenomation I've seen in a long time," Dr. Ignacio Escorriola commented as he injected 6 vials of whole IgG antivenom into the intravenous line in John Hull's neck. The CEO was almost unrecognizable, his right leg was about three times the size of his left leg and he had large bruises and small purple petechiae covering most of his skin. The catheter draining his bladder was dripping bloody fluid into a clear bag and dried blood was caked around his nostrils and lips. Although his mouth grimaced as if he was trying to speak, the hemorrhage into the left speech center had rendered him speechless. He would survive, but never be the same.
Dr. Mary S. Cariot, Ph.D. was celebrating in her own way. When she had found out how Hull had stolen her ficus samples and sprayed them on the Reserve, she had been furious. Not so furious as to quit her well-paying position with WRI, but mad enough not to tell Hull that her samples were dying off in droves. The mutant growth gene not only increased the growth rate of the fig vines, it hastened the normal aging process, so the life expectancy of the mutant strangler figs was only about three to five years, according to her calculations. She had actually visited the Williams' website and had emailed them with detailed information about the secret seeding of the Reserve by Hull. Disgusted by the unethical and greedy behavior of her current employer, she had also circulated her resume to a number of academic and environmental research groups.
As for John Hull, he intimidated no one in the dreary Skilled Nursing Facility he now called home. Without real family or friends, there was no other place for him to recover. The nurse's aides got used to his scowls and red face, but paid him no mind as they rolled him over to wipe his backside. He wasn't rich and powerful here, he was just "the aphasic stroke in 14B."
A few years later, Jack and Suzy Williams took an early retirement to
their modest rammed-earth home on the ridge overlooking the lake in Alajuela
Province. The trees they planted thrived, the medicinal plant garden
brought in enough to live on and it provided employment for a dozen
of their new Tico neighbors. Jack still enjoyed surfing the net with
his computer, and felt glad that it was powered by the combined photovoltaic
and wind generating system that supplied their entire home with electricity.
Suzy became an avid windsurfer on the lake, and they both enjoyed their
hikes into the rainforest which surrounded their property on two sides.
Each morning they counted their blessings as the roar of the howler monkey
troop started their day.
1. for more information about the indigenous people
of Costa Rica and preservation of the rainforest read:
Taking Care of Sibö's Gifts: An Enivironmental Treatise from
Costa Rica's KéköLdi Indigenous Reserve
by Paula Palmer, Juanita Sanchez and Gloria Mayorga, published Asociacion
de Desarrollo Integral de la Reserva Cocles/KéköLdi, San Jose,
Costa Rica, 1993. The association can be reached at Apartado 170-2070,
Sabanilla, Montes de Oca, San Jose, Costa Rica or (506) 24-60-90 voice
or (506) 53-75-24 fax.
The book is also available from Paula Palmer:
1103 Linden Ave., Boulder CO 80304, USA,
Phone: 303/444-0306,
Fax: 303/449-9794
Email: globresponse@igc.apc.org