Symbol of a dream: the majestic, sacred lupuna tree of Panguana watches over the field station in the Amazon, 2008. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)
In February 1983, one and a half years after I had set off, I returned to Germany. I had spent most of that time in the jungle. Those months were enormously important for me. I had returned as an adult to the place where my life had taken such a decisive turn. I had worked as a researcher myself and discovered in my own, personal way the Amazon Rain Forest habitat. More than a decade after my miraculous struggle for survival in the jungle, I had gained a still deeper connection to it. If my eleven-day trek after the crash had been some sort of initiation, during which I already had an intimation that my life was bound to that of the jungle in a mysterious way, those eighteen months during my studies of the bats offered me conscious, adult insight into some of its secrets.
In Germany, a move and a new beginning were waiting for me. My time in Kiel was over, my belongings packed in boxes, and now I took them and my newly gathered experiences and moved to Munich, where my dissertation adviser taught. At first I lived with my grandmother in Sibichhausen, where I had already spent so many wonderful vacation weeks. But the distance from the Munich city center was too far, and so I soon looked for a small apartment of my own in Neuhausen.
I took the necessary subjects at the Ludwig Maximilian University for my doctorate. Parallel to that, I was able to work part-time at the State Collection of Zoology, as well as analyze the wealth of material I had gathered in Panguana.
Here I met many colleagues, and among them was one who courted me especially charmingly. He was working on parasitic ichneumon wasps, always had advice when I needed him, and best of all: He always made me laugh. He liked to treat me to meals, we discovered that we had a lot in common, and before we knew it, we had fallen in love.
The year after my return, I realized that I had to go to Panguana again to complete my observations, and during those three months in the summer of 1984, Erich sent me wonderful letters in Peru. When I was in Munich in September, right on time for the beginning of the lectures, we saw each other even more frequently—due to my work at the State Collection of Zoology, often even daily.
It would take another three years before my dissertation, entitled “Ecological Separation of Bat Species in the Tropical Lowland Rain Forest of Peru,” and its oral defense were finished. As chance would have it, there was an opening for a library director at the State Collection of Zoology. Since this position corresponded to my interests and qualifications, I applied for it. As a great lover of books, I work to this day in that unique zoological library, which ranks among the largest of its type in Europe, and here find the perfect balance to my commitment to Panguana.
In 1989, Erich and I got married in Aufkirchen, where my mother officially lies buried. My husband was interested from the beginning in Peru, and above all, of course, in Panguana, but he had not yet had an opportunity to travel there himself. And now, of all times, it became difficult, if not impossible. For in recent years the terror of the Sendero Luminoso, whose first excesses I had already encountered during my 1980 trip, had turned Peru into a country full of chaos and violence. Though it was relatively safe in Lima, traveling into the heart of the country was emphatically discouraged. Too many locals, but also foreigners, tourists as well as scientists, had been brutally massacred.
In those years we would without question have lost Panguana, if Moro had not worked in an extraordinary way for the preservation of the research station. Just as I did, he saw in it a sort of legacy that had been entrusted to him and felt the desire and the duty to maintain what my parents had begun there so many years ago. Meanwhile, with my father’s consent, he had moved onto the grounds of Panguana. In this way he could better lend his support when necessary to the scientific guests my father permitted to visit and use the research station. After my father had returned to Germany, he stayed in regular contact with Moro, gave him orders by letter and remunerated him for his work. But now, difficult times were beginning for people in Peru and for Panguana as well.
The Sendero Luminoso itself did not come as far as the Yuyapichis, but a different movement did, which took its name from an Inca successor executed by the Spanish occupiers: “Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru.” Though this movement distanced itself emphatically from the Sendero Luminoso and officially supported the rights of the indigenous population, it nonetheless did not shy away from bloody revenge campaigns against the tribe of the Asháninka Indians, who were supposedly traitors to the cause. And since Panguana was in the traditional area of the Asháninka, it was, of course, also affected by those confrontations. The members of Túpac Amaru collected dues from the inhabitants of the rain forest, east of the Andes, and threatened many people, also in Puerto Inca and the other small surrounding jungle towns. There were many deaths, and for one and a half years their representatives were also based in the village of Yuyapichis, where they made life hard for the locals. That Moro managed in those difficult times to protect the forest area of Panguana and to prevent anyone else from taking possession of it—for that, I will always be grateful to him and his family.
