INSIDE ONE OF THE UBIQUITOUS GO-GO-BARS that line Soi Diamond Alley, in Pattaya, a seaside town 90 miles south of Bangkok, a handful of balding, potbellied foreigners are drooling over a dozen Thai girls strutting along the bar to the blare of disco music.

wildlife conservation, endangered species, poaching, poachers, environmental law, wildaid

Galster tracks aloe-wood poachers with one of WildAid’s rangers in Khao Yai National Park.

wildlife conservation, endangered species, poaching, poachers, environmental law, wildaid

Steve Galster, WildAid's co-founder and point man in Thailand, meets with one of his informants, a former go-go girl based in Pattaya, a hub of black-market activity.

wildlife conservation, endangered species, poaching, poachers, environmental law, wildaid

Cold-irons-bound: Thai authorities frequently confiscate Asian black bears during animal-trafficking raids; WildAid field director Tim Redford designed these holding pens at the Banglamung Wildlife Center, outside Pattaya. “We know there are illegal restaurants where you can eat bear meat,” says Galster, pictured here.

wildlife conservation, endangered species, poaching, poachers, environmental law, wildaid

Where the wild things aren't: The Sriracha Tiger Zoo, near Pattaya, is an infamous tourist attraction where protected tigers and crocodiles are put on display. The zoo was busted by the Thai police in fall 2003.

wildlife conservation, endangered species, poaching, poachers, environmental law, wildaid

Tiger tales: Galster giving a talk at the Southeast Asia Environmental Law Enforcement Training Center, which WildAid established at Thailand’s Khao Yai park to teach rangers how to use counterinsurgency tactics against poachers

Sitting at a nearby table, under a revolving mirror ball, Steve Galster seems immune to such louche diversions. A clean-cut, six-foot-five native of Green Lake, Wisconsin, he looks like a generic American, dressed in standard-issue blue jeans and a long-sleeved oxford shirt. While the men around him pant, he chews his bubble gum, orders a beer, and waits.


A few minutes later, a young woman in a cleavage-baring black T-shirt walks up and kisses Galster on the cheek. A former go-go dancer who now works as his paid informant, she pulls a small Ziploc bag from her purse and slides it across the table. The bag contains aloe wood—an aromatic essence so highly valued that some Asian poachers have killed to obtain it. It’s illegal to sell native aloe wood in Thailand, but the stuff is routinely smuggled out of the country anyway, because Middle Eastern consumers prize it as incense. The wood can wholesale for $1,000 per kilo.


Galster slowly opens the baggie and nods.


“The main aloe trader in Pattaya is from Iraq,” the woman says. “He keeps some wood in his store, but there’s no problem if you want more. The guy says he has a warehouse full of it.”


That’s all Galster needs to hear. He heads out the door and into Sin City—alleyways crowded with stores offering bootleg Viagra, cheap plastic surgery, and cheaper sex, not to mention crocodile purses with beady-eyed heads still attached, illegal pelts from endangered animals, and aphrodisiacs like tiger-penis wine. Despite his subdued midwestern manner, the 42-year-old Galster seems energized, clearly reveling in the hunt.


Before long he finds the small shop he’s after. The window display includes a glass case full of fake Rolex watches and another stocked with aloe-wood oils in ornamental bottles. Galster walks up to the owner, a middle-aged Iraqi with a clipped rectangular mustache, and explains that he wants to export aloe wood to the United States. This sounds unlikely coming from a farang—the Thai term for a foreigner—but the trader doesn’t hesitate. He pulls out a large white plastic box filled with wood chunks. Then he breaks off a tiny piece, drops it in a small metal urn, and lights it, dispersing the fragrant smoke with circular waves of his hand.


Galster inhales. “That’s good,” he says conspiratorially. “Like hashish.”


“Good?” says the dealer. “It’s the best! This little bag costs $2,500—more expensive than gold. There are only limited quantities left, and it is hard to get.”


“Limited quantities” is one way of putting it. Even though it’s against the law to remove aloe from national parks in Thailand and Malaysia—practically the only places where the wood can still be found in either country—poachers are busy chopping down trees. Traffic, a UK-based group that monitors worldwide trade in protected plant and animal species, warns that aloe wood may soon become commercially extinct due to overharvesting.


Galster lays down enough cash for a 12-gram baggie and leaves. ���ϳԹ���, he checks to see if the palm-size digital video camera he’s been using is still recording. Then Galster—a man whom many wildlife experts consider the planet’s most effective sleuth in the shadowy world of endangered-species smuggling—starts speculating about what he’s just seen.


“I feel bad suspecting that guy, because he may just be an Iraqi shopkeeper trying to make a little money,” he says. “But we saw the watches and the wood. They’re both illegal businesses. And people in piracy often fund other illegal activities.”


What Galster is suggesting is that this small-time crook may be tied into something bigger—namely, a black-market financial network that funds terrorism. “I just can’t help wondering whether Iraqi aloe-wood dealers are raising money for something else, like Al Qaeda,” he adds. “We’ll have to keep looking into it.”


That sounds like gonzo conspiracy theory—and, in fact, no connection between plant or animal trafficking and terrorism has been established—but it may not be too far-fetched. Two years ago, in a much-publicized story that broke half a world away from Galster’s Asian beat, a gang of cigarette smugglers based in Charlotte, North Carolina, pleaded guilty to skimming $1.5 million and funneling a portion of it to Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamic terrorist group. William Wechsler, an expert on the financing of terrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York, points out that “local terrorist cells are supposed to support themselves, and they do that by committing everything from penny-ante financial crimes to credit card fraud. So animal trafficking, as an easy source of quick and illegal money, would not be unusual for terrorists to take advantage of.”


Galster has spent the past two decades working as a political and environmental detective, often under cover, and during that time he has specialized in collating intelligence on the global flow of contraband—be it grenades, ganja, girls, or gorillas. Along the way he’s made some unusual connections. He spent part of the late eighties embedded with the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan, where he watched the guerrillas routinely use opium profits to buy weapons. In the nineties, while helping Russian police and environmental officials break up a ring that was smuggling the pelts (and parts) of endangered Siberian tigers, he saw firsthand that the crooks were also involved in an entirely different enterprise—moving women into the sex-slavery trade in Japan.


Whether Galster is right or wrong about his Iraqi merchant, his investigative skills have definitely advanced the cause of animal protection. In recent years he’s focused his energy on helping create and lead an innovative new group called WildAid, a lean, aggressive conservation outfit that’s taking direct action against poachers and traffickers in species-rich but economically poor countries like Thailand, Cambodia, Ecuador, and Russia.


WildAid’s mission is straightforward: training local law enforcement and wildlife officials to fight poachers, in an attempt to protect national parks, wildlife preserves, and other places that represent the last stand for many endangered species. Because modern wildlife crime is becoming increasingly complex, Galster believes the tried-and-true approach that conservation groups have followed for decades—raising money, funding scientific research, and using a worldwide bully pulpit to campaign against species destruction—is both passive and passé. He’s convinced that only a strong, proactive approach to animal security can save species that are on the brink of extinction.


Given all this criminal activity, is it possible that Galster sometimes gets carried away imagining how the various bad guys might fit together? Maybe. But he’s paid to think outside the box, and there’s no denying that he’s accomplished a lot by following up on his wildest ideas.

ACCORDING TO A 2001 REPORT issued by the United Nations Environment Program, the illegal global wildlife trade is a $5-billion-a-year industry. So it’s no wonder such exotic species as the clouded leopard and the Malayan sun bear—whose skins and gall bladders, respectively, can sell for $1,000 apiece—are being hunted to the vanishing point in their last remaining habitats: the national parks that Galster calls the “Fort Knoxes” of the animal world.


Unfortunately, the forts keep getting plundered. Some 900 of the earth’s plants and animals are considered so close to extinction that their sale is prohibited by the Geneva-based Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a UN treaty organization that regulates the world’s legal wildlife traffic. Another 24,600 species are threatened to such a degree that CITES controls their trade through quotas. That doesn’t help the 762 plant and animal species that, according to the Red List, a survey of threatened species compiled in 2003 by the World Conservation Union in Switzerland, have been wiped out over the past 500 years. As Edward O. Wilson noted in his 1999 book The Diversity of Life, “The sixth great extinction spasm of geological time is upon us, grace of mankind. Earth has at last acquired a force that can break the crucible of biodiversity.”


WildAid was founded in 1999 to turn back this tide. It’s the brainchild of Galster and three colleagues: Suwanna Gauntlett, 40, who previously ran the Gauntlett Group Inc., an eco-consulting firm that helped industrial giants such as Nike and Alcoa make their factories run cleaner; and Peter K. Knights and Steven Trent, two 40-year-old trafficking experts from Great Britain who previously worked for the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a nonprofit that specializes in exposing environmental crime. WildAid has three broad aims: hunting down and stopping poachers; exposing and eliminating black-market trafficking operations; and using public-awareness campaigns to stop the human consumption of exotic plants and animals.


The group received its initial seed money—$1 million—from the Barbara Delano Foundation, a San Francisco–based green fund created by the late Barbara Delano Gauntlett, Suwanna’s mother and the heir to the Upjohn Pharmaceutical fortune. These days, the foundation provides 38 percent of WildAid’s $5 million annual budget; the rest comes from institutional grants and public donations, 100 percent of which go directly into international field projects, which will cost about $4 million this year.


A significant part of WildAid’s appeal to donors is its fast-and-light approach. The group operates out of small offices in Phnom Penh (where Gauntlett is based), London (Trent), San Francisco (Knights), and Bangkok (Galster). While larger groups such as the World Wildlife Fund (with an annual budget of around $300 million) continue to rely mainly on a scientific approach—studying animal populations, monitoring species, and relaying the results to the public—WildAid attacks poaching and trafficking hot spots with 48 staffers who are not primarily biologists but activists, undercover investigators, economists, and law enforcement officers. Each office is manned by a mix of locals (like Krisana Kaewplang, 32, who speaks Khmer and specializes in community outreach and ranger training in Thailand) and globe-trotting professional activists (like Tim Redford, a 43-year-old Brit who built endangered-animal sanctuaries for the Thais before joining WildAid).


“Rather than spending a lot of money on U.S. infrastructure and holding workshop after workshop, we believe in direct spending in the field,” says Gauntlett. “There are 30,000 parks in the world, most of which are not protected at all. That’s why we dedicate ourselves to direct protection of wildlife preserves in developing countries, which have the will to fight animal crime but not the funds or the expertise.”


WildAid has put this theory into practice in Thailand, setting up the Southeast Asia Environmental Law Enforcement Training Center, in Khao Yai, an 867-square-mile national park that’s home to endangered Asian elephants and sambar deer; in Cambodia, where the 560 square miles of Bokor National Park are now patrolled by WildAid-trained rangers who carry AK-47s; in Russia’s Far East, where anti-poaching teams are fighting to save Amur tigers and leopards; and in Ecuador’s Galápagos Marine Reserve, where they built two new ranger bases to help expand protection of the islands and surrounding waters. Last year, when the actress Angelina Jolie volunteered to put up $1.5 million for the protection of a 240-square-mile Cambodian forest that was overrun with freelance gold miners and marauding game hunters, she turned to WildAid for help. Gauntlett helped assemble a 50-man force made up of former Khmer Rouge soldiers for what became known as the Maddox Jolie Project, named after Jolie’s adopted Cambodian son. Galster calls them “Jolie’s Rangers.”


In the four years that WildAid has operated in Cambodia, the group has helped confiscate 17,300 live animals, two tons of body parts, and two tons of bushmeat. In Thailand, they’ve helped the government rescue more than 35,000 live animals just in the last nine months—from six tigers caged in a private home to 1,000 crocodiles in a private zoo—and park rangers in Khao Yai have confiscated some five tons of aloe wood. In the Galápagos, WildAid has trained rangers to halt illegal turtle poaching and stop fishermen who supply shark fins to Asian markets, where an environmentally destructive delicacy called shark-fin soup is a prized dish.


Methods like these have put the conservation world on alert that there’s a cutting-edge group out there with a revolutionary new approach. “I’m an ecologist, and we freely think we can tackle any problem,” says John Seidensticker, chairman of the Save the Tiger Fund Council and a senior scientist at the Smithsonian National Zoo, in Washington, D.C. “But sometimes we ecologists should just sit back and listen to the people who know about security. As far as I’m concerned, Steve Galster is the best conservation-security expert operating in Asia today.”

BORN IN 1961, GALSTER FIFTH of seven children. He grew up mostly in Wisconsin and Michigan, where his father ran a landscaping business. When he was a kid, he liked to round up roadkill and give the animals proper burials in his own pet cemetery. This led to his first foray into political activism: a letter sent to then–first lady Pat Nixon in the early seventies, urging her to erect fences along the entire U.S. highway system to keep animals from wandering into traffic.


Back then, Galster figured he would grow up to be a high school biology teacher or a veterinarian, but he ended up majoring in political science at Grinnell College, in Iowa. In 1986, he enrolled in a security studies graduate program at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., where most of his teachers were either employees or alums of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, the State Department, or the White House. It was there—and during a subsequent job at the National Security Archive, a GWU think tank that oversees the world’s largest collection of declassified U.S. government documents—that he learned to “treat every little piece of intelligence as significant information, part of a puzzle that becomes clear only later, when you put all the pieces together.”


Galster coupled his curiosity with an inherent affinity for intrigue. In 1988, the Archive assigned him to analyze the U.S.-Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan, starting with declassified documents in which important information had been blacked out. He filled in the blanks by traveling to Moscow and convincing a few Soviet academics to endorse a visit to Afghanistan. He started off embedded with Soviet troops but ended up hanging out with the CIA-backed mujahedeen.


“The Russians were just desperate for people to tell their side to,” Galster remembers. “When I got to Afghanistan, I met an Islamic fundamentalist commander—Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was getting a lot of the U.S. money and guns—and I became convinced he was the wrong guy for us to back. I made it a point to tell that to the other mujahedeen, who hated Hekmatyar, and that opened the door to them inviting me to check out their operations.”


He recounts all of this blithely, but the work was both dangerous and enterprising. “I think Steve was fortunate that he began his Afghan project when glasnost was starting and the Kremlin had decided that they had a certain story to tell,” recalls Thomas S. Blanton, director of the Archive. “That the Soviets chose to tell it to him showed he understood that if you go straight to the primary sources, you can quickly become an expert while all the cud-chewers back home are still passively looking into it. He did a remarkable job.”


In 1991, the EIA hired Galster and his girlfriend at the time, an Africa scholar named Kathi Austin, to examine the connections between civil wars in Africa and the ivory trade. They got started by joining a Young Republicans chapter in Washington, which led to their meeting what Galster calls “mercenaries and right-wingers” who were supporters of such rebel leaders as Jonas Savimbi, in Angola, and Alfonso Dhlakama, in Mozambique. Posing as conservative journalists, the pair traveled all over southern Africa and met members of the Mozambique National Resistance (a.k.a. Renamo), who were arming themselves by selling elephant ivory, rhino horns, and gems. After more than a year of research, their 1992 report for the EIA, “Under Fire: Elephants in the Front Line,” helped convince CITES to uphold the international ban on the ivory trade.


Galster was hooked. In 1993, working for the EIA, he dove back into the international rhino-horn trade, this time posing as a wealthy South African buyer and tracing one ring from South Africa to Asia. After convincing a major trafficker—who was moving rhino horns with the aid of Chinese government officials—that his financial interest was sincere, Galster was personally escorted to a 1.2-metric-ton hoard, housed in a huge warehouse on a remote stretch of the China-Vietnam border. Using a hidden camera, he captured footage of more than 500 rhino horns.


Back in Washington, the EIA arranged to show Galster’s video to a contact at the National Security Council, the president’s principal foreign-policy advisory group. At the time, the U.S. was threatening trade sanctions against the Chinese for not enforcing their own laws against the rhino-horn and tiger trade. With the help of the NSC, the EIA showed the video to delegates at a CITES meeting in Brussels that September. The Chinese government was caught flat-footed, and responded by raiding the warehouse, seizing the contraband, and holding a publicly televised rhino-horn bonfire in October 1993. Not long after, it banned the sale of rhino horns in China altogether.


For Galster, it was a spectacular success, and though he plays down the risks, they were real. “One lonely American in the middle of nowhere?” says Ted Osius, a State Department Asia expert who has helped secure federal funding for WildAid’s Southeast Asia Environmental Law Enforcement Training Center. “Man, if the rhino-horn dealers were willing to eradicate an entire species, they definitely would have popped him if they’d found out what he was doing. He’s got guts. He was definitely risking his life.”


Still, Galster felt that he wasn’t even scratching the surface of animal trafficking, which is why he decided to join forces with Gauntlett, Knights, and Trent. By 1999, they were all running up against frustrating limits in their particular fields. Galster, who first met Gauntlett when he requested emergency funding from the Barbara Delano Foundation to combat tiger poaching in Russia, was finding it difficult to raise money for his own anti-trafficking operation, the Global Survival Network. Gauntlett was itching to get her hands dirty fighting poachers in the field. Knights, who by then was managing the Delano Foundation, missed the conservation-security work he’d been doing for the EIA. And Trent wanted to make a longer-term impact on environmental crime.


“We all had the same thought,” Galster recalls. “That other organizations with lots of funding were getting nowhere against trafficking—but maybe we could get somewhere, with less money, spent on field programs directly overseen by us.


