Oswaldo Contreras, Guadalajara Course Manager, reports on his visit to a Pride campaign site in Janos, Mexico.

I did my very first field visit for Rare with Albino Herrera in the state of Chihuahua northern Mexico. The beautiful Chihuahuan desert landscape in the Janos Valley was an inspiration for both of us.

Albino is running a Pride campaign, in a partnership between Rare and TNC’s local partner, Pronatura Noreste. He is a local community member of Janos and a great cowboy, with a farm, cows, and some land where his family harvests corn and grass.

He is doing an outstanding job with his Pride campaign, which deals with conserving the most valuable resource in the region: water. Preserving the local grasslands also plays an important role in this campaign, and his mascot, the prairie dog, will be the best conservation messenger. (Janos Valley has the biggest black-tailed prairie dog colony in the whole world.)

With his 49 years, this cowboy faced one of his greatest challenges in his Pride campaign. This was to dominate a computer. Our goal in my first visit was to finish his Pride Campaign Project Plan. This document is the bible for his campaign, his map to all the roads he must undertake in the upcoming 12 months.

So, we met and got started. After 5 nonstop days of working 10-12 hours every day, we finished one Friday night. He never before had done a 100-page document in his life, and he was much excited about it.

We were exhausted, and he was ready to write his acknowledgments. I decided to type while he dictated to me. So, he first thanked God for the opportunity he met in this project. Then he thanked his wife (who passed away some years ago), who he said helped him from heaven. When he said these beautiful words, his voice broke and a small tear fell down the cowboy’s face. Then I realized that a tear rolled down out of my eye too.

We stayed up till late in the night, sharing a beer and talking about stuff, as old friends—tired but happy and proud of working with the heart in the last week. I realized that I couldn’t have a better first field visit at Rare.

This is Paul Butler’s third report on visit to a Rare Pride campaign in Peru.

The elementary school we visited in Oxapampa was small (less than 100 students, I would guess), the children even smaller. But what it, and they, lacked in size they more than made up with in enthusiasm. Their smiles were broad – each one anxious to see the foreign visitors that had joined Cesar to visit their school.

Cesar is Rare’s campaign manger in Oxapampa, Peru. Thirty-eight years old, Cesar has lived in Oxapampa for nearly 20 years. Trained in agronomy and livestock management, Cesar has a strong background in working with communities on agricultural extension issues and on the conservation of protected areas.

Today he would be accompanied by a costumed “spectacled bear” on a mission to teach the children about the value of forests and the need for reforestation. It would be the first time Cesar had worked with a costume, but not be his last, as he would be using it to visit schools and communities across the region to serve as a “spokesperson” for the environment. The great grandchild of Smokey the Bear perhaps!

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Rare has formed a partnership with the prestigious UN Equator Prize, which recognizes outstanding local efforts to reduce poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. Rare has agreed to offer next year’s winner a free Pride campaign; we will get access to a great pipeline of local conservation leaders. You can read more about the partnership in the Equator Initiative’s newsletter, Between the Lines.

Dictionary definitions of the word pride include, “A sense of one’s own proper dignity or value; self-respect” and “Pleasure or satisfaction taken in an achievement, possession, or association”. Pride can be a powerful emotion and one whose association can be taught and learned. Humans do not have an in-born love of a particular sports team, nor to the piece of cloth that comes to symbolize a nation in the form of its flag. Yet these symbols of national, regional or communal pride can evoke outpourings of passion as evidenced by the hysteria caused at some sporting events, the emotions stirred by rousing renditions of national anthems — particularly when ones “tribal” affiliations are perceived to be threatened by another’s, or by an external source.

An example of this was seen in July 1969, when the Salvadoran army launched an attack against Honduras, as existing tensions between these two nations were inflamed by rioting during the second North American qualifying round for the 1970 FIFA World Cup!!! An assault on one’s pride is in effect an assault on one’s “self respect”; and self respect is a powerful motivator for action.

For almost two decades Rare has used local pride as an emotive key to build and foster community support for environmental conservation. Rare’s Pride program strives to build community awareness as to the importance and uniqueness of the natural resources that local people “own”, how the sustained management of these are vital to individual and community well being, and the internal and external threats that they face. Coral reefs serve as feeding and breeding grounds for vital fish stocks, as well as bulwarks for coastal protection and a resource for garnering much needed eco-tourism dollars, yet they are threatened by dynamite and cyanide fishing. Forests are vital for watershed protection, to prevent landslides and protect against erosion, while providing potentially a sustainable source of products from medicines to fuel wood. Yet, according to the FAO nearly 200 million hectares of forest were destroyed between 1980 and 1995.