During my stay in Peru for my dissertation work, I had tried to resume my father’s efforts to declare Panguana a nature reserve, but without success. Still, I managed at that time to obtain from the local authorities a first option on the site. My parents had actually purchased the land lawfully from the previous owner, even though it was without official papers. But no one else in the region could produce official documents about this area either. And now suddenly it was said that all properties belonged to the state, and one could only acquire them if one used them for agriculture.
So Moro and I considered whether it would make sense to plant cocoa in a small section of the secondary forest. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Toward the end of the 1980s, it reached the point where the whole area was parceled, and state surveying engineers newly divided the land. I couldn’t come to Peru at the time, for the journey was too dangerous due to the Sendero Luminoso. On top of that, I was in the middle of my dissertation. What could we do now to ensure Panguana’s survival?
In this critical situation Moro’s wife, Nery, declared herself willing to have grounds of Panguana temporarily signed over to her name so that they would be secure. For some neighbors had already been casting covetous glances at the forest, knowing as they did what a rich stock of precious timber Panguana boasts. But our friends defended the valuable trees, above all our glorious lupuna tree, if necessary even “with tooth and nail.” At the time Moro got a lot of trouble from the neighbors, who didn’t understand why this guy was guarding a forest in this way for faraway Germans, instead of chopping it down, selling the valuable wood and turning the land into pastures. But Moro had meanwhile grasped what Panguana is about. Today it is certain: Without him and his whole family, Panguana would no longer exist.
The years passed, a trip to Peru was out of the question, and so Munich became the center of my and my husband’s life. We took vacations such as I had scarcely known before then: to Italy, Greece and Spain. I discovered Europe, so to speak, only now, and enjoyed that very much. At that time, during which I increasingly shied away from press inquiries and gave no interviews, when there was nothing I wanted less than to tell the story of my plane crash, over and over again, I was often overcome with a great longing for the country of my birth, but I put that off until later. I was doing well. I finally had a home, which was fundamentally different from the one I had once had in the jungle. Only the exuberant abundance of plants on our roof terrace hinted at where my heart still secretly belonged. A Polish handyman, who once had something to repair on the roof, was amazed by the lush greenery and spoke to the landlord about it. Afterward, he said extremely sympathetically to my husband: “I know, I know: wife crashed—needs jungle.”
It was ultimately the phone call from Werner Herzog that prompted me, after a fourteen-year interval, to return to the rain forest and Panguana. I have already described the significant role this trip played in working through my accident. A second, no less important aspect was that I finally saw Panguana, Moro and his family again. It became clear to me that the time had come for me to assume responsibility for the research station, the forest and its inhabitants. That had remained first and foremost the cause of my father, who had meanwhile reached the ripe old age of eighty-four. He still attended to all matters, wrote detailed letters to Moro in which he addressed him, as he had over all the previous years, as “señor”—in the end, at some point, as “estimado amigo,” meaning “esteemed friend.” My father continued to advise students and doctoral candidates when they were interested in a topic that had to do with Panguana. And he still had research results to review and analyze from his time in Peru. During his retirement he still visited once a week the institute of zoology in Hamburg, where he offered his services to the reptile section.
He still had so many plans. Alongside a book about the forms of human life, about which he had already been speaking when I was still a teenager, he had also begun to write his life story. Unfortunately, he only got to the first chapters, and the unfinished manuscript breaks off, of all places, shortly before his departure for Peru. In the middle of these various projects, he was surprised by a severe illness, which would lead to his death in the year 2000.
