by Colin Tudge
Above all, wild forest can be and always has been a prime source of timber – but whereas in the past foresters all too often just took what they wanted (and clear-felled vast areas of North America, for instance, often with gratuitous profligacy) the trend now is to log selectively and sustainably. Tropical forest, with its huge range of species, all of different ages, poses the greatest challenge – but it is one that Brazil’s researchers at EMBRAPA is rising to. Thus the foresters under EMBRAPA’s jurisdiction divide the Amazon forest around Belém into sections. Each section is harvested only at thirty-year intervals – thirty years being a rule of thumb, but a sensible one. They do not simply fell whatever looks biggest and likeliest, or seems roughly to conform to the species they want. They go to great lengths to ensure they know the particular species of each tree. The reason is as described earlier; that what seems to be one kind of tree may in reality be several, and if the logging is indiscriminate then the rarer types might be driven to extinction in passing. In any one round of harvesting, the foresters are careful to leave a good representation of each kind of tree – and preserve especially the most fruitful ‘mother trees’, to give rise to the next generation.
I spent a day with Brazilian foresters, round Santarém, guided by EMBRAPA’s Ian Thompson; and indeed their work is most impressive. The trees to be felled have all been previously identified, marked, and their position plotted on a computerized map. Because there are so many different species, and only a few of each can be harvested at any one time, the target trees may be widely scattered. Each one has to be located, felled, and then dragged out of the forest to the dispersal point – a task performed by dedicated tractors known as ‘skidders’, with caterpillar tracks and grappling hooks. In the bad old days (and still, where the harvesting is less controlled) likely-looking trees were simply felled, and the skidders crashed through the undergrowth to look for them – creating mayhem, and often missing some. Now, the skidders follow the most economical route to the trees that have been felled and drag them out decorously, with immense skill, touching no other trees on either side. In the bad old days, logs were often half stripped of bark by the time they were dragged out – and so, it might be inferred, were the trees they had crashed against en route. Now they emerge unblemished.
But even with the best of intentions, it is hard to work always to the highest standards. In Brazil, I went out with a pukka team linked to EMBRAPA, and truly dedicated to the cause of sustainable harvesting. Even they were obliged to cut corners. The men work eleven days on and two days off. They sleep in camps. The food is wholesome – beef, chicken, beans, rice – but it’s more or less the same every day. Brazilians are very friendly, but these lumberjacks were too tired even to look up. Under the rules the skidders should not work if the ground is wet, for then they make deep furrows where water gathers and mosquitoes breed, and they crush the soil and generally screw up the natural drainage. (For the same reason, northern lumberjacks traditionally work only in winter, when the ground is iron hard.) But on the day I was there it had been raining. The skidders dug deep. What option did they have? The men and machines were in the field and there were quotas to fill. But the team I was with was among the best, with a benign and enlightened foreman (a local man). I was told of a team nearby that was contracted to cut sixty trees a day – one every few minutes: far too many to allow serious reflection, or best practice. Recently a man on that team had been killed, hardly surprisingly, and his mates were not allowed a day off to attend his funeral. Thus we see in microcosm the tragedy of the modern world: how good ideas, and life itself, are sacrificed to the all-powerful gods of profit and competition. We can’t afford to run the world like that: it’s too vicious, too dangerous.
It is also tragically and abundantly the case that the neat, clever, well-planned mode of harvesting I witnessed in Santarém is not the norm in Brazil, or in the tropics as a whole. In Brazil, 60 per cent of felling in that vast and difficult country is carried out illegally. Greenpeace estimates that in the state of Pará, it is 90 per cent. President Lula acknowledges that most people in Brazil, as in the Third World as a whole (which means most of the world), are agrarian. He wants to build an agrarian economy based on small farms and forest-farms, not unlike that of the United States in the early to mid twentieth century. But the big-time ranchers and loggers, including or especially the illegal loggers, have others plans, and pursue them ruthlessly. Those who speak for small settlers are liable to be murdered, like the rubber tapper Chico Mendez in 1988 or, most recently, Sister Dorothy Stang, originally from Ohio, aged seventy-four, who had campaigned for thirty years for the poor people of Amazonia. She was gunned down on 12 February 2005. Assassination is a regular trade in rural Brazil. The hitmen are called pistoleiros. I met one who retired to drive a taxi.
Loggers and ranchers, legal and illegal, have already removed 20 per cent of the 4 million square kilometres (400 million hectares) of Amazonia’s rainforest. The International Monetary Fund, which lent billions of dollars to Brazil after its recession of 2002, is urging yet more clearance in the cause of economic growth – as if economic growth, defined in crude cash, was necessarily reflected in human wellbeing. As in Brazil, so in Indonesia: the police are estimated to intercept only about 3 per cent of the shiploads of wild timber that stream out of the Indonesian province of Papua (the western half of New Guinea), each one returning a profit of around $100,000. Overall, at this moment, the fight to maintain the world’s wild forests, and to leave a world that can support our grandchildren, is being lost.
