every living thing. man’s obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys, 2009, p.290

Every
Living Thing
Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life,
From Nanobacteria to New Monkeys
Rob R. Dunn
Preface by E. O. Wilson
To Monica and Lula,
my greatest discoveries.
ii
Contents
Preface by E. O. Wilson
Introduction
Part I
Beginnings
1. What We All Used to Know 3
2. Common Names 23
3. The Invisible World 40
Part II
Fogging (The Tree of Life)
4. The Apostles 59
5. Finding Everything 87
6. Finding an Ant-Riding Beetle 111
Part III
Roots
7. Dividing the Cell 133
8. Grafting the Tree of Life 149
i
v
vii

Contents
v
9. Symbiotic Cells on the Seafloor 165
10. Origin Stories 181
Part IV
Other Worlds
11. Looking Out 193
12. To Squeeze Life from a Stone 209
13. The Wrong Elephant? 224
14. What Remains 246
Endnotes 257
Index 265
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
i
273
Preface
E. O. WILSON
T
his is an important and timely book for studies in the history of
science. Aimed at a broad readership, it identifies what is cer-
tain to be a major enterprise of biology through the rest of the
present century: the exploration of Earth—which, it turns out, is still
a little-known planet.
Most readers, including a good many biologists themselves, still
think that the task of finding and classifying every species of organ-

ism has been largely completed. In this very erroneous conception, a
new kind of frog or butterfly might indeed seem newsworthy. But in
fact, while it is true that perhaps 80 percent of the flowering plants and
95 percent of the species of birds are known, only a small fraction of
the far greater diversity of insects and other invertebrate animals have
been discovered. Fewer than 10 percent of fungi and many fewer than
one percent of microorganisms are known.
Of the species known, less than a tenth of a percent have been
studied in any depth—and even then across only part of the range of
their entire biology. If in-depth examination of such “model species”
constitutes the first dimension of present and future biology, the dis-
covery and study of the full diversity of life can be said to be the second
dimension. The third dimension is then the reconstruction of the
evolutionary history of each species, called the Tree of Life initiative.
Without the second dimension better developed, humanity is flying
largely blind in its endeavors to stabilize and manage the living world.
We are falling far short of even imagining, much less realizing, the
benefits such knowledge can bring to our own species.
v
Preface
In Every Living Thing, Robert Dunn has made a significant con-
tribution to the true picture of biodiversity by relating the stories of
some of the key contributors in the centuries-long effort to explore the
second dimension. To an extent that exceeds the biographies of labora-
tory-bound biologists, the lives of the biodiversity pioneers are physical
as well as intellectual adventures. Through his friendship with some
of the pioneers and his own experiences, Dunn conveys the spiritual
commitment and excitement that biodiversity studies provide.
We are now on the cusp of two new paradigms destined to trans-
form and hugely accelerate the exploration of the biosphere. Both are

technology-driven. The first is genomics: The entire genetic code of a
bacterium species can be read in only several hours, and at a rapidly
dropping cost. This breakthrough has begun to light up the previous
vast “dark matter” of the microbiological universe, and to bring micro-
bial ecology to new prominence. It has also energized the Tree of Life
through DNA-based phylogenetic reconstructions.
The second technological advance is the Encyclopedia of Life.
Newly launched (officially in 2008), it will in time make available ev-
erything known about every species of organism, both previously cata-
logued and newly discovered into the future, through a single portal
on command, any time, anywhere, to anyone, for free. Like an organ-
ism, it will be constantly growing in real time. The facility will be of
enormous value to a large spread of human concern, from agriculture
and biotechnology to medicine and public health. It is being accom-
panied by the Biodiversity Heritage Library, also now launched, which
will eventually give free Web access to the complete original literature
on each of the species. The number of pages to be scanned has been
estimated to be as high as 500 million.
As Robert Dunn’s personality-based historical narratives show, the
passion to know every living thing has been part of biology for more
than 300 years. Now, what remains to be accomplished in this Great
Linnaean Enterprise will be multiplied many times over, and most of
the life of Earth illuminated during the present century.
vi
i
Introduction
“There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in
your philosophy.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET
T

