Demon Fish (29 page)

On September 26, 2006, the press office put out a release describing how the fourth and fifth modern expeditions to the Bird’s Head Seascape had uncovered more than four dozen new species. There are other sharks in the world that can crawl, like a certain bullhead shark, but that didn’t seem to matter. The next day, media outlets on every continent except Antarctica trumpeted the discovery of a small, sinuous creature that could propel itself forward on its fins: a walking shark. “I guess it just sort of captured people’s imagination,” Erdmann says now.

In a world of unrelenting bad press about the oceans—where commercial fish stocks may disappear altogether within a few decades, lovable whales find their blubber chock-full of PCBs, and colorful coral reefs are likely to find themselves bleached and acidified out of existence by the end of the century—the Bird’s Head Seascape offers a reassuring alternative. There are still regions of the world that boast an almost unimaginable array of marine creatures, which testify to the ocean’s fecundity and diversity. And unlike rich terrestrial ecosystems, which have been scrutinized and cataloged by humans for centuries, we still have only a rudimentary sense of these underwater worlds. These are the parts of the planet that still offer a chance for discovery.

Raja Ampat is not entirely pristine. Ammer, an avid diver whose Kri Island resort Erdmann uses as a launching pad for much of his work, remembers when he would go diving and the seas were teeming with all sorts of sharks, not just the endearing walking sharks and wobbegongs, slothful creatures that still lurk on the seafloor with their wide, flat heads and snaggletoothed mouths. Neither of these sharks boasts large fins, so they have little market value. Poachers have taken many of the other sharks that used to traverse these waters, such as most of the blacktip and whitetip sharks that drew European explorers here two hundred years ago.

But by and large, the region remains a corner of the world that has yet to be ruined. While shark finning is still legal in Indonesia, the local government in Raja Ampat is the one regency (a subdivision of the national government) that refuses to issue licenses for those interested in slicing off a shark’s most valuable parts and dumping the rest in the ocean. Huge mantas still swim here unmolested, tiny pygmy sea horses dot Raja Ampat’s sea fans, and many of its coral reefs appear to be resistant to the rising sea temperatures that are decimating reefs elsewhere.

So Erdmann and his colleagues have embarked on a second mission that involves less science and more politics: preserving the Bird’s Head Seascape before it collapses under the pressure of poachers, mining entrepreneurs, and all the other outsiders who are encroaching on this remote paradise. It’s a new way to market conservation, an approach with both opportunities and pitfalls.

Ammer has been practicing his own, somewhat authoritarian form of conservation in the region for years, in which he just tells other people what to do. Ammer sold Harley-Davidsons in Zwolle, Holland, before coming to Indonesia in 1990, initially to retrieve military vehicles, aircraft, and Coke bottles that were abandoned during World War II. After making a comfortable profit on these finds, he returned and settled in Raja Ampat in 1993, founding a succession of resorts. As one of the area’s biggest employers, he holds considerable sway over many locals. He ran into trouble while operating his first resort on Wai Island, because Yarefi villagers came to view him as God. They believed he matched the description of a “man who had the power of life and death,” in local legend. This mythical figure, according to folktales, originally had dark skin like other Papuans but then developed a disease that turned his skin white. According to the myth, this divine savior didn’t eat pork and eventually moved to Holland after being treated badly by the locals. Ammer matched this description in certain ways—he’s Dutch and light skinned, and as a Seventh-Day Adventist he doesn’t eat pork. Some villagers started actually worshipping him, which made the local chief jealous, and the controversy ultimately forced him to abandon Wai for Kri Island. But it helped give Ammer a sense of the influence he can wield over many Papuans.

In 1993, Ammer decided to teach a local fisherman named Nikson a lesson about the importance of protecting sea turtles. “He had two turtles in his boat,” Ammer remembers. “I said I’d buy them. As he was still counting his money, I grabbed the turtle and threw it out of the boat. Nikson went after the turtle, thinking it had slipped out of my hands. While he was doing that, I threw the other turtle out of the boat. He thought I was crazy. Now he works for me.”