“It was one thing to uncover an illegal trade, point fingers at corrupt players, and then have nothing happen. It was another to be able to follow up undercover research with action.”

GALSTER FIRST CAME UP WITH the prototype for WildAid’s current programs in 1993, on an excursion to Vladivostok to help disrupt a Siberian-tiger-trafficking ring.


When he arrived in the Russian Far East on behalf of the Tiger Trust, a nongovernmental organization based in New Delhi that protects tigers in India, it was, he says, “virtually open season on wildlife.” Biologists estimated that there were no more than 250 Siberian tigers left in the wild; dozens were being killed each year by poachers who hunted on foot, by car, and by helicopter. Galster assembled and trained three five-man patrols made up of Afghan-war veterans and park rangers. The teams were deployed to track tiger hunters in the forest and use hidden cameras to record transactions in the city. Thanks to the success of Galster’s original anti-poaching units, as well as a dozen additional units now funded by a consortium including the World Wildlife Fund, the Siberian tiger population has risen to 400.


Unfortunately, the hunters never disappeared, as Galster discovered in April 2000 when he went back to Vladivostok to renew WildAid’s contracts with the Phoenix Fund, an umbrella group he helped establish that funnels money to smaller, non-governmental species-protection outfits in Russia. He intended to stay only a few days, but one of the anti-poaching teams he’d organized had identified a rogue policeman from the neighboring town of Ussurisk, 40 miles to the north, who was moving tiger and bear parts to a Chinese mobster across the border in Jilin province. The Vladivostok police alleged that the Chinese dealer had paid off the cop, Vladimir Korolev, to murder a competitor. Now they wanted Galster to pose as an American buyer, wear a wire, and catch Korolev in an illegal transaction.


Galster couldn’t refuse. Sergei Bereznuk, director of the Phoenix Fund, posed as his assistant. After making contact with Korolev, the men drove to Ussurisk in the middle of the night to meet him. They were wired with old Soviet listening devices that transmitted to a backup team of cops and government intelligence agents perched in a nearby van.


“The cop finally pulled up, and I could see he was a big fat guy driving an old, crappy Toyota,” Galster recalls. “He took us across town to an empty safe house and showed us some tiger skins. They were huge. All I was thinking was, This is such great stuff! I hope my camera doesn’t malfunction.”


It didn’t. On the grainy video, Korolev unrolls his wares and spreads them on the floor: skins from two massive adult male tigers, with their jaws frozen in wide snarls. Galster kneels down to examine them.


“How much tiger skins you need?” Korolev asks, with Bereznuk translating. “How much length? [I] can do as much as you want.”


“As many skins as I want?” Galster asks.


“Yes, as many skins,” comes the answer. “What coat you want? Winter or summer?”


Galster opted for summer, and the two agreed on a price of $3,000 for two skins, plus another $100 as a delivery fee. Delivery was key; the undercover team needed to get the trafficker back to their Vladivostok jurisdiction to arrest him. Galster gave Korolev $100, and they left in two cars for the Vladivostok Hotel, where Galster was staying.


That’s when the ancient Soviet transmitters the pair were wearing blinked out, cutting them off from their colleagues in the van. “We didn’t have $3,000 in cash to pay this guy off, so we were getting nervous,” Galster says. “Then we got back to the hotel and—shit!—there was a car from the undercover team in the parking lot that he might have recognized.” Galster and Bereznuk told the rogue cop they were going upstairs to fetch his money, but when Korolev saw some cops in the lobby greeting them familiarly, he revved up his car and bolted—with the skins. Luckily, the backup team was able to pull him over and make an arrest.


During a hearing held in a Vladivostok court in November 2000, Korolev testified that the skins in his trunk didn’t belong to him. Despite Galster’s damning video, he avoided jail time. But the operation still had a major impact: The skins were confiscated, and the Ussurisk police later fired Korolev. In a country where policemen are viewed as untouchable because they often live up to their reputation for corruption and ruthlessness, the arrest made national news.


“The biggest deal was the publicity,” recalls Bereznuk, speaking from his Vladivostok office. “The trafficker wasn’t just an ordinary cop. He had been in charge of a department that surveilled foreigners. That he was fired sent a big message to some traffickers: Even high-level bureaucrats could be caught and disgraced.


“Steve was one of the first foreigners I’d ever met in the flesh,” Bereznuk adds. “I watched him go out on patrols, ask a lot of questions, raise money for us, volunteer his time to other groups, analyze the poaching situation, develop a solution, and personally implement it. He wasn’t a huge, disinterested investor throwing money at us from abroad. He was involved on the ground. That’s when I decided he is not your average American.”

LIKE MANY CONSERVATIONISTS, Galster zeroes in on charismatic megafauna—”indicator species,” he says, that forecast the situation of the ecosystems they dominate. He instills this idea in the rangers WildAid trains, which is why the guards who patrol Khao Yai and Bokor national parks focus much of their attention on bears, tigers, clouded leopards, and elephants. Khao Yai’s elephant-monitoring team heads into the forest each week to make sure the park’s 120 pachyderms are accounted for. But animal-defense patrols are not enough for an armistice; the whole culture of poaching needs to be undermined as well.


At the end of a muddy road in Khok Saard, a village on the outskirts of Khao Yai, 118 miles north of Bangkok, Sompong Prachopchan is standing over a boiling vat, stirring mushrooms. At 39, he’s a new convert to the agrarian way. There’s a tiger tattooed across his chest, a reminder of his former life, that of a mercenary for the Thai military who fought the Khmer Rouge and other insurgents. Throughout the eighties and nineties, when he wasn’t doing that, he was poaching protected tigers, bears, elephants, and barking deer.


That all ended three years ago when Sompong was caught with an 18-pound haul of aloe wood by a WildAid-trained ranger patrol in Khao Yai. After his arrest and trial, a few days in jail, and a hefty fine, he was enlisted to work on the group’s community-outreach project. In this program, villagers who used to forage in the park for food, or hunt endangered species to sell to traffickers, now receive seed money for alternative livelihoods, like growing flowers and mushrooms.


Standing under a plastic tarp in the pouring rain, Sompong stops stirring and walks over to a table piled with chrysanthemums. “When I was a poacher, a middleman sent me into the forest to get aloe wood,” he says. “We all knew that if we shot an elephant or a tiger, he would buy that, too. But after I was arrested, I decided to leave poaching. If we keep on destroying the forest, there will be none left for the next generation.” As he talks, Sompong rolls bunches of flowers into old newspapers. The bouquets will be sold in local markets, the profits to be shared among the villagers. Galster says he tapped the ex-mercenary to work on the village-conversion project partly because he figured “he would have cred among fellow poachers,” and partly because he views the fight against wildlife trafficking as a counterinsurgency movement.


“What you do is apply counterinsurgency war-gaming to poaching and trafficking,” he continues. “The poachers and traffickers are the insurgents; the local villagers are their moral support; and the big boss trafficker at the top of the food chain is the logistical support, funneling money and weapons. Counterinsurgency teaches you that the people fighting your war really have to believe in it themselves. You can’t just be giving them rice, because they’ll see right through you, take your rice, and still go into the park and poach animals. For it to work, you have to be genuine.”


Sompong seems to believe in Galster’s conservation model, though he admits to keeping his old aloe-wood saws around for a rainy day. “I am earning ten times less than I made poaching, but that’s OK,” he says. “My new job is influencing poachers in my own village and in other villages to find different work. Some poachers are changing their attitudes, and some are waiting to see if this works out or not.”


At this, he points to a man walking down the road. It’s the middleman who used to buy Sompong’s aloe wood; Sompong still owes him 6,000 baht (about $153) for helping pay his poaching fine. Later that day, when Galster learns that Sompong is still paying off the vig to his old boss, he quickly and quietly sends the reformed poacher an envelope with enough cash to cover the debt. WildAid’s model park program, it turns out, is called Surviving Together.


And as Galster knows, not everyone in Khok Saard is willing to be reprogrammed. “The women in the village have turned into a capitalist force, reinvesting their profits back into the business. But some of the men are still poaching. The good news is, the men don’t want to risk getting caught, so they’ve stopped carrying guns into the forest, which means we are documenting fewer animal kills.”

FEWER ANIMAL KILLS is also the goal of WildAid’s new U.S. print-ad campaign, which graphically depicts a hornless rhino bleeding on the concourse of Grand Central Station and a tiger oozing blood on the steps of the New York Public Library. Whether these will shock jaded Americans into writing checks remains to be seen, but a similar WildAid campaign a few years ago, against the consumption of shark-fin soup in Thailand, got that entire nation’s attention.


Shark-fin soup is an expensive delicacy throughout Asia that’s served to honored guests at birthdays and weddings. The key ingredient comes from a cruel practice: slicing the fins off live sharks and throwing the carcasses back in the ocean. Just about any shark will do. In 2000, after Peter Knights put out a report based on data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, estimating that fishermen kill more than 50 million sharks per year worldwide, Galster called on the Thai government to ban shark finning. When there was no response, he escalated with a provocative public-awareness campaign created by J. Walter Thompson, the international advertising powerhouse based in New York.


The ads ran in Thai newspapers and magazines in July 2001; the most provocative one depicted Chinese tombs in the shape of upside-down soup bowls, with the tag line “Tests show that shark fins sometimes contain mercury, making this endangered species more dangerous to you dead than alive.”


The Thai press went crazy, sales of shark-fin soup initially dropped by 30 percent, and Bangkok’s soup purveyors organized into a group called the Association of Shark Fin Restaurants. The restaurateurs produced counter-research claiming that their shark fins were mercury-free; then they filed a lawsuit against Galster, his PR assistant, and J. Walter Thompson to recover what they claimed were $3 million in losses. The suit is still winding its way through the Thai courts. In the meantime, WildAid has successfully lobbied CITES to get whale sharks listed as a protected species, and is trying to get the great white listed as well.


“When we designed the ad campaign, our feeling was that we would see a slow build. After all, by telling Thais not to eat shark-fin soup, we were asking them to change a deeply ingrained social and cultural behavior,” says Marc Capra, 46, who was managing director of J. Walter Thompson’s Bangkok office at the time. “But the reaction was dramatic. Even people of Chinese heritage who used to take the soup for granted were appalled and could not help being emotionally affected.” Lately, Capra has broadened J. Walter Thompson’s relationship with WildAid, creating an international pro bono campaign for their Asian Conservation Awareness Program. Hard-hitting print ads currently running in Malaysia show humans bleeding where noses, genitals, or other appendages have been cut off. Sample tag line: “Your hand is chopped off. Infection sets in. Then they cut off the other hand. You’ve just lived a bear’s last few moments.”


Galster excels at building such partnerships. Last September, he convinced Thailand’s environment minister, Prapat Panyachatraksa, to sign a memorandum of understanding to cooperate with WildAid on reducing wildlife crime. It seemed like a mere formality, but in October, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra gave the go-ahead to unleash the biggest crackdown on wildlife trafficking in Southeast Asia. Since then, WildAid has helped the government save more than 35,000 animals, and the Thai police have arrested dozens of traffickers.


“It’s been very exciting,” Galster says. “The police have been busting people every day. After a tip to our hotline, I went with 50 investigators to a slaughterhouse in Sai Noi [a town north of Bangkok], where we found live and dead animals, tame bears, tigers in cages ready to be slaughtered and sent as meat to exotic restaurants, and tiger cubs that looked wild.” Police netted a gruesome haul: 100 pounds of tiger bones, 46 pounds of newly slaughtered tiger meat, three tiger skins, and 20 black bear paws, still bloody.

WILDAID DIDN’T INVENT the idea of wildlife protection; the concept originated decades ago with farsighted field biologists. But the group has managed to turn aggressive protection into one of the hottest trends in conservation.


“In human society, if you want to stop murder and lawlessness, you create a police force. Same goes for stopping animal crime,” says Alan Rabinowitz, the 50-year-old director of science and exploration for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which manages wildlife habitats all over the world from its base at the Bronx Zoo.


Rabinowitz ought to know. A well-known big-cat expert and author of such books as Chasing the Dragon’s Tail: The Struggle to Save Thailand’s Wild Cats, Rabinowitz first saw the need for strong, sustained species protection when he traveled to Belize in the 1970s to study the country’s dwindling jaguar population. His research, he soon realized, had little practical impact on the jaguars’ survival. So he established the world’s first jaguar preserve and raised money to protect its boundaries.


“When I started my fieldwork, nobody in conservation wanted to talk about protecting parks,” Rabinowitz says. “Even today, you’d never see a line item in a conservation budget for guns and bullets. But in part due to WildAid, it is now acceptable to fund ranger training and salaries. If species are to survive, a national park has to be a truly inviolable wildlife core protected by well-trained people.”


This same debate—armed and active enforcement versus passive security—has roiled the conservation ranks in Africa for decades, and has led to a wide array of protection schemes on that continent. Now, with WildAid pushing its hardcore protection agenda, wildlife groups are moving more forcefully into the protection game in other parts of the world. Since 1999, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has been working with the Thai government to improve anti-poaching enforcement and wildlife monitoring with the border patrol; and in 2001, Conservation International started funding ranger training in Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains, turning former Khmer Rouge guerrillas into anti-logging brigades.


“Science-based organizations such as WCS are increasingly realizing that we have to get into enforcement issues, and WildAid is the core team that has experience we can draw on,” says Elizabeth Bennett, 47, director of the hunting-and-wildlife-trade program at the WCS. “But protection can have an impact only if it works in concert with biological monitoring and a deep understanding of ecosystems. We’re learning a lot from WildAid, but I’m not entirely sure how much they are learning from us.”


She’s right. WildAid is not a replacement strategy for the science-based conservation movement; it’s been designed to plug what Galster and Gauntlett see as gaping security holes in wildlife protection. But there are still some in the conservation community who think that strategy is shortsighted.


“Protection is WildAid’s niche,” says Sybille Klenzendorf, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s tiger conservation program. “But that’s a kind of first step you take when a species such as the tiger is facing imminent extinction from hunters. It’s putting out a fire….Now the direct threats to tigers have become habitat loss and loss of prey. So we moved into that area.”


Once they’ve put out these fires, though, Galster says WildAid’s plan is to work itself out of existence—maybe even by 2030. He hopes the group becomes redundant, turning its overseas offices into locally run NGOs with all-local staffs, as he has already done with the Phoenix Fund in Russia. It is, perhaps, WildAid’s most radical idea.


“One of the differences between us and mainstream U.S. conservation groups is that they still believe foreign governments need to be educated to step up wildlife security,” Gauntlett explains. “But governments in Third World countries already want to protect their parks. Once groups like WildAid give them budgetary and training support, we’ll be able to bow out and let those governments entirely take over protecting the wildlife within their borders.”


In the meantime, Galster is hatching WildAid’s grandest project yet: unplugging what he calls “the Chinese vacuum cleaner, sucking up Southeast Asia’s wildlife left and right.” It’s widely known that practitioners of Chinese traditional medicine use tiger bones and bear gall bladders as remedies, and that tiger and reptile meat is considered exotic cuisine to some Chinese. What’s less well known are the numbers. Traffic, the UK-based monitoring group, reports that during 2000, 20 tons of turtles were shipped from Indonesia to China every week. And in just seven months in 2002, Thai officials intercepted 1,800 mammals and 21,000 reptiles bound for their voracious neighbor to the north.


Galster’s goal is to level the illegal wildlife trade in Asia over the next five years—corresponding with the buildup to the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008—by getting indigenous NGOs to work across borders and fight poachers, traffickers, and consumers. In addition to the programs they’ve already got up and running in Cambodia, Thailand, and Russia, WildAid is hoping to beef up wildlife-security operations in Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan by stitching together a $10 million grant from a number of sources, including the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), a consortium that includes the MacArthur Foundation, the World Bank, and the Japanese government, which has already given them $250,000. It sounds grandiose, but the CEPF was set up precisely because its donors concluded that the only way to save endangered habitats was to sponsor creative broadband approaches.


“We are at a point where conserving biodiversity hot spots is so complex that no single group can go it alone,” explains Jorgen Thomsen, senior vice president of Conservation International and the executive director of the CEPF. “Direct support to civil society groups from a partnership of public and private funds has a higher probability of success for protecting both species and habitats, especially when you are dealing with ecosystems that straddle the boundaries of several countries. China may well be a very big market for wildlife, from tigers to turtles, coming in from abroad, but you can’t look at the China consumption issue separately. It’s tied to he markets in neighboring countries which are suppliers.”

GOOD THING, THEN that in Southeast Asia, suppliers don’t keep a very low profile.


One day last September, Galster and Tim Redford, director of WildAid’s Surviving Together community-outreach project, decided to check out Tachileik, a bazaar just across Thailand’s northern border with Myanmar that’s infamous for species trafficking. Myanmar is one of China’s biggest wildlife suppliers, but to find what they were after, the two men had to wade through long rows of open-air stalls jam-packed with knockoff Nikes and Nikons, pirated gaming CDs and DVDs, mountains of Jockey shorts, porn videos, fishing rods, polyester nightgowns, and fake tiger penises carved from wood. Soon enough, Redford spotted some actual wildlife.


“That’s a golden cat skin, and that looks like a clouded leopard skin with a very unusual melanic coat variation. That’s pretty damn rare,” he said, pointing to a five-foot-long piece of soft beige fur with bold, cloud-shaped gray spots. Because of poaching and habitat destruction, the clouded leopard is endangered all across Asia; according to the Red List, there are fewer than 10,000 of the animals left on earth. Standing in Tachileik, it was not hard to understand why. In a country where the average per capita income is $300, this skin could bring in about $114.


