EuropaWorld 24/11/2000 WOODMAN

Shortly before eight o’clock in the morning of 29 July 2000 a young Australian by the name of Madeleine Habib clambered aboard the container ship Aquitania, in the French port of Honfleur, and proceeded to attach herself to one of the ship’s cranes. She was followed by five colleagues. In a few minutes all the ship’s cranes were out of action.

Aquitania had arrived the previous evening from Brazil and the containers that lay stacked on her decks were full of timber that the Greenpeace campaigners suggested had been logged illegally from the rain forest. They may have been correct for the companies to whom the timber belonged had already been exposed for their involvement in the illegal production and
trade of timber from the Brazilian Amazon. Indeed one of the companies – Amaplac – was already under investigation by the authorities for its logging activities.

There followed a confrontation with the police which lasted all day and all the following night, but eventually the captain of the Aquitania decided he had had enough for he cast off, leaving Honfleur without discharging his cargo and with Madeleine Habib still chained to one of Aquitania’s masts.

Such actions by Greenpeace and other campaigners have been successful in highlighting the threat to the world’s forests posed by illegal logging, one of the principal causes of forest destruction. Every two seconds the snarling chain saws of the loggers account for an area of forest the size of a soccer pitch. This rate of loss means that an area the size of Luxembourg –
2,400 square kilometres – is lost every week. To add insult to injury, most is chipped or pulped and we buy it as toilet paper or milk cartons. Of the area of forests existing in the 1950s, say the World Wildlife Fund, (WWF) half have now been destroyed.

Greenpeace estimate that no more than 20% of the world’s ancient forests now remain. In the tropical regions of Central and South America, in Africa and in South-East Asia, the areas covered by rainforest have shrunk from over two billion hectares to less than one billion today. Half of all this loss has occurred in the Amazon basin.

Forests matter for several reasons. They have a substantial effect on climate, both directly by generating water vapour, which helps to form clouds, and indirectly by locking up carbon dioxide. Three-quarters of the 2000 billion tonnes of carbon in terrestrial eco-systems is stored in forests say the British Columbian Forest Alliance, the vast majority of it in trees.

Secondly, tropical rainforests in particular, are home to an enormous range of animals and plants many of which have yet to be researched. Important medicines have already been extracted from rain forest plants; there may be cures for cancer, AIDS, and heart disease waiting to be discovered. Destroy the forest and these often fragile and specialised species will be lost. As WWF point out, when the trees disappear so does everything that depends on them from micro-organisms, fungi and beetles to big cats and tropical birds.

Cut down the forests and this bio-diversity disappears. Moreover, destroying the trees effects the regions’s soil and micro-climate. Small farmers find this to their cost when they burn patches of forest to plant crops. The soil is often thin and without the forest canopy to protect it from tropical rainstorms much is soon washed away. This silt then causes further problems: blocked rivers flood while mud slides can cause the loss of even more precious soil.

When this happens the farmer has no alternative but to burn more virgin forest. This far from straightforward; the burning may get out of hand setting off a major conflagration that can persist for months.

Indonesia was especially badly hit by forest fires in 1997, as farmers and others burned the forest to plant rubber trees and oil palms. The fires burnt all over Borneo and were said to have produced as much carbon dioxide as all the coal, oil and petrol burned in Western Europe that year. Periods of drought may make a fire spread more easily, but the cause of ignition is almost always human.

Nor is it only fire that produces carbon dioxide. A source of potentially even greater potency is the forest floor. Immense amounts of carbon lie locked up in leaf litter and in organic detritus in the soil. Each year a little of this finally rots away; each year the carbon is replaced by new falls of leaves and dead branches.

When the forest is cleared and the soil turned over, this process of rot is speeded up by a combination of sunlight and oxygen, releasing several decades worth of carbon in a few short, tropical months. Operations that disturb the forest floor, such a road building, logging, even some forest management schemes can trigger this process.

Some Pressure groups believe that consumers can play a major part in halting this orgy of forest destruction . In Costa Rica, for instance, conservationists point to the loss of a quarter of the Central American rainforest in recent years. Where once stood trees, now stand enormous cattle ranches. These export meat to the industrialised world where much of it is processed into hamburgers. In the 1970s, nearly 17 million hectares (30 million football pitches) of rain forest became cattle ranches. Consumers could have an influence here by asking where their beef comes from.

Consumers can also exercise care when buying furniture made of mahogany, teak, rosewood, ebony and other forest hardwoods. Unless these bear a specific label such as that of the Forest Stewardship Council guaranteeing that they have come from a sustainable source, there is a high probability that the purchase will result in further shrinkage of the world’s forests. This is especially true if the product comes from the Amazon basin where Greenpeace estimate that up to 80% of logging operations are illegal. Even where logging operations are legal there is increasing evidence that sustainable yields are being grossly overestimated. Logging removes the oldest and largest trees – those containing the most carbon and providing greatest influence on the forest. The Australian Rain Forest Conservation Society have noted how sustainability estimates have constantly had to be revised downwards as forests become degraded as a result of logging.

The world is slowly waking up to the vital role that forests play in climate control, bio-diversity, water regulation and in providing habitats for species that may be of medical value. The good news is that twenty-two countries have now agreed to implement the WWF’s ‘Forests for Life’ Campaign to establish protected areas covering at least 10% of the rainforest by the
end of the year 2000. And in the Congo basin, six African countries have agreed to improve cross-border forest protection.

Not everybody may want to emulate, or even approve, the direct actions of Madeleine Habib and others but in the interests of preserving those forests that still remain we can and should all be prepared to ask where our furniture, our building materials, even our hamburgers, come from.

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