Ammer doesn’t spend his time throwing turtles out of boats anymore, but he refuses to let anyone fish sharks in the waters under his control, and he urges locals to practice restraint out of self-interest. He understands the economic realities of the region—“In Raja Ampat there are very few ways to earn money. You can catch grouper, you can make salty fish, or you can catch shark”—but he also knows native tribes here don’t embrace the cyanide and bomb fishermen who have come here to decimate the reefs. There are two particularly destructive ways to fish on a reef: set off an underwater bomb that destroys everything in its path, or squirt cyanide through a syringe at the fish, which immobilizes them and makes them easy to scoop up. Both of these techniques translate into lasting damage.

“They listen to what I say, and what I say makes sense,” he says, adding that his tough-love lectures usually center on the fact that the most exploitative fishermen in Raja Ampat hail from faraway islands like Sulawesi. The fishermen from elsewhere operate like bandits, he argues, plundering one part of the ocean before moving on to their next target. Locals can’t afford to practice the same approach, he adds, because they lack the financial resources that would allow them to go off and poach on others’ turf, the way the men from Sulawesi can. “I tell them, ‘You see that boat? It’s not from here. Where they live, they’ve destroyed everything, and now that they’ve done that, they come here, and they’re going to destroy what’s here. When they do that, where are you going to go? You don’t have a boat.’ ”

Erdmann echoes some of the same themes in his message to locals, telling them they need to adopt a long-term vision when extracting resources from the sea, but frames it a little more diplomatically. He and other Conservation International officials envision a network of marine reserves in the region, where local fishermen will be allowed to continue operating but all other fishing activities would be off-limits. Scientists and environmentalists are increasingly turning to marine reserves as a way to preserve the last, best places, on the grounds that protecting critical areas of the ocean from commercial exploitation will allow these ecosystems to recover.

When Erdmann lays out his plan for winning over local Raja Ampat villagers, he slips into a form of environmental bureaucratese, describing how he’s trying to “create an enabling environment for conservation.” But his road map is straightforward: he’s aimed at winning over the people who live in eighty-eight remote villages throughout Raja Ampat. Conservation International is helping underwrite seven radio stations as part of a “community conservation radio network,” and they’ve convinced Radio Republik Indonesia, a station based in the nearest big city, Sorong, to air a two-hour environmental talk show each Friday night. The show, which is called
Radio Gelar Senat Raja Ampat
and mixes in local Papua languages with Indonesian, consistently scores high ratings with local songs and folklore about marine protected areas. CI has launched the conservation education vessel
Kalabia
(which means “walking shark” in the local language), and it’s financed a newspaper called
Tabloid Raja Ampat
. “It’s soft-sell conservation,” Erdmann offers.

On one level his plan seems quite doable: there are only 35,000 people living here, so the area is much less dense than other parts of Indonesia, with just 353 residents per acre. On the other hand, it took six years to convince the Indonesian minister of fisheries to announce the creation of seven marine protected areas spanning 3,475 square miles. Even with that accomplished, it took years for the government to put fishery management plans and effective patrols in place.

Initially, Erdmann explains as we head to meet with one of the local villagers who will help determine what happens to Raja Ampat, Conservation International and its allies were hoping the Indonesian government would offer sweeping protection to the region right after the first major expedition in 2001. But in the early stages the fanfare did not translate into new protections, so environmentalists decided they were better off building grassroots support for conservation efforts.

The future of marine protected areas here lies in the hands of men like Leonard Ayello. In his camouflage T-shirt, hooded sweatshirt, and Ginotti flip-flops, Ayello doesn’t exactly look like a village elder. But as the son of the Selpele village’s spiritual leader, he wields power.

Landownership in Raja Ampat is different from other places. The islands are owned by tribes (Ammer, for example, rents Kri Island from a local tribe), and by extension they own the reefs that extend from their land. Just because a tribe owns an island doesn’t mean its members live there: the villages of Selpele and Salio own Waigeo, which is uninhabited.

Sitting in the northwest corner of Raja Ampat, Waigeo is a site of forbidding beauty. Made of karst limestone—uplifted coral reefs that over time and exposure to the air and rain have melted into undulating peaks of varying heights—the rock formations look like beehives, or haystacks, rising out of the water. With just narrow strips of sand to serve as beaches and unforgiving soil, the islands offer little opportunity for even subsistence farming. But the waters surrounding Waigeo provide refuge for an array of creatures, including blacktip sharks, sea turtles, and a vast number of fish.

