Title:SOUTH AMERICA: Do As I Say, Not As I Do. Earth Island Journal, 10410406, Winter2009, Vol. 23, Issue 4Database:MasterFILE Premier
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SOUTH AMERICA: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Section:AROUND THE WORLD
Ever eager to burnish its environmental credentials, the Brazilian government often announces with-great fanfare various initiatives to safeguard the Amazon rainforest, the world's largest. Last August, for example, President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva established an international donors fund to pay for conservation efforts; Norway has already pledged $1 billion. And earlier in 2008, the government said it was prepared to use federal troops to halt illegal logging.
As it turns out, those soldiers may have to patrol the government itself.
In October, the Brazilian Environment Ministry released a list of the top 100 largest illegal loggers in the Amazon — and the six worst deforested areas all belong to the Brazilian government.
Carlos Mine, the country's environment minister, was irate, and promised to prosecute all of the loggers, including other government agencies. "We're going to blow all 100 of them out of the water and then some," he said.
The government properties where the deforestation has occurred are managed by the Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), an agency set up to distribute land to the poor. About 550,000 acres of Amazonian rainforest were destroyed on the six INCRA parcels as settlers chopped down trees to sell as lumber and to clear ground for planting crops and grazing animals.
INCRA is contesting the claims that the deforestation is illegal, and the matter is set to be investigated by a third party.
Electoral pressures may be fueling the deforestation on government lands. According to Mine, mayors in the Amazon region are ignoring illegal logging in the hopes of gaining an advantage in upcoming elections.
The revelation that small farmers are among the worst loggers is also likely to renew long-standing debates over who causes the most damage to the rainforest. Some of Brazil's largest landowners are using the announcement to argue that poor peasants are as much to blame for deforestation as are large agribusiness concerns.
From 2004 to 2007, destruction in the rainforest decreased. But in the last year, the number of acres chopped down has begun to creep upward again.
"They are small deforestations, of 50 to 75 acres per person," Mine says, referring to the forest loss on INCRA lands. "On the other hand, a small one deforests little, but thousands [put together] deforest a great deal." — ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE AND REUTERS, 10/1----
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Section:WHAT IT TAKES '07: THE GREEN ADVENTURE from the fop down Margaret Lowman /// Arbornaut, 53
• DURING HER NEARLY 30-year career as a rainforest researcher, "Canopy Meg" has hung out in trees from Australia to Peru, Cameroon to Panama. She's mastered the intricacies of stringing steel-cable walkways hundreds of feet above the ground, contended with voyeuristic Pygmies, and stared down a particularly cranky Gabon viper. Her work has contributed to the preservation of the Washpool region, one of Australia's last remaining rainforest tracts. But with trees around the world falling fast to saw and bulldozer, Lowman is as likely to be escorting politicians and developers on canopy walks as swinging through the leaves on a steel vine. Air your grievance. "Good things can happen when scientists communicate to the public and not just to other scientists. I worked on a television series that was shot in the rainforest of Belize. While we were there, it was announced the forest was going to go under the chain saw. But after the program aired, the government withdrew the logging rights." ACTION PUN // Buy Green Lumber
Only purchase wood products from Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, or Malaysia if they carry an "FSCcertified" label (www.fscus.org), which means they come from sustainably managed forests.
PHOTO (COLOR)
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Section:Science & Technology Environmentalists thought they could save the rain forest and make money at the same time. They were wrong.
This time last decade, the world was worried sleepless over the fate of the Amazon rain forest. Beatriz Saldanha decided to do something about it. So she shut down her beachwear business in Rio de Janeiro and grabbed a backpack. Her plan: to bring an isolated community of Amazonian forest dwellers into the global economy. It was a loopy idea. And it worked. By bathing sheets of raw cotton in latex, gently milked from wild rubber trees, she came up with "vegetable leather," a tough, pliable fabric that could be fashioned into jackets, jeans and tote bags. Today her company, Amazon Life, is an international brand, with upmarket clients like Hermes, the Dutch bicycle maker Giant and the British cosmetics label Lush. But all that may soon collapse. Despite a modest operating profit, Amazon Life is $1 million in the red. Now its major creditor, the government-owned National Social Development Bank, is threatening to foreclose. "To us," the bank told her recently, "your company has failed."
The tale is sobering, not just for Saldanha and the small band of rubber tappers she employs but also for anybody concerned with the state of the Amazonian wilderness. For more than a generation, environmentalists, policy wonks and conscientious capitalists have locked arms to find a sustainable way of preserving the wilderness--sustainable for both trees and people. The idea was to help forest dwellers and rural settlers profit from the wilderness without destroying it. Tread gently, the wisdom went, and untold wealth could be had, plucked so lovingly from the wild that not even God would miss it.
By this thinking the Amazon, the world's biggest tropical rain forest, was not a shrine to nature but a living emporium, worth more in dollars and cents upright than uprooted. The steamy 10-story forest canopy had it all--herbs, oils, perfumes and elixirs, and perhaps someday even cures for AIDS or cancer. To Saldanha and countless other "ecocapitalists" who followed, such ventures were living proof of a bold conviction: that man and forest were fated to be not enemies but partners. Now she--and plenty of environmentalists--are wondering if it was all a dream.
Saldanha's saga is just one sign that this whole way of thinking about the business of conservation is in trouble. For one thing, it obviously hasn't put a dent in the destruction of the Amazon. Poring over satellite photos taken last year, Brazilian scientists discovered that 25,500 square kilometers of forest--an area the size of Belgium--had disappeared in 2002. Twelve years after the world pledged to mend its ruinous ways at the much-ballyhooed Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the alternatives are also failing. Selective timber harvesting--culling mature trees without clear-cutting the forest--has proved costly and inefficient. Even bona fide "ecologically friendly" activities--such as collecting wild fruits, rubber and nuts--are money-losing propositions, or worse. The Switzerland-based Worldwide Fund for Nature warns that galloping global demand for "natural" remedies has pushed 4,000 to 10,000 plant species to the brink of extinction. Successful businesses take a heavy toll on the wilderness, while the most environmentally benign sustain only the trees.
