Fortunately, there are some signs that both of these avenues are beginning to be recognized and supported. The African Forest Landscape Restoration (AFR100) Initiative was founded in December 2015 as a country-led effort to restore 100 million hectares of degraded and deforested land across Africa by 2030. Thirty countries within the African Union have signed on to the scheme, and Ethiopia’s innovation and technology minister famously declared that the country had planted more than 350 million tree seedlings in just twelve hours as part of the program in 2019. Importantly, AFR100 was developed with local outcomes as a top priority. It not only plants trees but also promotes sustainable agroforestry, the intercropping of trees with other forms of land use, and erosion control. This means that broader continental and global needs for forest cover and the production of a “Great Green Wall” to push Sahara desertification back are balanced with needs to enhance local food security. Farmers working in Burkina Faso and Niger have, for example, through experimental modifications to traditional agroforestry, water retention, and soil management practices, converted between 200,000 and 300,000 hectares of land, which produce 80,000 tons of food per year. Such initiatives also offer the opportunity to build more equitable futures in the region. For example, women and girls make up more than 50 percent of the active agricultural labor force across the tropics. Consultation with them when planning forest-restoration projects ensures the wider sharing of educational, infrastructural, ecological, and land-ownership benefits across those societies living within tropical forest environments.22
As we saw in Chapter 13, a growing number of initiatives around the tropics are also seeking to actively combine archeological, paleoecological, historical, and traditional knowledge to construct more equitable, effective conservation plans—policies that integrate smallholders and Indigenous groups in the sustainable management of forests rather than forcing them out. Where local smallholders in western Ghana have been involved and supported in reforestation initiatives, they have planted a significant number of trees on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species as part of their tree plantations, acknowledging and conserving the most vulnerable portions of their surrounding ecosystems. We have seen how, in Australia, Rainforest Aboriginal People are receiving increasing support for their application of traditional, historically documented burning to landscapes and their ongoing stewardship over endemic plant and animal diversity. Similarly, collaboration with Indigenous Kayapó and Upper Xingu groups produced one of the largest protected tropical forest areas in the world at 130,000 km2 in Brazil, as well as effective policies for biodiversity management. Indeed, prior to the rise of Brazil’s recent nationalist government, the country had begun to stem the tide of deforestation, recording a dramatic reduction between 2000 and 2012 that had significantly offset rises elsewhere around the planet. Further support and realistic assessment of the priorities and capacities of local communities interacting with tropical forests are essential. Colombia and Costa Rica have provided one such route of support, introducing taxes on carbon emissions to fund more sustainable practices by landowners, such as reforestation and mixed agroforestry.23
Nonetheless, given the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, it is also essential that extratropical governments and consumers recognize the role they have to play in bolstering change. Global deforestation and fragmentation should be greatly reduced, according to predictions, if the international Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) scheme, which pays tropical nations to reduce emissions from these activities, is successful. Some scenarios and payment plans are expected to lead to the preservation of between 75 and 98 percent of current forest cover across the tropics, though care must be taken that such schemes do not come to mimic further Western colonial dictation. Many oil palm–using companies, seeking to retain access to high-value international markets, have begun to voluntarily sign on to the sustainability standards of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) established in 2004. Obtaining RSPO certification necessitates consideration of impacts on soil and water sources and air quality, as well as plans to mitigate damage to biodiversity. Where this certification system has been applied, livelihoods have improved and negative environmental impacts have been reduced. Your power as a consumer to shape sustainability has been highlighted by the fact that European countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium and giant multinational corporations such as Unilever and Carrefour have, as of 2020, committed to using only palm oil ingredients with 100 percent RSPO certification in their food and cosmetic products. The international pressure (and support) must be kept up, however, as smallholders often lack the means or incentives to adopt RSPO guidelines, and noncertified markets, particularly in Asia, remain open for business.24
