People and rainforests

Humans came from the forests. Humans have destroyed most of them. But you are helping to look after what remains. I want to begin by congratulating you on your work and courage (well shown in the film we saw last night), and to wish you all success in the future.

I know something of rainforests myself: from the tropical exuberance of Amazonia and Cameroon to the vast space beneath the canopy in Belize. Recently I visited the rainforest of Tarkine in Tasmania where the exuberance was temperate rather than tropical.

You know better than most that all is far from well. Over the last 40,000 years the human impact on the Earth has first slowly - and then rapidly - increased. Clearance of forests for farming between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago changed everything. It may even have changed the global climate, and, by affecting emissions of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, halted a return to colder conditions.

With a vast increase in human numbers, came towns and eventually cities. Tribal communities evolved into complex hierarchical societies. Before the industrial revolution some 250 years ago, the effects of human activity were local, or at most regional, rather than global. Now the impact is indeed global.

That impact has been enormous. A periodical visitor from outer space would find more change in the last 200 years than in the preceding 2,000, and more change in the last 20 years than in the preceding 200.

A useful illustration is the vast increase in the rate of weathering of the Earth's surface due to deforestation, grazing of pastures and crop cultivation. Just look at what has happened in the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. The soils have become sand, the trees have been replaced by camel grass, animals of all kinds have disappeared, and the clouds sail overhead to drop their rain somewhere else.

What has caused these changes since humans destroyed so much of the forests? They fall into six main categories, all interlinked. Briefly they arise from human population increase; degradation of land, consumption of resources and accumulation of wastes; water pollution and supply; climate change in its many aspects and impacts; energy production and use; and destruction of biodiversity, above all in forests.

Of these factors population issues are often ignored as somehow embarrassing or mixed up with religion and the ideology of development. In fact we have been spreading like dandelions, insects or any other species on a bonanza before coming up against the environmental stops. Our very success is our undoing. It has been suggested that human multiplication is now a case of malignant maladaptation in which a species, like infected tissue in an organism, multiplies out of control, affecting everything else.

Most people are broadly aware of land resource and waste problems, although far from accepting the necessary remedies. Soil degradation is currently estimated to affect some 10 percent of the world's current agricultural area. Forests have shrunk and people in them have gone elsewhere.

Water issues, both fresh and salt, have had a lot of publicity, and already affect most people on this planet. At present demand for fresh water doubles every 21 years and seems to be accelerating. We are at present using some 160 billion tons more water every year than is replenished.

Climate change with all its implications for atmospheric chemistry is also broadly understood, apart from those who are determined not to understand it. Carbon levels in the atmosphere are now the highest in the last 650,000 years, and rising fast. The effects on the Earth in terms of new patterns of rainfall, drought, heat and cold, sea level rise, and extreme events are at last beginning to be measured.

To run our complex societies we need copious supplies of energy. At present we are drawing upon dwindling resources of fuels laid down hundreds of millions of years ago. Every day we consume the equivalent in petrol of all the vegetation that grows on the Earth every year. To convert some land into areas for growing biofuels may be part of the solution, but it should not be at the expense of forests.

But damage to the diversity of life is probably the most important for human welfare. In this process trees occupy a critical place. Their role as a source of raw materials, food, medicine and the rest is immeasurable. They form part of the enormous wealth of free natural services we enjoy. Such services mean a broadly regular climatic system with ecosystems - terrestrial, marine and atmospheric - to match:

• We rely on forests and vegetation to produce soil, to hold it together, and to regulate water supplies by preserving catchment basins, recharging ground water, and buffering extreme conditions.
• We rely upon mangrove forests as spawning grounds for fish, and on deltas as shock absorbers for floods.
• Likewise we rely on the natural processes of recycling and waste disposal.

Yet few realize the extent to which we have been appropriating the resources of the Earth for human purposes. Already we use - or abuse - some 40 percent of total photosynthetic production on land.

The diversity of ecosystems, and of the forests within them, is a key factor. Modern agricultural techniques have led to an excessive dependence on a few miracle strains of even fewer plants, trees and animals. Without a large natural genetic reservoir, we make our supplies of wood, food and other commodities highly vulnerable to disease. Irish potato growers in the 19th century, African cocoa growers in the 20th, and Caribbean banana growers in the 21st have learnt this lesson to their cost.