When Galster happened upon a stall with three adult clouded leopard skins on display, he knew he was on to something. The shop girl said her parents owned the stand and kept several dozen more skins back at their house, but that she was unwilling to take a stranger there. An hour later, after inspecting every lane in the market, Galster found the house on his own.


The ground floor was dark and musky, with floor-to-ceiling glass cabinets crowded with 18th- and 19th-century British colonial china and hand-painted wooden bowls piled next to necklaces of yellowing animal teeth. Galster spotted a fearsomely sharp horn from a serow—an endangered woolly-coated wild mountain goat—and Redford offered the family $150 for it, but they weren’t selling. They could get much more from gamers who use the horns to make spurs for illegal cockfighting, another piece of information for Galster to add to his jigsaw puzzle.


Because Galster already had spoken to the shopkeeper’s daughter, who was now there too, the woman agreed to show him the rest of her stash. She sent the girl up a rickety flight of wooden steps to the family’s quarters. A few minutes later, she came back down staggering under the weight of a large plastic box, which she dropped behind the counter. The stench of mothballs enveloped the store as she pried off the lid, revealing a stack of carefully packed skins.


Normally unflappable, Galster looked painfully surprised as he removed the first skin and gently unfolded its limp head and paws on the counter. There were 30 clouded leopard skins in the box, and the merchant volunteered that she received a similar shipment of 30 skins every two months, selling about one skin every other day. “We used to think the traders always had the same skins up all the time, year after year. But she’s selling 15 per month, and this is just a small store,” Galster whispered. “Even if she is the main dealer in Tachileik, which I doubt, that’s a huge amount.”


Galster told the woman he would return when he figured out how many skins he wanted to order, then he and Redford crossed back to their hotel on the Thai side for a postmortem. He seemed depressed and distracted. Tachileik had made him realize that WildAid needs to ramp up its Asian operation substantially if it’s going to be more than a short-term offensive in the war on poaching.


“This is bad,” Galster concluded. “The fact that she was selling clouded leopard skins means they are running out of tiger skins in Burma, because when one species is knocked out, they go on and knock out the next species down. You don’t see people every day with animal skins on their floors or up on their walls, so you’re not so likely to add the numbers up. I think for once we have been underestimating. The situation with skins is much worse than I thought.”


For the first time in a long while, Galster’s vaunted intelligence had been wrong. The world’s endangered species might yet be protected from black-market traffickers and mom-and-pop dealers, but that day seemed a long way off. He sank back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “It’s not about how long you live,” he said. “It’s about what you get done.”

The post See the Last Clouded Leopard. See the Last Clouded Leopard Die. See the Last Clouded Leopoard Skin in the Black Market. See a Pattern Here? appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

The weather reports from the top of the world last summer were not good. Miles of sea ice went missing in the Arctic Ocean. Biologists warned that polar bears would soon have no place to live. The 170-square-mile Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, at the northern end of Ellesmere Island, broke apart for the first time in thousands of years. And 950 miles south of the North Pole, off northwestern Greenland, the U.S. Coast Guard’s newest and largest icebreaker, the Healy, was having trouble finding any ice to break at all.

Northwest Passage, the Arctic

The USCGC Healy navigates the Beaufort Sea

Northwest Passage, the Arctic

The Northern Passage, as navigated by the USCGC Healy, August 19-30, 2003

Northwest Passage, the Arctic

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: the ice-recon chopper at rest on the tarmac.

Northwest Passage, the Arctic

CRACK-UP:”extremely lame conditions” on the Beaufort Sea

Northwest Passage, the Arctic

THE ICE STARE: Yves Sivret surveys the scene from the bridge.

It was August in this lonely corner of the Arctic Ocean, and the iceboat’s chief, Captain Daniel K. Oliver, picked up his binoculars and took in the view from the Healy‘s bridge. There was not much to report in the way of upcoming hazards. We were surrounded by deep blue sea.


During routine ice-breaking, there is usually a lot to do on the Healy—scrutinizing satellite images for ice migration, replotting the ship’s course, crushing big chunks into smaller chunks—but absent the frozen obstacle course, life on board slowed down considerably. The 92 members of the crew piled too much food on their trays from the all-you-can-eat buffet and wandered the floors. Even the announcements broadcast over the shipwide intercom grew lethargic. Instead of “Attention, all hands! Following is a test of the flight-crash alarm!” or “Secure all doors and hatches!” we got “Now, all hands! There will be a morale skeet shoot at fifteen hundred on the flight deck.” And “Now, for the attention of all hands, there will be a pudding-eating contest on the mess deck.”


Not that the Healy eschews diversions: For example, there are Polar Bear initiation rites (in which “Bluenoses”—Arctic first-timers—prove their mettle by swimming in frigid water) and Ice Liberty (a few hours of shore leave on an ice floe during which each Coastie is allotted a ration of two beers). But the lack of any kind of ice whatsoever made even boozing on a berg—or any other ice-related fun—impossible.


The Healy had just departed the harbor of the U.S. Air Force’s Thule Air Base, in Greenland, and was sailing to its next assignment, in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska. The ship was going to smash through the 900-mile-long Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The only other time the Healy accomplished this was on its maiden voyage, in July 2000—a test to see whether this behemoth ice-breaking machine could survive the waterway.


Built with state-of-the-art laboratories and sonar mapping systems, the four-year-old, 420-foot, 16,000-ton, $350 million Coast Guard icebreaker was designed to be a platform for Arctic exploration. The ship’s crew regularly hosts visiting research teams who do everything from collecting water samples to monitoring how clams survive on the polar seafloor. Although no extensive experiments were planned for this voyage, scientists—like Dave Monahan, director of ocean mapping for the Canadian Hydrographic Service, who was on board to map spots on the passage’s seafloor that have remained blank on nautical charts for 500 years—would be gathering anecdotal information.


As the Healy cruised through calm seas, Captain Oliver, a soft-spoken 46-year-old from California, underlined the fact that, on a calm day like today, even a yacht would be able to sail unhindered to the Alert radar station—the Canadian Forces’ acoustic surveillance facility about 400 miles away on the tip of Ellesmere Island and the northernmost permanently inhabited spot in the world.


“Don’t forget: The Alert station is named after the HMS Alert, a steamship that got up that far in 1876,” the captain said. “Back in the 19th century, when they didn’t even have icebreakers, a lot of navigators made it up to Alert, because there was open water.”


The captain was making an important point: If wooden schooners could sail that far more than a hundred years ago, then the recent disappearance of Arctic ice might be the result of the earth’s naturally cyclical climate, rather than human-induced global warming. Blame Mother Nature or human nature, but my mission was the same: to conquer the passage and jump ship when the boat arrived at Barrow, Alaska, 14 days later.


– On the bridge, Captain Oliver set down his binoculars. “Six weeks ago, I suspect, there would have been so much ice, we wouldn’t have been able to cross the Northwest Passage.”

THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE—a labyrinth that runs from Greenland to Alaska around 90 major and some 30,000 minor islands—has always been a Holy Grail-cum-icy death trap for mariners. As far back as Columbus, cartographers dreamed of a quick maritime route to the Orient from Europe. Often they drew the mythical strait on their maps without knowing its exact location.


Naturally, this raised expectations. In 1497, explorer John Cabot sailed as far as the southeastern shore of what is now Canada and claimed it for England. He was followed by such single-minded British adventurers as Henry Hudson, who was left to drift in a small dinghy—in the same bay that bears his name today—during a 1610 mutiny on his fourth attempt to find the passage. By the mid-1800s, the quest for a shipping shortcut had crystallized around the Parry Channel, an 800-mile deep-water route from Baffin Bay to McClure Strait, just east of the Beaufort Sea, named after the British naval explorer Sir William Parry.


The search for an Arctic thruway became a worldwide obsession. In 1845, when the ice swallowed up British rear admiral Sir John Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror, along with 133 crewmen, newspaper accounts of the tragedy inspired 40 separate rescue expeditions. Historians credit Royal Navy captain Robert McClure, who, between 1850 and 1853, sailed all but 200 miles of the route (and walked and sledded the rest of the way) with the first traverse by a European. But it wasn’t until 1906 that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, the first man to reach the South Pole, finally accomplished the first complete ocean-to-ocean transit. With Amundsen’s success, and the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, the obsession ran its course. Nearly a century later, fewer than 5,000 people have made it all the way through.


If it weren’t for the fact that recent NASA satellite data showed Arctic ice coverage to be shrinking, shipping magnates, government officials, and political scientists would probably still be ignoring the Northwest Passage. But the lack of ice has rekindled interest. A viable route through the Arctic could save time and money; from Europe to Japan, it’s 6,000 miles shorter than the Panama Canal route.


This only causes headaches for Canada, whose government sees the Northwest Passage as a proprietary waterway, as Canadian as Lake Winnipeg. The United States and Europe—relying on the United Nations’ International Law of the Sea definition of an “international strait” as a body of water that connects two oceans—view the passage as the world’s property. In 1969, the SS Manhattan, a tanker in the Humble Oil and Refining Company fleet, crossed the Northwest Passage without asking our northern neighbor’s permission. Even though Canadian politicians objected vociferously, Ottawa provided two icebreaker escorts that helped free the American ship from 25 separate jams. Nowadays, the U.S. State Department notifies Canada of American icebreaker travel plans, and Canada responds by “granting permission” that the U.S. never asked for in the first place.


In diplomatic terms, you could call this a stalemate. According to Morris Maduro, a political-science professor at the University of Alberta, “in five years the passage will be navigable in summer, and in ten years, the winter. This will be one of the hottest issues dividing Canada from the U.S.” That seems slightly alarmist. But as defense analyst Rob Huebert, associate director of the University of Calgary’s Center for Military and Strategic Studies, points out, Canada is not prepared to handle the environmental disasters, mass tourism, maritime accidents, potential terrorist activity, and contraband smuggling that a new Canada Canal could entail. As sea ice recedes, he told me, “America’s back door swings wide open.”


More worrisome is the fact that only 150 full-time Canadian soldiers are guarding the 2.5 million square miles that constitute the northern areas of Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon Territory. There are also a few thousand volunteer Canadian Rangers—aboriginal reservists equipped with World War I-era Enfield rifles. As Colonel Norris Pettis, commander of the Canadian Forces Northern Area, tried to reassure me, the rangers serve as the nation’s “eyes and ears in the middle of nowhere.” When I asked a spokesman in Canada’s Department of National Defense how the military is readying for an open Northwest Passage, I received a release stating that an Arctic Capabilities Study recommended “slightly increasing the number of personnel” and providing the Inuit rangers with “GPS systems, radios, binoculars, and camping equipment.”


To be fair, there are other organizations (the Canadian Coast Guard and the Canadian Air Force, for instance) watching the Arctic. But even Gary Sidock, director of operational services for the Canadian Coast Guard’s Central and Arctic region, conceded that such surveillance will never be enough.


“Can I tell you there is a picket fence around Canada? No,” Sidock told me. “The Arctic is an easy place to hide in—but you have to get there first. And it’s an isolated and inaccessible spot.”

UNLIKE FRESHWATER ICEBERGS, sea ice is not romantic. It is neither majestic nor soaring. It does not give off that otherworldly spectral glow of pure whiteness born of glacial snow. Its verticality does not threaten ocean liners with a predatory, awe-inspiring loom. It is not prehistoric in origin. Quite the contrary: Most sea ice is younger than a decade. It is flat and flawed. It is often pockmarked, dirty with algae, and lumpy with protruding hummocks. It forms into small pizzas, called “pancake ice,” and coagulates into larger 60-foot disks, called “ice cakes.” It sets into mile-long floes that crash into one another, forming uneven bands of “ice ridges” that can grow into heaps ten feet tall and harden like a scab over a wound. And when summer temperatures degrade the ice, it is dismissed as “rotten.”


Even so, polar ice is menacing. It can be as crumbly as a saltine one minute and as hard as anthracite the next. If its pressurized floes are thick and unbroken, it can stop an icebreaker dead or slice the steel hull of a lesser ship like a can opener. And just like all things harsh and unpredictable and carnivorous, Arctic ice is easy to fall in love with.


But for the first few days after the Healy chugged away from Thule, there wasn’t any.


Sure, there were a few picturesquely clichéd glacial icebergs vamping it up in the vast open expanse of Baffin Bay, but none of the saltwater ice in question. And 300 miles west of Thule, when the Healy crossed into the narrows of Lancaster Sound, the official entrance to the Northwest Passage, there was nothing but water.


Unlike freshwater glaciers, which freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the salinity of seawater requires 28.8 degrees to freeze. So sea-ice melt serves as an early warning system for the earth’s climate; less ice means air and ocean temperatures are heating up. In that sense, the Arctic is a litmus test of climate change.


In August 2000, a front-page article in The New York Times interpreted the “first” sighting of open water at the North Pole in perhaps “more than 50 million years” as “evidence that global warming may be real and already affecting climate.” In an April 2001 report titled “Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic,” the U.S. Office of Naval Research stated that over the last quarter-century, “submarine data reveal a 40 percent decrease in Arctic sea ice volume,” and satellite data “demonstrate a decrease in sea ice extent of 3 percent per decade.”


The old Arctic hands on the Healy didn’t seem overly concerned. Yes, the ice coverage had recently shrunk somewhat, they said, but a lot of ice was simply being blown into other sections of the passage, clogging it up and making it harder to navigate. On a lower deck, in one of the ship’s cavernous lab spaces, 59-year-old Dave Monahan talked to me about the passage’s current state as he monitored a computer that, every few seconds, recorded time, date, water depth, and ship’s location. Hardly anyone ever asks his Hydrographic Service for an official map of the area, he said. Ice or no ice, he believed that the waterway remained too dangerous to be a commercial route.


“The good news is, the chances of crashing into another vessel up here are rather small,” Monahan told me, laughing at his own understatement. “The bad news is that we haven’t mapped all the shoals in the Northwest Passage by a long shot. We don’t know the tides and currents. There are no navigational aids, like lighthouses or buoys, nobody and nothing to help you if your radar goes down. There’s dense fog. And then, of course, there’s always the ice, the ice, the ice.”


One afternoon, six days into our journey, as I paced my spartan cabin and looked longingly out the tiny porthole, the Arctic finally began to live up to its reputation. First, by the barren shores of Bathurst Island, a few chunks of ice drifted by like albino lily pads. Then came a few ice pizzas. Then a floating football field appeared, its ragged and ruffled ridges indicating a considerable keel. Crashing into it felt like a 3 on the Richter scale.


The cylindrically hulled Healy drove up on top of the massive floe until the heft of the boat sent dozens of cracks spidering across the surface. The floe split and hunks the size of double-decker buses cleaved off, some bouncing along the ship’s flanks as it plowed through, others flipping over helplessly, exposing their baby-blue underbellies as if they were giving up and crying uncle.


In previous centuries, when Arctic explorers looking for the Northwest Passage got mired in ice, they had very few options. They drifted wherever the floes took them or threw ropes down and ordered crews to haul the ship by hand into the nearest open channel, a procedure called “warping.” Or they abandoned ship altogether and slogged to shore, hoping to regain their vessels when the ice thawed. More often, they watched with dread as the ice ground their schooners to sawdust. The wrecks later washed ashore on the passage’s uninhabited islands, which are still littered with the bones of stranded sailors cannibalized by their frostbitten, scurvy-crazed compatriots.


None of this befell the Healy. Instead, one of the ice pilots simply gunned the throttle and sped up.

IN 1903, THE FIRST YEAR of what would be a three-year crossing of the Northwest Passage, Roald Amundsen wrote that ice conditions “had been unusually favorable. We had made headway with ease… As far as we could judge, the year 1903 must have been a very favorable one as regards ice.”


Amundsen’s accounts, as well as those of British naval explorers—such as Sir James Clark Ross, who discovered the location of the magnetic North Pole in 1831—used to be consulted by Arctic adventurers looking for pertinent navigational tips. But recently, scientists have started reading these explorers’ logs to look for clues about environmental change. Kevin Wood, the Knauss Marine Policy Fellow at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, spent the past year using the data on ice extent, ice thickness, melt and freeze dates, along with temperatures recorded by 44 Arctic expeditions, to reconstruct the polar climate during the 1800s. In a recent issue of the geophysics journal Eos, Wood and co-author James Overland concluded that “19th-century explorers did not usually encounter more formidable ice than explorers in the 20th century.”


Wandering around the Healy‘s decks, in balmy 20-degree temperatures, carrying the leather-bound tomes of one 19th-century explorer or another, Wood, a 41-year-old climatologist, scrutinized the occasional glaciated island as it went by and compared it with explorers’ descriptions from previous centuries. The book he was reading when the Healy first hit the ice was The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic Seas, by Captain Francis McClintock, who wrote in 1860 that he was astonished by “the total absence of ice in Barrow Strait. I was here at this time in 1854—still frozen up—and doubts were entertained as to the possibility of escape.” In other words, radical climate change is not just a modern phenomenon; it’s also a historical feature of the passage. Wood put it this way: “Based on 19th-century material in which explorers encountered extreme ice variability and ran into both warm seasons and cold seasons, I don’t see anything surprising here.”


Wood isn’t the only one looking to the past for answers. Using two centuries’ worth of temperature and ice records from Russian, U.S., and Canadian archives, Igor Polyakov, a physical oceanographer at the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska, has come to a similar conclusion.


