For Vast Rain Forests, Clock's Ticking
6/19/98
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE
Following is an excellent article from the Boston Globe that says it
better than I can: "...the rain forests aren't only being threatened,
they are disappearing. If the current rates continue, all that may be
left in 20 years are boutique forests and jungle museums - protected
areas that give a glimpse of what the past was like but that are so
small they cannot support all the life that once thrived there."
g.b.
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: For vast rain forests, clock's ticking
Source: Boston Globe
Status: Copyright 1998, contact source to reprint
Date: June 7, 1998
Byline: By Matthew Brelis
In the two decades since saving the world's rain forests became an
environmental cause celebre, there has been plenty of consciousness
raising, some successful corporate boycotting, and a new flavor of ice
cream - Rainforest Crunch.
There have been modest victories. Children have put coins in parking
meters at zoos and aquariums around the country, raising $1.5 million
for conservation land. Costa Rica, which witnessed massive
deforestation, has preserved about 20 percent of its wilderness and is
in the vanguard of new, benign land uses. And there is hope for more:
In April, Brazil promised to set aside 62 million acres of Amazon
jungle for preservation.
But in the time it takes you to read this sentence, more than two
acres of rain forest will be destroyed.
From 1980 through 1995, 450 million acres of forest - almost all of it
tropical - were lost around the world. In roughly that same time, a
comparatively small 18.3 million acres were conserved, according to
the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, England.
And despite the high profile of the rain forest issue, the rate of
destruction is increasing. A congressional commission this year
estimated that 22,393 square miles, or 145 million acres, are being
destroyed in the Amazon annually. As a result, the rain forests aren't
only being threatened, they are disappearing. If the current rates
continue, all that may be left in 20 years are boutique forests and
jungle museums - protected areas that give a glimpse of what the past
was like but that are so small they cannot support all the life that
once thrived there.
"We need to leapfrog destruction or jump start some new conservation
processes so that something meaningful is left," says Bruce Cabarle,
director of the global forest program for the World Wildlife Fund.
"When we whittle forests down to such a small size, we begin to lose
the things inside them that make them unique. And one of the things
you usually lose are the large vertebrates that require a lot of
space. We could end up where we will have boutiques or museums, but
they will be empty museums."
And the dry season is about to settle on an Amazon Basin that some
scientists say is dangerously parched. That condition could permit
fires to burn out of control. The Amazon is the largest of the world's
three remaining great tropical rain forests - the others are in
Central Africa and Papua New Guinea - and the home to much of the
world's flora and fauna, and a fifth of the world's fresh water.
"This is really a very critical situation," says Daniel C. Nepstad, a
scientist at the Amazon Institute and the Woods Hole Research Center.
"There is an interaction between El Nino events increasing in severity
and frequency, selective timber harvesting, which leaves the forest
more vulnerable, and the expansion of the agricultural frontier. It
means that 1998 could be a severe burning season. The area that is
vulnerable is some 400,000 square kilometers, or eight Costa Ricas, or
20 Massachusettses."
Recent fires in Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia indicate how fragile the
rain forests are on a global scale. The fires are set, in some cases
by poor indigenous people clearing land to farm, in others by
multinational companies clearing land for plantations.
In the case of subsistence farming, the resultant ash provides rich
fertilizer for only two or three years, then the process is repeated.
The Amazon forest is also facing threats from international timber
companies that previously clear-cut their way across the Southeast
Asian archipelago and are now moving into Latin America with a
vengeance, buying up the logging rights to millions of acres.
"It looks like we are tilting at windmills," acknowledges Christopher
Hatch, campaign director for Rainforest Action Network, a California-
based environmental action group that organizes product boycotts and
demonstrations in an effort to raise awareness and protect the
remaining forests.
Because of the pace of deforestation, the World Bank and World
Wildlife Fund estimate that one of every eight plant species on earth
is threatened with extinction. Some have great medicinal and
pharmaceutical value - for example, a plant that grows only on
Madagascar is used in the treatment of Hodgkin's disease - while the
value of others remains undiscovered.
The rain forests also have helped to protect the world's climate by
cleansing the air. Carbon dioxide - a gas mostly caused by industrial
uses and burning forests - exacerbates the greenhouse effect by
permitting the sun's heat to reach the earth, but then blocking the
heat from radiating back out to space.
