Read The Ragged Edge of the World Online
Authors: Eugene Linden
The Ragged Edge of the World (39 page)
There is also hope in the fact that the Ndoki persists intact, and that Cuba may not go the way of every other Caribbean island, that Yellowstone is now actually a more complete ecosystem since I was last there, and that, if they can survive climate change and plastics, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands have a shot. So do many other places I've visited but not described in this book, such as the forests of the Guyana Shield and the extraordinary landscape of Kamchatka.
There are scores, hundreds, perhaps even thousands more places that have also remained relatively intact. Even today biologists are finding new lost worlds, such as a haven bursting with lowland gorillas just to the east of the Ndoki, or a healthy population of more than 100,000 gibbons (one of the most endangered of the great apes) in a reserve in Cambodia. Even if we're losing the war, we can't give up. And so, in closing this book, I'll offer a proposal.
I'll offer this proposal even though this is not a how-to-fix-it book. I'll offer an idea because it's critical that we try to preserve what are in essence the vital organs of the planet, for our sake as well as out of obligation to those countless life forms we are crowding out, hunting or poisoning. What follows are my thoughts of how we can tackle conservation at the scale of the problem. They are just one possible solution; there may be many others.
Continental-Scale ConservationUpon leaving the Ndoki in 1992, I attended the Rio Earth Summit in Brazil. I was traveling lighter, since I'd lost about 15 pounds in the forest, and flew to Rio via Cape Town. I wrote a story from Rio as part of
Time
's coverage of the overhyped event, and then a few weeks later
Time
ran my cover story on the Ndoki. I'd hoped to raise the profile of the area so that loggers could not move in by stealth, and in that respect the article was a success. It received a good deal of attention, and the World Bank subsequently helped broker a deal that kept the region inviolate, while opening other parts of the Congo for logging.
Time
's coverage of the overhyped event, and then a few weeks later
Time
ran my cover story on the Ndoki. I'd hoped to raise the profile of the area so that loggers could not move in by stealth, and in that respect the article was a success. It received a good deal of attention, and the World Bank subsequently helped broker a deal that kept the region inviolate, while opening other parts of the Congo for logging.
Now, nineteen years later, the Ndoki still remains largely untouched. Following my article,
National Geographic
did its own major feature on the region, again focusing on Mike Fay. These and other articles have firmly lodged the Ndoki in the minds of conservationists as an extraordinary place, and it remains protected despite on-and-off civil war, many changes of government, and the encroachment of loggers from all sides. The question remains, however, is the Ndoki large enough to endure if the forests surrounding it are cut? It was a key question when I visited the region, and it is even more relevant today, when logging has stripped the forest right up to the preserve's edge.
National Geographic
did its own major feature on the region, again focusing on Mike Fay. These and other articles have firmly lodged the Ndoki in the minds of conservationists as an extraordinary place, and it remains protected despite on-and-off civil war, many changes of government, and the encroachment of loggers from all sides. The question remains, however, is the Ndoki large enough to endure if the forests surrounding it are cut? It was a key question when I visited the region, and it is even more relevant today, when logging has stripped the forest right up to the preserve's edge.
Therein lies the conundrum of conservation: Dedicated people can save a forest and yet still lose it if the surrounding land that supports it no longer has the ability to deliver water and moderate climate. I pondered this problem for many years after I went to the Ndoki. Having written about many of the grand failures of conservation, I didn't want to contribute to that huge and growing literature by offering a plan that required a huge infrastructure, detailed studies, approvals from various bureaucracies, or any of the other factors that I had watched subvert many well-intentioned proposals. Instead I wanted a plan that would be large enough to save the systems that support gems like the Ndoki, one that could be deployed quickly, one that was largely self-policing, one that was cheap, and one that required very little infrastructure and expertise.
One day the answer hit me. The next time Mike Fay came through New York, we had lunch, and I laid out my idea. He immediately fastened on the necessity of what he called “wall-to-wall” coverage of the rainforest. Emboldened, I then developed the concept further.