“The ice was thick in the 1920s, thin in the 1930s and 1940s, thick again in the 1960s and 1970s, and thinner in recent decades,” Polyakov told me from his office in Fairbanks. “Our research shows that a big portion of the changes we are seeing are due to a cycle of multi-decade variability. Any prediction here would be speculative, but I can advise people not to throw out their winter clothes.”


I was glad I took his advice. Several nights later, the view from the bridge looked as if we’d landed on the moon. A thick white crust stretched all the way to the horizon. The uneven topography alternated between blocks of ice mesas, deep ice craters, bony ice ridges, and rolling ice dunes glowing an otherworldly sapphire-blue.


An announcement came over the intercom: “QM1 Grob has the conn.” This meant that the floes were so thick that Quarter Master Dave Grob, a 35-year-old Arizonan with wire-rimmed glasses and trim brown hair, had been dispatched 106 feet above sea level to the aloft conning tower to steer the ship through the hazardous maze. The glassed-in ice pilot’s tower is the modern-day equivalent of a crow’s nest, three vertical ladders above the bridge. Grob was giddy as hell up there, because the gnarly floes offered a rare challenge to a jaded ice-breaker.


“Did you see the size of that chunk?” he asked me once I’d shimmied up the ladders and into the conn. “It’s awesome!”


In the ten years Grob has been with the Coast Guard, he’s worked on patrol boats in Florida and scuba-dived under the North Pole, but piloting an iceboat still gets his adrenaline pumping. Off the starboard, he pondered a field of primordially crusty, mustard-colored ice. It gave him the willies.


“You got to wonder about the history of that ice, where it came from and what those old explorers felt like,” he said, turning on the searchlights and beaming them at a ridged wall ahead of us, at 11 o’clock. He had no choice but to plow into it head-on. Small pieces cracked off, but a huge chunk stayed intact and the Healy teetered slowly up and down while the Doppler Speed Log—the naval equivalent of a speedometer—steadily dropped.


Grob eyed the floe, estimating its strength. Then he flipped on an additional engine and revved it up. The ice finally cracked and the ship was free. “Ice-breaking is like driving an SUV,” he said. “It’s smoother on the road, but it’s made for extreme terrain. Like all off-roading, it’s man and machine versus nature. But you still have to be careful, or nature wins.”

IT’S SAFE TO SAY that most humans will never experience the hazards of the Northwest Passage. But Captain Oliver had navigated through here in 2000, and now, ten days into our journey and about 600 miles into the passage, with satellite images showing miles of impassable frozen sea between 20 and 30 feet thick, he wasn’t going to let a few ice cubes stop him.


We were in Viscount Melville Sound, where, in 1819, Sir William Parry and his crew got stuck in the ice. They ducked into a bay he dubbed Winter Harbour and waited for the spring thaw. The Healy was far better equipped to handle dicey situations than a wooden sloop, but the harsh Arctic environment still made stranding a possibility.


The captain dispatched Yves Sivret, a 40-year-old ice ace on loan from the Canadian Ice Service, to go out with the ship’s regular ice-reconnaissance helicopter team and have a look. The hope was that Sivret, a specialist in aerial ice analysis, would spot flaws in the floes and find a way out.


Hovering at 1,500 feet in the chopper, the blocked entrance to McClure Strait in sight, Sivret sweated through his padded neon-orange survival suit and stroked his Viking beard. An icefield the size of New York’s Central Park butted up against another one the size of the Washington Mall. Even more problematic than the floes’ extensive reaches were their high ridges and eerie turquoise glow—indications that this was solid pack ice that could bog down and ensnare the icebreaker.


“Can we go higher?” he asked the pilot, Gary Naus, who pushed the helicopter up to 3,000 feet.


Every few minutes, flight mechanic Ray O’Dell radioed the ship with the exact amount of time left before “splash”—the moment the helicopter would run out of gas and drop into the Arctic Ocean.


“Five-zero to splash,” O’Dell informed the mother ship.


“Splash?” Sivret said. “It’s more like five-zero to splat, with ice this thick out there!”


Such thick ice seemed to call into question the 40 percent decrease in Arctic ice thickness quoted in the U.S. Navy study. As Dennis Conlon, the author of the report, later told me, “None of those submarine measurements pertain to your area of interest,” because those subs never traveled through the passage to begin with.


Some scientists even dispute the importance of the 40 percent decrease the submarines reported in the higher latitudes. Greg Holloway, a polar expert at Canada’s Institute of Ocean Science, points out that “the ice may have been 40 percent thinner in the few locations that the submarines went, but it wasn’t that much thinner Arctic-wide. It was probably even 40 percent thicker in other sections of the Arctic. There is a big variability in ice from year to year due to wind and temperature. Most of the ice was still there. It just moved around.”


I had come north to see ice, and now I was seeing how bad it could get. Earlier in the summer, on a quest to row a collapsible rubber boat solo across the Northwest Passage, Dom Mee, a former British marine commando and ocean rower, experienced the same kind of here-today-gone-tomorrow phenomenon. The ice got so bad that he was ultimately trapped for three days, only 35 miles from his destination at Victory Bay, on Baffin Island, and forced to abandon the trip, which he later described as “absolute hell.”


From his heli-perch above Melville Sound, Sivret spotted a variation in the ice plates a few miles away. On closer inspection, he zeroed in on a patchwork of pale colors—gray chunks the size of city blocks whose dullness indicated weak “first-year” ice, thin floes that formed last summer and, having survived another August, would age into thicker “multiyear” ice. Here and there, he could see a few pools of open water. He turned to pilot Naus and said, “Tell the captain the bad news is there’s miles of multiyear ice. The good news is we can go around it to the southeast.”


The ice recon completed, the chopper headed back to the Healy with “three-zero to splash.” In the flight hangar, Sivret stripped off his survival suit. Underneath, his light-blue oxford was soaked, proving that the Northwest Passage could still make a sea hound sweat.


“I’m going to brief the captain,” he said. “But first I’m going to change my shirt.”

That’s the trouble with ice: It’s unpredictable. When it comes out of nowhere and surrounds you, threatening to hold you hostage for the winter, your first priority is to get away from it. And when it vanishes unexpectedly and you’re back in the safe monotony of open water, you miss its jagged menace.


Being on the Healy as it picked its way through the Northwest Passage was like going to a summer camp where the strangers you meet on the first day become your best friends. Though the camaraderie would remain, the awe-inspiring ice responsible for bonding us Bluenoses with the crew disappeared as we sailed out of the passage and into the slate-colored chop of Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. Being iceless again was a letdown. But at least I had managed to document some mammoth floes, however many—or few—of them are left.


That Arctic sea ice, as recorded by NASA satellites, has decreased by about 3 percent per decade over the past 30 years is a fact that many climate researchers acknowledge. But it’s about the only thing they can agree on. They disagree on whether the warming trend is permanent or temporary, earth-shattering or a minor blip on a millennial time scale, naturally geothermal or artificially human-induced. That’s why, ten days after The New York Times ran its August 2000 front-page story under the headline “Ages-Old Icecap at North Pole Is Now Liquid, Scientists Find,” the newspaper was compelled to run a correction, and its reporter, John Noble Wilford, wrote a follow-up piece headlined “Open Water at Pole Is Not Surprising, Experts Say.”


“When there has been an ice decrease in one piece of the Arctic, people make the leap that the decrease correlates to the entire Canadian archipelago,” says John Falkingham, director of ice forecasting at the Canadian Ice Service. “But we don’t have any data to support this, because there is no systematic observation of glaciers and ice shelves in the north.”


The Arctic’s erratic behavior is one of its charms, but that same ineffability is what makes it hard for scientists—or, for that matter, governments and political analysts—to come to conclusions. Scientists point out that those talking heads who claim the Northwest Passage is about to be ice-free year-round are neglecting the fact that the near-total lack of sunlight between October and March means that, barring a realignment of the solar system or catastrophic global warming, winter will always freeze the Arctic. Which is another way of saying that North America’s back door is not wide open, though it certainly may be ajar.


“We have a very poor understanding of the Arctic,” says John Stone, executive director for climate change at Environment Canada, the government science ministry. “There are disturbing warning signs, and you cannot ignore them. But we don’t have enough data right now. The only thing we can be sure of in the Arctic is that we are in for more surprises.”


The surprise when the Healy entered the Beaufort Sea was that, once again, we couldn’t find any ice to party on. The normally stoical voice reverberating over the Healy‘s intercom system could not mask its disappointment. “Attention, all hands! Due to extremely lame ice conditions, Ice Liberty has been canceled.”


Unlike hundreds of their predecessors, the crew had successfully weathered the legendary passage and its predatory ice. But, a hundred years after Amundsen, the journey ended without a triumphal on-ice celebration.


As the Healy‘s helicopter carried me to the permafrosted dust bowl of Barrow, my last impression was this: Arctic ice is like a polar bear—sometimes it vanishes into the landscape, and sometimes, just when you let your guard down, it materializes out of nowhere, brandishing its deadly white teeth.

The post Break On Through appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

ADVENTURE, LIKE LIFE, HAS CONSEQUENCES. What we do, what we consume, and where we go have an impact. As tourism continues to explode on our small planet (travelers will soon be taking a billion trips a year), the success or failure of sustainability, cultural awareness, and environmental protection will decide whether we preserve a world of natural beauty and discovery or create a wasteland of paved paradises and bland globalization. Since it’s never been more crucial to get to that place where good, clean, and fun intersect, we’ve searched the globe for signs of inspiration and hope—the best eco-lodges, the most inventive travel outfitters, the coolest technology, and the destinations where the defining struggle for the soul of travel is already in progress. And guess what, eager wanderers: You (yeah, you) really can make a difference.

The post Find Eden Now . . . and Save it for Later appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

For those who want to mix pleasure with principled travel, here are a few expedition guides that get a gold star for treading lightly and forging ahead with sustainable tourism.

A notch above: a TourIndia Kerala tree house

TAUCK WORLD DISCOVERY
In 1999, to celebrate its 75th anniversary, Tauck World Discovery, which travels to all seven continents and offers more than 100 upscale trips, sent a handful of its 450 staff members on a monthlong volunteer stint in Mesa Verde National Park. This move inspired an avalanche of good deeds: Tauck has since donated more than $1 million in grants to various national park projects and now offers regularly scheduled volunteer opportunities for both its staff and guests. Projects have included building new fences around George Washington’s headquarters in Valley Forge and mucking out the rangers’ horse stables behind Old Faithful in Yellowstone. Next year, travelers who sign up for Tauck tours can volunteer for cleanups at Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Zion national parks. For more details, call Tauck World Discovery at 800-788-7885, or visit its Web site at .

LINDBLAD EXPEDITIONS
Since 1958, this ship-based tour operator has taken clients to the loneliest points on the planet, from Antarctica to Norway’s Svalbard Islands. Acutely aware of the impact tourism has on these fragile ecosystems, the company set up an environmental management system in 2000 to reduce consumption and waste on its vessels. Clients can also help preserve the landscapes they’re visiting: Since 1997, Lindblad guests have donated $1.5 million to the company’s Galápagos Conservation Fund. Call Lindblad at 800-397-3348 for more information, or visit its Web site at .

TOURINDIA KERALA
This innovative outfitter, operating in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala, has, over the last quarter-century, become India’s model for small-scale sustainable tourism. One of its first projects was retrofitting kettuvallams, or rice boats, into low-impact houseboats to show visitors Kerala’s scenic backwaters. That was followed by village tours via open bullock carts, and by the construction of an eco-lodge near Vythiri, in North Kerala, where guests stay in private tree houses 86 feet off the ground. But the company’s greatest success so far is the development, in 2001, of the 22-mile Periyar Tiger Trail, which protects rare tigers and other species by partnering with the Kerala Forest Authority to patrol and monitor all activity within the 300-square-mile Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. It employs former poachers as forest rangers and trekking guides. For more details, call TourIndia Kerala at 011-91-471-233-0437, or visit its Web site at .

BORNEO ECO TOURS
This Malaysia-based outfitter set up the Sukau Ecotourism Research and Development Centre in 2000 to funnel some of the profits from its Sukau Rainforest Lodge into conserving a portion of the million-acre Lower Kinabatangan River Basin, where the Asian elephant population was being forced out by logging. In addition, the center has adopted 64 acres of the degraded riverine land and invites every guest to plant a tree. The goal? To put 5,000 seedlings in the ground this year. For details, call Borneo Eco Tours at 011-60-88-234009, or check out its Web site at .

A Blueprint That Breathes

The world’s leading eco-architect on how to build green

MOST OF US IMAGINE that a stay at an eco-lodge means eyeballing howler monkeys from the deck of a tree house with a cup of shade-grown espresso. But beyond a remote location and a few solar panels, what makes a lodge “eco”? We asked internationally renowned eco-architect and planner HITESH MEHTA to walk us through the creation of a sustainable retreat that mixes the eco, the exotic, and the luxe.

Drawing up plans for the proposed LOBOLO ECOLODGE, on the western edge of Kenya’s Lake Turkana, Mehta began where all good design should: with the neighbors. “The local people are seldom included in the initial planning or in the assessment of a lodge’s potential impacts,” says Mehta, a Kenyan-born Indian working for the Florida landscape architecture firm EDSA. “Yet they are the ones who know the resources and whose culture needs to be respected.”

The pastoral Turkana tribe, whose cattle still graze the arid moonscape surrounding the lake, hold two things sacred: water and grass. So Mehta incorporated, for example, a path for cows, and gutterless buildings that speed rain back to the soil.

Although construction has been on hold due to regional strife, Kenya’s political situation has cleared, and Mehta’s client, the Kenyan outfitter Jade Sea Safaris, is already using the site as a tent camp for birders, cultural tourists, and fossil-seekers headed across the lake to the Koobi Foora archaeological sites made famous by the Leakeys. When completed, Lobolo Ecolodge will be luxurious—$300 a night for bush convenience—but its footprint will be decidedly low-key: Eco-architecture often means reining in grand plans—forget the gold-plated faucets if the metal was mined by exploited workers—in favor of local supplies. Mehta’s team studied native plants, searched out sustainably harvested timber, and found the best outdoor lighting that still allows for power stargazing. Will Lobolo’s guests appreciate Mehta’s hard work? Yes, if it’s done right. “The lodge will feel timeless,” he says. “Its main feature is the natural world. If we cannot create an almost spiritual connection to nature, we have failed.”

AERIAL VIEW OF SITE: “The whole landscape around Lobolo Ecolodge is a desert, and the site of the lodge is actually an oasis,” explains Mehta. “We wanted to make sure that we did not overdesign and therefore violate the limits of acceptable change to the site.” Mehta’s team calculated the carrying capacity of the spring-fed oasis, then subtracted the water needed to keep the cattle pasture green and to replenish groundwater sources. The final tally: enough water for only 16 guest units, eight campsites, and 12 units of staff housing—roughly 85 people in all. Structures are set far enough from the lake to make it accessible to cattle, goats, and shorebirds.

A.
LAKE TURKANA is home to huge flocks of flamingos, and serves as a nesting site or flyway for 350 other bird species. It’s also a fine swimming hole (albeit one shared with crocodiles and hippos), so there’s no need for an energy-and water-hogging pool.

B.
STAFF HOUSING: 12 to 15 employees (80 percent of the 20- to 30-person staff will be locals) will live on the grounds with their families.

C. A small GROCERY STORE and medical dispensary for use by locals and guests will be staffed by members of the Turkana tribe.

D. The tribe helped identify the best route for this CATTLE PATH to nearby grass pastures. “We want the Turkana to feel pride in this design,” says Mehta.

E.
DOUM PALMS AND LEAFLESS ACACIAS are indigenous to the area but have been damaged by El Ni-o storms. Reestablishing these will attract native birds and insects.

A Blueprint That Breathes, PT II

SIDE VIEW OF GUEST UNIT: Each of the two-unit guest villas—framed out of local pine—will be built on stilts to protect them from flash floods in the brief monsoon season and to allow the natural flow of surface water into the lake. The Turkana helped identify the best cabin spots for viewing sunrises over the water and for spotting the occasional oryx or gazelle. A. LIGHTS: ���ϳԹ���, movement-sensitive lights will point downward to maximize stargazing and reduce light pollution. Inside, you’ll find only low-wattage bulbs.


B. CONSTRUCTION: No nails will be used, because of their “high energy embodiment”—steel is made by burning fossil fuels, and the folks at Lobolo prefer their fossils in the ground. Tongue-and-groove construction will hold timber flooring and ceiling boards in place, and sisal ropes and palm strings will be used to secure the rafters to the roof frame.


C. GARDEN: Recycled gray water will irrigate the grounds and the organic vegetable garden. The lodge will eventually have two “constructed wetlands” to purify septic waste naturally. The camping area will use water-free composting toilets.


D. PORCH AWNINGS will be woven by the Turkana out of reeds from nearby wetlands and fast-growing bamboo.


E. BATHROOMS: Low-flush toilets will use only 1.6 gallons per flush, instead of the standard commercial 3.5. Even better, the shower heads will use a half-gallon per minute at high pressure, compared with the normal 2.5. Only biodegradable, non-phosphate shampoo and soap may be used.


F. ROOFS will be fashioned out of sisal-fiber-reinforced cement tiles, which will be made on-site. Energy will be supplied by photovoltaic panels.







