Brazil’s great Atlantic forest rises again

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Wending like delicate green tendrils across the chequered farming landscape of eastern Brazil are four corridors of hope. Prowled by ocelots, pumas and tapirs, these slender forest passages form links in a chain of renewal – for threatened wildlife, for an all-but vanished rainforest and for poor farmers and their families.

When forester Laury Cullen Jr first moved to Pontal do Paranapanema in São Paulo State to study an endangered monkey, nine-tenths of the once-mighty Mata Atlantica, Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, had fallen. Cleared for timber and farms, its removal came at a devastating cost to the many hundreds of species of animals and plants living there, most of which are found nowhere else on Earth.

Twenty years on and the relentless march of human progress has taken a hopeful turn. Corridors and islands of forest are springing up anew, tended by the caring hands of 310 farming families who today earn a better living from the intermingled trees, wildlife and crops than they were ever able to gain from agriculture alone.

Cullen’s approach has successfully managed to combine the goals of conservation and landscape restoration with finding new sources of income for poor farmers and funds for further forest replanting – a plan that saw him honoured as an Associate Laureate of the 2004 Rolex Awards.

Today the scale of his achievement can be seen from space and via Google Earth, which shows the largest forest corridors. “The change in the landscape is striking,” Cullen says. “We are extremely proud to see how our activities in the ground have effectively changed the landscape and contributed to additional cover in the Atlantic rainforest.”

The corridors and associated “stepping stones” (islands of forest close enough together for animals and birds to migrate between them) contain two-thirds of a million trees comprising 700 hectares of new forest that links the state’s two largest protected areas, the Black Lion Tamarin Ecological Station and the Morro do Diablo State Park. For the first time in decades the long, slow ebb of the Mata Atlantica has reversed and regrowth has begun.

Although the new forest has been established only for a few years, ecology students monitoring wildlife transit are reporting that the ocelots, pumas and tapirs are using the corridor to move between protected areas. “We now hope jaguars, one of the species we most want to save, will begin to use them too,” says Cullen.

When he began his project, much of the farming land was degraded. At the same time, the Brazilian government had decided to resettle thousands of urban poor in rural areas. Cullen worked alongside the new settlers, showing them how to use agroforestry – the integration of trees with farming – to improve soil fertility and generate new sources of income from trees, seedlings and from organic farming of corn and coffee. Fifteen community-based agroforestry nurseries are now flourishing.

Asked how to describe the mood of the farmers today, he says: “The main word is ‘proud’. Our farmers are very proud of their involvement in changing landscapes and changing the history of land reform in Brazil. They have demonstrated it is possible to ‘green’ the fragmented rural landscapes and to generate new income.”

As the word spreads, the number of participating farmers is growing at a steady rate of around 5 per cent a year. The plan has also been accepted by larger farmers and sugar cane growers in the area. Settlers from the nearby states of Parana and Mato Grosso have visited to learn from the experiences of the Pontal farmers and are planning similar projects in their own districts.

The Rolex Award has brought significant international recognition to the project, Cullen says. It was a key factor both in establishing the wildlife corridors and in helping to raise US$3 million in funding over the past eight years.

Nevertheless, finding enough money to maintain momentum remains a challenge. “We need to find ongoing funding for small technologies like irrigation that can help increase production,” Cullen says.

The benefits, he points out, are global. When fully grown, the 700ha of new forest will store 65,000 tonnes of carbon and he hopes that fresh investment will soon begin to flow from large international corporations keen to offset their carbon emissions.

The ripples from those slender forest corridors are also making themselves felt in the corridors of power: the project has become one of Brazil’s most often quoted community-based conservation achievements, and is thus meeting one of its most ambitious goals – to influence the political process and thinking at local, state and national level.

For Laury Cullen, the inspiration to keep going is readily drawn from the profound changes both in the natural and the human landscapes that are taking place. The keys to success, he says, are “presence, passion and determination”: at Pontal do Paranapanema they are in plain view as a new paradigm for modern humanity living in harmony with the natural world unfolds.

Julian Cribb

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The change in the landscape is striking.”

Brazil’s great Atlantic forest rises again

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