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FOREST CONSERVATION NEWS TODAY
Deals with Industrial Loggers Never Save Rain Forests
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Forest Networking a Project of Forests.org, Inc.
http://forests.org/ -- Forest Conservation Portal
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1/2/02
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by Forests.org
Half of the Earth's original forest cover has been completely lost due
to deforestation and only one-fifth of the world’s original forests
still remain in large, natural and relatively undisturbed blocks.
Increasingly, remaining large forests are primarily threatened by
industrial logging. Only a few years ago, the tropical logging
industry was on the ropes and near collapse. Because of massive
advocacy campaigns and boycotts organized by hundreds of modest forest
conservation groups, consumers of exported logs had begun to realize
that their purchases directly destroyed ancient old-growth forests.
Demand was slowing, and along with global economic troubles, many
predatory loggers were being pushed out of business. Throughout the
tropics, a new rainforest conservation and development paradigm was
blooming, as projects by local peoples to ecologically manage and
preserve their forests were multiplying.
Then the environmental conglomerates entered the rainforest
conservation game with a bold new conservation program of acquiescing
to industrial harvest of the World’s remaining primary old growth
forests in exchange for “green” logging practices by former mafia
like marauders. Their position is that economic need by the World’s
poor makes strictly preserving the World’s last large areas of ancient
forests difficult if not impossible. Their premise is correct:
conservationists must engage questions of equity, justice and
community development. Their remedy is fatally flawed: no amount of
reform of industrial logging will result in ecologically sustaining
forests, or equitably improving poor people’s lives.
Their plan to save the World’s forests: legitimize commercial logging
of the World’s remaining intact ecological inheritance in exchange for
pledges to follow the law; rudimentary changes in the level of
destruction wrought by first time intensive and extensive harvest of
ancient forests; and token, museum-like conservation set asides of a
small percentage of remaining wildlands. Incidentally, and I am sure
purely by coincidence, donations from those engaged in logging and
other businesses has helped maintain and grow the environmental
empires – while providing job security to many eco-emperors. Those
that question the assertion that logging ancient forests will save
them are squashed by the public relations behemoths.
The loss and diminishment of species, genetic materials, plant
communities, wildlife populations, landscapes, ecosystems, bioregions
and the global ecological system; that is occurring at a frenzied and
unprecedented pace, is a global catastrophe. The ecological fabric of
being upon which life depends is unraveling. Ecological and
evolutionary processes and patterns are crumbling. We are dismantling
ourselves, our ecological identity and gravely imperiling our future.
Clearly, the eco-emperor has no clothes. Industrial first time
logging of ancient old-growth forests is never ecologically
sustainable or socially beneficial for most. No amount of reform and
slick greenwash campaigns will make it so. Corporate environmentalism
threatens to negate the vast progress made to conserve the World by
small groups of people laboring late at night around a kitchen table.
Only communities can meaningfully sustain themselves.
Industrial logging of ancient old-growth forests must be stopped.
Now. In recognition of the role remaining large ancient forests play
in making the Earth habitable, the international community must
compensate governments and local peoples for their lost short-term
income for forgoing the once-over plunder. Relatively modest
investments in large protected areas interspersed with ecologically
based community development projects could maintain whole and operable
forest landscapes while sustainably providing for local needs.
And if compromised ecologists such as the one quoted below want a
“nice wooden table”, they are going to need to buy it from a
community that ecologically managed and protected their forests. Not
from an industrial logger that saved the ecologist’s favorite little
park while devastating huge adjacent areas. Global ecological
sustainability depends upon maintaining the World’s remaining large
forest expanses through a mixture of large protected areas coupled
with community and ecologically based conservation management
activities; paid for by the over-developed World. If not you, who
will make it so?
g.b.
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Making Deals With Loggers In Effort to Save Rain Forest
Source: Copyright 2001 Associated Press
Date: December 6, 2001
Byline: Tim Sullivan
LOPE RESERVE, Gabon -- Every day, National Route 1 rumbles under the
weight of Gabon's rain forests being slowly hauled away.
The sound of a seemingly endless stream of enormous trucks carrying
40-foot logs out of the forests is enough to make conservationists
shudder.
But it's also a sound that makes clear just how complicated
environmentalism can be in this part of the world.
"It's too easy to say loggers are bad and we are good. You can't paint
it as a black-and-white thing," said Lee White, a British ecologist
and zoologist who has spent more than a decade working in the Lope
Reserve, a 2,000-square-mile protected island of equatorial rain
forests and rare wildlife.
Faced with balancing the threat to rain forests and animal species
with the need for one of the world's poorest regions to create jobs,
conservationists in central Africa are turning to an unlikely ally for
help -- the timber industry.
It's a move that angers some in the conservation movement, but to
scientists like White, it's the only option left.
"We're all aware that logging is going to go on," said White, a
scientist with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society who
has been in the forefront of working with logging companies. "You're
not going to set aside all of Gabon as a protected area."
With that in mind, environmentalists like White have begun working
closely with timber companies. They negotiate land swaps with loggers,
keep track of long-term logging plans and even arrange purchases of
timber concessions for particularly valuable areas.
Some of the most pristine wilderness left on Earth is in this part of
Africa, small enclaves in Gabon, Congo and Republic of Congo so
isolated that animals in some places have no fear of humans, because
they have rarely encountered people.
Footage shot by the few scientists who have made it to these areas
shows entire families of gorillas -- perplexed but seemingly
unconcerned -- staring back at the sudden human interlopers.
