Figure 13.1. Photograph of Queensland’s rainforest on fire in 2019. This wet forest was formerly considered to be safe from fire, but climate change and the buildup of dry vegetation on the forest floors has led to intense burning in recent years. Renier van Raders
Figure 13.2. The scene left behind following a fire in the rainforest in Queensland, Australia.
Renier van Raders
The prominent contribution of tropical deforestation to rising global emissions, as well as the local, regional, and global earth systems feedbacks that, as we saw in Chapter 12, are possible should these forests continue to disappear, has meant that the conservation and management of tropical forests has become a major environmental, economic, and political priority. This is the case not just for governments in and around the equator but, as demonstrated by the international political fallout during the Amazonian fires of 2019, also for those further to the north. And rightly so. Because by 2050 over half of the world’s human population and two-thirds of its children will live in the tropics, looking increasingly intently at tropical forests to make their living and to secure their futures. The possible solutions can seem obvious from Euro-American homes. Cordon off the land like a crime scene, remove all humans to let it return to “nature,” plant more trees, and encourage foreign governments to prohibit logging, hunting, and landscape conversion. However, these sometimes patronizing perspectives usually ignore two major issues. First, as we’ve seen, most tropical forests have not been completely “natural” for many millennia. Second, the responsibility for the current impacts of capitalism on tropical landscapes, as well as for the global wealth imbalances at the core of deforestation, hunting, and climate change crises, does not lie solely with people in the tropics. Instead, we are all, particularly those of us enjoying comfort in the Western world, liable for the fate of these threatened biomes. While this can be hard to swallow, as we will now see, only by acknowledging the above two points can we develop more successful and just conservation, economic, and political policies.3
GIVEN ALL THAT we have seen throughout this book, it may come as something of a surprise that some conservationists and ecologists have sought to define areas of tropical forest as “wilderness.” The current rate of global species extinctions is estimated at 1,000 times its natural baseline rate as a result of twenty-first-century human planetary influences. Thanks to the sheer quantity of plant and animal species in tropical forests, a plethora of which are thought to still await discovery, conservationists have focused on these ecosystems as bastions in the global fight against species loss. Some have even suggested that by protecting vast areas of “wilderness” with low human “footprints” and high levels of biodiversity (i.e., tropical rainforests), we can secure the future of the majority of the Earth’s plants and animals. Similar ideas drive the proposal that by adding more trees around the world, notably in dry tropical and subtropical areas, we can successfully counteract climate change by returning large areas of land to a “restored” state. Alternatively, ecologists have emphasized the significance of the condition of the remaining forests—namely, whether they remain “intact” or have been “degraded” by human actions. Such terminology hints at desires to reach a primeval, undisturbed condition, something clearly visible in many UNESCO designations of natural heritage areas. For example, the Wet Tropics of Australia is said to contain “relicts of the great Gondwanan forest that covered Australia… 50–100 million years ago.”4 Now, the maintenance of intact forests, with their characteristic canopies, stratification, and dynamics, can certainly have its benefits. These forests undoubtedly play immensely significant roles in air quality, soil stability, climate, and biodiversity protection. In fact, many of the best-protected ecoregions worldwide occur in “intact” areas of tropical forest within the Neotropics and Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, the fencing of wholly “natural” tropical areas is becoming increasingly challenging in the face of human population growth. Moreover, ecologists are recognizing that “intact” does not have to mean “pristine,” while many ecological benefits also exist in secondary and “anthropogenic” forests. As we’ve seen from the beginning of this book, tropical forests are not static. Instead, they have been constantly on the move thanks to plate tectonics, climate change, and, later, deliberate human interventions. The exclusion of these dynamic histories, as well as their traditional human occupants, can thus misrepresent these forests, often with unintended consequences.5
The establishment of protective reserves can still represent a highly effective solution to tropical conservation if done in the right way. However, for many areas of tropical forest, they are simply not an effective, or even viable, option. So what can be done instead? Can we learn something from the archeological, historical, and paleoecological insights we have already gained? Bushmeat hunting, for example, is often taken to be inherently unsustainable, leading to “empty” forests. However, as we saw in Chapter 6’s tour of our species’ first global expansions, semiarboreal and arboreal mammals, including two primates (the gray langur and purple-faced leaf monkey) that are now endangered, were consistently hunted by bow-and-arrow-wielding human populations in Sri Lanka’s rainforests between 45,000 and 3,000 years ago, without apparent negative impacts. Furthermore, even deliberate early human modifications to tropical forests to maintain clearings, tracks, and grassland biomes, dating as far back as 45,000 years ago, likely stimulated rather than hindered populations of prey such as wild boar in Borneo. Certainly, ethnographic and historical observations in Central Africa and South America document that Indigenous hunting methods and cultural restrictions see hunters move between different forest areas and different species to maintain the overall health of their prey communities. Meanwhile, a review of ethnographic research across the Amazon Basin, New Guinea, and Australia has revealed the benefits of human burning for the new growth of starch-rich plants as well as for populations of locally hunted birds and ground-dwelling and arboreal mammals. In fact, although, as discussed in Chapter 12, prehistoric “overhunting” was potentially an early human earth systems intervention, the majority of tropical animal extinctions convincingly linked directly to hunting actually postdate European colonialism. Indeed, today, the most unsustainable bushmeat hunting occurs where traditional weaponry, local ecological knowledge, and subsistence requirements have given way to heavy population pressure, “trophy” killing by tourists, or a commercial, individualistic drive to use snares and rifle technologies to maximize capture. In the latter case, this is often done to feed a rampant international illegal trade in pets, medicinal ingredients, or valuable items such as ivory. With the right conditions and practices in place, however, hunting in tropical forests, particularly as a local source of food, need not inevitably result in their falling silent.6
