The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The legend of the White City – Ciudad Blanca – has fascinated men for generations and many have gone searching for the lost city in the remote jungles of Moskitia in Honduras. One of these men is Steve Elkins, a self-described “cinematographer, a curious man, an adventurer” (p. 9) whom the author of the present book, Douglas Preston, discovers, befriends and eventually joins in the search. Preston, an accomplished writer and a veteran adventurer himself, with a history with the American Museum of Natural History and the National Geographic Society, becomes equally immersed in the effort to find and understand the disappeared city. The book is partly a real-life adventure story, but partly it gives a rather comprehensive history of the region and the archeological work surrounding it.

Following innovative use of LiDAR technology that identifies potential sites to start the search, an expedition is launched in the most inaccessible and hostile jungle valley to initiate an archeological study of the lost ‘City of the Monkey God.’ The obsessed Elkins is the driving force, but he receives backing from a variety of sources and also convinces the government of Honduras to endorse and support the effort. He puts together a mixed team that includes highly qualified archeological experts (led by Chris Fisher), as well as a film crew, photographers and others, including Preston. There is also a small band of former SAS agents providing security and survival skills to the team. Early on in the effort, a Honduras-based American fixer, Bruce Heinicke, with a dubious past in the drug trade provides his often unscrupulous services.

After a section on the history of the search for the city, the main part of the book focuses on the expedition, as it prepares for the field work and its stay on the site. This turns out to be a harrowing experience in the jungle that is infested with highly poisonous snakes and myriad insects, jaguars and other predators circling the campsite. During heavy rains the site floods and turns into mud. Despite their precautions the expedition members are soon covered in nasty bug bites.

The expedition is basically successful in its quest. However, an academic controversy rises around it when the news of the find come out and are widely advertised by the National Geographic Society. A group of American archeologists spearheaded by Christopher Begley of Transylvania University and Rosemary Joyce of UC Berkeley attack the effort on various grounds of “false claims of discovery” (their assertion is that the discovered city is much less of significance archeologically than Preston, Elkins and the National Geographic suggest) and “antiquated and offensive, ethnocentric attitudes” (in terms of dismissing local peoples’ knowledge of the area) (p. 186). Although the attacks seem exaggerated, at the very minimum – given that the expedition is fully endorsed at the highest level of Honduran authorities and is conducted very professionally under the supervision of well-respected archeologists – the controversy does not go away and the expedition continues to be accused of “B movie fantasy” resurrecting the “trope” of “the big hero explorer” (p. 188). In fact, I recently read a rather vitriolic review of the book (and another one, Jungleland by Christopher S. Stewart) written by Mark Bonta of Penn State for The AAG Review of Books (Fall 2017). In it, Bonta points to “the disconnections and conjunctions of scholars and the popular pseudoscientific imagination” (AAG p. 279).

Preston speculates for the reasons, the simplest of which might be professional jealousy, especially coming from Begley who himself has been compared to “modern day Indiana Jones” and known for traveling to Honduras with his own film crews. Another reason might be that the current Honduran president and administration came to power through a coup and replaced also the national archeological authorities that had supported Begley and the Americans. Be that as it may, many journalists picked up the controversy and had little interest in hearing both sides of the story. In the end, the site is being excavated and preserved with the full support of Honduras, including President Hernández.

Although the adventure at the heart of the book is well told and interesting, to me the most important part of the book is the last third. There has been a lot of speculation why the thriving (and controversial) City of the Monkey God suddenly disappeared five centuries ago with its inhabitants abandoning it over a short period of time. The explanation seems to hinge on brutal epidemics that devastated the old Mesoamerican (and beyond) indigenous cultures as the Spanish conquistadores arrived. The native populations who had no resistance to the Old World diseases succumbed in incredible numbers, so that even 90 percent of the populations died. This was of course an add-on to the “cruelty, slavery, rape, abuse, starvation, war and genocide” inflicted on the people by the Spanish, English and other invaders (p. 295). Preston cites the work of Jared Diamond whose famous book Collapse describes the historical collapse of many civilizations around the world through environmental overstretch, disease, invaders and other factors (I might note that Diamond, too, as a scientist prone to popularizing knowledge and using grand theories to explain change is reviled in some academic circles).

Ironically, about half of the expedition members, including Preston, catch a seemingly incurable tropical disease, leishmaniasis, during their stay in the jungle. Perhaps the scariest conclusion of the book is that these kinds of diseases that today are the daily reality of mostly poor people living in the tropics, are becoming more common also in the developed countries in the North. The main reasons for this are the increased air travel that rapidly transports people between different part of the world and, importantly, climate change that makes previously safe areas in North America, Europe and Asia (including Japan) more susceptible to tropical parasites and their hosts and vectors. This unfortunate fact raises the likelihood of a major global pandemic that could devastate societies and economies. The only positive aspect of this is that, perhaps, more investment will go to research and the development of drugs and vaccines now that people in the wealthy and powerful North are threatened.