We should also perhaps find some optimism in how figureheads such as Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate have led waves of school strikes and protests around the world to demand urgent, united political and economic action on environmental justice and climate change. Furthermore, we are potentially at the threshold of a moment in which Euro-American governments are finally forced to reckon directly with centuries of colonialism and imperialism that have left scars of global inequality and legacies of racial prejudice within their own borders. The year 2020 saw the inequality and discrimination that have plagued European and northern North American interactions with the tropics since the fifteenth century boil to the surface. The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis law enforcement on May 25, 2020, saw the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement soar to national and international prominence. An estimated 15 million to 26 million took part in protests across the United States to protest against this brutal killing, as well as the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor in February and March of the same year, respectively. It became one of the largest movements in North American history. National and international support for BLM also expanded well beyond the United States, with protests organized across Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. We have also seen a rise in demands to deal with the symbols and systems left behind by long-term northern North American and European colonial abuses, as well as the toppling of statues, including that of Edward Colston whom we met in Chapter 11, of individuals known for their racist views, participation in slavery, and contribution to the murder of Indigenous populations. We are finding multinational corporations and academic institutions making commitments to the production of more equitable working environments and societies. Admittedly, much of this still remains superficial or “tokenistic,” and a number of politicians and members of our societies remain resistant. But are we perhaps at the cusp of a major social reckoning—one that acknowledges and addresses the centuries of marginalization, persecution, and exploitation of certain sectors of society and that sees European and northern North American nations accept the role they have played in the political, social, and economic situation of the nations of the tropics and the challenges facing them today?25
BY NOW YOU have seen how tropical forests reach into almost every recess of your life. They have shaped the bouquets you pick up for your loved ones, the scents and displays of your gardens, and, for those of you who celebrate Christmas, the trees at the center of your living room. They have also played a major role in the evolutionary origins of the ants running along your paving slabs, the birds singing outside your window, many of the stars of your local zoo, and, of course, you, your families, your friends, and the entirety of our species. Tropical forests have also grown into your kitchens, providing the rice in your cupboards, the crucial ingredients in many of your medicines, the chicken in your oven and the eggs in your omelet, the sweetcorn on your barbeque, the coffee in your cup, and the chocolate you treat yourself to when no one is looking. They have also provided the rubber for your bikes and cars, your ability to erase mistakes, your Wellington boots, and the insulation surrounding almost anything with an electric wire in your home and workplace. Tropic
al forests are all around you. Sadly, so too are the legacies of centuries of imbalanced colonial and capitalist interactions between the western half of Europe and northern North America and the tropical world, molding the racial tensions, the economic inequalities, the political battlegrounds, and a lot of the social and cultural marginalization in the societies in which you live. These are not distant, exotic environments on the other side of the world. Rather, through an entangled prehistory and history, they have found their way into your homes—no matter where you are.
