The Tree (53 page)

But even with the best of intentions, it is hard to work always to the highest standards. In Brazil, I went out with a first-rate team linked to EMBRAPA, and truly dedicated to the cause of sustainable harvesting. Even they were obliged to cut corners. The men work eleven days on and two days off. They sleep in camps. The food is wholesome—beef, chicken, beans, rice—but it’s more or less the same every day. Brazilians are very friendly, but these lumberjacks were too tired even to look up. Under the rules the skidders should not work if the ground is wet, for then they make deep furrows where water gathers and mosquitoes breed, and they crush the soil and generally screw up the natural drainage. (For the same reason, northern lumberjacks traditionally work only in winter, when the ground is iron hard.) But on the day I was there it had been raining. The skidders dug deep. What option did they have? The men and machines were in the field and there were quotas to fill. Still, the team I was with was among the best, with a benign and enlightened foreman (a local man). I was told of a team nearby that was contracted to cut sixty trees a day—one every few minutes: far too many to allow serious reflection, or best practice. Recently a man on that team had been killed, hardly surprisingly, and his mates were not allowed a day off to attend his funeral. Thus we see in microcosm the tragedy of the modern world: how good ideas, and life itself, are sacrificed to the all-powerful gods of profit and competition. We can’t afford to run the world like that. It’s too vicious, too dangerous.

It is also tragically and abundantly the case that the neat, clever, well-planned mode of harvesting I witnessed in Santarém is not the norm in Brazil, or in the tropics as a whole. In Brazil, 60 percent of felling in that vast and difficult country is carried out illegally. Green-peace estimates that in the state of Pará, it is 90 percent. President Lula acknowledges that most people in Brazil, as in the Third World as a whole (which means most of the world), are agrarian. He wants to build an agrarian economy based on small farms and forest farms, not unlike that of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. But the big-time ranchers and loggers, including or especially the illegal loggers, have others plans and pursue them ruthlessly. Those who speak for small settlers are liable to be murdered, like the rubber tapper Chico Mendes in 1988 or, most recently, Sister Dorothy Stang, originally from Ohio, age seventy-four, who had campaigned for thirty years for the poor people of Amazonia. She was gunned down on 12 February 2005. Assassination is a regular trade in rural Brazil. The hit men are called
pistoleiros.
I met one who retired to drive a taxi.

Loggers and ranchers, legal and illegal, have already removed 20 percent of the 1.6 million square miles (988 million acres) of Amazonia’s rain forest. The International Monetary Fund, which lent billions of dollars to Brazil after its recession of 2002, is urging yet more clearance in the cause of economic growth—as if economic growth, defined in crude cash, was necessarily reflective of human well-being. As in Brazil, so in Indonesia: the police are estimated to intercept only about 3 percent of the shiploads of wild timber that stream out of the Indonesian province of Papua New Guinea, each one returning a profit of around $100,000. Overall, at this moment, the fight to maintain the world’s wild forests, and to leave a world that can support our grandchildren, is being lost.

But at least now there are rules, which weren’t there a few years ago, and they are catching on—for reasons of sound business as well as a more general sense of enlightenment. More and more importers now insist that timber from all sources is certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council, launched in 1989, to guarantee that properly identified species have been harvested in a sustainable manner. Still, there are plenty of drawbacks, not least that the smallest providers cannot always afford to comply with the protocols: and the problem may sometimes lie with the paperwork, rather than the practice. Nonetheless, FSC guidelines are now applied to more than 40.8 million acres in more than thirty countries. The industry is at least trying to clean up its act, and give credit where it’s due. With luck, the race can be won. Perhaps what’s needed now above all are better-informed consumers: people worldwide who recognize that Brazil’s angelim, say, is a very special timber and are prepared to pay handsomely for it—provided it is certified as the right species, properly harvested. If, at the same time, producer countries ensure that the cash flows back to the communities on whose lands the trees were growing, then we truly have the basis for a benign industry that benefits everybody. The same is true, of course, in food production. If consumers pay well for properly raised chickens (chickens raised in woods are ideal) and for fair-trade organic coffee, and if the farmers get the money, then the world can truly improve. If the producers are paid too little, and production is cut-rate and careless to keep costs down and maximize profit margins, and/or the money is siphoned off by middlemen, then the world will go to pot and all of us will go with it.

