The Shrinking Forest
Ryan, John C.
WHEN CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FIRST SAW the island of Hispaniola, he was awed by its lavishly wooded mountains. "All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes," he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabela,...
...In 1940, Brazil's president expressed this philosophy with striking clarity: -To conquer the land, tame the waters, and subjugate the jungle, these have been our tasks...
...I1 . Postel and Ryan, "Reforming Forestry," p. 78...
...Coastal Ecuador underwent almost complete deforestation in just 15 years, starting in 1960.1 Export-oriented logging has eaten through the temperate rain forests of Chile and Canada, whose rugged, fog-shrouded coastlines harbor some of the world's largest andoldest trees...
...15-32...
...Norman Myers, Deforestation Rates in Tropical Forests and Their Climatic Implications (London: Friends of the Earth, 1989), p. 18...
...WRI, World Resources Repofr 1990-1991 1i00 1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 The Shrinking Forest I. Quoted in Catherine Caufield, In The Rainforest (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 32...
...The Hemisphere's forests have been so thoroughly transformed-logged or replaced by cities and farmland-that it is hard to imagine the cathedrals of giant trees that once cloaked the land...
...Shirley Christian, "Ecologists Act to Save Ancient Forest in Chile from Industry," New York Times, April 3, 1990...
...Less than 5% of the Atlantic coastal forest remains today...
...Large- scale clearing of tropical forests, biologically the richest ecosystems on the planet, began in earnest only after World War U1...
...22-24...
...Most of these undisturbed, or primary, forests occur in huge blocks in the far north of Canada and Alaska, and in the interior reaches of the Amazon basin...
...Norton, 1989), p. 254...
...Seventy-five percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has taken place in the last 20 years...
...Forests were cleared on Barbados, Hispaniola, and elsewhere in the Caribbean to meet overseas demand for sugar...
...Caufield, In the Rainforest, p. 42...
...5. Quoted in William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W...
...By the mid-nineteenth century, New England had largely been converted from woodland to wasteland, and large numbers of farmers who had exhausted their soils moved west to try again...
...Norton & Co., 1991) pp...
...Other early European visitors to the Americas were similarly impressed...
...Mather, Global Forest Resources, pp...
...The country's other two major forest zones, the Atlantic coastal forest and the Araucaria coniferous forest of the south, have received less attention but have suffered almost complete devastation...
...But it is, by Brazilian and international standards, largely untouched...
...Norton & Co., 1991), p. 154...
...John Perlin,A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization (New York: W.W...
...4. Alexander S. Mather, Global Forest Resources (Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 1990), pp...
...5 The Brazilian Amazon has become a symbol of environmental destruction because huge areas are now being cleared...
...But his prophecy was soon proven wrong as the Chicago-centered lumber market devastated the pine forests of the Great Lakes states in a matter of decades...
...Spencer B. Beebe, "Conservation in Temperate and Tropical Rain Forests: The Search for an Ecosystem Approach to Sustainability," paper presented at the 56th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, March 25-29, 1991...
...But it has also carried severe costs, bome especially by indigenous people health and productivityof their environment...
...deforestation in Central America has also accelerated exponentially in the past few decades [see figure...
...All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes," he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabela, "all are accessible and filled with trees of a thousand kinds and tall, so that they seem to touch the sky...
...Mather, Global Forest Resources, p. 51...
...Of 25 coastal watersheds over 250,000 acres in size, only one has never been cut...
...Early forest clearance was largely oriented toward domestic needs for farmland, fuelwood and building materials, but exports of timber, typically for masts of British naval ships, assumed increasing importance toward the nineteenth century...
...131-135...
...WHEN CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS FIRST SAW the island of Hispaniola, he was awed by its lavishly wooded mountains...
...The forests of the Americas (and the rest of the world) have been pushed to a point that improvement of the human condition-especially for the 150 million Americans living in absolute poverty-depends on a reversal of the environ- mental legacy of the past five centuries...
...Myers, Deforestation Rates, pp...