INTERIOR: Floors will be made of local slate from the town of Loiyangalani, and furniture, floor mats, and recycling baskets will be locally constructed from palm fronds. Mosquito nets will keep the odd bug away, and ceiling fans and roof vents will serve as air-conditioning. You might sweat a little when summer temps reach 104 degrees, but just think: No noise to drown out the songs of the African skimmers, wagtails, and stints.

On The Beaten Track

We came, we saw…and every so often we left entire landscapes worse for the wear. ���ϳԹ��� grades the good and the bad of five classic destinations.

THE REGION
ANNAPURNA CIRCUIT, NEPAL
HOW IT RATES
Conservation Efforts C
Community Involvement B-
Outlook C+

THE LOWDOWN
Since Nepal opened its doors to outsiders in the 1950s, Western trekkers have flocked to the Annapurna region by the tens of thousands—bringing with them a demand for firewood and cheap labor. By the mid-1980s, large swaths of pine forest had been cut, ill-equipped porters working for $2 a day were dying of exposure, and enough ramen wrappers littered the ground to earn the area a reputation as one of the highest trash heaps on earth. The nonprofit Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP), charged with managing the area since 1986, teaches locals about alternative fuels, waste disposal, and fair labor conditions; groups like the Boulder, Colorado-based Himalayan Explorers Connection () assist porters by collecting clothing donations and lobbying for better wages and working conditions. But without enforced government mandates, outfitters have no incentive to jump on the bandwagon, and both workers and the environment continue to suffer. Meanwhile, the recent Maoist uprisings have brought tourism here to a near-standstill. This may help the ecosystem, but it hurts the economy.

THE GREENEST WAY TO GO NOW
The adventure outfitter KarmaQuest (650-560-0101, ) emphasizes interaction with local villagers and donates up to 5 percent of its take to ACAP. The company’s Annapurna Circuit trips are on hold until the region stabilizes; in the meantime, try its 12-day trek through the calmer Langtang Valley.

THE REGION
GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS, ECUADOR
HOW IT RATES
Conservation Efforts A
Community Involvement B
Outlook A-

THE LOWDOWN
Even Darwin would likely appreciate how tourism benefits this arid archipelago, home to the mockingbirds and finches that inspired his evolutionary theory. The logic is economic: By providing island residents with alternative job opportunities, the travel sector discourages them from turning to the region’s most destructive industry, illegal fishing. Annual visits by some 60,000 natural-history buffs have helped create jobs for more than 1,000 locals, and the Galápagos, a protected area since 1959, has the controls in place to limit their impact: Tourists must stick to 60 designated sites and travel with park-certified guides, and strict laws cover everything from trash disposal to shoe-washing (required to prevent the introduction of foreign species). But with only two boats on hand to patrol 23,000 square miles of ocean, illegal tuna, shark, and sea-cucumber fishing continues to be a problem. Unless the Galápagos National Park Service finds funding for additional surveillance boats and increases fines for fishing violations, the islands’ stellar eco-record may be tarnished within this decade.

THE GREENEST WAY TO GO NOW
Untamed Path (800-349-1050, ) employs local naturalist guides and charters eight- to 16-passenger boats (quieter and less obtrusive than the standard 90-man yachts), so you’ll have access to quiet nooks—and giant tortoises, dolphins, and sea lions—that the mega-yachts can only long for from a distance.

THE REGION
MASAI MARA NATIONAL RESERVE, KENYA
HOW IT RATES
Conservation Efforts C+
Community Involvement C+
Outlook C

THE LOWDOWN
In the low season, it’s a sight more common than the Big Five: Land Rovers zooming across the plains to encircle a lone, wigged-out cheetah. Safari guides, under pressure to secure the perfect photo op for paying customers, too often let environmental concerns fall by the wayside. The standards—or lack thereof—were set in the 1960s, when Kenya’s post-independence government recognized safari tourism as a potential cash cow and encouraged foreign development but neglected to protect the land and wildlife. While the standards have been raised since the 583-square-mile Masai Mara was turned into a national reserve in 1974, little has been done to encourage lodges to properly handle garbage and wastewater, reduce firewood consumption at the region’s 25 camps and lodges, or compensate the original Masai inhabitants booted off their land. Despite a few recent positive steps—the Kenya Professional Guides Association is testing guides on game-park ethics, and the Ecotourism Society of Kenya has developed a very basic lodge certification program—little passes eco-muster in the world’s most popular wildlife-watching destination.

THE GREENEST WAY TO GO NOW
Dream Camp (011-254-2-57-74-90, ), on the banks of the Talek River, is a progressive anomaly for Kenya. Spend your nights in one of 15 thatch-roofed tents with solar power and hot showers. By day, follow expert Masai guides on foot to spot lions, cheetahs, and wildebeests without disturbing their habitats.

THE REGION
INCA TRAIL, PERU
HOW IT RATES
Conservation Efforts C+
Community Involvement B
Outlook C

THE LOWDOWN
As recently as the 1970s, Peru’s 30-mile path from the Urubamba River to the ancient city of Machu Picchu, at 7,710 feet, appeared untouched. A decade later, travelers joked that you didn’t need a guide to get up there—you could just follow the toilet paper. Despite the international cleanup efforts that began in the mid-1980s, repairing the damage done by as many as 900 hikers a day proved to be, well, an uphill battle. Promising change came in 2000: The area was declared a national park, and new laws required that visitors be accompanied by an officially licensed guide. A porter strike in 2001 led to a maximum weight limit of 20 kilograms (about 44 pounds) per bag and a minimum wage of $8 per day. And starting this year, a daily limit of 450 hikers will be imposed, cutting high-season traffic in half. “The Inca Trail is better than it’s been,” says Kurt Kutay, longtime guide and owner of Seattle-based Wildland ���ϳԹ���s. “But if you’re looking for a wilderness experience, go somewhere else.”

THE GREENEST WAY TO GO NOW
Hike the Inca Trail, with Wildland ���ϳԹ���s (800-345-4453, ), which runs small-group trips with four to ten people to minimize impact and limit trail crowding, and is staffed entirely by locals. Wildland has also run trash-removal trips to pick up all that toilet paper that littered the trail.

THE REGION
MONTEVERDE CLOUD FOREST RESERVE, COSTA RICA
HOW IT RATES
Conservation Efforts A
Community Involvement A
Outlook A

THE LOWDOWN
In 1954, three decades before Costa Rica became the world’s first packaged-ecotourism destination, a group of conscientious-objector American Quakers bought a chunk of orchid-and-fern-dotted forest in the 5,000-foot Tilarán Mountains, resolving to protect it from the devastation of slash-and-burn agriculture. When the San José-based nonprofit Tropical Science Center took over in 1972, it upheld that commitment to preservation. Home to endangered jaguars, three-toed sloths, and more than 400 bird species, the 25,950-acre Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve today sees upwards of 55,000 visitors a year and remains an international model for tourism-centered conservation. Only 150 people can visit at a time, and tourists must keep to a few marked trails that cover only 2 percent of the reserve. Tourism has created a thriving market for the local weaving-and-handicrafts co-op, and key decisions, like the one to limit the number of visitors, are made with input from local residents.

THE GREENEST WAY TO GO NOW
“Responsible” doesn’t have to mean basic. Four miles from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, The Monteverde Lodge (011-506-257-0766, ) has solar-powered Jacuzzis, a cozy bar where all glass and paper are recycled, and a fern-and-bromeliad garden that draws cloudforest wildlife to your doorstep.

Emerging Eco-Markets

The rising stars of sustainable development

GUYANA In 1989, the government set out to prove that a rainforest can yield social and economic profits without being systematically destroyed, and turned the 916,800-acre Iwokrama Forest into a development-free zone. The Trip Iwokrama Rainforest ���ϳԹ���s ($425 per person; 011-592-225-1504, ) offers a four-day canoeing excursion on the Essequibo River, where you can fish for piranha, paddle rapids, and spot black caimans.

PANAMA Forget about Noriega, the canal, and that little invasion we spearheaded in 1989. Panama is angling to be the next Costa Rica, with nearly 6,000 square miles of public lands and a wildlife population (jaguars, tapirs, giant sea turtles, sloths) that’ll make any tropical nation green with envy. The Trip From your treetop-level bed at the Canopy Tower eco-lodge (a five-story former radar tower) in Soberan’a National Park (doubles from $200; 011-507-264-5720, ), you’ll wake up eye to eye with purple-throated fruitcrows.

THE GAMBIA Its large beach resorts have drawn sun-worshiping Brits for decades. But lately tourists are aflutter over this tiny English-speaking West African nation’s avian activity: It’s possible to see up to 300 bird species in a two-week trip. This popularity is largely due to companies like Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, which has joined forces with Clive Barlow, one of The Gambia’s best-known ornithologists, to provide bird-watchers with ample sightings. The Trip Take a 16-day birding excursion with Victor Emanuel Nature Tours ($4,295; 800-328-8368, ) to Abuko and Tanji forest reserves and Kiang National Park.

VENEZUELA Once the current political crisis has been resolved, Venezuela is equipped for an eco-renaissance: In 2002, Angel-Eco Tours, a Caracas-based outfitter, formed ecotourism advocacy group EcoAlianza to better market the country’s 43 national parks. The Trip Bravely carrying on through this winter’s unrest (besides, the Caracas airport is 20 miles from downtown), Angel-Eco Tours ($1,499; 888-475-0873, ) offers an eight-day excursion to 3,212-foot Angel Falls led by local Pem-n Indian guides. Guests live with the Indians in their camps and visit other sacred waterfalls.

ACCESS & RESOURCES
The virtual vanguard of intelligent ecotourism

A comprehensive site that provides information on travel books, eco-forums, special reports, and other musings on the green scene. Business Enterprises for Sustainable Travel, a spin-off of The World Travel & Tourism Council, was developed in 2000 to promote sustainable business practices in the travel and tourism industries. The official Web site of the International Ecotourism Society gives a glimpse into the industry. For a $75 annual fee, join and gain access to its global network of 1,600 members. This UK-based Concern campaigns for ethical tourism. The current cause is convincing trek operators to commit to guidelines that protect porters. This Washington, D.C.-based travel retailer sends employees around the world to evaluate a resort’s worthiness. If the property is up to Manaca’s “Eco-Assessment” standards, it gets a juicy online write-up.

The post The Green Awards appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

IT USED TO BE ENOUGH FOR TOURISTS staying at hotels in wilderness areas to “do no harm”—that is, to leave the outdoors the way they found it. But since the very existence of a resort operation, no matter how green, can blotto fragile soil and scare off wildlife for days, most eco-lodge operators have tempered their vision to “doing more good than harm.” And as Michael Seltzer, the director of Business Enterprises for Sustainable Travel, reminds us, eco isn’t just about the environment. “Facilities worthy of the term ‘eco-lodge’ should also benefit the local community and economy,” he says. We found quite a few places that fit this bill and offer access to stunning wilds. The choice is yours: Spend your next vacation at a corporate mega-resort or check into one of these ten Edens, and save the guilt for your fuel-guzzling flight home.

Kenya’s Tassia Lodge

1.
The High Life Just Gets Better and Better
2.
Everybody Wings it in This Lush Shangri-La
3.

Join the Griz and Roam a Kinder, Gentler Last Frontier
4.

Visions of Ancixent China in the Snow Peaks of Yunnan
5.

The Amazon Trough the Eyes of the True People
6.

Frodo Never Had It So Good
7.

Step into a Hemingway Story (But Hold Your Fire!)
8.

A Comeback Reef and a Kingdom by the Sea
9.

Dreamtime and Fireflies in Central America
10.

A Getaway to Andean ���ϳԹ���

Turtle Island

The high life just gets better and better

IN 1972, WHEN AMERICAN cable-TV mogul Richard Evanson bought Turtle Island, a 500-acre knob in the South Pacific’s Yasawa Archipelago, it was a barren wasteland that had been overgrazed by wild goats. Using gear he’d brought in by boat and helicopter, the new owner survived on the beach alone for three years while working on the lodge, with help only from Joe Naisali, a Fijian from a nearby island who checked in from time to time on the modern-day Crusoe.
Since then, Evanson, now 68, has restored the island’s ecosystem by overseeing the replanting of 300,000 trees, protecting the mangroves and coral reefs, and constructing new wetlands. The island’s natural springs provide water; a four-acre organic garden keeps the kitchen stocked; and no more than seven couples are allowed to stay in the resort’s bures (traditional thatch-roofed bungalows) at any given time. Which means a well-heeled few can have the saltwater fly-fishing, black volcanic cliff trails, and coral reefs of the Blue Lagoon (yes, the very same one where a teenage Brooke Shields frolicked in the buff) all to themselves.

But it’s not all about eco-hedonism. Turtle Island, with an initial contribution from Evanson of $50,000, also established the Yasawa Community Foundation, which uses donations to support employment, education, and health care on neighboring islands. Every year, the resort shuts its doors for more than a week and invites doctors who conduct free medical clinics.
True to its name, the resort also protects endangered green and hawksbill turtles by “auctioning off” those caught by local fishermen, painting the names of the winning bidders on the turtles’ backs, and releasing the reptiles back into the ocean. The indelible paint doesn’t harm the turtles, but it does make their shells worthless to would-be poachers and evokes puzzled looks from snorkelers wondering just who the hell George is. Contact: Turtle Island, 877-288-7853, . Cost: $1,124 to $1,810 per couple per day; includes unlimited food and alcohol and all equipment use (except boats for fishing excursions).

Asa Wright Nature Centre and Lodge

Everybody wings it in this lush Shangra-La

THE 24-MILE FROM Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain, up to Asa Wright Nature Centre is not a trip you want to make after dark. The road twists vertiginously around sharp drop-offs, and nighttime is when poisonous fer-de-lance snakes slither across the road. But arrive at Asa Wright’s refurbished plantation house in daylight and you’ll be in time for a nocturnal delight: the nightly flyby of up to 47 bat species.
In 1967, Americans Don Eckelberry, a wildlife artist, and Emma Fisk, a conservationist, led the effort to buy the 200-acre estate and convert it into a community-outreach center. Run on the philosophy that all profits should be used to preserve more unspoiled wilderness, Asa Wright now encompasses a stunning 1,000-acre valley in the island’s northern mountains.
A typical day: Roasted-on-site coffees in hand, guests gather at 6 a.m. on the veranda to watch the sun rise over the Arima Valley and ogle the yellow bananaquits and ruby-topaz hummingbirds. After breakfast, eager bird-watchers, their necks slung with Bushnell binoculars, join guided walks to glimpse the rare ferruginous pygmy owl and 142 other bird species. At sunset, everyone returns to the porch to swill rum punch and wait for the bats to swoop down.

If the atmosphere sounds genteel enough for your grandmother, it is. But then again, Granny probably wouldn’t hammer 22 miles on a mountain bike, climbing 2,000 feet into the Northern Range and back to sea level at Maracas Bay, Trinidad’s most beautiful beach. It’s also doubtful she’d drive 30 miles southeast to the Nariva Swamp to kayak through mangroves and mingle with toothy caimans.
The 24-room lodge is small, and its board of directors intends to keep it that way, recently voting down additional housing in order to minimize guests’ impact on the rainforest. But that doesn’t mean their ethic isn’t spreading: The center recently purchased another 1,000-acre property in the island’s Aripo Valley, which is being developed as the Aripo Forest Lodge. Contact: Asa Wright Nature Centre and Lodge, 868-667-4655, ; U.S. booking agent, Caligo Ventures, 800-426-7781. For mountain-biking or kayaking day trips from Asa Wright, contact local guide Gerald Nichols at 868-623-3511. COST: starting at $90 per person, double occupancy; $120 single; includes three meals a day.

Birch Pond Lodge

Join the griz and roam a kinder, gentler last frontier

ALASKAN BILL ROYCE BOUGHT this secluded 100-acre slice of spruce and birch forest 75 miles north of his home in Anchorage to use as a weekend getaway. But then Royce got eco-religion and decided to build a sustainable lodge. So he enlisted his son, Daryl, to help him dig foundations and post holes (by hand, so as not to disturb the wildlife with bulldozers) for two one-bedroom cabins.
Some of the guests at Birch Pond Lodge, which formally opened in 2000, opt to stay in the original cabin, a comfortable old two-story lodge with overstuffed sofas and an Alaskiana library, where family-style stews are served. The old lodge isn’t completely eco-friendly yet, but Royce is planning to convert it to passive energy next summer by installing solar panels. The more private, one-bedroom Beaver Lodge and Loon Cabin, however, were constructed from Alaskan spruce trees that had fallen prey to bark beetles. Beaver Lodge also has a composting toilet, and both cabins will eventually be fully solar-powered.
In spring and summer, visitors to Birch Pond can canoe or kayak its spring-fed lake, hike along alpine ridges in the Talkeetna Mountains, or commune under the stars (making sure to avoid insomniac grizzlies). In winter, there are miles of virgin snow (22,000-acre Nancy Lakes State Park is right next door) for cross-country skiing and frozen lakes for ice skating. Many Alaskans might be tempted to rip up the abundant white stuff on a snowmobile, but Royce forbids recreational “sledding” on his property. “You can’t appreciate nature if you’re blowing by it at 60 miles per hour on a snow machine,” he says. Plus, there’s nothing like the rev of an exhaust-spewing engine to tarnish the Zen glow of the cabin’s roaring fire and its exquisite view of Denali and the whirling Northern Lights. Contact: Birch Pond Lodge, 907-495-3000, . Cost: $220 per person per day (single or double); includes lodging, three meals daily, guided nature hikes, and canoe and kayak tours.

