An Urge to Burn : Madagascar: Rare Island Up in Smoke

Madagascar is burning.

The evidence is everywhere: in the haze of smoke that drapes itself into the steep dales of the capital, Antananarivo, in the evening; in acres of hillside blackened with fire that line the road on the three-hour drive from there to this forest glen near the east coast, leaving nothing but a stubble of tree stumps.

It is visible in the appearance from the air of the great island’s central highlands, its once-deep forests burned away, leaving only a threadbare coverlet of green, as thin as the felt of an old billiard table, through which the rich red of Madagascar’s soil bleeds.

Blessed with a bounty of plant and animal life almost unique on Earth, thanks to 165 million years of geographical isolation from the African mainland, Madagascar is cursed with a human population of pyromaniacs.

Centuries-Old Habit

The result of their fires is that this fourth-largest island in the world is also the most heavily eroded. Compounded by a population explosion, the residents’ centuries-old habit of slash-and-burn agriculture today menaces the island’s future.

The story is told here of a visiting Soviet cosmonaut who told his hosts that their island is the only land mass he could never fail to identify from space. It is always surrounded by a halo of bright red sea, he explained, the color of the soil relentlessly scrubbed off its denuded surface by the wind and rain.

Madagascar’s prized lemurs, the squirrel-tailed, dog-muzzled, monkey-like primates of which 23 species are unique to the island, have been pushed out of their accustomed habitats into progressively smaller strips of forest.

Its precious rice fields, which feed the world’s heaviest per capita consumers of rice, are fouled by soil eroded off the bare hills. Its best west coast port is all but useless today, so full is it of silt carried off the hills by its river.

Spreading Malnutrition

As the forests dwindle and the soil is degraded, charcoal and rice alike become more expensive, and malnutrition spreads among Madagascar’s children.

Martin Nicoll, a World Wildlife Fund official here, observed: “Virtually everyone in Madagascar is dependent on an endangered ecosystem.”

That ecosystem is one of the world’s wonders. The island may not have lions, elephants or giraffes, but not one of its more than 400 species of primates, rodents, carnivores and insects is seen anywhere else on the globe. About 95% of its reptile species and 46% of its birds are also unique.

Its outstanding diversity and sheer strangeness often have naturalists talking of Madagascar as if it were the product of a fabulist’s imagination.

“Butterflies as big as birds, and birds as colorful as the rainbow” were among the wonders listed by British environmentalists Gerald and Lee Durrell in their keynote address to a 1985 scientific conference marking the start of worldwide concern over the island’s environment.

Mammals here have retained traits that their mainland cousins lost in prehistoric times, such as the ultrasonic alarms and signals that tenrecs--small, burrowing insectivores--produce by vibrating their quills.

Unusual Ecological Niches

Others have filled ecological niches left vacant by the vagaries of evolution. For instance, the nocturnal aye-aye, perhaps the strangest of Madagascar’s lemurs, fills the role of the rest of the world’s woodpeckers by digging under tree bark for grubs with its spindly, “E.T”-like middle finger.

But the Malagasy love affair with fire is increasingly at odds with this otherworldly population of animals and plants.

The Malagasy burn for many reasons. They burn the hillsides to clear land for a form of rice culture known as tavy. They burn the flatlands to bring up new shoots of grass for their cattle to graze. They burn irreplaceable forest to make charcoal.

“And sometimes,” said Voara Randriamasolo, director of the national zoo in Antananarivo, “when they’re unhappy with the government, they burn.”

The fires set in pastureland eat away at the edges of the rain forest, drying them up until they flake away like the pages of a yellowing book. “The fires get out of hand because the people set them and let them burn until they just die out,” said Sheila O’Connor, a Cambridge University biologist working in the south of the country.

Unprotected by forest, the rolling hills of the highlands are scarred by crescent-shaped earthslides and eroded gullies, so common that the Malagasy have a word for them in their quasi-Polynesian language: lavaka.

Conservation Effort

Yet for all that, Madagascar has today become the focus of one of the world’s most ambitious conservation programs. Development agencies, including the U.N. Development Program and the U.S. Agency for International Development, have over the last three years made the environment their prime focus.

In the same period, the government has awakened to the threat. After an international conference in 1985, the government approved a program to improve management of its 22 preserves and to add 14 sites to protect such delicate ecosystems as coral reefs and mangrove swamps.

“Today, there’s often no staff in some preserves, or sometimes one nominal guide, with no transport, no training,” said Nicoll.

With foreign help, the government is prepared to spend as much as $200,000 per year to train and equip wardens for each of 14 particularly important reserves selected for intensive management. The programs will include rural development schemes aimed at providing local farmers with alternatives to the ancient destructive practices.

In some ways, Madagascar is a test of environmental preservation programs in the Third World. Where environmentalism is no luxury, such programs must have their own justification. Farmers cannot simply be instructed not to burn; they must be told how to find alternatives.

‘Why Should We Stop?’

“The difficulty,” said Randriamasolo, “is the chiefs say, ‘We’ve been burning for 100 years. . . . Why should we stop now?’ ”

Complicating the process here has been a history of political, not just geographical, isolation. For 10 years beginning in 1975, the Malagasy government barred all foreign researchers from the island. When they were permitted to return, the government itself was just beginning to realize the seriousness of the decline.

