Jungle

by Jungle (retail) (epub)

  Beyond the tropical landscapes themselves, long legacies of colonialism and imperialism, by producing very different socioeconomic conditions, have also dictated the flexibility with which local communities can now even afford to act in the face of threats. This has included the suppression of local Indigenous traditional knowledge in many regions through murder, disease, and relocation. But it has also involved fundamental emerging wealth imbalances that inevitably shape local priorities. Many tropical nations in Africa are home to some of the fastest-growing, but also the poorest, populations anywhere in the world. For example, in Madagascar, more than 92 percent of the population lives on less than US $2 per day. The government announced schemes of protected areas in 2003; however, breakdown in law enforcement and political crisis has hindered their progress, opening the door to illegal logging and mining, as well as bushmeat hunting and slash-and-burn farming by desperate populations attempting to survive in a drying landscape. In the southern area of the island, twentieth-century French imperial policies that forced mobile pastoralists to adopt more “modern” sedentary cultivation of cash crops have also increased contemporary pressure on tropical forests and a lemur population that represents c. 20 percent of the world’s primate species. Similarly stark wealth discrepancies and political instability pose major challenges to coordinated conservation efforts across tropical Africa as well as New Guinea, where small-scale farmers are often the primary drivers behind deforestation. Contrast this to Australia, the richest nation in the world to host tropical forest, thanks to its very different colonial history. Here, a far higher level of per capita income and the economic and social benefits offered by comprehensive access to education provide a context in which a designated Wet Tropics World Heritage area can be effectively extended and policed across 894,420 hectares in Queensland (an area eight times the size of Greater London) and profit from the arrival of 5 million tourists (from home and abroad) and income of AUS $426 million every year.12

  We should therefore not underestimate the degree to which Western conservation ideals are something of a luxury, born of the fact that, in many ways, we have already “made it” in terms of “development” and industrialization. The centuries of colonial and imperial removal of wealth from tropical nations, with limited return in terms of local investment and infrastructure, have, by contrast, exposed governments in the tropics to tensions between demands for improvements to living conditions at the same time as conservation and climate crises are reaching a tipping point. Brazil is an increasingly wealthy member of the BRICS economic group, with low population growth and relatively high earnings. Nevertheless, its government remains under heavy pressure from its supporters to develop further. The state of Amazonas is Brazil’s poorest but also contains the largest area of tropical forest cover. As Victor Caetano Andrade and I saw at the start of this book, dense rainforest necessitates taking slow boats or expensive planes to move around, within, or beyond the state. Political, economic, and social incorporation of Amazonas, and its capital Manaus, into Brazil’s federal network has always been challenging and involved a relatively late history of European contact with Indigenous communities. Poor populations are desperate for access to growing markets or even basic medical supplies, as tragically witnessed during the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Better infrastructure and land conversion, either government mandated or illegal, are seen as key routes to improving local livelihoods but will also inevitably represent a major conservation threat to significant areas of tropical forest, necessitating detailed planning. Local situations such as these must be considered when international calls are made for South American nations to stop cutting down trees or when Kenya and India are told to stop burning fossil fuels, especially in the context of long histories of Western extraction, exploitation, and unequal development efforts.13

  Multinational corporations, as well as global consumerism, also now have a viselike grip on tropical nations, thanks to centuries of profits made on the basis of poorly paid labor, conversion of tropical land, and capitalist-based approaches to agriculture and tropical landscapes. Even relatively wealthy nations, such as Australia, do not escape, and the extent of and slow response to the “Black Summer” can be, at least partially, linked to poor policies on climate change in a nation that relies on coal-mining companies to bolster its economy. Similarly, governments in South America and West and Central Africa have often leased vast areas of tropical forest to dominating corporations seeking oil and gas. In the case of “cash crops”—from coffee in North, Central, and South America to tea in Sri Lanka and from bananas in the Caribbean to soybeans in Brazil—global demands, including from ourselves, many miles away, have long driven large landowners and small farmers toward cheaper, profit-making monoculture fields. Returning to palm oil, companies relying on this ingredient for products as diverse as lipstick, pizza dough, instant noodles, shampoo, chocolate, cooking oils, packaged bread, and biodiesel, catering to growing demand from Asian and Euro-American markets and consumers, have been a major driving force behind Southeast Asian governments having poor control over, or even actively encouraging, unregulated, unsustainable conversion of tropical forests to widespread plantation systems, to the jeopardy of their endemic wildlife. Meanwhile, simultaneous rising costs of local land, as well as corporations’ expansion of their own holdings, can leave the door open to the abuse of the land rights of local people, as well as rising prices that leave small-scale farmers and Indigenous populations with little option but to convert, contract, abandon, or sell their own plots. Aggressive market conditions thus threaten more mixed, more sustainable, and often more productive approaches. The expansion of cattle ranching by large landowners across the Amazon Basin to meet regional and global meat markets has represented a similar problem in Neotropical forests.14

