A PALL of smoke hangs over the frontier town of Paragominas, in the eastern
Amazon state of Pará. The air is choked with burning sawdust. Throughout
the day, truck after truck rumbles by, laden with massive tree trunks. And even
after midnight, the lights are still burning and machines grinding at the
countless sawmills that line the road. This small town of just 65 000 people has
one of the highest concentrations of sawmills in the world.
Amazonia is the world’s last great reserve of tropical timber, containing, by
some estimates, up to $5 trillion worth of wood. So far, much of this has
been protected by its sheer inaccessibility—the vast majority of Amazonia
is completely roadless, so loggers and others eager to exploit the forest must
travel by river or not at all.
But thanks to the BelĂ©m-BrasĂlia highway, built in the east in
1965, timber companies have flocked to Pará from all parts of Brazil with
dramatic consequences for the destruction of the forest. And now the governor of
Amazonas, Amazonino Mendes, is doing his best to woo loggers from Pará
over to the relatively untouched western Amazon.
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It is not just Brazilians who are keen to exploit this vast resource. Rumours
are rife about the growing attentions of multinational timber companies
from Malaysia and Korea, where, thanks to relentless exploitation, timber is now
scarce.
This prospect dismays many ecologists. “It’s frightening to me that you could
have a repeat of the Asian experience here in South America,” says Bill
Laurance. He came to INPA, Brazil’s national institute for Amazon research, this
year from Australia, where he studied logging in Queensland and Asia. Foreign
timber companies, he says, have no vested interest in the long-term management
of Amazonia’s forests. “They really have one goal, and that is to extract the
maximum amount of timber in the minimum amount of time.”
First hand, the effects of logging are shocking. The standard practice is to
roam the forest cutting any likely looking trees. As they come crashing down,
they pull others with them because they are entangled in a mass of gnarled woody
vines, many as thick as a human arm. A huge gap strewn with trunks and debris is
left behind. Then there’s more carnage as a second, retrieval team blunders
around with a bulldozer (called a skidder) until it finds and hauls out the
felled trees. Years later, though a few trees repopulate the skidder trails,
nothing grows where the tyre tracks ran, and trees still fall along the trails,
brought down by winds channelled along the newly created corridors.
And then there’s the problem of fire. Normally the rainforest is safe from
fire—the tightly closed canopy preventing the moist leaf litter on the
forest floor from drying enough to allow any chance sparks to spread. But break
open the canopy, let in the hot equatorial Sun, and it’s a different story.
Throughout Pará, fires have wiped out vast areas of logged forest,
leaving giant scars on satellite images, and tangled thorny regrowth where the
trees once stood.
But there are alternatives. For the past six years, ecologist Chris Uhl of
Pennsylvania State University has been investigating ways of making logging
efficient and sustainable. Just outside Paragominas, Uhl and a team of
researchers from the small, independent research organisation IMAZON set up
side-by-side plots of forest—one subjected to typically brutal logging
practices and the other to a host of careful measures designed to minimise the
impact of the logging.
For the managed plot, the team began by drawing up an inventory of the
location and species of the trees, then planned which were to be cut. They
designed a set of skidder trails that would reach all of the felled trees while
minimising the damage. They cut vines from the selected trees and allowed them
to wither to prevent unnecessary secondary damage. Then they tried various
techniques, such as selectively killing “undesirable” trees, to provide more
growing space for the young commercial trees to be targeted in the future.
The results were dramatic. Vine cutting meant that 30 per cent fewer trees
were damaged. Careful route planning reduced by a quarter the area affected by
bulldozers. Smaller gaps in the canopy and less fuel left behind on the forest
floor meant less risk of fire. And there was also less chance of accidentally
damaging commercial species that would be ready for harvesting next time around.
“With these practices, you’ll be able to go back to the site in 35 years or so
for a second harvest,” says Uhl, instead of 70 to 100 years at present.
But to convince loggers to adopt these practices will not be easy. After all,
they require investment now with the major return coming thirty or forty years
later. Why should loggers bother when the resource seems limitless? “The problem
with management is not technical, it’s political,” says forester José
Natalino da Silva from the state-funded research agency EMBRAPA in Belém.
“We don’t have any management because we have too much forest.”
Token efforts
The government is at least making an effort to change the situation. No
logging permits are issued by IBAMA, the Brazilian environmental protection
agency, without a management plan. But the plans are often worthless, says
Natalino, and are rarely enforced. He has just finished a survey in Paragominas
in which he examined 224 plans and visited 34 sites. “The results were a
disaster,” he says. They all had plans approved by IBAMA but not one site was
following good management practices.
“Most people assume that when a law is passed, it’s going to happen,” says
Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at INPA in Manaus. “That’s not the way it works
here. It isn’t enough just to make decrees.” One of the key bottlenecks is
personnel: IBAMA is well intentioned but has only about 4500 rangers to patrol
the fifth largest country in the world, says Claude Gascon, an ecologist who
coordinates the Smithsonian Institution’s forest fragmentation project near
Manaus.
The situation is not hopeless—there are at least two timber companies
that are bucking the trend, one on Marajo Island at the mouth of the Amazon, and
another 250 kilometres from Manaus in the centre of the basin, where a Swiss
company called Precious Wood is attempting to manage 50 000 hectares of
forest.
Small beginnings
It is taking advice from Brazilian forester Niro Higuchi, of INPA, who has
run an experimental project on selective logging just outside Manaus for the
past 16 years. Higuchi is encouraged by the enthusiasm of the Swiss company, but
exasperated by the reluctance of others to follow suit. Though he considers
himself very much a forester, rather than an ecologist, he says he is more than
ready to change sides if the timber companies persist in their
recalcitrance.
