Norka Ruiz Bravo

A Conservation Ethic in Practice
Preserving Cultural and Biodiversity by
Bridging the Generational Knowledge Base

Discusión de casos de innovación:
Amazon Conservation Team

A conservation ethic is that which aims to pass on to future generations
the best part of the nonhuman world. To know this world is to gain a pro-
prietary attachment to it. To know it well is to love and take responsibil-
ity for it.

—Edward O. wilson, The Future of Life

In “Changing the Landscape of Power,” Mark Plotkin describes his personal jour-
ney and his efforts to preserve cultural and biodiversity in the northeast Amazon
rainforest—what he terms “biocultural preservation.” He discusses his novel
acercarse, which seeks to protect the knowledge of the indigenous peoples integral
to the ecosystem and brings together shamanic traditions, computer technology,
and global positioning systems in the service of ecosystem preservation. Plotkin’s
path to the creation of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) and its landmark
Shamans and Apprentices Program is the inspirational tale of how he developed a
sense of purpose and a conservation ethic, and then executed his vision of an
organization that would leave an enduring legacy.

Plotkin’s tale began with his search for personal purpose. He recognized early
in his pursuit of higher learning that the new and trendy approaches of molecular
biology he experienced in his classes were not going to satisfy his interest in the
biology of whole organisms. He dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania’s
program in molecular biology, which led him to a series of fortunate encounters
with some of the greatest scholars in ethnobotany, evolution, and ecology, incluir-
ing Richard Evans Schultes, Stephen J. Gould, and Edward O. wilson. Plotkin cred-

Dr. Norka Ruiz Bravo is Special Advisor to the Director, Institutos Nacionales de Salud.
During her career at NIH, she has led the development and implementation of
numerous research grant policies, including the Public Access Policy, which makes arti-
cles supported by NIH funds publicly available via the National Library of Medicine’s
PubMed Central website. A native of Peru, Dr. Ruiz Bravo has an abiding interest in
policy and social issues.

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Norka Ruiz Bravo

its a class he took with Schultes for awakening his sense of personal purpose.
Inspired by Schulte’s personal story of life and discovery among the indigenous
peoples of the Amazon, Plotkin looked for opportunities to emulate him.

Imbued with a newly found purpose, a well-developed sense of adventure, y
a generous tolerance for risk-taking, Plotkin found his first opportunity to visit the
South American rain forest as a research assistant to a field biologist studying the
black caiman, an endangered crocodilian. He soon returned to South America on
his own, first to visit the Maroons, a West African society in the rainforest of
Suriname, and subsequently for the first of his many stays with the Tirio Indians
in the area along Suriname’s border with Brazil. Plotkin’s fundamental ethnob-
otany apprenticeship took place among the Tirio, and it was there that the first
seeds of his career as a social entrepreneur were planted, germinated, and grew into
what is now the ACT.

The Shamans and Apprentices Program was the first key component of what
became the ACT. The program began as a way to promote and provide opportu-
nities for shamans to pass on their ethnobotanical and other knowledge to a
younger generation. The program considers indigenous peoples and their knowl-
edge of their environment an integral part of the ecosystem to be preserved and
protected. Shamans and Apprentices shares important characteristics with other
programs that recognize that if they are to be successful, they have to provide
something of value to the indigenous people. Plotkin’s research, an almost ten-year
compilation of the Tirio’s ethnobotanical knowledge that waspresented to the
tribe’s leadership, challenged their skepticism about the “old ways” and convinced
them of the value of preserving their ancestral knowledge. Shamans and
Apprentices grew from the Tirio’s help in translating the research into their native
language and, more importantly, their rekindled interest in passing knowledge
from one generation to the next. As in other successful programs, the Shamans and
Apprentices Program’s mechanism for making this intergenerational transfer of
knowledge is both replicable and sustainable, and is operated by the indigenous
people themselves.

Ethnographic mapping, which enables tribes to map and monitor the integri-
ty of their territories by using Google Earth and global positioning technology, es
the second key component of ACT, which is also shared with other successful pro-
gramos. Of particular note are transparency, and building relationships and
alliances. In teaching the Tirio how to map their territories, ACT engaged
Suriname’s government as well as neighboring tribes. As the other tribes saw how
the Tirios mapped their territories, they wanted to map their own, and so it spread.
Tribes that had maps were able to use the government’s legal system to challenge
illegal encroachment on their lands. Transparency, relaciones, and alliances all
proved crucial to scaling-up the mapping projects; por 2009, a reported 20 millón
acres of indigenous lands had been mapped.