So, what are you going to do about it? A number of conservation policies are being enacted across the tropics. Trees are being planted to stabilize landscapes and extract carbon from the atmosphere. Protected areas are being developed and enforced to stem the tide of deforestation, degradation, and biodiversity loss. And human populations in the tropics are beginning to be given the resources to apply many of the “usable pasts” we have explored to develop more sustainable, often Indigenous-led approaches to farming, agroforestry, and economic productivity that integrate forests into new forms of land use. However, those on the front lines of this key fight for sustainability cannot be left to take a stand alone. They need economic initiatives that redistribute resources from richer nations and richer sectors of tropical societies. They need global consumers to pay for sustainably produced tropical products, consider the footprint of their tropical tourism, and hold poorly regulated multinational corporations to account. They need global voters to see national interests as global interests, to recognize the mistakes and legacies of colonial pasts and the need to fight for fairer societies around the world. They need the inhabitants of Europe and northern North America, alongside China, to cut their significant per capita contributions to global CO2 emissions in order to stop further environmental change and to give them a buffer to undertake their own, more sustainable economic development. Every single one of you could, today, begin to play at least a small part in every single one of these things. And, as this chapter should have shown, it does need to be today. You might act because this book has shown you that you have an affinity to and a responsibility for tropical forests. You might act because you actually already felt a moral or empathetic desire to help others and just needed some direction as to how. Or you might act because you have seen that, if you don’t, climate change, declining food sources, economic catastrophe, political instability, mass migration, and an explosion of pandemic diseases will very soon be knocking at your own door.26
APPENDIX:
TROPICAL FORESTS IN GEOLOGICAL TIME
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is indebted to the many generations of ecologists, biologists, earth scientists, botanists, zoologists, and conservationists who have made their careers revealing the remarkable secrets of our “jungles.” These pages are built on their labors of love for environments that they have seen increasingly threatened as the decades have ticked by. Since the first chapter, I have argued that tropical forests have been generally marginalized in studies of human history. Nevertheless, I also hope to have highlighted the work of archeologists, paleoanthropologists, anthropologists, historians, and paleoecologists who have persistently bucked this trend—endeavoring to recenter these habitats in discussions of the evolution of our species, the emergence of food production, preindustrial urban settlements, and the impacts of European colonialism on landscapes and people. This book is a tribute to them. This book should also have demonstrated that advancements in “science” are far from the only sources of knowledge about tropical forests. Indigenous voices have long emphasized the ecological, cultural, and economic importance of these environments, not just as stewards of their own lands but also as key advocates for global human sustainability. Governments and scientists often simply haven’t listened closely enough. Or even listened at all. I am incredibly grateful to the Indigenous peoples I have had the great fortune to meet and work with, including, specifically, Uruwaruge Heenbanda and Uruwaruge Wanniya-laeto of the Wanniya-laeto community in Sri Lanka and Desley Mosquito, Barry Hunter, and Gerry Turpin of the Jirrbal, Djabugay, and Mbabaram Aboriginal groups, respectively, in Australia. Indigenous groups and their traditional knowledge must be acknowledged and celebrated instead of ignored or exploited. They offer some of the best hopes for sustainable human use and management of these environments around the world today.
In an era when science is, quite rightly, facing increased scrutiny over its ethics, work environments, and treatment of researchers, I have been immensely privileged to be able to call upon some of the most supportive mentors during my explorations of tropical forests. My two PhD advisors at the University of Oxford set me off on my first encounters with these dynamic environments, and I have never looked back since. Mike Petraglia introduced me to Sri Lanka and its remarkable prehistory. Julia Lee-Thorp gave me the methodological tools to explore it further. Looking back, I am sure I was an incredibly irritating student. But hopefully all the red pen and the constant knocking on their doors was worth it. I will also always be immensely grateful for my first advisor at the same institution, Peter Mitchell, without whom, I can categorically say, I would be neither an academic nor an archeologist. I would also, of course, have never even made it into my first tropical forest without the support and kindness of my local collaborators in Sri Lanka: Dr. Siran Deraniyagala, who put the island on the map of Pleistocene archeology; Dr. Nimal Perera, who cemented it there; and Dr. Oshan Wedage, who is one of the truest, most loyal friends anyone could ever ask for and an incredibly talented researcher. Thanks to them, the future of the discipline in this part of South Asia is in very good hands indeed. I also owe an immense debt of gratitude to my current employer, Nicky Boivin, who has been the most encouraging, understanding, and inspirational of mentors as I have gone on to expand my research around the tropical world. Thank you for the opportunity and resources to pursue my passion as a career. I will never forget how incredibly lucky I am, and this book would not exist without your support.
