What are we doing here? (-Jess)

As some of you have recently pointed out, we haven’t explained very much about who we are working for, what we are hoping to accomplish, or why we are out in the villages or in Peru in the first place. That is partly because we’re not completely sure of those things ourselves, but I can still fill in a few more details.

Because I was not quite ready to enter graduate school and had no concrete plans beyond graduation, last September one of my professors put me in touch with his friend who knew about a new conservation project starting in the Peruvian Amazon. I frenziedly threw together a last minute proposal to work with them as a Fulbright scholar, and was shocked and, well, mildly unprepared and a bit anxious when I found out last summer that I would actually be going. Andrew was up for the challenge and thankfully agreed to come along and try it out as a team. So we made our best guesses at what things we might need for the next year and made the trip here at the beginning of October, hoping it would all work out.

The name of the conservation project is PROCREL, which stands for Program for Conservation in the Region of Loreto. They have the modest objective of preserving and protecting the enormous biodiversity of the region while bettering the quality of life for the region’s inhabitants and ensuring the health of ecosystems and communities in perpetuity. Who can argue with goals like those? On the other hand, how do you even start trying to meet goals like those? So far, I have been surprised and impressed by how seriously they are tackling these issues. The general idea is to create a network of regional conservation areas that will protect key natural areas of the region- headwaters of major watersheds, migration corridors, rich habitats still relatively undisturbed, etc. Then they work with the communities closest to these newly protected areas to try to figure out ways to make it easier for them to meet their needs without having to heavily extract any resources from the nearby protected area. However, they are allowed to use the area to some extent, under strict management plans, because the hope is that if the area is useful and valuable to them then they will help to protect it. This all sounds very good in theory but there are a myriad of issues to overcome in order to make it work in practice, but the PROCREL team is giving it their best shot.

We work primarily in the proposed Nanay-Mazan-Arabela Conservation Area, which is the watershed that provides water for the city of Iquitos. We go out with between one and five members of the team whenever anyone goes up the river to visit the communities in this area (so far, somewhere between a third and half of every month). Our role here is mostly to learn- both from the team and from the villagers. However, we are increasingly able to help with some of PROCREL’s activities in the villages and we do odd jobs around the office (like many interns) in when we are in Iquitos. We are developing some independent projects for our free-time in the villages; gathering stories and information about the way the community members use resources and how things are changing for them in the rapidly shifting reality of the Amazon region. Additionally, we’re trying to pick up more Spanish, stay healthy and sane, learn more about neotropical flora and fauna, get a better handle on what conservation means, decide what we want to be when we grow up, and master the art of the maracuya smoothie. Other goals may crop up over time, but those are keeping our hands full at the moment.