DIALOGUE TO GLOBAL MAYORS 对话全球市长 BACK COVER STORY · 封 底 故 事
No environmentalist should want to do
anything to encourage logging of pristine
forest — and some fear that any recognition
of the conservation value of logged forests
might encourage this. But ignoring logged
forests can sometimes be counterproductive
to biodiversity conservation.
That is what is happening in Indonesia,
where some conservationists are backing a
billion-dollar government plan, announced
in 2010, to save pristine rainforests by
encouraging palm oil and other plantation
agriculture to instead move onto “degraded
land.” The pristine forests, meanwhile, will
be conserved so as to generate carbon
credits.
The Washington-based World Resources
Institute is among those groups supporting
that strategy, by mapping Indonesia’s
degraded land. It says this will help
the government to divert “new oil palm
plantation development onto ‘degraded
lands’ instead of expanding production into
natural forests.”
Much depends on what the government
decides will count as “degraded lands.” And
the WRI’s mapping may help protect some
logged forests. But Laurance says that a lot
of the 36 million hectares — an area larger
than Germany — that has been designated
as “degraded” in Indonesia is precisely the
kind of logged forest that could be almost as
rich in species as natural forests.
“Preventing degraded forests from being
converted to oil palm should be a priority of
policy-makers and conservationists,” says
Edwards. The danger is that conservationists
end up on the wrong side — complicit in
forest destruction and biodiversity loss.
of the losses have served to underestimate
how much remains.
All this is a real break from the orthodoxies
of conservation ecology and our often
simplistic ideas about deforestation. A
reevaluation of the conservation of other
kinds of degraded ecosystems may be
required. Even invasions by farmers may
not be the end for forest biodiversity,
says Sayer. “Forests that regenerate on
abandoned farmland are often surprisingly
rich in biodiversity, including some species
that are often thought of as [only found in]
natural forests,” he says.
There are important implications for practical
conservation. Conservationists have
traditionally concentrated their lobbying and
activities on the ground towards protecting
untouched “conservation hotspots,” a term
pioneered by Russell Mittermeier, president
of Conservation International.
disturbed forests, and given the huge extent
of logged areas, he argues that conservation
has to embrace them.
Certainly neither Laurance nor his
colleagues maintain that the latest research
on logging and biodiversity should be
treated as a green light for clearing forests.
Far from it. For one thing, the roads created
by loggers make forests vulnerable to
invasions by farmers and ranchers, who
may be far more destructive. But it does
suggest that well-managed permanent
forest estates could be part of the solution
to biodiversity loss, rather than the problem
— and that conservationists should devote
more attention to that task, even if it lacks
the romance of protecting the pristine.
By concentrating their attention on what is
lost, conservationists have often ignored
what survives. And the new study reveals
that the statistical failings of their analyses
by conservationists in favor of protecting
surviving scraps of virgin forest. But
Laurance says the new findings about how
the conservation value of logged forests has
been underestimated will add fuel to the
argument that, in the 21st century, logged
forests are of increasing value to the planet’s
biodiversity and can no longer be shunned.
“Conservationists ignore [logged forests] at
their peril,” says Edwards.
This revisionist thinking mirrors that
articulated by, among others, Peter Kareiva,
chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy,
who attacks our romantic notions of the
environment as something fragile and
separate from humans and questions
whether there is any truly pristine nature left
anywhere. Even the Amazon was thoroughly
worked over by pre-Columbian societies.
Wilderness is a myth, say the new
ecologists. They question our obsession with
putting nature in a glass cage and poo-poo
our antipathy to alien species. We have no
choice but to see ourselves as a functioning
part of all ecosystems, they argue.
This more sanguine view of forest
degradation is hardly embraced by all
conservation scientists. Two years ago, the
well-known conservation activist, Thomas
Lovejoy, now of George Mason University
in Virginia, co-authored a letter in Nature
that bore the headline “Primary Forests
Are Irreplaceable for Sustaining Tropical
Biodiversity.” The letter argued that even
though few truly undisturbed forests exist,
those that remain contain more biodiversity
than comparable degraded forests.
Ironically, another co-author was Laurance.
Yet Laurence points out that logged forests
are still more biodiverse than other types of
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