Shadows Over the Rain Forest

SEEN from an aircraft, the Amazon rain forest reminds you of a continental-size tufted carpet, looking as green and pristine now as it did when Orellana put it on the map. As you slog through the hot, humid forest on the ground, dodging insects the size of small mammals, you find it hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy takes over. What appear to be leaves turn into butterflies, lianas into snakes, and chunks of dry wood into startled rodents that scurry away at top speed. In the Amazon forest, fact is still blurred with fiction.

“The greatest irony,” notes one observer, “is that Amazon reality is as fantastic as its myths.” And fantastic it is! Picture a forest as large as Western Europe. Stuff it with over 4,000 different species of trees. Embellish it with the beauty of more than 60,000 species of flowering plants. Color it with the brilliant hues of 1,000 species of birds. Enrich it with 300 species of mammals. Saturate it with the buzz of perhaps two million species of insects. Now you see why anyone describing the Amazon rain forest ends up using superlatives. No lesser comparisons do justice to the teeming biological bounty of this largest tropical rain forest on earth.

The Isolated “Living Dead”

Ninety years ago the American writer and humorist Mark Twain described this fascinating forest as “an enchanted land, a land wastefully rich in tropical wonders, a romantic land where all the birds and flowers and animals were of the museum varieties, and where the alligator and the crocodile and the monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo.” Today, Twain’s witty remarks have acquired a sober twist. Museums and zoos may soon be the only homes left for a growing number of the Amazon’s tropical wonders. Why?

The leading cause is obviously man’s hacking away at the Amazon rain forest, rooting out the natural home of the region’s flora and fauna. However, besides wholesale habitat destruction, there are other—more subtle—causes that are turning plant and animal species, even though still alive, into “living dead.” In other words, authorities believe that there is nothing that can stop the species from dying out.

One such cause is isolation. Government officials with a fancy for conservation may ban the chain saw from a patch of forest to secure the survival of species living there. However, a small forest island offers these species the prospect of eventual death. Protecting the Tropical Forests—A High-Priority International Task gives an example to illustrate why small forest islands fail to support life for very long.

Tropical-tree species often consist of male and female trees. To reproduce, they get help from bats that carry pollen from male to female flowers. Of course, this pollination service works only if the trees grow within the bat’s flying radius. If the distance between a female tree and a male tree becomes too great—as often happens when a forest island ends up surrounded by a sea of scorched earth—the bat cannot bridge the gap. The trees, notes the report, then turn into “‘living dead’ since their long-term reproduction is no longer possible.”

This link between trees and bats is only one of the relationships making up the Amazonian natural community. Simply put, the Amazon forest is like a huge house that provides room and board to an assortment of different but tightly interrelated individuals. To avoid overcrowding, the inhabitants of the rain forest live on different stories, some close to the forest floor, others away up in the canopy. All residents have a job, and they work around the clock—some in the day, others during the night. If all species are allowed to do their share of the work, this complex community of Amazonian flora and fauna functions with clockwork precision.

The Amazon’s ecosystem (“eco” comes from oiʹkos, the Greek word for “house”) is, however, fragile. Even if man’s interference in this forest community is limited to exploiting a few species, his disruption reverberates throughout all the stories of the forest house. Conservationist Norman Myers estimates that the extinction of a single plant species can eventually contribute to the death of as many as 30 animal species. And since most tropical trees, in turn, depend on animals for seed dispersal, man’s wiping out animal species leads to the extinction of the trees they service. (See the box “The Tree-Fish Connection.”) Like isolation, disrupting relationships assigns more and more forest species to the ranks of the “living dead.”

Small Cuts, Small Losses?

Some justify deforestation of small areas by reasoning that the forest will bounce back and grow a fresh layer of greenery over a stretch of clear-cut land in much the same way our body grows a fresh layer of skin over a cut in a finger. Right? Well, not quite.

