8
NEW GUINEA
In March 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace caught his first glimpse of New Guinea. He had endured many hardships to reach the island—bouts of malaria, storms at sea, attacks by bandits, long stretches of loneliness—and he later wrote that upon spotting its northern coast, not far from the Bismarck Sea, he “looked with intense interest on those rugged mountains, retreating ridge behind ridge into the interior, where the foot of civilised man had never trod.”
Getting to New Guinea is easier now, but in a world where a traveller can begin a day in New York and end it in Tibet, South Africa, or Chile, the island remains one of the most remote places on the planet. For me, the trip began when I locked the door of my Beijing apartment on a cold November afternoon. As the wind hit me I pulled a scarf over my mouth to protect against the city’s gritty pollution. Two days earlier, air quality monitors installed on the roof of the U.S. embassy recorded PM 2.5 (particulate matter with diameters smaller than 2.5 millionths of a metre) at levels the Environmental Protection Agency terms hazardous. In U.S. cities, air-quality managers would have warned citizens to avoid outdoor activity, but Beijing didn’t publicly measure the pollutant, and for most city residents the haze was just another bad day.1
I adjusted my backpack and walked down my lane, past two women playing badminton and a line of small shops. A woman wearing a face mask walked a poodle with ears dyed bright pink. I hailed a cab at a crowded intersection and, protected within its small interior, finally took a few deep breaths.
Only after my plane climbed above Beijing’s pollution bubble was I reminded of how skies are meant to look. In clear, high air, we flew south over China’s arid eastern plains, much of the land appearing from above like patches of dry skin. At sunset, we crossed into Guangdong Province, China’s industrial heartland, its sprawling factories reflecting the last rays of light from their rooftops, and then bent west along the scimitar edge of Vietnam, over Nha Trang and east of Ho Chi Minh. We slipped into Malaysia near its southern tip and dropped toward Singapore, a billion-watt light at the end of the world’s largest land mass. Hundreds of container ships anchored in the South China Sea burned like fires, and streetlights cast orange-gold pools on asphalt highways.
From Singapore, my next flight headed east over the thousand islands of Indonesia: over Borneo’s troubled orangutans and north of Bali’s five-star resorts, past Flores, one of the world’s top scuba sites, and Timor, where fighting between separatists and pro-Indonesian militias left hundreds dead in the 1990s. Wallace had called the Indonesian archipelago “the largest and most luxuriant islands which adorn our earth,” but today he wouldn’t recognise them. Since China’s awakening, Indonesia’s forests have fallen at among the fastest rates globally. In 2002, the UN Environment Program warned that most of Indonesia’s lowland jungles could be gone within three decades.2 The Jakarta government responded by banning log exports, but environmental groups estimate that illegal shipments could comprise as much as 80 percent of its trade. According to a recent study of satellite images, Sumatra and Kalimantan—two of Indonesia’s largest islands—lost nearly 10 percent of their forests between 2000 and 2008.3
As dawn broke we were crossing New Guinea. I pushed open my window shade and peered out at the healthiest land I am ever likely to see: the entire world below my 35,000-foot window was deep green. A few emerald rivers cut loops through the jungle, but otherwise nothing broke the canopy—no towns or villages, no roads, no pillars of smoke. I finally felt like Wallace, a naturalist on my way to discover the world as it once had been.
A few hours later I was sitting on the balcony of the Binatang Research Center, a small collection of laboratories and bunkhouses on Papua New Guinea’s northern coast. Below me, a British graduate student peered into hundreds of plastic bags hanging from clotheslines. Each contained a leaf or twig impregnated with insect larva—one of the first-ever methodical studies of “gall-inducing insects”, thousands of almost entirely unknown bugs that have evolved the ability to force plants to build edible walls (called galls) around their eggs. Inside the building, researchers identified other insects and then carefully pinned them to trays. A few, like the Queen Alexandra’s birdwing (Ornithoptera alexandrae)—the world’s biggest butterfly, with a wingspan a foot across—were well studied, but most had never been classified. The researchers filed many in wooden drawers marked “Unidentified Families XXXX”.
I had arranged my visit through a string of contacts that ended with Vojtech Novotny, a Czech ecologist who is arguably the world’s top expert on New Guinea’s forests, and we met for coffee overlooking a bay where three boys were splashing loudly. Novotny was forty-six and looked like Wallace might have after a few months in the forest: he was spare, with a lean face, and he dressed casually in shorts, a short-sleeve shirt, and plastic sandals. Like Wallace, he wore large glasses and had grown a substantial beard. (A picture of Wallace near the end of his life shows him with a bushy white Santa Claus-like beard; Novotny’s was just as big but red and flecked with only hints of white.)