That's not what Chico Mendes had in mind when he rallied a ragged band of rubber tappers to stop cattlemen from chopping down trees for pasture in Acre, in western Amazonia. The backwoods labor leader was shot and killed by an angry rancher 15 years ago for his trouble and became the world's first ecomartyr. His disciples understood that the power brokers in Brasilia wanted progress rather than conservation, and they thought they had figured out a way to have both. Scores of forest-friendly projects like Amazon Life bloomed. The New Age beauty boutique the Body Shop bought natural dyes and nuts from Indian villages. Brazil nuts culled from the forest floor were stirred into Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream.
What's become clear over time is that such projects are rarely profitable. Just getting forest goods to the grocer's shelves is an epic task. When the precarious Xapuri forest cooperative failed to deliver enough Brazil nuts, Ben & Jerry's had to rely on Amazonian agrimoguls for extra crunch, and then added cashews grown on plantations. Rainforest Crunch is no longer made. In other cases agreements have foundered over questions about the division of spoils. The Body Shop's celebrated agreement with the Kayapo Indians disintegrated after a nasty row over royalties. For all the environmentally correct initiatives, Brazil culls fewer fruits, nuts and oils from the wilds today than it did half a century ago.
Even those companies that don't rely on local partners have had little luck in the Amazon. For a time big drug companies were excited by the research possibilities held out by the medicinal roots and plants long used by rain-forest shamans. The truth is, it's rarely worth the time and money it takes to turn a plant into a useful pill or potion. It's easier to use computers to simulate the chemical makeup of medicinal plants in the laboratory. "They say there's a trillion dollars hidden in the rain forests, but so far few companies have seen any of that," says Eric Noehrenberg, trade director of the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers. "I call it the green-gold myth."
Socially responsible investing is all the rage; just look at the surging Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, which list businesses with racially diverse work forces or clean energy technology. Despite official blessings and a Switzerland-size swath of Amazon rain forest set aside for only the gentlest sort of enterprise, the forests themselves have seen little of this windfall. But myths die hard. In the late '90s John Forgach, a onetime senior executive at Chase Manhattan Bank, launched the "concept fund" A2R, hoping to lure investors to "biodiversity" ventures. "I'm not out just to save the forest," he once declared. "I want to make money." With cash from the World Bank and other lenders, he scoured the planet for environmentally correct companies in need of capital, funding things like low-impact timer harvesting, ecotourism and organic agriculture. His assets reached $27 million, and he talked of reaching half a billion. By last February, with the stock market flat and many of his companies failing, the creditors "simply pulled the plug," he says. "I believe in sustainability. It's a much more intelligent way to do business. But this concept business is for better times." Forgach now teaches forestry at Yale.
Acre Gov. Jorge Viana still holds out hope. In his state, the biggest source of income is the federal treasury, which underwrites 84 percent of local spending. In the real economy only cattle ranchers have flourished, and as their pastures spread, so does deforestation. Still, Viana, a trained forestry engineer, believes that the salvation of the Amazon lies in managed tropical forestry: prized woods like mahogany and cedar are cut carefully to allow new trees to sprout for future harvesting. Viana is handing out tax breaks and sprawling logging concessions to big lumber combines and settler communities alike that have earned certificates, or "green seals," from international forestry authorities. "Once people see the rain forest is valuable," Viana claims, "they will defend it."
But will they? The record on managed logging in the tropics is dismal. "We should have seen second-, third- and fourth-generation timber on the market by now, and there isn't any," says Niro Higuchi, a forestry expert at Brazil's National Amazon Research Institute, or INPA. Now Asian loggers are heading to Brazil, Higuchi says, "because their own reserves are gone." Only a handful of Amazonian lumber companies have met international "sustainability" standards, and the most famous one of all, MIL/Precious Woods, is running out of timber well ahead of its planned 25-year logging cycle. "After you harvest those big, valuable 100-year-old trees, it gets a lot harder," says Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at INPA. No wonder the vast majority of timber falling in the rain forest is bootleg.
The big question behind the struggling eco-enterprises is whether preservation should be seen as a business at all. Three years ago Pirelli, the Italian tire maker, launched the Xapuri, a truck tire made from latex from the wilds of Acre. Pirelli loses money on the deal, but it reaps a social dividend for assisting impoverished rubber tappers, who, but for subsidies, might have disappeared long ago. "If you apply the law of the market, you are going to create false expectations," says Beatriz Saldanha. Saving the wilderness, she knows, is a worthy effort in its own right, and one that society must underwrite. The rest is a green illusion.
PHOTO (COLOR): Struggle: Amazonian latex won't keep Beatriz Saldanha (right) in business
PHOTO (COLOR): Against the tide: The logging industry does a brisk, but not sustainable business; Forgach retired from green investments to teach forestry
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (COLOR) - ec12srenyard Mar 5, 2009- ec12srenyard Mar 5, 2009
By Mac Margolis
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How flora and fauna structure tropical forests
Sunrise in a tropical forest is never quiet. Monkeys bicker over breakfast. Birds clamor for the attention of mates. Insects chirp and twang as they go about their morning business.
If plants made noises, they would contribute to the din. Instead, inaudibly, neighboring trees bicker about sharing sunlight. Colorful canopy blossoms clamor for the attention of pollinators. Roots tussle over water. A sapling groans because a fungal infection is girdling its trunk.
For almost 3 centuries, biologists from temperate lands have tried to tune in to these silent tiffs. Often, the diversity of the tropics has stymied them.
