Action Plans for Tropical Forests

More than 6 billion people on Earth use wood products every day to construct buildings, produce paper, make furniture, and heat their homes. Forests will never be free of some level of destruction, but action plans can help by encouraging people to think of forests as a nonrenewable resource that needs diligent protection. In reality, forests are renewable resources because they return if allowed a long enough period of time.

Tropical forest conservation may be divided into five general action plans that are all geared toward immediate relief of the stress on tropical forests, rather than long-term solutions. Groups such as the Rainforest Action Network, Friends of the Earth, and the National Resources Defense Council urge members to follow these plans listed here by either encouraging community action or demanding the ear of government officials. The first action plan involves the certification of wood products to assure businesses and the public that their purchases come from woods produced in a sustainable manner. Second, citizens can offer assistance to companies that want to adopt more sustainable methods. Third, grassroots programs can help make quick progress by avoiding the red tape found in bureaucracies. The Rainforest Action Network, for example, established in 1993 the Protect-an-Acre Program in Brazil to give small grants to local communities for purchasing sustainable use forest. The program currently works in Acre, activist Chico Mendes’s home state, to protect land from proposed oil drilling. A fourth approach involves activism in which the public demands an end to needless destruction due to oil drilling, mining, and agriculture, and to encourage banks not to fund destructive industries but instead fund only sustainable industries. In 2004 the Rainforest Action Network persuaded Citigroup, the world’s largest bank at the time, to reorganize its lending practices with more emphasis on sustainable industries. The fifth action plan encourages people to inform the public about companies that currently destroy oldgrowth forests with no desire for sustainable practices, perhaps embarrassing these companies into adopting better methods.

Any of the action plans described here work much better if they receive cooperation from government. For instance, Papua New Guinea is one of the world’s most heavily forested countries, yet its rate of deforestation will destroy all of its accessible forests by the year 2021 if leaders look the other way. Phil Shearman is director of the University of Papua New Guinea’s satellite imagery project for monitoring the country’s forests. He told the New Zealand Herald in 2008, “Forests in Papua New Guinea are being logged repeatedly and wastefully with little regard for the environmental consequences and with at least the passive complicity of government authorities.” Local and national governments hold the key to successful forest conservation, explaining why groups such as the Rainforest Action Network put considerable effort into getting government leaders on their side. The case study, “Ecotourism in Belize’s Rain Forests,” describes a project with just such cooperation.

Source of Information : Green Technology Conservation Protecting Our Plant Resources

Watersheds and Ecology

A watershed is an area of land surrounding a riparian habitat that supplies all of the habitat’s water. Environmental damage to a watershed in the form of pollution or erosion directly affects its riparian waters. Conversely, a healthy environment and watershed give rise to healthy riparian habitat. For instance, undisturbed watersheds containing trees and plant life have riparian areas with clean, clear water. Vegetation, ground cover, and extensive root systems in these places prevent sediments and runoff. In heavy rainstorms, water rushes into streams and dirties the water with soil. A slow leaching of soils and vegetation, by contrast, adds nutrients to the riparian system rather than polluting it.

Clean inflow from healthy watersheds replenishes riparian habitat for a diverse collection of microbial, plant, and animal life. The banks and sediments of streams contain bacteria and fungi that decompose organic matter in the water and soil. Life on the water’s bottom, on rocks and pebbles, is usually composed of microbial communities called biofilms, made up of bacteria and algae, and small plant life called phytoplankton. Invertebrates and dissolved minerals in riparian water feed insect larvae and small fish, and many riparian habitats contain freshwater fish upon which large and small mammals prey. Riparian sites also provide shelter for animals, migration routes, and a shady resting place in hot climates.

Riparian vegetation prefers moist, shady conditions; some species contain root systems that have adapted to a shallow water table and tolerate seasonal flooding. The deep roots of riparian trees prevent erosion and the undercutting of banks in which flowing water wears the bank away from the bottom up. Native plants along waterways provide shelter for insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds. Vegetation that overhangs flowing waters also helps keep the waters cool for fish such as trout and salmon, which are discussed in the sidebar “Salmon.”

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Desalination of Water

Desalination (also desalinization) converts salt-containing waters such as seawater into
freshwater. Desalination has the potential to be particularly valuable in places suffering drought, countries in severe water stress, or in areas of expanding desertification.

Two common methods for removing salts from water are distillation and reverse osmosis. Distillation is an inexpensive process in which freshwater evaporates out of heated salt water. Reverse osmosis (RO) requires more expensive filtration equipment than distillation. In RO pressure forces seawater through a filter, called a membrane, containing very small diameter pores. The pores let water pass through but remove about half of the dissolved salts. The concentrated salt water can be returned to the ocean and the freshwater used for irrigation. More advanced RO systems contain membrane pores in the range of 1 micrometer (μm) that make the treated water safe to drink. Microfiltration uses smaller pores of 0.05 to 0.5 μm diameter, and ultrafiltration uses pores of 0.001 to 0.01 μm diameter. Both of these filtration techniques ensure that water is safe to drink because they remove even very tiny contaminants such as viruses. RO plants usually employ a pre-RO filtration step called coarse screening that catches large insoluble materials on a screen to make the membrane filtration more efficient.

At least 7,500 desalination plants operate worldwide with about 60 percent of them in the
Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Israel depend on desalination for a major portion of their clean freshwater. Saudi Arabia owns the world’s largest plant, which produces 130 million gallons (492 million l) of freshwater daily. North Africa, the Caribbean, and countries in the Mediterranean region have also explored desalination; Mexico and the United States use it on a small scale.

Though desalination technology can supply water to thirsty areas of the world, it currently produces less than 1 percent of the world’s water needs. Three disadvantages contribute to desalination’s slow acceptance. First, the treatment plants, especially RO, are expensive to build. RO requires costly equipment, and both distillation and RO consume large amounts of energy, so desalination’s costs create too great a burden for drought-stricken developing countries. Even in developed nations, desalination costs more than other water treatment methods. Second, the desalination process creates a large quantity of salt, which must be cleaned from equipment on a regular maintenance schedule. Third, the excess salt and high-salt wastewater must be returned to the environment. Dumping the high-salt wastes into the ocean harms aquatic ecosystems in the area; dumping it on land has the potential to contaminate surface waters and groundwaters.

In order for desalination to lessen world water shortages, technology will need to design
more efficient, inexpensive filters. The Canadian author and water treatment expert Maude Barlow said in 2008, “Even with current plans to triple global production, including nuclear-powered desalination plants, this technology cannot meet the demand for freshwater in the world.” Desalination adds to the world’s water supply, but it does not appear that it will be part of sustainable water use in the near future.

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Sustainable Livestock Production

Livestock serves as an excellent protein and mineral source for humans, but those nutrients come with a price paid in water. One pound (0.45 kg) of meat protein requires 8,124 gallons (30,744 l) of water to produce. By comparison, the same amount plant protein of equivalent quality requires 3.1 gallons (11.6 l) to produce. Put in another perspective, a pound of sugarcane needs 21 gallons (80 l) of water, but a pound of leather requires 2,000 gallons (7,571 l) of water to produce.