Other things about Novotny also reminded me of Wallace. Both, for instance, kept unusual pets. Wallace raised a string of animals, including an infant orangutan and several birds of paradise. Novotny had an ornery hornbill named Kokomo that hopped around the centre’s yard and pecked at the fingers of anyone, except Novotny, who tried to pick it up. Both men had also dedicated large parts of their lives to field research. Wallace spent eight years in Southeast Asia and five years in South America. As a way of introducing his work, Novotny explained that he had become hooked on New Guinea during his first visit in 1995; he sent an email to his university in then Czechoslovakia saying he needed another six months and ended up staying for a large part of every year since, enough time that he had learned to self-diagnose impending bouts of malaria.
For me, a more important similarity was that Wallace and Novotny shared interests both in the precise answers demanded by science and in larger questions that can be addressed only by philosophy, literature, or religion. The Malay Archipelago became a bestseller in Britain (and, reportedly, Joseph Conrad’s favourite book) partly because Wallace approached the natural world with awe and curiosity and partly because he addressed greater social and cultural issues. Novotny had written an equally appealing book, Notebooks from New Guinea, and he seemed the perfect person to answer my broadest questions: Why should the world care that, if current trends continue, a generation from now the planet will look much more like China and much less like New Guinea? Why, in short, should we protect our last old-growth forests?
Scientists have a number of stock answers to that question. First, they say that forests are important providers of what they call eco-services. For local communities, that means everything from maintaining healthy soils that purify water and prevent flooding (by holding rainfall and releasing it slowly) to moderating weather by slowly transpiring moisture. Because they protect the world’s richest biological environments, they also provide communities with food and building materials. In Papua New Guinea that is particularly true: a 2000 government census found that more than 80 percent of the nation’s citizens remained directly dependent on the natural world and many continued to live entirely on things they found in the jungle; if all commerce were to cease—if, say, the world suddenly ran out of fossil fuels—they would be among a small group of people for whom life would hardly change.4
More recently, scientists have begun to focus on forests as carbon storehouses. As plants grow they trap carbon, and while mature forests are generally carbon-neutral—absorbing as much carbon as they release—when they’re cleared, most of their carbon escapes to the atmosphere. Deforestation now contributes roughly 15 percent of global carbon emissions, and if forests are cleared more rapidly, that percentage could rise.5 (The world’s forests are thought to contain 638 billion tons of carbon, more than is currently stored in the atmosphere; the Amazon alone holds roughly one-sixth of that, more than a decade’s worth of the world’s fossil fuel emissions.)6
Experts also point to the high biological diversity of forests as a good reason to save them. While old-growth forests cover only about 10 percent of the planet’s land, they provide habitat for roughly 80 percent of terrestrial species.7 Tropical forests are particularly important, together sheltering more than half of Earth’s terrestrial life.8 And only a tiny part of that diversity is better understood today than it was when Wallace visited New Guinea in the middle of the nineteenth century.
If preserved, that untapped knowledge may prove to be of great practical value. Many modern products and concepts—from engineering to psychology—are based on natural structures, but medicine is most frequently cited. Nearly 40 percent of all medical prescriptions dispensed in the United States are derived from wild plants, animals, and microorganisms (or are synthesised to mimic naturally occurring chemical compounds), and scientists generally point to a handful of widely used examples, among them morphine (a powerful analgesic that was based on chemicals found in opium poppies), quinine (an antimalarial drug derived from the bark of the South American cinchona tree—Cinchona ledgeriana), and erythromycin (an antibiotic first found in a fungus from the Philippines).9 Thousands of similar cures are still used by forest communities and most have never been tested in Western laboratories.10
Novotny saw value in all those arguments. He’d spent most of his career studying intact, healthy New Guinea forests. But he’d also looked at logged-over sections, and he described the resulting grasslands and monocrop plantations as “biological deserts”, places where the world’s most complicated, diverse ecosystems had been almost instantly reduced to some of its simplest environments. More than fifteen thousand plant species have been identified in New Guinea, and in one hectare of healthy rain forest—an area roughly the size of two American football fields—it is common to find more than three hundred unique kinds of trees. (By comparison, a healthy old-growth forest in New England or northern Europe generally contains no more than fifty species per hectare, a factor, largely, of colder weather.)