The forests these biologists are familiar with have a tenth as many species per acre, and winter's cold tends to silence the flora for months at a time. "[Coming to the tropics] completely shatters everything you thought you knew and everything you thought was true," says Catherine Potvin, an ecologist at McGill University in Montreal. "We have acquired knowledge about how northern systems work, and yet we have no clue as to what's going on here [in the tropics]."
"It's much more difficult, much more complex, much more stochastic."
For years, these travelers have appreciated all too well the diversity and dynamic nature of these green paradises. But they have been unable to glean why or how these conditions come about. Yet just as zoologists have managed to attach meaning to animal chatter and from that figure out predictable patterns of behavior, botanists and ecologists have started to distinguish patterns of tropical plant "behavior."
"What biologists are looking for are ways competition is ameliorated so all these species can coexist," explains S. Joseph Wright, a tropical ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Balboa, Panama. Do plants jostle each other to get and keep a place in the sun? Or do they let animals or other organisms control their fates?
Wright and others find that seemingly random events -- weather, predators, pathogens -- can dictate which trees sprout or survive at any given time. They also help ensure that no one species outcompetes all the rest.
Because each plant differs in how it harnesses the available resources -- be they water, light, pollinators, even seed dispersers -- each does better or worse in certain conditions. Researchers have begun to sense that these differences lead to complex patterns.
As conditions change, so does an individual species' fitness. Over time, one type of tree may give way to another, and the mix of species -- that is, the community structure -- shifts.
To tease apart the complexity, scientists typically begin by concentrating on a particular aspect of these communities. "I'm interested in how microorganisms affect community structure," explains STRI plant pathologist Gregory S. Gilbert. A botanical epidemiologist of sorts, he is examining the distribution and survival of a common tropical tree, Ocotea whitei, that grows in ravines and on wet slopes in Central and South America. He works on Barro Colorado Island, a tropical reserve in Panama. There, "this species has lost about half its population in the last 10 years. And there is no sign of [the loss] slowing down," he says.
A fungus is to blame, and Gilbert suspects that the fungus has always existed on the island, infecting a few isolated trees. When it gets into a tree, it settles below the bark, where it destroys inner tissue. Cankers develop on the trunk, sometimes encircling the tree but rarely killing it.
The current devastation may have its roots in the early 1980s, when a record dry year followed an extremely wet one, Gilbert speculates. First, extra moisture provided optimal conditions for the fungus' spread. Then, because the fungus makes the tree less able to transport water, the drought -- caused the following year by an El Nino -- created "incredible stress as far as the tree is concerned," he explains. "The tree is already a slope specialist -- it has to grow where it is moist most of the time. When drought hits, the [trees] can't handle it."
For his studies, Gilbert checked both young and old trees for cankers. He determined the distances between young trees and the nearest adult O. whitei, noting, too, their fungal status. He then examined the distances between young O. whitei and adults of a canopy tree that does not get this disease. Finally, he compared his observations about the distribution of infected trees with data about dead O. whitei collected in surveys done in 1982, 1985, and 1990 (SN: 6/4/94, p.362).
More than the usual number of juvenile O. whitei die or become sick when they sprout within 20 meters of an adult, say Gilbert, ecologist Stephen P. Hubbell of Princeton University, and Robin B. Foster, a botanist at STRI and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In contrast, more than the expected number of young trees thrived when they existed over 30 meters away from an adult of the same species, these scientists report in the current OECOLOGIA.
"If you go away from the mother trees, [you can see that] they have a much better chance of surviving and a much better chance of being healthy," says Gilbert.
Even more intriguing is how this fungus seems to have singled out O. whitei. Nine of the 10 tree species on the island in the same family as O. whitei develop the cankers. But far fewer individuals of the other species become infected, and the one that seems immune is increasing in number.
What's more, O. whitei's cousin, Beilschmiedia, seems to protect its neighbors as well as itself from the fungus. When Gilbert examined the distribution of small O. whitei trees, he discovered that those growing close to an adult Beilschmiedia are more likely to be healthy, irrespective of whether they are also close to a sick adult O. whitei.
He concludes that this fungus is helping restructure the island's forest. His data add weight to the notion that, in the tropics, individuals of a species do better farther away from each other. This tendency helps create the mosaic of different species that contributes to the high diversity observed, he notes.
"The neat thing is that up until now, the studies in the tropics of the impact of diseases on tree spacing or on population dynamics have been done almost entirely on the level of seedlings, and the studies, of course, were done in a matter of weeks," Gilbert points out. "What we've been able to do extends that and shows that diseases can have an impact [on species distribution] for many, many years; they can affect trees that have [already] put a tremendous amount of effort into growing."
Wright does not see the dramatic -- or traumatic -- change that Gilbert witnesses. He focuses on more subtle controls on plant populations. Nonetheless, Wright, too, has begun to perceive patterns of change, some of which run counter to what others had thought about tropical flora.
"One thing that's sort of been intuitive dogma is that once a tree gets its place in the sun, it controls it and is not displaced," Wright says. "But I've watched trees being encroached upon tremendously by their neighbors. The zones of contact between the tree crowns aren't stable; one tree crown is overtopping another."
To get to work, Wright rides a steel cage that hangs from a construction crane. In this way, he can get 38 meters into the air, right up to the tops of the tallest trees. "The vast majority of the action is out on the tips of branches," he points out. "If you look at the way the trees are built, the leaves and the reproductive organs are all out in the sun, at the tips."
He finds that the youngest leaves -- the most energetic photosynthesizers -- are farthest out. As they age and are nibbled on by insects, they lose this prominence, both functionally and spatially -- the tip elongates and adds another set of leaves. Certain shrubs follow this pattern, but not deciduous trees common in the northeastern United States, he notes.
From monitoring those tips, Wright has learned that the plant often fuels flower production with the half-dozen or so leaves closest to the bud. They harness sunlight daily for this new growth.