Of all livestock industries, beef production requires the most water and the most rangeland. Feedlots account for almost half of all beef and pork production and three-quarters of poultry production. In terms of efficiency, feedlots that concentrate all animals in pens provide an advantage over free-range production, wherein animals roam outside cages to graze on the land. The United States depends to a large extent on feedlots, using energy dense grains to feed the animals rather than natural grasses, but many people object to this style of factory farming on ethical grounds. The Humane
Society of the United States has explained, “The vast majority of our meat, dairy and eggs comes not from animals on small farms but from factory farms—massive operations that treat animals like profit-making machines, routinely subjecting them to terrible abuses. . . .” Feedlots furthermore produce large amounts of manure, which has the potential to pollute waterways, yet these operations do not spoil the land as grazing often does.

Whether free-range or feedlot-raised, meat production is an inefficient way to produce energy. Meat-producing animals convert grain to animal body weight on a pound-to-pound (kg-to-kg) basis as follows: fish, 2.0; chicken, 2.2; pigs, 4.0, and beef, 7.0. Cattle and sheep present another problem in the environment because they belch large amounts of gas that forms in their normal digestion of fibrous plants. This gas contains about 60 percent methane and 40 percent carbon dioxide, both greenhouse gases. The agriculture and energy industries have studied ways to capture ruminant gasses as an energy source and also so they do not add to global warming. The dairy farmer Richard Huelskamp described the plan clearly in a 2006 interview with the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Daily: “I believe that agriculture has got to be supplying 25 to 50 percent of our domestic energy. We need to maintain sustainability.” Can meat production be transformed from one of the most inefficient types of production to a sustainable activity?

Dairyman Huelskamp developed a sustainable use for the so-called biomethane his cows produce. A month’s worth of manure from Huelskamp’s farm travels on conveyers into digester tanks where the solids partially decompose and the gases form. The farm recovers the majority of the gas by funneling it to a generator to produce energy. Part of the decomposed manure serves as fertilizer to reduce the farm’s total waste output.

Sustainable meat production incorporates other devices to reduce its ecological footprint. People can contribute by changing their diet to more seafood and poultry and less beef and pork. In the meantime, livestock operations can adopt as many water and soil conservation techniques as possible. Cattle and sheep, though inefficient, offer the following advantages: Freerange animals eat grasses that humans cannot eat; rangeland that supports grazing is usually poor in supporting crops, so does not cause a conflict with plant agriculture; and many of the world’s poorest regions have access only to cattle as a reliable protein source.

The Worldwatch Institute predicts meat consumption will increase 2 percent per year until at least the year 2015. For this reason, sustainable livestock farming seems a necessity. The future of sustainable livestock raising will likely consist of the following
methods: raising livestock with free-range methods rather than with feedlots to decrease waste loads; incorporating goats with cattle to more efficiently use all rangeland for meat production; raising grains on the farm using water and soil conservation and to reduce fuel use; selling only to local meat producers to reduce transport fuel consumption and emissions; and designing operations to produce less beef and pork and substitute with other products to maintain the farm’s income.

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Case Study: Boreal—Earth’s Northern Woods

Forests that cover the northern regions of Canada, Russia, China, Scandinavia, and southern Alaska make up the boreal forests, or taiga. (Smaller areas of Japan, Korea, and Mongolia also contain boreal forest.) They include a band of growth between 45° and 57° north latitudes and form an almost continuous ring at the top of the globe. Boreal forests hold little tree diversity compared with tropical rain forests: They contain only a limited variety of coniferous trees that retain needles year-round and have a short growing season of about 130 days. Boreal forests nevertheless support extensive food webs of plants, mammals, birds, insects, and fish. They also act as a northern watershed by containing numerous lakes, rivers, wetlands, bogs, and marshes.

The boreal forests serve the Earth in the following additional ways: (1) as a carbon reservoir for storing carbon not released into the atmosphere; (2) in filtering millions of gallons of water each day; and (3) by providing resources for resident people that use the forest for hunting, trapping, and fishing. The boreal forests also contain vast potential commercial potential because of their timber, oil, gas, minerals, and hydroelectric power resources, so they have become a central point of interest of both industry and environmentalists.

Large oil and natural gas reserves under the forests of Alaska, Canada, and Russia represent the number-one threat to the future of boreal forests. Fossil fuel reserves in other parts of the world will someday run dry, and countries such as the United States desire a reliable supply of domestic fuel, which the boreal region holds. In addition to the United States, Canada, China, Russia, and Norway have all eyed their own boreal forests for oil exploration.

Global warming also threatens boreal forests because as temperatures rise the health of the cold-tolerant trees may decline, and disease and parasites gain opportunity to infect them. At the same time, warmer temperatures have already made temperate deciduous forests to the south drift north toward the boreal habitat. The warmer temperatures therefore threaten boreal growth from the south, and melting glaciers and polar ice may cause flooding from the north.

Environmental organizations have tried to protect boreal forests from the destruction that has occurred in poorly managed tropical forests. In the United States and Canada, the following organizations act as watchdogs over boreal forests by monitoring the mining, oil drilling, and logging industries and by participating in global warming talks: the Northern Alaska Environmental Center; the Sierra Club; the Nature Conservancy; the Alaska Department of Fish and Game; and the Natural Resources Defense Council; and Nature Canada.

Forests in Siberia and eastern Russia suffer added threats because of the way they have been managed, and have endured several consecutive seasons marked by wildfires, insect outbreaks, and overgrowth that keeps seedlings from maturing. Enterprises that once operated farms under socialism now own much of Russia’s forestland. These owners may view forests as a community resource to be depleted for building personal wealth without much regard for sustainable methods. For example, the Federal Forest Service of Russia for many years controlled more than 90 percent of Russia’s forests and has shown interest in conservation, but this agency also ran about 20 percent of the country’s logging. The agency furthermore has released no information on forest area land or logging activities, so environmentalist groups such as Greenpeace Russia and the Taiga Rescue Network found it difficult to design conservation action plans.

Environmentalists suspect that forest management in Russia has not been optimal. Fedor Pecar, chief of the Irkutsk airbase in Russia told Greenpeace in 2007, “This year there are more of them [fires] than in all of the previous years. One may think that now everything is being burnt off: fields and old straw. Almost half of the fires were caused by this. The villagers burn off private meadows and they are doing it recklessly and carelessly. Thus not only forest, but also buildings and houses catch fire. . . .” In 2000 Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree abolishing the Federal Forest Service, the only federal agency with interests in protecting the boreal forests. Fortunately, Russia’s boreal forests are very remote, and logging them would be an expense that for the present has kept them safe from large-scale destruction.

The world’s boreal forests will not be safe forever if the timber and fossil fuel industries need new places to explore. Boreal forests the world over will require careful monitoring and strong legal protections for their survival.