In temperate and extreme northern forests the ecology is, in principle, much simpler. Latvia is a fine example. It is neatly poised between temperate and boreal; forestry is the biggest industry. I went walking with Latvian foresters late in 2004. All the vast woods are dominated by just a few species: silver birch, Norway spruce, Scotch pine, and a couple of species of alder. Plus red and roe deer, moose, wolves, lynx, and a host of beavers, which really do dam the rivers in a most spectacular fashion. Amazing creatures. Sometimes the foresters just harvest individual trees. Sometimes they clear-cut entire areas, usually not too much at a time, and then replant. They replant only native species, barring the odd larch from Russia. Indeed, although the country is small, the foresters have notionally divided it into four regions and do not transfer trees from one region to another, since they may have different adaptations in different places.

The Latvian forests are replenished from vast nurseries; I visited one whose properly proud owner claimed it was “only small” although she produced 180,000 birches per year, about a quarter of a million spruces, and half a million pines (plus a pleasing array of ornamentals—cypress, juniper, mountain ash, and so on). However, she raises her trees from elite parent stock—trees grown in the wild but nonetheless more robust than usual. Thus the forest is not exactly replaced in pristine form. There is some genetic improvement along the way (meaning, in effect, that the wild trees are turned into landraces). On the other hand, it seems perverse to plant seeds from trees that are known to be feeble, even if there is some loss of genetic diversity when the feeble ones are left out, so this seems a reasonable compromise. There is huge contrast with the tropics, too, in the rate of growth. The Brazilians are hoping to produce worthwhile crops of teak in eighteen years; eucalypts commonly reach harvestable size in less than a decade. The common forest trees of northern-temperate Latvia are typically expected to take around a century. Northerners plant for future generations.

But not all pristine forest should be exploited, either by tourists or by loggers. We need heartlands left entirely to whatever forest people are indigenous to them, and to the wild creatures (albeit with rights of entry for dedicated scholars, for it is always important to improve understanding). The wild creatures have rights of their own, and besides, without those heartlands, the slightly less wild places that we do exploit will surely lose their diversity, however dutifully we strive to keep them intact.

Great forestry cannot be a matter simply of aesthetics, however, and cannot be left simply to common sense. Both must be abetted by excellent science.

THE RIGHT KIND OF SCIENCE

Modern forest science can be breathtaking. It operates both on the very largest scale and on the most minute. Satellites now fly far overhead, measuring the height of individual trees to within a few centimeters—and so are able to monitor growth over vast areas, which is especially useful in times of climate change; they are able, too, from the reflected light, to identify individual species to some extent. The canopy is being opened up by towers, cranes, ingenious systems of ropes borrowed and adapted from rock climbers, and by gas-filled balloons that hover overhead and lower each scientist into the branches like a worm on a fishing line. The excitement and the promise is the same as it was half a century ago when scuba diving first opened up the coral reefs—except, of course, that the canopies are even richer than the reefs. Permanent gauges ticking twenty-four hours a day monitor the flow of gases of all kinds, including the volatile organic materials produced by the trees and by the ground litter, providing continuous data on growth and general health, year after year. Bigger and bigger computers extract more and more from the data. All in all, the instruments and the ingenuity are providing a continuous overview that even a couple of decades ago would have been beyond imagining. Without these data, we would have very little insight at all into the effects of global warming. As it is, we can see the changes unfolding before our eyes, though it is hard to grasp the complexity.