In the tropics, many plants shed their leaves, produce a flush, and then flower, says McGill's Potvin, who works in the crane's cage alongside Wright. Up north, flowering tends to precede leaf development, as if to announce an end to the winter dormancy. She and Wright suspect that because the tropics lack a cold season, where respiration drops and insect pests are inactive, the trees there can't afford to store the reserves they produce for reproduction. "If the plant had a storage organ, somebody would find it and eat it," Wright jokes.
At one time, researchers thought tropical trees underwent this growth spurt during rainy seasons and dropped leaves during the hot, dry months to avoid water stress. But Wright has evidence that light, not water availability, guides growth in many species and, in turn, helps restructure tropical forests.
"A lot of that dogma about the role of seasons and of water stress in controlling this is just wrong," he says. "If you look at the data, most of the flowering is in the dry season."
There are fewer clouds during that time, resulting in more sun for plant growth. Each week for 208 weeks, Wright's group looked for new leaves and flowers on trees in a particular study site on Barro Colorado Island. There, sunlight for photosynthesis increases by almost 50 percent during the dry season, and many of the species take advantage of that extra energy. In the forest within the crane's reach, several of the most common species increased their leaf area by 20 to 60 percent at the beginning of the dry season rather than losing leaves, as predicted. Data from six other forests also indicate that most trees have evolved to leaf out and flower when the sun is strongest, Wright and Carel P. van Schaik reported in the January AMERICAN NATURALIST.
"These plants are not tied to the seasonality of water but to the seasonality of radiation," Wright concludes. These deep-rooted species represent one extreme along a continuum in terms of their rooting depths, he explains. Shallow-rooted plants represent the other extreme, with many species lying in between. Most likely, observations of trees with shallow roots had led to the current dogma.
For example, some of the trees that now make up the canopy under the crane do drop their leaves when the rain stops. They got their start before the Canal Zone was established, when much of the land was pasture. At that time, their roots competed only with the very shallow roots of grasses for the ground's water. They didn't tolerate dry months very well, but that scarcely mattered because no other trees competed with their leaves for light.
Now, life is very different. Many of the trees that have begun to grow up around the early settlers have invested in deep root systems. The deeper the roots, the longer the tree can avoid stress caused by lack of water and the longer into the dry season it can be productive. These well-rooted species only make matters worse for a tree with shallow roots, since they compete for that tree's water and force it to drop its leaves ever earlier in the season. "The competition with the other trees has made its timing [of active growth] all wrong," Wright says of one such aging giant.
In the meantime, the deep-rooted plants use the dry months to gain inches that will one day enable them to challenge other species for a place in the sun. Over time, the canopy's shape and makeup change as these opportunists reach up, block more and more of the older trees' sun, and make room for themselves.
"They make hay when the sun shines, almost literally," Wright says.
PHOTO: A fungal infection led to this canker on Octea whitei and threatens to make the species rare in this Panamian forest.
PHOTOS: With a construction crane stationed in the middle of a forest study plot, biologists can monitor the canopy leaves and blossoms up close (insert). - ec12srenyard Mar 5, 2009- ec12srenyard Mar 5, 2009
By ELIZABETH PENNISI
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Section:Science & Society
Is a live rainforest worth more money than a dead one? A new study suggests that efforts to harvest the products of tropical forests may generate substantial monetary profits while at the same time preserving the ecological wealth stored there.
Most financial analyses of a rainforest's worth have focused only on the value of felled timber. As a result, these calculations indicate the forest is worth more as farmland or pastureland than as a source of timber. Such work has provided support for forest clearing--a process that eliminates uncounted species of plants and animals while exacerbating the greenhouse effect.
Research by a group of U.S. scientists now shows that an intact rainforest can provide more revenue than a cleared one. The investigators, who describe their findings in the June 29 NATURE, estimated the value of a hectare of Amazonian forest near Iquitos, Peru, by examining the annual production of fruits, oils, rubber and medicines there. "These data indicate that tropical forests are worth considerably more than has been previously assumed and that the actual market benefits of timber are very small relative to those of nonwood resources," say Charles Peters of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, Alwyn Gentry of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis and Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University.
The analysis shows that 1 hectare of forest produces $400 in fruit and $22 in rubber annually. Since such products grow every year, the forest's real value far exceeds one year's profit from these crops. To estimate the total worth of resources, the researchers used a model to calculate a figure called the net present value. For fruit and rubber, the net present value is $6,330 per hectare. This amount would be higher if it included revenues from medicinal plants and other products.
In contrast to harvesting fruits, cutting a hectare of rainforest timber earns a net revenue of $1,000, but this is a one-time payout. Periodic cutting of selected trees yields a net present value of only $490. A tree plantation located on a hectare of cleared forest has a net present value of $3,184. For pastureland, the figure is less than $2,960.
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Copyright © Time Inc., 1993. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be duplicated or redisseminated without permission."SOUTH AMERICA: Do As I Say, Not As I Do." Earth Island Journal 23.4 (Winter2009 2009): 12-13. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=35825524&site=ehost-live>.Title:SOUTH AMERICA: Do As I Say, Not As I Do. Earth Island Journal, 10410406, Winter2009, Vol. 23, Issue 4Database:MasterFILE Premier
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SOUTH AMERICA: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Section: AROUND THE WORLDEver eager to burnish its environmental credentials, the Brazilian government often announces with-great fanfare various initiatives to safeguard the Amazon rainforest, the world's largest. Last August, for example, President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva established an international donors fund to pay for conservation efforts; Norway has already pledged $1 billion. And earlier in 2008, the government said it was prepared to use federal troops to halt illegal logging.
As it turns out, those soldiers may have to patrol the government itself.
In October, the Brazilian Environment Ministry released a list of the top 100 largest illegal loggers in the Amazon — and the six worst deforested areas all belong to the Brazilian government.
Carlos Mine, the country's environment minister, was irate, and promised to prosecute all of the loggers, including other government agencies. "We're going to blow all 100 of them out of the water and then some," he said.