But at least now there are rules, which weren’t there a few years ago, and they are catching on – for reasons of sound business as well as a more general sense of enlightenment. More and more importers now insist that timber from all sources is certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council, launched in 1989, to guarantee that properly identified species have been harvested in a sustainable manner. Still, there are plenty of drawbacks, not least that the smallest providers cannot always afford to comply with the protocols: and the problem may sometimes lie with the paperwork, rather than the practice. Nonetheless, FSC guidelines are now applied to more than 16.5 million hectares in more than thirty countries. The industry is at least trying to clean up its act, and credit where it’s due. With luck, the race can be won. Perhaps what’s needed now above all are better-informed consumers: people worldwide who recognize that Brazil’s angelim, say, is a very special timber and are prepared to pay handsomely for it – provided it is certified as the right species, properly harvested. If, at the same time, producer countries ensure that the cash flows back to the communities on whose lands the trees were growing, then we truly have the basis for a benign industry that benefits everybody. The same is true, of course, in food production. If consumers pay well for properly raised chickens (chickens raised in woods are ideal) and for fair-trade organic coffee, and if the farmers get the money, then the world can truly improve. If the producers are paid too little, and production is cut-price and careless to keep costs down and maximize profit margins, and/or the money is siphoned off by middlemen, then the world will go to pot and all of us will go with it.
In temperate and extreme northern forests the ecology is in principle much simpler. Latvia is a fine example. It is neatly poised between temperate and boreal; forestry is the biggest industry. I went walking with Latvian foresters, late in 2004. All the vast woods are dominated by just a few species: silver birch, Norway spruce, Scots pine, and a couple of species of alder. Plus red and roe deer, moose, wolves, lynxes, and a host of beavers which really do dam the rivers in a most spectacular fashion. Amazing creatures. Sometimes the foresters just harvest individual trees. Sometimes they clear-fell entire areas, usually not too much at a time, and then replant. They replant only native species, barring the odd larch from Russia. Indeed, although the country is small, the foresters have notionally divided it into four regions and do not transfer trees from one region to another, since they may have different adaptations in
different places.
The Latvian forests are replenished from vast nurseries – I visited one whose properly proud owner claimed it was ‘only small’ although she produced 180,000 birch per year, about a quarter of a million spruce and half a million pines (plus a pleasing array of ornamentals – cypress, juniper, rowans, and so on). However, she raises her trees from elite parent stock – trees grown in the wild, but nonetheless more robust than usual. Thus the forest is not exactly replaced in pristine form. There is some genetic improvement along the way (meaning in effect that the wild trees are turned into landraces). On the other hand it seems perverse to plant seed from trees that are known to be feeble, even if there is some loss of genetic diversity when the feeble ones are left out, so this seems a reasonable compromise. There is huge contrast with the tropics, too, in the rate of growth. The Brazilians are hoping to produce worthwhile crops of teak in eighteen years; eucalypts commonly reach harvestable size in less than a decade. The common forest trees of northern-temperate Latvia are typically expected to take around a century. Northerners plant for the next generation but one.
But not all pristine forest should be exploited, either by tourists or by loggers. We need heartlands left entirely to whatever forest people are indigenous to them, and to the wild creatures (albeit with rights of entry for dedicated scholars, for it is always important to improve understanding). The wild creatures have rights of their own and besides, without those heartlands, the slightly less wild places that we do exploit will surely lose their diversity, however dutifully we strive to keep them intact.
Great forestry cannot be a matter simple of aesthetics, however, and cannot be left simply to common sense. Both must be abetted by excellent science.
THE RIGHT KIND OF SCIENCE
Modern forest science can be breathtaking. It operates both on the very largest scale, and on the most minute. Satellites now fly far overhead, measuring the height of individual trees to within a few centimetres – and so are able to monitor growth over vast areas, which is especially useful in times of climate change; and are able, too, from the reflected light, to some extent to identify individual species. The canopy is being opened up by towers, cranes, ingenious systems of ropes borrowed and adapted from rock-climbers, and by gas-filled balloons that hover overhead and lower each scientist into the branches like a worm on a fishing line. The excitement and the promise is the same as it was half a century ago when scuba diving first opened up the coral reefs – except of course that the canopies are even richer than the reefs. Permanent gauges ticking twenty-four hours a day monitor the flow of gases of all kinds, including the volatile organic materials produced by the trees and by the ground litter, providing continuous data on growth and general health, year after year. Bigger and bigger computers extract more and more from the data. All in all, the instruments and the ingenuity are providing a continuous overview that even a couple of decades ago would have been beyond imagining. Without these data, we would have very little insight at all into the effects of global warming. As it is we can see the changes unfolding before our eyes, though it is hard to grasp the complexity.