We have also seen that farming activities need not necessarily be in conflict with tropical forests. As shown in Chapter 7, these environments have yielded some of the earliest examples of deliberate cultivation anywhere in the world. Not only that, but Indigenous farming activities in the tropics reveal the possibility of very different avenues to food production than our common Euro-American perceptions of “agriculture.” Archeology, paleoecology, and Indigenous knowledge are all now advocating the benefits of such “usable pasts” for improving food security in the tropics in the twenty-first century. Nigerian archeobotanist Dr. Emuobosa Orijemie of the University of Ibadan emphasizes how the archeobotanical record of the last 1,000 years in central Nigeria shows that “mixed landscapes of indigenous crops, such as oil palm, groundnuts, yams, cowpea, and pearl millet, and not monoculture” provided food security for human populations through periods of demographic expansion and climatic variability. Indeed, all around the tropics, scientists, local smallholders, and Indigenous communities are calling for a move away from the precarious world of maximum productivity encouraged by Euro-American expectations of genetically modified technologies, monoculture, and market demand and a turn instead toward the security of diver
se traditional grains, legumes, farming systems, and extended family-based social networks. These practical legacies of food production are also the reason why, at the very beginning of this book, we saw villages on the banks of the Amazon Basin still sitting astride the fertile human-created Amazonian Dark Earths and combining small fields of manioc and maize with stands of wild Amazon nut (Brazil nut) trees and palms. Although many imagine agricultural fields and clearance as the prime route toward supposed “civilization” and development, the millennia of farming practices recorded in the soils of tropical forests around the world suggest very different, more sustainable routes forward for food production, particularly as the tropics and their inhabitants are increasingly threatened by climatic instability.7
Because 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban settlements by 2050, and much of this will be focused on the tropics, we also need to come to terms with the fact that cities and their infrastructure will come into increasing conflict with tropical forests. Although high concentrations of people, roads, railways, airports, houses, and industry associated with Euro-American ideals of the city seem incompatible with tropical sustainability, Chapter 9 showed us that the tropical archeological record may once again offer some solutions. In particular, the “low-density agrarian-based urbanism” seen in Cambodia, North and Central America, the Amazon Basin, and Sri Lanka provide models for the low-density distribution of people across a landscape and the intermeshing of food production with urban facilities, administrations, and dwellings. Similarly, precolonial walled cities in West Africa, such as Benin City, demonstrate how well-organized systems of urban nodes, wild forest, land for cultivation, and fallow land formed to protect large populations from enemy incursions but also from resource shortages, a lack of fertile soils, and the loss of crucial forest environments. There is also renewed present-day scientific interest in the soil modifications that many of these past urban landscapes developed and relied upon to maintain their large tropical populations. Although they represent very different settings and socioeconomic contexts than their present counterparts, twenty-first-century urban planners are actively using and pushing these archeological examples as they seek to develop more sustainable models of cities that are more resistant to fluctuations in climate and natural hazards and have greater local security in terms of food and livelihood. In particular, they are highlighting how a planned mixture of “green” and urban space, as opposed to the informal developments currently seen expanding across Latin America and Southeast Asia, can provide a better model for tropical cities. Moreover, they point out that past urban examples highlight the importance of local ownership, consultation, and involvement, rather than top-down decisions and economic and political elites, in the ultimate long-term success of tropical urban sprawls.8
Accepting the “deep human history in tropical forests” also allows us to use archeology and paleoecology to make some specific suggestions in terms of the species and ecosystems we want to preserve or even try to reintroduce in different parts of the tropics. Take the example of planting more trees. We clearly need to take care as to which trees are planted, where, and how. Oil palm has been highlighted, by governments, companies, and conservationists alike, as an important route to prosperity for tropical nations and their populations thanks to a large and growing global demand. Where agricultural fields, pastures, and grasslands are covered in oil palm trees in a systematic manner, the land can capture more carbon, leading to long-term environmental and economic benefits for local populations, and despite its bad media press, compared liter for liter, oil palm threatens fewer species than coconut oil and olive oil. However, in Southeast Asia in particular, remote sensing satellite imagery has shown that much of the land converted to oil palm plantations over the last two decades has actually been native, peat swamp forest, leading to significant carbon emissions through fire, peat drainage, and loss of significant biodiversity. Archeology and history can have a significant role to play in developing more ecologically relevant solutions, highlighting the profitable and sustainable inclusion of economically valuable crops within diverse farming systems, as seen with oil palm in Africa in Chapters 7 and 