Daniel H. Janzen

Daniel H. Janzen (Milwaukee, United States; 1939), graduated in biology from the University of Minnesota then went on to obtain a PhD from the University of Berkeley, California in 1965. In 1963, while still a student, he attended a tropical biology course in Costa Rica offered by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OET), a consortium of North American and Costa Rican universities. He returned there as a teacher in 1965 and has since kept up an active involvement in OTS activities. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, he held professorial posts at the universities of Kansas (1965-1968), Chicago (1969-1972) and Michigan (1972-1976), as well as teaching courses in Venezuela and Puerto Rico.

An advisor to former Costa Rican president Óscar Arias, he was instrumental in the set-up of the country’s National Biodiversity Institute (INBio) and in the design of its network of national parks. He has been awarded with prestigious awards, such as the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1984), the  Kyoto Prize (Japan) in 1977, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2002) and the Blue Planet Prize of the Asahi Glass Foundation (2014). He is member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States since 1992.

The story of American ecologist and naturalist Daniel H. Janzen, winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category, is not only that of a researcher who has studied butterfly caterpillars since the age of ten. Nor is it solely about his pioneering and influential presence in tropical ecology. Janzen is also the protagonist of an adventure which some might call Utopian, but which happens to be true and, furthermore, ends happily after nearly four decades in the making.

For Janzen has proved that it is possible to protect a large expanse of tropical forest and to do so in a lasting way; to help nature resist the incursions of a model of progress that craves its riches even at the cost of its destruction. The formula? Together with his wife, the ecologist Winnie Hallwachs, Janzen has turned biodiversity into a resource that is socially and economically competitive on a short-term basis. This, he believes, is the way to ensure that “at least some small fraction of the planet’s biodiversity is still with us 1,000 years from now.”

Janzen works in the Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) in Costa Rica: 165,000 hectares of restored forest system, designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and with an international name as one of the best tropical examples of “biodiversity-developed conservation,” in the words of the jury’s citation. “The ACG is a model of how to conserve a large complex tropical ecosystem that has been inspirational to tropical biology and conservation initiatives throughout the world.”

“The ACG is a model of how to conserve a large complex tropical ecosystem that has been inspirational to tropical biology and conservation initiatives throughout the world.”

TUITEAR

Getting the Guanacaste project off the ground called for all of Janzen’s social and political acumen, which he put to work in such diverse tasks as convincing the authorities, raising funds or, even, expropriating a stretch of jungle operated by the CIA. A skills set that is far from common among naturalist scholars.

Janzen, who holds the Conservation Biology professorship at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, United States) but spends much of the year in Costa Rica, has long been accustomed to combining classroom theory with the most hands-on kind of practice: “I wanted a professional career that allowed me to have one foot in a U.S. academic institution and the other in some tropical region.” His love affair with the tropics began at age 15, when he persuaded his father to take the family to Mexico for their two months of vacation, so he could pursue his favorite hobby: collecting butterflies. “That trip really opened my eyes,” he now relates.

Not long after, he was back in Mexico preparing his thesis on ants and their interaction with the acacias that are their habitat, the first in a long list of research projects dealing with ecological networks in the world’s tropical regions. Indeed Janzen is author of one of the most exhaustive studies ever carried out on the multiple species of butterfly caterpillars. Why caterpillars? “Learning which caterpillar eats which plant, and which parasitoid eats each caterpillar, and why and how and when, is learning how to read wild biodiversity,” he replies. “At present, humanity largely treats wild biodiversity the way an illiterate treats literature – as firewood, toilet paper and shipping cartons. I do caterpillars, plants and parasitoids because I am curious about them, and because they taught me to read.”

He is also a pioneer in the use of new-generation genetic techniques based on DNA sequencing in order to classify species. In particular, he is among the promoters of the International Barcode of Life project, which aspires to DNA barcode 5% of the world’s species over the next five years. Janzen’s own goal is to employ this technique to catalogue the Lepidoptera fauna of Guanacaste.

Guanacaste. The place where Janzen has made his most indelible mark outside of academic circles. The reserve, occupying lands that the Spanish crown granted one of its captains around the year 1580, was for four centuries a grazing ground for cattle. Janzen and Hallwachs came up with the idea for the conservation project in 1985. They wanted an area “big enough to preserve its biodiversity, and at the same time tolerate moderate, non-damaging use by society.” They explained their plan to the then President of Costa Rica, Óscar Arias, who approved it with the dual proviso that it cost the Government nothing and be completed during his four years in office.

“And we did it, with the help of a large number of Costa Rican citizens, more than 9,000 individual international donors, nine countries…,” Janzen recalls. They bought lands off 22 proprietors paying the market price, and joined them to a plot expropriated from the CIA, which had built an airstrip there as logistical support for the Contras fighting in Nicaragua. The aim, from the outset, was for the AGC to be embedded in the community. In the early 1980s, Janzen and Hallwachs had observed how a national park in the south of Costa Rica was literally overrun by 1,500 gold miners, and had learned that fences and guards are not enough to create a protected area: “The ACG had to be made a legitimate and desirable part of Costa Rican society. It had to be turned into a large farm that produces and therefore survives.”

The secret lies in what it produces: wildlife and biodiversity. “The ACG is a farm with 350,000 species of crops,” says Janzen, and it is also economically self-sufficient, earning about as much from tourist visits to equal what the government gives it in salaries. Which brings us to another of the projects’s strong points: the parataxonomists. Many Guanacaste residents are now highly trained guides, engaged in cataloguing hundreds and thousands of species. The experience indeed has proved such a success that the Frontiers of Knowledge prize money will be applied in its entirety to funding the ACG Parataxonomist Program.