After that, I decided to take up my parents’ legacy and enable the studies that had been begun such a long time ago to be carried on. It was a great help that my husband supported me in this from the beginning. Ever since he had come for the first time during the filming of Werner Herzog’s documentary to the place that had so decisively shaped my life, and was also responsible for my survival after the crash, he, too, had been seized by enthusiasm for this spot.
As a first step we officially appointed Moro as administrator and my local representative and put that in writing. In this way he has an entirely different status with neighbors and authorities and can represent Panguana’s cause still better than he already did, anyhow, all those years without an official mandate. For my parents’ motivation for exploring the forest without exploiting it was still completely foreign to many locals. Meanwhile, Moro’s work has borne fruit. And of course a rethinking has taken place in Peru as well over the past thirty years. Nowadays the schools offer the subject educación ambiental (environmental education) and in this connection teachers often visit us with their classes. Slowly, but surely, the thought is beginning to catch on that it is perhaps not such a good idea to chop down the rain forest so as to raise cattle on pastures, which don’t even thrive there. Meanwhile, there are already even reforestation programs and environmental specialists to ensure that not everything is destroyed.
The village council of Yuyapichis visited us too and wanted to become informed on-site about what we do there. They were really taken with what they saw and also learned what Moro is accomplishing there. Meanwhile, Moro has turned out to be an outstanding guide in the jungle. He has not only been acquainted since his early childhood with all the animals and plants, but in the meantime he has also embraced the idea of nature conservation. How delighted I am when I witness for the first time how enthusiastically and thrillingly he is able to explain the forest to the children. Meanwhile, it has also become a tradition that every time a group of scientists comes to Panguana, the schools send a class to learn about what the people from Europe and other parts of the world are actually doing here.
This understanding among the local population and the acceptance of our neighbors are enormously important for our work. For what good does it do if we create a tiny idyllic spot in Panguana, but all around it the rain forest is destroyed?
To truly stop this development, I realized quite early on, we require allies—and in Peru as much as in Europe. We need resources that far exceed my private possibilities. That became clear to me at the latest when I got to see the long-since mothballed files at the ministry of agriculture. They had been created in the 1970s when my father had already begun pursuing this goal.
A main argument of the assessment against a nature reserve was that Panguana was too small, so we had to enlarge it, acquire land, expand the research station. For that, we needed money that I could not muster privately. There seemed to be no solution in sight.
Then, as often in my life, a wonderful chance opened up as if on its own. Through an article on Panguana that I wrote for the Munich academic journal Aviso, in collaboration with my colleague Professor Ernst-Gerhard Burmeister, the married couple Margaretha and Siegfried Stocker, who are the owners of the Hofpfisterei, the biggest medium-sized ecologically producing bakery business in Germany, became aware of Panguana. When we happened to meet personally by chance in the State Collection of Zoology at an opening for the artist Rita Mühlbauer, who regularly creates art postcards for the Hofpfisterei and had also painted in Panguana, Siegfried Stocker told me that while reading the article he had spontaneously thought: “I would like to get involved in this!”
It was a long time before we truly developed our working relationship, which we cultivate today and about which I am really pleased. First we got to know each other over time, and the Stockers thoroughly weighed all the pros and cons of sponsoring Panguana. But in the end a dream came true for me: In 2008, Siegfried and Margaretha Stocker decided to support Panguana through the additional purchase of areas threatened by slash and burn, and to make a vital, long-term contribution to the expansion of the research station.
It is a partnership that is well matched. As my parents were pioneers, the Stockers were no less so. To bet on a purely ecological bakery business in the early 1970s was widely regarded at the time as quite risky. With their self-commitment to sustainability in their business model, the ecological cultivation of ingredients for the breads and the renunciation of all chemical supplements, they were far ahead of their time, very much like my father, who was already reflecting on ecological contexts at a time when ecology still didn’t mean anything to the broader consciousness of our society. When the Stockers decided to support Panguana, it finally became possible to take a decisive step forward.