The government properties where the deforestation has occurred are managed by the Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA), an agency set up to distribute land to the poor. About 550,000 acres of Amazonian rainforest were destroyed on the six INCRA parcels as settlers chopped down trees to sell as lumber and to clear ground for planting crops and grazing animals.
INCRA is contesting the claims that the deforestation is illegal, and the matter is set to be investigated by a third party.
Electoral pressures may be fueling the deforestation on government lands. According to Mine, mayors in the Amazon region are ignoring illegal logging in the hopes of gaining an advantage in upcoming elections.
The revelation that small farmers are among the worst loggers is also likely to renew long-standing debates over who causes the most damage to the rainforest. Some of Brazil's largest landowners are using the announcement to argue that poor peasants are as much to blame for deforestation as are large agribusiness concerns.
From 2004 to 2007, destruction in the rainforest decreased. But in the last year, the number of acres chopped down has begun to creep upward again.
"They are small deforestations, of 50 to 75 acres per person," Mine says, referring to the forest loss on INCRA lands. "On the other hand, a small one deforests little, but thousands [put together] deforest a great deal."
— ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE AND REUTERS, 10/1----
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RESCUE A RAIN FOREST
Contents
- Margaret Lowman /// Arbornaut, 53
- ACTION PUN // Buy Green Lumber
Section: WHAT IT TAKES '07: THE GREEN ADVENTUREfrom the fop down
Margaret Lowman /// Arbornaut, 53
• DURING HER NEARLY 30-year career as a rain forest researcher, "Canopy Meg" has hung out in trees from Australia to Peru, Cameroon to Panama. She's mastered the intricacies of stringing steel-cable walkways hundreds of feet above the ground, contended with voyeuristic Pygmies, and stared down a particularly cranky Gabon viper. Her work has contributed to the preservation of the Washpool region, one of Australia's last remaining rainforest tracts. But with trees around the world falling fast to saw and bulldozer, Lowman is as likely to be escorting politicians and developers on canopy walks as swinging through the leaves on a steel vine.
Air your grievance. "Good things can happen when scientists communicate to the public and not just to other scientists. I worked on a television series that was shot in the rain forest of Belize. While we were there, it was announced the forest was going to go under the chain saw. But after the program aired, the government withdrew the logging rights."
ACTION PUN // Buy Green Lumber
Only purchase wood products from Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, or Malaysia if they carry an "FSCcertified" label (www.fscus.org), which means they come from sustainably managed forests.
PHOTO (COLOR)
Copyright of National Geographic Adventure is the property of National Geographic Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
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Margolis, Mac. "Jungle Economics." Newsweek (Atlantic Edition) 143.7 (16 Feb. 2004): 44-46. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=12319821&site=ehost-live>.
Jungle Economics
Section: Science & TechnologyEnvironmentalists thought they could save the rain forest and make money at the same time. They were wrong.
This time last decade, the world was worried sleepless over the fate of the Amazon rain forest. Beatriz Saldanha decided to do something about it. So she shut down her beachwear business in Rio de Janeiro and grabbed a backpack. Her plan: to bring an isolated community of Amazonian forest dwellers into the global economy. It was a loopy idea. And it worked. By bathing sheets of raw cotton in latex, gently milked from wild rubber trees, she came up with "vegetable leather," a tough, pliable fabric that could be fashioned into jackets, jeans and tote bags. Today her company, Amazon Life, is an international brand, with upmarket clients like Hermes, the Dutch bicycle maker Giant and the British cosmetics label Lush. But all that may soon collapse. Despite a modest operating profit, Amazon Life is $1 million in the red. Now its major creditor, the government-owned National Social Development Bank, is threatening to foreclose. "To us," the bank told her recently, "your company has failed."
The tale is sobering, not just for Saldanha and the small band of rubber tappers she employs but also for anybody concerned with the state of the Amazonian wilderness. For more than a generation, environmentalists, policy wonks and conscientious capitalists have locked arms to find a sustainable way of preserving the wilderness--sustainable for both trees and people. The idea was to help forest dwellers and rural settlers profit from the wilderness without destroying it. Tread gently, the wisdom went, and untold wealth could be had, plucked so lovingly from the wild that not even God would miss it.
By this thinking the Amazon, the world's biggest tropical rain forest, was not a shrine to nature but a living emporium, worth more in dollars and cents upright than uprooted. The steamy 10-story forest canopy had it all--herbs, oils, perfumes and elixirs, and perhaps someday even cures for AIDS or cancer. To Saldanha and countless other "ecocapitalists" who followed, such ventures were living proof of a bold conviction: that man and forest were fated to be not enemies but partners. Now she--and plenty of environmentalists--are wondering if it was all a dream.
Saldanha's saga is just one sign that this whole way of thinking about the business of conservation is in trouble. For one thing, it obviously hasn't put a dent in the destruction of the Amazon. Poring over satellite photos taken last year, Brazilian scientists discovered that 25,500 square kilometers of forest--an area the size of Belgium--had disappeared in 2002. Twelve years after the world pledged to mend its ruinous ways at the much-ballyhooed Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the alternatives are also failing. Selective timber harvesting--culling mature trees without clear-cutting the forest--has proved costly and inefficient. Even bona fide "ecologically friendly" activities--such as collecting wild fruits, rubber and nuts--are money-losing propositions, or worse. The Switzerland-based Worldwide Fund for Nature warns that galloping global demand for "natural" remedies has pushed 4,000 to 10,000 plant species to the brink of extinction. Successful businesses take a heavy toll on the wilderness, while the most environmentally benign sustain only the trees.
