Last week, Arader Galleries generously hosted Mongabay’s Climate Week event, which focused on Suriname.
Arader Galleries is featuring the work of naturalist and botanical artist Maria Sibylla Merian, a German-born naturalist who, in 1699, left the comforts of Europe for Suriname alongside her daughter Dorothea.
Merian sold her possessions to finance the journey, decades before government-backed voyages like those of Alexander von Humboldt. Once there, she meticulously documented the flora and fauna of the tropical rainforest, relying on the knowledge of enslaved Indigenous and African people. She used Indigenous names and noted the medicinal uses of flora and fauna. She also documented the brutal realities of slavery.
She returned to Europe two years later with an extensive collection of research, which culminated in Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (“The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname”) in 1705. The work documented insect life cycles and plant-insect ecological relationships at a time when metamorphosis was poorly understood in Europe.
Merian’s work provided a good jumping-off point for my remarks. Mongabay also relies heavily on local knowledge through local sources and a global network of contributors, many of whom live close to the stories they report.
One of Mongabay’s biggest impacts in recent years came in Suriname. In 2023, a Surinamese resident contacted us with information about a proposal to grant over 500,000 hectares of forest land in the country to agribusiness interests without much consultation with local communities. We went on to publish maps and government documents showing the areas under consideration, some of which overlapped with lands important to Indigenous and Maroon communities.
Our stories prompted widespread attention in Suriname and beyond. In March 2024, President Chan Santokhi responded by cancelling a pilot program that would have allocated 30,000 hectares to 50 Mennonite families from Bolivia. That doesn’t mean other projects won’t move forward, but doing so without public knowledge is going to be a lot harder.