The first opportunity to test reactions to my idea came on the tenth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, when I was invited to come back to Rio and participate in the “handover” of the summit to Johannesburg. There I had the chance to present my thoughts on continental-scale conservation at the plenary to the assembled heads of state and other dignitaries, and got an enthusiastic reception. But, as it was with Rio, and as it is with many conferences, my proposals were forgotten by the time delegates picked up their first cocktail at the receptions following the sessions.
Then in 2003, Tom Lovejoy, the celebrated conservationist and tropical biologist, hosted a dinner that brought together the heads of some of the biggest conservation groups in the country for an informal discussion of my idea. Once again, there seemed to be some interest, but I left the dinner with the conviction that ultimately it was not going to get out of the gate unless I took the lead.
And so I decided to write an article for
Foreign Affairs,
inviting Tom Lovejoy and Dan Phillips, who had played a key role in getting protection for the Ndoki when he was ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to join me as coauthors. The piece was published in the July-August issue in 2004. What I present here is a longer explication of my thoughts that uses the structure I first presented in Rio:
Foreign Affairs,
inviting Tom Lovejoy and Dan Phillips, who had played a key role in getting protection for the Ndoki when he was ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to join me as coauthors. The piece was published in the July-August issue in 2004. What I present here is a longer explication of my thoughts that uses the structure I first presented in Rio:
Consider the Ndoki rainforest: Nestled in the northeast corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and bordered on three sides by vast swamps, the Ndoki was so inaccessible ten years ago that its animals were naïve of humans. Not even neighboring Ba'Aka Pygmies knew its elephant trails. Since then this forest has received protection (the 4,000-square-mile Nuabale-Ndoki National Park was created in 1993), and the Ndoki has survived political upheaval and civil war. Given the tumultuous politics and endemic corruption of the Congo basin, the protection of the Ndoki ranks as a conservation triumph.
There's just one problem: The forest seems to be drying out. While rainfall records are spotty, changes in flora and the more frequent appearance of desert dust from the Harmattan winds are worrisome developments in one of the drier wet tropical forests in Africa. As logging consortiums cut other unprotected forests throughout the Congo basin, reducing the system's capacity to store and recycle moisture, regional rainfall, now ranging between 1,273 mm and 1,650 mm, may stay below the threshold needed to sustain a wet tropical forest. If that happens, the present denizens of this enchanted forest may find themselves with nothing to eat and nowhere to go. The message from the Ndoki is that saving the parts is necessary, but it is not always sufficient. Conservationists must find ways to preserve the vitality of the systems that support a particular forest, lest other factors such as regional climate change trump even the most effective legal protection. Moreover, the pace of deforestation is such that, in many cases, conservationists will have to act without perfect knowledge of the vulnerabilities of the systems they are trying to preserve.
Since this dilemma first surfaced in the early 1990s, two pertinent issues have shifted from the realm of the debatable to the obvious:
1. The Problem of Scale: The mismatch between efforts to preserve the life support systems of the planet and the scale of the threat has risen into bold relief. Presently, roughly 5 percent of earth's tropical forests have effective protection. At the same time, the rate of moist tropical forest deforestation and degradationâ8.1 million hectares from 1990 to 1997âhas actually accelerated, in part because the fall of the Suharto regime in May 1998 loosed a fury of illegal logging in Indonesia.
2. Anemic International Action: Even as this mismatch between the scale of efforts and the scale of the problem has become apparent, it has also become clear that official action from the international community will offer too little, too late to close the gap. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the so-called Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, brought together heads of state from around the world to address environmental problems. Commitments made there were largely forgotten by the time the fleet of presidential jets left the runway. For instance, ten years after G-7 nations promised $1.2 billion to preserve the Amazon in the PPG-7 agreement (the Pilot Programme for the Protection of Tropical Forests of Brazil), only $350 million has been committed and $120 million disbursed. As Gus Speth argues in
Red Sky at Morning,
virtually the only international agreement ratified during the past thirty years that has had any major positive effect has been the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone. Partly as a result of the failure of international treaties, history is ratifying some of the nightmare scenarios of the past. In the past fifteen years, 60 percent of Indonesia's protected areas have been logged, and, at present rates of logging, Sumatra is now largely devoid of undisturbed forest and Borneo is not far behind, with dire consequences for the orangutan, Sumatra's pygmy elephant and countless other life forms.
