by Jane Goodall
It is difficult to imagine that the timber industry as a whole, in today’s cutthroat world, would adopt Merve’s way of doing things, but as more and more forests are maintained on private land, it becomes an attractive possibility.
Even a petroleum company can work in a forest in an environmentally sustainable way. In the early 1990s I had extensive dealings with Conoco—when it was still a subsidiary of DuPont. Back then my friend Max Pitcher was vice president for exploration at Conoco—meaning he was in charge of finding new places to exploit. Max flew me in a small plane over the forest to show me how different companies worked. We flew over the whole of the Conoco concession near Pointe-Noire in Congo-Brazzaville, and Max explained that seismic exploration does not have to be conducted in straight lines.
He showed me a grove of trees, sacred to the local people, that had been directly in the path of the Conoco exploration team. They had gone around and not through the grove. But the seismic lines were not visible—the Conoco teams, back then, walked through the forest and had equipment dropped from helicopters so that bulldozers were not necessary. If they needed to make a temporary road, Max told me, they used roll-out “carpets” of logs so that the soil would be less impacted, and they removed the carpet afterward and even had botanists to study the vegetation before disturbing the soil and to replant it afterward.
Of course, if a commercially viable oil deposit had been found, a proper road would have been constructed. We spent a lot of time discussing how an oil well could serve to protect all the forest in the area around it and provide benefits to the people. Conoco did not find a commercially useful oil deposit, so we could never put our plan into action. But they did leave a team and some equipment behind when they left to build our Tchimpounga Sanctuary for the infant chimpanzees we were caring for who had been orphaned by the bushmeat trade.
We Need Our Forests
One tool that can be helpful to those fighting to save the forests is the fact that we really do need our forests. They provide us with clean water, protect the watershed, and prevent erosion. They also provide food and medicinal plants, and support a very wide range of different animals and plant species, thus protecting biodiversity. Moreover, forests are often referred to as the “lungs of the world,” as they take in CO2 from the air around them and release oxygen. The CO2 is stored not only in the leaves of the trees but also in forest soils, especially peat soils.
All of these benefits are referred to, in conservation and development circles, as “services” provided by the forests. This means, of course, “services to the ecosystem,” but people tend to think of this as services to people, and this always angers me—forests are not there to “serve” us. Rather we need to be wise enough to understand how they work and gratefully accept the benefits they offer. However, in this greedy, materialistic world it is useful to be able to point out that it makes more economic sense to protect rather than to destroy the trees—in other words, to assign a monetary value to living trees, particularly those in an intact forest.
My first intimation that this was possible was during one of my visits to Costa Rica, when I learned about the Payment for Environmental Services, a program launched by the farsighted government in 1979. Under this scheme, payments were made to owners of forests and forest plantations in recognition of the valuable role played by these forests in maintaining clean air and pure water in the country.
In 2005 the British government commissioned the most comprehensive review ever carried out of the economics of climate change. I happened to be at the conference in Paris when the principal investigator, Sir Nicholas Stern, presented the conclusions of the countless scientists and economists involved. And I still remember how thrilled I was to hear him saying that the cheapest and most efficient way of slowing down global warming was to save and restore our forests.
For a very long time I had been trying to think of a way to convince governments and villagers that it was in their best interests to preserve their forests. Ecotourism, while it would provide long-term economic benefits and was an exciting prospect for villagers, could not hope to provide the kind of money that governments received in return for handing out forest concessions for logging and for mining, oil, and gas operations. But if the developed countries, in an effort to compensate for their ever-increasing levels of greenhouse-gas emissions, would agree to put monies into the protection of “carbon sinks,” as forests have been described, this might be the answer.
By this time scientists around the world were working on ways to be able to estimate, quite precisely, the amount of CO2 sequestered in different kinds of forests and forest soils. From the start it was clear that tropical forests, along with the great boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere—known as taiga in northernmost parts—play the most important role in this respect. The boreal covers most of inland Canada and Alaska, most of Sweden, Russia, inland Norway, and northern Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Japan. These vast and wonderful forests store huge amounts of carbon, especially in their rich peat soils—more, it is estimated, than that which is stored in the remaining tropical and temperate forests combined, and second only to that stored in the oceans of the world.
Like the tropical forests, the boreal forests are increasingly being logged, and this is obviously having a big effect on the production of greenhouse gases. The most recent estimates suggest that deforestation and forest degradation account for about 10 percent of global CO2 emissions—about the same as the transport sector.