Like everywhere in the world, New Guinea’s large mammals and birds receive most of the attention: ornithologists visit with hopes of glimpsing birds of paradise and cassowary—man-size animals that, with hornlike crests and Big Bird-esque feet, resemble giant prehistoric turkeys; hikers search for tree kangaroos, the result of Australian wallabies moving into the jungle.
Both groups should, however, be looking at the island’s insects. So far, scientists have identified more than 10,000 species and the number of drawers marked Unidentified Families XXXX has piled up. Novotny estimated that some 250,000 species probably live on the island, and while some, like butterflies, are well understood, most have never been classified.11 “For example, with certain groups of parasitic wasps, you can be sure that at least 95 percent of them are unknown,” Novotny said as we looked across the shimmering bay.
Clear-cutting—when loggers take every tree regardless of age or species—creates a cascade of changes. After loggers leave, farmers move in to burn debris and take advantage of open land. Increasingly, companies buy the tracts to plant oil palms.
Even when loggers leave fragmented forests, the damage is acute. When particular trees are removed, their absence sets off chain reactions as reliant species move elsewhere. And changes in physical space also have long-term consequences. In natural rain forests, sunlight hits the forest floor only when old trees fall. But after loggers clear an area more light penetrates, giving quick-growing species an advantage. Even after careful selective logging, where only specific species are taken, the large amount of sunlight stimu-lates the growth of vines and—just as kudzu has overrun woodlands beside many American roads—two vine species, beach knickers (Caesalpinia bonduc) and merremia (Merremia peltata), have choked large areas of logged New Guinea jungle.
In a century or two, selectively cut forests might recover enough to look pristine. But they will still lack the diversity of untouched forests. “Those fragmented and logged-over forests can sustain some part of the species biodiversity, but it’s very hard to say how much,” Novotny explained. “They’re a bit of a messy ecosystem.”
For Novotny, the fact that large areas of the world’s last biologically intact forests can be so degraded in a decade or two is reason enough to invest in saving remaining old-growth rain forests. “The value of having a complex, evolved ecosystem is that it can be studied to understand how complicated biological systems evolve and work,” he said as we sipped strong local coffee. “The biological diversity can be used and finally will be used if it’s preserved. These are products of evolution, so they’re very sophisticated and we don’t really understand them yet. It’s about preserving things which are the product of millions of years of evolution and can’t be re-created.”
Novotny, however, was new to advocacy. Like many scientists, he shied away from activism, preferring to explain rather than interfere. But over two decades, he’d become disturbed by the rising speed of Papua New Guinea’s deforestation, and in 2010 he published a journal article called “Rain Forest Conservation in a Tribal World: Why Forest Dwellers Prefer Loggers to Conservationists”. In the article, he noted that almost a quarter of Papua New Guinea’s forests were cleared or degraded between 1972 and 2002. More recent studies had shown that over 90 percent of the country’s exported logs are shipped to China, where demand is rising rapidly. The “growing intensity of logging . . . raises some intriguing questions,” Novotny wrote, “notably why so many tribal communities apparently prefer loggers to conservationists, and what conservationists might do to endear themselves to indigenous forest owners.”12
Then he went on to offer answers. One of the paper’s central arguments was that New Guinea’s forests weren’t saved by enlightened thinking but because, until recently, locals couldn’t do much damage. New Guinea’s lowlands have the highest malaria incidence outside of Africa, keeping the population small, and people armed with Stone Age tools couldn’t clear many trees: “The limited damage done by forest-dwelling populations to lowland forests . . . appears to be a consequence of technological impotence [rather] than of free choice,” he wrote.
The arrival of the modern world had changed that. Finally presented with chainsaws and bulldozers, locals had decided to trade trees for televisions, roads, cars, hospitals, and schools. “Despite decades of investment in conservation, I am not aware of a single large rain forest in Papua New Guinea that has been successfully protected when a choice between logging and conser-vation was available to its landowners,” he wrote.
