快猫短视频

GARY ACKLES is clear-felling the Amazon rainforest, removing giant mahogany
and ipe trees with trunks as wide as a pickup truck. He鈥檚 using a robotic
chainsaw unlike anything seen before, in this or any other forest. And he is
selling this hardwood timber to make boardwalks in the US, doorstops in Europe
and guitars for sale around the world. So how come environmentalists are
cheering him on?

Because these trees are underwater. This, say the environmentalists, means
that we can walk the boards and play the guitars without a tinge of guilt. The
timber is still rooted in soil and perfectly preserved鈥攂ut dead.

The trees were submerged almost 20 years ago when the Brazilians built a
100-metre high hydroelectric dam in the depths of the forest. Now Ackles, a
Canadian engineer whose greatest love is inventing new machines, has come up
with a device to rescue the timber from its watery grave.

Ackles has started work at the Tucurui dam on the Tocantins river, a
tributary of the Amazon. When the dam was completed in 1984, it flooded an area
of rainforest larger than Greater London. Environmentalists have always seen the
scheme鈥攐ne of the 20 largest hydroelectric power plants in the
world鈥攁s a monument to environmental folly. Brazil鈥檚 then military
government wanted the hydroelectricity in an unseemly hurry to power new
aluminium smelters on the coast. The generals didn鈥檛 even wait to chop down the
valuable hardwood timber before closing the floodgates.

They flooded prime rainforest containing an estimated 1.5 million trees.
Ackles reckons that today the timber is worth $600 million and he wants
the lot. He believes that over the next 20 years he can salvage it using his
robotic underwater lumberjack.

For some years, local timber companies have employed daredevil lumberjacks to
dive into the muddy waters of the lake to attack the submerged trees with
hydraulic chainsaws. But it鈥檚 difficult and dangerous work. When someone shouts
鈥淭imber!鈥� they don鈥檛 look up, they look down. For the trees 鈥渇all鈥� upwards,
hurtling to the surface like missiles from a submarine. Several chainsaw
operators were killed when trees shot to the surface unexpectedly.

Then last year Ackles showed up with his new half-million-dollar machine,
designed and built to his specification. It consists of a floating barge
equipped with two robotic arms. The top arm grips the tree and holds it in
position. The lower arm finds the base of the trunk on the lake floor and lops
it with a chainsaw. Then the top arm brings it to the surface. The machine is
operated from a cabin on the barge, where the operator manipulates the arms and
watches their progress using sonar sensors.

Ackles鈥檚 current machine can cut timber down to a depth of 20 metres. 鈥淭hat
means we work close to the lake shore, either that or we only cut part of the
tree,鈥� says Ackles. 鈥淏ut within three months we will have a new barge on the
lake that can cut to a depth of 40 metres.鈥�

The machine is an offshoot of equipment that Ackles developed to pick logs
off the beds of Canadian rivers, where they had sunk years before while being
floated downstream to coastal timber yards. His company鈥擜quatic Cellulose,
based at Vernon in British Columbia鈥攊s now building other machines to work
at Tucurui, and also at other reservoirs and rivers round the world.

鈥淚t only takes 14 seconds to cut a trunk with a diameter of five feet (1.5
metres),鈥� says Ackles. 鈥淭otal retrieval time for a tree is three or four
minutes, with maybe 15 minutes to secure the tree at the surface for later
collection.鈥� On a good day, he and his team can retrieve 45 trees. 鈥淓ventually I
want to have nine machines at work in Lake Tucurui. We are building four more
right now. The aim is to log the whole lake over the next 20 years,鈥� he
says.

But will the timber be any good? In the fetid oxygen-free water pooled up
behind the Tucurui dam, the tree trunks are not yet rotting (see 鈥淕reener
trees鈥�). 鈥淥nce saturated, many wood species will remain preserved for hundreds,
even thousands of years,鈥� Ackles says. In fact, he claims, his underwater wood
is better than the normal stuff. It is naturally cured as water from the lake
replaces the resin. His company offers 36 sunken Tucurui tree species for sale,
including Brazil nut wood, mahogany, ipe, jatoba and massaranduba, or bullet
wood鈥攖imber so hard that nails can鈥檛 pierce it.

And Ackles is gaining the plaudits of environmentalists unused to singing the
praises of logging companies. In April, New York-based environment group
Rainforest Relief forced city authorities in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to ditch
plans to use hardwood from live Amazon rainforests for their boardwalk
renovation. Instead, they encouraged the city authorities to buy Tucurui timber
from Ackles鈥檚 company. 鈥淭his is a great victory for the forests,鈥� said
Rainforest Relief鈥檚 director Tim Keating.

