Robin Le Breton

 

Consultant on Natural Resource Management

M.Sc. Environmental Management, M.S. Agricultural Economics,

M.A. Law

People with enquiring minds – like those who read this page, for example – might ask how it comes about that a guy who runs a rainforest research center in South America has a Master’s degree in Law from one of the world’s oldest universities where, as of course they will know, the Law of the Jungle is not part of the curriculum. You will not find the answer to that question here. It is just one of those things in life to which there is no answer: it just happens.

I was raised on a farm in Africa and my father often told me that farming is a mug’s game and that I’d never be able to make a living from it. I didn’t really believe him but I thought it was useful advice, so armed with it and with a second, more relevant, degree (in Agricultural Economics), I was obviously perfectly equipped to be an Expert in Agricultural Development. For about twenty years, I pursued this career (my third) very happily: I traveled about the world a great deal and was handsomely paid to tell the grateful farmers on five different continents how they should run their farms. They listened very politely, and then went on doing what they had always done. Eventually it dawned upon me that something was wrong, so as soon as I had paid off my mortgage and educated my children, I bought a farm of my own to study my father’s axiom at closer quarters. I discovered that indeed he had been right all along about farming. (He wasn’t right about everything, though: he said that if you hover around flowers a lot like birds and bees do, you’ll end up having babies: I kept well away from flowers, but ended up with babies anyway – he must have got something wrong somewhere). I also discovered that farms are part of system – an ecosystem, for example, as well as a social system, so you can’t make a farm produce bountifully if you ignore the systems that it is part of. Well, one thing led to another, so the farm got involved in the forest and the forest got involved in the people who live in it, and nobody really seemed to know for sure what made what work, so we ended up with a research center, trying to figure it all out. It wasn’t so surprising that I should end up living in the middle of the jungle with jaguars and anacondas all over the place: I was always gifted with animals, ever since I was very small. Once I was walking through the forest and a tiger jumped on me and started gnawing my shoulder: I whipped around and gouged out its eyes and stamped on them and they popped like ripe grapes. My father said later it couldn’t have been a tiger as there aren’t any in Africa: I never cared much about details - maybe it was a zebra, then: I remember it had stripes. I was only four at the time so how much would you expect me to remember, anyway?

Of course, I had to get another degree as well, otherwise no one would take me seriously, so I got a Master’s in Environmental Management just to prove I know all about it. I do other things as well: I founded Iracambi to support the rainforest research (if you want me to tell you more about that, just click here): I work with local government (I was the founder chairman of the county economic development council) and I am member of the State Environmental Policy Council as well as former vice–chairman of the State Park advisory council. And, yes, I do have some practical skills, too: like any country boy, I can vaccinate a calf, skin an ox, operate a chainsaw: I can the change the gearbox in a Land Rover, pilot an aircraft and I play a mean hand of Risk. I speak all kinds of different languages. Trouble is I can’t remember what they all are – this is called Dynamic Random Access Memory Decay and is relieved (but not cured) by keeping your hard drive in the refrigerator. (Or by putting your head in a bucket of water).