On a personal level, the book made me think about my forthcoming trip to the Amazon rainforest next week where there is a current epidemic of yellow fever and dengue, and where the nurse in my office told me to use a double protection of insect repellent against horse flies and other biting insects. Little good did these precautions do to Preston and his mates.


View all my reviews

The GEF in the Changing Landscape of Environmental Finance

[Published in Earth-Eval]

We have recently completed the Sixth Comprehensive Evaluation of the GEF (known by its acronym OPS6). The Comprehensive Evaluations are conducted by the Independent Evaluation Office every four years as critical inputs to the GEF replenishment process. I presented the final draft of the OPS6 to the second replenishment meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in October 2017 and the GEF Council in November. The donors to the GEF recognized the evaluation as a foundation for determining the programmatic directions for the next, seventh, GEF replenishment period. OPS6 was a major collective effort, which kept us at the IEO occupied for the better part of two years. It brought together 29 separate evaluations and studies that focused on a wide set of issues, ranging from the results and impacts of the GEF and its various focal areas and programs, to organizational and institutional issues. In conducting the evaluation, we utilized mixed methods, both quantitative and qualitative, to ensure the best approach to answer the evaluation questions posed. Many of the approaches were innovative, such as the use of geospatial tools and methods to track impact and value for money of GEF funded programs and projects on the ground. We also applied formative approaches to evaluate progress made in the Integrated Approach Pilots that were launched during the current GEF cycle. While each of the component evaluations has its own detailed conclusions and recommendations, the Comprehensive Evaluation brings them together at a high strategic level.

Judging from the terminal evaluations of completed projects, the GEF continues to perform well at the aggregate level. Some 81% of the completed projects were judged to have satisfactory or higher outcome ratings. The GEF has also exceeded its co-financing targets raising $8.8 to each dollar invested by the GEF. More challenging is ensuring the continuation of the global environmental benefits after the projects are closed. Only 62% of the projects were judged to have outcomes that are likely to be sustained. The reasons behind this drop often appear to lie in institutional capacity and financial sustainability in the program countries. Indeed, proof of this seems to be that middle-income countries tend to perform better on sustainability than do least developed countries. Furthermore, projects in biodiversity and land degradation face bigger sustainability challenges than those in climate change, likely because of the limited alternative sources of funding and the lack of private sector involvement. These are crucial issues that we need to understand better and, consequently, the IEO has embarked on an exercise to unpack the mechanisms behind sustainability. We expect to present this study to the Council in its next meeting in June 2018, so stay tuned.

Another important development in GEF programming in the past years has been the increase in programmatic approaches, as well as the rise of multifocal area projects that address simultaneously biodiversity conservation, sustainable forest management, land degradation, and climate change and carbon sequestration. Two major evaluations focused on these, finding that projects under programs do indeed tend to perform slightly better than standalone projects, although increased complexity when programs involve multiple countries or agencies and cut across focal areas poses some challenges that need to be managed. The multifocal area projects do produce benefits on multiple fronts when trade-offs, especially between environmental and socioeconomic outcomes, are well managed. (For the findings of the formative evaluation of the Integrated Approach Pilots, see earlier blogs by Dennis Bours.)

The Comprehensive Evaluation concluded that the GEF’s main comparative advantage in the rapidly changing and expanding global environmental finance landscape lies in its ability to address a broad range of environmental issues and the synergies between them, not just climate change, and to serve multiple Conventions and multilateral environmental agreements. It is virtually the only public funding source for the biodiversity, land degradation, and chemicals conventions, and provides important support to many regional and global agreements around international waters. In the increasingly crowded field of climate finance, the GEF still plays a central role but must define its niche more clearly. The GEF also has proven strengths in working with governments to create an enabling environment in countries through legal and regulatory reforms that lay the ground for lasting improvements in environmental management. A study we conducted identified conditions, which are necessary for programming to lead to transformational change. These include a level of ambition and setting in place mechanism for sustainability from the outset.

The recommendations of OPS6 build upon the conclusions regarding the GEF’s comparative advantages regarding its strategic positioning in the broad global environmental field and the strengths of its work on transformational change. The evaluation recognizes the value of integration in programming that addresses multiple environmental issues, but also calls for caution in managing complexity. Integration should be based on the need when the environmental problems call for integrated solutions, and on GEF’s additionality. Not everything is entirely rosy either. Despite its solid performance over a quarter century, the GEF still has areas where more progress needs to be made. Its track record on engaging with the private sector is still rather patchy. Progress has been made in integrating the gender dimension and in engaging with indigenous peoples in GEF programming, but more remains to be done to ensure that the organization applies internationally recognized good practice standards.

The third replenishment meeting of the GEF will take place at the end of January in Brazil. As instructed by the GEF Council, the GEF Secretariat has taken the OPS6 recommendations and fed them into their plans for the programming directions and policy agenda for the next GEF cycle. As an evaluator, I am naturally very pleased as I see that our hard work is having a concrete real-time impact on how we approach global environmental challenges that are fundamental to the survival of humankind.