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Forest Roads

Timber companies must have roads that lead to harvesting sites to allow heavy equipment and emergency vehicles into and out of the forest. The companies usually build these logging roads themselves to meet these needs. But the road-building and the completed roads create a major disruption to forest ecosystems. In addition to the noise and dirt created during road-building, smooth-surface or packed gravel roads make forests vulnerable to the following occurrences:

» increased erosion and sediment runoff
» habitat fragmentation
» biodiversity loss
» enhanced exposure to invasive species, pests, and diseases
» disrupted migration routes by wildlife, reptiles, and amphibians
» wildlife mortalities on roads
» opening of once-inaccessible forests to hunters, off-road vehicles, and illegal farming or logging
» opening of territory to mining and farming

At present, logging roads and helicopter landing areas built on public lands cause those lands to lose federal protection as wilderness areas. In 1997 President Bill Clinton tried to reverse this policy by passing what came to be known as the “Roadless Rule,” which authorized the U.S. Forest Service to obliterate hundreds of miles of abandoned logging roads and halt construction on others. At the time, Forest Service officer Bob McDowell in Lake Tahoe, California, told the Tahoe Daily Tribune, “The kinds of roads that we will obliterate are the roads that don’t go anywhere—old logging roads and landing areas. The ultimate goal is to re-contour some roads, to make the road bed disappear.” The recovery of the land under the Roadless Rule has progressed very slowly, and thousands of miles of abandoned logging roads remain in North American forests. Some states, such as Idaho and Alaska, have challenged the Roadless Rule for putting too severe a restriction on their forest management. For example, at the close of 2003, Alaska had successfully won the right from the USDA and the Department of Justice to exclude the Tongass National Forest from the Roadless Rule.

The effect of abandoned and overgrown roads has not been determined. Scientist Eric Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society said in 2005, “Roads are terrific at providing human access to areas, but unfortunately they bring with that access a host of ecological problems.” The timber industry countered that forest roads were necessary to serve local communities in times of wildfire, meaning an out-of-control fire. In 2005 President George W. Bush did away with the Roadless Rule to allow greater access for mining and logging in the nation’s forests. Chris West spoke for the American Forest Resource Council in support of the White House’s decision and to calm the public’s fears over road expansion: “Despite the environmental rhetoric, chain saws, bulldozers and drilling rigs are not gassing up to enter roadless areas.” The case study “Boreal—Earth’s Northern Woods” discusses how roads and other human activities in the forest have kept this debate alive.

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Timber Harvesting

Tree harvesting in the past meant the removal of all trees of any size and regardless of value. Logging companies clear-cut the landscape, which not only destroys the forest but also eliminates ecosystems. Even animals inhabiting the uncut adjacent forest must contend with the increased activity and noise coming from the clear-cutting zone. Clear-cutting also makes the harvested land vulnerable to soil erosion, floods streams, increases silt levels in streams that harm aquatic life, and makes landslides more likely.

During 2007 in Oregon, storms caused landslides in two clear-cut areas and torrents of mud and debris overwhelmed homes and vehicles and covered a state highway. While no humans were killed, several received injuries, and the damage to wildlife has not been fully resolved. Stephen Hobbs of the Oregon Board of Forestry described the event as a rare quirk of nature. He told the Oregonian, “Mother Nature threw a curveball at us. It was a pretty intense storm event, so you’re going to have unexpected things happen.” Despite these assurances, other people suspect that clear-cutting creates a danger to human and animal life. The University of Washington professor David Montgomery told the Olympian in 2008, “As a geologist, I see no surprises here. When you clear-cut potentially unstable slopes, you increase the risk of landslides up to tenfold.” These differences of opinion on the harm of clear-cutting and other tree harvesting methods continue.

In addition to the harvesting method loggers choose, all harvesting sites require roads built into the forest to give equipment access and allow logging trucks to transport the logs out of the forest. Roads help the overall efficiency of logging, and timber companies cannot do their job without them, but forest roads also harm ecosystems by fragmenting habitat, driving out animal species, and giving access to invasive species.

Once loggers reach the logging site, they can use any of a variety of harvesting methods, described in the table on the next page. Over the long term it is in the best interests of loggers to choose a method that sustains their industry but also conserves forests for future generations.

Logging comprises any of the harvesting methods described in the table below, plus the methods used for felling the trees and the yarding methods for taking the logs out of the forest. Tree cutting can be done in two ways: conventional sawing or mechanical logging. Sawing cuts the full length of trees to the stump close to the ground, while mechanical cutting removes trees using a piece of equipment called a feller (or faller). An operator drives a feller up to the tree to be removed and a blade or saw at the end of the feller’s arm cuts the tree, usually leaving a taller stump than the sawing method.

For centuries, horse-drawn wagons hauled logs out of the forest. This required little road-building and made little noise. In the 1800s horse or oxen teams dragged logs to specialized narrow logging railroads or, in areas where railroads could not reach, to mountain streams where workers transferred the logs to another conveyance, a process called offloading. Gravity simply carried the harvest downstream to a collection point at the bottom of the mountain. Dragging logs downhill to a train or stream soon proved to be inefficient because every forest snag or stump acted as a fishhook and grabbed at each log on the journey. Loggers soon learned that dragging logs uphill by cable to a mountaintop railroad track was the best approach. This so-called uphill logging or skyline logging evolved into the helicopter logging used by many timber operations today in difficult-to-reach terrain. Though horses still haul timber in parts of the world, today most operations use trucks, cables, and helicopters.

Timber harvests consist of whole logs, called roundwood, which means logs denuded of branches and bark. These harvests are of three main types: (1) hardwoods from broadleaf, deciduous trees; (2) softwoods from gymnosperm trees, including pine, spruce, fir, and juniper; or (3) pulpwood, which is any wood harvested for papermaking.

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Old-Growth Forest Ecosystems

Old-growth forests consist of trees that have never been cut so have never been forced to regrow. These primary forests contain the original growth of a tree population and therefore they contain the oldest and most mature trees found in the forest biome. Old-growth trees arise at the latest stage of forest ecological succession, and because of this they contain a mixture of species and a variety of sizes. They also contain dead trees that have fallen and begun to decay, broken branches, snags, and several canopy layers. All of these things create specialized habitats for a variety of animal life, plants, and fungi. Old-growth forests contain very complex ecosystems with many interrelationships between species, and of course, this enhances biodiversity.

The unique characteristics of old-growth forests sometimes provide habitat for species that cannot live anywhere else. Some of these specialized habitats include hollowed trees, tree cavities, decaying logs, the canopy, the understory, moist soil, and bark. In dense old-growth forests, the top of the canopy receives direct sunlight for the life in that habitat, while creatures near the forest floor live in dark, shaded surroundings. Animal diversity in old-growth forests includes moose, bear, weasel, lynx, fox, wolf, deer, bobcat, mountain lion, chipmunks, squirrels, shrews, bats, woodpeckers, owls, and hawks. This represents only a partial list and does not account for the microbes, insects, invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, songbirds, and aquatic species that also live in old-growth forests. Vines, ferns, shrubs, mosses, lichens, and some grasses dominate the plant diversity. A typical old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest contains giant redwoods, Douglas fir, spruce, and possibly hemlock and cedar. Each 2.5 acres (0.01 km) contain about 20 large trees at least 300 years old, many measuring over three feet (1 m) in diameter.

