Report States Effort to Save Rainforests Doomed
http://forests.org/web - Discuss Forest Conservation
10/30/98
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE
Saving rainforests is a lost cause. All but the most isolated
rainforests are going to get logged or cleared for agriculture. Its
time to give up and go home. So long, it has been nice knowing you.
The fact that this fatalistic crap gets printed in scientific
journals, as reported below, makes me mad as hell. There is some
truth to the fact that efforts must be targeted to areas where
conservation is relatively more likely to succeed, and where there is
high biodiversity and ecosystem values. This does not mean that any
rainforest should be written off. These millions of year old
cathedrals to evolutionary brilliance are not to be sacrificed when
the going gets tough. There is a lot of rainforest left out there,
and I for one am not giving up on any of it any time soon. Your
comments are appreciated at http://forests.org/web/
g.b.
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Attempts to save most rainforests doomed - report
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyright 1998, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: Wednesday, October 28, 1998
LONDON, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Efforts to save most of the world's
rainforests are doomed to failure and should probably be abandoned,
according to a group of European scientists.
They said intensive farming and logging meant that many rainforests
were already beyond repair and suggested that conservationists
concentrate on preserving the few areas that are not yet under
pressure.
Reporting in the New Scientist magazine on Wednesday, scientists at
the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Italy gave a bleak
outlook.
``The pressures to remove the forests are too great to be stopped,
especially in places like Southeast Asia,'' said Frederic Achard of
the Research Centre.
The research team of 12 experts in tropical forests said there was no
hope of stopping deforestation by logging companies and farmers in
major rainforest regions such as Indonesia and much of the Brazilian
Amazon.
``There is very little we can do to change the politics of these
countries,'' Achard said.
Parts of the rainforests of the central Amazon Basin, Congo and New
Guinea might be saved however and priority should be given to
identifying and protecting areas of high biodiversity in these zones,
the research centre said.
The Indonesian island of Sumatra was pinpointed as the hottest of the
deforestation hot spots. An island twice the size of Britain, it has
lost virtually all its lowland forests in just 25 years, along with
the animals that lived in them.