| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Letters to the editor California Antipodes Many of us have a hard time finding Madagascar on the map. It is almost never in the news, but drifts around in the far reaches of our consciousness, to surface occasionally on public television shows narrated by a David Attenborough or Gerald Durrell. Like Xanadu or Papua New Guinea, it represents for many Californians the ultimate “other.” The island of Madagascar is, after all, the farthest place from California you can get on this Earth and still stand on dry land. Terry Gosliner, Director of Research at the California Academy of Sciences, said after visiting Madagascar, “I felt like I was on another planet.” The upside-down baobab trees; the unlikely plants of the spiny desert; the monkeylike lemurs; the fossa cats that are not cats; and half the world’s chameleons are all creatures that seem not of this world. The Malagasy people seem largely untouched by materialism. Their lives are oriented more toward their families and to education—including learning about their own country’s extraordinary natural resources. What they do share with Californians is an inordinate friendliness. It feels wonderful to travel halfway around the world and be so welcome (although it does help to speak some French.) Once you have located Madagascar on a map it seems to be an extension of Africa. It isn’t. Madagascar parted company with Africa over a hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs still reigned. Since then, it has become a place unto itself. The plants and animals have evolved in isolation and today 90 percent of them are found nowhere else on Earth. Because the threats to their survival have been relatively few, some species have evolved little over the intervening eons, and today they offer insights into the early ancestors of distantly related continental species. Added to this endemism is concern over the rapid destruction of the forest where most of these species live. In the 2,000 years since Madagascar was first populated by people, some 80 percent of the indigenous forest has been cut and burned. That is quite restrained compared to the United States, where 90 percent of the uncut forest has been logged in the 400 years since Europeans settlement. But where America began to see the light about 40 years ago, in Madagascar an exploding population—an average of six children per family—is putting enormous pressures on the land. In focusing on Madagascar, the Academy also wants to draw attention both within and outside the country to the need to allocate resources to preserve its natural treasures. For the most part, the idea of conservation falls on receptive ears. And if the rural inhabitants can make a good living protecting their forests and aiding visitors, they can avoid the treadmill of subsistence farming and the large families. The newly formed ties between the Academy and Madagascar follow a long institutional tradition of cooperating with distant communities. Fifty years ago, in its first year of publication, Pacific Discovery published the first account in English of the newly discovered dawn redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides. In “Reunion with a Chinese Redwood,” William Gittlen commemorates Ralph Cheney’s description of his journey to a distant valley in the heart of China, and how Chaney persuaded the authorities of the importance of this tree which had become extinct elsewhere in the world. There is a legend that the only reason the ancient forest survived in these parts was because 300 years ago an angry warlord slaughtered most of the local population because they wouldn’t pay their taxes. The tree has survived the 50 years since its scientific discovery in large part because of Chaney’s efforts. We hope Academy researchers will have similar successes today, whether they be in Madagascar or any of the dozens of other places our scientists are working. Keith K. Howell is Editor of
California Wild. |
Fall 1998
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