he idea of writing this book came to me in the middle of the
Amazon. My wife was there as a medical anthropologist. I was
baggage. We flew on a small plane to a faraway place where we
did not speak the local language, did not know the customs, and more
often than not, did not entirely recognize the food. We were often the
only ones fully clothed. We were the only ones who did not sleep in a
handmade hammock. We were the only ones who complained about
the bugs. We could not have felt more foreign.
We were Westerners raised on books and computers, highways
and cell phones, living in a village without running water or electric-
ity. There was also the small matter, parenthetically, that everyone in
town believed that we were a “commission” sent to lead an indigenous
revolution against the navy. It was easy to go to sleep at the end of the
day feeling a little misunderstood.
Then one perfect Amazonian evening, with macaws hanging in
midair and monkeys calling from beyond the village green, we played
soccer. I am not good at soccer, but that evening it was wonderful.
Everyone knew the rules. We all spoke the same language of passes and
shots. We understood one another perfectly. It seemed like a transcen-
dent moment. I was, as the photos show, smiling widely. As darkness
came over the field and the match ended, the goalie, Juan, walked over
vi
Introduction
ii
to me and, leaning in, said in a matter-of-fact way, “In your home, do
you have a moon too?” So much for transcendence.
After I explained to Juan that yes, we did have a moon and yes, it
was remarkably similar to his, I felt a sort of awe at the possibilities that
existed in his world. In Juan’s world, each village could have its own
moon. In Juan’s world, the unknown and undiscovered was immense

and marvelous. The known was a small field in the jungle, the local
trees, some bugs, and a livelihood. Juan knew his daily life, and all the
rest was conjecture. He had never seen the Andes Mountains, which
begin their rise into the clouds just twenty miles south of Juan’s home,
just beyond the distance Juan could run. Anything was possible.
In Western society, we know that Earth has only one moon. We
have looked at our planet from every angle and found all of the wildest
things left to find. I can, from my computer at home, pull up satellite
images of Juan’s village. There are no more continents and no more
moons to search for, little left to discover. At least it seems that way.
Yet, as I thought about Juan’s question, I was not sure how much more
we could really rule out. I am, in part, an ant biologist, so my thoughts
turned to what we know about insect life and I knew that much in the
world of insects remains unknown. How much, though? How ignorant
are we? The question of what we know and do not know clung to me.
The next step in my nascent obsession with what we know about the
world was simple. I began collecting newspaper articles about new spe-
cies. Articles would, it seemed, come out almost every week. New monkey
discovered. New phylum discovered. New spider, new rat, new porcu-
pine, new whale, new relative of the giraffe, and on and on they appear.
My drawer quickly filled, and this was just with big things. My own spe-
cialty is ants, but “new ant” never makes it into the paper. I have an ant
named after me and no one has ever called me from the New York Times
to talk about it. I have never even seen it again after I first collected it.
No one has.
I began a second drawer for more general discoveries: new cave
system discovered with dozens of nameless species, new mountain of
vi
Introduction
x

life discovered in Papua New Guinea, new lineage of microbes, four
hundred species of bacteria found in the human gut. The second
drawer began to fill and as it did, I wondered whether there were bigger
discoveries out there, not just species or lineages, but entire basic kinds
of life that are all around us but invisible, life on other planets, life
that lives off substances thought to be useless, life even without DNA. I
started a third drawer for these big discoveries. It fills more slowly, but
all the same, it fills.
In looking into the stories of biological discovery, I also began to
find something else, a collection of scientists, often obsessive, usually
brilliant, occasionally half-mad, who made the discoveries. It is easy
to imagine that most new discoveries come from global collaborations
and expensive research programs in which progress is incremental and
dependent on many individuals. Yet to a surprising extent the biggest
recent discoveries in biological science appear to still depend on the
observations and insights of just one or a few people. Those individu-
als very often see the same things that other scientists see, but they
pay more attention to them, and they focus on them to the point of
exhaustion, and at the risk of the ridicule of their peers. In looking for
the stories of discovery and what is left to discover I found the stories
of these people and the ways in which their lives, little known to me
before I began writing this book and probably little known to you, have
changed how we see the world.
I began to see similarities not only among the scientists who
made big discoveries, but also in how Western scientists and society
responded to those discoveries. For one, we are, before these discov-
eries, always more ignorant than we imagine ourselves to be. Unlike
Juan, we are repeatedly willing to imagine we have found most of what
is left to discover. Before microbes were discovered, scientists were
confident that insects were the smallest organisms. Before life was dis-