It is true, of course, that the forest grows back if man leaves a deforested patch alone long enough. But it is also true that the new layer of vegetation resembles the original forest no more than a poor photocopy resembles a crisp printout. Ima Vieira, a Brazilian botanist, studied a century-old stretch of regrown forest in the Amazon and found that of the 268 tree species that used to flourish in the old forest, only 65 form a part of the regrown forest today. This same difference, says the botanist, holds true for the region’s animal species. So although deforestation is not, as some claim, turning green forests into red deserts, it is turning parts of the Amazon rain forest into a weak imitation of the original.

In addition, cutting even a small stretch of forest often destroys many plants and animals that grow, crawl, and clamber in only that spread of forest and nowhere else. Researchers in Ecuador, for instance, found 1,025 plant species in a certain area of seven tenths of a square mile [1.7 sq km] of tropical forest. More than 250 of those species grew nowhere else on earth. “A local example,” says Brazilian ecologist Rogério Gribel, “is the sauim-de-coleira (pied bare-faced tamarin, in English),” a small, charming monkey that looks as if it were wearing a white T-shirt. “The few remaining ones live only in a small forest stretch near Manaus in central Amazon, but the destruction of that small habitat,” says Dr. Gribel, “will wipe out this species forever.” Small cuts but big losses.

Rolling Back the “Rug”

Outright deforestation, however, is throwing the most alarming shadow over the Amazon rain forest. Road builders, loggers, miners, and hordes of others are rolling back the forest like a floor rug, razing entire ecosystems in the blink of an eye.

While there is deep disagreement about the exact figures for Brazil’s annual rate of forest destruction—conservative estimates put it at 14,000 square miles [36,000 sq km] per year—the total amount of Amazon rain forest already destroyed may be more than 10 percent, an area larger than Germany. Veja, Brazil’s leading newsweekly, reported that some 40,000 forest fires lit by slash-and-burn farmers raged across the country in 1995—five times more than the year before. Man is torching the forest with such vigor, alerted Veja, that parts of the Amazon resemble an “inferno on the green frontier.”

Species Are Going—So What?

‘But,’ some ask, ‘do we need all those millions of species?’ Yes, we do, argues conservationist Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard University. “Since we depend on functioning ecosystems to cleanse our water, enrich our soil and create the very air we breathe,” says Wilson, “biodiversity is clearly not something to discard carelessly.” Says the book People, Plants, and Patents: “Access to abundant genetic diversity will be the key to human survival. If diversity goes, we will soon follow.”

Indeed, the impact of species destruction goes far beyond felled trees, threatened animals, and harassed natives. (See the box “The Human Factor.”) The downsizing of forests may affect you. Think of this: A farmer in Mozambique cutting cassava sticks, a mother in Uzbekistan taking a birth-control pill, a wounded boy in Sarajevo being given morphine, or a customer in a New York store savoring an exotic fragrance—all these people, notes the Panos Institute, use products that sprang from the tropical forest. The standing forest thus serves people around the world—including you.

No Feast, No Famine

Granted, the Amazon rain forest cannot provide a worldwide feast, but it can help to prevent a worldwide famine. (See the box “The Fertility Myth.”) In what way? Well, in the 1970’s, on a large scale, man began to sow a few plant varieties that produced bumper crops. Though these superplants have helped to feed an additional 500 million people, there is a catch. Since they lack genetic variation, they are weak and vulnerable to disease. A virus can decimate a nation’s supercrop, triggering famine.

So to produce more resilient crops and avert starvation, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) now urges the “use of a broader range of genetic material.” And that is where the rain forest and its original inhabitants come in.

