Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Somewhat discouraged by the lack of wildlife, we headed for lunch at a canteen attached
to a run-down pool hall on the park's outskirts. Over a meal of rice,
plátanos
, and beefsteak,
I mentioned that my Serra da Canastra birding trip, with its added sightings of maned wolves
and giant anteaters, had sparked the collective curiosity of the van passengers. Together
with Wes Sechrest, then head of the Global Mammal Assessment project of the Internation-
al Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, John Morrison, David Wilcove,
and I wondered: How many places on Earth still support the same roster of large mammals
that were present there 500 years ago? Is Emas one of them? The question has an important
relationship to rarity because 39 percent of large mammals with body mass greater than 20
kilograms (a maned wolf weighs in at around 23 kilograms) are considered threatened with
extinction, as compared with 25 percent of mammals overall. Theory and lots of empirical
data tell us that bigger mammals tend to be more wide-ranging than smaller mammals, and
as George Powell had shown in Peru, most parks are too small to support them. With hunting
of large mammals common almost everywhere today, the answer to our question, we spec-
ulated, could well be zero or at best very few places left on Earth with intact large-mammal
faunas.
But the results of our research on the topic were more optimistic than we expected. The
article we published in the
JournalofMammalogy
in 2007 reported that 130 places on Earth
serve as large-mammal refuges and that they support the full roster of big mammals that lived
there 500 years ago. These refuges fell into two categories. One category included the most
inhospitable places on Earth, places that were too cold, too damp, too dry, too humid, or too
remote for humans to develop. This group featured vast regions of Siberia, northern Canada,
Alaska, and the Amazon and Congo basins. The other group included a much smaller set of
places, including Emas—remnants still afloat in human-dominated landscapes. We made no
claims about whether the species survived at carrying capacity in these places—often they
were present at much lower numbers or densities than in the past. It was clear, though, that
places such as Emas would need intensive management to maintain the rich large-mammal
fauna still present.
After lunch and a short drive, we arrived at a soy plantation that bordered the park. We
stepped out of the car and into a completely different environment. Walking among the
neat rows of soy, I asked Carly how many planters grew soybeans on farms adjacent to
Emas. Gauging by my experience with rice cultivation in Nepal, I expected the answer
to be in the hundreds. I was off by two orders of magnitude. Carly held up one finger.
“This 40,000-hectare ranch is owned by one person. There probably aren't more than a few
landowning entities in this entire area.”
Big soy. It was my first encounter with such a vast expanse of agriculture. The lucrative
plants covered the entire landscape. Corn grows here also, and in some parts of the Cerrado
cotton is added to the rotation. The soybean is a recent addition to the farming economy of
