Wildlife Biologists Are Sharing Best of 2 Worlds : Ecology: Brazilian scientist hopes to take home ideas from volunteer and public education programs that she is observing.

The often dry and wind-swept landscapes of the Channel Islands seem an unlikely training ground for a woman charged with protecting the lush rain forests of southern Brazil.

But through an exchange program hosted by wildlife biologists in Ventura, Maria Elisa Castellanos Sola will take home valuable tips to help her manage the endangered and disappearing jungles in the state of Minas Gerais.

The dark-haired Sola is at once excited and intensely serious as she talks about her plans to set up volunteer and public education programs such as the ones she saw in Ventura County.

On Santa Cruz Island, for instance, she watched high school students work as volunteers in a summer program with the Nature Conservancy to repair fences, rid the island of non-native plants and do general maintenance.

Each evening, groups of students prepared a short presentation on the work they had done that day, and the issues involved.

“While these children are doing this hard work, they are also learning about the environment,” Sola said. “When you have kids working with preservation, you teach them something they could not learn in a classroom. It was really beautiful to see this.”

That combination of teaching and tapping the potentially vast network of free labor through volunteers will be incorporated in a similar program in Brazil, she said.

“This is my plan--to have a program like this, this year,” Sola said.

Sola is one of two scientists from Latin America chosen to come to the county this year as part of a program aimed at exchanging information and experiences, learning from American mistakes and profiting from successes.

The eight-week course, known as the Exchange Program for Latin American Protected Area Managers, was conceived by Marc Weitzel, a Ventura-based U. S. Fish and Wildlife biologist whose duties include leading the California condor recovery team. The exchange program is funded by Fish and Wildlife’s Office of International Affairs.

Eventually, the 2-year-old program will also send U. S. scientists to Latin America to learn from that region’s experiences as well.

“We have to think of protecting natural resources in a global context,” Weitzel said. “Everything we do is interrelated.”

The air and water that is cleansed and purified by the rain forests of Brazil is important to the entire region, he said. “One could look at the entire Western Hemisphere as a single ecosystem.”

For instance, migratory birds, which spend many months of the year in Ventura County, spend their winters in Latin America.

“Natural resources do not respect political boundaries,” he said. To protect endangered species in California, their habitats in Latin America must also be preserved, he said.

Sola’s stint in the United States began in Ventura County, where it ends this week. She visited the Hopper Mountain Wildlife Refuge, where biologists lived during the first months that the endangered California condors were reintroduced to the wild in the nearby Sespe Condor Sanctuary.

Sola also spent a few days with the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary staff, visiting Santa Cruz Island.

She said she found that Brazil and the Channel Islands have similar problems related to ranching. In both places, introducing domestically bred animals for human consumption destroys the environment.

On the islands, grazing animals destroy native grasses and shrubs; in Brazil, the ranchers cut down the forest to make way for pastures for grazing or for coal mining.

The farmers in Brazil contract to work for large companies that own the land, Sola said.

“They are very poor people who go inside the forest to cut for the industry,” she said. “They do not know what they are allowed to do and the industry does not tell them.”

It is her task to educate them and help them understand the law and why it is important to protect the waterways and hillsides, Sola said.

“On the island, the problems are not what the farmer does not know,” she said. “It is more of a management problem.”

Ranching is still allowed on Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa islands until the property can be acquired by the National Park Service or until current leases run out.

The exchange program has also taken Sola to Salton Sea, northeast of San Diego; the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve; Stillwater National Wildlife Reserve in Fallon, Nev.; Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, and the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Newark.

That preserve, one of the largest of its kind completely surrounded by urbanized area, has an active cadre of 120 volunteers and two centers that host thousands of schoolchildren every year for educational tours, workshops and day camps.

The center also has a program that teaches teachers how to teach conservation.

That’s important in an area where it is conservatively estimated that 85% of the marshes have been filled in for development, said John Steiner, chief of public use for the refuge. That’s why the refuge concentrates a good deal of attention on public education, especially for children.

“They have a great time and fall asleep exhausted on the bus on the way home, and they’ve learned something they will never forget,” Steiner said of the children. “Our goal is that by the time the children are able to vote, that they will know what they will be losing and understand the importance of a salt marsh.”

Sola lauded the Bay Area program as well.

“They try to give the children a whole vision about the environment at all levels, nature and culture,” she said. “They learn to appreciate their place in time over the millennia.”

Sola said she will use at home what she learned about the use of volunteers as well as the educational programs.

But the flow of information has not been one-way, Weitzel and Sola said.

In Minas Gerais, where the environmental laws are considered more advanced than in the rest of Brazil, landowners must set aside 20% of their property to remain wild. That segment is chosen by the government so that the state will always have contiguous wild areas.

In addition, all of the watershed is protected.

“The rivers and lakes are owned by the federation,” she said. She also gave slide presentations on the programs her institute operates.

But Sola said she takes home a wealth of ideas that she is eager to put into place. She looks to the strong models she has seen here as a means to marry the people with the conservation goals of her agency.

“The real origin of our problems is that we did not consider ourselves and our culture as part of the environment,” she said. “We have tended to separate the two.”

Her intention is to use what she learned to help people “better understand where we are in the planet.”

And by so doing, she said, she intends to help preserve it.