  Euro-American consumerism can even dictate which areas and tropical forest environments are made conservation priorities in the first place. Reserves, whether they are 39,000 km2, like the Tumucumaque National Park in Brazil, or under 2 km2, like the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve in Singapore, are expensive—both to establish and to maintain. Where tropical governments are able to invest in parks or in laws prohibiting logging or clearance, they need there to be some form of payoff. Ecotourism—travel to protected reserves to explore wildlife—has provided one way in which foreign wealth can simultaneously fund the maintenance of forests with crucial ecosystem roles while also producing additional economic benefits for local communities. The problem is that the forests receiving the most attention by protective policies are often those that provoke Western fascination rather than necessarily those that serve the most pressing local needs. For example, they frequently include the green homes of iconic conservation stars such as the troops of montane gorilla in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, the orangutans of the Kabili-Sepilok Forest Reserve in northern Borneo, the jaguars of Brazil’s Pantanal Matogrossense National Park, and the cassowaries and tree kangaroos of the Wet Tropics of Australia. This can be significant, especially as these giants often occupy a critical “keystone” position in tropical ecosystems. Nevertheless, it means that governments are less willing to pay for the conservation of less traditionally glamorous forests, including dry tropical forests, montane rainforests, coastal mangroves, and peat swamp forests, which often have more unique taxa, are often under far greater threat, and perform crucial functions in landscape stability and buffering against natural hazards. The position of many of these forests in climatic boundary areas, such as the sides of mountains or precipitation gradients between ever-wet and seasonally dry rainfall regimes, also makes them some of the most vulnerable to increased pressures of human land use and climate change.15

  Tropical nations and their governments are, of course, not completely blameless in the conservation challenges facing the tropics. Political corruption, crime networks, increasing nationalism, and willful neglect of science can pose real problems for tropical forest conservation. Nor does the world need any repeat o
f the condescending ideologies of “saving” supposedly incapable local tropical populations that served as justification for many colonial and imperial enterprises and atrocities over the past half a millennium. In fact, local voices, such as the Association of Small Island States, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center, cooperative unions of fair-trade cultivators, Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon, and, as mentioned above, Rainforest Aboriginal organizations in Australia, are showing themselves perfectly capable of expressing the existential threats that they, and all of us, face in the context of climate change, governmental development strategies, and corporate interests, as well as advocating practicable solutions. However, top-down international and even national declarations and demands are often blind to the social, economic, political, and environmental histories that can limit the power of these groups and their voices. They can also hide the role of Euro-American nations in continuing to create an imbalanced tropical world through consumer choices and demands and wealthy, exploitative businesses. If we want to truly protect tropical forests for future generations, we must not only listen to local stakeholders and Indigenous populations such as the groups mentioned above but also practically support them by putting our money where our mouths are. In this way, we can combine local, traditional ecological and economic knowledge and strategies with archeological and paleoecological insights into how tropical landscapes have evolved and been managed by humans through time, to give tropical forests, and ourselves, the best chance to fight some of the most extreme sustainability challenges to ever face humanity during its time as a widespread tropical species.16

  THE HISTORICAL COLONIAL restrictions placed upon significant amounts of Indigenous and local knowledge, which was developed over millennia, means that the application of traditional management and adaptations in tropical forests is not always straightforward and can sometimes even have negative impacts. Here, archeology and paleoecology, as well as the revitalization of Indigenous languages and oral histories, can enable local stakeholders to engage with ancestral practices and solutions. For example, in the Caribbean, whereas postcolonial houses are built of hard materials that are expensive to replace and dangerous in the face of intensifying cyclones, hurricanes, and earthquakes, the archeological record of precolonial housing shows something very different. Semipermanent housing, built on foundations of resistant materials and structures as well as more lightweight, easy-to-replace components, was not a sign of “backwardness” but an ideal, economic solution to the everyday challenges of living on these islands. On the Atherton Tablelands of Australia, combined visits of Aboriginal elders, archeologists, and paleoecologists to previous sites of occupation such as Urumbal Pocket have enabled more thorough documentation of the nature and importance of past human land and resource use through a combination of preserved oral histories with soil traces of human food processing, plant and animal use, and records of controlled burning. Sometimes, such interdisciplinary work and collaboration can even highlight negative elements of past practices, emphasizing the need for detailed, context-specific reviews and solutions rather than blanket statements or applications. For example, archeological and environmental investigation of human-made sediment traps at the locations of Konso and Engaruka in Tanzania show that traditional approaches enabled the capture of fertile, fine-grained soils and the avoidance of field salinization. However, while these practices improved growing conditions in the valley regions, soil erosion and vegetation loss in the highlands may have resulted in ultimate abandonment and loss of livelihoods. More detailed work of this nature is essential to understand how food security, resilient settlement, and sustainable use of tropical forests and landscapes was achieved, or indeed not, prior to the arrival of domineering colonial, imperial, and capitalist forces across much of the tropics—using the past to plan for the future.17

