Trees for life: the world's ancient forests are disappearing, and it could spell disaster for all living things. (Forests).

Eight thousand years ago, large tracts of ancient forest covered about 40% of Earth's land area. Today, only about half of the original forests remain.

There are several reasons why we're losing our forests, including agriculture, mining, and commercial logging. But, it's the logging that recent research by the Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI) points to as "... the greatest danger to frontier forests ... affecting more than 70% of the world's threatened frontiers."

The executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Klaus Toepfer, warned us in August 2001 that it will take a "miraculous transformation" in world attitudes to hang on to the healthy forests that are left. In his report, Mr. Toepfer said that if people and governments don't do something to protect them, the Earth's remaining closed-canopy forests will disappear within decades.

A report, from the World Bank in 2000, said that Indonesia's tropical forest could be gone in 10 to 15 years. It was estimated in 1999 that the country was losing five million hectares of forest a year.

The Economist reported in November 2001 that Afghanistan's forest cover had fallen below 0.5% of the country's land, down from more than 3% in 1980. Environmentalists predicted that all the natural woods there will be gone by 2005. Over the last two decades, deforestation, a three-year drought, and poverty have turned thickly wooded hills into barren wasteland.

In South America, destruction of the Brazilian rainforest jumped in 2000 to its highest rate since 1995. The area deforested was roughly the size of Belgium. Brazil's Atlantic forest (Mata Atlantica) is one of the richest areas in the world. When the Portuguese arrived in 1500, it covered more than a million square kilometres with dense forest. By 1600, two million trees had been cut down and sent to Europe. Sugar cane, coffee and cocoa plantations, and rapid urban development destroyed more of the Atlantic forest. By 1999, only 7% of the original forest remained. Between 1990 and 1995, a piece of the forest the size of a soccer field was destroyed every four minutes (500,000 hectares in total), twice the rate of devastation in the Amazon, which spans half the country. That made the Mata Atlantica one of the top five environmental priorities globally, according to the U.S.-based Conservation International (CI). Along with a Brazilian environmental group, SOS Mata Atlantica, CI launched a zero deforestation plan in June 2000.

We've known for some time that the cutting down of the Amazon rainforest will have a catastrophic impact on the world, yet the chainsaws are as busy as ever. Official estimates released in April 2000 suggested that 1.7 million hectares of Amazon forest disappeared in 1999, slightly less than the previous year, but still an area larger than Prince Edward Island.

A new environmental law went into force in October 1999 to help slow the loss of both the Atlantic forest and the Amazon. The law involved heavy frees and up to five years' jail for the illegal felling of trees. As an article in The Economist in April 2000 pointed out, Brazil is good at making laws, but poor at enforcing them: "Up to 80% of all the timber produced in Brazil is illegally felled."

While 14% of the Brazilian part of Amazonia (about a third of the Amazon rainforest, the world's biggest, is over the border in other countries) has disappeared in the past 30 years, things are not as bad as predicted in the 1980s when it was thought the forest would be almost gone by now. However, if it continues to be hacked away at the current rate, it's only expected to last another 200 years.

If our forests go, we're in trouble: they do a lot to help keep our ecosystems healthy.

The Amazon ecosystem, for example, is so vast that it creates its own climate. Most rainfall is recycled, and the forest affects light reflection and therefore climate beyond its own region. The Amazon rainforest absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide and gives off oxygen, and therefore acts as a brake on global warming.

Elsewhere, the cost of deforestation is being felt in the form of altered climates, droughts, flash floods, landslides, and soil erosion. The result can be enormous human and economic suffering.

Ecologically and socially responsible forest management can, and is, being practised worldwide. But it is the exception rather than the rule, according to the environmental group Greenpeace. Ancient forests continue to be at risk from accelerating rates of destructive and illegal logging.

Greenpeace believes that individual and corporate consumers have the right and the responsibility to buy wood and wood-based products that don't harm the environment. Replacements already exist for virtually every form of wood product from ancient forests, from building construction to product packaging.

And, when wood is being used, insisting on products that have been AA certified by The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) will also help stop forest destruction and promote responsible forest management.

FSC is an international nonprofit organization founded in 1993 to help stop ancient forest destruction and promote ecologically and socially responsible management of the world's forests. Members include representatives from environmental and social groups, the timber trade and the forestry profession, Indigenous people's organizations, community forestry groups, and forest product certification organizations worldwide. But FSC says to beware of misleading claims about products coming from well-managed forests. It refers to "an authoritative study by the World Wide Fund for Nature, which found that, of a sample of 80 different environmental claims on wood and paper products, only three could even be partially substantiated."

FSC says it aims to clear up the confusion by providing a truly independent, international, and credible labelling scheme on timber and timber products. This will guarantee that the product has come from a forest that has been evaluated and certified as being managed according to agreed social, economic, and environmental standards.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. The International Network of Forests and Communities (INFC) was founded in October of 1998, and within three years, the Network included more than 356 members from 54 different countries. It promotes forestry that is "socially, ecologically, and economically sound." Members believe that the health and well-being of forest ecosystems and human communities are interdependent. They firmed the Network because they were alarmed at the increasing rate of degradation of forest ecosystems across the globe. Report on INFC and its work.

2. In 1997, Julia Hill climbed halfway up a 60-metre redwood tree in northern California, where she lived for two years. Ms. Hill wanted to save the 1,000-year-old tree from becoming timber for the Pacific Lumber Co. When she climbed down in 1999, the company agreed to a deal under which Ms. Hill and her supporters pledged to pay $50,000 (U.S.) to Pacific Lumber to make up for lost logging revenue, and the company agreed to spare the redwood she had lived in and a one-hectare buffer gone around it. The company planned to donate the money to Humboldt State University for forestry studies.