covered at the bottom of the ocean, many scientists were confident that
nothing lived deeper than three hundred fathoms. Once we made a
tree of life that included four kingdoms (animals, plants, fungi, and
i
Introduction
x
prokaryotes), we were confident that there would be no more major
branches to reveal.
Here I tell the stories of some of the biologists whose discoveries
have shaped what we know about the dimensions of the living world.
I focus on those discoverers who found entirely new realms of life
whether at the bottom of the ocean or in our own cells. We are again
at a stage when we believe we have found most of what might be found,
but we are wrong. The more I have acquainted myself with the sto-
ries of the biological discoveries, the more I have been convinced that
whole realms of life remain to be found.
I began by thinking that Juan, in asking if we too had a moon, was
the naive one, not me. But my view of the world has changed. While I
sat talking to scientists for this book, none of them asked if I too had
a moon, but one admitted that he was looking for a fourth domain of
life. Another believes he has discovered the cause of more than half
of all diseases on Earth. Yet another believes that more than half of
all life on Earth can be found in the crust and subsurface beneath the
ocean and our feet. We will not find another moon, but what these
scientists imagine is just as surprising. And even before a new realm or
kind of life is found, we still have to explore the realms we have already
discovered. Most species on Earth are not yet named. Most named spe-
cies have not yet been studied. When we lived in small communities,
hunting and gathering, we knew only the animals and plants around
us, particularly those that were useful or dangerous. Living on the thin

green surface of our small planet in a universe full of stars, we are not
so different today. The wild leaps up and more often than not we do
not even know its name.
Part I
Beginnings

3
1. What We All Used to Know
J
ust a few tens of thousands of years ago, we all lived in Africa.
For most of human history and prehistory, we lived in small,
illiterate communities. We began in the savannas where we for-
aged and hunted. We collected the animals and plants and named
what we found. Slowly at first, some individuals or communities left
on foot, following game or chance, or maybe just fleeing other people.
They traveled along routes about which we continue to speculate. With
time, they forgot where they had been. They carried no record of their
past with them, beyond what survived in myth. Any story or name not
mentioned in a lifetime disappeared.
Every year the front line of villages moved farther out. It was a slow
wave of bodies and livelihoods. Individuals in that front line found,
with each move, new animals, new plants, and more generally, new
life. Collectively, humanity revealed pieces of the story of life. Because
nothing was written and languages, as we spread, diverged, each dis-
covery was local, each lesson learned repeatedly. Communities landed
on the new landscape like a reader landing on a random page in a book.
They found themselves surrounded by but a few paragraphs of some-
thing much larger. They set about translating those paragraphs. In each
place, on each page, people would have to give names not only to all the
wild beasts, but also to the plants, the fungi, the beetles, and the ants,

and anything else that was to be used, avoided, or simply discussed.
Every Living Thing
4
On these organisms and their new names they hung knowledge, sto-
ries, and belief.
That was the first great wave of discovery. It is a forgotten part of
our scientific story. Long before Columbus or Magellan, much of the
world had been found. Seldom do we consider what those first great
explorers in small, fire-lit communities understood of Earth.
While drinking an espresso and reading People magazine, it is hard
to imagine our kin ever ate shoots and leaves, that they ever knew most
of the animals and plants by name.* We look out now and see pigeons.
We see the nameless green of the trees, and of the unclassifiable weeds
among the sidewalk cracks. Insects bat at our screens and we swat them
without partiality. We imagine now that the “natives” (of no relation
to us) were ignorant or at least simple, but a few generations ago, we
were “those people.” We all lived in small communities, hunted, and
foraged. We shat in the woods.
Clear views of how we once lived and what we once knew are il-
lusive. History has left us potsherds and ruins, but little in the way
of records of the knowledge our ancestors had of the species around
them. Contemporary communities where people gather and hunt or
even farm can, however, be models of parts of the past. In many such
communities, people still record little, know mostly what they have
heard and remember, and name new things they find. As long as we
are careful to remember that they are also, in important ways, differ-
ent from ancient communities, we can use these contemporary com-
munities to understand aspects of how life might have been in the past.
In these communities, we can find something of who we once were.
Having a measure of what we once were and knew is necessary if we are

