FIELDS OF DREAMS // Taking it personally // The horror
of deforestation hit Lynn Carpenter hard, prompting a
change in her life's focus
DATE 09/25/94
NEWSPAPER THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION NEWS
EDITION MORNING
PAGE L02
STORY LENGTH 47 INCHES
HEADLINE FIELDS OF DREAMS // Taking it personally // The horror
of deforestation hit Lynn Carpenter hard, prompting a
change in her life's focus
BYLINE/CREDIT DAN FROOMKIN:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS OC:COLLEGES:FACULTY:CENTRAL
AMERICA:RESEARCH:LAND:ENVIRONMENT:TREES:PLANTS:AGRICUL
TURE:REPAIR
.
Lynn Carpenter knows exactly why she abandoned more than two
decades of research on hummingbirds, raided her savings account to
buy a farm in Costa Rica and started searching for ways to save the
rain forests.
"It was a real good midlife crisis," she says one afternoon in
her farmhouse, her fat green pet parakeet Pablo perched on her
shoulder and nibbling at her nape.
"I was bored with everything I was doing."
By some reckonings, Carpenter's life was anything but boring.
She was at the top of her field, a respected professor with a
hard-won international reputation as an expert in hummingbird
behavior and the relationship between the birds and the plants they
pollinate.
But in the five years from 1986 to 1991, Carpenter's short-lived
marriage to a marine-biology professor ended in divorce, her father
died, teaching somehow started to lose its thrill and her research
funding hit a lull.
She was on a nine-month sabbatical in Costa Rica in 1991,
studying the relationship between hummingbirds and local plants,
when the horror of deforestation hit her hard.
"I really felt it personally. Up close. And it just made me
question what I was doing."
It's not so unusual for scientists to change their focus from
time to time, but for Carpenter, the switch from observing
hummingbirds to planting trees was more than that. It represented a
radical departure: from watching to doing.
When she saw the world wounded and dying before her, hummingbird
research suddenly looked irrelevant.
"It didn't matter as far as the survival of the human species,"
she says.
"This matters."
What Carpenter calls her "metamorphosis" led her to risk
everything -- her reputation, her savings, years of her life. And
although it's still too early to say whether her investments of
time and money will pay off, she has already established herself in
this new field.
"What she's trying to do is very credible," says Ron Carroll, a
longtime expert on tropical conservation and associate director for
the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia.
And, he says, "It's something that hasn't been done."
While scientists who study the tropics acknowledge that local
people must ultimately be enlisted in the fight against
deforestation, most of their reforesting experiments have occurred
on high-quality land or industrial-size plantations.
"The local people don't really relate to them very well,"
Carroll says.
The methods being tested by Carpenter, in contrast, are within
the realm of the possible for local farmers.
"She doesn't have a big Massey-Ferguson tractor pulling a tree
planter behind it," Carroll says.
And her land is at least as bad as any existing farmer's.
"She got quite a reputation for searching out the worst piece of
land in the area," Carroll says with a laugh. "Everyone wants to
sell land to the gringos now."
The word that Carpenter's colleagues at the University of
California, Irvine, often use to describe her these days is "gutsy."
And much of that has to do with her willingness to raid her
savings.
"It's easy to be an activist with somebody else's money," says
Walter Fitch, chairman of UCI's department of ecology and
evolutionary biology.
"I think what she's doing is great. She's looking at a problem
that is important, and doing it creatively and with enthusiasm."
Harold Koopowitz, a fellow UCI professor who has studied plant
conservation for nearly 20 years, praised Carpenter's project but
cautioned that some of her goals may be overambitious.
"It may work. It may be a great thing to do. But I think that
she's just at the beginning, and it's going to be a long, hard
road," he says.
And yet, he adds, "The world is getting to be such a mess that I
think that even if one is grasping at straws, one has to grasp at
the straws."
An Air Force brat, Carpenter was born in Oklahoma and raised in
Massachusetts, Texas and California. She decided that her destiny
was biology while a student at the University of California,
Riverside.
As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley,
she did pioneering work with the Andean hillstar hummingbird, which
lives in Peruvian mountains 2 and 3 miles high.
Carpenter had puzzled over how the bird with the emerald-green
throat was able to find enough food in such a barren area to fuel
the frantic beating of wings it needs to stay aloft in such thin
air.
So she spent 13 months in Peru from 1968 to 1971. And when she
discovered that the hummingbirds roosted in caves at night, she
sneaked up on them and took scientific measurements.
"What I did was go at night and stick thermometers up their
butts," she says. "And I found neat stuff."
Her discovery -- that the birds go into a torpor, letting their
bodies cool to the point of near-suspended animation -- was written
up in Science magazine and remains of great interest, not only to
hummingbird scholars but to scientists interested in freezing
people and thawing them out again.
Carpenter joined UCI's department of ecology and evolutionary
biology in 1972, where -- until Costa Rica beckoned. -- she happily
mixed teaching and writing during the school year with field work
during the summer
Today, Carpenter in some ways resembles the subject of her
former studies. Like the hummingbird, she is full of energy and
constantly on the move.
But in other ways, she is like the flower around which
hummingbirds hover.
"What I like about her is that she's down-to-earth," says Raffi
Hovsepian, 21, one of the undergraduates who followed Carpenter to
Costa Rica.
"And she gets very emotional in her lectures. You could tell it
was coming from deep down inside, and you rarely see that at a
university."
Carpenter's lectures on overpopulation and deforestation in
particular are legendary at UCI.
"I get excited when I give my lectures," Carpenter says. "I get
angry in class. I get scared in class. ... And that gets the
powerful reactions from the students."
Many of the issues central to her work on the farm are at the
core of the courses she teaches: introductory ecology and field
methods in ecology.
"We haven't used our resources efficiently," she tells the
students. "And the resource that is being used sloppily is soil.
"When you see muddy water running down a storm gutter, do you
think: `That's my children's food supply going out to sea'?"
After her lectures, some students decide they want to help,
too. "It's starting to dawn on them, and they're getting scared,"
she says.
As important as her work may be, Carpenter insists it is just a
stopgap measure.
That's not being pessimistic; that's thinking like an ecologist.
"The world's ecosystems are not going to survive if the world's
populations continue to grow at the rates that they're growing,"
she says.
Overpopulation is "the ultimate problem," she says, and not even
the most efficient use of resources can sustain an ever-increasing
number of people.
So Carpenter is taking a few quiet steps on her farm to address
that problem, too.
She talks to her workers about the importance of small families
and birth control. "I make comments all the time," she says.
And she hopes to eventually hire local women to work in her tree
nursery, not only for their labor, but to teach them about birth
control and break the cycle that leaves them home, in poverty,
having child after child.
"I'm hoping that I'm buying some time," she says, "so that the
whole ecosystem doesn't fall apart before we manage to solve the
population problem."