Deep in the Peruvian Amazon, the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Regional Conservation Area boasts enormous biodiversity—pink dolphins, rare monkeys, giant river otters, reptiles, and hundreds of birds and different types of plants. It’s also one of the most prominent examples of a government recognizing that environmental conservation doesn’t require keeping people out. That instead, it’s possible for humans to coexist with nature and help protect it.
And the region’s protected status is supported, in part, by research conducted by tourists.
Biologist Richard Bodmer has been welcoming visitors to his research station along the Yarapa River, on a strip of Indigenous territory between Tamshiyacu Tahuayo and another area co-managed by Indigenous communities, the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, to help track wildlife and collect other ecosystem data for decades. His guests arrive through a partnership with Earthwatch Expeditions, a tour company that connects people with scientists carrying out long-term research projects around the world and invites them to engage in “participatory science.” Earthwatch runs nearly two dozen trips: to study the ecosystems of polar bears in the Arctic, whooping cranes in Texas, trees in Acadia National Park, and large mammals in Kenya, among others.
In the Amazon, research guides the daily activities of the (typically) eight-day itinerary. Participants sleep on a restored vessel first brought to the region at the start of the 19th century to transport rubber. Solar energy is used to power air conditioning and provide hot water for showers. The goal, Bodmer says, is to support conservation strategies that protect ecosystems and the people who rely on them simultaneously. A bonus is that economic activity tied directly to keeping those ecosystems intact helps to remind the government that effective conservation is valuable in its own right.
Every evening, participants identify their research targets: choose a particular animal they’d survey, in a particular location and across a specified radius, during a particular window of time. Searching for parrots and other birds means taking a small boat up or down the river. “There, we would watch and wait,” says Jared Katz, a psychotherapist in Vermont who joined an Earthwatch trip earlier this year with his wife, Jennifer Jewiss. “One of us held a GPS and would call out the coordinates at each of the stops we made that morning, and someone else had a clipboard and grid to record the data. The others of us (and those two as well) watched for flight.”
The collection of data over time has led to a greater understanding of the ecosystem. For instance, Bodmer says, birds shifting where they roost might suggest changes in the aquatic landscape; the recent flooding in the region appears to be impacting primates, which move easily across the canopy, less than animals living on the ground.
What stands out about Bodmer’s Amazon riverboat trip is that travelers spend time in a region that’s now government-protected and Indigenous-managed—in part because of the findings of his previous research groups.
The actual ecofriendliness of ecotourism varies a great deal. In general, small-scale operations, local ownership, and community involvement are key, says Gyan Nyaupane, who researches ecotourism, protected area management, and Indigenous Peoples and serves as the director of Arizona State University’s Center for Sustainable Tourism.
And while the easiest way to minimize your carbon footprint and protect natural resources is to not travel, and often the most appropriate way to engage with remote communities is to leave them alone, the reality is that governments want to see economic growth. “What is the best approach to economic development? Is it better to mine these places? Or build dams, clear land for agriculture?” says Nyaupane. “Ecotourism is probably more sustainable than any other extractive industry.”
Across the ecotourism and conservation-focused travel sector, location affects how sustainable the logistics can be—electric vehicles may not be available in some environments, for example, or the base camp for the trip may not use renewable energy. That always creates tricky math—when is something a necessary part of the process, and when does it resemble something closer to hypocrisy?
In the Amazon, Bodmer gets closer than many to aligning daily activities with the greater purpose of environmental conservation. The research station was recently converted to 100 percent solar power, according to Earthwatch Expeditions, and Bodmer says they’ve eliminated diesel fuel—not a small feat in remote regions, where diesel-powered boats are common and generators ubiquitous—and that they source most of their food locally. It runs air conditioning only when it’s especially hot, and otherwise, unlike many companies that accommodate clients’ comfort and convenience to a fault, tourists have to learn to be hot.
“They could have run air conditioning 24/7, with generators, no problem at all, but that wouldn’t have felt good,” says Katz. “It was hot and absolutely uncomfortable at times. But it was well worth it to me, because I knew we were being better stewards.”
(Earthwatch Expeditions is updating other trips to lower their impacts as well, the result of an agreement it signed this year with Natural Habitat Adventures. The company says it’s investing in the development of electric safari vehicles for trips in Africa and working on an all-electric skiff in the Galápagos Islands, for example.)
“Field assistants” like Katz and Jewiss pay a flat fee, currently set at $4,795—that will jump next year to meet the costs of Natural Habitat’s initiatives—to spend the week with Bodmer and contribute to the research that he and colleagues in the region have done over time. That body of research is considered to have had a significant impact on global conservation strategy in the last couple decades.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Indigenous communities in the region were competing with outsiders coming into their territory for fish, bushmeat, and timber. It risked changing the whole landscape. When Bodmer arrived in the mid-1980s, conservationists believed that the best way to preserve biodiversity was to keep people off the land. For decades, not just in the Amazon but globally, so-called fortress conservation was considered best practice. But the conservation strategy of establishing parks to protect the land has meant Indigenous people got kicked off their land—and, ultimately, leading to protracted conflict and violence between park guards and Indigenous peoples.
As Bodmer, who did postdocs on forest mammals in Borneo and community reserves in Brazil, and completed his PhD in Peru before he settled into what would become a long-term, ongoing research project, got to know the communities in the region, he was convinced things needed to change. The concept of a community reserve became a driving force. In the 1990s, he explains, research conducted by his team and others across the Amazon set out to prove two key ideas: that people can use fish, bushmeat, palms, and other resources sustainably and that communities are good at managing their own reserves. That it’s essentially what they, like Indigenous communities around the world, have always done.
Over the years, he and various teams he has worked with—with field data collected by Earthwatch Expedition tourists—produced research showing that use of natural resources could be sustainable and, Bodmer added, “that this sustainable use conserved biodiversity, species, Amazonian habitats, and helped local subsistence and market economies.”
Lusbita Manuyama Torres, who lives in Mariscal Castilla in northeastern Peru, says that Earthwatch Expeditions has become an integral part of her Cocama community. She and other women in her village sell baskets and wood carvings to tourists who join the expedition, and the handicrafts have taken on increased importance as agriculture, their other main source of income, becomes less reliable with climate change. They also sell those crafts to other villages; it’s not something they do just to cater to travelers. Because the company uses boats that have been in the region for over a century—rather than import or build new boats for its operations—their husbands are able to work as boat mechanics.
But the connection runs deeper, Manuyama Torres says. Earthwatch participants come to her village, where they can meet families and spend time with them as they cook, learn about materials used for thatching roofs and plants used for medicine, and watch crafters make their goods. Other tourists mainly pass through to glimpse wildlife, and they often buy handicrafts but don’t visit her village or take time to learn about local cultures or conservation practices.
Most importantly, the research done on the riverboat has helped to drive a global shift in understanding the study of and approach to land conservation—that people can coexist with the environment around them, taking from and giving back to nature at the same time. The dozens of academic papers that have been published based on research collected by Bodmer and his guests have helped to support the very policies that enable Manuyama Torres’ community to continue to live as it always has.
That’s what drew Katz and Jewiss, who travel frequently and seek out low-impact ways to visit new places, to the trip in the first place. “We did not just experience the Amazon for our own enjoyment. We did our best to contribute to the conservation of this fabulous ecosystem,” Jewiss says. Being an active part of the research, rather than taking a sit-back-and-unwind kind of trip, actually enabled her to relax and enjoy herself more. “I didn’t feel like we were just going to be tourists,” she says.
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