to understand how far we have come and how far we might go.
• • •
* Of course the espresso comes from a bean, the seed of the coffee tree that was planted and do-
mesticated nearly a thousand years ago through traditional ecological knowledge in Ethiopia.
What We All Used to Know
5
One could go almost anywhere in the world to find communities of
people living off the land in ways that require traditional oral knowl-
edge of the species around them, knowledge our ancestors would have
needed. I started in Cavinas, Bolivia. The road to Cavinas is long and
in most places not a road at all, but instead a river or a footpath. To get
to Cavinas our first big step would be to get to Riberalta, the biggest
city in the northern Bolivian Amazon.*
To get to Riberalta, my wife Monica and I flew to Santa Cruz, Bo-
livia. From Santa Cruz, we took a bus to Trinidad, a sleepy town at the
southern edge of Bolivia’s great, flooded Amazonian savannas. From
Trinidad, we took the long bus north. We were traveling in what was
to be the dry season, but the water had not yet drained out of the land.
The floods still clung to grasses, forest and, as would soon be relevant,
to the roads.
The going was slow. A bus ride that was to take one day took several.
Mosquitoes flew in the windows, fed on us, and flew back out. The heat
came in and stayed. Day came and was replaced by night, once, twice,
and then a third time. For several days, the bus passed through what
remains largely unbroken forest and savanna, a landscape populated
with a billion insects, a dozen primate species, caimans, anacondas,
and the occasional forlorn cow. During that journey, the bus made a
single planned stop (in a one-hut town majestically named Sheraton).
Of course, that excludes the stops for flat tires, broken axles (fixed with
rope), and a six-hour period during which the driver of the bus tried

to get it unstuck by hitching it to horses, cows, and then, all at once, a
truck, two horses, and a cow. We suffered the same things that ailed the
early Western explorers: bad food, bad transport, long days, and—let’s
face it—our own lack of fortitude. In retrospect, the trip was a kind of
earned joy. During those days though, it was nearly all miserable.
As we rode into Riberalta, the roadsides turned from forest to agri-
* The inhabitants of Riberalta refer to it as a city, though there are few buildings over one story
and, at the time of our last visit, only one paved road. Nonetheless, it is the most urban center
most people of the region are likely to ever know.
Every Living Thing
6
culture, to the point where we could almost have been driving through
any Midwestern farmland—but Riberalta is not Iowa. Despite the cows
and crops, it is isolated, tropical, and wild. Seen from above, Riberalta
is a kind of settled island, surrounded by forest and water. To its north
is the Madre de Dios River, which bends and bows its way back up to
the Andes. To the east of Riberalta is the Beni River, which meets the
Madre de Dios at the edge of town. The Beni River drains the long, flat,
seasonally flooded plains of Bolivia, on which a large civilization once
rose and, somewhat mysteriously, fell. The rest of the surroundings are
forest, punctuated by small fields, pastures, savannas, and more rivers
(all draining into the Madre de Dios River, which itself drains into the
mouth of the Amazon some two thousand miles away). Within the
city are small houses, many of which are still roofed with thatch, and a
single city block with paved streets. On that paved block are most of the
town’s two-story houses, all owned at one time or another by rubber
barons, Brazil nut barons, or the odd mayor. Each night the wealthy
of Riberalta (a relative kind of wealth) get into their cars or onto their
motorcycles and circle the single plaza, cruising. The poorer, motorless
masses look on, faces powdered with the ever-present ether of ancient