Red Sky at Morning,
virtually the only international agreement ratified during the past thirty years that has had any major positive effect has been the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone. Partly as a result of the failure of international treaties, history is ratifying some of the nightmare scenarios of the past. In the past fifteen years, 60 percent of Indonesia's protected areas have been logged, and, at present rates of logging, Sumatra is now largely devoid of undisturbed forest and Borneo is not far behind, with dire consequences for the orangutan, Sumatra's pygmy elephant and countless other life forms.
Even as we rush toward these deadlines, new discoveries underscore the interdependencies of earth's ecosystems. Deforestation in Sumatra and Kalimantan in Indonesia has contributed to regional droughts and wildfires, and residents of Brazil's Mato Grosso assert that the rainy season has diminished in the past decade, though most do not make the connection to the retreat of the Amazon forest northward.
Despite this, all is not lost. For some time conservationists have recognized the problem of scale. Indeed, the big conservation groups (the Wildlife Conservation Society through Living Landscapes, the World Wildlife Fund through ecoregional planning, and Conservation International in its Tropical Wilderness initiative) have focused on working on larger scales. George Woodwell of the Woods Hole Research Center has called for action to protect the “functional integrity of landscapes” and points out the obvious but ignored truth that human economic activity benefits from ecosystems that sustain themselves and provide services indefinitely, while embedding natural systems into a human matrix works to the benefit of neither humans nor nature.
Moreover, in recent years there have been a number of ambitious initiatives aimed at protecting larger stretches of forest and preserving biologically functional units. For instance, the Ecological Corridor Project links a thousand reserves between Bahia and Paraná in Brazil's Atlantic Forest. The Cordillera del Cóndor Peace Park in Ecuador and Peru shows that even nations with long histories of conflict can find common ground in “peace parks.”
Even more ambitious initiatives are in the works. One such undertaking is the Amazon Region Protected Area program. Once added to existing reserves for indigenous people and other set-asides, roughly 40 percent of the Brazilian Amazon would have some form of protectionâat least on paper. Achieving this would depend on a huge number of ifs (not the least of which is the political will of Brazil's future presidents).
In Africa, the Congo Basin Initiative has new life. The region's seven nations have officially endorsed it, and the U.S. government has committed its prestige and $36 million of new money over three years to implementing the Plan de Convergence to bring this initiative to life. If the current plan achieves its goals, roughly 23 percent of the Congo basin forest would have some form of protection.
These initiatives represent unprecedented steps toward protecting moist tropical forests at the system level. They also provide strong evidence that governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) can still launch ambitious conservation efforts absent strong international agreements. The question remains whether these efforts, even if perfectly executed, will provide sufficient forest protection to safeguard the integrity of these two crucial forest systems.
At present no one knows how much of a giant system such as the Amazon or Congo basin must remain intact to avert a self-reinforcing cycle of drying out. Much depends on how and where the forest is logged or clear-cut, plus what happens to the land afterward. Absent any certainty about the tipping points for the world's great forest systems, prudence suggests preserving as much of the system as possible. This in turn forces environmentalists to look beyond parks and indigenous zones, beyond biosphere reserves and wildlife refuges, to find ways to preserve forest cover in areas of lower biological diversity, in areas of lesser ecological interest, in privately held lands and lands currently being converted to other uses. While there is widespread recognition of the urgency of landscape-scale initiatives, there remains a need for a continental-scale plan that would extend to areas that are not a priority with donors and conservation organizations; a plan that could be rolled out rapidly and without endless negotiations, and something that would excite the interest of both donors and the host countries.
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