Science operates on the smallest scale too, as demonstrated at EMBRAPA. It’s all very well to identify specific species of trees, and then remove a few – but what effect does this have on the genetic diversity of the ones that are left? After all, if trees of any one species are widely scattered, the total population in any one area is unlikely to be large, and each individual may be making a significant contribution to the overall gene pool. At EMBRAPA, Dr Milton Kanashiro coordinates a programme known as Dendrogene (adapted from a comparable strategy developed in Europe). The idea is to analyse the DNA in the cambium of the trees, and see whether selective logging leads to any change in the total genetic variation in the population as a whole. If the results show that diversity is being lost, then the harvesting can be adjusted. Thus can science improve on common-sense rules of thumb.
So the developing science of forestry is wondrous. The future of biology surely lies at least as much in these broad arenas as in the minutiae that at any one time are fashionable (biotech is the present-day flavour of the month). Yet we should not get carried away by forest science, or by science in general. Science does not, as is so often supposed, provide an undeviating, flawless, royal road to truth. At the deepest level, modern philosophers of science point out that all its theories are uncertain – all provisional, waiting to be upset by new insights. John Stuart Mill pointed out that however much we know, we can never be sure that we haven’t missed something vital. Always there are known unknowns – and unknown unknowns, and even unknowable unknowns. When it comes to dealing with living systems – and particularly with systems as complex as tropical forest – the unknowns and the unknowables multiply. Even to acquire the most basic data is extremely difficult and time-consuming: note from earlier discussions how hard it is even to judge how many species of trees there are in the American tropics. Yet the basic inventory of species is only the beginning. The tales related in the last chapter show how complicated the relationships between different creatures can be. After half a century of close study the subtleties of figs and their dialogue with wasps are still being unravelled. But there are millions of species out there, each directly and indirectly interacting with millions of others – and among them, for good measure, bacteria and viruses can often be crucial players, and of them we have virtually no inkling at all except when particularly obvious types attack particular species that we happen to take an interest in.
Yet there is worse. The modern theory of chaos shows that even a few simple forces, when left to interact, may produce endlessly complex and diverse outcomes, and the complexities and diversity are innately unpredictable. In forests there aren’t just a few simple forces. There are interactions of countless species, each subject to its own pressures. We can sometimes guess within broad limits the outcome of any one exigency – climate change, or particular strategies of logging – but in detail we certainly cannot. One casual introduction can make all the difference – like the European wasps that have been taken to New Zealand, and feed (among other things) on the resin from the totara and other conifers, and seem to be wiping out entire food chains of specialist insects that used to feed on resin, and in turn were preyed upon by birds. Such outcomes cannot be predicted.
Science, in short, for all its wondrousness, is innately limited: the picture it can give of the universe, or of life, or of trees and forests, is always biased and incomplete, and we can never tell how incomplete it is. Yet to conserve forest, and to take from it what we need, we are obliged to manage it. Clearly, even the best forest managers can never achieve the precision of the engineer. They are, at best, like physicians, who are obliged to act if their patients are in trouble, but must always do so with imperfect information. They just have to use their judgement.
So we can adjust the world’s economic structure in ways that are sensible – building it largely around trees. There is plenty of good, traditional husbandry out there. It will never be possible to control wild forest absolutely, even if it was aesthetically desirable to do so –but ecology is coming on apace. Science in general, of the right kind, can abet all human endeavour.
What matters in the end, though, is politics – politics in the broad sense: the creation of societies that actually work, and have fruitful relations with each other. It matters who leads those societies, and what the leaders do with their power. Above all we must never stop asking the question that seems to have gone missing. What do we actually want? What are we trying to achieve?
I don’t believe the world can get significantly better if we leave politics to career politicians. That is not what ‘democracy’ means. I also nurse the conceit (for which there is abundant evidence) that human beings are basically good (a belief that I have been intrigued to find of late is fundamental to Hindus). It seems to follow that if only democracy can be made to work – if the will of humanity as a whole can prevail – then
the world could be a far better place: that it could, after all, come through these next few difficult decades; that our grandchildren can indeed live as they will want to do, and as people should.
It follows that the most important initiatives are those that are called ‘grass roots’. Indeed they always have been, when you take a cool view of history: the suffragette movement; the trade unions; organic farming. Things start to work well when people at large take matters into their own hands. All these principles are exemplified by the Green Belt Movement in Kenya. Appropriately, it was begun by a woman from rural Kenya, Wangari Maathai; and it is built around trees.
WANGARI MAATHAI AND THE GREEN BELT MOVEMENT
Wangari Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She is not of course the first African to win it – others in recent years include Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Kofi Annan – but she is the first African woman. She began the Green Belt Movement in 1977 – partly, she said in her Nobel acceptance speech, ‘responding to needs identified by rural women, namely lack of firewood, clean drinking water, balanced diets, shelter and income’. The people in this world whose opinions really count are those who are closest to the action and in Africa, as Professor Maathai pointed out, ‘Women are the primary caretakers’ and so ‘they are often the first to become aware of environmental damage as resources become scarce’.