That's not what Chico Mendes had in mind when he rallied a ragged band of rubber tappers to stop cattlemen from chopping down trees for pasture in Acre, in western Amazonia. The backwoods labor leader was shot and killed by an angry rancher 15 years ago for his trouble and became the world's first ecomartyr. His disciples understood that the power brokers in Brasilia wanted progress rather than conservation, and they thought they had figured out a way to have both. Scores of forest-friendly projects like Amazon Life bloomed. The New Age beauty boutique the Body Shop bought natural dyes and nuts from Indian villages. Brazil nuts culled from the forest floor were stirred into Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream.
What's become clear over time is that such projects are rarely profitable. Just getting forest goods to the grocer's shelves is an epic task. When the precarious Xapuri forest cooperative failed to deliver enough Brazil nuts, Ben & Jerry's had to rely on Amazonian agrimoguls for extra crunch, and then added cashews grown on plantations. Rainforest Crunch is no longer made. In other cases agreements have foundered over questions about the division of spoils. The Body Shop's celebrated agreement with the Kayapo Indians disintegrated after a nasty row over royalties. For all the environmentally correct initiatives, Brazil culls fewer fruits, nuts and oils from the wilds today than it did half a century ago.
Even those companies that don't rely on local partners have had little luck in the Amazon. For a time big drug companies were excited by the research possibilities held out by the medicinal roots and plants long used by rain-forest shamans. The truth is, it's rarely worth the time and money it takes to turn a plant into a useful pill or potion. It's easier to use computers to simulate the chemical makeup of medicinal plants in the laboratory. "They say there's a trillion dollars hidden in the rain forests, but so far few companies have seen any of that," says Eric Noehrenberg, trade director of the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers. "I call it the green-gold myth."
Socially responsible investing is all the rage; just look at the surging Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, which list businesses with racially diverse work forces or clean energy technology. Despite official blessings and a Switzerland-size swath of Amazon rain forest set aside for only the gentlest sort of enterprise, the forests themselves have seen little of this windfall. But myths die hard. In the late '90s John Forgach, a onetime senior executive at Chase Manhattan Bank, launched the "concept fund" A2R, hoping to lure investors to "biodiversity" ventures. "I'm not out just to save the forest," he once declared. "I want to make money." With cash from the World Bank and other lenders, he scoured the planet for environmentally correct companies in need of capital, funding things like low-impact timer harvesting, ecotourism and organic agriculture. His assets reached $27 million, and he talked of reaching half a billion. By last February, with the stock market flat and many of his companies failing, the creditors "simply pulled the plug," he says. "I believe in sustainability. It's a much more intelligent way to do business. But this concept business is for better times." Forgach now teaches forestry at Yale.
Acre Gov. Jorge Viana still holds out hope. In his state, the biggest source of income is the federal treasury, which underwrites 84 percent of local spending. In the real economy only cattle ranchers have flourished, and as their pastures spread, so does deforestation. Still, Viana, a trained forestry engineer, believes that the salvation of the Amazon lies in managed tropical forestry: prized woods like mahogany and cedar are cut carefully to allow new trees to sprout for future harvesting. Viana is handing out tax breaks and sprawling logging concessions to big lumber combines and settler communities alike that have earned certificates, or "green seals," from international forestry authorities. "Once people see the rain forest is valuable," Viana claims, "they will defend it."
But will they? The record on managed logging in the tropics is dismal. "We should have seen second-, third- and fourth-generation timber on the market by now, and there isn't any," says Niro Higuchi, a forestry expert at Brazil's National Amazon Research Institute, or INPA. Now Asian loggers are heading to Brazil, Higuchi says, "because their own reserves are gone." Only a handful of Amazonian lumber companies have met international "sustainability" standards, and the most famous one of all, MIL/Precious Woods, is running out of timber well ahead of its planned 25-year logging cycle. "After you harvest those big, valuable 100-year-old trees, it gets a lot harder," says Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at INPA. No wonder the vast majority of timber falling in the rain forest is bootleg.
The big question behind the struggling eco-enterprises is whether preservation should be seen as a business at all. Three years ago Pirelli, the Italian tire maker, launched the Xapuri, a truck tire made from latex from the wilds of Acre. Pirelli loses money on the deal, but it reaps a social dividend for assisting impoverished rubber tappers, who, but for subsidies, might have disappeared long ago. "If you apply the law of the market, you are going to create false expectations," says Beatriz Saldanha. Saving the wilderness, she knows, is a worthy effort in its own right, and one that society must underwrite. The rest is a green illusion.
PHOTO (COLOR): Struggle: Amazonian latex won't keep Beatriz Saldanha (right) in business
PHOTO (COLOR): Against the tide: The logging industry does a brisk, but not sustainable business; Forgach retired from green investments to teach forestry
PHOTO (COLOR)
PHOTO (COLOR)
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By Mac Margolis
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Pennisi, Elizabeth. "Tending nature's garden." Science News 146.11 (10 Sep. 1994): 170. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=9409197637&site=ehost-live>
How flora and fauna structure tropical forests
Sunrise in a tropical forest is never quiet. Monkeys bicker over breakfast. Birds clamor for the attention of mates. Insects chirp and twang as they go about their morning business.
If plants made noises, they would contribute to the din. Instead, inaudibly, neighboring trees bicker about sharing sunlight. Colorful canopy blossoms clamor for the attention of pollinators. Roots tussle over water. A sapling groans because a fungal infection is girdling its trunk.
For almost 3 centuries, biologists from temperate lands have tried to tune in to these silent tiffs. Often, the diversity of the tropics has stymied them.
The forests these biologists are familiar with have a tenth as many species per acre, and winter's cold tends to silence the flora for months at a time. "[Coming to the tropics] completely shatters everything you thought you knew and everything you thought was true," says Catherine Potvin, an ecologist at McGill University in Montreal. "We have acquired knowledge about how northern systems work, and yet we have no clue as to what's going on here [in the tropics]."
"It's much more difficult, much more complex, much more stochastic."