As a result, the globe's temperature is rising. Last year was the
warmest in the last 600 years, according to researchers at the
University of Massachusetts. In 1995, scientists reported direct
evidence that the tropical rain forests soak up large amounts of
carbon dioxide.
Even selective logging, mining, or oil exploration of the forests,
each of which leaves a much smaller area of destruction than slash-
and-burn agriculture or clear-cut logging, can also create a threat
because the access roads left behind are used by settlers to clear
more land, says Ian Bowles, vice president of Conservation
International.
While there is a generalized awareness that it is important to
preserve the rain forest, that does not seem to be translating into
significant consumer action. Imports of the tropical wood mahogany to
the United States, for example, rose 14 percent from 1991 to 1995.
Despite the daunting odds, conservationists insist there is still some
hope for the rain forests.
"I'm optimistic because I have seen significant successes and I have
seen corporate leaders from Intel and Ford Motor play an active role
in our organization," says Bowles. "Ten years ago, major corporate
leaders in the US were not paying as much attention to conservation on
a global scale as they are now." And Hatch, of the Rainforest Action
Network, predicts that mahogany imports should start to drop as public
awareness is increased.
What is doomed, however, is the idea of a wilderness area set aside
simply for preservation's sake. Land purchases are good solutions for
areas that are highly threatened and might not otherwise be saved,
says Nigel Sizer, a senior associate with the World Resources
Institute. But buying the land, which can be had for as little as $1
an acre, is the cheap part. Protecting it from poachers and illegal
logging is more difficult, and more expensive.
It is estimated that 80 percent of logging in Brazil is illegal. And
many of the country's national parks are known as "paper parks"
because there is nothing to prevent them from being overrun. Even
Brazil's announcement with the World Bank and World Wildlife Fund that
62 million acres will be set aside has been met with some skepticism
since preserving the land may be difficult.
"Every effort made today, no matter how small, can make a difference
many years from now," Sizer says. "The environmental movement has won
huge victories protecting wilderness. ... That said, each year more
forest is lost, less is left, and time is running out."
Instead of simply buying land and fencing it off, says Daniel Janzen,
a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent the last
three decades working in Costa Rica, the rain forests must be viewed
as gardens - with all the attendant requirements: care and management
and harvesting. "We do not need more planning conferences, more
studies, more analysis," he says. "We need honestly spent cash to buy
the land and put it into a different kind of production, in direct
competition with the agro-scape and urban landscape.
"We have to stop thinking of there being `productive lands' and set-
asides, conserved. All three land uses are highly productive, but each
produces a different crop and each requires a different set of rules,
laws and traditions."
In Costa Rica, there are plenty of examples of how to protect rain
forests while producing income. Tourism now accounts for about $700
million annually, and has supplanted bananas and coffee as the top
foreign-exchange earner.
"Bioprospecting" is another potential money-maker that requires rain
forests to be kept intact. The largest such contract, partially
brokered by Janzen, was the $1.3 million that drug giant Merck paid to
Costa Rica's National Biodiversity Institute for chemical extracts
from flora and fauna in protected areas. If drugs are made, Costa Rica
gets a royalty. Other companies, seeking everything from fragrances to
natural pesticides, followed suit.
Another promising international effort is the purchase of carbon
storage rights by polluters who emit large amounts of carbon dioxide.
A Nebraska-based power company spent $500,000 and raised that much
again for 5,777 acres of Costa Rican forest to give to the national
park system this year, in order to offset carbon dioxide emissions
from a power plant under construction in Washington state.
If such sales are approved under the protocols hammered out at an
international conference in Kyoto, Japan, last year, they could
generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year for forest
preservation. Diplomats will gather in November in Buenos Aires to
grapple with the issue of carbon set-asides and the role that forests
can play. But the time for action is growing short.
"Goods and services that come out of the forest that require us to
keep it in a fairly pristine state will be the key to the future,"
says Cabarle. "And what happens in Buenos Aires will be a key event to
watch. It will fundamentally determine if and when we have a market
for trading greenhouse gas emissions and what role, if any, forests
will play in that.
"It could be the greatest boon for forest preservation, or the biggest
fatalistic missed opportunity we stumbled over in the dark."
This story ran on page E01 of the Boston Globe on 06/07/98. c
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.