  Where protected reserve initiatives are possible, the involvement of local stakeholders, whether they are recognized Indigenous groups or local farmers, has repeatedly resulted in more successful outcomes than when they are ignored. In the Brazilian Amazon, Indigenous classification systems of plants and ecosystem transitions have long been at the center of attempts to maintain botanical diversity throughout the giant 130,000 km2 reserve of the Kayapó and Upper Xingu people. In the Ecuadorean Amazon, Indigenous groups combine with local nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and government initiatives to promote ecotourism to individual villages as a source of additional wealth but also a way to promote tropical forest preservation and conservation. Government and administrative support for Aboriginal ranger groups, such as those of the Jabalbinna, Djabugay, and Girringun, have had significant success preserving wildlife in the Wet Tropics of Queensland. Similarly, the allocation and networking of so-called local gorilla guardians in Cameroon has enabled a better understanding of the frequency and distribution of some of the most endangered great apes in Africa, revealing ongoing illicit hunting and strengthening communication and understanding between local villages, hunters, governments, and conservation scientists in order to increase support for protective measures and action. Sometimes conservation initiatives spring completely from the actions of local interest groups. In the Mamberamo-Foja region of Papua (the Indonesian portion of the New Guinea land area), the Ijabait elders act quite literally as “guardians” of local tropical forests. They live at strategic sites, such as forest boundaries and rivers, to monitor and control human use of forest and freshwater animals. In each case, the involvement of local groups, whether through cultural and traditional concerns, social contracts, or added economic benefits, has led to the more beneficial imposition of protected areas and a reduction of illegal incursions. As conservationist Professor Douglas Sheil of the Wageningen University puts it, “The inclusion of populations living in tropical forests not only acts as a robust local barrier to incoming external threats but is also more likely to reconcile economic and subsistence concerns with conservation needs.”18

  Considering local interest groups is also essential to developing and supporting more sustainable ways of extracting resources and products from tropical landscapes. For example, Reduced Impact Logging initiatives use dedicated training for workers, effective patrolling, protection of hillside forests, and refined tree cutting to reduce ecosystem and soil disturbance. The long-term ecological and economic benefits of retaining tropical forest cover are clear. However, these programs also require short-term costs for producers, consumers, and governments. In Bolivia, local government laws, enforcement, tax benefits, and regulated extractions have been required to encourage the effective use of certified forests. To reduce bushmeat hunting in Africa, governments and NGOs similarly need to consider the provision of protein substitutes given the current importance of wildlife to local diets. On the Yucataán Peninsula, honey production represents the main source of income for as many as 16,000 rural ethnic Maya farmers, and Mexico is the world’s fourth-largest honey exporter. These Indigenous farmers produce honey traditionally, refusing to use chemicals, limiting impacts to the forest environment, and taking close care of the health of bees. Nevertheless, the cost of meeting global “organic” certification standards means that, to reap the benefits, they will require government assistance if they are not to resort to more “conventional” methods. Similarly, some of the first pioneering growers of organic coffee included Indigenous farmers practicing agroforestry in Chiapas and Oaxaca in Mexico. Their approach proved beneficial for soils, ecosystems, and even the carbon cycle, but as larger landowners have taken up organic coffee cultivation and official organic status has become harder to sustain in the face of global competition, Indigenous farmers have faced the difficult choice of whether to risk intensification or revert to cheaper alternatives. Ultimately, “trade-offs” require governments, companies, and NGOs to support local communities in the short term in order to cash in on the ecological and economic benefits of longer-term sustainable approaches to forest use within the tropics.19
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br />   On a planetary scale, there are also growing movements by Western nations to actively “pay into” tropical conservation. In 2019, the summit of G7 nations in Biarritz, France, agreed on a US $22 million aid package to help combat and mitigate the wildfires ravaging the Amazon. As is often the case, however, the idea of “aid” proved controversial: Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro suggested that he would reject the money as the conditions attached amounted to colonial interference in South American agrobusiness competition. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program represents a more organized, long-term means for wealthier nations, which have often benefited from the exploitation of the tropics, to begin to pay something back to support conservation efforts in and around the equator and, in so doing, simultaneously protect local environments and economies and the global climate. Developed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the REDD+ program acknowledges that tropical forests should be valued not only for their extractive potential but primarily for the carbon that they store, protecting our atmosphere from further CO2 emissions, warming, and ultimate climatic disaster. In fact, it places a financial estimate on the benefits of this vital “carbon sink.” Poorer countries receive results-based payments, subsidized by wealthier nations, for reducing unregulated logging impacts, slowing overall deforestation, preventing fires, and restoring tropical forest biomes. Not only that, but REDD+ ensures that Indigenous peoples, small and large businesses, and national governments are all heard during the development and application of these initiatives across the tropics. Although the overall economic and ecological benefits are still being determined, and it has also been seen as a controversial, top-down colonial scheme potentially prone to abuses in its own right, this program currently supports sixty-four nations across Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Furthermore, it does, at least, represent perhaps the first explicit recognition by the international community that the responsibility for tropical forest conservation and sustainability is a global one. If we want to do something about the intensifying loss of these environments, as well as the associated earth systems repercussions, then we will all have to play (and pay) our part.20