Jungle
Page 31
Which brings us to perhaps the most important way in which we can all limit our own impacts on tropical forests: modifying our consumer habits and choices. Many of us have benefited from the globally imbalanced social, economic, and political processes of the last five hundred years, with our own relative comfort to this day relying on the resources, people, and environments of the tropics. Tropical deforestation and its causes all remain tied to our own choices and histories, whether we want to accept it or not. The effects will also, sooner or later, impact us. It is time for us all to take action—whether it is paying a premium on furniture that uses timber from the Forest Stewardship Council or studying what a purchase of “organic” coffee actually means for Indigenous-led growing initiatives; whether it is buying fair-trade chocolate or boycotting clothing companies that use poorly paid, and often child, labor from the tropics; whether it is reading in depth about the practical benefits of the next ecotourism destination for local communities and economies or taking the time to read biscuit labels to distinguish products that include sustainable palm oil versus mass-produced, uncertified palm oil; or whether it is reducing our car journeys or flights abroad, curbing emissions, and reducing the climatic impacts on the most vulnerable tropical communities as well as, eventually, ourselves. Back home, be that in a tropical city away from forest frontiers or miles and miles away on an icy, dreary morning in northwestern Europe, these products and facilities may seem to just drop into our laps and fly onto our shelves. But their origins, their production, and our empowered ability to purchase and use them all derive from the tropics and the last half millennium of Euro-American economic and political integration with, and often exploitation of, tropical forests and their communities. Our decisions matter.
IN THE WINTER of 2018, the supermarket chain Iceland released a Christmas ad very different from the cute, comfortable viewing the UK public was used to at this time of year. Produced in partnership with Greenpeace, the video shows a cartoon orangutan swinging through the bedroom of a young girl, messing up her possessions as it went. Reaching a bottle of shampoo, “Rang-tan” suddenly stops and howls, transporting the viewer back to its own, tropical home. Here, fire, destruction, and devastation are suddenly strewn across the screen, causing “Rang-tan” to flee, an ecological refugee. While people will undoubtedly question Iceland’s motives and timing, as a multinational corporation, its move to ban uncertified palm oil products from its stores is a positive one. Furthermore, the video provides a beautiful artistic vision of the influence all of us can have on tropical homes many thousands of kilometers away from us merely by picking up the wrong bottle in a supermarket. Do we really want rampant flames and falling trees messing up forests and livelihoods on our behalf? Even if we cannot always see them? In a manner perhaps characteristic of the way the Western world often seeks to bury its head in the sand, the UK monitoring body Clearcast actually banned the ad from television, deeming it “too political” for the Broadcast Code of Advertising and Practice due to the involvement of the conservation organization Greenpeace. That did not stop it from receiving millions of views on social media, however. Ultimately, like that video, this chapter and those preceding it have sought to repeatedly highlight how all of us are, in some way, implicated in the fate of tropical forests and the success of their conservation. From Indigenous groups to small-scale farmers seeking to survive, from companies extracting profit to governments trying to improve the lot of their citizens, from conservation scientists campaigning for particular species or biomes to each person standing at a supermarket shelf, starting a car, or queuing for a flight, we are all dependent on the tropics for our economic and social situations and all responsible for what happens next. Is it so hard, therefore, to find a common, intense interest in their ongoing existence? They need all of us, now, more than ever. Will we answer?21
Chapter 14
A GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY
It was the middle of the night on the shores of Ponta da Castanha on the Téfé River tributary of the Amazon, toward the end of the Brazilian journey that began this book. Lying in my hammock, restless from the heat, mosquitoes, and a hard day of trekking, I felt incredibly small. Just beyond the door of the wooden hut where I, Victor, and our colleagues were sleeping stood environments that have, in some form or other, been on our planet for at least 300 million years. The specific microclimates, species, and structure of the particular Neotropical forests that swayed in the nighttime breeze outside extend back to 60 million years ago. That’s older than the most significant mountain range of the South American continent, the Andes, and highlights the resilience, but also the changeability, of these remarkable environments over geological timescales. The building’s open holes for windows let the incessant chattering of insects, swishing of bats, and, toward dawn, squawking of birds wash over me. I had never heard such a concentration of wildlife in such close proximity. But these noises quite literally spoke to the role tropical forests have played in the evolution of animal life on this planet—from the early reptilian ancestors of the crocodile our boat driver had seen loitering by our boat that evening to the dinosaurian ancestors of birds, from the gliding mammals of the Jurassic to the hominin ancestors of me and my companions resting inside. I had never felt more in awe of tropical forests and their contribution to the story of life on Earth than I did in that moment.1