Science operates on the smallest scale too, as demonstrated at EMBRAPA. It’s all very well to identify specific species of trees and then remove a few—but what effect does this have on the genetic diversity of the ones that are left? After all, if trees of any one species are widely scattered, the total population in any one area is unlikely to be large, and each individual may be making a significant contribution to the overall gene pool. At EMBRAPA, Dr. Milton Kanashiro coordinates a program known as the Dendrogene Project (adapted from a comparable strategy developed in Europe). The idea is to analyze the DNA in the cambium of the trees and see whether selective logging leads to any change in the total genetic variation in the population as a whole. If the results show that diversity is being lost, then the harvesting can be adjusted. Thus can science improve on commonsense rules of thumb.

So the developing science of forestry is wondrous. The future of biology surely lies at least as much in these broad arenas as in the minutiae that at any one time are fashionable (biotech is the present-day flavor of the month). Yet we should not get carried away by forest science, or by science in general. Science does not, as is so often supposed, provide an undeviating, flawless royal road to truth. At the deepest level, modern philosophers of science point out that all its theories are uncertain—all provisional, waiting to be upset by new insights. John Stuart Mill pointed out that however much we know, we can never be sure that we haven’t missed something vital. Always there are known unknowns—and unknown unknowns, and even unknowable unknowns. When it comes to dealing with living systems—and particularly with systems as complex as tropical forests—the unknowns and the unknowables multiply. Even to acquire the most basic data is extremely difficult and time-consuming: note from earlier discussions how hard it is even to judge how many species of trees there are in the American tropics. Yet the basic inventory of species is only the beginning. The tales related in the last chapter show how complicated the relationships among different creatures can be. After half a century of close study the subtleties of figs and their dialogue with wasps are still being unraveled. But there are millions of species out there, each directly and indirectly interacting with millions of others—and among them, for good measure, bacteria and viruses can often be crucial players, and of them we have virtually no inkling at all except when particularly obvious types attack particular species that we happen to take an interest in.

Yet there is worse. The modern theory of chaos shows that even a few simple forces, when left to interact, may produce endlessly complex and diverse outcomes, and the complexities and diversity are
innately
unpredictable. In forests there aren’t just a few simple forces. There are interactions of countless species, each subject to its own pressures. We can sometimes guess within broad limits the outcome of any one exigency—climate change or particular strategies of logging—but in detail we certainly cannot. One casual introduction can make all the difference—like the European wasps that have been taken to New Zealand and feed (among other things) on the resin from the totara and other conifers, and seem to be wiping out entire food chains of specialist insects that used to feed on resin and, in turn, were preyed upon by birds. Such outcomes cannot be predicted.

Science, in short, for all its wondrousness, is innately limited: the picture it can give of the universe, or of life, or of trees and forests, is always biased and incomplete, and we can never tell how incomplete it is. Yet to conserve forest, and to take from it what we need, we are obliged to manage it. Clearly, even the best forest managers can never achieve the precision of the engineer. They are, at best, like physicians, who are obliged to act if their patients are in trouble but must always do so with imperfect information. They just have to use their judgment.

So we can adjust the world’s economic structure in ways that are sensible—building it largely around trees. There is plenty of good, traditional husbandry out there. It will never be possible to control wild forests absolutely, even if it was aesthetically desirable to do so; but ecology is coming on apace. Science in general, of the right kind, can abet all human endeavor.

What matters in the end, though, is politics—politics in the broad sense: the creation of societies that actually work, and have fruitful relations with one another. It matters who leads those societies, and what the leaders do with their power. Above all, we must never stop asking the question that seems to have gone missing. What do we actually
want
? What are we trying to achieve?

I don’t believe the world can get significantly better if we leave politics to career politicians. That is not what democracy means. I also nurse the conceit (for which there is abundant evidence) that human beings are basically good (a belief that I have been intrigued to find of late is fundamental to Hindus). It seems to follow that if only democracy can be made to work—if the will of humanity as a whole can prevail—then the world could be a far better place: that it could, after all, come through these next few difficult decades; that our grandchildren can indeed live as they will want to do, and as people should.