When Juliane was fourteen, her parents made a decision that would define the rest of her life: they established a biological research station in the Peruvian Amazon, in lowland rainforest at the western foothills of the El Sira mountains, beside the Río Yuyapichis, a tributary of the Río Pachitea. The station was called Panguana. It was founded in 1968 and was initially planned as a five-year research project. It became something more permanent.
Juliane moved with her parents to Panguana. The station was remote — access required crossing the Pachitea at the village of Yuyapichis and then either a ninety-minute walk or a two-hour upstream boat ride. The forest surrounding it was primary tropical rainforest, meaning it had not been cleared or significantly disturbed. It was dense and layered and full of creatures that could be dangerous and full of creatures that were simply extraordinary.
She was home-schooled at Panguana. Her parents taught her to observe the forest rather than fear it. They taught her to read water — to understand that streams flow to rivers, that rivers flow toward people, that following water downstream is the most reliable navigation in a landscape without roads or trails. They taught her that insects were the greatest practical danger, not the large predators that dominate the imagination’s version of the jungle. They taught her which fruits might be poisonous and which were safe. They taught her the calls of specific birds and the behaviors of specific animals.
This education was not survival training in the dramatic self-reliance sense. It was scientific familiarity — the quiet accumulation of knowledge about a specific ecosystem that her parents needed for their research and that they transmitted to her as a matter of course, the way any child absorbs the knowledge that surrounds her. She has said in subsequent interviews that the rainforest, for her, was not the “green hell” of popular imagination but a familiar place, comprehensible and navigable in ways that it would not have been for someone encountering it for the first time.