The health of an old-growth forest depends on fires caused by natural circumstances, such as lightning strikes. Frequent, short-lived ground fires reduce competing vegetation and degrade dead wood, which hastens the return of nutrients to the soil. Fires also thin out the densest growth and open more space for sunlight to reach places that had been cut off from light. Though fires may temporarily destroy some wildlife habitat, fires also create new habitat. For instance, some small mammals may prefer the plants and grasses that first break through the earth after a fire, and only ground fires afford this opportunity.

Old-growth forests and their ecosystems have remained largely a mystery despite the studies that have been conducted in them. They have outlived generations of humans, and they surely contain undiscovered species as well as ecosystems that have not been fully identified. These forests survived from a time when humans did not affect seemingly every corner of the Earth. For that reason alone, they deserve respect within the world of living things.

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Tempe rate and Boreal Forest Loss

Forest evaluation takes place by two main methods: aerial surveys and satellite imagery and on-the-ground field studies. Aerial surveys gather information on forested regions such as the Blue Ridge Mountains. Satellite images help scientists view much larger expanses such as the total area forests occupy on a continent. Scientists who conduct field surveys gather detailed information by observing forest ecosystems up close. Field surveys typically collect data on the following topics in assessing forest health:

» grass and wildflower ground cover
» wildlife diversity
» densities of small, stunted trees
» numbers of large, old-growth trees
» increased old-growth mortality rates due to thickets of small trees
» large-scale insect or other parasite infestation
» pathogens in rain runoff
» shift from low-intensity ground/grass fires to fast and large canopy fires, called crown fires

The FAO report states that the net rate of global forest destruction has slowed in some places, which is an encouraging sign, but overall the world continues to lose forests. For instance, aerial and satellite studies have revealed that forest area has increased a small amount (less than 0.1 percent) in Europe and parts of Asia in the past 15 to 20 years. During the same period, the total area of North American forests did not increase, but their destruction was greatly diminished. Both of these trends suggest that Europe and most of North America have put significant effort into forest conservation. Only Mexico, which loses about 0.5 percent of its trees annually, and select parts of Asia have continued losing temperate forests with no sign of slowing.

The United States destroyed most of its old-growth forests by 1920, especially in the East and Midwest, where secondary forests have now replaced them. Sections of the West and Alaska still experience large losses, however, to the point where plant and animal diversity now differs from the diversity that sustained Native Americans before European settlers arrived. Between 1600 and 1800, eastern settlements began removing trees for lumber, and the need for wood grew as the settlements became cities. When settlers migrated west, more trees came down for building houses, barns, and fencing. In the 1800s railroads crisscrossed the continent, and the new tracks demanded a constant supply of wood for railroad ties. Today lumber and paper make up the main uses of the country’s timber harvest, but trees supply other non wood products.

How has Europe managed to increase the amount of its forested land, especially in one of the most densely populated parts of the world? European countries have taken the lead in exploring sustainable methods in forest management. For example, in Europe tree plantations that restore destroyed forests tend to contain plantings of native trees interspersed with monoculture. This mixture of natural and artificial conditions allows a secondary forest to grow quickly, yet it retains some of the biodiversity of the original forest. Primary forest makes up only 4 percent of Europe’s forest area, so these secondary forests represent the continent’s best hope of reversing decades of deforestation. In North America primary forests account for almost 45 percent of total forests, mostly in Canada, and 12 percent of those primary forests have now been entered into conservation programs. The goal is to emulate Europe and begin rebuilding forested area.

Alaska has presented the American public with a unique situation regarding deforestation. Alaska’s large expanses of forest have been tempting the timber industry for many years, and the state now supports an active logging industry; about 5 percent of Alaskans are employed by the timber industry. But increased logging and further destruction of forest tracts due to new oil exploration have drawn increasingly heated debate. Laurie Cooper of the Alaska Wilderness League told the Los Angeles Times in 2008, “We’re at a crucial time right now to make sure we’re looking at a future that retains some of this landscape and some of this way of life for future generations.”

Alaska contains two principal types of forests: coastal rain forest and interior boreal forest. Most of the timber activity takes place in the coastal regions, and of the total forests available for logging, the federal government owns 51 percent, the state and local governments own 25 percent, and private owners hold about 24 percent. Alaska Native corporations make up 99 percent of all private forest landowners. Alaska also contains the nation’s largest and second-largest national forests: the Tongass National Forest, containing 16.8 million acres (68,000 km2), and the Chugach National Forest, with 5.9 million acres (24,000 km2). Logging presently occurs in a small portion of each of these forests, but Tongass has of late become a focal point in a debate on the possible expansion of Alaska’s logging.

In January 2008, President George W. Bush approved a plan to open an additional 3 million acres (12,140 km2) of Tongass National Forest to the timber industry. Though the decision sought to relieve financial stress in Alaska’s economy, environmentalists pointed out that logging may not help the economy much. Tom Waldo, attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice, warned in a New York Times article that logging may harm Alaska more than help it: “It leaves 2.4 million acres [9,712 km] of wild, roadless backcountry areas open to clear-cutting and new logging roads.” Meanwhile, the logging industry contributes only about 1 percent of Alaska’s economy.

The Pacific Northwest has had similar questions on the extent with which logging should take place, especially when local mill towns depend on timber for their income. One question that turned into a serious argument between the timber industry and environmentalists came in 1986, when the northern spotted owl was placed on the endangered species list. Spotted owls prefer habitat of old-growth forests like the kind that stretch from northern California to Canada. Listing the owl as threatened pitted conservationists against people whose livelihoods depended on logging. Many of these forests now receive federal protection as habitat for the owl, and the mill towns have slowly found income in nonforest pursuits, including tourism.

Temperate forests have not had the controversies that characterize the forests in Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, so the public has perhaps overlooked the dire condition of these forests. Part of this complacency comes from the fact that forests are a renewable resource: The trees grow back after they have been cut. But the time required to replace a forest is hundreds of years, depending on the type of trees growing there. Julia Bonds of the Coal River Mountain Watch in Appalachia said in a 2003 interview on mining and logging in the area of West Virginia where she grew up, “It’s [mountaintop mining] not only turning the mountaintops into wastelands, but the valleys as well. The wonderful and valuable hardwood forests are being destroyed, and they will not return for over 600 years, if ever. Our beautiful mountain streams have been devastated.” The temperate forested land in the United States has now stabilized, but that may be little comfort to people who remember when these forests stretched for hundreds of miles. The worth of forests is explored further in the sidebar “Old-Growth Forest Ecosystems.”

The United States has been able to stabilize its forested land area by reversing its commerce in wood products. The United States exported lumber for decades until the start of the 1990s, when imports began to outweigh exports. Today the value of U.S. wood product imports is double the value of its exports. In other words, the United States spares its forests by relying on wood products from other countries. In addition to primary wood products (raw lumber), the United States imports a large quantity of its secondary wood products, such as furniture.

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Temperate and Boreal Forest Preservation

Temperate and boreal forests differ from tropical forests in that they grow at latitudes of cool to cold winters and live in places that receive seasonal variation. Like tropical forests, temperate and boreal forests have been greatly reduced from their original area on Earth. While tropical forests have lost an estimated 50 percent of their area, a very small percentage of temperate forests and boreal forests remain from their original population.