As Novotny explained it, the problem was simple. Like the rest of the world, New Guineans want better material lives, and if conservationists want to save forests, they should start paying competitive rates. In one community where the Binatang Research Center had begun to work, that rate seemed to be about $2 per hectare per year, plus a simple school and some antimalarial pills. Given that 12 million hectares of old-growth forest remain in Papua New Guinea, the cost of saving intact areas would be around $24 million each year, plus some bricks and mortar and a few industrial-size trash bags of antimalarial pills.13
That seems like a small amount given what could be lost. In 2011, New York City and a city-based non-profit group spent $42 million to manage the 341-hectare Central Park, certainly a beautiful and much-enjoyed space, but not much compared to the wonders of New Guinea’s jungle.
Sitting on the balcony of the research centre as evening fell, I asked Novotny if he thought the world would react quickly enough to save significant parts of what remained.
The boys had finished playing and Novotny gazed across the quiet bay. “When I came here in 1995, we were writing proposals about how New Guinea had one of the lowest deforestation rates in the world and how great that was,” he said. “Now New Guinea’s right in the middle of typical rates of deforestation for tropical forests and the trend is getting worse. The status quo is pretty good, but the forest will not last if all these trends continue,” he said. “It could go either way.”
Looked at over a longer timeline, Papua New Guinea is rapidly going the way of patio furniture and living-room floors. In 2008, scientists at the University of Papua New Guinea released a report about the state of the country’s forests. By comparing aerial photographs taken in 1972 with satellite images from 2002, they were able to measure how much of its tree cover had been lost and damaged.
The 1972 images show what looks like an uninhabited country. New Guinea was still a blip on the world’s forestry map. (Australia, its next-door neighbour, didn’t need its timber and Japan had yet to begin importing significant quantities.) According to the report, 82 percent of the nation was covered by intact forests, leaving it “perhaps the most forested land in the world”, and looking at the photographs one gets a sense of how the planet looked without humans: other than a few coastal plantations and highland meadows, the country was blanketed with trees.14
The 2002 images show the rising mastery of man. Nearly a quarter of Papua New Guinea was cleared or degraded during the three intervening decades, and the images reveal rectangular blocks of farmland and timber plantations with amoeba-like arms spreading along valleys. In areas with new logging, roads appear in fishbone patterns, the first stage of what will become greater clearing as locals build houses and carve out farms. Over time, the addition of a single road, possible only because a logging company arrives with heavy equipment, can set off a chain reaction of smaller, individual reclamations, and, according to the study, almost a quarter of the nation’s logged land had been converted to “non-forest cover”.15
Assigning responsibility for those losses is as difficult for forests as it is for tigers and turtles. The arrival of loggers starts the process, but it is driven by both consumers and landowners. Papua New Guinea’s population had risen from 2.7 million in 1972 to 5.6 million in 2002, and the report finally drew a line down the middle, attributing the losses almost equally to logging and the expansion of subsistence farming.
Given Papua New Guinea’s growing population—in 2011, it reached 6.7 million—and China’s timber demand, it is, however, clear that the speed of deforestation could easily rise, and the report found that if trends continued, more than three-quarters of the country’s accessible forests would be gone or degraded by 2021. “It will not be long—perhaps in the lifetimes of the country’s current leaders and policy-makers—before the ecology of large portions of the country has been degraded permanently, with major consequences not only for terrestrial and marine biodiversity and timber and non-timber production, but also for the livelihoods, health and development prospects of large numbers of Papua New Guineans,” the authors wrote.
Two weeks after I talked with Novotny, I flew to Port Moresby. Spread haphazardly between patches of spotty forest, the city epitomised a colonial-era banana republic. Expensive homes were ringed with barbed wire to protect against packs of unemployed men who wandered the streets. Locals gossiped about corrupt officials selling the county’s natural resources and parking the earnings in offshore bank accounts. When I visited the national botanical gardens, the front office dispatched a security officer, in case anyone tried to rob me. (Aside from a tree kangaroo that kicked at the door of its small cage, everything was quiet.)
I caught a taxi to the Papua New Guinea Forest Authority—a bunker-like building with broken air conditioners and mismatched plastic chairs—to meet Goodwill Amos, the director of an office tasked with studying the relationship between Papua New Guinea’s wilderness and climate change. A friendly man with a Buddha-like stomach and an Einsteinian bush of grey hair, Amos explained that pressure from environmental groups had forced Japanese timber companies to slow their buying in the 1990s. After the Yangtze River flooded in 1998, however, China had more than filled the gap: within a year, China had become Papua New Guinea’s top customer; in 2010 it took more than 90 percent of the country’s log exports.