Thus it really was important to create financial incentives for governments and villagers to preserve the remaining forests and restore trees to cleared or degraded land. Lengthy deliberations in many countries resulted in a UN program—Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD—to compensate governments of the forested nations that protected their forests. Initially, this concept was flawed, since it was almost impossible to monitor its effectiveness. A government, or village leadership, could accept money to protect their forest but continue to cut down the trees undetected. Nonetheless, gradually new technology was making it possible, in cooperation with DigitalGlobe, Google Earth, and Esri, to monitor the situation from space using satellite imagery.
Another criticism of REDD was that it showed a lack of concern for the welfare of villagers: if they were suddenly deprived of their livelihood—not allowed to cut down trees for charcoal or make new clearings to grow food for their families, for example—they would suffer. Moreover, tree plantations might be introduced, and although these might sequester CO2, they lead to loss of biodiversity.
So a new version of this program, spearheaded by the Norwegian government with support from Germany, Finland, and the United Kingdom, was created—REDD+. This improved version emphasized that in addition to conserving the forest per se in order to sequester CO2, it was also important to alleviate poverty, engage local communities in forest management, and conserve biodiversity. I was immediately enthusiastic, for our JGI TACARE program, which has been so successful, was based on exactly this kind of holistic vision.
Tanzania was one of a few countries selected for piloting REDD+ programs—and JGI was successful in acquiring a grant from the Norwegian government to work on one of these programs. Already we had funding from USAID for our TACARE program, initially to work in the degraded land around Gombe and subsequently to expand south into the Gombe-Masito-Ugalla Ecosystem. And now this new grant has enabled us to work with villagers to determine how we can best protect still-intact forests.
It is very exciting, for not only does it enable us to help the villagers living around the forests to have better lives, but it also helps us protect the chimpanzees that live there, as well as their habitat. The total area covered by our various projects is 4,633 square miles of protected forest and degraded forestland, where villagers had previously been not only farming but also practicing various harmful activities, such as making charcoal and harvesting honey by smoking out the bees, causing many forest fires. The for
ests are home to approximately 1,100 chimpanzees.
JGI is working in a total of fifty-two villages (which involves around 350,000 people). In each village we have trained forest monitors, selected by the village governments to patrol their forests. With the aid of new Android smartphones and tablets and an app called Open Data Kit, the monitors can accurately and instantaneously record the coordinates, descriptions, and pictures of forest fires, any tree felled illegally, or houses being built in protected areas. The important thing is that these forest monitors have been empowered—it is they who have selected what should be recorded, based on their indigenous know-how. They have chosen twenty-two different types of human activity that they believe can be threatening to the forest. And there are signs of thirty species of animals that they monitor.
Of course they note every time they see or hear a chimpanzee, or see a chimpanzee nest. This information, collected in areas near settlements, nicely complements the survey data that are collected in more remote forests by JGI and other scientists. It is in this way that we know that there are more chimpanzees outside than within protected forest areas—vital information for us as we devise plans, along with the villagers, to protect these endangered apes.
All this information is collected in a standardized way and is sent immediately to Google Cloud Storage, from where JGI and partners can download it for analysis, and to a live map on the web that is automatically updated and can easily be accessed by average citizens. The program is changing lives. The forest monitors are very proud of their work, and it increases their standing in the village. They are helping to make accurate maps of village land, recording the sacred sites, including sacred trees. And they are providing invaluable information, not only for science but to help the village leaders. JGI has a similar community-based monitoring program in Uganda and is in the process of designing a similar, scaled-up initiative with partners in the eastern part of the DRC.
If such initiatives can be developed around the world, especially where there are forests rich in biodiversity, then indeed we can have hope for the future. Hope that we can slow down climate change while the global community works out new ways to live in harmony with nature. Hope that our children’s children will know and marvel at the amazing diversity of life in the forests of the world.
Spiritual Value of Forests
Let us never forget that forests are beautiful in their own right. They have, for me, a spiritual value that makes them the most enchanted places on earth.
I want to share something that was one of my inspirational stories for my book Reason for Hope. It happened when I was walking along a trail through a glorious old-growth forest on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon. Suddenly, from the trail, I saw an amazing tree. It had been in a forest fire—about a hundred years ago, apparently—and only some forty feet of the trunk remained. I walked over to it and found it was completely hollow. I entered through an opening, almost like a small door, into a chapel pointed at the top.
The remaining outer shell of the tree, straight and tapering as the spire of a church, directed my eyes up and up, through the surrounding green of the forest, to the sky high above. I stood there, awed and humbled, and sent up a prayer for the survival of the remaining forests of the world.
I was with Chitcus, my Native American “spirit brother,” and a small group of Roots & Shoots children. I wanted to share my experience, and as the tree only held six people at a time, we held several ceremonies, during each of which I stood inside the tree with four children at a time. We faced one another, holding hands, and gazed upward to pray for the forests while Chitcus knelt in the middle and chanted an Indian blessing and made smoke from the sacred kishwoof root, which seemed to carry our prayers up and up and up and out into the blue playground of the clouds.