The temperate forests that remain in eastern North America, northeastern Asia, and Europe share the following characteristics: varied temperature from below zero to 85°F (30°C); even precipitation throughout the year; moderately dense canopy with partial light penetration; fertile soil; and seven to 10 tree species per square mile (three to four species per km).

Temperate forests contain plant, tree, and animal diversity, and they occupy moderate climates with a long growing season. These factors have made temperate forests attractive to generations of people for timber and hunting. Due to their location in temperate climates, cities and towns have grown up near temperate forests, so the trees have been accessible for logging. As towns expanded, the forests became fragmented, which worsened the conditions for the forest ecosystem.

Boreal forests, also called taiga, occupy the largest biome on the Earth's land surface and grow in the northern parts of North America, Europe, and Asia. These forests contain the following characteristics: cold climates with precipitation mainly as snow; sparse canopy that permits moderate light penetration; nutrient-poor soil; trees that are mainly cold-tolerant evergreen conifers; and animal diversity that may be greater than plant diversity. Though boreal forests occupy places remote from many urban centers, they have been severely reduced by centuries of logging and are in jeopardy of disappearing within a few generations.

Globalization of economic markets combined with population growth has put pressure on all the world's forests, but these things occur unevenly across the face of the globe. Because temperate forests occur near population centers, throughout history they have been cut down at a faster rate than the remote boreal forests. Regardless of how these forests have been accessed and harvested, temperate and boreal forests require the same dedicated protection as forests in the Tropics. Though local efforts can protect some tropical forests, temperate and boreal forests will likely need the oversight of governments and international organizations. These forests lie in industrialized countries where big businesses and government have often worked in close association. The international Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) stated in its recent report State of the World's Forests 2007, 「 『What happens to forests' will be largely determined by 『what happens outside forests'.」 In other words, small local communities may no longer have the power to protect the remaining forests and the success or failure of conservation will rest with strong leadership.

Source of Information : Green Technology Conservation Protecting Our Plant Resources

Tropical Forest Preservation

Tropical forests inhabit warm, humid regions of the globe, and so they occur at or near the equator. Tropical growth covers about 6 percent of the world’s land area but contains at least two-thirds of all plant and animal species. Conservation of these forests affects biodiversity perhaps more than any other forest type, but several threats from human activities have made tropical forests very vulnerable to destruction. Primary threats represent the underlying factors that threaten almost all the world’s forests today. Poverty, population growth, climate change, and government policies are primary threats that contribute to the deforestation of tropical areas. Secondary threats, by contrast, exert immediate damage on tropical forests: logging, ranching, crops, and roads, for example.

Tropical forests have been particularly affected by poverty in developing countries for two reasons. First, governments may encourage deforestation in order to export products, and second, subsistence farming in impoverished areas decreases the forest little by little over time. The status of tropical forest loss due to these factors has not yet been determined in full because scientists have a difficult time monitoring forests, especially dense remote tropical forests. Illegal logging and mining, small-scale subsistence farming, and cultivation in remote places can go on for years before they are discovered and stopped.

Tropical forest restoration begins with the planting of native seedlings in degraded areas. Tropical forest soils normally lack sufficient nutrients, and intense cultivation and grazing depletes those few nutrients. For that reason soil rehabilitation accompanies tropical forest restoration. Sustainable harvesting methods can then be used in restored forests or original forests if timber harvesting remains necessary. Restoration remains a challenge because tropical forests are complex and largely unknown ecosystems located in regions where slash-and-burn logging and ranching have been the norm for a long time. These forests will likely never receive full protection without strong government support.

Sustainable harvesting makes use of reduced impact logging techniques to harvest trees at a rate no greater than the rate of tree replenishment. This objective has become very difficult to achieve as population increases and consumerism grows. Many of the resources that come out of tropical forests go to developed countries rather than the local economy. Ecotourism has proved to be another lucrative source of income that preserves these resources.

The fate of tropical forests rests on a combination of actions that originate at the local level and go to international programs. Any or all of these methods should be investigated further to save tropical forests from further destruction: sustainable forestry; new methods in logging and mining; alleviation of poverty to aid subsistence farming; ecotourism as an income source instead of lumber exports; and new methods of forest restoration. Most important, industries and governments must commit themselves to conservation plans. Without government help, tropical forests will likely continue to shrink in size until they become an endangered ecosystem.

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Challenges in Restoration

Destruction of tropical forests has been going on for generations, but restoration technology represents a new promise. Restoration planners have a daunting task in changing the way communities, businesses, and governments think about their forests. This change in thinking begins with educating communities, as Chico Mendes did in Brazil, to the harm subsistence farmers potentially do to forest resources and their health when they cut down trees. The idea of restoration must be presented to those at higher levels also, such as local leaders, national government agencies, and international organizations. International pressure on illegal logging and clear-cutting gives restoration projects more time to achieve success.

The process of restoration itself presents several challenges to workers on a restoration project. First, seed dispersal is difficult work in hot, humid tropics. Second, not all seeds grow, and animals also eat about 65 percent of the seeds workers scatter or the seedlings they plant. Third, each section of forest has slightly different environmental conditions that make them unique, so one plan does not always work in all areas. Fourth, logging methods that remove all the native trees from an area also remove their seeds, which would be the best choice for restoring a native forest. Ecologists must therefore raise new seedlings in a nursery.

Fifth, clear-cut logging removes birds as well as trees, and many birds disperse seeds better than volunteers can. Finally, restoration includes extra work such as the planting of shrubs that protect seedlings and provide shade cover. Tropical forest preservation and restoration therefore may be one of the most complex jobs in environmental science. Tropical forests require this help more than any other forest type, and the preservation must go into action quickly to head off a pending disaster in biodiversity.

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Ecotourism in Belize’s Rain Forests

The Central American country Belize borders Mexico, Guatemala, and the Caribbean Sea.
Almost 13 percent of Belize contains protected forests, and of this area old-growth forests make up a large portion. Overall, forests and woodlands cover almost 92 percent of Belize. Rather than build an economy based on lumber, Belize’s leaders have developed a system in which the country uses its forests as an ecotourism destination. Belize also provides a rare example of sustainable ecotourism in which local residents act as guides and teach tourists about local history, their culture, and the region’s environment.

Belize houses hundreds of species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians, but its plant diversity may be most astounding: More than 3,000 species of higher plants live there. For almost 20 years the government has supported eco-business grants, which are funds that help small businesses establish themselves as green businesses, or businesses that emphasize sustainable activities. Meanwhile, local communities form custodial groups that watch for forest fires, illegal harvesting of trees and plants, wildlife poaching, and invasive species.

Traditional tourism can take a toll on land and coasts, and for decades Belize suffered from this type of unrestrained tourism. Habitat began to disappear, residents and animals were displaced, and waste accumulated. Ecotourism, by contrast, focuses on travelers who wish to see plants or animals in their native habitats. In Belize, sustainable ecotourism helps protect the forest habitat while it benefits residents by protecting forest-oriented lifestyles of the native people. Local interests that benefit from today’s sustainable ecotourism include arts, crafts, foods, language, and traditional healing methods.

In 1993 a group of business leaders formed the Belize Ecotourism Association to address ongoing issues on conservation and tourism. Some of the current issues covered by this association are the following: adopt-a-roadway programs; cruise ship traffic; national park management; and studies of proposed dams and other public projects. Through this organization the people of Belize control their destiny without outside influences.

