Report States Effort to Save Rainforests Doomed

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Archives

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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Title: Attempts to save most rainforests doomed - report

Source: Reuters

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.

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