Ms. Hill was inspired by the Earth First! environmental group that had been fighting lumber companies in northern California since the late 1980s. Write a follow-up report on Ms. Hill's activities and the impact she has had on environmental issues.

FACT FILE

In true tropical rainforests, it rains almost all year and daylight lasts 12 hours every day; the air is always hot and steamy.

When writer Henry Thoreau made the first of his famous journeys into the Maine woods in 1846, extensive clearing had been under way for 200 years in the U.S.; the timber was used for barrel staves and masts in the 1600s, and later for matches and paper.

Our oldest human ancestors probably lived in rainforests, and we still depend on them for many foods, medicines, woods, fibres, and saps.

Websites

World Wildlife Fund--http://www.panda.org/
forests4life/

The International Network of
Forests and Communities--http://www.
forestsandcommunities.org/
main.html

The Forest Stewardship
Council--http://www.
fsccanada.org/

Rainforest Alliance--http://
www.rainforest-alliance.org/
about/index.html

RELATED ARTICLE: A dilemma.

As right as it seems to be saving the world's lush rainforests, there are some places where the locals see environmentalists as the enemy; as misguided do-gooders. The tiny settlement of Mambele in central Africa (deep in the rainforest of Cameroon) is one such place. The people there are angry because foreign conservationists have helped clear out the loggers, as well as the jobs they create. But the forest, which developed over 15,000 years and is second in size only to the Amazon, is doomed to disappear by 2020 without controls on logging. In 1999, it was estimated that 162 million hectares of African tropical forest are destroyed every year. Logging trails have not only cleared trees, they've created paths to previously inaccessible wildlife. Now, hunters are destroying deer, monkeys, anteaters, chimpanzees, and gorillas, for their meat and medicinal value.

But conservationists argue that where trees are cleared, the economic benefits are temporary. Once the forests are gone, so is the local economy that depended on the timber. The end result is not only ecological devastation, but poverty as well.

Nevertheless, some of the locals say conservationists are self-serving hypocrites. As one central African journalist put it: "You destroyed your environment and got developed--now you want us to stop doing it! What do we get out of it? You have your TVs and your cars, but no trees. People want to know what they gain by conserving the forest ... Give us schools and hospitals, and we'll give you your reserves."

Ecuador had a similar dilemma brought on by its oil riches. A new billion-dollar oil pipeline will boost the country's economic growth by 2.5% a year until 2020, provide 52,000 new jobs while it is being built, and attract billions of dollars of foreign investment. That's pretty appealing in a country that's struggling financially. But part of the 500 km pipeline runs through Andean cloud-forest, home to 450 species of birds, almost 5% of the world's total, 46 of which are considered endangered. Ecuador's tropical forests contain over 15,000 plant species. (There are 13,000 plant species in all of Europe.) Ecuador is also a part of the world that has a big stake in eco-tourism, in which more than 70% of the local population work. Environmentalists say the pipeline is a disaster in the making, considering that landslides and earthquakes haunt the region--between 1998 and 2001 the country's existing pipeline burst 14 times, releasing a total of 145,000 barrels of oil.

RELATED ARTICLE: Has beens.

Boreal forests are mainly coniferous and stretch across the northern areas of Canada, Europe, and the former USSR. While they represent most of the Earth's forests, they currently are threatened by extensive logging.

Temperate forests are mixed, broad-leaved and coniferous, and are located in warmer, subtropical areas of Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North and South America. Only scattered remnants of original temperate forests remain, appearing in less than 0.2% of the Earth's land area.

Tropical forests, the oldest kind of forest, have been growing on Earth for millions of years. They're near the Equator (in Latin America, Hawaii, Madagascar, Indonesia, Australia, Asia, and Africa), are mostly evergreen, and highly diverse with as many as 100 different tree species in one square kilometre. Two hundred years ago, 20 million square kilometres of tropical rainforest covered one-fifth of the Earth's land surface. More than half of this forest has been burned, bulldozed, or cut down. Now, only 8.8 million square kiiometres remain. Every second of every day, rainforest the size of two football fields (one [km.sup.2]) is destroyed. Some scientists think more than 100 animal and plant species become extinct every week as a result of this destruction.

RELATED ARTICLE: A lot of wood chips.

Southern Chile holds more than one-third of the Earth's remaining temperate rainforests. When the U.S. multinational Boise Cascade Corp. set out its plans a few years ago to build a vast timber mill in the country's Lake District, it created a rukus. Known as Cascade Chile, the project would have created only about 200 jobs, and would have doubled the rate of deforestation in the country's temperate rainforests. But, for Boise, it would have meant annual production and export of up to 114 thousand cubic metres of wood chips as well as 540 million sq metres of oriented strand board (wood chips glued together, similar to plywood). That's the equivalent of 866,000 telephone poles, according to one estimate.

Environmentalists said the mill would destroy the most biologically diverse region in Chile, which holds more than one-third of the Earth's remaining temperate rainforests. These rainforests are home to many unique plant and animal species: scientists estimate that 90% of the species found in Chile's native forests are found only in Chile. The tourism and salmon industries together employ 55,000 people in the region and the two groups joined forces with environmental groups to try to stop the $180-million (U.S.) port-and-mill project. Years of intense local and international pressure from concerned citizens, businesses, and environmental groups, combined with legal action in Chile paid off. Boise was forced to cancel its plans to build the mill, and announced that the project was cancelled in February 2001.