red dust winnowed from the mountains by time.
When we arrived, we took motorcycle taxis to a hotel at the edge of
town run by a woman named Doña Rosa. Our backpacks still on our
backs, we had to flex our stomach muscles to keep from tipping back-
ward with the weight of our books, shoes, and clothes at each bump
in the road. At the hotel, we moved into a first-floor room beside the
Beni River, unpacked our things, and proceeded to sleep for the first
day and a half. We would stay here, our home base, off and on over the
next several years.
Our room had its drawbacks. It was close enough to the neighbor’s
house for us to hear them fighting, close enough to the street to hear
the bread boy’s horn each morning, and close enough to the kitchen to
go to sleep to the washing of pans. But it was also so close to the Beni
What We All Used to Know
7
River that we woke up the first night, and each subsequent one, to hear
the brown water tumbling by beside us. We dreamed of rivers. Rivers,
like the Beni, carried the first Amazonians around the forests. Rivers
flooded the lands where agriculture emerged. It was the rivers in which
the debris of the Amazon’s forests steeped. The rivers saw it all and
carried it with them—the wild cries of animals or the fragments of
words, the residues of dozens of languages being spoken on the banks
as people went to the water to wash, to fish, or even just to admire the
reflection of their moon.
We needed to go upstream, to see what was farther in, beyond the
roads. We needed to go upstream to get to Cavinas. Upstream, from
the perspective of the people of Riberalta, the forests are populated
more densely by myth than by humans. There, “the Indians still live in
the old way,” Doña Rosa’s Croatian husband told us. Some of them can
turn into jaguars, so we should be careful if we go. The scientist in me is

annoyed by stories about man-jaguars, yet there is undeniable mystery
left in the deep forest, mystery enough to lure me farther in. Science
requires skepticism, and yet discovery, more often than not, requires
a temporary relaxation of that skepticism. To discover something, you
first have to believe it is possible. I wanted to see what lurked between
the far-off trees, where a little bird seemed to call out my name.*
One floor above us, in the same hotel, lived Sarah Osterhoudt,
then working for the New York Botanical Garden. Sarah introduced
us to the Confederation of Indigenous People of Bolivia (CIDOB). The
members of CIDOB wanted someone to go and work in the indigenous
communities deep in the forest to document local knowledge. Within
a few weeks, we were packing our bags to make a trip to Cavinas, a
Cavineño community southwest of Riberalta, to document the inhab-
itants’ use of medicinal plants, bring in some school supplies, and un-
* I mean this literally. There was a small night bird that very clearly seemed to call out, “Rob,
Rob, Rob.”
Every Living Thing
8
derstand what a community so far from the road, so far from anything
but the forest and the river, knew of the world.
We imagined ourselves brave explorers, but the land of the Cav-
ineño had been visited by scientists as early as 1900.* We brought a
nice tent and some of our favorite foods. Still, we could not escape the
feeling that far from the main road, there was something left to learn.
We chartered a small plane from Riberalta to fly the three of us and a
local guide to Cavinas. The plane was old. Nervous about the age, but
more specifically about the dangling bits of metal below the engine,
I asked the pilot how the plane was doing. “Great,” he offered, “we
bought it from the Summer Linguistics Institute and we haven’t had
to do anything to it since.” That seemed well enough, except that, as

Monica yelled to me over the sound of the motor, “the Summer Lin-
guistics Institute got kicked out of Bolivia twenty years ago.” Too late.
We were off, a thirty-year-old clunker of a plane, our four-person team,
the pilot, and a small parrot that sat above the front passenger’s seat
and looked at us as we rose above its kin.
Words fail in describing the low flight over the Amazon to Cavi-
nas. It was most like snorkeling slowly over trees. The shades of green
seemed infinitely varied, with no two the same and each shade bearing
meaning and life. In northern Bolivia, the forest stretches for many
hundreds of miles in every direction but east, where one finds the
boundary of Bolivia and Brazil, and efficient Brazilian timber harvest-
ing. Flashes of color emerged and, as we neared, turned into macaws,
flowers, and fruits. Below us were the Beni River and its ancient
oxbows, grown up in sweeping, verdant swaths of lighter and darker
green. As we began to land, the colors grew even brighter and more
surreal. As we came closer and closer to the trees, we could see termite
* Ironically, one of those few scientists was also an ant biologist, W. M. Mann. I would not even be
the first person to ask the Cavineño what they knew about ants. See, for example, Wheeler, W. M.
and W. M. Mann. 1923. A Singular habit of sawfly larvae. Psyche 30: 9–12.
What We All Used to Know
9
mounds. We saw them with more and more detail until it became clear
they were on what was to be our runway.
We landed awkwardly, bouncing as the landing gear connected with
the cement-hard termite mounds. I had barely enough time to wonder what
kind of termites they were before the door opened. The community had
come out to meet our plane. Our guide quickly jumped out of the plane
and walked in the opposite direction. We were left standing by the still-
turning propellers, looking at two long lines of families, many people
half dressed, farmers in hand-me-down suits with the zippers missing,