Isn鈥檛 there a downside? None of the environmental groups New
快猫短视频 contacted could think of one. Steve Howard at World Wide Fund for
Nature in Britain said: 鈥淎ckles鈥檚 initiative is undoubtedly a good thing. We
have no problem with it. In fact, besides ensuring that living trees somewhere
else are left in place, it is likely to be good for local ecosystems in the
lake. These trees often contain natural chemicals to deter insects. When the
forest is flooded the chemicals get into the water and damage freshwater insect
濒颈蹿别.鈥�

Ackles says that he hopes to gain official approval soon from the Forest
Stewardship Council, a WWF-backed body that issues certificates for timber
operations that do not destroy natural forest. 鈥淭his is new for them,
effectively a new industry. We are having to write the rule book, but I am
confident of approval,鈥� says Ackles. Howard agrees. 鈥淭hey should get
certification,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey are making efficient use of a valuable
谤别蝉辞耻谤肠别.鈥�

How big a business could underwater logging become? Howard thinks it is
鈥渕inuscule compared to the scale of logging that is destroying the Amazon
rainforest鈥�. Ackles agrees that it is a costly way of getting timber and
unlikely to replace mainstream logging. But it does produce a high-quality
environmentally friendly product. And he says the Tucurui project is far from
being a one-off. He talks of logging flooded forests elsewhere in Latin America
and South-East Asia, and at various times has claimed to be looking at
reservoirs in Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, Venezuela and Panama.

But his next stop is likely to be the Balbina reservoir, another Amazon
reservoir widely regarded as an even worse environmental boondoggle than
Tucurui. The 50-metre-high Balbina dam, completed in 1987, flooded an area of
unlogged forest the size of Warwickshire. But the lake is so shallow and its
waters so slow moving that the dam produces only enough electricity to power a
town of 100,000 people. It floods the equivalent of two football pitches to
generate enough power to run a 1-kilowatt electric fire.

And there are several other Amazon reservoirs that have been flooded without
the timber being removed first. They include the Brokopondo dam across the
border in Surinam, and the Petit-Saut dam in French Guiana, which powers the
nearby Ariane rocket launch site.

But Ackles鈥檚 original business of reclaiming logs lost on river beds could be
an even bigger earner. He estimates that up to a fifth of all logs floated
downstream to mills in Canada disappear en route, mostly because they sink. Many
are still lying on river beds, often in near-pristine condition, awaiting
salvage. So far he has only picked logs from the bottom of rivers in Canada and
the US. But he is keen to move south. 鈥淭here is a lot of opportunity in North
America, but the trees are small and they are mostly softwood, which is much
less valuable,鈥� says Ackles. 鈥淭he profits鈥攁nd the sex appeal鈥攁re in
the tropics, where there are valuable hardwoods on the beds of the Amazon
谤颈惫别谤蝉.鈥�

Europeans have been harvesting timber in the Amazon basin for hundreds of
years, he points out. 鈥淧ortuguese and Spanish ships hauled trees back to Europe
to make the hulls of their boats. And a lot of that timber sank before it left
the Amazon.鈥� Last year, he even sent survey teams scouting round the Amazon
looking for it.

There are parallels here with other industries. Over the past two decades,
many mining companies have begun routinely sifting through piles of waste
mineral ore to extract metals left behind during earlier, cruder mining
operations. Now Ackles could be following their lead, pioneering a new industry
in sniffing out the valuable timber left behind by earlier, cruder exploiters of
the rainforests.

One environmental gain from underwater logging is the removal of timber that
might eventually rot away, releasing greenhouse gases that will contribute to
global warming. The amounts of gas involved could be substantial.

The issue is doubly important in the fetid waters of some tropical
reservoirs, where vegetation rotting in the absence of oxygen produces alarming
quantities of methane. Molecule for molecule, methane is a greenhouse gas 20
times more potent than carbon dioxide. Philip Fearnside of Brazil鈥檚 National
Institute for Research in the Amazon, in Manaus, estimates that the greenhouse
gases emitted by Lake Tucurui have twice the global warming potential of a
coal-fired power station producing the same amount of electricity.

Underwater logging also has political and economic implications. Companies
that harvest timber from lakes and river beds might want to claim credit under
the Kyoto Protocol鈥攊f it survives鈥攆or minimising greenhouse-gas
emissions. The cash value of such 鈥渃arbon credits鈥� could be crucial to the
viability of the salvage operations.

But there are questions about how much, in reality, the removal of timber
from the lake will reduce emissions. According to Vincent St Louis of the
University of Alberta in Edmonton, author of a recent study of the global impact
of reservoirs on greenhouse gas emissions: 鈥淚t is mostly the soils and litter
that contribute to the gases released from reservoirs. The trunks of trees rot
very little when submerged in reservoirs.鈥�

The reason, he says, is that 鈥渟ubmerged wood rots very slowly because lignin
decomposition by fungal organisms, which is rapid in the terrestrial
environment, is inhibited underwater鈥�. But, while very slow, the decomposition
could indeed eventually take place over hundreds and thousands of years. Climate
negotiators may have to decide how much they care about greenhouse emissions
many centuries into the future.