These environments have often been framed as dangerous, exotic, pristine “deserts” of preindustrial human activity. But closing my eyes, I felt incredibly connected to this place. I remembered the pottery we had seen on the forest floor the day before on top of distinctive Amazonian Dark Earth soils, a solid record of the long human history of the Amazon Basin that extends back to between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago. In my mind I retraced my steps through the clusters of palms and Amazon nut (Brazil nut) trees and the shifting swidden fields of manioc and maize that stood on the other side of the village and that our host Jucelino had shown us the day before. The vegetation and forest structure around many such villages along the Amazon and its tributaries provide a living archive of the millennia of land management in these environments. When it came time to leave, I took my seat on a western European–operated aircraft. I thought about the way in which huge distances and home comforts can make those of us living in Europe feel so separate from tropical forests—but also about how colonial and capitalist processes that followed European arrival in the Amazon Basin over the last five hundred years were visible all around me; how the growth of Amazon (Brazil) nut trees Victor and I were analyzing changed as disease, warfare, murder, and ongoing marginalization caused Indigenous inhabitants to flee parts of the forest; how the entwinement of Brazil in the transatlantic slave trade helped drive the global availability of coffee in my airplane cup and the sugar I was about to put into it; and how the rising pressures to feed smallholders, multinational corporations, ambitious governments, and Western consumers were driving the deforestation and land conversion taking place before my eyes on the ground passing by below. I might be able to fly away from Brazil physically, but the historical origins of global and regional inequalities and the importance of increasingly threatened tropical ecosystems to global sustainability mean that, ultimately, I am still connected to the tropical forests of the Amazon Basin and indeed the rest of the world. We all are.2
Through this book I hope to have convinced you that tropical forests are a part of your history, your present livelihood, and your future security. I hope that next time you turn on a nature documentary, you feel a little closer to the miraculous plant and animal life tropical forests have to offer. I hope that the next time you watch a film with an explorer cutting through a tangle of tropical vines, you are less surprised to witness the incredible achievements of preindustrial human societies rise out of the “jungle” before them. And I hope that the next time you see a news report about the poor public health of Indigenous populations, racial tensions, multinational corporation mining, deforestation, and rampant fires in the t
ropics, you do not look away. Instead, I hope you keep watching. I hope you feel a responsibility. And I hope you begin to take time to research and explore the ways in which you might be able to make a difference. Remarkably, despite our complex global social and communication systems, humans often struggle to empathize with issues unless they are on their doorstep. Yet Chapters 12 and 13 have shown that the environmental, political, and economic threats facing populations living in the tropics will, through the connection of tropical forests to earth systems, lead to changes in biodiversity and climate the world over. Not only that, but participation in a colonial and capitalist system that has exploited the tropics for the last half a millennium means that we all have some obligation to help obtain justice in fights against the global economic and infrastructural inequality, rampant profit-driven tropical deforestation and land-cover change, marginalization of Indigenous rights and knowledge, and ongoing racial violence and systemic discrimination that are still visible across almost all of Europe and northern North America. Yet “hope” at this stage won’t do us much good. So I will now make one last attempt to show you what is at stake. Let’s look at what is happening and what is predicted to happen to (1) tropical forests and their species, (2) to human inhabitants of the tropics, and (3) to the global climatic, economic, social, and political situation as a consequence of tropical forest disappearance. Perhaps by seeing what we all stand to lose, we can gain a new urgency in negotiating a more just, resilient future for the tropics.3
STUDIES OF TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY forest loss based on global yearly satellite images at high levels of resolution suggest that deforestation is continuing unabated, despite growing awareness of its planetary impacts. The majority of the world’s deforestation is happening in the tropics, where total forest loss increased by over 2,000 km2 (an area about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island) every year in the first decade of this century. Tropical rainforests, such as those of the Amazon Basin, accounted for nearly a third of global forest-cover reductions, while tropical dry forests in South America and moist deciduous forests in Africa saw annual increases in total deforestation of 459 km2 and 536 km2 a year, respectively. Southeast Asia also saw a particularly large expansion of forest removal over this period, with Indonesia alone showing an increase in annual losses from 10,000 km2 to around 20,000 km2 (so that an area of forest roughly equivalent to the size of New Jersey was being removed by 2010). This highlights the pantropical nature of rampant deforestation in the twenty-first century. Some predict that, if nothing is done, by 2100, Amazonia, the Congo Basin, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Wallacea will retain just half of their forest cover. Meanwhile, the tropical Andes, Madagascar, the Atlantic forests of Brazil, and New Guinea will have just 26, 23, 26, and 18 percent of their present-day forests still standing.4