Chinese firms had also proven more ravenous: in 2003, Papua New Guinea’s log exports broke 2 million cubic metres—roughly the amount of wood in 2 million full-grown New England maples or one million Douglas firs—for the first time; by 2007, they reached 2.8 million.16 Amos believed the trade was limited only by the speed at which loggers could cut. “Before China, the trade was flat,” he said. “Now they take everything we harvest.”
For Amos, China’s demand was problematic because the government of Papua New Guinea had proven incapable of managing the nation’s resources. According to national laws, loggers are allowed to take only mature trees—trees with diameters of fifty centimetres or more—and to log only once every thirty-five years, enough time to allow forests to recover, providing citizens with sustainable incomes. But companies routinely ignored the laws, taking everything or taking only the biggest, most valuable trees and then returning a few years later for more. “The biggest problem is that the companies only take what the market wants, and when that changes they come back again and do more damage,” Amos said. “We’d like them to go in once and not come back for thirty-five years.”
The government had also failed to meet the basic needs of most Papua New Guineans. Logging companies offer many communities their first opportunity to enter the modern world: “In most places where landowners decide to log, there is no infrastructure,” he said. “The people decide that if they need services”—roads, health clinics, and schools—“they need logging.”
And he found fault with the international community. China had refused to ban illegally sourced timber, and Chinese buyers seemed to care only about getting the lowest price. While environmental activists had been able to shame many Western firms into buying timber from sustainably managed plantations—for example, toy-maker Mattel pledged to avoid companies that “are known to be involved in deforestation” after a Greenpeace campaign that included the slogan, “Barbie, it’s over. I don’t date girls that are into deforestation”—the groups had found no traction among Chinese companies.17
At the same time, rich developed nations had failed to provide promised funding to protect New Guinea’s forests. At the Copenhagen climate change conference in 2009, the United States and a group of other nations offered to raise billions of dollars to help developing countries reduce emissions. Scientists suggested that some of that money could be used to protect blocks of healthy rain forest, trapping their carbon (a program known as REDD—Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). But few countries had actually received much funding.
Papua New Guinea’s forests store roughly 5 billion tons of carbon—the amount emitted by the world in just over seven months of burning fossil fuels—but its government had received only a few million dollars to study conservation, and Amos wasn’t holding his breath for more.18 When I asked if he thought rich nations would provide enough aid to counter loggers, he shook his head. “Here we say NATO stands for ‘no action, talk only’. For me, I don’t think the wealthy countries will put up the money.”
As I was leaving the office I noticed a cartoon pinned to a bulletin board. An overweight man leaned out the window of a car marked “Developed countries” to yell at a poor farmer cutting down a tree. “Yo! Amigo!!” the man shouted. “We need that tree to protect us from the greenhouse effect.”
Amos didn’t find it funny. “The problem is that we use the forest as a cash cow, just taking the resources without managing them properly,” he said. “It’s greed.”
My final stop was with Phil Shearman, the director of the University of Papua New Guinea’s Remote Sensing Centre. Shearman had led the team of scientists who compiled the country’s state of the forests report, and I wanted to hear him prognosticate. Forest Trends and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) had recently warned that at “present cutting rates”, Papua New Guinea’s natural forests would largely be logged out by 2022. Amos told me that less than 13 million hectares of healthy, intact forest remained, half of what Shearman’s team had found in the 2002 satellite images. I wanted to know what he thought Papua New Guinea would look like in a decade or two.
We met at a resort hotel and drank South Pacific beers by a swimming pool. Shearman had not looked closely at how forest cover had changed since 2008, but he believed the rate of clearing was similar to what he had seen earlier in the decade, somewhere in the ballpark of 1.4 percent each year.
“The primary forest here is falling very fast, very fast,” he said. “The quicker they can get the timber to China, the quicker they can make it liquid and make more money.”
Like Amos, he considered the national government incapable of stemming the pillage and was sceptical that wealthy nations would prove generous enough to outbid loggers. “The history of understanding deforestation is not so much a gradual thing,” he said. “It’s a punctuated equilibrium model, like warfare or evolution. There are long periods where not much happens and then, bang, you get a year with huge losses. Papua New Guinea is entering one of those periods now.”
