Pimm: examing deforestation in Canaima National Park near Venezula-Brazil border

Van Houtan's research for the BDFFP focuses on the characteristics that predispose certain birds to disappear from the fragments more quickly than others. But that is only his scientific side. He is also pursuing a master's in Duke's Divinity School, and while Pimm and Vale headed for the remote upper reaches of the forest, he embarked on a taxi tour of Manaus. His aim, he said, was to reach out to local Christian leaders, mainly pastors and missionaries, and to urge them to address environmental issues in their church.

"I've really come to believe that the fundamental obstacle to stopping this crisis, to preventing the loss of biodiversity, isn't a lack of science. It's a lack of will. It's an ethical issue," he said, as the taxi sped across town, passing stacks of timber and signs offering the services of borracheros (rubber repairmen), evidence of the rubber boom that built this urban island in the jungle. "But a lot of people don't see the environment as something that involves them," he continued. "They don't see themselves as a creature."

For Christians, Van Houtan said, "that's a huge irony. The Creation Story ends with humans being made--in a garden. The Bible actually talks about this. It's not blatant. But it's there." Take Colossians, he said:

"'For by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in Earth.' That's all of this. God made it, and it's good, and he gave us the tools to preserve it."

That afternoon, Van Houtan spoke to the local director of New Tribes Missions, a nondenominational missionary group. The director had moved to Manaus from Oklahoma more than a decade ago to bring the Gospel to indigenous tribes living in the forest. Since then, he said, things had changed. "The fish are getting smaller. So now the way the Indians sometimes catch them is by using dynamite. Or poison. They'll pour it in the water, and it ruins that part of the river. But they know they'll get enough to eat that day."

Van Houtan came away from the meeting with a new idea. He wants to produce manuals on natural history and ecology for missionaries to use as they teach native populations. "This would help them understand what they see around them every day--why a sloth is green, for example, or why a parrot will eat clay," he said. "It's offering them something they value. They see themselves as part of nature--which we all are, of course. They just 'get it' better than we do."

After two hours on the highway, north from Manaus, the truck turned onto a narrow dirt road. It was Pimm's last night in the area--the next day he'd head for Brasilia, for the conservation biology meeting--and he'd arranged an excursion to the canopy, the forest's topmost stratum, "the biologically least known part of the planet."

Two Brazilian scientists from INPA agreed to take Pimm into the forest, and one of them, an ornithologist who identified himself only as Marcos, drove the truck, dodging ruts and powering up hills. "You have to stay in the middle," he said at one point. "Sometimes the caiman is sleeping in the bog on the side."

The road went east for almost thirty miles to an INPA research camp, an open-air structure just off the road. After a meal of fish and rice, Pimm discussed the plan for the morning: arise at 5:00 and then hike to the tower, a 150-foot steel observatory, about a mile away. INPA scientists use the tower to conduct species censuses and to measure carbon levels in the atmosphere. Pimm wanted to show off the view.

In the morning, Pimm led the way. It was still dark, and the forest was almost silent. Turning a headlamp to either side of the trail revealed the dizzying complexity of the surroundings--mammoth tree trunks with roots like buttresses, tangles of lianas, and enormous oblong leaves that hid the moonlit sky from view. Along the path, patches of phosphorescent bacteria glowed like stardust, and a ground cover of decomposing leaves filled the air with a rich odor of humus.

In The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin's 1837 account of his first encounter with the tropics, the experience that would set him on the road to Origin of Species, he reveled in the "bright green foliage" and the "elegant curvature of the fronds," and he marveled at the ants--"the lion-hearted little warriors"--that he observed as they blanketed the forest floor in search of prey. "It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration," he wrote. "But it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind."

Darwin was overcome. And yet he'd only seen the beginnings of the system, a network so intricate that, long after the age of discovery, just a tiny fraction of its many parts are known. Above him, in the treetops, was another world altogether, the forest's canopy. Darwin hadn't the means to get there--but Pimm had.

"Look out there and pick a tree," said Pimm. He was winded from the climb, and his shirt was soaked in sweat. "Pick any one. And then try to find ... (deep breath) ... another one ... like it." He was offering a lesson in biodiversity. Out there lay a living patchwork, a green expanse wreathed in mist and extending to the horizon. Many a trained professional botanist had failed, he said. "You simply cannot do it."

Indeed, here, high above the sandy soil, was what has been called the last great unexplored frontier of the natural world. In only the two hectares below, said Pimm, were more species of trees than in all of eastern North America. On any one of them, there might be a thousand species of insects, a hundred species of fungi, spiders no one had ever seen, unidentifiable frogs living in the cistern-like crowns of equally unidentifiable epiphytes. No one really knew.

Stuart Pimm was born in Derbyshire in the north of England. His father was a factory worker in the local Rolls Royce plant and his mother kept the house. Growing up, he was small and slight, precocious and bookish. "I was not a sportsman," he says. "I liked to read, and I liked birds."

Pimm was twelve years old when he went on his first field trip with the Derbyshire Ornithological Society and glimpsed, to his amazement, a gold finch. "That," he recalls, "was the first. I was hooked." He became an avid birdwatcher. He kept a "life list" of the species he'd seen and was always seeking more.

As an undergraduate at Oxford, he studied ecology and spent two summers doing field work in Afghanistan. After graduating, he went to New Mexico State University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1974, and where he encountered the peculiarities of a different culture. "Someone kindly explained to me shortly after my arrival that the smallest coin was worth twice the amount of the medium-sized coin."

As a young scientist, Pimm was eager to do his research in a pristine setting "in order," he says, "to understand how nature really works." It didn't matter to him whether it was desert or rain forest, only that it was utterly untouched, an ecosystem in its purest state. Hawaii was not such a setting--far from it; decades of tourism had altered the islands in major ways, killing off many of the native species. But that's where Pimm ended up, on a project that had originated in New Mexico. He'd been studying the dynamics of southwestern hummingbird communities when he heard that Hawaii's honeycreepers behaved in a similar way.

The honeycreepers, Pimm learned, were also on the verge of extinction, and it was then, he recalls, that "something changed." Well on his way to a successful career--by the time he was twenty-nine, he had published five papers in Nature and Science--he suddenly realized, he says, "that science wasn't enough." He wondered whether, in twenty years, "people would not look back and ask, 'What were you doing while all these species were going extinct?' " Instead, he embraced "science with a sense of responsibility."