While horror stories of bad collaborations can often ring around the conference circuit and coffee breaks, in the context of tropical forest research, I have been constantly left stunned by the kind encouragement, input, and assistance provided by my colleagues—from across the world and across disciplines. This book was no different, and the quotes and images included are a permanent testament to the generosity of my colleagues, as well as to the diversity of voices, from PhD students to professors, from historians to earth scientists, that are invigorating our understanding of the importance of tropical forests to life on Earth. A huge thank-you to each and every one of the people who suggested references, answered my annoying questions, and read through different parts of this work: Victor Lery Caetano Andrade (Preface), Tim Lenton, Silvia Pressel, and Luke Meade (Chapter 1), Carlos Jaramillo (Chapter 2), Emma Dunne, Leonardo Salgado, and Paul Barrett (Chapter 3), Zhe-Xi Luo, Tyler Lyson, and Gina Semprebon (Chapter 4), Yohannes Haile-Selassie, Tim White, Sarah Feakins, and Kira Westaway (Chapter 5), Eleanor Scerri, Oshan Wedage, and Sue O’Connor (Chapter 6), Tim Denham, Dolores Piperno, José Iriarte, and Umberto Lombardo (Chapter 7), Scott Fitzpatrick, Monica Tromp, and Kristina Douglass (Chapter 8), Lisa Lucero, Damian Evans, and Eduardo Neves (Chapter 9), Alexander Koch, Noel Amano, Amanda Logan, and Grace Barretto-Tesoro (Chapter 10), Alicia Odewale, Ayushi Nayak, John Hemming, John Tully, Kathy Morrison, Åsa Ferrier, Meena Menon, Justin Dunnavant, and Alex Moulton (Chapter 11), Nicky Boivin, Yadvinder Malhi, Nadja Rüger, Yoshi Maezumi, and Janae Davis (Chapter 12), and Renier van Raders, Emuobosa Orijemie, Desley Mosquito, and Douglas Sheil (Chapter 13). The views expressed are my own, and they should in no way be blamed for any mistakes made. However, they have also helped make this book what it is.
While the other colleagues who have helped me in writing this book and pursuing this line of enquiry are too many to name individually, I would like to particularly thank my local collaborators, beyond Sri Lanka, who have welcomed me into their countries and research envir
onments and taught me more than I can ever repay. These include Grace Barretto-Tesoro and Francis Gealogo in the Philippines, Letícia Morgana Muller, Hilton Pereira, Eduardo Neves, Eduardo Tamanaha, Carolina Levis, and Charles Clement in Brazil, Oscár Solis in Mexico, Emuobosa Orijemie in Nigeria, Åsa Ferrier, Alice Buhrich, Desley Mosquito, Barry Hunter, Gerry Turpin, Richard Cosgrove, Simon Haberle, and Janelle Stevenson in Australia, Ravi Korisettar in India, and Mahirta Mahirta in Indonesia. It is their work and their efforts, alongside the Indigenous groups and stakeholders that many of them work with (or are a part of), that are cementing tropical forests as landscapes of cultural and natural heritage of both national and global significance. I would also like to thank the often unnamed administrative and support staff that make all of our research a possibility in the first place. For me, that is Anja Schatz, Anja Hannewald, Ellen Richter, Dorit Wammetsberger, Graeme Richardson, Daniela Gütsch, Beate Kerpen, Anna Pallaske, Michelle O’Reilly, Hans-Georg Sell, Christian Nagel, Gerd Kusserow, Thomas Baumman, Thomas Melzer, and Thomas Brückner at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. It is Stefanie Schirmer, Ulrike Thüring, Dovydas Jurkenas, Mary Lucas, Erin Scott, Elsa Perruchini, Sara Marzo, Bianca Fiedler, and Jana Ilgner in our laboratories. It is Anneke van Heteren (Zoologische Staatssammlung München), Jacques Cuisin, Violaine Nicolas-Colin, Géraldine Véron, Joséphine Lesur, and Christine Lefèvre (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle), and Malcolm McCallum and Tom Gillingwater (University of Edinburgh) for their support in the sampling and repatriation of museum collections. It is also all of the visitors of museums, journalists who feature our findings, peer reviewers, journal editors, members of national governments and administrative sectors that process fieldwork permits, and teachers, as well as the taxpayers, voters, and politicians who support our work around the world.
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