Uhl is just as exasperated, not least because the present system is so
inefficient. Up to 25 per cent of the felled wood is never recovered in the
traditional system, he says, because it is simply never found by the skidder
teams. Add to that savings through more efficient use of machinery and time and
his team estimates that management practices could pay for themselves, even in
the short term.
But there is another stumbling block to careful logging practices. If those
careful loggers are to change the status quo—that the resource is there to
be liquidised rather than sustainably harvested—they must be confident
that they will be able to return in 35 years to collect on their investment.
Fires are an obvious threat to this, although less brutal practices will
minimise the risk, and—shocked into action by the fire-scarred satellite
images—some loggers around Paragominas are already installing fire breaks
to protect their forests.
But as long as there are trees remaining, there is another danger: land
invasion. Brazil has increasing numbers of landless poor, sem terras,
who are flocking to the Amazon to find tracts of unoccupied but accessible
forest where they can burn the trees and grow food.
And for every logger who wants to preserve the resource there will be others
who want to take the money and run. Ecologist Dan Nepstad from the Woods Hole
Research Center in Massachusetts, and a team of researchers from the independent
environmental research institute IPAM in Belém are working with a
community of 150 families on the Rio Gelado in the south of Pará to
develop a sustainable way of logging their 15 000 hectares of forest.
The community has already been forced off two lots of land—once to make
way for a hydroelectric dam and another time because of an invasion of
mosquitoes and biting flies. Now, the title to their land is being contested by
a gun-toting logger of the old school, who has no interest in long-term
preservation. The leader of the community has already survived one assassination
attempt and the legal wrangles continue. “We spent the first money we got on a
lawyer,” says Nepstad. “That’s the name of the game.”
* * *
The low-impact road
IN Pará and elsewhere in Amazonia, roads have usually marked the
beginning of the end for the jungle. Indeed, in Ecuador, even the rumour of a
new road in the rainforest has been enough to bring a rash of colonists anxious
to get in before land prices rise. Four years ago, however, the Ecuadorian
government and the Maxus Oil Company set out to prove that a road need not be
the first step to destruction of the forest. So far, the experiment has been
mostly a success, but the biggest tests lie ahead.
Maxus started work on the road in 1992 to service the oil wells it was
drilling in Yasunà as part of the oil boom that has propped up Ecuador’s
economy for the past twenty years. “This country has become so used to living on
oil that they will drill wherever they find oil. It doesn’t matter if it’s a
national park,” says Alberto Padilla, chairman of the biology department at the
Catholic University in Quito. Padilla, like most Ecuadorians, sees no
alternative. “We have economic problems now. If we were to stop doing this, we
would be even worse. Instead of being Third World, we’d be Fourth World,” he
says. But in exchange for permission to work in YasunĂ, Ecuador’s
government insisted on strict environmental safeguards.
By all accounts, Maxus is doing everything it can to prevent the usual dismal
scenario from unfolding. No bridge connects the road to the public highway on
the other bank of the Rio Napo, so any vehicles must cross to the roadhead on a
Maxus-controlled ferry. The company regularly patrols the road and evicts any
squatters it finds. Even the road itself is special. Instead of digging the
usual roadbed, Maxus rolled out a carpet of synthetic fibre from Du Pont to
protect the soil, then topped it with trucked-in gravel. When the oil runs out
twenty years from now, they plan to truck the gravel back out, roll up the
carpet, and let the forest take over again, says Lucia Rivas, a spokesperson for
Maxus.
All this effort seems to be paying off. Maxus claims—and most
biologists who work in Yasunà agree—that not a single colonist has
set up camp along the road in the two years since it was finished.
And a comprehensive study of the road’s effects on the jungle’s plants and
animals has so far turned up relatively little impact. The busy period of road
construction caused a brief upheaval in some insect populations, says Terry
Erwin of the Smithsonian Institution, but everything has settled back down to
normal again. “Essentially, the road is a long, natural gap that the insects
have adapted to,” he says. Small mammals and birds are less abundant near the
road—probably as a result of road noise—but this effect disappears
some 50 metres into the forest.
But for a few species, even this most careful of all roads could be
devastating. Hunters of the local Huaorani tribe can now cover much more ground
in the forest by hitching rides on oil company trucks.
More importantly, the road brings the outside world closer, so hunters now
fill not just their families’ bellies but the demand of a commercial market as
well. Huaorani hunters catch macaws for sale in the local pet trade, sometimes
chopping down trees to capture nestlings. Monkey and tapir meat are sold in
restaurants in the frontier oil town of Coca, less than two hours by speedboat
upriver from the Maxus roadhead.
The largest monkeys—woolly, howler and spider monkeys—are tasty
and slow to reproduce, so they are especially vulnerable to hunting. “They are
not now but they will be the rarest monkeys in South America,” says Larry Dew,
who is studying the primates for his doctorate at the University of California
at Davis. After losing several monkeys to hunters’ guns, he now makes regular
payments to the local Huaorani families to keep them from killing monkeys on his
study site. But he still worries whenever hunters are nearby. “So there we are
every day, with the animals, listening for gunshots and running toward them,” he
says. “It’s a crisis.”
The true test, of course, will come when it is time for Maxus to pick up its
road. Local residents won’t want to see their road vanish, and sceptics expect
Maxus to use local support for the road as an argument against spending the
millions of dollars it will cost to remove it. “It’s not going to be politically
feasible unless the Ecuadorian economy takes off in the next twenty years and
environmental issues become a lot more important than they are now. I don’t see
the oil company going against the wishes of the Quechua and the Huaorani and
ripping up a road that’s been there for twenty years,” says Nigel Pitman, a
graduate student at Duke University in North Carolina who worked as a botanical
consultant for Maxus during the road’s construction.
And once Maxus pulls out, the colonists they have resisted so well for so
long may move in after all.
Bob Holmes