Diary of a Petition

A petition week. Friday 28th September to Friday 5th October Alan Lee and Anja Kirchdorfer A petition week. Friday 28th September to Friday 5th October The first I heard of the proposed bill to reduce the size of the Bahuaja Sonene National Park (BSNP) was in an email from Peruvian biologist Juan Grados. His opening line to the mail was “please read this, it is very important”. The first part of the email consisted of the resignation letter from the former head of the Institute of Natural Resources, Luis Alfaro Lozano, outlining his protest to the proposed bill. In the rest of the email was the text for the bill. I was dismayed to read the content, as it was strongly biased towards the extraction of gas with no value being placed in the priceless biodiversity of the areas.. In addition, reading the lines “Mando se publique y cumpla”, or “THE CONGRESS OF THE REPUBLIC has issued forth the following Law” I presumed that this was now an official law, that the Candamo had been lost without anyone even being aware that it could be. I forwarded the email to a contact in INRENA to ask if the contents of the mail were true, and she wrote back that they were. In the meantime, I searched for any media reference to the issue. I could not believe that such an iconic area could simply be rezoned so that gas could be extracted. The only paper carrying any news on the story was a brief statement in El Comercio. I wrote panicked emails to a circle of close people who I knew should know something about what was going on. I was partly relieved to get an email from Daphne Matsufuji of Rainforest Expeditions, who informed me that although the bill had passed the Consejo de Ministros, it still had to be approved by congress. With this information, mywife Anja searched online and found the official website of the Peruvian Congress with one page listing all the bills and their status (http://www2.congreso.gob.pe/Sicr/TraDocEstProc/CLProLey2006.nsf). Although we now knew that it had not been presented to congress yet, we did not know when this would happen or how much time there was to try and get media attention on the subject to stop it. I phoned John Forrest of the Tambopata Reserve Society (TReeS), UK-based NGO to see if he knew anything. John had little new to report except that Chris Kirkby had been keeping him in the loop with updates. Since Chris has a long history in Tambopata and Peru and is well connected to many influential people, I tried to get hold of him to find out what action was being taken, but he was not available. That was Friday 30th September, about 4 days after the bill had been proposed. On the Saturday morning I was up early after an almost sleepless night to see if anyone had any updated information. But my inbox was empty. Deciding that I could not sit around and do nothing, I remembered that I had once received a “sign a petition” request from Renata Leite Pitman about the Inter-oceanic highway. I remembered that the site was easy to use and allowed users to set up their own petitions. I started to do some background research and write information contained in the original petition. I set it up with Anja’s help, and then sent it out to a few contacts to see what they thought of it and to see if it fitted into any organised protest that I might not have been aware of. By Sunday morning I had not received any feedback that I should not go ahead, and sent it out to 2 mailing lists. The first was the Peruvian one supplied by Juan Grados, and the other was a selection of my friends and contacts. The text was simple: Love the rainforests of Peru? Then 10 seconds of your time to add your voice to the protest: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-candamo-heart-of-the-bahuaja-sonen... The heart of the Tambopata and Bahuaja Sonene National Park is under attack. Oil companies have sneaked a bill before the Peruvian Government that now awaits ratification from the Congress and conservationists and environmentalists have not had a say in the process. We need at least 1000 signatures to present to the members of congress in order to show there is another side to the story. This is urgent. More important than updating your profile on Facebook. Act now. Spread the word. By the Sunday evening the petition had nearly 200 signatures. On Monday I finally received an email from Kurt Holle, whom I always new would be a big player in organising any incursion into the area with over 2 decades work experience in the area. Kurt had organised the website salvemoscandamo.com. This site was in Spanish, and initially he speculated turning the petition side over to the one set up via care2.com. However, I pointed out that if we tailored his site to collecting local signatures from Peru and left mine for International participants, then this would be useful as his site would reflect the voice of Peru, which was going to be the most important and would be listened to by congress members. We linked sites, and I referred Peruvians to salvemoscandamo.com and vice versa. I was relieved that finally we had an Alliance, and Kurt took up the phrase, so we became the “Save Candamo Alliance”. That allowed me to take my name off the head of the petition, something that had been bothering me as I felt that this should be led by a Peruvian. Apart from that I found it difficult to organize effective protest from the UK without good communication and limited contact to key organizations and people in Peru. However, a lot of prominent people had been offering support, amongst them James Gilardi of the World Parrot Trust. I also received a very supportive e-mail from Catherine Sahley of CONATURA that encouraged me to continue and keep going. By Tuesday we had collected over 1000 signatures. That had been my initial modest target and I could not believe it had been achieved so fast. Many of the people who had signed were famous names from the scientific research community in Peru, and it was great to see their support. Susana Cárdenas Alayza, a biologist at the Living Landscapes Program had contacted me about what I planned to do with the 1000 signatures. I had replied that I had simply planned to email them to the list of congress people available on the official webiste of the Peruvian Congress: http://www.congreso.gob.pe/organizacion/pleno.asp?mode=Pleno She suggested I pass this onto a sympathetic congress member Daniel Abugattas. By the time I had prepared the petition and sent it on 3 October, there were 1400 signatures. 46 nationalities are represented with the top 10 Countries: 1. Peru 597 2. US 381 3. UK 177 4. South Africa 42 5. Spain 31 6. Germany 30 7. Canada 28 8. Holland 18 9. France 16 10. Finland 13 The sexes were equally represented for those who disclosed this information: 596 Men 598 Women. The average signing age was 33, the youngest person 13, the oldest 80 My wife, Anja, had been very supportive all the way along. She organised the translation of the bill into English through her translation contacts, and also did a lot to promote the website and petition. Where I had not received feedback from any of my efforts to contact BBC or Greenpeace UK, she had successfully managed to enlist the support of several German based websites. The most significant being http://www.regenwald.org/. Guadalupe worked really hard to set up the online petition letter, which in 3 or 4 days of going live had generated 4000 responses, an incredible amount! On Friday I read via the website livinginperu.com that the TLC – or Free Trade Agreement – between USA and Peru had been ratified in the US, I was really depressed, as this was a key area of pressure that the environmental movement had been targeting to stop the bill. Later on in the evening I received a very short email from Daphne to say that the movement of the bill through congress had been halted. I was euphoric, as this was the first piece of good news that we had heard all week. On the Saturday I phoned the Rainforest Expeditions offices to confirm this. The atmosphere was one of cautious relief – as the bill has not been scrapped. However, we now have the time to build on the alliances established within this tumultuous week, and show a united front for the Oil and Gas company’s next efforts to redefine the borders of protected areas for their own designs.