Wenhai Ecolodge

Visions of ancient China in the snow peaks of Yunnan

EVEN ON A GOOD DAY, making your way from the United States to Wenhai, a rustic community-owned and -operated eco-lodge located at 9,900 feet in the mountains of southern China, is a 24-hour commitment: First you have to fly ten hours from San Francisco to Beijing or Shanghai. Then you continue three hours on to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, and catch a 45-minute hopper flight to Lijiang, an aging hamlet with old stone houses and cobblestone streets. And you still haven’t arrived.
“From there, you take a half-hour bus ride up to the village of Baisha, where you start hiking for five hours, first through rural communities, then up through pine trees, then into oak and rhododendron forests,” explains Graham Bullock, coordinator of the Ecotourism Program in China for the Nature Conservancy, which has been sponsoring the Wenhai project. Only then do you arrive at Wenhai Ecolodge, a refurbished log house with sloping roofs and hand-carved window frames. Although the inn has only 20 beds, it is becoming a maverick example of ecotourism in China.
The lodge is owned by a village cooperative of 56 families who bought, renovated, and now staff the property, dishing out rural cuisine in a rustic courtyard. Equipped with solar panels, bio-gas equipment, water purifiers, and a greenhouse, the place proves that small-scale ecotourism can thrive. Plus it donates 10 percent of the profits to conserving nearby Wenhai Lake and its surrounding forests, which are threatened by unsustainable agriculture and illegal logging.
The extreme geography of Yunnan—where Asia’s three great rivers, the Yangtze, Mekong, and Salween, rush among five immense mountain ranges—makes for varied trekking. It also accounts for the region’s wildlife diversity, which ranges from protected black-necked cranes to Asiatic black bears. From Wenhai Ecolodge, visitors can take a three-day hike down to Tiger Leaping Gorge along a difficult, narrow path. But if the long journey to Wenhai has already wiped you out, there’s always the option of chilling on the patio as the sight of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains, a cluster of 13 peaks that top out at 18,467 feet, unfolds like a private Imax screening. Contact: The Nature Conservancy’s Ecotourism Program in China, 011-86-888-515-9917, . Cost: $20 per person per night, including food; hiking guides extra.

Posada Amazonas

The Amazon through the eyes of the true people

AT THE EDGE OF AN OLD-GROWTH forest the size of Connecticut, Posada Amazonas is run and staffed mainly by members of the native Ese’eja community. Ese’eja means “true people,” and these indigenos are expert river navigators who support themselves by hunting, preparing forest medicines, and gathering wild Brazil nuts to sell to tourists.
Because of the lodge’s community ownership, guests have ample opportunity to “go local.” This might mean taking ethnobotanical walks—during which Ese’eja guides explain which seeds and barks are traditionally used for hammocks, fans, arrows, and medicines—or visiting the neighboring 1.8-million-acre Tambopata National Wildlife Reserve to search for giant river otters and parrots. Those who prefer altitude can climb the lodge’s seven-story, 115-foot canopy tower and stop at each level to observe tanagers, jacamars, guans, and oropendulas in action.

“The low-impact eco-lodge has prompted the Ese’ejas to undertake their own conservation efforts, such as protecting the large eagle nests in the vicinity,” says Kurt Holle, general manager of Rainforest Expeditions, the company that operates the Tambopata Research Center in southern Peru (a 13-bedroom facility dedicated to macaw research). Rainforest Expeditions, also the catalyst for the construction of Posada Amazonas, splits the profits from Amazonas 40/60 with the 400-member Ese’eja community.
There’s no electricity or hot water at Posada Amazonas, but hurricane lamps serve as night-lights and mosquito netting covers the beds. The lodge is constructed from local clay and wild cane and roofed with palm fronds. Each of its 30 bedrooms opens directly onto the rainforest, but the howler monkeys usually refrain from entering the rooms. Contact: Rainforest Expeditions, 877-905-3782, . cost: $95 per person per night; includes three meals a day.

Wilderness Lodge Lake Moeraki

Frodo never had it so good

OWNER GERRY MCSWEENEY, a biologist who presides over the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society (New Zealand’s biggest environmental organization), and his wife, Anne, created this lodge as a base while lobbying to conserve the adjacent 6.7 million acres of rainforest in the South West New Zealand World Heritage Area on the South Island. The resulting “Place of Green Jade,” or Te Wahi Pounamu Reserve, which includes visitor centers and walking trails, comprises more than 10 percent of the country’s total landmass.
“When we established the lodge in 1989, the immediate concern was to create jobs with ecotourism as an alternative to the timber industry, which was logging 1,000-year-old podocarp trees,” the 49-year-old McSweeney says. “Now we’ve moved on to other conservation efforts. But we’re not too popular with recreational fishermen: We’ve stopped them bringing their dogs to the coast because they kill the penguins.”
Located in a lakeside clearing surrounded by an ancient podocarp forest, the main lodge was once the Red Dog Saloon, a well-loved watering hole for construction workers building the remote Haast Highway back in the sixties. The McSweeneys reused most of the original wood and run the entire complex on hydroelectric power from the nearby Moeraki Rapids. They also built 22 guest rooms in two separate buildings connected by covered walkways.
Staying at a lodge run by naturalists makes for 24/7 activity. Guests can take a guided 1.5-mile trek to the Tasman Sea coast, where fur seals and Fiordland crested penguins roam. Then they can paddle around two-mile-long Lake Moeraki. Or they can do what Kiwis do best: tramp along the ten-mile Moeraki Valley trail system, where wild orchids grow. When midnight rolls around, it’s back outside to gaze at the Southern Cross. Contact: Wilderness Lodge Lake Moeraki, 011-643-750-0881, . cost: From $90 to $160 per person; includes breakfast, dinner, and two guided activities per day.

Tassia Lodge

Step into a Hemingway story (but hold your fire)

IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, indigenous small-scale tourism has been providing an alternative to the traditional luxury safaris run by old colonialists and staffed by underpaid tribespeople. Set on a rocky bluff a bumpy six-hour drive from Nairobi, Tassia is the newest of a growing group of community-founded eco-lodges.
Owned by members of the semi-nomadic Laikipiak Masai tribe, this six-banda (bungalow) open-plan lodge, which sleeps up to 12 people, sits inside the tribe’s 60,000-acre ranch, giving you access to lands that run from the Mokogodo Escarpment across massive plains to the Ngare Ndare River, along which gazelle and buffalo roam. The Laikipiak are renowned for their hospitality—the losers of Survivor Africa were sent here to lick their wounds—and their guest lodge has a laid-back, all-natural vibe: thatch roofs, wood floors, hand-carved furniture, paraffin hot-water heaters, and half walls in the bedrooms, which are designed to let cool breezes in without impeding the views of Lolokwe Mountain.

Visitors can accompany their Masai hosts on game drives to see hyenas, leopards, lions, and waterbuck. Or they can hike up to the 7,300-foot summit of neighboring Mount Lossos and paraglide back down. At the end of the day, Tassia guests usually end up wallowing like happy hippos in the lodge’s stone-floored swimming pool. Contact: Let’s Go Travel, Nairobi, 011-2542-4447-151 or -4441-030, . Cost: $360 per person per day; includes lodging, all meals (excluding alcohol), and all activities.

Chumbe Island Coral Park

A comeback reef and a kingdom by the sea

THE HANDFUL OF SNORKELERS who swim Chumbe Island’s coral reefs will eventually meet Oscar, a three-foot potato cod, and Louise, a hawksbill turtle. Chumbe, the world’s first privately managed marine sanctuary, is an uninhabited 54-acre island eight miles off the coast of Zanzibar that uses the profits from ecotourism to conserve its endangered coral reef and forest reserve. Since 1994, when the Zanzibari government closed the half-mile reef to fishing and officially declared it a protected haven, locals who used to fish the island have worked as park rangers, guarding the reef against poachers.
“The former fishermen, who are now our park rangers and guides, were the key to raising awareness about marine ecology and sustainable management of natural resources,” says London native Eleanor Carter, Chumbe’s project manager. “Local community members, including women from rural Muslim societies, have been given preference for employment. We had some not-so-happy husbands at the beginning, but they got used to it.”

Aside from basking in solitude on the two-mile sandbar that appears at low tide, guests skin-dive among the Indian Ocean’s parrot fish, lobsters, stingrays, dolphins, and unicorn fish; hike past baobab trees and into a virgin coral forest with 15,000-year-old petrified clams and spiky euphorbia; and take nighttime nature walks to look for endangered giant coconut crabs.
The seven triangular thatch-roofed bungalows have solar-powered lighting, composting toilets, and gray-water recycling systems. Roofs are designed to channel rainwater to underground cisterns where it’s filtered, solar-heated, and then hand-pumped by staffers to the bungalows’ showers. The cabins are decorated with African art and textiles and stocked with organic soaps and shampoos made by a local women’s cooperative. The island’s chef cooks up Zanzibari, African, Indian, and Middle Eastern cuisine, all made from local produce and seafood.
Since the island became an official marine sanctuary, fish population and diversity have increased. Contact: Chumbe Island Coral Park, 011-255-24223-1040, . Cost: From $150 per person per day; includes lodging, meals, snorkeling, and guided dives.

Selva Bananito Lodge

Dreamtime and fireflies in Central America

GERMAN EXPATRIATE RUDI STEIN began homesteading this remote 2,000-acre property near Porto Limón and Cahuita National Park, on the eastern coast of Costa Rica, in the 1970s. But when he wanted to start logging some of the rainforest that abuts the Bananito River, his kids intervened.
“We wanted to help my dad find an alternative to logging, so we built the lodge instead of letting him cut trees,” says Rudi’s daughter, Sofia, who owns and runs Selva Bananito with her brother, Jürgen. “The cabins are made out of abandoned mahogany logs that we dragged out of the woods using water buffaloes.”
The hotel, which consists of 11 cabins and a main building—all built on stilts—has serious eco bona fides: It uses oil lamps and candles instead of electric lights, relies on solar-heated water, recycles gray water via water lilies and hyacinths, according to native methods, and stocks organic soaps and shampoos made by a local cooperative. Additionally, the Stein family donates 10 percent of the lodge’s income to a nonprofit conservation foundation.

But don’t get bogged down in the green litany: The lodge borders the 2.5-million-acre La Amistad Biosphere Reserve, the largest protected ecosystem in Central America, providing ample exploratory elbow room. Adrenaline junkies can rappel down 100-foot waterfalls and learn how to climb giant ceiba trees using ascenders and harnesses, while the less adventurous can hang out—binocs in hand—on the lodge’s 100-foot viewing platform and scan the mahogany canopy for toucans, crested hawk eagles, and red-lored parrots.
As the day winds down, guests soak up the evening light from the hammocks crisscrossing their casita decks. “At night, there are so many fireflies blinking on and off,” Sofia says, “that visitors say our place seems like eternal Christmas.” Contact: Selva Bananito, 011-506-253-8118, . cost: $100 per person per night, double occupancy, which includes three meals a day, plus taxes. For visitors who stay for three days or more, the fee also includes a free guided rainforest hike and a tree-climbing intro session.

Black Sheep Inn

A gateway to Andean ���ϳԹ���

WHEN GUESTS ARRIVE at this lodge, tucked in the Cordillera mountain range five hours down the road from Quito, they marvel at the rustic chalet-style lodge and the view over the Rio Toachi Canyon. But they break out the cameras for the facility’s dry-composting toilets. These thrones are stand-alone shacks that include little indoor vegetable and flower gardens and picture windows for enjoying the canyon views.
“Guests always compliment us on the toilets,” says Andres Hammerman, a 36-year-old Chicago native who co-owns Black Sheep with his wife, Michelle Kirby. “But they’re also a really good example of sustainable agriculture, because the compost is used later for planting trees.”
The rest of the lodge may not be quite as eccentric, but it’s equally sustainable. The four outbuildings (which have a total of nine bedrooms, each with its own fireplace) and the dining lodge are built from homemade adobe bricks and roofed with straw and Spanish tile. Hammerman and Kirby travel to Quito to recycle glass, paper, and plastics. Besides donating phone lines to the village school and police station, the couple encourages visitors to get involved in local projects; one recent guest bought books for local schoolchildren.

The seven-mile hike from 12,500-foot Quilotoa Crater Lagoon down to Black Sheep is considered one of the best day hikes in Ecuador (a lodge employee will drive you to the trailhead). Visitors can also climb, mountain-bike, and ride horses along the volcanic walls of Rio Toachi Canyon, trek to pre-Incan ruins, or wander up into the high-altitude cloudforest. In the evenings, guests assemble for family-style feasts of organic veggies from the garden. Afterward, they gather around the fireplace to drink beer, tell stories, and woozily stroll back to their cabins to sink into cozy loft beds. Contact: Black Sheep Inn, 011-593-381-4587, . cost: $18 per person, double; $30, single; includes breakfast and dinner.

The post Resort to Virtue appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

You’re about to read one of the ���ϳԹ��������������������, a series highlighting the best stories we’ve ever published, along with author interviews, where-are-they-now updates, and other exclusive bonus materials. Read Jay Stowe’s interview with Natasha Singer about this feature here.

“One time,” says Doug Tweedie, Carhartt’s man in Alaska for the past 25 years, “there was this walrus attacked a guy tying his boat up to a dock somewhere in the Aleutian chain who said what saved him were the black extreme-heavy-duty Carhartts the walrus’s chompers couldn’t bite through.” Tweedie tells me this as he busily checks the microphone onstage at the Denali Fairview Inn during a lull in the festivities. “Another time there was this couple pulled over by the side of the Alcan Highway. A grizzly bear mauled the husband, who had gotten out of the car, but our coveralls deflected the claws and saved his hide.”

The Carhartt Ball is not your traditional black-tie-and-strapless-gown gala with a sit-down four-course dinner. It started in 1996 after Talkeetna’s garbage-removal and snowplow magnate, Bill Stearns, came up with the idea of a Carhartt shindig as an antidote to cabin fever. Although Carhartt rarely advertises, Tweedie agreed to drive up from Anchorage to sponsor the first ball and hand out prizes in the storytelling competition, where winners take home the eponymous outerwear. Six years later, the annual event has become an occasion for area hunters, fishermen, carpenters, trappers, mountaineers, whitewater rafters, and back-to-the-land curmudgeons to don their multicolored patched chore coats, kneeless pants, and worn overalls reduced to strings, and snowmobile into the two-block-long town in the foothills of Mount McKinley to entertain one another with accounts of death-defying animal attacks and engine failures.

On December 29, festivities start early at the local VFW hall (a 60-by-80-foot log cabin), where a catwalk is set up and Talkeetnans make like Gisele Bündchen and strut down it, modeling Carhartt’s upcoming spring line. Then the party moves to the Fairview Inn, where everyone crowds around the horseshoe bar wearing spanking-new carpenter pants saved just for the occasion, as well as cruddy “roadkill Carhartts”—articles of clothing that have blown off the backs of pickup trucks, gotten run over, and been rescued by passersby. With the perfectly groomed hair of a national newscaster, 51-year-old Tweedie stands out among the guests in a bespoke brown Carhartt tuxedo with black lapels. He is, after all, the master of ceremonies. So that I will blend in, Tweedie has lent me a purple jacket (brighter hues were recently introduced in the Carhartt line, to appeal to rap stars and women) festooned with battery-operated blinking lights and a gigantic hieroglyph on the back that spells out CARHARTT in sequins and glitter.

Alaskans buy an estimated four times more Carhartt work duds per capita than their compatriots in the lower 48, and their loyalty is not due to just the harsh weather. Up here, hair-curling adventures featuring these sturdy $40 pants and $70 jackets are what distinguish weather-beaten sourdoughs from virgin flatlanders. The company was founded in Michigan in 1889 by traveling salesman Hamilton Carhartt, who started the trend by fashioning railroad uniforms out of surplus army tent material. Today, his great-grandson Mark Valade presides over the family-owned, Dearborn-based business, which reportedly grossed $324 million in 2000. Still, what is it about this brand that has made the Carhartt survival story a phenomenon so peculiar to Alaska, a kind of currency swapped in bars late at night, over breakfast in diners, and at the state fair? As the epicenter of what could be called the Rescue-Pants Epic, Talkeetna’s Carhartt Ball seems a good occasion to investigate why this extra-thick, water-repellent, 100 percent ring-spun duck cloth has become the stuff of frontier fable.

“In Alaska, you’re always getting into extreme situations where everything fails but your Carhartts,” Tweedie theorizes. “Then, when you get out of the situation, you tell everyone about it.” And they tell everyone else. All around us at the Fairview Inn, drinking from beer steins at wooden tables, standing by the house-rules sign warning “All firearms must be checked with the bartender,” villagers are one-upping each other with Carhartt war stories.

“People call every week with animal stories, chainsaw stories, accident stories—stranded off the road in 70 below zero, skidding hundreds of feet on icy roads on tipped-over motorcycles. I’ve stopped writing them down,” Tweedie says. Then he perks up at the thought of a humdinger. “Do you know the one about the Fairbanks policeman who was saved when an assailant’s bullet ricocheted off the brass zipper of his Carhartt jacket?”

The post In Alaska, These Pants Save Lives. Do You Own a Pair? appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

OTHER COUNTRIES MAY HAVE S.A.D. (seasonal affective disorder), which plunges people into dark depression, but Iceland has the opposite affliction: summer activity delirium, a Nordic outdoor madness that runs from June through August and sends locals, who have hibernated during the long cold winter, heading for the glacialrivers and volcanic hills to enjoy all-night kayaking, salmon fishing, off-trail hiking, and river rafting under the midnight sun.

