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Interview with Lider Sucre
QUESTION: WHAT IS THE GOAL OF THE MUSEUM?
ANSWER: Our goal is really to make people become far more aware of the extraordinary heritage that we have as citizens of the world. When we look at biodiversity... biodiversity is disappearing at an alarming rate, as we have so often heard. But what we find also is that most of the public doesn't even grasp what this means. What is biodiversity? And how does it translate into something that can impact me or something that transcends my life and transcends the future?
QUESTION: WHAT WILL SE SEE IN THE 45,000 SQ.FT. MUSEUM?
ANSWER: There are eight galleries that detail a different chapter in a story. It's a story that tells you about biodiversity and the natural history of Panama. You see it as an example of the biodiversity of the world. The first thing you will experience is an introduction to what biodiversity is. It's a gallery called the ramp of life. It will tell you the basics of biodiversity and it will also assault you with a collage, a mural, a glass mural of the umpteen varieties of life that you can see in Panama. Then you go right into this gallery. It is actually a theatre called Panamarama. Panamarama is a surround theatre with fourteen screens, where you are surrounded by Panama eco-systems. You go from a coral reef through a rain forest, a cloud forest, down to the Darien and different eco-systems... not from the perspective of a human being, but from the perspective of a wild creature. So you are going to be a fish for a while swimming in the coral reef. Then you're going to be a turtle that's laying its eggs. So it's swimming up, up and it comes out on the beach and starts laying its eggs, and then goes into metamorphosis into a mammal that is going through the swamp & lowland forest. And eventually you morph again into a Quetzal. You are going along with another Quetzal flying through the cloud forest looking at the mist, the bromeliads, at the orchids, everything hanging down from the trees and so on until finally you are going along with another Jaguar in the deep jungles of the Darien.
Then you go onto the human path, which is an exhibit that explains how humans came to the isthmus and came through onto other parts of the Americas, how they used the isthmus as a link and how their history interacted with the tropical eco-systems that they found here. The fruits that they found, the fruits that they brought, the colonial era and how Panama's position as a nexus, a hub, was critical in telling the Panamanian history. And it shows not only the biological connectivity of the place, but also the human connectivity that Panama has been characterized by.
The following gallery is called Oceans Divided. That's where you find two huge aquaria, really the largest aquaria that exists in Central America. One is depicting the Caribbean, which is a part of the Atlantic. It depicts a Caribbean eco-system. And on the other side it depicts the Pacific eco-system. These two oceans are only fifty miles apart in Panama but they couldn't be more different for two tropical oceans. The Caribbean is full of coral reefs. It's a very colorful ocean. It is pouring nutrients, which means you don't have big schools of fish. What you have is a lot of diversity and color. The Pacific is extraordinarily prolific in Panama. There are enormous schools of fish and that abundance of life feeds a huge fishery. We have a very productive fishery in Panama. But they are a result of very different ecological conditions just across the isthmus, fifty miles from each other. In the Oceans Divided you can see the effect that splitting the oceans had in the ecology of each of these two oceans.
Your journey culminates in the Hall of Interdependence. The Hall of Interdependence, where you learn that all organisms are interlinked and that that linkage, that co-evolution, the joint evolution of organisms reaches its summit in the tropical rain forests of the world in the hot, humid inner tropics. You go through the hall of Interdependence and you are assaulted almost by this gigantic sculpture of a fig tree. It's a straggler fig and it's a tree that depends very tightly on a specific species of wasps which breeds within the tree to pollinate itself. It's a fascinating story and its one of many stories, over thirty different stories or tales, from the rain forest that take advantage of the wealth of scientific information that is available in this part of the world. It's where the case study about biodiversity materializes. We don't want people to just feel like biodiversity is this extraordinarily large body of life that you can tally; 935 species of birds, 227 species of frogs, 10,000 species of vascular plants. Those are all numbers. We want people to fall in love with biodiversity. To see how sublime it is that a hummingbird would evolve a beak that is 180 degrees around, that fits in only one species of Haliconia and no other. That makes it a forest relationship between the two of them. If the hummingbird becomes extinct, the Haliconia loses its only pollinator and becomes extinct as well.
QUESTION: WHEN WILL THE MUSEUM BE OPEN?
ANSWER: 2010, and we are pretty much on track right now. It's a very exciting project. The year 2010 is going to be an international year on biodiversity in coordination with the United Nations. It will be one of the marquee events of that year. The museum aims to be attractive to everyone. At the same time, as an institution, we want to target very strongly young children or kids that will be seeing the museum as part of the school curriculum.
QUESTION: WHY IS THE BIODIVERSITY MUSEUM IMPORTANT NOW?
ANSWER: Once you lose one species that's gone forever. You've taken that species away for every human being that will come from here on. You can never bring them back. We want people to come out of the museum not only feeling that there is an astounding diversity of life out here in the tropics but also going a bit deeper in understanding that it is not just numbers. It's a sublime world contained within itself in the rain forest, thousands and thousands of interdependencies amongst birds, amongst plants, amongst orchids, amongst microorganisms, amongst predators and prey. The level of complexity that that relation attains in the tropical rain forest far exceeds the level found elsewhere in the world. We want people to experience that or at least understand how complex and how fascinating it is.
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Lider Sucre is a Harvard Business School graduate who leads Panama's environmental activist group the Association for the Conservation of Nature, or ANCON.
"The Uribe proposal is our most important issue at ANCON right now," Sucre said during a recent interview. "We would not only lose irreplaceable biodiversity, we would also lose something that makes us uniquely Panamanian."
"Our government has to maintain good relations with Colombia, but a road through the Darién would be devastating for us," Sucre said. Sucre believes the destruction of forest habitat would harm several species of birds, which exist nowhere else in the world.
- National Geographic
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