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The Fisheries Fellows project helps me to apply the knowledge that I gained through my studies. As Fellows, we are not only doing research, we are giving a use to that research. The results of the research we conduct during out studies usually ends up on a shelf in the University library – being used by no one. Rare’s Fisheries Fellows Program will allow me to develop an understanding of the social aspects related to fisheries, understanding fisheries issues as the integration of many factors: people, markets and the biological resource, without focusing solely on fish dynamics.

Opportunities such as this one are not always available, so when you have a chance like this you have to go for it. For me, one of the best experiences of the 11 week training course was the opportunity of meet the organizations of the Northwest Pacific Mexican Lobster Fishery – a great example of community collaboration that brings benefits to all while insuring a sustainable fishery.

We seven fellows of the first generation are multidisciplinary professionals, with different views of the real situation of fisheries in Mexico, but with the same goal of helping community fishers to understand the importance of the sustainable use of the resources for their own benefit. (Ivan Martínez Tovar, Fisheries Fellow, has just completed his 11-week training course and is moving to Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, to begin work on the program.)

This is the second report by Paul Butler on a Peruvian Rare Pride campaign.

The Rare team had arrived on a flight over the Andes and a lengthy drive along potholed roads to the small town of Oxapampa. Local Indians with their incongruous bowler hats and intricately woven shawls mingled with people that clearly had a more European ancestry. Our quest was to meet our local collaborator, Cesar Raul Laura Contreras.

Cesar works for ProNaturaleza, one of the largest NGOs in Peru, and a partner of U.S.-based Nature Conservancy for over 15 years. Their staff of over 80 individuals implements land and species conservation, sustainable natural resource management projects, and climate change projects across Peru as well a large volunteer program.

Paul Butler, Rare Senior VP, Global Programs, reports on a visit to a Pride campaign in Peru.

I guess deep down the whole team was a little nervous boarding a small Peruvian plane to fly over the Andes to reach our project site in Oxapampa, Peru. After all, less than a month ago, WWF lost a cadre of staff in a tragic helicopter accident in the Himalayas. The plane would take a team from Rare and marketing gurus Arnold Worldwide to visit a Rare Pride project site in the Yanachaga-Chemillen National Park. Pride campaigns utilize a charismatic flagship species, (the spectacled bear, in the case of the Oxapampa campaign) which become a symbol of local pride and acts as a messenger to build support for habitat and wildlife protection. Marketing tools – such as billboards, posters, songs, music videos, sermons, comic books, and puppet shows – make conservation messages positive, compelling, relevant, and fun for the community. Campaigns appeal to people on an emotional level, generating an increased sense of pride and public stewardship that goes beyond mere awareness-raising. Pride campaigns involve and engage every segment of the community: teachers, business and religious leaders, elected officials, and the average citizen.

Established in 1961, the 122,000 ha Yanachaga-Chemillen National Park was set up to preserve the headwaters of Palcazú and Huancabamba-Pozuzo rivers as well as fauna and flora including over 100 species of mammal and 450 species of bird. It is an area under threat from deforestation and clearing land for agriculture and cattle raising. Rare is working with an outstanding local group called ProNaturaleza and our local campaign manager, Cesar Raul Laura Contreras, on a project to raise awareness about the plight of the park and the spectacled bear. Our trip would take the team to see Cesar in action in the communities and schools building pride in the environment and looking at less destructive alternative ways to generate income and jobs. The plane, a nine seater, afforded excellent views of the Andes that rise to the east of Peru’s capital of Lima. Some of the higher peaks were still snow-covered, many were blanketed in cloud, making the flight even more exciting, especially as the plane decended and wove its way through the peaks to land at the isolated San Ramon airstrip, where we were greeted by a cow on the “runway” and a contingent of local police in what looked like an Indian tut tut. I think we all knew this would be an exciting trip.

There is a Mexican song and an expression that says: “No soy monedita de oro, para caerles bien a todos” (“I’m not a gold medal wanted by everybody”) that basically is used when somebody realizes how hard it is to meet different expectations with a simple alternative, so there is a need for trade off. That is what happens with ecotourism entrepreneurs living in protected areas.

So in thinking about their role to promote conservation, job generation, and quality of services, it is common that people become overwhelmed and then start to ask what really matters in ecotourism. Local people, money, or natural habitats? Visitors satisfaction, employee satisfaction, or profits? Meet and enforce park regulations or new and catchy ecotours?  The answers to these questions finally lead to the models of ecotourism business that are developed by the people. I wonder how hard it is for local people  - on one side – to address some of those critical questions and on another side to show the way that those concerns are linked.

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