Viking showers: one of Iceland’s many waterfalls.

Map by Jane Shasky

Summer madness also encourages indigenous activities that are so kooky they could be espoused only by Iceland, the sparsely populated, snowed-over landmass in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean whose inhabitants lived in virtual isolation for 800 years. There’s spranga, for example, which involves performing aerial flips and gymnastic turns while swinging from a thin knotted rope attached to a vertiginous sea cliff, a sport that evolved from the methods the Vikings once used to hunt birds in their coastal nests. Andwatercross, a contest that happens every year around the northern oasis of Lake Mýyvatn, east of Akureyri, in which the winner is the snowmobile driver who executes the most aquatic laps without drowning his Polaris in the drink. Or Arctic rafting, in which teams lug rubber whitewater rafts up sharp snowy peaks and careen down the flanks.
But my favorite all-night rite of summer is the puffin rescue, an event that takes place every August in the south of Iceland on the tiny island of Heimaey, where millions of birds live and breed. I kept asking about it in Reykjavík, but nobody seemed to know what I was talking about. Then one summer I met shoe magnate Oskar Alex Oskarsson, who’s from Heimaey, and he sent me to the island to run ragged at twilight with his mother and her grandchildren. During the day, they toured me around and pointed out the places where thousands of nocturnal baby pufflings emerge from their nests in the cliffs and fly out to sea in search of food. The problem is that, every night, several thousand of the confused little critters, attracted to the blinking lights of town, fly away from the ocean and alight under streetlamps. Enter the town’s 5,000 citizens, who don’t sleep the entire month of August because they’re out all night running after birds.


This is harder than it sounds. We were out from midnight until 4 a.m. chasing after fluffballs the size of runt kittens, cornering them in teams of three or more in parking lots and soccer fields, and storing them in shoe boxes.


We then went home and napped until 6 a.m., when we drove to the beach cliffs and extracted the chicks, whose chirps were emanating from the shoe boxes, and flung them out to sea.


Icelandersí symptoms of summer activity delirium are endless. You too can get in on the madness, but when planning your own expedition to the country’s spectacular volcanoes and glaciers, know this:


(1) The weather can go Arctic on you even in summer: Last year on a relatively easy 25-mile trek from Pórsmörk to Landmannalaugar, an American man died of hypothermia because he lacked raingear. So get advice from locals if you plan to venture out on your own.


(2) Whatever you dream of, someone will help you: When I fessed up to Einar Finnsson, one of the crack mountain rescuers who started Ice-landic Mountain Guides adventure tours, that I was harboring fantasies of spending two months walking the country’s 900-mile Ring road, he didn’t think I was crazy. Instead, he suggested something more ambitious: taking six months and hiking along the off-trail south shore and north fjords as well. He even said he’d map it for me.


(3) All the possibilities for unconventional adventure can make Iceland addictive: On my latest trip here, an immigration official at the Keflavík Airport flipped through my passport and said, “I can see you’ve been here six times. By the time you come back, you’d better be able to speak Icelandic.” His comments amused me not because he thought I should take up a new language, but because he was so absolutely sure I’d be back—and soon.

Access and Resources: Reenact Your Own Viking Saga

The Western Fjords.

Trekking the Laki Lava Field // Southern Iceland
When Icelandís Laki volcano last let loose (in 1783), it spewed 30 billion tons of lava and ripped a 15-and-a-half-mile-long fissure across the landscape, making it one of the largest eruptions in human history. It’s not likely to blow again any time soon, but a trek across and into the 135 craters it left behind gives a glimpse of its awesome power. If you explore the terrain with Icelandic Mountain Guides, you’ll be hiking six to eight hours a day, starting at the old farming community of Kirkjubæjarklaustur (don’t even try to pronounce it)—where the lava miraculously halted at the town church—past abandoned farms where you’ll camp for the night, through wetlands chiming with birdsong, and into the 226-square-mile lava field with craters so imposing some of them merit their own names, such as Red Hill. It’s no wonder this striking Arctic desert geormorphology was where Neil Armstrong trained before he set off on the first Apollo mission to the moon. Reykjavík-based Icelandic Mountain Guides (011-354-587-9999; ) offers five-day guided trips here for $340.

Paddling Breidafjördur Archipelago // West Coast of Iceland
The subarctic archipelago of Breidafjördur, a wild maze of almost 2,700 tiny, mostly uninhabited islands, is Iceland’s only marine conservation area, which makes it perfect for sea kayakers who want to avoid the country’s otherwise ubiquitous coastal commercial fishing boats. The spectacular western coast is also home to thousands of cormorants and shags that breed on the offshore islands. Starting from the isolated coast at Dagverdarnes, you can paddle past Helgafell (a holy hill—not the volcano south of Reykjavík—mentioned in the Icelandic sagas as a territory that sparked a blood feud) and other mountains of the Sn3/4fellsnes Peninsula, through skerries that jut out of the water like an offshore Stonehenge, and among island colonies of friendly seals. Most paddlers who go on the four-day trip offered by Ultima Thule are intermediate kayakers ($390; 011-354-567-8978; ).
Backpacking the West Fjords // Northwestern Iceland
Visitors may think Iceland is sparsely populated, with just 281,000 people living on 39,709 square miles (a landmass roughly the size of England, which is home to 48 million people), but when the locals need space, they head north to the 232-square-mile Hornstrandir nature reserve, stunningly wild terrain near the Arctic Circle. The handful of farmers who once lived here fled in the 1950s, unable to bear the isolation. Con-sequently, there are no roads, so you can either walk in (which takes four or five days from the nearest village, Nordurfjördur), or take the ferry from Ísafjördur, the central hub of the West Fjords. Most backpackers opt for the ferry ride to the abandoned hamlet of Hornvík. From here you can climb K‡lfatindar, at 1,760 feet the highest cliff around, which has an incredible view of the Greenland Sea and the Hornbjarg nesting grounds crowded with razorbills, puffins, and fulmars. Then hike along the uninhabited coast across rock fields, shallow rivers, hidden coves, and meadows bursting with flowers. The 20-mile trek ends at Adalvík, another abandoned homestead, where you catch the boat back to civilization. Be forewarned: It’s so remote that even the powerful Icelandic cell phones that work in the glacial interior don’t get signals here. Ísafjördur-based West Tours (011-354-456-5111; ) offers five-day walking excursions for $480, including food, guides, and luggage transport. Hornstrandir Tours (011-354-895-1190; ) can assist hikers in planning their own expeditions and has two boats that drop off and pick up backpackers.

Access and Resources: Reenact Your Own Viking Saga

The diminutive yet durable Icelandic horse.

Whitewater Rafting // North Iceland
Whitewater rafting may be a relatively new activity in Iceland, but if you want to tackle the country’s toughest waterways, act now. Within the next few years, Iceland’s government plans to dam up the rivers of the northern Skagafjördur coast, considered the country’s top rafting area, to power a hydroelectric plant. Icelanders prefer the wild of the East River (Jökuls‡ Austari), a ten-mile run through deep basalt gorges, under red cliffs, past black sand beaches, and through dramatic Class IV rapids. Based at Varmahlíd in northern Iceland, Activity Tours (011-354-453-8383; ) offers three-day trips on the East River ($430, not including travel from Reykjavík).

The Viking Horse // Near Reykjavík
Only 13 hands high with long shaggy manes, Iceland’s friendly horses appear to be dainty little ponies, but the diminutive beasts are actually tougher than the volcanic rocks they clamber over. They’re also accustomed to carrying much heavier loads than pampered American stallions, which may ex-plain why former heavyweight-boxing-champion-turned-horse-lover George Foreman, who owns nine, has such an affinity for them. But the most popular feature of these purebreeds is that even someone who’s never been on a horse before can learn to handle one in five minutes, and then spend the next few hours in a “tolt,” the horse’s signature fast but smooth gait. First-timers might want to start off with a three-hour Lava Tour ($44) or a four-hour Viking Express adventure ($60) through lava fields around 1,122-foot Mount Helgafell volcano near Reykjavík, offered by the Ishestar Riding Center (011-354-555-7000; ). Ishestar also organizes a seven-day, 145-mile trek ($1,536) across Iceland on the Kjölur Trail for hard-core equestrians. This ancient Viking route will take you past national parks, monumental waterfalls, glacial rivers, geothermal hot springs, and lush valleys. —N.S.

Getting There // Iceland
Because Iceland’s long sunny nights allow for nonstop adventure, summer is the best time to visit, but it’s also the busiest and most expensive season, so plan ahead. Icelandair flies daily to Reyjkavík from New York, Boston, Minneapolis, and Baltimore (summer round-trips from $982; 800-223-5500; ). But last-minute deals are available via Icelandair’s affiliated Web site (), which offers good rates on flight-plus-hotel packages. The Icelandic Tourist Board () gives advice on hotels and tour operators, and pointers on everything from horseback riding to saltwater angling, plus information on special summer events, like the Arctic Open golf tournament and the Reykjavík Marathon. —N.S.

Mars on Ice

Exploring Europe’s Largest Glacier

I WAS ON EDGE of the Vatnajökull Glacier in a modified monster truck staring out at fog as thick as our driver Addi’s Icelandic accent. I was here with a volcanologist, Haraldur Sigurdsson, to hut-hop and explore the geothermal vents and volcanic craters of the 3,247-square-mile Vatnajökull—the largest glacier in Europe. But instead of tackling our planned 100-mile route on skis, we hired a “super jeep.” This tricked-out Toyota Land Cruiser came equipped with two steel ladders for bridging crevasses, and giant knobby tires deflated to a flabby three psi to plow through snow up to three feet deep.

WE BUMPED ALONG THE ICE, surfed through deep drifts, and used the ladders to crawl over crevasses. But we were oblivious to the dangers outside the vehicle, thanks to Dire Straits blaring from the CD player and the built-in GPS device charting our course. Four hours and 40 miles later, we reached the rim of Grímsvötn caldera, where an elaborate cave system carved by geo-thermal vents stretches for miles below the glacier. We rappelled into the caldera, then hacked our way back up the soft ice of a 70-degree couloir bordered by columns of black volcanic ash. The next day, we used crampons and ice axes to down-climb through a deep crevasse at the lip of the caldera into the slippery ice passages of Vatnajökull’s underworld. At night, we sipped cold beers and relaxed in the geothermally heated sauna next to the Grímsvötn Hut, one of the Iceland Glaciological Society’s half-dozen widely spaced cabins scattered at points across the glacier.
THREE DAYS LATER, we set out for the far northern end of the Vatnajökull, 25 miles away, to explore Kverkfjöll volcano. When we arrived, we dropped our packs at the nearby Kverkfjöll Hut, a ten-by-ten-foot wooden box, and walked to the edge of the half-mile-long crater. Mud pits littered the floor of the chasm, while sulphur bubbled and dozens of smaller vents hissed scalding-hot steam. After pounding several pitons into the soft lava rock, we made an easy rappel into this 200-foot-deep Martian landscape. The ground beneath me trembled with volcanic force, and suddenly Kverkfjöll sent forth a geyser of boiling mud 50 feet from where I stood. Simultaneously, a block of blue ice calved from the overhanging glacier—a frightening reminder that life is never static in the land of fire and ice. —Mark Synnott
The Icelandic Glaciological Society has six huts spaced 30 to 50 miles apart on the glacier. (If you are skiing, plan on tent bivvies to bridge the distance.) The huts cost $20 per person per night. For information on the huts or super-jeep tours ($400 per day, accommodations extra), call Icelandic ���ϳԹ���s (011-354-569-1000; ).

Hot-Pot Luck

Tubing Your Way Around the World

Blowing off steam in one of Iceland’s hot springs.

THERE IS NOTING LIKE dunking your body in 102-degree water while your head periscopes up through the steam into 48-degree mountain air. In fact, this Icelandic tradition of lolling in mineral-rich geothermal runoff, which gets its blistering temperature from subterranean volcanic activity, dates back at least a thousand years. Today’s Icelanders use the “hot pots” as places to gossip, detox, and, pun intended, let off steam. Politicians and executives conduct business in the pools, and the country’s daily paper Morgunbladid runs a gossip column titled “Overheard in the Hot Pots.”

THE APEX OF THE HOT-POT SCENE is Iceland’s famous Blue Lagoon, 53,820 square feet of opalescent turquoise waters surrounded by craggy black lava hillocks. The water’s surreal hue comes from a combination of blue-green algae and soft white silica mud that forms on the rocky bottom. Forty minutes from Reykjavík, the Blue Lagoon is open year-round (entrance fee $8; 011-354-420-8800; ).

BUT FOR A TRUE ICELAND EXPERIENCE, try one of the downtown pools run by Spa City (entrance fee $2; ). The Laugardalslaug (011-354-553-4039) is an old favorite, with its steam baths, three hot pots, and a stone-walled whirlpool. The cityís newest, Arbaerjarlaug (011-354-510-7600), has pools with jet-massage seats, mini-geysers, and water slides. But don’t forget to shower nude before you put your suit on and jump in, or you’ll get chastised by vigilant locals for whom the baths are a sacred ritual. “Geothermal bathing is good for your heart,” says Grimur S3/4mundsen, the Blue Lagoon’s managing director. “It’s good for your social life too—you never know who you might meet there.”

The post My Iceland Obsession appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

THOU SHALL NOT look the talent in the eye.

the star plays with his food

Foster inspects a satellite tag on Keiko’s dorsal fin

Thou shalt not pat, stroke, rub the nose of, or otherwise fondle the talent.


Thou shalt neither encourage the talent to ham it up nor applaud his antics, no matter how much he begs for attention.


These are the commandments one must abide by to land an interview with the world’s largest movie star–more reclusive than the retired Garbo and undergoing a tough-love rehab program in a remote corner of Iceland. Having sworn not to molest him, I’m escorted onto an eye-popping neon-orange skiff called the Draupnir, which will ferry his entourage and me across the harbor of Heimaey Island, off the south coast of Iceland, to see the celebrity shut-in.
“Nobody from the media has been allowed to see him for, I’d say, at least a year,” his main handler, Jeff Foster, yells to me as we rocket over wind-whipped chop. “ABC, NBC, and other TV crews came out, but they could only shoot him from across the bay. No close-ups. Were they pissed off…” For the first time in seven months, he explains, the star will be taken for a “walk,” the start of an exercise program to shape the couch potato up for summer.


“You don’t have a camera, do you?” Foster interjects, panicking suddenly that he forgot the fourth and most vital commandment: Thou shalt not photograph the talent. “No? Good. Because he performs for the camera, and we’re trying to get him away from that. He learned to love the camera during filming. Remember not to look straight at him. Only take a peek indirectly out of the corner of your eye.”


Foster, 45, is a lifelong sea-hound from Seattle with an earthen all-weather tan and a shaggy mop of thick dirty-blond hair. In his time he has served some major divas, including a 1,700-pound walrus named Georgie Girl who for months used to plop her head in his lap every evening and moan contentedly while he read her bedtime stories. Many aquarium veterans consider Foster the world’s top marine- mammal tamer, a man with an innate gift for charming sea creatures. He routinely gets into tanks with his outsize heavyweight charges, roughhousing with them as though he were one of them. Normally he’s a laid-back, roll-with-the-punches guy, but today Foster is edgy; he has to ensure an interloper doesn’t goose the talent’s ample flank or play paparazzo.


“You never get used to spotting him for the first time,” Foster relates as the boat slows and pulls into a cove. “Every time you see him, you get a little thrill. Some people get out of control.”


I practice averting my gaze, but before I’m fully prepared, the 10,000-pound star sneaks up on us and exhales loudly. He tilts his head and it’s clear he’s angling for an introduction. For my part, I instantly break the solemn commandments I swore to uphold only minutes ago and make eye contact. It’s too hard not to react, not to flirt with the headliner in his white collar and black tuxedo, shiny as a Kalamata olive. More loyal than Lassie, brainier than Barney, friendlier than Flipper, swift as Secretariat, bigger even than Big Bird and Dumbo–Keiko the killer whale exudes the kind of instant allure that makes it clear why he’s become an idol.

LIKE EVERYONE else, I heard of Keiko’s legendary charm from some of the thousands of print and television pieces that cheer-led the Free Willy movement. Caught in 1978 or 1979 off the south coast of Iceland by an American team that collected orcas for the marine-mammal trade, the two- or three-year-old killer whale atrophied for a year in an aquarium pool near Reykjavík, where he had been stashed because, rumor had it, his capture exceeded the number permitted that year. (Because of poor record keeping, it’s difficult to confirm when, exactly, he was caught.) Then he shipped out to Marineland of Canada, where run-ins with an aggressive male orca made for an unhappy home. From there, he got exiled to the boondocks–a cramped, smog-ridden amusement park called Reino Aventura in Mexico City that gave him top billing, but also skin lesions–caused by the whale equivalent of papillomavirus.