Even today, some Malagasy, just like many other Africans, bristle at the suggestion that foreign help is crucial to preservation of the island’s ecosystem.

“It must be the Malagasy themselves who take matters in hand,” said Bartholom Voahita, chairman of the World Wildlife Fund’s local office. “The British or Americans wouldn’t allow their patrimony to be taken over by Tanzanians, would they? So, why should we let ours be taken over by them?”

Yet, the pace of destruction is so great, and the rate of discovery so slow, that scientists are convinced that countless species are going extinct without ever having been known.

“Since the arrival of man on the island (1,500 years ago), two species of tortoise, three of birds and 11 of lemurs have disappeared,” the Durrells told the 1985 conference. At least 238 others are endangered.

“I think you’d have to conclude that there have been extinctions here in the last 20 years,” said George Schatz, a botanist from the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis who has been helping the government chart a proposed reserve. “Sometimes a species is localized to just the side of a hill. When the hill goes, the species goes.”

At the same time, new species are constantly being discovered in the island’s newly explored areas.

Not too long ago, botanists discovered a new palm--not just a new species, but a new genus. It wasn’t that the palm was so inconspicuous that no one noticed it before. Rather, it is a majestic tree, 100 feet high and crowned with a red crest that proclaims its presence from half a mile away.

“It was in a place where people had never gotten to,” said Schatz.

“I know that one of every 20 plants I collect here is probably a new species,” he added. “In my preserve, there might be 500 new species altogether.”

The decline of Madagascar’s ecosystem began, if at a leisurely pace, with man’s arrival from the South Pacific about 1,500 years ago. At that time, much of the island was covered with virgin rain forest.

Since then, the forest has receded to a thin strip along the island’s eastern coast and clumps in the isolated northern and southern tips, and the Malagasy have perfected their slash-and-burn methods of cultivation.

Population Explosion

Destructive as they are, the impact of these techniques was limited when Madagascar was relatively thinly populated and the land plentiful. But in the last 20 years, the population has nearly doubled, to about 11 million from 6.2 million in 1966. The pace of destruction has grown proportionately.

“The farmers might get 400 to 500 kilograms of rice per hectare the first year (of slash-and-burn cultivation),” said the World Wildlife Fund’s Nicoll. “The second year, they only get half as much. The third year, they get a tremendous infestation of pests and weeds because the soil is dying. So, it’s abandoned. They pull out and leave it fallow for 11 to 15 years.”

That’s long enough for the land to recover. But the population explosion has forced the Malagasy to telescope this cycle.

“There is so little land now that the cycle is three to five years,” said Nicoll. “That’s not enough time for anything but grass and bamboo, so the cycle spirals downhill. They go into more difficult areas--steeper hills, poorer climates.” The destruction builds geometrically.

Conservationists say the government’s emphasis on preservation has borne some fruit in recent times, particularly by halting the commercial exploitation of endangered forest land for timber and by controlling the poaching of lemurs.

Some local people have discovered that conservation pays more directly, too, in guide fees and jobs in tourist lodges.

Perhaps one of the greater successes is a small reserve known as Perinet, about 50 miles east of the capital and just outside the railroad stop of Andasibe. Tree cutting and lemur hunting have all but ceased in the reserve, said Maurice Bedo, a young guide who explained that he grew up inside the forest of Perinet.

“I spent all my childhood hours in here because I love nature,” he said. Being a guide is so lucrative here that Maurice’s brother, Joseph, recently gave up on his college preparation because no job he could aspire to with a college education would pay more than he gets now.

In his patched blue jogging suit, Maurice leads a troop of researchers deep into the woods. Tree roots interlock in a sort of ladder up the steep hillsides. He stops frequently to point out the peculiar characteristics of the plants lining the path. This one is an anodyne for a scorpion bite, he explains, showing how one crumples the leaf and rubs the moisture on the skin.

Perinet is dedicated to the preservation of Madagascar’s largest lemur, the indri, a tailless brown-and-white teddy bear of a primate.

The indri’s most appreciated feature is its call. “A Callas among the lemurs,” is the description of one naturalist, “who composes and performs its own operas.”

Presently, Maurice’s brother, Joseph, emerges from a thicket with the news he has tracked down an indri family of five. Suddenly, they are spotted flinging themselves, limbs outstretched, across the wedge of sunlight coming through the treetops. Two can be seen folded together in the crook of a tree.

Silence.

Then with the abruptness of a foghorn comes a symphony of pentatonic sound, a song of greeting, alarm or awakening in five harmonizing pitches. The calls continue for perhaps five minutes. Then they end as suddenly as they began.

All over Madagasgar, the Malagasy and foreign visitors alike have been discovering those hitherto-hidden qualities of the island’s wildlife. But resistance to changing the old ways still thrives.

Cambridge University’s O’Connor was confronted by resistance just last year, after she and some colleagues emerged in their Land Rover from the depths of a forest preserve they were helping to chart.

“We came across a huge plot on fire,” she recalled. “Later, one of the villagers told us they had done it to display annoyance at our not having made contact with them before going into the forest. It may or may not have been true, but they never did cultivate it.”