Since tropical forests house more than half the world’s plant species (including some 1,650 species that have potential as food crops), the Amazon nursery is the ideal spot for any researcher looking for wild plant species. In addition, the forest’s inhabitants know how to utilize these plants. Brazil’s Cayapo Indians, for instance, not only breed new crop varieties but also preserve samples in hillside gene banks. Crossbreeding such wild crop varieties with the vulnerable domesticated crop varieties will bolster the strength and resilience of man’s food crops. And that boost is urgently needed, says FAO, for “a 60% increase in food output is necessary in the next 25 years.” In spite of this, forest-crushing bulldozers keep pushing deeper into the Amazon rain forest.

The consequences? Well, man’s destroying the rain forest is much like a farmer’s eating his seed corn—he satisfies his immediate hunger but endangers future food supplies. A group of experts on biodiversity recently warned that “the conservation and development of the remaining crop diversity is a matter of vital global concern.”

Promising Plants

Now step into the forest “pharmacy,” and you will see that man’s fate is intertwined with tropical vines and other plants. For instance, alkaloids extracted from Amazonian vines are used as muscle relaxants prior to surgery; 4 out of 5 children with leukemia are helped to live longer thanks to the chemicals found in the rosy periwinkle, a forest flower. The forest also provides quinine, used to fight malaria; digitalis, used to treat heart failure; and diosgenin, used in birth-control pills. Other plants have shown promise in fighting AIDS and cancer. “In the Amazon alone,” says a UN report, “2,000 species of plants used as medicines by the native population and that have pharmaceutical potential have been recorded.” Worldwide, says another study, 8 out of every 10 persons turn to medicinal plants to treat their ills.

So it makes sense to save the plants that save us, says Dr. Philip M. Fearnside. “Loss of Amazonian forest is considered a serious potential setback to efforts to find cures for human cancer. . . . The notion that the shining achievements of modern medicine permit us to dispense with a major portion of these stocks,” he adds, “represents a potentially fatal form of hubris.”

Nevertheless, man goes on destroying animals and plants faster than they can be found and identified. It makes you wonder: ‘Why is the deforestation continuing? Can the trend be reversed? Does the Amazon rain forest have a future?’

A Search for Solutions

“IN arguing of the shadow,” wrote English author John Lyly, “we forgo the substance.” To avoid that pitfall, we should indeed keep in mind that today’s shadows over the rain forest are mere reflections of deeper problems and that forest destruction will continue unless its underlying causes are tackled. What are those causes? The “fundamental forces attacking Amazonian preservation,” says a UN-sponsored study, are “poverty and human inequities.”

The Not-So-Green Revolution

Forest destruction, argue some researchers, is partially a side effect of the so-called green revolution that took off some decades ago in southern and central Brazil. Before that, thousands of small-farm families there made a living growing rice, beans, and potatoes and raising livestock on the side. Then, large-scale, mechanized soybean-growing operations and hydroelectric projects swallowed up their land and replaced cows and local crops with agricultural products reserved for feeding the industrialized countries. Between 1966 and 1979 alone, farmland set aside for export crops increased by 182 percent. As a result, 11 out of every 12 traditional farmers lost their land and livelihood. For them, the green revolution turned into a bleak revolution.

Where could these landless farmers go? Politicians, unwilling to face unjust land distribution in their own region, showed them the way out by promoting the Amazon region as “a land without men for men without land.” Within a decade after the opening of the first Amazon highway, more than two million poor farmers from southern Brazil and drought- and poverty-stricken northeastern Brazil had settled in thousands of shacks alongside the highway. When more roads were built, more would-be farmers traveled to the Amazon, ready to turn forest into farmland. As they look back on these colonization programs, researchers say that “the balance sheet on almost 50 years of colonization is negative.” Poverty and injustice have been “exported to the Amazon,” and “new problems have been created in the Amazon region” as well.

Three Steps Forward

To help tackle the causes of deforestation and improve man’s living conditions in the Amazon rain forest, the Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia published a document recommending that, among other things, the governments in the Amazon basin take three initial steps. (1) Address the economic and social problems in the poverty-stricken regions outside the Amazon rain forest. (2) Use the standing forest and reuse the areas that have already been deforested. (3) Deal with society’s grave injustices—the real causes of human misery and forest destruction. Let us look closer at this three-step approach.