Deforestation remains a serious threat in Belize because of the country’s other industries, which include: marine products, citrus, cane sugar, bananas, and garments. Belizean jungles also contain oil reserves, so the country confronts ongoing problems of encroachment and development. Despite the success the country has had in protecting its forests for ecotourism, Belize has arrived at a decision point in which it will either continue along the sustainable ecotourism path or move toward mass tourism and become a resort destination.

To build a promising future in conservation, Belize must fill the gaps in its education system by expanding programs that teach residents how to care for and protect their forests. The Belizean ecologist Colin Young was interviewed in 2007 by the environmental resource site Mongabay.com. Young explained, “Having strong, creative teacher education programs in the sciences for primary- and secondary-level teachers is a necessary first step to excite students in pursuing careers as scientists. Once the number of scientists increases, younger generations will have role models they can emulate.” Young added, “What is apparent is that forest resources in Belize need to be managed in a more holistic and transparent manner. . . . Empowering local communities and local people, where appropriate, to become stewards and co-managers of forest resources is also paramount.” Belize’s forest conservation will depend on dedication from all facets of its society in order to continue its success.

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Restoration and Sustainable Harvesting

Years of burning the Amazon Basin forests have created dry conditions that increase the chance of more fires and makes restoration more difficult. Restoration and sustainable forest management are possible in all of the world’s tropical forests, but time is running out. Success in restoration and sustainable harvesting will come about only if both rural villages and national governments agree to the same plan.

Restoration involves activities that enable a degraded forest to recover its health and return to normal growth. Restoration methods make up a science called restoration ecology, which is the transformation of land back to its original state, or close to its original state, after being damaged by human activities. Restoration of tropical forests consists of three main techniques: reforestation, rehabilitation of degraded forests, and conversion of damaged areas to sustainable forestry.

The United States and many other countries have used reforestation to restore land that had been cleared of its forests. Reforestation involves the planting of hundreds of seedlings containing a mixed population of native trees, followed by the return of forest in the seeded areas to near their original condition within 100 to 500 years, depending on the type of trees.

In 1977 environmentalist Wangari Muta Maathai began the women’s Green Belt Movement in her native Kenya for the purpose of restoring the country’s tropical forests. Maathai inspired the group to build nurseries, raise seedlings, and plant new trees. Maathai described her country in her 2006 book, Unbowed: “At the time of my birth [1940], the land around Ihithe was still lush, green, and fertile . . . We lived in a land abundant with shrubs, creepers, ferns, and trees, like the mitundu, mukeu, and migumo, some of which produced berries and nuts. Because rain fell regularly and reliably, clean drinking water was everywhere. There were large, wellwatered fields of maize, beans, wheat, and vegetables. Hunger was virtually unknown. The soil was rich, dark red-brown, and moist.” By the time Maathai finished Unbowed, the situation in Kenya had undergone a drastic change. “The [European] missionaries were followed [in the 1800s] by traders and administrators who introduced new methods of exploiting our rich natural resources: logging, clear-cutting native forests, establishing plantations of imported trees, hunting wildlife, and undertaking expansive commercial agriculture. Hallowed landscapes lost their sacredness; local people became insensitive to the destruction, accepting it as a sign of progress.” Maathai’s Green Belt Movement had by 2004 planted a seedling for each citizen of Kenya—more than 30 million trees—that received legal protections from the government. Wangari Maathai was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her restoration program, which became a model for other countries in tropical Africa.

Rehabilitation consists of a variety of techniques like those used by the Green Belt Movement to restore partially degraded forests. Depending on the tropical forest’s condition, rehabilitation may include restoration of soil nutrients, selection of new plantings for fire or disease resistance, or selection of species for erosion control. Small clearings of tropical forest recover faster than large swaths of cut areas, especially when healthy forest surrounds them. Rehabilitated areas produce secondary forest, which contains less plant diversity than old-growth or primary forests, but over the long term these forests build good plant and animal diversity.

In addition to restoration of damaged land and rehabilitation of damaged forest, a third option involves sustainable harvesting, also called sustainable forestry. Sustainable harvesting relies on the concept that forests must be managed as a nonrenewable resource. Though tropical forests renew themselves over a span of years, the current rate of destruction—0.2 percent per year—will eliminate them faster than they can rebound.

Sustainable harvesting methods allow loggers to remove the timber they need while reducing damage to untouched trees. Sustainable harvesting rejects the use of clear-cutting or slash-and-burn methods. Instead, timber companies use techniques that are gentler on the forest ecosystem, called reduced impact logging techniques. The following list provides the main reduced impact techniques that could help conserve tropical forests:

» preharvest mapping and selecting trees of commercial value

» cutting canopy vines before felling trees to prevent damage to the surrounding canopy

» building narrow roads or trails through the forest to reach cuttings, rather than clear-cutting for major roads

» employing directional tree felling to reduce damage to standing trees

» reduction of wood waste by cutting stumps low to the ground

» protecting watersheds with stream buffer zones

» use of low-impact yarding systems—methods for hauling timber from forests to trucks

» incorporating restoration and rehabilitation methods in logging areas

» preventing illegal logging

» developing tree plantations on severely degraded land to prevent erosion and desertification

» performing post-harvest assessments to develop constant improvements

In countries where the government owns and controls most of the tropical forest, economics determine the decisions on traditional versus sustainable forestry. In good economic times, developing countries have a greater willingness to follow environmentally sound forestry. In depressed economic times, however, the government may begin selling timber at below-market value, and subsistence farmers may cut down more trees for cultivation or fuel. This means that big business must also accept a philosophy of conservation in order to save the forests. In 2008 Brazil’s Blairo Maggi, governor of a state with high soybean production, declared to Folha de São Paulo newspaper, “With the worsening of the global food crisis, the time is coming when it will be inevitable to discuss whether we preserve the environment or produce more food. There is no way to produce more food without occupying more land and taking down more trees.” The forest biome therefore remains very vulnerable to human needs.

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Activist for the Brazilian Rain Forest

Chico Mendes was born into extreme poverty in 1944 in the Acre state of western Brazil. Mendes’s people earned their living as seringeiros, or rubber tappers, workers who gather rubber from the forest’s seringeira trees owned by private owners. After World War II ended in 1945, the need for massive amounts of rubber slowed and rubber prices plunged. Landowners forced the seringeiros to sell their harvest for pennies. At the same time, ranchers squeezed the villagers into smaller pieces of viable land by slashing and burning the forests for conversion to cattle ranches. Stephan Schwartzman of the Environmental Defense Fund said, “For their part, the rubber tappers had no inkling that the forest had values and meanings in the outside world, beyond its rubber and Brazil nuts.” Within a decade of the conversion from rubber production to ranches, almost half of the rubber tapper communities died from malnutrition or lack of medical care.

