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They saw that their forests were being destroyed. They still depended on hunting for a living, and whereas before you could go in and walk in the forest for an hour and come back with something to eat, by the time I was proposing the park, it would take people sometimes a week to find something to eat.
For example, in May there is a big festivity in the town where I used to live, and the prize thing – everybody is supposed to bring back spider monkeys. That is the favorite meat. And in 1993, I was doing a census and diagnostic work in preparation for land titling, and at the community meeting I asked, "Well, how many people were able to hunt spider monkey for the feast?" And you could see everyone sort of wanted to raise their arms because, it used to be everyone, and then they hadn't. So they kind of looked around, and suddenly they realized that no one else had – in the whole community, only one person had found a spider monkey – in the entire village. So those things started to really hit home.
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Feb. '99 Journal