For years, these travelers have appreciated all too well the diversity and dynamic nature of these green paradises. But they have been unable to glean why or how these conditions come about. Yet just as zoologists have managed to attach meaning to animal chatter and from that figure out predictable patterns of behavior, botanists and ecologists have started to distinguish patterns of tropical plant "behavior."
"What biologists are looking for are ways competition is ameliorated so all these species can coexist," explains S. Joseph Wright, a tropical ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Balboa, Panama. Do plants jostle each other to get and keep a place in the sun? Or do they let animals or other organisms control their fates?
Wright and others find that seemingly random events -- weather, predators, pathogens -- can dictate which trees sprout or survive at any given time. They also help ensure that no one species outcompetes all the rest.
Because each plant differs in how it harnesses the available resources -- be they water, light, pollinators, even seed dispersers -- each does better or worse in certain conditions. Researchers have begun to sense that these differences lead to complex patterns.
As conditions change, so does an individual species' fitness. Over time, one type of tree may give way to another, and the mix of species -- that is, the community structure -- shifts.
To tease apart the complexity, scientists typically begin by concentrating on a particular aspect of these communities. "I'm interested in how microorganisms affect community structure," explains STRI plant pathologist Gregory S. Gilbert. A botanical epidemiologist of sorts, he is examining the distribution and survival of a common tropical tree, Ocotea whitei, that grows in ravines and on wet slopes in Central and South America. He works on Barro Colorado Island, a tropical reserve in Panama. There, "this species has lost about half its population in the last 10 years. And there is no sign of [the loss] slowing down," he says.
A fungus is to blame, and Gilbert suspects that the fungus has always existed on the island, infecting a few isolated trees. When it gets into a tree, it settles below the bark, where it destroys inner tissue. Cankers develop on the trunk, sometimes encircling the tree but rarely killing it.
The current devastation may have its roots in the early 1980s, when a record dry year followed an extremely wet one, Gilbert speculates. First, extra moisture provided optimal conditions for the fungus' spread. Then, because the fungus makes the tree less able to transport water, the drought -- caused the following year by an El Nino -- created "incredible stress as far as the tree is concerned," he explains. "The tree is already a slope specialist -- it has to grow where it is moist most of the time. When drought hits, the [trees] can't handle it."
For his studies, Gilbert checked both young and old trees for cankers. He determined the distances between young trees and the nearest adult O. whitei, noting, too, their fungal status. He then examined the distances between young O. whitei and adults of a canopy tree that does not get this disease. Finally, he compared his observations about the distribution of infected trees with data about dead O. whitei collected in surveys done in 1982, 1985, and 1990 (SN: 6/4/94, p.362).
More than the usual number of juvenile O. whitei die or become sick when they sprout within 20 meters of an adult, say Gilbert, ecologist Stephen P. Hubbell of Princeton University, and Robin B. Foster, a botanist at STRI and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. In contrast, more than the expected number of young trees thrived when they existed over 30 meters away from an adult of the same species, these scientists report in the current OECOLOGIA.
"If you go away from the mother trees, [you can see that] they have a much better chance of surviving and a much better chance of being healthy," says Gilbert.
Even more intriguing is how this fungus seems to have singled out O. whitei. Nine of the 10 tree species on the island in the same family as O. whitei develop the cankers. But far fewer individuals of the other species become infected, and the one that seems immune is increasing in number.
What's more, O. whitei's cousin, Beilschmiedia, seems to protect its neighbors as well as itself from the fungus. When Gilbert examined the distribution of small O. whitei trees, he discovered that those growing close to an adult Beilschmiedia are more likely to be healthy, irrespective of whether they are also close to a sick adult O. whitei.
He concludes that this fungus is helping restructure the island's forest. His data add weight to the notion that, in the tropics, individuals of a species do better farther away from each other. This tendency helps create the mosaic of different species that contributes to the high diversity observed, he notes.
"The neat thing is that up until now, the studies in the tropics of the impact of diseases on tree spacing or on population dynamics have been done almost entirely on the level of seedlings, and the studies, of course, were done in a matter of weeks," Gilbert points out. "What we've been able to do extends that and shows that diseases can have an impact [on species distribution] for many, many years; they can affect trees that have [already] put a tremendous amount of effort into growing."
Wright does not see the dramatic -- or traumatic -- change that Gilbert witnesses. He focuses on more subtle controls on plant populations. Nonetheless, Wright, too, has begun to perceive patterns of change, some of which run counter to what others had thought about tropical flora.
"One thing that's sort of been intuitive dogma is that once a tree gets its place in the sun, it controls it and is not displaced," Wright says. "But I've watched trees being encroached upon tremendously by their neighbors. The zones of contact between the tree crowns aren't stable; one tree crown is overtopping another."
To get to work, Wright rides a steel cage that hangs from a construction crane. In this way, he can get 38 meters into the air, right up to the tops of the tallest trees. "The vast majority of the action is out on the tips of branches," he points out. "If you look at the way the trees are built, the leaves and the reproductive organs are all out in the sun, at the tips."
He finds that the youngest leaves -- the most energetic photosynthesizers -- are farthest out. As they age and are nibbled on by insects, they lose this prominence, both functionally and spatially -- the tip elongates and adds another set of leaves. Certain shrubs follow this pattern, but not deciduous trees common in the northeastern United States, he notes.
From monitoring those tips, Wright has learned that the plant often fuels flower production with the half-dozen or so leaves closest to the bud. They harness sunlight daily for this new growth.
In the tropics, many plants shed their leaves, produce a flush, and then flower, says McGill's Potvin, who works in the crane's cage alongside Wright. Up north, flowering tends to precede leaf development, as if to announce an end to the winter dormancy. She and Wright suspect that because the tropics lack a cold season, where respiration drops and insect pests are inactive, the trees there can't afford to store the reserves they produce for reproduction. "If the plant had a storage organ, somebody would find it and eat it," Wright jokes.