It was an extraordinarily moving and significant experience, and now, when things seem particularly grim, I relive that sacred memory and somehow find the strength to go on.
Chapter 18
Hope for Nature
These before-and-after pictures show the restoration of prairie grasses and flora on the grounds of the US government atomic accelerator facility Fermilab in Illinois. The first picture was taken in 1976. The second one shows what the prairie looks like now. At one time this was the largest reconstructed prairie habitat in the world. (CREDIT: FERMILAB)
A couple of years ago I went back to Cambridge to give a talk at my old university. The weather was perfect and I decided to go for a walk in the country. So a friend and I drove to one of my old haunts. But it was only because of a little church I remembered that I could find the place. Where there once had been trees and bluebells and a small clear stream, there was now churned-up earth, a bulldozer, and some muddy pools of filthy water. And there was a notice board—“SOLD”—and the name of some developer. I don’t think I shall ever forget the shock of seeing the destruction of what had once been so beautiful. I felt pain, anger, and, perhaps most, a deep, pervading sadness.
The truth is that when corporate greed and public demand for a better and better lifestyle are pitted against the health of the environment—and the health of people, for that matter—it is the bottom line that wins. Have we totally lost the wisdom of the indigenous people who made decisions based on how they would affect their people in years to come? How many more supermarkets or luxury apartments do we need?
It is not only avarice—there is a shocking ignorance too. Some people simply do not understand, or do not want to understand, the consequences of environmentally destructive actions. Others understand only too well, but are overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.
The other experience I cannot forget is when I flew in a small plane over the area around Gombe, in the early 1990s, and saw what had in 1960 been pristine forest now reduced to bare, eroded hills. Here was the result of poverty. Too many people living on land that was not large enough to support them, too poor to buy food from elsewhere, cutting down the last trees in their desperate need to feed their families.
And so, relentlessly, the planet is being desecrated in the name of “progress,” on the one hand, and as a result of poverty, ignorance, and apathy, born of hopelessness and despair, on the other.
So long as never-ending economic growth remains the goal of our governments and our major financial institutions, and so long as the corporate bottom line continues to put immediate profit above the future of our children, and so long as so many of the world’s inhabitants continue to live in unalleviated poverty, the crimes against the natural world will continue.
We who care, we who understand, must use every means at our disposal to fight back. We shall lose some of the battles—but we must not give up. And we have a powerful ally, for nature, ever resilient and resourceful, will, given time, clothe a devastated landscape with green growing things so that it becomes a place where animals can once again thrive. Of course it can take a very long time indeed for such an area to become a well-functioning ecosystem with diverse flora and fauna. But when the right people—those who truly understand the dynamics of a healthy ecosystem, who have learned by watching, and who are prepared to accept that nature may know best—work in harmony with natural systems, the healing process can be speeded up.
For instance, I know about the resurrection of the countryside around Sudbury in Canada, which was so devastated by reckless logging followed by relentless nickel and copper smelting that the whole region became a vast panorama of dead tree stumps and blackened rock faces. However, when I visited Sudbury in 2002, it was hard to believe it had ever been damaged. In the late 1970s, community members began planting trees, shrubs, herbs, and grasses in order to heal the land. They had to perform many tests and listen carefully to nature so that they could figure out ways to help plants grow in soil that was compromised by so much metal toxicity. Eventually the mining companies started to join the restoration effort, hoping to improve their impact on the environment as well as their reputation. Now Sudbury is a lush, thri
ving, highly vegetative region, and the wildlife is thriving in healthy fields, forests, and waterways.
I often think of Sudbury as an example of a place that seemed hopelessly ruined and has returned to full vibrancy. We have to remember that it’s possible. We have to keep telling ourselves these stories and sharing them with others, and we have to keep hope alive—and go on fighting. For the planet. For our children and theirs. The wonderful thing is that there are so many great examples of habitat restoration that it was hard to decide which ones to include.
Listening to Mother Nature
But here is one that I really want to share. I learned about it from one of my “Forest Warriors,” John Seed (see chapter 17). We were sitting under a tree on that Australian beach when he told me about an amazing initiative that is restoring a landscape, honoring the culture of the people, and demonstrating John’s huge vision and the determination, energy, and skill that make it happen. This project is known as “Restoring Shiva’s Robes.”
The Hindus believe that one of their supreme gods, Shiva, was so dazzling in his original form of pure light that the other gods pleaded with him to tone it down a bit. And so Shiva, in his compassion, agreed to do so, and appeared as the sacred mountain Arunachala. This has been his only form ever since. At the foot of this mountain is a huge temple honoring him. The temple covers acres, and is one of the largest in India.