Keiko’s big break came in the early 1990s when SeaWorld–which owns most of the 52 killer whales in captivity–rebuffed the casting call for orcas to star in the Warner Bros. flick Free Willy, the story of a troubled teenager’s struggle to liberate an oceanarium’s trophy whale and reunite him with his family. Apparently, unlike the SeaWorld execs, Keiko’s Mexican owners hadn’t read the screenplay. They signed the ailing, severely underweight Keiko up for the role, unprepared for the 1993 film’s smash success and the real-life fight it would trigger between animal-rights activists and the marine-park lobby over liberating the movie’s star. The hot property then went on tour. First, in 1995, he was donated to the Free Willy Keiko Foundation, and upgraded to four-star accommodation at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport; later, in 1998, after a lengthy lawsuit (the Oregon Coast Aquarium sued to keep Keiko, arguing he was too ill to fly), he was flown in a fiberglass tank aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo jet to the North Atlantic waters whence he came; in 1999, the Free Willy Keiko Foundation merged with the Jean-Michel Cousteau Institute (run by the son of Jacques) to form Ocean Futures, a nonprofit with 18,500 members, based in Santa Barbara. Today, a retinue of 16 foreigners and 13 locals works round the clock to keep Keiko happy and to reintroduce him to the wild.


His emancipation isn’t coming cheap–$3 million per year–but seeing his charms in the flesh, I understood how the cult of Keiko had grown to more than 1.2 million, mainly children, who made phone calls or wrote letters and donated their dollars and pennies to the cause. VIP devotees include Jimmy Buffett (who sent in $500), Michael Jackson (who offered him a home at Neverland), and telecommunications billionaire Craig McCaw, whose namesake foundation has put up most of the project’s spending money.


Orcas are not an endangered species, and Keiko’s keepers say they have no agenda beyond freeing the celebrity–as soon as this August if Keiko will go. It’s not a science experiment or a potential model for busting other orcas out of their tanks; it is, insists Charles Vinick, executive vice-president of Ocean Futures, a simple act of humanitarianism for a beloved whale.


“This would never have happened if Keiko wasn’t a movie star,” he says. “The movie brought this whale into the hearts of millions of children who were able to give conscience to a movement about what we as humans can do to protect the environment. This is not about what could happen to other captive animals. We’re talking about this one whale.”


When I starting looking into it, I loved the idea that whales–or one whale–could go home again. The story line reminded me of Born Free, the tale of Elsa, the tame lion who returned to the veld and went on to raise her own wild cubs. Yet what finally got me to Heimaey Island was not the life-imitates-art scenario, but the rumors that the project wasn’t working out. By all accounts, Keiko didn’t want to go native. Five years and approximately $20 million later, even the optimists admit that chances are slim for tame Keiko to swim off with his wild brethren this summer. For one thing, there isn’t much time. Keiko is in the autumn of his years. Male orcas in captivity tend to live 20 years or less; in the wild, up to 45 years. Keiko is at least 25.


“Keiko is already living on extremely borrowed time, past the age when most males in captivity have lived,” says Erich Hoyt, author of the orca ur-text Orca: The Whale Called Killer and a senior research consultant for the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, a UK-based charity with 70,000 members. “They have only themselves to blame. They have stalled and stalled. Every day and week and month that goes by makes success less likely.”


Other pessimistic observers are second-guessing the whole program. There’s even a conspiracy theory circulating that the Keiko freedom ride has been designed to fail, so that kids won’t clamor for more show whales to be let go. I don’t take this seriously, but it is a bit strange that everyone involved in Keiko’s rehab is an expert in training captive orcas and that they are relying on tried-and-true taming methods to “condition” him for the wild. Hiring specialists in animal subjugation to undomesticate what is essentially a house pet sounds about as logical as enlisting R. J. Reynolds execs to run Smokenders. In a further irony, Foster, Keiko’s chief warden, suspects he may have been one of the animal’s original captors; in the 1970s, his father-in-law, a pioneer of whale-catching, sent Foster here to collect orcas.


And don’t even get the locals started. Iceland ceased commercial whaling operations in 1989, and former whalers remain bitter that their well-being comes second to that of a washed-up show-biz cetacean. They even have their own conspiracy theory: that Keiko is a Trojan Whale sneaked into Iceland by Greenpeace to ensure that the country that welcomed its lost orphan back home can’t turn its new eco-friendly image upside down by reintroducing whaling. Other Icelanders, disillusioned by the hype that had promised the now off-limits Keiko as a million-dollar tourist magnet, see the whale as proof that Americans have nothing better to do than extend human rights to fish. For cartoonists, stand-up comedians, and amateur jesters on the mainland, Keiko’s the national joke.


“Female whales have swum by him, but when Keiko gets horny, he humps the tires strung along his bay pen instead,” Iceland’s top chef, Siggi Hall, teases me one night in his restaurant in downtown Reykjavík when he learns that I have a date with the infamous whale. “His trainers have taken him out to swim, but he always comes home like a good little puppy. This isn’t a killer whale, it’s a pet mammal. We could get better use out of him on the dinner table! Do you know how many whale steaks I could get out of him? But Keiko’s so old, he’d be hard to cook and tough to eat,” Hall continues. “We could boil his blubber down. Imagine how many soap bars and Keiko candles we could make out of him!”

HEIMAEY HARBOR IS, as Herman Melville once wrote, “cold as Iceland.” With its vertiginous cliff faces and petrified volcano cones, Heimaey offers one of the most wildly beautiful landscapes in the country. But the tiny strip of land, dotted with two-story cottages roofed in a rainbow of Crayola colors, is also Iceland’s most treacherous. A volcanic eruption in 1973 buried half of the fishing village under 250 million square meters of molten lava and ash, forcing the whole town to evacuate and then return years later to rebuild. Rough seas around the island routinely sink cod and herring boats. And the island’s weather, where winds of up to 170 miles per hour are not unusual, is considered the worst in the island nation.


Whatever your take on the folks working to free Keiko, you can’t knock their dedication. The 16 international staffers rotate into this hurricane-prone freezer on seven-week assignments without a day off, starting early in the morning to prep the 140 pounds of fish that comprise Keiko’s food rewards and often ending more than 12 hours later. They’re a colorful bunch, too, that includes a group of former SeaWorld animal housebreakers; Steve Sinelli, a retired high-tech executive from Oregon; Smari Hardarsson, the 1998 Mister Iceland; and Keiko’s vet consultant, Lanny Cornell, the former SeaWorld chief zoologist who was fired after a series of bloody run-ins between humans and captive orcas. Cornell currently advises the Las Vegas Mirage casino on its pet dolphins and recently helped Marineland of Canada acquire new belugas from the Russian military.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” says Sinelli, who signed on as a 50-day volunteer and ended up staying for three years. “My wife only gets me half of the year. I don’t think any of us expected to be here so long. It does get lonely. But the payoff is in trying to accomplish something that everyone says can’t be done. Regardless of the outcome, I don’t feel there’s any failure.”


If it isn’t all smooth sailing for his entourage, so far Heimaey has been good to Keiko. He’s in the most natural environment since his capture. Instead of being restricted to a man-made tank, Keiko’s confined to a bay the aggregate size of 20 soccer fields. Instead of watching action videos and groups of children through aquarium glass, he can observe schools of fish that swim through his pen, along with the gulls and puffins that swoop down from the cliffs overhead. He’s no longer part of an hourly dolphin show presented on hot summer days before audiences of hundreds of screaming and applauding fans. No wonder, even though he’s probably still a virgin, he seems in no hurry to leave his halfway house.


On the other hand, some basic facts of his captive routine remain the same: Humans plan and run his daily regimen. Using the fish-reward method employed by theme parks to train marine mammals, their protocol is to tutor the tame animal in wild orca practices in the hope that he’ll eventually pass for a feral whale. So Keiko is still singing for his supper, only the show tricks– behaviors,” in the performing-orca biz–have been rebranded “aerobics.” Foster tells me that the team works the whale out with “18 to 35 exercise sessions a day in winter, up to 50 sessions per day as the days get longer,” with the goal of making him fit enough to keep up with wild whales.


Out on the Draupnir for Keiko’s walk, Brian O’Neil, a hunky thirtysomething redhead who first worked with Keiko at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, unhinges a plastic mesh platform off the side of the boat and crouches down on it, signaling the orca to come alongside and follow the craft as it kicks into higher gear. O’Neil points the yellow Styrofoam end of a black target pole above the point in the water where he wants Keiko’s head. With the target pole, he commands the whale to swim parallel to the boat; then he indicates for him to hang out astern, in the motor’s foamy wake. The idea is to encourage Keiko to approach the pace and endurance levels of wild whales, which swim in short bursts of up to about 35 miles per hour but usually cruise more slowly, covering up to 100 miles per day. As we circle the bay, the Draupnir is going 13 miles per hour.


“Think of the bay as a track and us as coaches and him as an athlete we are training for a marathon,” Foster says. “Only the marathon is the open ocean.”


In Keiko, Foster may see a marathoner in training, but the picture I get is of a five-ton cocker spaniel going to obedience school. The Moby Dog impression is strengthened by O’Neil, who after every correct response rewards Keiko either by grabbing herring from a shiny stainless-steel bucket and flinging them into the bay or by tooting a silver dog whistle, called a bridge, as a secondary reinforcement. “The bridge is instant confirmation,” O’Neil says. “Keiko knows it means ‘good job, good boy.'” So much for curtailing the whale’s need to please people.

“ONCE A TRAINER, always a trainer. All the wrong people are involved in this. They’re still doing obedience training, using that whistle,” rails Richard O’Barry, founder of the Dolphin Project, a Florida-based group dedicated to freeing captive marine mammals, as well as a consultant for the World Society for the Protection of Animals, an animal-rights network with 380 member organizations in 80 countries. “At least Keiko is back in home waters, experiencing the natural sounds of the sea and the rhythms of the tide. But he’s still being exploited. The whole plan to ‘train’ Keiko to be wild is ridiculous, a captive idea, and the main problem. They’re putting on a whale rehabilitation show, not letting the whale go wild.”


Captivity mavens consider O’Barry an extremist. On Earth Day 1970, he was arrested for stealing a dolphin and and trying to free it. On other occasions, however, he’s been more successful. Sure, a few of the dolphins he’s freed have had to be recaptured because they swam into shallow inlets to beg humans for food, but others joined up with wild dolphins, never to be seen again. O’Barry is also a former dolphin tamer who makes no bones about his résumé. He trained the dolphins who performed in the 1960s TV show Flipper and became a marine freedom-fighter after one of his trainees died in his arms at the Miami Seaquarium.


O’Barry has an alternative model for freeing Keiko. “First of all, you get rid of all the trainers, anyone connected to the captivity industry whose history with animals involves obedience. Then you back off and let nature take its course. You try to become invisible. To diminish human contact, first you wear sunglasses, so they can’t see your eyes. Then you wean them off anything connected to captivity–buildings, boats, buckets, man-made objects, training behaviors. You stop asking them to do anything. You feed them live fish at random intervals for doing nothing, not for doing something. And you build a blind, and you throw food from behind it to sever the dolphins’ connection of food with humans.


“You stop feeding them bits of dead fish. First you feed them dead fish halves, then whole dead fish, then partially alive fish that have been stunned, then live fish,” he continues. “Then, if you want to make them wild, you stop feeding them, period. When they can hunt fish for themselves, you can set them free.”


Ocean Futures PR material touts the fact that Keiko is “continuing to increase and approximate natural feeding patterns” and now gets “up to 50 percent of his food in the water column.” I assumed this means he now forages for half of his food. I am wrong.


“Actually, it’s now closer to 100 percent from the water column, which means that we don’t feed him by hand directly into his mouth anymore. We throw fish into the water for him to retrieve,” says Charles Vinick. Translation: Humans supply Keiko with 100 percent of his diet, between 90 and 140 pounds per day of dead herring. Vinick contends that 25 percent of the food the team feed him is live fish, but on the day I visit Keiko in Heimaey, all the food he gets is formerly frozen.


“We don’t feed him live fish every day. Maybe every week,” Foster says. As for Keiko chasing down the live pelagic creatures that swim continually in front of his nose, Foster is doubtful. “We’ve never seen him eat live fish, so we can’t speculate. We have seen him chase cod and pin it down with his nose, but that might just be cat-and-mouse play behavior. My gut feeling is that he’s probably never been food-motivated enough to forage. But we’re not concentrated on getting him to hunt. Our main goal is conditioning,” he says.


But if Keiko is to be self-sufficient and to not haunt fishing boats begging for scraps, won’t he have to hunt for himself?


Because orcas hunt in packs, Ocean Futures argues that Keiko won’t go for his own food until he’s fully free and accepted into a group of wild whales. “We can’t teach him navigational skills, where food sources are, or how to catch them. The best thing for him to do would be to integrate into a group of wild animals and let them teach him all that,” Foster avers, reminding me that tame animals, such as stray house cats, revert to hunting instinctively when they’re hungry.


Unconvinced, I call Kenneth Balcomb, founder of the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Washington, a 60-year-old research biologist who has studied the population dynamics of wild orca pods in the North Pacific for the last 25 years. He thinks Keiko could learn to feed himself before he’s free.


“Hundreds of whales come to the waters off Heimaey every year because of the herring spawning grounds there. All you’d have to do is take Keiko over to where wild whales are traumatizing fish schools and eating them,” Balcomb suggests. “If Keiko were hungry at that point and not magnetized by a metal fish bucket, he’d see all his buddies out there eating live fish and he might join them. It would be a good opportunity for him to learn how to hunt.”

SINCE ORCAS STAY with their families for the bulk of their lives, Keiko’s best chance of a successful return to the wild might be to hook up with his kin. That’s what happens in Free Willy 2, anyway, in which our hero rejoins the Pacific family pod that scientists have dubbed “J.” I figure flesh-and-bones Keiko is entitled to the same prodigal-son welcome home that celluloid Willy got. But the helicopter and several boats now looking for wild playmates for Keiko in the North Atlantic aren’t focused on a family reunion.


“We’ve never set finding Keiko’s family as a research goal. We’ve taken 11 genetic samples and dozens of photo IDs of killer whales, and we’re looking for similarities,” says Vinick. “But to go to the level of specificity of finding his family would be very difficult. You’d need a huge team and more resources, and our team is dedicated to Keiko.”


Actually, according to wild-whale specialists, locating Keiko’s family pod would be easy and cost-effective, and would dramatically increase the chances of the orca’s permanent return to nature. After the $7.3 million cost of Keiko’s digs at the Oregon Coast Aquarium and the $1.3 million move to Iceland and the 35 months the whale has spent in his pen in Heimaey, finding his family looks relatively quick and cheap. Balcomb, director of the Center for Whale Research and pioneer observer of “J” pod, estimates that it would take four grad students on stipends 30 days during herring season to locate Keiko’s sibs.
“I’m confident we could find his family. The whale population around Heimaey is 600 whales. I’ve cataloged 30 whales in Iceland in one night. You could identify the entire whale population in one herring season and find Keiko’s family pod,” Balcomb postulates. “He might not recognize his own family, but his mom might look at him and wonder. There would be some kind of connection. We’ve seen it with other large mammals, like elephants that have been returned to the wild and to their families after having been snatched away as infants.”


In many ways, this summer is Keiko’s last best chance to make it back to nature. At the end of March, the town’s mayor signed a deal with a Norwegian salmon farm to take over Keiko’s bay next year, and Icelandic officials say the whale will have to move this fall. Vinick acknowledges that the group is looking for new homes for Keiko in case he’s not free by September. They are committed to caring for the orca for the rest of his life.


Meanwhile, as per an Icelandic government-approved plan, Keiko is sporting a tracking-device on his dorsal fin. If he’s within 20 miles of the control boat, a VHF transmitter allows a boat to follow him and close in on his exact location in real time. If he surfaces, a polar orbiting satellite records his location so his complete path can be charted later. The ostensible reason for the tag is to monitor Keiko’s condition and whereabouts and, should he go free, to allow for intervention if he gets into trouble. Which is to say, it enables further human meddling.


“Ideally, we want him to be tagged forever, because he’s become an ambassador of his species,” Vinick notes. “He can tell us more about the wild whales he’s with.” Foster goes further. “If we reintroduce Keiko to the wild, there’s every possibility with the satellite tag that we can relocate him and, even after he’s integrated into a pod of animals, recall him back to the boat. We’ll be able to attach suction cups and new monitoring devices to him, maybe even a camera pack that sends images back to us.” Funny, but the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “freedom,” which includes the words “autonomy” and “emancipation,” makes no mention of ongoing obeisance to former masters. Ocean Futures wants to have it both ways–to succeed in freeing Keiko, but to be able to call him home, too.


I confront Vinick with the conspiracy theory that a cabal of marine-park owners lurks behind the scenes, making sure Keiko doesn’t go free. He fails to see the humor and issues a categorical denial.


“It may look slow, but three years is a human schedule, not a Keiko schedule,” Vinick stresses. “We’re learning how easy it is to capture a whale and how difficult it is to put one back.”


Difficult, but not impossible. Although Keiko is the first aquarium whale to be purposely reconditioned for the wild, a handful of other confined whales have escaped their captors and made it back to the ocean–to stay. Back in 1971, the U.S. Navy was teaching two orcas it caught in 1968, named Ishmael and Ahab, to retrieve missile debris from the sea floor. Just like Keiko’s trainers, Navy animal behaviorists schooled the whales to follow a lead boat from their coastal pens into the open ocean and to return to the boat at an audio signal. One day, Ahab took a 50 kilometer joy swim, but was recaptured. On another day, Ishmael spotted a whale pod in the distance and, ignoring the insistent siren call of the herring bucket, swam off. He never returned to base.

The post Jonah is the Whale: Inside the $20 million campaign to free Keiko appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.