Chico Mendes watched the smoke fill his homeland’s sky year after year. Into the 1970s, ancient forests burned and new ranches and farms took their place. Swindlers with counterfeit deeds took land from the few fortunate tappers who had owned their property for generations. Tappers who refused to sign over their land were killed at the hands of the scam artists. Mendes’s frustration grew as he watched his people fall deeper into trouble. “Don’t you sign anything,” he urged. “This land is ours. When you change it into money, you are losing the possibility of surviving. Land is life!” Still, the land burned, rain filled pools in the rutted ground and mosquitoes bred; malaria soon plagued the already suffering villages.

Between 1980 and 1983, a gold rush hit Brazil and highways carved through the remaining forests. Miners refined the gold with mercury, and tons of this metal began entering the ecosystem, as well as the native people’s bodies. Chico Mendes had few political skills but nevertheless led a workers’ union and fought on behalf of his people against illegal logging, the poisoning of forest ecosystems, and conditions that led to the villagers’ illness and threatened livelihoods. He taught them the value of the intact forest and at the same time informed environmentalists in other countries about the rubber tappers, a culture that most of the world never knew existed. Mendes persevered in alerting the world to the devastation that the Brazilian government and businesses had done to the Amazon Basin. International environmental groups listened; British film director Adrian Cowell released The Decade of Destruction, filmed in the Amazon, to show the world how the forests were being annihilated.

Mendes and other natives of the Amazon advocated the sensible use of tropical forests.
They tried to convince leaders that part of the forests could be conserved even while industries claimed other portions. For a half-century the seringeiros and ranchers continued a fierce battle over how the forests were to be used. Through the 1980s Mendes rallied the seringeiros into a national organization, found people in government willing to accept the idea of conservation, and helped environmentalists understand that the Brazilian forests had become an environmental emergency. The ranchers, however, did not easily retire from the forests. At the close of 1988, a rancher and his son shot Mendes to death at his home in the town where he had been born. After his death, the Brazilian government set up extractive reserves, or reserva extratìvìstas, which were forest preserves that Mendes had long advocated. The reserves now protect the seringeiros’ culture and the forest and its ecosystems. Schwartzman said, “What I wanted them [the press, policy makers, and the public] to know was that environmentalism in the Amazon . . . was what Chico was doing; that contrary to the received wisdom and common sense of the time, there were people in the forest interested in alternatives for the future—theirs and that of the forest.” Chico Mendes’s work may provide a lesson for the present and the future; local communities might hold the greatest power of anyone to save forests that are also part of their culture.

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Secondary Causes of Tropical Forest Loss

Secondary causes of tropical deforestation relate to the activities that have immediate negative effects on forests. The major secondary causes are the following:
• logging and logging roads
• cattle ranching
• cash crops, small-scale cultivation, and fuel wood
• mining and oil drilling
• large dams
• tourism
• new roadways

These causes can be grouped in various ways. For instance, logging roads create much the same problem as public highways by removing trees, causing erosion, and fragmenting habitat, while cattle ranching resembles mining because it requires large tracts of cleared forest.

The upheaval in the Amazon Basin provides an example of how human activities kill a forest over time. In the first phase, logging operations remove the best timber from a region, after which timber companies sell the land to cattle ranchers for their animals to graze, beginning the second phase of the land’s use. Ranchers may leave a few trees standing for shade, but after the land has been overgrazed, the ranches move to other places and families buy the land at discounted prices. These families cultivate small gardens and perhaps cut down more trees for cash crops or fuel and hunt the native animals. Eventually, the small farms deplete the nutrients from the soil so that it supports little new plant growth. The farmers move on to cleared land they can cultivate or they remove more forest. Meanwhile, other parts of the forest disappear as mining operations and oil drilling companies burn the already damaged patches of forest because burning is easier and quicker than cutting and hauling out the logs. The succession of human activities in the Amazon Basin described above is unsustainable. After a few decades, maybe less, the forested land turns into a bleak landscape that cannot support substantial human, animal, or plant life. The results of such actions are detailed in the sidebar “Chico Mendes—Activist for the Brazilian Forest.”

Ranchers and large farms have learned to reduce soil degradation by clearing the forest in a method called slash and burn. Slash and burn is a process of cutting down large tracts of forest, letting the downed trees dry, then burning them in place to release nutrients into the soil. Soils in tropical forests tend to be nutrient-poor due to the dense vegetation they support. Slash-and-burn methods fortify the soil for grazing or agriculture, but eventually the added nutrients also diminish and the ranches and farms move to another part of the forest to begin the process again. This constant using up of land and moving on to healthier sites is called shifting cultivation. Abandoned land that has been treated this way can again support a healthy mixture of growth through ecological succession in the succeeding decades. By the time the vegetation has returned, however, the shifting cultivation may also return as it progresses through a region.

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Primary Causes of Tropical Forest Loss

Deforestation of the world’s tropical forests today arises from a mix of primary and secondary causes that often relate to one another. Primary causes, also called basic causes, refer to general conditions within a region’s economics and politics that lead to deforestation. Secondary causes exert more specific, direct actions on trees.

The underlying factors of tropical forest loss connect to local population lifestyles. Therefore, primary causes of tropical deforestation may be different from one continent to the next. In general, however, tropical forest degradation comes from the following primary causes:

• poverty
• overpopulation
• historical factors
• government policies
• exports to the international market

Poverty and overpopulation throughout the world force people to deforest their land; consequently plant and animal biodiversity declines, pollution increases, and climate change upsets ecosystems. Regional history also puts pressure on forested lands, especially in relation to the region’s poverty levels. Tropical forests exist mostly in developing countries, other than the forests of Hawaii and Australia. The history of these developing countries include a period of colonialism in which Great Britain, France, Spain, or Portugal took land away from native people who had managed it for generations. Over time, colonial management of the land’s resources tended to exploit those resources more than private owners would likely exploit their own land.

Financially poor countries additionally hold large international debt— money owed to other countries. In order to repay debt with high interest rates, developing countries may be tempted to harvest their natural resources for income. Government policies on debt repayment, natural resource management, and exports contribute to degradation of tropical forests. Exports help to pay off debt, but there exists another reason why developing countries have high amounts of exports: overconsumption in the industrialized world. High export levels from tropical regions may be attributed to the following four factors: overconsumption, excess waste, rampant development, and specialized markets in tropical woods, plants, birds, animals, and minerals. This problem has been described in a variety of ways; one term for the problem is the throwaway society. The International Food Policy Research Institute has gathered data on the world’s resources relative to world population, and many environmental scientists have summed up the results with the following phrase: “Twenty percent of the world’s population is using 80 percent of the world’s resources.” Said another way, consumerism threatens forests.

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Consequence s of Deforestation

As the world’s forested area contracts, the carbon-storage capacity of the planet also decreases. Between 1990 and 2005, for example, the planet’s carbon-storage capacity declined because more than 5 percent of forests disappeared during that time. By the end of 2005, the Coalition for Rainforest Nations proposed that nations be paid to leave their forests standing because the worth of the stored carbon exceeded the worth of timber from the same trees. Kevin Conrad, a resident of Papua New Guinea (where forests are critically threatened), spoke to the United Nations in 2007 on the topic of deforestation, emissions, and global warming. “I think collectively we as humanity have become more mature in this climate battle, and we understood collectively that we’ve got to turn off all the emission sources in order to win,” Conrad said. “The climate doesn’t know whether it came from a factory or from Papua New Guinea’s deforestation. If we can deliver sustainable revenues to communities living in rural areas of tropical countries that are deforesting simply to exist, then we have sort of a win-win proposition.” Halting deforestation may be the cheapest way to slow global warming.