Making Investments

Address socio-economic problems. “One of the more efficient options to reduce deforestation,” notes the commission, “is to invest in some of the poorest areas in Amazonian countries, those that force populations to migrate to the Amazon to seek a better future.” However, the commissioners add that “this option is rarely considered in national or regional development planning or by those in the industrialized countries who champion sharp reductions in Amazon deforestation rates.” Yet, explain the authorities, if government officials and concerned foreign governments aim their expertise and financial support at solving problems such as insufficient land distribution or urban poverty in the Amazon’s surrounding regions, they will slow the flow of Amazon-bound farmers and help save the forest.

What, though, can be done for small farmers already living in the Amazon? Their day-to-day survival depends upon growing crops on soil unfit for farming.

The Forest for the Trees

Use and reuse the forest. “Tropical forests are over-exploited but under-used. On this paradox depends their salvation,” says The Disappearing Forests, a UN publication. Instead of exploiting the forest by felling it, say the experts, man should use the forest by extracting, or harvesting, its produce, such as fruits, nuts, oils, rubber, essences, medicinal plants, and other natural products. Such products, it is claimed, represent “an estimated 90 percent of the economic value of the forest.”

Doug Daly, of the New York Botanical Garden, explains why he believes shifting from forest destruction to forest extraction makes sense: “It placates the government—they don’t see big chunks of Amazonia being taken out of the marketplace. . . . It can provide a life that will keep people living and working, and it conserves the forest. It’s pretty hard to find something negative to say about it.”—Wildlife Conservation.

Leaving the forest for the sake of the trees actually improves the living conditions of the forest’s inhabitants. Researchers in Belém, northern Brazil, have calculated, for instance, that transforming two and a half acres [1 ha] into pastureland gives a profit of only $25 per year. So just to earn Brazil’s monthly minimum wage, a man would need to have 120 acres [48 ha] of pastureland and 16 head of cattle. However, Veja reports, a would-be rancher could make much more money by extracting the forest’s natural products. And the scope of products waiting to be collected is amazing, says biologist Charles Clement. “There are dozens of vegetable crops, hundreds of fruit crops, resins, and oils that can be managed and harvested,” adds Dr. Clement. “But the problem is that man must learn that the forest is the source of wealth instead of an impediment to getting wealthy.”

Second Life for Wasted Land

Economic development and environmental preservation can go together, says João Ferraz, a Brazilian researcher. “Look at the amount of forest that has been destroyed already. There is no need to cut more primary forest. Instead, we can reclaim and reuse the already deforested and degraded areas.” And in the Amazon region, there is plenty of degraded land to go around.

Beginning in the late 1960’s, the government granted huge subsidies to encourage big investors to transform the forest into pastures. They did that, but as Dr. Ferraz explains, “the pastures were degraded after six years. Later, when everyone realized that it was a huge mistake, the big landowners said: ‘OK, we’ve received enough money from the government,’ and they left.” The result? “Some 80,000 square miles [200,000 sq km] of abandoned pastureland is withering away.”

Today, however, researchers like Ferraz are finding new uses for these degraded lands. In what way? Some years ago they planted 320,000 seedlings of the Amazonia-nut tree on an abandoned cattle farm. Today, those seedlings are fruit-bearing trees. Since the trees grow fast and also provide valuable wood, Amazonia-nut seedlings are now planted on deforested land in various parts of the Amazon basin. Extracting products, teaching farmers to plant perennial crops, adopting methods to harvest wood without damaging the forests, and reviving degraded land are, in the view of the experts, enlightened alternatives that can help keep the forest standing.—See the box “Working for Preservation.”

Yet, say officials, saving forests requires more than transforming degraded land. It calls for transforming human nature.

