Bolivian botanist with a buzz: bringing people and plants together, Ines Hinojosa is cultivating cohesion and leadership in indigenous communities with her revolutionary approach to sustainable development.

• Author: Spector, Anna M.

Ines Hinojosa Ossio, Bolivia's most prominent ethnobotanist, is not often found in the modest La Paz office of Tropico, the conservation organization where she is on staff, but usually out walking the country's forested research transects, along with her husband, agronomist Enrique Uzquiano, and indigenous investigators in training. Hinojosa has led some of the most successful ethnobotany projects with indigenous people in Bolivia. She is perhaps her country's only ethnobotanist in the true sense of the profession--both investigating people's interactions with plants and using that knowledge as a tool for their own development.

Hinojosa throws out Quechua and Aymara words and phrases as easily as she can wordsmith a scientific article in perfect technical Spanish. This facility with languages is in part rooted in her childhood. "My mother worked a lot outside of the home [as a nurse] and my father also worked a lot, so I was raised by my grandmother, who spoke to me in Quechua. When I started school at five years old I had to learn Spanish.... It wasn't hard, well, maybe for my mother I imagine."

In addition to being multilingual, Hinojosa has a special ability to quickly find the precise word or expression to describe what she wants to say, making her an engaging speaker at conferences and meetings. For example, when she talks about what would happen if her project with the indigenous Tsimane' did not receive continued funding, she explains that people would think, "We have just begun to take off and the airplane crashes."

Starting in the late 1990s with just a few thousand dollars, as well as the solid results of projects conceived principally by the people who benefit from them, Hinojosa began turning heads at foreign embassies, international aid agencies, and charitable foundations. They realized that Hinojosa and her associates were accomplishing what even a million dollars could not: Indigenous people were now managing their own businesses, marketing products from forest resources that are sustainably managed.

Of course along with this feat comes many other desirable results--the conservation of unique forests and the biodiversity they contain, the general raising of the standard of living of the indigenous community, and perhaps most importantly, a reversal of the social dissolution that many indigenous people currently suffer in Bolivia.

Earlier, when Hinojosa was working at the Beni Biological Station in the Beni Biosphere Reserve, she became interested in working with the region's Tsimane' people and the endemic palm jatata (Geonoma deversa). The jatata groves provide rich habitat for wildlife, such as the jaguar, white-lipped peccary, giant anteater, and the giant otter. The Tsimane' are expert craftsmen at weaving the leaves of the jatata palm into panels for roofing material. Tightly woven jatata can provide a leak-free roof for up to ten years in the rain forest. These panels are also highly prized by city dwellers in Bolivia's larger urban areas, especially Santa Cruz, because they provide an attractive roof for auxiliary buildings like gazebos.

The Tsimane' had two problems, however: On the one hand, the jatata palm was coming under heavy extractive...