...the rest was cleared for timber, sugar and other crops beginning as early as 1500.1 Of the 20 to 25 million hectares of Araucaria that once existed, less into eastern Paraguay.' A S MUCH AS ECONOMIC FORCES HAVE driven the deforestation of the Americas, cultural or ideological forces have also played a key role...
...As the nineteenth century drew to a close, lumbermen left the stump fields of the Midwest behind and turned to the largely untouched forests of the South and the Pacific Coast, which they similarly devoured...
...With scattered exceptions, the magnificent coastal groves of the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and most of the rest of the Americas exist only in historical accounts...
...A member of the first Portuguese crew to land in present-day Brazil reported that "the number, size and thickness of...the trees and the variety of the foliage...beggars calculation...
...Centuries will hardly exhaust the pineries above us," predicted one Minnesotan in 1854...
...Forest destruc- tion notonly exacerbates economic inequality, it is driven by it...
...Such descriptions might seem remote or even fantastical to a modern reader...
...2 Throughout the Hemisphere, European expansion has been fueled by the consumption in a matter of years of the wealth accumulated over centuries in the soils and vegetation of forests...
...9. International Environment Reporter, March 13, 1991...
...Without an immnediate effortto protect the world's remaining forests and restore some of those lost, floods will continue to wash away downstream farms and communities, hillsides will shed their life-giving soils, the global climate will warm, and the plants and animals that provide important food, medicine, income, and delight will continue their march into extinction...
...38-43...
...In just over 20 years, cane planters on Barbados admitted to having destroyed all the island's timber to build and fuel their mills...
...Elsewhere, fewer forests have escaped degradation or destruction: in the contiguous United States, for example, less than 5% of primary forest is intact...
...74-92...
...The nation now has 3.2 million acres of monocultuire tree plantations and perhaps a half million acres of surviving ancient forest.'" In Canada's British Columbia, close to 700,000 acres are cleared of their centuries-old trees each year...
...The seven- teenth-century Puritans' fear and hatred of the "waste and howling wilderness" as "the Devil's den" has been secularized, but the desire to conquer nature is little diminished...
...2. Forty percent figure based on calculations done for Table 1 in Sandra Postel and John C. Ryan, "Reforming Forestry," in Lester Brown, et al., State of the World 1991: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society (New York: W.W...
...7. John R. McNeill, "Deforestation in the Araucaria Zone of Southern Brazil, 1900 -1983," John F. Richards and Richard P. Tucker, eds., World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), pp...
...3 Deforestation also began rapidly in the great eastern forests of North America...
...Governments havegenerouslysubsidizeddestrutivetimber, cattle, and hydroelectric mega-projects for large indus- tries at public expense, while impoverished farmers have destroyed fragile rainforests largely because they have been forced off more fertile cropland...
...Most forests are publicly owned, but almost all of the province's uncut forests have been leased to private companies for logging...
...Comit6 Nacional Pro Defensa de la Fauna y Flora et al., "Project Final Report: Chile, Evaluation of Native Forest Destruction," unpublished report, [n.d...
...3. Perlin, A Forest Journey, p. 259...
...In Chile's Bio-Bio Region, 31% of the native coastal forests were cleared and converted to monoculture plantations between 1978 and 1987...
...Without a doubt, ecological degradation has brought great (if fleeting) economic benefits to some...
...Today, some 40% of the original forest mantle remains largely undegraded...
...4 Despite these experiences, North Americans continued to believe the continent's resources were limitless...
...8. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1882), p. 36...
...This pattern was established soon after Europeans arrived in the New World...
...And in this centuries-old battle, we have won victory upon victory...
...CENTRAL AMERICA FOREST COVER % of total land area 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 I' Sources: Alexander S. Mather, Global Foresi Resources...
...28-49 6. Mark Collins, ed., The Last Rainforests (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1990), pp...
...Ironically, recent decades have seen the waning of this philosophy in many quarters but have also witnessed the most destructive period of forest loss in the Americas...
Vol. 25 • August 1991 • No. 2