babies clinging to mothers. We walked toward the lines and said hello.
One man greeted us and offered us a handshake. The shake was followed
by a back slap, a handshake, a back slap, and another handshake. We
struggled to learn this local greeting as quickly as possible and shook and
patted each adult who came forward, one by one, until we reached the
end of the rows and watched the plane take off, leaving us in the middle
of the Amazon, without a guide.
We would not know it until much later, but our arrival had been
entirely unannounced; everyone had simply heard the airplane and
run to the landing strip. One of those who had greeted us was a local
emissary of the navy. (After a series of losses of territory through un-
successful wars, Bolivia is now landlocked, but the navy, now more
humble, persists.)* He asked us what we were doing in Cavinas. Monica
explained that she had come to learn about the people’s treatment of
illness and their access to health care. The emissary scowled to indi-
cate his incredulousness. Sarah explained that she had come to study
local knowledge of plants. A more worried scowl. I explained that I had
come to study ants, at which point the emissary turned and left. If this
was the revolutionary commission, he had nothing to worry about. As
the emissary walked away, we looked around at the community gath-
ered before us. We had arrived.
• • •
* Cavinas itself, where the navy emissary was based, is not even directly on the river.
Every Living Thing
10
How or when humans first migrated into the New World tens of thou-
sands of years ago from places more like Alaska than the Amazon basin
remains contentious. New genetic analyses suggest that migration pro-
ceeded in two separate stages: an initial buildup of populations in what
are now Alaska and northwestern Canada followed by the migration

south of a small number of individuals, perhaps just a few hundred,
as recently as sixteen thousand years ago.
1
On the controversial front
lines of anthropology, even so timid an assertion invites hate mail. But
regardless of just when and how, we know that humans arrived and
upon arrival, some individuals continued to move.
The migration from the Bering Strait to the Andes and Amazon is
thought to have taken hundreds of generations, but it could have easily
been much quicker. We imagine our ancestors as slow and plodding.
Yet they, like us, would have occasionally felt the need to keep walk-
ing, to see what was over one hill and then the next, telling the kids the
whole while, “We’re almost there.”
Many things changed as humans migrated south from the cold
north. Walk among the conifer forests of the Arctic Circle and you will
find just one or two species of ants, only a dozen kinds of trees, and
cold, modest, flowers. The indigenous people of those places, like the
people who kept moving, know or knew these ants and trees and the
local birds and mammals well, as there are relatively few to know. As
humans migrated farther south, they would have to learn many more
species. The average acre of Amazonian forest hosts hundreds of tree
species. Within walking distance of a house are hundreds of bird spe-
cies. To try to name even just the obvious or important plants and ani-
mals of a tropical forest is to attempt to write a very large book without
a pen. It is to build out of language and memory an encyclopedia of
life—biased, no doubt, toward the useful and common—but poten-
tially enormous all the same. Where the people of the Arctic Circle
distinguish the parts and habits of reindeer or caribou, the native Am-
azonians had to distinguish hundreds of species of plants, even if only
to label them as good, bad, or deadly.

What We All Used to Know
11
• • •
Naming species is not big science. It is like mapmaking or dictionary
work and, on its own, of relatively little use. But it is the first step. It
is the first thing children do as they lay hold of their surroundings.
It is the simplest measure of the world. It is analogous to finding and
naming the planets and the stars. Once named, it is another matter
altogether to set the stars and planets, the moons and other bodies in
motion relative to each other, but it is the beginning. Every culture
known names species, then groups them, and then builds them into
knowledge and stories. Naming, and the learning associated with it,
is part of what makes us human. The closest of our primate kin can
name just a few species. Researchers have shown that vervet monkeys
respond differently to calls that seem to indicate different predators.
They look down for “snake,” up for “eagle,” and run into the trees for
“holy shit, leopard.”
2
Many species call out more general aspects of the
world, whether “danger,” or “I’m so sexy,” but we are the only ones who
can (or would want to), say “black-capped chickadee,” or to call out the
name of the more rare but ever observant protist, Kamera lens.
In addition to the names themselves, we might guess that tra-
ditional peoples, in naming plants and animals, also knew or know
about their uses. By learning from locals, anthropologists have sought
to identify the most useful plants and animals. They have sought to
learn how much local peoples know, how much they can know, and
what of that knowledge can be put to use.
In Cavinas, whatever the old ways were, they were lost long ago. Mis-
sionaries had settled with the Cavineño in Cavinas by the end of the

