The Lost Land of the Jaguar, a three-part BBC documentary broadcast earlier this month, should be required viewing for any Guyanese who have not yet visited the interior. Although it is equal parts reality television and wildlife programme – recording the quirks of a small team of British naturalists as carefully as the landscape they explore – the series nevertheless makes a strong case for the preservation of Guyana’s remarkable biodiversity. For those of us who are accustomed to thinking of Guyana in terms of our relatively small and unremarkable towns and cities, the non-human drama of the rain forest will come as a welcome surprise.
There seems to be no end of serendipity if you go far enough into the bush. Early on, after a foolhardy descent into the Kaieteur gorge, a shivering Englishman rhapsodises about the various frogs he has stumbled across in the freezing mist below the falls. The camera pans in close on a grape-sized rocket-frog in its bromeliad home, then on to the tadpole-studded skin of another frog that will carry her young to maturity nestled atop her back. Elsewhere, there are close encounters with giant otters, a harpy eagle, a man-sized black caiman and a Frisbee-sized tarantula. In the Rupununi there is a great horror-movie moment in which the camera reveals a cave full of shrieking vampire bats, and some charmingly surreal footage of a giant anteater nosing around the savannah.
What is most remarkable, however, is the way to forest seems to revert to an earlier era as the explorers move further away from the coast. In one especially remote area, they come across a stretch of river where the fish are so abundant that they can be scooped up by the handful as they jump through the air.
Inexplicably, very few Guyanese appear on-screen. When they do, they are mostly background characters, acting as guides, driving boats, or cooking. This tends to create the impression that if it were not for the good work of these benevolent outsiders most of us would willingly sell off our pristine interior for the chance to overcome our chronic underdevelopment. (A voiceover explains, more than once, that Guyana is a poor country, in dire need of the easy cash that miners and timber companies could pay for the forest.)
The series does end with the expedition reporting to President Jagdeo, and a brief mention of his plan for Guyana to preserve the forest if properly paid to do so. But there is no discussion of what the public at large feels about the matter. That is a pity, for most of our apparent apathy stems from ignorance – only a tiny fraction of Guyanese have more than a passing knowledge of the interior. It is easy to feel indifferent towards a wilderness you have never seen firsthand and probably never will. Ironically, nature programmes like The Lost Land of the Jaguar are probably the best antidote to this indifference, but since we are rarely part of their intended audience their impact here is minimal. Until that changes, allowing more of us to feel we have a stake in the interior, the political will necessary to preserve our rain forest is not likely to improve.