The innovative aspect of ACT lies in its bringing together ethnographic map-
ping and the Shamans and Apprentices Program. Putting the tools for ethnograph-
ic mapping directly into the hands of the shamans and their apprentices is a novel

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A Conservation Ethic in Practice

idea, and it has been critical to the success of ACT. This single act has enabled a
preindustrial indigenous people to leap into the twenty-first century on its own
terms. Ethnographic mapping encourages the transfer of intergenerational knowl-
edge well beyond ethnobotany alone. The shamans’ knowledge of their territories
is often deeper than what can be gleaned from purely technological approaches,
and the apprentices have thus learned to consult their elders. Indigenous peoples
have been empowered by
knowledge and by having in
their own hands the tools to
map their territories, usar
satellite
a
monitor encroachments on
their borders, and avail
themselves of legal means
to protect their lands.

For millennia, humans have been
using plants and other natural
products for healing, yet it is clear
there is much left to discover.

tecnología

ACT’s

integrative
approach to ecosystems,
which preserves indigenous peoples and their knowledge, is particularly valuable
in terms of discovering new drugs. A 2007 análisis (by Newman and Cragg) del
role that sources for new and approved drugs play in the treatment of human dis-
eases found that natural products are significant.1 Natural products or their syn-
thetic derivatives comprise the majority of antibiotics, antifungals, and anticancer
agents, and they were the source for the majority of the antibacterial and antidia-
betic drugs developed between 1981 y 2006. During this period, totally synthet-
ic compounds found either by random screening or by adapting the known molec-
ular framework of an active natural product played an increasingly important role
as the source for antiparasitic, anticancer, antiviral, and antifungal drugs. Of par-
ticular note is the fact that the known bioactive structural features of natural prod-
ucts informed the synthesis of a significant fraction of the totally synthetic com-
pounds. The authors argue that the awesome power of combinatorial chemistry to
generate untold numbers of potentially bioactive molecules is most effective when
informed and focused by knowledge of the naturally produced bioactive com-
pound. ACT’s systems approach is ensuring the preservation of the fundamental
knowledge of ethnobotanical and other natural products needed to inform drug
discovery.

Not surprisingly, given its role as the steward of medical and behavioral
research for the nation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a long-stand-
ing and abiding interest in the potential health benefits of natural products. Mayoría
NIH institutes and centers support research that involves natural products. A
crude search using “natural products” to query the NIH’s Computer Retrieval of
Information on Scientific Projects reveals that more than five hundred grants
were awarded in 2008 to researchers across the country.2 And, in April 2009, el
National Institute of General Medical Sciences sponsored a major symposium on

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Norka Ruiz Bravo

natural products in biomedical research.

The NIH’s largest component, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), began its
formal drug-discovery program in 1955 with the Cancer Chemotherapy National
Service Center. As a part of its current effort in drug discovery, NCI supports the
Natural Products Repository as a national resource. The Repository houses over
170,000 extracts taken from more than 70,000 plants and 10,000 marine organisms
in over 25 countries, as well as more than 30,000 extracts of diverse bacteria and
fungi. Samples from the Repository are available at no cost to those researching the
treatment of any human disease.3

The NIH’s Fogarty International Center is home to the International
Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) Program.4 The ICBG Program is based
on the belief that the discovery and development of pharmaceutical and other
agents from natural products can promote the development of scientific capacity
and economic incentives to conserve the biological resources from which the prod-
ucts are derived. Started in 1992 by the NIH, the National Science Foundation
(NSF), and the United States Agency for International Development to address the
issues of drug discovery, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable economic
desarrollo, the program is currently funded by nine components of the NIH,
and by the NSF and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Today’s ICBG Program
supports seven awards of approximately $600,000 a year in nine countries in Latin
America, África, Southeast and Central Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Hasta la fecha, más
than five thousand plants, animals, and fungi have been collected in order to exam-
ine their biological activity in nineteen different areas, and hundreds of individu-
als have received research training.

For millennia, humans have been using plants and other natural products for
healing, yet it is clear there is much left to discover. It is also known that clear-cut-
ting and slash-and-burn agricultural methods destroy not only the trees and
macro-fauna, but much of the associated micro-fauna and microbes that are
invaluable and irreplaceable resources. The ACT biocultural ecosystems approach
ensures that the ancestral ethnobotanical knowledge of indigenous peoples will be
preserved and available for the discovery of treatments and cures that have wide
application. In the short term, the success of the ACT lies in its having enabled the
successful mapping of an increasing number of indigenous territories, the passing
of ancestral indigenous knowledge from one generation to the next, y el
empowerment of indigenous peoples. These are positive steps on the road to long-
term biocultural preservation, a critical benefit for us all.

1. Hombre nuevo, David J. and Cragg, Gordon M. (2007) Natural Products as Sources of New Drugs over

the Last 25 Años. j. Natural Prod. 70: 461-477.

2. See http://crisp.cit.nih.gov/.
3. Research is subject to a Material Transfer Agreement to protect the rights of all parties, incluido
ver

organizaciones;

pertinent

country

y

el

es

de

those
source
http://dtp.nci.nih.gov/branches/npb/repository.html.

4. See http://www.fic.nih.gov/programs/research_grants/icbg/.

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