Whole forests can now be utilized - and destroyed - by wood chipping machinery. Can such technology be controlled? Can economic ethical considerations co-exist ?
Dennis Richardson
DENNIS RICHARDSON, of J.G. Broome and Associates, forestry consultants, Taupo, New Zealand, was formerly Professor of Forestry at the University of Wales; before that appointment he was director of the New Zealand Forestry Service Research Institute.
The dilemma which Mephistopheles presented to Dr. Faustus was one which faces most of us at some time or other-a choice between possible future returns and immediate gain. Since future returns are necessarily hypothetical, the judgement of history upon Faustus has always seemed to me self-righteously harsh. It is a judgement, however, which history may yet come to make upon foresters. The purpose of this article is to sound a warning that, in our current preoccupation with total forest harvesting and whole tree utilization, we may attract (and more deservedly than the unfortunate hedonist) a similar judgement from posterity.
The past two decades have seen a dramatically increasing demand for reconstituted wood products (pulp and paper, fibreboards and particle boards) throughout the developed world.
These increasing demands have led to impressive developments in the production and transport of wood chips, and in the variety of raw materials accepted by the manufacturing industries. In Japan in 1950, no hardwood was used as pulpwood; by 1970 the hardwood to softwood ratio was 60: 40; the increase followed a logistic curve with a point of inflexion about 1960. More recently, wood chips have been replacing logs as the delivered raw material, the ratio of chips to logs reaching 75: 25 in 1971. These developments in Japan have been accompanied by massive imports of wood chips, initially from the west coast of North America (200 000 tons in 1965 rising to 4 million tons in 1970), New Zealand (exceeding 2 million tons in 1973), and Australia (1.4 million tons in 1971, over 3 million tons in 1973, with as much as 30 million tons projected for 1988). Wood chip harvesting operations have now begun in Brazil, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, with exports of rubber wood, mangrove and mixed tropical hardwood chips. Other tropical countries are planning similar developments.
The utilization of mixed tropical hardwood chips for reconstituted wood products has a particular significance. Traditionally, as we all know, high forest areas in tropical countries have been exploited for a very limited number of species; in many cases, less than one stem per 0.4 ha is harvested. Because timber harvesting opens up hitherto inaccessible areas, however, logging is often followed by burning of forest for agricultural settlement.
Thus, the harvesting of mixed tropical hardwood species for the manufacture of reconstituted wood products makes possible a massive increase in raw material utilization and provides profitable outlets for hitherto unused species (f.o.b. prices for mixed tropical hardwood chips from Papua New Guinea exceed US$25 per "bone dry unit," i.e., 1 090 kg, approximately equivalent to US$23 per metric ton). It is scarcely surprising that, after living with the problems of underutilized species for so long, foresters should contemplate the prospect of multi-specific chip-wood harvesting with unmitigated pleasure.
It is not the desire of the author to play the role of the ancient mariner at this marriage between forester and logger, but our excitement must be tempered by awareness of some possible deleterious (even disastrous) consequences of uninhibited forest clearance in some tropical areas. Chipwood harvesting in the temperate zones, and rubber plantation clearance present few problems, since the objective of such programmes is to replace poor resources with higher yielding species and varieties. Similarly, where in tropical regions the objective of land clearance is the establishment of food crops-and where site selection is based on objective ecological appraisal - there can be no reasonable opposition to chip harvesting. It is otherwise in the mangrove areas, and in rain forest where there is no land hunger. And yet it is precisely these latter areas which are now being sought out for chipping operations.
The reasons for the selection of the more remote areas are not hard to find; because they are unpopulated, or only sparsely settled, there are few problems of land tenure or traditional rights of usufruct to deter the legislators responsible for the allocation of concessions, or to interfere with the operations of the loggers. There are no environmentalist irritants or inconvenient demands for impact statements. And, because of an evident lack of local labour, there is relative freedom for the concessionnaire to import indentured expatriates. There are, of course, many difficulties in operating in such areas, but they are evidently outweighed by the advantages; in any case, they are outside the scope of this article.
What, now, are the hazards of omni-specific wood chip harvesting? They are primarily ecological and they stem from our ignorance, as foresters, of tropical forest ecology.