Throughout much of the forest, the profusion of plant life blocks out
the equatorial sun, allowing only a gentle light onto the animal
trails that cut through the trees. The forests are filled with
wildlife: gorillas, deer, buffalo, various species of monkeys and
birds, chimpanzees and spectacularly colored mandrills.
Other than a handful of scientists and the occasional eco-tourist, the
only signs of human life in the Lope Reserve are the crumbling remains
of ancient iron furnaces, mounds of dirt a couple of feet across,
where long-gone forest people made their tools.
It's from the air, though, that the true vastness of the wilderness
can be seen. It becomes apparent why people could think the forest
would last forever and why it took so long before the fighting over
Gabon's rain forests grew bitter.
From 2,000 feet up, one sees an ocean of green stretching to the
horizon in every direction. Thin logging roads, orange-red ribbons
that cut through the trees, are all that interrupt the view -- and not
very often.
But the areas open to logging in Gabon have increased dramatically in
the past few decades. While most of the country was once protected,
now most of it is available as timber concessions.
Until recently, the modern world had little interest in reaching the
most pristine areas, which are in the deepest recesses of the forest,
and often cut off by small mountains and swamps.
But with rain forest timber growing scarcer, and with the price of
oil, the main export for many central African nations, far below its
peak, isolated sections of timber are looking increasingly profitable.
Roads are moving deeper and deeper into the forests, and the pristine
enclaves are growing rarer. More and more, the thin strips of dirt
road lead past vast areas of stripped forest, laid bare by chain saws
and bulldozers.
The reason is simple: money.
The nations of central Africa may be rich in natural resources, but
they're far from affluent. Poverty is the norm, and the life
expectancy is often 25 years below what it is in the West. Congo has
been ripped into feuding territories by war, and Republic of Congo
endured its own civil war in the late 1990s. Gabon's economy stumbled
badly as the price of oil fell.
As a result, the timber industry -- with its jobs and its income --
has grown increasingly important. In Republic of Congo, for instance,
timber companies employ 10,000 people and bring in 7 percent of
foreign earnings, the second most important sector of the economy
after oil.
Such numbers leave these nations with a fairly simple equation, even
for the people dedicated to protecting the environment: "It is
impossible to protect all the tropical rain forests in Republic of
Congo, because the country needs to develop," said Marcel Nguimbi, a
government wildlife conservation officer.
In early July, about 100 square miles of Republic of Congo rain forest
were declared protected land in an agreement reached by government
officials, the Wildlife Conservation Society and CIB (Societe
Congolaise Industrielle des Bois), a German logging company.
The Goualogo Triangle, as it's called, has some of the highest
densities of gorillas, chimpanzees and forest elephants in central
Africa. It also contains large tracts of mahogany and other valuable
hardwoods that, if harvested, could bring about $1.5 million a year
into the country's desperately fragile economy.
Speaking at a New York news conference announcing the agreement, CIB
President Hinrich Stoll said the trees in the Goualogo were worth
about $40 million and that the company was "giving up one of the
richest places on Earth."
"The forest is the capital of the Congo and we need to use it, but we
need to use it in a sustainable way, and that's what we're trying to
do," he said.
Some in the timber industry have decided that being ecologically
friendly can be good for profits. Environmentalists said part of the
reason loggers have been willing to work with them is because they
want to be identified as "green" companies, avoiding negative
publicity or even boycotts for having run afoul of the conservation
movement.
While seemingly illogical at first glance, careful logging can help
protect natural areas, scientists say. In West Africa, which is much
more heavily populated than the center of the continent, most
protected wilderness areas are little more than isolated islands of
trees surrounded by farms and villages. Too small to support much
wildlife, and under unrelenting pressure from nearby villagers who use
them for hunting and firewood, these wilderness areas turn into
forested patches of ecological emptiness, largely devoid of animals.
Long-term logging plans, though, which carefully prescribe cutting in
timber concessions in 30-year-long cycles, can create semi-forested
buffers, separating true wilderness areas from villages and towns.
"I really think you can establish a synergy between protected areas
and logging," said White. "Elephants can walk into logging concessions
without being shot. . . . Migratory birds can cross the forest and go
back."
Last year, the Wildlife Conservation Society made big news in
environmental circles by helping arrange a deal that traded away about
260 square miles of the Lope Reserve -- where a confusing web of
legislation and old agreements still allowed logging in some areas --
to a timber company. In exchange, about 160 square miles that had been
set aside for logging were added to the reserve along its southwestern
boundary. In addition, logging was prohibited throughout the reserve.
White said that while the Lope lost about 80 square miles in total
area, the reserve came out the winner, gaining "one of the most
pristine blocks of forest in Gabon."
From his research station, a series of wooden buildings overlooking
the forest and the base from where a generation of scientists have
done their fieldwork, Lee pointed toward the south, toward that
pristine area he helped trade away. "It's about 25 days walking that
way. That's the only way to go there."
But the deal infuriated some of the most strident anti-logging
conservation organizations. While the rancor has settled somewhat, the
memory still burns.
"We weren't sure what was really traded was like for like," said Simon
Counsell, director of the Rainforest Foundation in Britain. Counsell
also said such agreements give too much positive publicity to logging
companies, which are, in many cases, legally bound to take care of any
land where they work.
"The public are expected to applaud the timber for doing these things,
but the law says they have to do them anyway," he said.
To Lee, though, dealing with timber companies is something that has to
be done -- and done now, before the forests are stripped away. Ask him
whether it bothers him to deal with companies that are, by their very
nature, dedicated to changing the forests he works so hard to protect,
and he replies like the realist he is.
"I like wood. I really like a nice wooden table," he said. "These
countries have to make money somewhere."
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