Praia do Forte

I just got back from 2 full days at Praia do Forte. Once a tiny, poor fishing town, Praia do Forte has been utterly transformed i the last thirty years. I need to take a moment to tell this story, one of the happier stories of Brazil.

Praia do Forte's transformation dates to a small band of young college students, who, thirty years ago, hatched a ridiculously optimistic project to try to protect sea turtles on the beaches of Brazil. At the time virtually all sea turtle nests on Brazilian beaches were failing - people killed and ate the females who crawled up on the beach to nest, and ate the delicious turtle eggs as well. Virtually every one of them. Hardly a single turtle nest remained to hatch, in all of Brazil's vast coastline. And of course, all of the species of sea turtles were crashing precipitously.

The college kids started what is now known as Projeto TAMAR, the sea turtle project. (TAMAR is short for TArtarugas MARinas, marine (sea) turtles in Portuguese).

Right from the outset the college kids stuck to a fundamentally important idea: to save the sea turtles, you have to first save the local people. Get the local people out of poverty, give them other alternatives, other ways to make a living. Enable them to buy other sources of food so that they don't have to eat sea turtles. And educate them about the turtles so that they start to care about them.

Here is what they did. First, they hired local fisherman - the ones who were killing the female turtles and collecting the eggs - to find the nests. And to PROTECT the eggs. They hired dozens of these fishermen to walk the coasts every morning, looking for sea turtle nests. If the fishermen found a turtle nest, they collected the eggs in a bucket and brought them back to Projeto TAMAR, where the eggs could be reared safely and the little turtles could be released to the sea.

And of course the moment the fishermen were being paid to protect eggs instead of to eat them, the fishermen stopped eating turtle eggs.

The TAMAR people realized at some point that the fishermen's wives also needed income. So they started helping the women develop crafts that they could sell to tourists. TAMAR started a gift shop, and bought the local women's crafts to sell in the gift shop. This developed over time into a major emphasis - to make sure the women of the fishermen's families had their own source of income. (Over 50 thriving local craft businesses owe their start entirely to TAMAR.)

TAMAR gradually built a huge sea turtle exhibit - piece by piece, one aquarium at a time - with live turtles as the focus. There are always a few injured ones that can't be released for some reason, so why not let tourists come look at them? They started adding little extra attractions like statues of turtles for little kids to play on, games, movies, restaurants, shops. They hired only local people to staff these stores.

Tourists started to arrive. Pousadas (B&B's) were built. More new jobs for the fishermen and their wives - construction jobs, taxi drivers, shopkeepers, shopowners....

There's a name for all of this now: ecotourism. Or sustainable tourism. Harnessing the economic power of tourism to help endangered species, and help local people.

TAMAR took baby sea turtles to schools and showed the turtles to the kids. Most of the kids had never seen sea turtles before. TAMAR people told me that over and over again, whenever kids were shown a baby sea turtle, their jaws would drop. They'd say "I had had no idea that the eggs I've been eating would make a little animal like this!" Most adults reacted the same way, actually - most had never seen a baby sea turtle in their lives. The same TAMAR person told me that of all the education projects they tried, this one always had the biggest impact - actually meeting, and touching, a baby sea turtle. (It's a lucky thing for the sea turtles that their babies happen to be so adorable!)

The emphasis on educating children began to take on all kinds of new unexpected dimensions. One day, a fishermen showed up at the door of the then-tiny TAMAR office pleading for help. His pregnant wife was in labor and they needed to get to a hospital, but had no transportation. So TAMAR started a little informal free taxi service to take local people to health clinics. (Then they eventually built a local health clinic.) One thing led to another and next thing you know they were driving kids to school. I sensed by the way the TAMAR biologist told me this that this was actually quite a logistical hassle - can't you just picture the situation, one of their precious research vehicles, and researchers, having to suddenly leave the beach and go pick up all the kids from school. But, as he said, "We could see how important it was, and obviously we had to do it."

TAMAR started a summer program for the local kids, to help with the turtles. Some kids stayed with them for years and years in a sort of "beach ambassador" program, junior research assistants really. Then TAMAR started helping those same kids apply to college. Next thing you know they were driving a van of those kids to college every day. Next thing, college scholarships. Today, the first crop of TAMAR's young "beach ambassadors" are hitting adulthood. Now remember these are children of local fishermen, born into what was a very impoverished coastal fishing town. Several are in graduate school, several are biologists now, some are in vet school, some in medical school, and one in law school (specializing in environmental law).

Others have chosen to live locally (many still work with TAMAR), to work in the tourist industry, to be fishermen.... The point is, they had a choice.

Early on, TAMAR enacted a requirement for its researchers and employees that I have never heard of in any other conservation project. TAMAR requires that all its employees and researchers must move to Praia do Forte - must live there permanently, with their families. So that they really start to care about the local community.

So, today? At this point TAMAR has grown to dozens of turtle stations spread across 1100 km of Brazil's vast coastline - almost everywhere turtles were known to nest. Hundreds of volunteers and employees patrol the beaches every day during nesting season, looking for nesting turtles, rescuing the eggs. Over 900,000 baby sea turtles have been released. Hardly anybody eats the eggs any more - the turtles are so famous now that people protect the nests wherever they find them. The same TAMAR biologist told me "We just have to put a flag on the nest now, and people see the flag and protect the nest." (TAMAR still occasionally has to remove some eggs - but now it's just to protect them from foxes or dogs or road traffic, not from being eaten by people.)

Gradually, the precipitous decline in the sea turtle populations slowed, then stopped, plateaued... and now all the populations are increasing.

How about the local people? Well, Praia do Forte is a BOOMING tourist town now. It's bloomed into a major tourist destination - primarily visited by other Brazilians. It's organized around a wide, peaceful, shady pedestrian walkway lined with dozens and dozens of shops, all leading you, eventually (ok, after QUITE A LOT of bikini shops and ice cream shops and art shops...) to the sea turtle exhibit. It's got dozens of new pousadas, hotels, bazillions of resturants, and a youth hostel. Bikes for rent, castle tours, canoeing on the nearby lagoon, snorkeling trips, whale-watching.... Yeah, it's touristy. Yeah, it's a zillion bikini shops and ice cream stores one after the other. But I swear to god, this one town has saved the sea turtles of the entire South Atlantic Ocean. And it has completely transformed the lives of the local people.

Some say they prefer the quaint image of the old-time fisherman, heading out to sea in his little rowboat from the tiny old Praia do Forte of the past. But that was a tough life and a poor life and a hungry life (and the sea turtles were one gasp from extinction).