Where Calvert spends most of his time in the field, Brower spends his in the lab. Where Calvert is a loner, Brower has acolytes—dozens of young, loyal graduate students scattered across the world. Where Calvert is rail-thin, Brower is … rounder. Where Calvert is laconic and cool, Brower is vocal, and sometimes ardent. Where Calvert studiously avoids institutional affiliations, Brower has been in the thick of academia for most of his life. The university has served him well. Brower is theauthor of hundreds of scientific papers, many of them the result of original and ground-breaking research. He has been the recipient of a dozen National Science Foundation grants. He holds the Gold Medal for zoology from London’s esteemed Linnean Society. It was Brower who convinced the United States government to cosponsor the Morelia conference, Brower who had access to the secretary of the interior. It was he who designed the Mexican butterfly preserves after the 1986 presidential decree. No one, not even Bill Calvert, has a more comprehensive understanding of monarch biology than Lincoln Brower. This is widely recognized. Even the
ejidatarios
had heard of Professor Brower, and if they resented his intrusion into their lives and livelihoods, they still acknowledged his scientific expertise. It was to Brower, in fact, that Dimas Salazaar, the farmer from Zitacuaro, addressed his plea—Brower, that is, who Salazaar believed could talk to the butterflies. This was because more than anyone else, Lincoln Brower spoke for them as well.
Still, the 1986 decree was a keen point of conflict. It had been Brower’s idea to create a core zone and a buffer zone; he expected the buffer to protect the core. Instead, the people who relied on the forest saw the buffer zone as the only economically viable place left to them and stepped up logging and farming there. And of course there was the matter of boundaries: who could tell what was buffer and what was not? A certain amount of illegal logging was the result of this confusion.
Over time Lincoln Brower had come to agree with the
ejidatarios:
the system was flawed, and stupid. But where they wanted the decree to be scrapped altogether, he wanted it to be rewritten: the core would be expanded, and there wouldbe no more buffer. This did not endear Brower to the
ejidatarios.
Earlier in the year, at a meeting to discuss buying the land outright, one of them had pulled a gun on him. Brower had been annoyed. The man was getting in the way of a serious discussion.
“It’s not just that I want to protect the oyamel trees per se because I’m a tree hugger,” Brower explained one afternoon in Mexico, as we drove to Cerro Pelón, one of the Mexican forest preserves that he and a graduate student were mapping by examining satellite data to monitor the density of the tree cover there. We had been driving around all day, looking at trees and collecting samples of nectar. This was for another study Brower was doing, one that would measure the food supplies available to butterflies in the area; he was convinced that if agriculture—especially industrialized agriculture, with its reliance on herbicides—was established too close to the colonies, the consequences would be devastating. “This is a unique ecosystem, and the whole damn system is collapsing,” he said.
True though that might be, it was also classic Brower—definitive, encompassing, uncompromising, gloomy. (From a paper published in 1994: “[The nine overwintering sites] harbor virtually the entire gene pool of the eastern population.… The small size of the area portends disaster for the future of the eastern population.”) Depending on whom you asked, the professor was an Oracle or a Cassandra—something mythic, in either case.
Brower was not by nature a melancholy man. The state of the Mexican forests weighed heavily on him, and it angered him, but it had not caused him to lose hope. At sixty-six, he was far too involved in life to
ejidatarios
had heard of Professor Brower, and if they resented his intrusion into their lives and livelihoods, they still acknowledged his scientific expertise. It was to Brower, in fact, that Dimas Salazaar, the farmer from Zitacuaro, addressed his plea—Brower, that is, who Salazaar believed could talk to the butterflies. This was because more than anyone else, Lincoln Brower spoke for them as well.
Still, the 1986 decree was a keen point of conflict. It had been Brower’s idea to create a core zone and a buffer zone; he expected the buffer to protect the core. Instead, the people who relied on the forest saw the buffer zone as the only economically viable place left to them and stepped up logging and farming there. And of course there was the matter of boundaries: who could tell what was buffer and what was not? A certain amount of illegal logging was the result of this confusion.
Over time Lincoln Brower had come to agree with the
ejidatarios:
the system was flawed, and stupid. But where they wanted the decree to be scrapped altogether, he wanted it to be rewritten: the core would be expanded, and there wouldbe no more buffer. This did not endear Brower to the
ejidatarios.
Earlier in the year, at a meeting to discuss buying the land outright, one of them had pulled a gun on him. Brower had been annoyed. The man was getting in the way of a serious discussion.
“It’s not just that I want to protect the oyamel trees per se because I’m a tree hugger,” Brower explained one afternoon in Mexico, as we drove to Cerro Pelón, one of the Mexican forest preserves that he and a graduate student were mapping by examining satellite data to monitor the density of the tree cover there. We had been driving around all day, looking at trees and collecting samples of nectar. This was for another study Brower was doing, one that would measure the food supplies available to butterflies in the area; he was convinced that if agriculture—especially industrialized agriculture, with its reliance on herbicides—was established too close to the colonies, the consequences would be devastating. “This is a unique ecosystem, and the whole damn system is collapsing,” he said.
True though that might be, it was also classic Brower—definitive, encompassing, uncompromising, gloomy. (From a paper published in 1994: “[The nine overwintering sites] harbor virtually the entire gene pool of the eastern population.… The small size of the area portends disaster for the future of the eastern population.”) Depending on whom you asked, the professor was an Oracle or a Cassandra—something mythic, in either case.
Brower was not by nature a melancholy man. The state of the Mexican forests weighed heavily on him, and it angered him, but it had not caused him to lose hope. At sixty-six, he was far too involved in life to
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