Tropical Forest Clearinghouse:
ParksWatch Works Against the Clock to Save Protected Areas
By Monte Basgall
Back in 1993, the Nicholas School's John
Terborgh joined an international group of fellow conservationists
that assembled in a crisis atmosphere at the White Oak Plantation
in northern Florida. They were worried that national parks,
the main havens for biodiversity in tropical regions, were
in trouble. That was alarming because the tropics are considered
the most plant and animal rich areas on Earth.
For Terborgh, a James B. Duke Professor of Environmental
Science, MacArthur Fellowship "genius grant" winner, member
of the National Academy of Sciences, and co-director of Duke's
Center for Tropical Conservation, concern about protecting
the enormous varieties of species in nature was nothing new.
The shortcomings of tropical parks weren't either.
In a book that was just published at the time of that meeting,
Diversity and the Tropical Rain Forest (1992, Scientific American
Library), he warned that "within a few decades, unperturbed
nature will cease to exist outside of protected parks and
reserves." Terborgh added that "it is clear that the rate
of creation of new parkland will decline in the future."
The outcome of the conference near Jacksonville was another
book called Last Stand: National Parks and the Defense
of Tropical Biodiversity (1997, Oxford University Press),
authored by Terborgh, his Center for Tropical Conservation
co-director Carel van Schaik, and 10 other experts in and
outside of the Nicholas School.
Last Stand cited inadequate funding and pressures
from logging, mining, road building, agriculture and throngs
of needy human migrants as major threats to parks and similar
protected areas. It noted that these bastions cover just 5
percent of the highly threatened tropical rain forest habitats
where more than half of all known species live, and probably
most undiscovered species too.
Terborgh's next book, Requiem for Nature (1999, Island
Press) reiterated the theme, calling most so-called refuges
in the tropics "a sorry lot," and contending that most exist
"only on paper."
Well before Requiem's publication, he had decided
to begin a surveillance program called ParksWatch to address
the issue. Despite their many shortcomings, "the parks that
are already established, at least on paper, are really precious
for the future of the world," he said in a recent interview
in the Center for Tropical Conservation's secluded office
off Duke's West Campus near the Duke Primate Center.
"We thought what the world's parks needed was a watchdog
organization, something equivalent to Amnesty International
or Human Rights Watch," Terborgh recalled. "So we began to
look for support, and I have to say we searched unsuccessfully
for something like seven years.
"Funding foundations thought it was a bad idea. They thought
it was none of the business of developed countries to be looking
into what was happening in less developed countries. They
thought it was northern imperialism imposing on the south.
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