At one time, researchers thought tropical trees underwent this growth spurt during rainy seasons and dropped leaves during the hot, dry months to avoid water stress. But Wright has evidence that light, not water availability, guides growth in many species and, in turn, helps restructure tropical forests.
"A lot of that dogma about the role of seasons and of water stress in controlling this is just wrong," he says. "If you look at the data, most of the flowering is in the dry season."
There are fewer clouds during that time, resulting in more sun for plant growth. Each week for 208 weeks, Wright's group looked for new leaves and flowers on trees in a particular study site on Barro Colorado Island. There, sunlight for photosynthesis increases by almost 50 percent during the dry season, and many of the species take advantage of that extra energy. In the forest within the crane's reach, several of the most common species increased their leaf area by 20 to 60 percent at the beginning of the dry season rather than losing leaves, as predicted. Data from six other forests also indicate that most trees have evolved to leaf out and flower when the sun is strongest, Wright and Carel P. van Schaik reported in the January AMERICAN NATURALIST.
"These plants are not tied to the seasonality of water but to the seasonality of radiation," Wright concludes. These deep-rooted species represent one extreme along a continuum in terms of their rooting depths, he explains. Shallow-rooted plants represent the other extreme, with many species lying in between. Most likely, observations of trees with shallow roots had led to the current dogma.
For example, some of the trees that now make up the canopy under the crane do drop their leaves when the rain stops. They got their start before the Canal Zone was established, when much of the land was pasture. At that time, their roots competed only with the very shallow roots of grasses for the ground's water. They didn't tolerate dry months very well, but that scarcely mattered because no other trees competed with their leaves for light.
Now, life is very different. Many of the trees that have begun to grow up around the early settlers have invested in deep root systems. The deeper the roots, the longer the tree can avoid stress caused by lack of water and the longer into the dry season it can be productive. These well-rooted species only make matters worse for a tree with shallow roots, since they compete for that tree's water and force it to drop its leaves ever earlier in the season. "The competition with the other trees has made its timing [of active growth] all wrong," Wright says of one such aging giant.
In the meantime, the deep-rooted plants use the dry months to gain inches that will one day enable them to challenge other species for a place in the sun. Over time, the canopy's shape and makeup change as these opportunists reach up, block more and more of the older trees' sun, and make room for themselves.
"They make hay when the sun shines, almost literally," Wright says.
PHOTO: A fungal infection led to this canker on Octea whitei and threatens to make the species rare in this Panamian forest.
PHOTOS: With a construction crane stationed in the middle of a forest study plot, biologists can monitor the canopy leaves and blossoms up close (insert).
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By ELIZABETH PENNISI
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"Have you rain forest and eat it, too." Science News 136.3 (15 July 1989): 47-47. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=8807676&site=ehost-live>.
Have you rain forest and eat it, too
Section: Science & SocietyIs a live rain forest worth more money than a dead one? A new study suggests that efforts to harvest the products of tropical forests may generate substantial monetary profits while at the same time preserving the ecological wealth stored there.
Most financial analyses of a rain forest's worth have focused only on the value of felled timber. As a result, these calculations indicate the forest is worth more as farmland or pastureland than as a source of timber. Such work has provided support for forest clearing--a process that eliminates uncounted species of plants and animals while exacerbating the greenhouse effect.
Research by a group of U.S. scientists now shows that an intact rain forest can provide more revenue than a cleared one. The investigators, who describe their findings in the June 29 NATURE, estimated the value of a hectare of Amazonian forest near Iquitos, Peru, by examining the annual production of fruits, oils, rubber and medicines there. "These data indicate that tropical forests are worth considerably more than has been previously assumed and that the actual market benefits of timber are very small relative to those of nonwood resources," say Charles Peters of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, Alwyn Gentry of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis and Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University.
The analysis shows that 1 hectare of forest produces $400 in fruit and $22 in rubber annually. Since such products grow every year, the forest's real value far exceeds one year's profit from these crops. To estimate the total worth of resources, the researchers used a model to calculate a figure called the net present value. For fruit and rubber, the net present value is $6,330 per hectare. This amount would be higher if it included revenues from medicinal plants and other products.
In contrast to harvesting fruits, cutting a hectare of rain forest timber earns a net revenue of $1,000, but this is a one-time payout. Periodic cutting of selected trees yields a net present value of only $490. A tree plantation located on a hectare of cleared forest has a net present value of $3,184. For pastureland, the figure is less than $2,960.
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"Jungle jailbreak." Time 141.9 (Mar. 1993): 13. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [City], [State abbreviation]. 5 Mar. 2009 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=9302220501&site=ehost-live>.
JUNGLE JAILBREAK
Section: THE WEEK; WORLDThe murderers of Brazil's rain-forest martyr escape from prison
EVERYONE KNEW THAT CHICO MENDES WAS A marked man -- long before the leader of the Amazon rubber tappers and champion of rain-forest preservation was killed in 1988. Little was done to protect him from hostile ranchers bent on stripping the forests. When his assassins, Darci Alves Pereira and his father Darly Alves da Silva, were convicted two years later, it was an unprecedented strike for justice that triggered a steady decline in local violence.
But with Darci and Darly's escape from prison last Monday, Brazil's western frontier has regained its reputation for lawlessness. Despite repeated warnings that lax security made a jailbreak all but inevitable, state and federal government officials paid no attention. Once again, rubber tappers fear more violence. This place could turn into a war zone,'' warned Gumercindo Rodrigues of the Xapuri Rural Workers' Union. Inundated with protests from environmental groups, the Brazilian government vowed to recapture the gunmen. They'll never find them,'' predicted Mendes' widow Ilzamar, who accused local authorities of complicity in the escape. A police manhunt has so far failed to turn up any sign of the fugitives, who could be hiding in neighboring Bolivia.
Copyright © Time Inc., 1993. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be duplicated or redisseminated without permission.