For anyone who finds beauty in wilderness, the value of a forest is not, of course, solely a function of its ability to store carbon, provide cures, or moderate flooding. There are greater meanings: the intuition of a more powerful intelligence in the intricate symphony of wilderness; the sense that we are part of a larger, immortal whole; the understanding of our shared history; the feeling, simply, of restfulness. Our greatest environmental writers have tried to capture those deeper values, and their writings often sound hyperbolic until we realise that they are also honest. John Muir, one of America’s first great wilderness advocates, wrote about feeling at one with the natural world in California’s Sierra Nevada. “We are now in the mountains, and they are now in us, making every nerve quiet, filling every pore and cell of us,” he wrote. “Our flesh-and-blood tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty around us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal.”19
Henry David Thoreau described the untouched land around Maine’s Mount Katahdin as “a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world”.20 Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, found “symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds, the ebb and flow of tides, the folded bud ready for spring” and advised that those “who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
I found a wellspring of that strength at the base of the tree where Fidelis identified the bird of paradise. Looking through the dense canopy at its small darting shape, listening to the symphony of New Guinea’s waking forest, I was overcome with a sense of well-being. Everything seemed right.
I caught moments of that feeling over the five days we spent together. On our first night I slept in Fidelis’s village, a community named Wanang, and began to understand how New Guineans have carved sustainable lives from the forest for thousands of years. With a population of 163 people, Wanang truly was sustainable. Locals drank spring water and bathed in a river. For food, they practised swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculture that required no industrial fertiliser: like their ancestors, they cleared small patches of jungle and, after several years, abandoned them to decomposing leaves and branches that replenished their nutrients. For construction, they used jungle materials: Fidelis had built his home from palm fronds, bamboo, sago grass, and kunai leaves. For entertainment, they told stories: other than a small solar array the Binatang Research Center used to power a radio receiver, Wanang had no electricity and people gathered each night to tell tales that reminded me of medieval ballads—Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales and Piers Ploughman.
On our final day together, I visited Fidelis and his family for a meal cooked with locally grown and wild-harvested ingredients. Up to then, our food had been atrocious. I had arrived in the village on Thanksgiving, and because I was a guest, one of the local chief’s sons had cooked what villagers considered a sign of respect: he mixed a store-bought can of Globe “new improved recipe corned beef”, two bags of Maggi “chicken flavour 2-minute noodles”, and what looked like a kilogram of white rice. As he cooked, he asked if I knew Jean-Claude Van Damme and if it was true that “you can just put food in a box in America and then push a button and in two minutes, it’s done?”
After several more days watching me force down tinned corned beef peppered with hunks of skin and fat, Fidelis had become concerned that I was not eating enough. “We thought white people preferred packaged food,” he said. “Maybe our local food is better.”
So I ended up eating local in the rain forest. When I arrived at his house—a one-room hut built on stilts—Fidelis introduced his wife and three children: his eight-year-old daughter Ulysses (named after his favourite butterfly), his three-year-old son Sylvester (named after his favourite actor, Sylvester Stallone), and a six-month-old boy, Legi, who was asleep in a bag his mother had woven from tree bark. After Fidelis showed me a bow he had crafted from a palm stem, his wife served a string of dishes that would be welcome at any Thanksgiving table: there was a rich pumpkin soup served with cubes of sweet potato, collard green-like leaves from a wild tree called melinjo (Gnetum gnemon), a chicken stewed with potatoes, and a plate of sliced bananas, watermelon, and pineapple. At other times of year, she would have served fruit from the palmetto family that Fidelis said “tastes like a lolly”, wild mangoes, galip nuts, and something Fidelis called “wild woman’s breast fruit” because it “looks like a breast and tastes nice”. After some animated discussion we decided it is better known in English as papaya.
The longer I spent with Fidelis, the more I appreciated how closely attuned he was to the natural world, how he drew meaning from its changes and lived comfortably within its boundaries. Dropped into the middle of a rain forest I might survive a few weeks, but, if he wanted or needed to, Fidelis could live his entire life within its sanctuary.
That intimate relationship became clear when Fidelis talked about his deeper spiritual beliefs. On our first day together he mentioned that his ancestors’ spirits live on his family’s land—a stretch of forest large enough that he needs a day to walk across it. Partly, he believed, they act as protectors: if strangers enter the land, perhaps to hunt wild pigs, “bad things will happen to them,” he explained. In recent years, two trespassers had, in fact, died violently. When villagers found the first man, “his whole stomach had come out through his asshole. He had no stomach left.”