It is not just complete deforestation that is a concern but, as we saw in Chapter 13, also the less obvious degradation of those forests left standing. A recent satellite study found that forest degradation occurred across the same area of forest in the Amazon Basin as complete deforestation did between 1995 and 2017. Since 2017 alone, approximately 1,036,800 km2 of Amazonian tropical forest area has been disturbed in some form (an area four times the size of the United Kingdom). One of the main causes of disturbance is wood harvesting and export, and early twenty-first-century extraction rates from selective logging are particularly high for Guyana (13 m3 of wood per hectare) and Indonesia (34 m3 of wood per hectare). However, the causes behind this damage vary in different parts of the tropics, and the use of wood for fuel is by far the largest contributor to forest disturbance in much of tropical Africa. Forests change even further as tropical cities expand. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a capital likely encountered by any of you seeking safari holidays in eastern Africa, researchers found that urban demand for fuel production and high-value timber left a clear impact on the surrounding tropical forests that extended many kilometers away from the city. Similarly, the highest rates of forest degradation in a studied region of southeastern Mexico are, unsurprisingly, currently found in regions with the highest human population density. Even those tropical forests that are left unshaven in the face of human activities are going to have to come to terms with a growing human presence.5
Perhaps the most emphatic of forest disturbances is fire, and twenty-first-century tropical forest fires are only going to intensify. Studying rates of charcoal accumulation in sediment sequences across the tropical forest environments of the Amazon, as well as the Brazilian Atlantic coast, researchers have concluded that the fire frequency and intensity seen in these areas today have no precedents throughout the 11,700-year span of the Holocene. In fact, based on current “worst-case” scenarios of changing land use and forest fragmentation in the Brazilian Amazon, models predict that the probability of monthly fire occurrence will increase by 73 percent by between 2071 and 2100, even before expected changes in climate are factored in. This is not just a South American problem, and crucial peat swamp forest ecosystems in Africa and Southeast Asia are increasingly “in the line of fire.” During even relatively mild climatic conditions in 2002, nearly three-quarters of the area impacted by fire in Borneo was peat swamp forest, and peat fires are now becoming common in every dry season in this part of the world. The next decade could see a total loss of peat swamp forest ecosystems across Southeast Asia as a product of increased fires and permanent human land-use changes. Observations of fire frequency across Australia during the early twenty-first century suggest that weekly bushfire occurrences will also only further impact the tropical forests of the Wet Tropics in coming years.6
Human-induced climate change will undoubtedly exacerbate the rates of fire, disturbance, and tropical forest structural change. It is becoming increasingly apparent that a temperature rise of between 1.5°C and 2°C from preindustrial levels will be enough to “tip” the planet into a completely new climatic and environmental state. Ice collapse and melt has already advanced beyond expected levels, and recent estimates suggest that the entirety of the Arctic ice cap will melt in summer by 2050. Although growing economies in Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa, in particular, have contributed to growing carbon emissions, tropical nations still only contribute around 20 percent of the global total. Yet they are still taking the brunt of the damage. Average surface temperatures increased by an average of 0.7°C around the tropics between 1961 and 2018. While this may not seem like a lot, compared to around 1.5°C for a region such as Scotland during the same period, normally low intra- and interannual temperature variation in the tropics means that smaller changes there can have bigger impacts on climate systems, environments, and species than larger changes in temperate regions. Atmospheric CO2 is already at levels only seen 4 million years ago in the Pliocene, and as climate modeler Tim Lenton, whom we met in Chapter 1, has pointed out, we are rapidly on our way to levels seen during the “hothouse” state of the Eocene when temperatures were 14°C higher than those of the preindustrial period. One might argue that this could actually be good for tropical forests, given their proliferation at that time, which we explored in Chapter 2, but given rising human pressures and the fact that climate change will also result in an increasing unpredictability of rainfall in many tropical regions, they will almost certainly be placed into an equal state of disarray as the rest of the planet, should these trends continue.7
In fact, scientists have shown that a decrease in forest cover of anywhere between 20 and 40 percent or a rise of 4°C in temperature would be enough to begin a permanent transition to savannah environments in most of the central, southern, and eastern Amazon. Alongside rises in fire frequency, this would undoubtedly spark an end to some of largest extents of tropical forest biomes anywhere in the world. Changes in climate and tropical forest habitat are also placing enormous pressures on the rich animal species of these environments. Insects, amphibians, and reptiles can all only tolerate small variations in temperature and will face increasing challenges in the decades to come. Bird
s have been demonstrated to struggle in the face of fragmentation, and isolated patches of Amazonian forest smaller than 1 km2 can lose nearly half of their bird species within a period of just fifteen years. Tigers in India, forest elephants and gorillas in Africa, and orangutans in Borneo are all considered particularly vulnerable to habitat loss, and their protected areas may soon become too small to sustain viable populations. Overhunting is also a growing issue, especially given an ongoing, profit-driven global trade in tropical animals and an increasing number of people seeking adequate protein in the tropics. Using a database of 3,281 records of how hunting has affected mammals around the tropics, researchers have found that about half of the existing intact tropical forest areas and 62 percent of wilderness areas are now, at least in part, already devoid of large mammals, with particularly large declines expected in West and Central Africa and Southeast Asia. Human introduction of invasive species will also continue to reconfigure tropical plant and animal communities, particularly in the face of habitat change. Invasive plants can suppress native species seeking to regrow. Meanwhile, exotic animals often tip the balance of predator-prey relationships. For example, the widespread distribution feral cats in the Wet Tropics of northeastern Queensland, which prey on often endangered, endemic small mammals, is a cause for considerable concern.8