How to Straighten Out What Is Crooked

Deal with injustices. Unfair human behavior that violates the rights of others is often caused by greed. And, as the ancient philosopher Seneca observed, “for greed all nature is too little”—including the vast Amazon rain forest.

In contrast with the Amazon’s poor struggling farmers, industrialists and owners of large tracts of land are stripping the forest to fatten their pocketbooks. Authorities point out that Western nations are likewise to blame for lending a big hand to the chain saws at work in the Amazon. “The wealthy industrialized countries,” concluded one group of German researchers, have “largely caused the already existing environmental damage.” The Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia states that preserving the Amazon calls for nothing less than “a new global ethic, an ethic that will produce an improved style of development, based on human solidarity and justice.”

However, continuing smoke clouds over the Amazon remind one that despite the efforts of environment-conscious men and women worldwide, transforming enlightened ideas into reality is proving to be as hard as grabbing smoke. Why?

The roots of vices such as greed run deep in the fabric of human society, far deeper than the roots of Amazon trees run into the forest soil. Though we should personally do what we can to contribute to forest preservation, it is not realistic to expect that humans, however sincere, will succeed in uprooting the deep and entangled causes of forest destruction. What ancient King Solomon, a wise observer of human nature, noted some three thousand years ago still holds true. By human efforts alone, “that which is made crooked cannot be made straight.” (Ecclesiastes 1:15) Similar to that is the Portuguese saying, “O pau que nasce torto, morre torto” (The tree born crooked, dies crooked). Nevertheless, rain forests around the world have a future. Why?

Enlightenment Ahead

Some one hundred years ago, Brazilian author Euclides da Cunha was so impressed by the Amazon’s wild profusion of life-forms that he described the forest as “an unpublished and contemporary page of Genesis.” And although man has been busy soiling and ripping that “page,” the standing Amazon still is, as the report Amazonia Without Myths says, “a nostalgic symbol of the earth as it was at the time of Creation.” But for how much longer?

Consider this: The Amazon rain forest and the world’s other rain forests breathe evidence of, as Da Cunha put it, “a singular intelligence.” From their roots to their leaves, the trees of the forest declare that they are the handiwork of a master architect. That being the case, will this Great Architect then allow greedy man to wipe out the rain forests and ruin the earth? A Bible prophecy answers this question with a resounding no! It reads: “The nations became wrathful, and your [God’s] own wrath came, and the appointed time . . . to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”—Revelation 11:18.

Note, however, that this prophecy tells us that the Creator not only will get to the root of the problem by eliminating greedy people but will do so in our time. Why can we make this statement? Well, the prophecy says that God goes into action at a time when man is “ruining” the earth. When those words were written nearly two thousand years ago, man lacked both the numbers and the means to do that. But the situation has changed. “For the first time in its history,” notes the book Protecting the Tropical Forests—A High-Priority International Task, “humanity is today in a position to destroy the bases of its own survival not just in individual regions or sectors, but on a global scale.”

“The appointed time” when the Creator will act against “those ruining the earth” is near. The Amazon rain forest and other endangered environments on earth have a future. The Creator will see to it—and that is, not a myth, but a reality.

Working for Preservation

An area of nearly 4,300,000 square feet [400,000 sq m] of lush secondary forest in the central Amazonian city of Manaus shelters the various offices of Brazil’s National Institute for Research in the Amazon, or INPA. This 42-year-old institution, with 13 different departments covering everything from ecology to forestry to human health, is the region’s largest research organization. It also houses one of the world’s richest collections of Amazonian plants, fish, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, birds, and insects. The work of the institute’s 280 researchers is contributing to man’s better understanding the complex interactions of the Amazonian ecosystems. Visitors to the institute come away with a feeling of optimism. Despite bureaucratic and political restrictions, Brazilian and foreign scientists have rolled up their sleeves to work for the preservation of the crown jewel of the world’s rain forests—the Amazon.