The belief in forest spirits became most apparent, however, when I asked about movies. Western scientists from the research centre had begun to show occasional films in Wanang by stringing up a sheet and using a battery to run a projector. So far, they had shown a dozen films, including some of the Indiana Jones series, Apocalypto (the story of a declining Mayan kingdom), and several natural history documentaries. But the most popular film had been Avatar, James Cameron’s story about a mining company that wages war on a jungle-living species of tall blue beings called Na’vi on a planet called Pandora.
Avatar had resonated for multiple reasons. Like the villagers, the Na’vi live in near perfect harmony with their forest, hunting and harvesting wildlife and drawing energy from Eywa, a power that can best be equated with the Western concept of Mother Earth. They also faced a similar problem: foreigners—in remote Papua New Guinea almost as strange as creatures from another planet—had recently arrived with bulldozers and chainsaws to exploit natural resources. And, as in the film, the Wanang villagers had chosen not to sell their forests and were increasingly ringed by villages that had.
The final similarity could be the thesis for an anthropology dissertation: like the Na’vi, Wanang’s villagers believe that the natural world—or perhaps the spirits that reside there—has free will and, if disturbed, will act. When the topic of Avatar came up, Fidelis and I were sitting by a stream where thousands of blue-and-yellow day-flying moths basked in the sun. Fidelis turned to me and said, “It can really happen. Now, already, our land is under attack.”
As it happened, we were hiking with a teenage villager named Matthew whose family owned the land we were on. Matthew said his ancestors’ spirits lived on top of a nearby hill. “If anything disturbs the forest, they will fight,” he said. “If loggers ever come to this forest they can be killed or get sick and die. Their medicines can’t save them. The medicines are nothing to the spirits.”
During the Avatar showing, the villagers had become most excited when the forest decided to join the war against the greedy company, which is called the RDA Corporation. In the movie, RDA stages a full assault on the Sacred Tree, the Na’vi’s link with Eywa, and is winning handily until Eywa decides to throw the whole forest against them. Cheers erupted when Triceratops-like creatures mauled human soldiers and huge flying crocodiles destroyed gunships. “We know it can be like that,” Fidelis explained. “The forest spirit will fight.”
In other ways, however, Avatar suffered from the typical oversimplification of Hollywood blockbusters. In it, for example, no Na’vi appear to suffer from tropical diseases. The human invaders are also less astute than real-world loggers. In Avatar, RDA Corporation makes no attempt to show the Na’vi the thrills of space travel, let alone American movies. But the main force driving Papua New Guineans to lease their land is the belief that people are happier somewhere else and that logs can buy them a place in that better world.
In Papua New Guinea, logging companies have learned to amplify that envy by taking village leaders on all-expenses-paid trips to Port Moresby and Australia. Sometimes they give them cars. More often they provide them with what locals call “talk-yes money” or “happiness money”—large, one-time payments to convince them to sell rights to their forests, to get them, in the clear logic of their language, to “talk yes”.
In areas like Wanang that is generally easy to do. The nearest paved road is a long day’s walk and the government had provided almost no services. Until the Binatang Research Center built the area’s first school in 2008, the isolation had left it almost entirely detached from the modern world. At the beginning of my trip, I asked a group of twenty villagers if they had heard of Barack Obama, and they shook their heads. One man had heard of the September 11 attack but knew only that “some terrorists hit America and some people died, but not too many people.”
As modern life has begun to creep into the area through visitors and trips to cities and movies shown by foreign scientists, however, villagers have begun to feel trapped, and many want to leave, if only to see what the world offers. For Fidelis, the choice was simple: even though he believes his family land is sacred, he hoped to lease part of it, perhaps to a company that will drill for oil. (He had seen oil bubbling from a small pond.) He had lived in Port Moresby as a teenager and was impressed by urban life, and he wanted to buy a car and a modern house with an indoor kitchen. He also hoped to send his children to good schools and needed to pay his father-in-law 3,000 kina, the equivalent of $1,400, for what New Guineans call “bride price”, a dowry.
If he came by a lot of money, he wanted to see Australia and the United States. “When I got to Port Moresby, I thought it was a huge city,” Fidelis told me on our last day together. “Then I saw TV for the first time and it was a show about Sydney. I couldn’t believe Sydney was even bigger than Port Moresby.” More recently he had heard about New York, Beijing, and London, and he wanted to see them all.
For me, time was rushing back at the end of the hike: I was beginning to think about the hundreds of email messages I would have and the onward travel arrangements I needed to make, and I wished I could return to the base of the tree where we listened to the bird of paradise. But Fidelis saw the lure of the greater world.
“I wish I could be just like you,” he said.