11. Similarly, paleoecological research, ranging from the study of ancient plant remains in archeological sites in Hawai’i to the analysis of ancient plant DNA preserved in lake records at the high-altitude border of Uganda and Rwanda, has helped to bring past landscapes back to life. Records from before European colonialism of forests that existed under different Holocene climatic conditions can better shape “rewilding” and conservation priorities. Study of ancient animal fossils in the tropics can play a similar role in determining where and how species that have disappeared from the area, but were present in the past, might be locally and productively reintroduced. Nevertheless, ultimately, the question remains, what do we actually want to protect or restore? Are we really always trying to reconstruct a “natural” landscape that, as we have seen throughout this book, has not truly existed in many parts of the tropics for thousands of years? Or do we rather want to engage with the idea that many of tropical forests were being successfully managed for a long time before colonial and imperial forces arrived and subsequently made them the threatened biomes they are today?9
This question is becoming increasingly pressing as the creation of reserves by national governments can damage the rights and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples whose ancestors have occupied tropical forests for millennia. There is sometimes a narrow conservation assumption that because industrialized, capitalist impacts on forests are devastating, we must lock out all human communities. The Twa, who had lived in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the eastern Congo Basin, were forcibly expelled, leading to rampant malnutrition as they were forced to integrate into wage systems and lost their traditional sources of food from the forest. The Wanniya-laeto of Sri Lanka have been similarly prohibited from hunting in their traditional forest lands and now face the gradual disappearance of their culture and even their language. In some cases, the removal of Indigenous groups evidently impacts the forests in a negative manner. In Australia, bureaucratic obstacles hindering Traditional Aboriginal Owners, such as the Jirrbal community, from practicing burning and forest management on their traditional forest land can have ecological as well as cultural consequences. A reduction in the application of long-held burning practices has meant that dense undergrowth has formed in both the dry sclerophyll forests and the rainforests of the region. The land now looks “sick,” as Jirrbal elder Desley Mosquito described to me. As the climate dries in the face of human-induced CO2 emissions, dense forest floors provide the ideal kindling for increasingly frequent forest fires. Significantly, a number of initiatives by the Wet Tropics Management Authority and the Rainforest Aboriginal Peoples now support the application of traditional knowledge within ecologically protected areas. Paleoecological research in the Amazon Basin has demonstrated how drastic changes in forest burning practices between precolonial and colonial times have had a major bearing on ongoing fire frequency and intensity. A Western scientific arrogance that insists we should always keep parts of the world fenced off and “undegraded”—perhaps as a way to somehow morally offset our own growing destructive impacts—while potentially ecologically productive, can sometimes actually damage the very ecosystems it seeks to protect. Not only that, but, like the history of the last five centuries, the creation of reserves has often been undertaken in a way that continues the unjust dismissal and marginalization of the very people who have the best long-term knowledge of local ecological dynamics and thresholds, as well as the most intense experiences of integrating new social, economic, and political structures into tropical land management—in short, the people we should be supporting and asking for advice.10
Figure 13.3. Monoculture oil palm plantation in Borneo, Indonesia. In principle oil palm offers a valuable crop for boosting incomes and, when planted on pastoral or open land, can even improve the carbon sequestration in the soil. Although increasingly reg
ulated, in the last two decades significant conversion of rainforest and peat swamp forests to plantations has occurred, releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and destroying wildlife habitats.
Douglas Sheil
WE NEED TO accept that colonial and imperial processes, documented in Chapters 10 and 11, have led to a series of environmental, economic, and political injustices that tie the hands of people living in the tropics today. At the most fundamental level, five centuries of ecological and land-use disruption by Euro-American powers have made tropical communities some of the most vulnerable to climate change and other conservation threats. We can trace the challenges of meeting subsistence needs in the face of rampant soil erosion, declining nutrients, and invasive species that plague islands such as Haiti, São Tomé and Príncipe, Madeira, Mauritius, Madagascar, and the Canary Islands back to profit-driven, colonially established plantation agriculture. Similarly, the deforestation of the Philippine uplands and coasts, which has left behind eroding slopes and a vulnerability to flash flooding, is a product of centuries of extractive logging by first Spanish and later US and Japanese imperial governments. Colonial and imperial extractive demands have also impacted the wildlife in certain regions. For example, in Sri Lanka, due to massive hunts by British colonial agents in the Horton Plains Highlands, animals once crucial for seed dispersal and forest dynamics are now completely absent from mountainous regions on the island today. One nineteenth-century British hunter reported that he alone had killed 6,000 elephants. Finally, the massive amount of fossil fuels burned in the name of industrialization—mainly, to date, to the benefit the Euro-American world—is the primary cause behind the present state of the polar ice caps and global climatic systems, which has seen frightening sea level rise and extreme typhoons and cyclones batter the islands of the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Caribbean. Given that a significant portion of capital for this process in many cases came from trade in human lives, cheap labor, and extractive profits, often from these very same tropical landscapes, this climate injustice and the current plight of these drowning nations should perhaps sicken us more than it often does.11
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