American conservation groups see Waigeo as a key part of their plan to preserve Raja Ampat, but to make it into a reserve, they need to convince the residents of Selpele and Salio to give their blessing. And to do that, they have been courting people like Ayello and his father.

Ayello, like many Selpele and Salio villagers, has spent part of his life working for Atlas South Sea Pearl. Cultured pearl operations are one of the region’s biggest sources of income; as the company’s general manager in Raja Ampat at the time, Markus Pieper, tells me over tea one morning, “We’re the only industry here.” The company employs 220 workers in three different sites: most are locals, looking after the 700,000 oysters that are growing at any one time. Ayello is one of the few headed for college, but he decided to work for Pieper once more in the summer of 2007 to save up some money.

At first Ayello is reluctant to talk, but at Pieper’s urging he explains why his village wants compensation for the sort of protection environmentalists are hoping to bestow on the region. The young man speaks quietly, but his tone is defiant. “The area is all owned by us,” he says, speaking in Indonesian. “Why wouldn’t we utilize it on a regular basis? It’s still ours, and we want to receive benefits from it.”

But Ayello also respects the logic of men like Ammer who suggest that locals are being ripped off. “We feel like the resources there are being used by outsiders, and we’re not receiving the benefits,” he says. From that perspective a deal with groups like Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy—which will presumably bring in patrol boats and with them jobs for locals as patrol boat officers—makes sense. Selpele leaders are “behind the idea,” Ayello says. But it’s not sewn up, he adds. “Some are still undecided and feel they need a fuller explanation.”

While Pieper supports Erdmann’s work and gets along well with village leaders like Ayello, he wonders privately if they will be able to show the restraint necessary to keep Raja Ampat as unpolluted and bountiful as it is today. Chinese companies constantly lobby to mine for nickel on Waigeo: such operations would suffocate nearby reefs by covering them in silt. But they’re offering to share nearly a third of the profits with local tribes, and Pieper is unsure of whether the villagers will reject the prospect of such a payout.

“They take everything,” he says, recalling how he watches his employees take mangoes from the trees before they’re ripe. “It’s a mentality of ‘If we don’t get it now, someone else will.’ At the end of the day, they look at the profits and rupiah in front of them today.”

But the seven local communities around Raja Ampat—including Ayello’s village—have decided to place a long-term bet on creating marine reserves. While Chinese mining operations initially opened up in seven separate locations around Waigeo, the massive amounts of red earth that ran off from the mines into the sea smothered the reef and sparked an outbreak of skin rashes among village children. The governor of West Papua and the head of Indonesia’s naval installation in nearby Sorong cracked down and halted all mining operations in the area. And Raja Ampat’s villages opted to protect their waters from exploitation.

In December 2006, they made traditional declarations to set aside 2.22 million acres of the waters under their control in seven marine protected areas. Six months later the Raja Ampat government added its legal muscle, issuing a decree that connected the network of preserves. At this point, the area had a total of 2.23 million acres under protection. Then, after months of lobbying by the local communities around Waigeo, which welcomed the community patrols and efforts to crack down on bomb and cyanide fishing in the area, the Raja Ampat government signed a new law that dramatically expanded two of the seven reserves. As a result, 2.95 million acres of Raja Ampat’s waters are now protected.

Ayello and his neighbors, the Selpele and Salio people, went even further than Erdmann had expected by declaring the entire reserve under their control off-limits to any sort of fin fishing whatsoever. They asked for just two things in exchange: the right to take three coveted invertebrate species from one-fifth of the reserve every two years, and the opportunity to serve as paid community patrols in the area. The first time they opened up the area again, in October 2009, their collective take of sea cucumbers, spiny lobsters, and top shell brought in nearly $15,000. And more than fifty men from the two villages, including Ayello, serve in the patrol force, a gig that provides them with not only a salary but food and lodging during each two-week posting at the protected area’s field station. Saving sharks and their prey is paying dividends that Ayello couldn’t even envision a few years ago.