Mangroves have been selectively exploited on a small scale for generations - for building poles, fuelwood, charcoal, tanning extracts (cutch), etc. Most species regenerate readily under these conditions, and with a minimum of intervention from the forester; where they do not do so, they can be planted.
A chip harvesting operation, however, is not selective, even though lip service may be paid to the concept of selective cutting; moreover, its scale may be such that the cleared areas are well beyond the biological capacity of the species for natural regeneration, and the resource capacity of forest services for replanting. The effects of chemical defoliants in Viet Nam are now sufficiently well documented to demonstrate the limited regenerative potential of-mangroves; and there are few foresters who can lay claim to sufficient financial and manpower resources to be able to undertake replanting to the extent required by chip harvesting projects. Most importantly, our understanding of the effects of mangrove clearance on such features as coastal erosion, the mobility of sand bars, tidal and current movements, fish breeding, etc.-as well as the more immediately disruptive effects (albeit on a smaller scale) on villagers whose lives and livelihood may partly depend on the mangroves-is frighteningly deficient. We can (and do) prescribe the retention of narrow coastal strips and cutting to girth limits, but even when such prescriptions can be effectively policed (an impossible task in some areas), they are at best hopeful palliatives deriving from experience wholly inappropriate to modern harvesting practices.
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The rain forest is no cornucopia; much of it is of low fertility, adapted to survival by an almost leak-free nutrient system and rapid recycling. |
The need for practical field investigations of these problems, and for the close monitoring of cutting effects, is urgent and obvious. The need for more extensive and immediate research ought to be stressed by forest services and any other agencies which advise on forestry. The adoption of resolutions in the comfort of conference halls and administrative offices, however, is a universe away from their implementation in the swamps of the mangrove habitats.
The case for caution in our approach to mangrove clearance is a relatively easy one to argue. It is less simple in the case of the rain forest, in view of its vastness, its richness in terms of species, and the apparently unlimited fertility indicated by its luxurious vegetation. Yet these features are all of them illusory.
Firstly, the seemingly unlimited extent of the rain forest is more than matched by the speed of its disappearance. What once stretched virtually unbroken over all the lowlands of the humid tropics and remained more or less intact for over 60 million years has, in the last 200 years, become fragmented and is being reduced at a rate greatly in excess of that of earlier forest removal in the temperate zones of America, Europe and Asia. Through clearance for plantation crops and shifting agriculture, the pace of destruction over the last 20 years has been such that if it continues the world's rain forests (and much of the flora and fauna they support) will, except for a few poor relics, vanish within the next half century.
Similarly, the species richness of the rain forest is but a fraction of what it once was; because lines: of communication have been cut by fragmentation, the rain forest can no longer play its traditional role as the gallery and issuing house of genetic and evolutionary diversity. Some biologists (informed scientists-not case-hardened "econuts") would go so far as to assert that through rain forest destruction man has permanently diverted the course of evolution.
Finally, and most important, the alleged luxuriance of the rain forest vegetation is a myth, deriving no doubt from the large size of the trees, the storeyed structure of much of the forest, and the impenetrable appearance of its edges when viewed from rivers, roads and airstrips. In from the edges, however, the ground flora is often sparse and, even in clearings, vegetation growth rates are extremely low. The-rain forest is no teeming cornucopia; much of it, in fact, is of low fertility adapted to survival by its almost leak-free nutrient system and rapid recycling.
In an undisturbed state, losses from the system are made good not by the weathering of the parent rocks (which occurs well below the level of the characteristically shallow root systems of the trees) but by additions in rainfall. (There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization-for instance, in areas enriched by alluvium and volcanic ash; but there are also large podzolic areas, such as the Kerengas of Kalimantan, which support high forest but which, on clearing, cannot sustain even one harvest of rice. There are laterites, too, which bake hard on exposure and can then support no vegetation; and there are abundant steep sites which when cleared will simply erode to barrenness.)
The fact that the most successful agricultural crops grown in rain forest areas are those from which only small quantities of nutrients are removed in harvesting (e.g., rubber, cocoa, oil palm, etc.) is not without significance.