In 2007 the U.S. government’s Climate Change Science Program released “The North American Carbon Budget and Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle” report, which concluded that the remaining North American forests could no longer remove the amount of carbon emissions produced each year. According to the report, the North American continent accounts for 27 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the world, and the disparity between emissions and forests’ capacity to reduce the carbon is getting larger. The report’s authors stated, “Carbon absorption by vegetation, primarily in the form of forest growth, is expected to decline as maturing forests grow more slowly and take up less carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.” Christopher B. Field of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology added, “By burning fossil fuel and clearing forests, human beings have significantly altered the global carbon cycle.”

People cannot ignore the connections that nature has established between forests, the cycling of elements, and the planet’s climate. People in forested regions of the world that are also beset by poverty need compensation if they agree to save trees. Even making deforestation illegal may not completely solve the problem. Desperate loggers may leave their land alone but sneak into other areas to continue harvesting wood. Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia’s Minister of Environment, told the Associated Press in 2007 that heavily forested countries such as his own, Brazil, and Costa Rica must receive compensation for avoiding the deforestation of their lands, or else any plan to slow carbon emissions would not work. “Our view is that we can combat climate change by maintaining the health of our forests and for that we need funding. This is a matter of justice.” Carbon payments to farmers might need official monitoring to ensure that farmers who receive payments refrain from logging forests anyway. In the deep Amazon and Congo basins, monitoring would not be an easy matter, and this highlights the challenges that come with protecting the forest biome.

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Pollution and Pests

Four types of pollution damage forests: acid rain, other air pollution, ozone, and runoff containing excess nitrogen fertilizers. Acid rain consists of industrial emissions containing sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides from fossil fuel combustion. In addition to rain, fog, snow, smog, dirt, dust, and smoke carry these compounds; all of these materials can be grouped into the general category of acid rain. Acid rain harms leaves and also makes soils more acidic. Acidic soils display different chemistry than normal soils and this affects nutrient uptake by roots. Acidification of soil also leads to a leaching of nutrients with rainwater. As a result, areas in the soil undergo eutrophication, which is the depletion of oxygen by microbes due to a sudden influx of nutrients, often nitrogen or phosphorus compounds.

Particles carried in smoke and smog change ecosystems indirectly by decreasing rainfall, and they may injure lichens, mosses, and insects in particular. The meteorologist Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem explained the process to Cable News Network in 2000: “The smoke and pollution particles, when going into the clouds, distribute water into many small droplets. They are so small that they are very slow in combining into raindrops and other icy precipitation particles.” The consequence is lowered rainfall or even drought.

Trees behave in the same way as humans when they become vulnerable due to aging, poor nutrient supply, or a stress such as dehydration: They become more susceptible to injury. Climate change makes trees vulnerability to infection in two ways: first, by putting physical stress on trees that increases the likelihood of infection, and second, by expanding the normal range of pests, including invasive species. With global warming, the range of many tree pests and pathogens will grow larger and affect trees that had previously been free of disease. Infection then attacks trees already stressed by environmental changes. Pests have another advantage over trees: They can adapt to changing environmental conditions faster than trees.

A greater proportion of stressed trees also gives invasive plants an opening into the forest habitat. These invaders may be nonnative trees, but they are also likely to be plants, insects, microbes, or animals. Not all invasive species kill ecosystems, but many do, and these invaders can take over a forest in a matter of days.

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Kudzu

Kudzu (Pueraria lobata or P. montana) is a vine that is part of the pea family, Fabaceae, introduced to the United States from Asia in the late 1800s. Farmers in the southeastern states planted the vine because of its fast growth with a plan to reduce soil erosion and possibly use it as animal feed. The vine also belongs to the legume family, which includes plants that capture nitrogen at the plant root and make it available for the plant’s use; this process is called nitrogen fixation. Kudzu, however, does not control erosion. Instead it bursts into growth so prolific that it engulfs every stationary thing in its path. Those early farmers probably soon discovered that without constant cutting, the vine overgrew yards, gardens, trees, orchards, stream banks, hillsides, and even abandoned houses and farm equipment. In 2005 Georgia farmer Jason Millsaps told National Geographic, “I’ve measured a foot a day [of kudzu growth]. It’s a never-ending battle to keep it back.” Kudzu remains a very big problem in U.S. agriculture, and universities have set up project teams to work solely on the task of solving the kudzu problem.

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Kudzu is one example of an aggressive invasive plant, nonnative to the United States. The vine has spread from its origins to the rest of the southeastern states, from Florida north to Maryland and west to Texas. Some farmers have nicknamed it “the vine that ate the South.” At the current rate of global warming, scientists predict kudzu will spread to Michigan in about 30 years. The University of Arkansas agricultural research station offers on its Web site the following: “The joke goes that you should fertilize kudzu in a dry year with motor oil because lubricating the undersides of the leaves reduces the chance of sparks as it races across the ground.” This fast growth explains why many invasive plants threaten the surroundings they enter; nature simply cannot adapt fast enough to repel them.

Aggressive plants may be the most harmful of all invasive species because they disrupt the foundation of ecosystems. Aggressive invaders kill or dislodge native photosynthetic plants that support a community of herbivores, carnivores, and predators in addition to microbes and invertebrates Kudzu also blocks sunlight from reaching soil organisms, overwhelms tree trunks and leaves, and can literally choke any woodland it overruns.

Kudzu removal is difficult for the following five reasons: (1) it creates deep and extensive root systems; (2) it grows back within days of cutting; (3) kudzu has no natural enemies outside Asia; (4) its seeds disperse easily, carried by wind, water, and animals; and (5) the herbicides active against kudzu also kill many native plants. Entomologist David Orr of North Carolina State University told the New York Times in 1998, “It takes a 55-gallon drum of herbicide to kill just one acre, and even then you don’t really kill it.” Protection against kudzu invasion may require a combination of new technologies and a certain amount of cleverness.

New techniques meant to save pristine forests from kudzu attack may soon employ caterpillars called soybean loopers, which have been engineered in laboratories to devour kudzu leaves as they do soybean plants. Though this research has been conducted since the mid-1990s, research has yet to find the right approach for looper-destruction of the thousands of square miles of kudzu infestation. Another approach under study involves a fungus named Colletotrichum gloeosporioides, which causes a deadly infection in kudzu after the fungus has been grown and strengthened in a laboratory. These and other biological means of fighting kudzu must come onto the scene quickly in order to help agriculture threatened by invasion.

Meanwhile, research into kudzu’s valuable properties has taken shape. Perhaps kudzu can be made into a food source or serve as a sustainable answer to deforestation. Botanists have explored kudzu’s use in pulp and papermaking, for example. University of Toronto botanist Rowan Gage told CBC News in Canada in 2007, “If you can develop it as a commodity, kudzu can pay for its own control.” Kudzu’s commercial use may be a long way off, but the fact that kudzu has caught the attention of people in Canada attests to the vine’s ability to grow and invade. Solutions from any sector of research will be helpful.