eighteenth century. The missionaries used the Cavineño to help them
extract the cinchona bark used to treat malaria. Missionaries sold cin-
chona, which was abundant around Cavinas, for export to Europe.
Then, in about 1869, with the rivers of the Bolivian Amazon still left
Every Living Thing
12
unfinished on maps, an American geographer reported rubber in
Cavinas.
Rubber would change life dramatically for all those who happened
to live near where it grew. The demand for rubber in Europe and North
America dragged indigenous people out of their houses and down clay
paths to trees. At those trees, the people would make rows of angled
cuts in the bark to drain the trees of their latex. Each morning they
placed a bucket below the cuts. Each afternoon, they returned to the
buckets to collect the pooling, white gold. It is scarcely an exaggera-
tion to say that by 1900 every rubber tree in the Bolivian Amazon was
discovered and tapped. If Cavinas was like other communities where
rubber was discovered, it is safe to assume that for a while every man
and most women of Cavinas went to the forest every morning and
every night to tap the rubber trees, collect the latex, burn it, ball it and
drag it to the shore for transport.* The sap of trees, drawn to protect
delicate European feet from the rain, burned the fingers of men and
women in the Amazon and often worked them to death.
3
Rubber boomed and then it busted. For a while after the rubber
bust, life may have returned to something like it used to be. Now, how-
ever, there was a demand for Western goods and therefore a need for
money. Matches, oil, and frying pans had been discovered. It was hard
to go back to the old days. Then the cycle began again. Brazil nuts,
from trees that also happen to be abundant around Cavinas, became

popular in North American Christmas bowls. It was enough to send
the Cavineños back out to the woods. They hauled Brazil nuts in ex-
change for pennies. Daily life turned on distant whimsy.
We had no way of knowing whether, after the two hundred years
that Cavinas had been adrift on the tides of the Western economy,
there was any traditional knowledge left of the forest, any knowledge
* Church reports that in 1880 there were 185 individuals, men, women, and children, employed in
Cavinas in the extraction of rubber and that they, in that single year, carried out, bucket to ball,
104,000 pounds of rubber, which is to say more than five hundred and fifty pounds per person.
Church, G. E. 1901. Northern Bolivia and President Pando’s New Map. The Geographical Journal
18: 144–153.
What We All Used to Know
13
codified in the native language and not supplanted by Western culture
and tradition.
Cavinas, as we found it, was a small village of mud and palm-thatch
houses. The land around the houses had been cleared, and perhaps
with the help of fire, left as grassland. Around each house there was
a circle of bare ground, swept daily, where the children, pigs, and pet
monkeys played. (While we lived in Cavinas, a pet capuchin monkey
took to riding a pig around town, pulling its ears left and right to guide
it.) The houses were mostly of palm: palm sides, palm-thatch roofs,
palm hammocks, palm seats. Commercial society turned up in the
form of a metal pot, a box of matches, and oil in every house. Most
else was found or made from forest products, grown, or killed. Sur-
rounding the village is forest. It was a landscape tangled with foot-
paths worn deep by use. It was, at least in terms of our own quest, an
auspicious place, a place where people might still, despite everything,
name, know, and understand the biota around them. If anywhere, we
thought, then here.

Because we were unannounced, it was not immediately clear where
in town we would sleep, how we would get food, or, really, what we
would do at all. Our guide had returned from whereabouts unknown
and was negotiating in Cavineño for what was either a place for us to
sleep or—our own Cavineño still nonexistent—a way to take all our
things and drop us off with the navy. Fortunately, it was the former.
We were given a small space in the radio room, a house at the center of
the village whose sole inhabitant was a CB radio that broadcast day and
night, almost without stop, in Cavineño. We put up a tent inside the
small room (the windows had no screens) and settled in.
With time, negotiation, and explanations for why we did not really
want to eat monkey, however tasty, we made a deal with a family in
town to cook for us, hired guides to show us local plants and animals
and began the work we had come to do. Because the oldest people in