In Peruvian environmental policy too, some things have changed for the better. Nature conservation used to be under the jurisdiction of the ministry of agriculture. However, since 2009, there is a newly created ministry of the environment. With this restructuring, it became possible to classify private and smaller tracts of land as protected areas. Though this meant starting over from scratch once again—after all, I had already filed an application with the original nature conservation authorities—I saw that it paid to redo all the work and in even greater detail. For meanwhile, thanks to our sponsors, we could expand the previously 460-acre land to 1,730 acres. We had it surveyed again and hope to be able to turn it as soon as possible into a private nature reserve. For then, our efforts for the conservation of the land will have a new, official status, in the eyes of the surrounding population as well as the authorities. It will be still more respected; for, unfortunately, there are still today far too many people who seek only short-term profit. A lot of animals live in Panguana, and there are also people who, unfortunately, see in them nothing but game to be hunted. But for us, of course, that is out of the question. On top of that, our forest contains a great deal of precious timber, and there are prospectors who move through the rain forests in search of mahogany trees. When they find one, they try to wheedle it out of the owner for fifty dollars or less, only to resell it at a profit many times that amount. Such a tree requires more than one hundred years to reach a size that makes it interesting to timber merchants, and then it ends up in Europe as window crosspieces. The wonderful lupuna trees, to which the Indians ascribed magic powers, are manufactured into plywood.
With his commitment Moro has managed to protect our animals and plants all these years. There is no question that it will be simpler for him when Panguana receives the official status of a nature reserve. Our Indian neighbors living at a distance of a few miles have also come to understand our aims and have promised to respect the land. We involve them in our plans too, and in return we support them in their concerns, so that the whole thing becomes a common effort, which can only be advantageous for all parties in the long run. For many people have meanwhile grasped that: Once the forest is destroyed, it will require centuries for it to grow back—if that happens at all.
Meanwhile, the climate is changing, and the rivers are drying out. The younger people might see that more than their elders. But I am certain that we can influence a great deal there. Today, Panguana already serves as a model research station. It can definitely achieve the same as a nature reserve. It doesn’t always have to be gigantic national parks—small areas, too, have their significance, and, of course, we will try to steadily expand the grounds.
Once again we are packing our suitcases. Our time in Panguana—for this visit—is approaching its end. Now it is time to head back to Pucallpa, and from there over the Andes to Lima. Here some pivotal meetings at the ministry await me, and I am already looking forward to being able to take another step toward our goal.
Everything began here in the jungle. During my odyssey, between death and life, I gained a completely new relationship to things. I learned that nothing, above all not life, can be taken for granted. Since then, I live every day as if it were my last. That also means never taking quarrels with me into the night, following my parents’ example. And the awe of nature—that was burned into my heart already when I was a child. I realized later that not all biologists think this way. My parents never instructed me; they imparted to me the respect for nature as a matter of course. Today I regard that as their most important legacy.
Those days are gone, and yet they shape the present. And the present, likewise, shapes the future. The rain forest is so indescribably manifold, and even though people have been working on it for decades, we understand only a fraction of what makes it up. In Panguana, too, after about half a century of scientific work, there remain endless things for us to discover. There are colleagues of ours who study a single fallen tree trunk for weeks and find hundreds of new insect species. To have Panguana declared a nature reserve—for me that’s only the beginning. I have many more dreams; one of them, for example, is someday to be able to perform canopy research at our station.
I often cannot help thinking about how wonderful it would be if my parents could see what we have achieved today. The fact that Panguana still exists after such a long time. How the area has grown and will continue to grow. The fact that so many scientists come here every year from all over the world and do their part to constantly improve our understanding of the rain forest’s wonders. I am sure it would make them happy. I have taken up their legacy on every level, keeping an eye fixed on the future. The future of the rain forest over which I crashed, which received me and saved me and gave me so much, is also the future of humanity, our climate and our planet Earth. Someone as deeply bound to it as I am will never stop working for its survival.