A crude index of rain forest fertility in some areas subject to shifting cultivation is the number of annual harvests which are taken before a new "garden" has to be sought. For most of the rain forest, three to four such harvests represent an unusually high number; in some sparsely populated areas-where wood chip operations are being established-a single harvest is the norm. (There may be, in fact, a causal relationship between poor soil fertility and low population densities. Shifting cultivators are not as unintelligent as we sometimes imagine; at least one tribe in Irian Jaya [West Irian], for example, uses a highly sophisticated site classification based on the use of indicator tree species - an accomplishment not yet matched by our scientifically trained agricultural botanists or foresters. And it is a not unreasonable hypothesis that areas in which no one claims rights of usufruct exist simply because such rights are worthless due to infertile soils.) In any event, the location of wood chip ventures in rain forest areas gives cause for concern because as in the case of the mangroves-foresters are woefully ignorant of the possible after-effects; the credibility of our claim to ecological expertise is already sufficiently stretched for us to be extremely wary of its further extension.
It will, of course, be argued that wood chip harvesting agreements invariably incorporate provision for reforestation. (The good intentions of such provisions are not in question; but, as everyone since Samuel Johnson is aware, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions.") Assuming that planting takes place, reforestation will be with fast-growing species, usually exotics. How confident can we be, one wonders, of the capacity of the sites to sustain high growth rates beyond the first short rotation? If they can, the position will be similar to that in nontropical areas where an unproductive resource has been replaced by a more useful one, and, in the author's view, there can be no argument about its desirability. But with our present knowledge of the fragility of the rain forest ecosystem and our lack of knowledge of fertility distribution within chip harvesting concessions, ultracautiousness surely represents a wiser policy than the Faustian alternative.
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Are we justified in developing a technology which may prove dangerous and uncontrollable? |
What is most troubling is the operational scale of chip-wood ventures. The problem is analagous to that of supertankers (and the new dimension assumed by problems of oil spillage) or nuclear fission technology-and it cannot be answered by our new panacea, cost-benefit analysis, however sophisticated. Like the choice which faced Faustus, our problem is essentially ethical, not economic. Are we justified in developing a technology which may prove dangerous and uncontrollable?
In urging caution in approaches to multispecific wood chip harvesting in the tropics it is not enough merely to annotate possible hazards. Positive resolutions, even if controversial, are needed. Here are four to present to any forest service or agency dealing with this form of harvesting:
1. That immediate steps be taken in the countries concerned and by the international agencies to monitor the oceanographic, riverine and biological effects of current wood chip operations in mangrove areas; and that, until such effects are more clearly known, large-scale harvesting of mangroves be resisted.2. That countries engaged in - or contemplating - omnispecific wood chip harvesting in tropical rain forest ensure that comprehensive site evaluations precede the granting of forest clearance concessions; and that such concessions be limited to areas where continuity of a productive cover can, as far as is humanly possible, be guaranteed.
3. That in granting wood chip harvesting concessions, the legitimate interests of peoples whose lives or livelihood may depend upon the continued existence of a vegetative cover be fully protected.
4. That foresters in tropical countries endeavour to limit wood chip harvesting concessions to ongoing logging operations on lands that they suspect will be subsequently converted to non-forest uses-whether by accident or design.
If the last of the foregoing resolutions could be successfully implemented on a world-wide basis, and logging residues from existing operations fully utilized, the first three would be unnecessary; there would be sufficient wood chips available (together with those from temperate zones, rubber tree replacement areas, etc.) to satisfy world demand now and in the foreseeable future. And all those so-called secondary species which concern us so much would be fully utilized. It is a chastening fact that the annual growth of extant forest plantations (based on data presented at the World Consultation on Man-made Forests - which are, admittedly, of doubtful accuracy) amounts to nearly 40 percent of annual world wood consumption. These is, thus, no impending world shortage of wood; but there is a very real danger of a world shortage of natural forests.
To return briefly to the introduction, despite the hypothetical future rejected by Faustus, his torments (as portrayed by the poets, dramatists and composers) were, when the day of reckoning arrived, real enough. The choice for foresters, surely, is not such a difficult one.
