[PEN-L:9620] Books on ecological crisis reviewed

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>From http://www.nybooks.com

Nature Without People?

BILL MCKIBBEN August 12, 1999

1) Requiem for Nature by John Terborgh 234 pages, $24.95 (hardcover)
published by Island Press

2) The Condor's Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America by
David S. Wilcove 339 pages, $24.95 (hardcover) published by Freeman

3) Continental Conservation: Scientific Foundations of Regional Reserve
Networks edited by Michael E. Soulé and John Terborgh 227 pages, $50.00
(hardcover) published by Island Press $25.00 (paperback) published by
Island Press

In recent decades, biologists, ethnobotanists, and the like have managed to
convey some sense of the staggering diversity of the rainforest, often
guided by the people who have lived there for eons. But in a political and
economic sense the tropical jungle is as dark and mysterious as ever.

You can follow the changes in the value of the Japanese yen second by
second from your desktop; reporters by the dozen struggle valiantly to
explain the particulars of Microsoft's antitrust defense. But who can tell
whether the tropical forest is disappearing more or less speedily than it
was in the late 1980s when every singer worth her faded jeans was cutting a
CD in its defense? This question is surely worth attention, since the
equatorial jungles contain more examples of creation's fabulous imagination
than any other ecosystem, and since its trees are a key part of the earth's
system for cleansing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Perhaps you
have a dim sense that some agreements have been signed to protect the
rainforests, some programs put in place. But are they working? What
strategies make the most sense to preserve what's left? Far more money and
attention is devoted to, say, searching for and describing the possible
remains of microbial life in the dust of Mars.

Any journalistic vacuum fills with bunkum and hocus-pocus. For example, in
his muscular account of globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the
New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman devotes nine pages
to questions of the environment, concentrating mainly on efforts to
preserve tropical ecosystems. He visits a remnant of Brazil's

Atlantic coastal rainforest where Anheuser-Busch has sent one of their
theme park designers to help design an "Ecopark." He then journeys inland
to the splendid Pantanal wetland system, where a "vice president for
corporate partnerships" at Conservation International explains how Ford is
funding research and conservation programs because, in Friedman's words,
"it believes that it can sell a lot more Jaguar cars if it is seen as
saving the jaguars of the Pantanal." Writing with his characteristic
confidence, even though the notes to his book indicate that all his
reporting comes from a single trip to Brazil, Friedman concludes, "if
that's what it takes to save this incredibly beautiful ecosystem and way of
life, then God bless Henry Ford and the Internet."

To judge by John Terborgh's account in Requiem for Nature, however, that's
not what it takes. Terborgh, a prominent ornithologist with long experience
in the Amazon region, is also co-director of the Center for Tropical
Conservation at Duke. Citing evidence from Washington's WorldWatch
Institute and the conservation group Friends of the Earth, he writes that
the rates of deforestation have increased in the 1990s. Even at the rate of
destruction observed between 1980 and 1990, the last tree in the last
primary rainforest on the planet would be cut sometime around 2045. And
Terborgh argues that none of the plans the conservationists have proposed
for their salvation will work.

Take, for instance, the practice of "ecoprospecting," where pharmaceutical
companies save rainforests in order to extract new medicines from their
genetic abundance. As Terborgh points out, the principal trend in molecular
biology is toward synthetic compounds; in any event, once the miracle plant
is discovered, it is then grown plantation style, obviating the need for
protection of the wild.

Or consider ecotourism. In a few cases, such as Rwanda's mountain gorillas,
there are attractions that foreigners will pay large sums to see. Most
parks, however, languish in obscurity, barren of charismatic megafauna.
Terborgh tells the darkly humorous story of his attempt even to find a map
of the five Ecuadoran national parks that were not the Galapagos. Even when
jungles are easier to locate, "poor visibility in the forest and skittish
birds and mammals pose an unresolvable dilemma for ecotourism guides.
Trails in the forest are typically narrow, so people must progress in
single file. Normally, the guide goes first, and it is the guide who spots
the toucan or the peccary. If the quarry doesn't bolt that instant, the
guide may be able to point it out to the second person in line. The third
will be extremely lucky to have a glimpse. The fourth in line might as well
not be there."

He describes a conversation with a longtime ecotourism guide who was
quitting the profession: "Too many customers went away complaining: The
humidity was uncomfortable, insects assaulted them, and the animals they
had found so appealing on the television screen were nowhere to be seen."

Perhaps instead of cutting down trees local people can be persuaded to
gather and market nuts or resins or anything else that can be sustainably
harvested. This is the Rainforest Crunch approach. In Terborgh's opinion it
is unlikely to amount to much. A study he quotes found that the economic
return for gathering Brazil nuts and tapping rubber trees was $4.80 per
hectare annually-and "almost any other kind of land use, including slash
and burn agriculture, easily achieves a higher return per unit area." As
for natural forest management schemes-which rely on carefully controlled
rotation of timber harvests-Terborgh concludes that they have failed almost
every place they've been tried, often because of the political instability
that bedevils tropical nations. Without strong forestry policies, squatters
will invade forest land and poachers will log at the edges. In any event
the economically valuable trees are few and far between, surrounded by many
ecologically vital but commercially marginal trees.

Terborgh has good evidence from his own experience for his dark views.
Again and again he has been forced to watch the destruction of the tropics
close up-his first field work was done in Peru's Apurímac valley, "the most
beautiful place I had ever seen." But within a few years the Alliance for
Progress had built a road across the Andes, and peasants were pouring in,
"the vanguard of a demographic explosion that continues to drive people
into rain forests the world over." "The frontier "melted away...in no more
than the blink of an eye"-by 1972, "hardly a tree remained of the
magnificent forest that had so recently filled the valley bottom." Cocaine
traffic soon followed.

Since he has seen the speed with which human beings can overpower a place,
he understandably discounts the notion of "sustainable development," the
feel-good compromise between ecological protection and economic development
that became the mantra of 1990s conservation.

"Given the expanding human population, the competitive nature of the global
economy, and our collective obsession with maximizing economic growth,
sustainable development is currently unattainable.... Indeed, it cannot be
achieved by the world as a whole without structural adjustments so radical
as to be inconceivable to governments and citizens alike."

For Terborgh, the central question for conservation is preserving soil, and
he concludes that "unsustainable erosion" of soil "goes hand in hand with
mechanization" of agriculture. When land use changes-when a forest is
cleared to make way for pasture or cropland-the biodiversity of the spot
disappears. Soon thereafter, especially in the thin soils of the tropics,
the land is exhausted and abandoned. "The accumulation of wasteland," he
writes, "is an indication of the unsustainability of human activities."
Since 1950, an area equivalent to India and China combined has been
abandoned as wasteland, an amount of land that grows much larger if one
also includes land converted into urban and suburban development,
industrial sites, and roads. This proportion of the world's land, he
contends, will surely grow, especially as populations increase from their
current six billion to eight or nine billion by the middle of the next
century. . .



Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)