Most people are aware of some of these factors, but rarely put them together. We suffer from a kind of intellectual and institutional autism. Some of the solutions to some of the problems are well known if - and only if - we have the will to apply them. But they require thinking differently across the whole spectrum. Nor do we grasp the intimidatingly global character of the issues. The human footprint is everywhere. What happens in one place very soon affects what happens in others. Nation states exercise diminishing control while global institutions have yet to acquire accountability. There is a constant battle between short term private advantage and long term public interest.

At root the problem is one of values. Any change in a system which gives primacy to market forces, exploitation of resources and ever rising consumption will be uncommonly painful. Unqualified economic growth is an obsession with some economists and politicians who see growth as something without natural limits. Many want to attach monetary value to almost everything. But how can anyone give monetary value to pollution of the atmosphere, acidification of the oceans, destruction of rainforests, or supply of such natural services as microbial disposal of wastes?

In order to change current thinking we have to infiltrate it, redirect its thinking, and introduce new values. A prime need is to establish the true value of what forests remain, and to secure appropriate treatment of those who live in them. It is worth looking at some of the routes which have been followed to achieve these ends. One such route is through international action to mitigate or adapt to climate change.

From the days of the Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 mechanisms have been sought to limit the growth of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. A big mistake was made in 1997 when conservation of old forests was omitted from the Clean Development Mechanism within the Kyoto Protocol: new forests were included but old ones were considered too difficult to negotiate. Yet the amount of carbon stored in old forests is around 200 tons of carbon per hectare. At present in Brazil alone around 20,000 square kilometres of old forest are burnt every year. To add old forest to new forest within the Clean Development Mechanism should now be a top priority.

In the meantime ten countries within the Rainforest Coalition have been trying to work out mechanisms by which they should be rewarded for not destroying their rainforests. Such mechanisms, if they could be established, would have to reflect true economic costs or externalities in the global ecosystem.

Once an assessment had been made, it would necessary to decide where the money should come from (for example in taxes on aviation and bunker fuel, or other use of fiscal instruments). There would then be the problem of deciding how the money should be distributed. Most people recognize the need for something of this kind, but are far from deciding how it should be done. It is easier to manage the treatment of live carbon in forests than to restrain the use of dead carbon from power stations, industry, transport and so on in industrial societies.

Another route is to match destruction of old forest by creation of new forest: in other word to go for long term sustainability. Unfortunately this has not really worked. Anyone who has seen the rich diversity of an old forest replaced by rows of mono-crop trees for eventual felling must find the spectacle deeply depressing.

Some 20 years ago the International Tropical Timber Organization was set up to establish standards for sustainable forestry covering both conservation and production of timber. Yet this organization has just admitted that only 3 percent of tropical forests (some 36 million out of 1,200 million hectares across the tropics), now meets these standards. Illegal logging is widespread, and the effects on forests and those who still live in them is very great.

This brings me to the point of most concern for Rangers: the role of people in forests. At present the pressure on forests for conversion into agricultural land, extraction of mining resources, and of course logging is enormous. Somehow we have to make it in the short term as well as in the long term advantage of people who live in and around forests to maintain them. They will not wish to be seen as creatures in a zoo.

That means making sure that they are rewarded for their work in conservation, and that in turn means making sure through use of fiscal instruments that part of the profits of tourism, as well as those from hunting, exploitation and the rest, go to those in the forests and not to outsiders bent on short term gain. We also need to excite the interest of local authorities, landlords, businesses, and above all volunteers to help look after the parks and other protected areas. That means a process of persuasion; bottom up as well as top down. This is your vital role.

A good example of what could be done was this year's award of the St Andrews Prize for the Environment to a group in central America. In Ancient Maya times thousands of nut trees were planted as staple food and as a hedge against famine. They were since neglected or chopped down to make room for such less nutritious crops as maize. Now under the leadership of the Equilibrium Fund, women in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico are returning to the planting and harvesting of nut trees which flourish in diverse forests and whose products can be used for a rich variety of purposes.

Most important of all we have to appreciate the true value of trees and forests, and to respect and rejoice in what they represent. In his book The Secret Life of Trees, Colin Tudge wrote:

"Groves of redwoods and beeches are often compared to the naves of great cathedrals: the silence; the green, filtered, numinous light. A single banyan, each with its multitude of trunks, is like a temple or a mosque - a living colonnade. But the metaphor should be the other way around. The cathedrals and mosques emulate the trees. The trees are innately holy."

Trees in and out of forests form part of the interconnectedness of all living organisms, and the delicate, infinitely complex functioning of the Earth system as a whole. We damage it at our peril.