Photo by Natalya Stanko
Campbell Plowden, right, setting up an alembic distillation pot with Manuel, curaca of the village of Brillo Nuevo in the Amazon.

by Jill Gómez

Haley van Oosten, founder and president of L’Oeil du Vert, a company that searches the world for fragrances to create unique scents, knew about the sublime fragrance given off by the resin of the copal tree. With a serendipitous click on the Center for Amazon Community Ecology (CACE) website, van Oosten initiated the possibility for a new product that might help sustain the native village of Brillo Nuevo and other small forest communities in the Peruvian Amazon. She read about the Center’s research on copal and contacted Campbell Plowden, a State College ecologist and environmentalist who established CACE four years ago.

“How many places on the web can tell you a lot about copal resin?” laughed Plowden.

We don’t hear as much in the news these days about the Amazon, but its forests are still being damaged and denuded at alarming rates to raise cattle and soybeans, cut timber, and extract oil and minerals. Thousands of colonists are entering the region on an ever-growing network of roads. The fertility of the region’s ancient soils is low, so farmers often adopt short cycles of slash and burn agriculture, abandoning plots and moving on to new areas. Sometimes communities accept much-needed quick cash for removal of their largest trees regardless of the loss of fruit trees, water quality and social harmony.

Plowden is passionate about protecting the rain forests and worked with Greenpeace for over a decade against forest destruction in the Amazon. Those years taught him, however, that he couldn’t do it well on a global scale. He entered a PhD program in ecology at Penn State with the dream of working directly with native Amazon communities to try to find positive alternative solutions. He spent a couple of years with the Tembé Indians in the eastern Brazilian Amazon, studying the ecology, sustainable harvest and marketing of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). These items include plant fruits, fibers and resins (and sometimes animal parts) that forest people can collect for personal use or make into products like handicrafts they can sell.

While Plowden found this work enriching, he quickly discovered the challenges of harvesting plants without harming them and selling them for a price that made all of the time invested in finding and getting them to market worthwhile.

Plowden founded the not-profit organization CACE in 2006 to “promote the understanding, conservation and sustainable development of human and other biological communities in the Amazon region.”

“We believed that if we could look very selectively at plants that people in forest communities could process themselves and sell as value-added products, we could fulfill two very important goals in the conservation picture,” said Plowden. “One [goal] is to simply enable people to generate more income to help them buy basic supplies, help them put their kids in school, buy medicines, etc. The other is to develop lucrative activities that can be genuine incentives to reduce their attraction to or dependence on destructive logging and cash crop agriculture—activities that can be profitable in the short term but are very harsh on the forests.”

Plowden and his Peruvian colleagues have begun their fifth year of trial and error discoveries about how to best harvest the copal resin and distill it into a precious golden essential oil that they hope, with practice and perfection, may sell for $500 or more per liter—a respectable profit for an Amazon community.

Finding widely dispersed copal trees is the first challenge in this venture. Even teams of locals who intimately know the forest around their village may only find three or four trees with resin lumps in a full day. The lumps are formed on the trunks of trees by bark-boring weevils. Sustainably harvesting most plant parts means avoiding harm to the host plant. In this case, Plowden is trying to figure out how much and how often resin can be removed so enough weevil larvae growing inside the lumps can live to maturity and produce the next generation of weevils.

Last summer, Plowden took a copper alembic pot with him to Peru to use in the group’s first attempt to distill copal resin to produce its essential oil.

“It was a comedy of errors. It’s critical that you seal all of the joints between your pot, your column, your tubes, your condenser, etc.,” said Plowden. “Old world oil distillers traditionally use a paste of rye flour to do this. We looked all around the city of Iquitos (the capital of Peru’s largest Amazon state of Loreto), and not surprisingly, we couldn’t find any rye flour.”

“When we returned to the village, I presented this problem to the village curaca, Manuel, who suggested we try making a paste with mashed cassava. One of the things the Bora [people] eat daily is a very thick bread made from the root of this staple crop. So we thought, we’ll make the paste, put it around the joints, and then as it heats up, it will basically solidify into bread that will seal the joints. But steam leaked out, so we kept adding more paste. Soon half of the pot was covered in a thick and half-cooked coat of cassava dough.”

Just in case, Plowden had brought down some plumbing sealant. They pulled off the crusty cassava, applied the sealant to the junctures—and it worked! They discovered they needed to pry it off right after a distillation run before it turned rock-hard.

Thanks to support from the Rufford Small Grant fund in the U.K., CACE has been able to contract a field savvy Peruvian agronomist and respected young Bora leader to further develop the copal pilot project in Brillo Nuevo.

“It was exciting to produce our first batch of copal oil last summer, but unfortunately its strong lemon scent made it seem better for a cleaning fluid than perfume,” said Plowden. “Our team is now searching for new species of copal resin to test, and we are going to let some resin lumps sit for awhile before we distill them because essential oils often improve with age like a fine wine. We’re learning a lot as we go along.”

While the copal project is mostly aimed at developing a way for men to generate some income from the forest (as a potential alternative to logging), Plowden and CACE also try to support artisans in their partner communities who are mostly women. The Center buys a wide range of plant-based handicrafts including bags, baskets, jewelry and decorative items which it sells at presentations and craft fairs. Its Amazon Forest Store is due to go online this fall.

“A few communities already have unique products that tourists really like to buy. The women from Brillo Nuevo and other remote communities are skilled weavers, but few tourists go there and they don’t get much for their long labor because they tend to make the same handicrafts as all the other communities: hammocks and bags.

“Why don’t you try making some belts?” Plowden suggested to a group of women during his March 2009 visit there.

“I passed out buckles, showed them my belt as a model and invited them to create any design. One woman made alternating blocks of red, yellow, black and tan from the natural-dyed chambira palm fibers. Another exclaimed, ‘Wow, that looks like a naca naca (coral snake),’ and an exciting marketing idea was born.”

Last summer Plowden met with the women again, listing the snakes they knew and drawing the basic patterns on a blackboard. The women produced prototypes of a dozen colorful Amazon snakes including anaconda, cascabel (tropical rattlesnake) and loro machaco (green tree pit viper).

Plowden is optimistic that the new belt-making enterprise could prove to be one more—albeit small—step toward helping a village such as Brillo Nuevo find ways to improve the lives of its people and safeguard its surrounding forest.

To learn more about the Center for Amazon Community Ecology, visit www.amazonecology.org.