Current Challenges on the Orinoco.

• Author: Malatesta, Parisina
• Position: Museo de Ciecias, Caracas, Venezuela - Brief Article

Private and government institutions in Venezuela are raising awareness of the precious biodiversity of this mighty river and its role in the nation's future.

Arturo Uslar Pietri once described the Orinoco "as a magical phenomenon, like lung and heart, pumping and racing" across a long-ago seabed, the great river axis of Venezuela into which all the waters of the country flow. Explored and traveled over the course of centuries with a combination of fascination and greed, from mouth to source, the river today has assumed gigantic proportions in the public consciousness.

A new stunning exhibition at Caracas's Museo de Ciencias has brought together, in a stream flowing like the river itself, over thirty French and Venezuelan institutions to consider the subject of the Orinoco. An unprecedented multidisciplinary display, The Orinoco Kingdom is a historical, cartographic, and artistic testimony by those who have tilled the Orinoco's basin, been inspired by its beauty, or settled its banks.

"How can we persuade Venezuelans to gaze into the mirror of the Orinoco that reflects their history and their future?" asks museum director Sergio Antillano. "The museum can help by interpreting a comprehension of that reality."

"The Orinoco basin is the setting that defines the country's future," he continues, "not only because it contains oil fields, twenty-three ethnic groups (90 percent of the total population), the largest concentration of biodiversity, and the only two biosphere reserves in Venezuela, or the major electric power source in the territory (Guri Dam), but because it is the source of our roots."

"One goal of this exhibition--in which 192 researchers participated--is the protection of those ties," Antillano explains. "It is hoped that appreciation will serve as the springboard to action."

What are the dangers to this great river, the ninth largest in the world, whose hydrographic basin covers over 45 percent of Venezuela? They are familiar: deforestation, contamination, overexploitation of systems, expansion of the farm frontier, spreading urbanization, illegal mining, and poaching.

But, in the Orinoco, the solutions are likely to be as diverse as the panorama of life itself. For example, across Venezuela's central plains, landowners of private hatos, or farms, like Hato Pinero, El Frio, and El Cedral, have set up refuges for a variety of jungle wildlife. In a new reforestation project initiated last summer in the middle river town of Mapire...