For Vast Rain Forests, Clock's Ticking

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

http://forests.org/

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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Title: For vast rain forests, clock's ticking

Source: Boston Globe

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

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