Book review: can’t see the forest for the trees

While deforestation is occurring, there is roughly as much reforestation taking place in the world to balance it out, claims the new book The Social Lives of Forests.

The Social Lives of Forests

The Sahel is growing greener. Amazon deforestation is slowing down.

Those are among the assertions in a new book of essays, by academics from several nations, that attempts to reverse the conventional wisdom about the state of the world’s forests.

The Social Lives of Forests, published this year, captures an emergent trend in research: that while deforestation does occur, there is roughly as much reforestation occurring. While the writers say more work needs to be done, they say that so far, the evidence either for or against net deforestation is inconclusive. This, of course, has implications for forestry and agricultural policy.

One key essay is by Alan Grainger of the school of geography at the University of Leeds in England. He went over data and remote sensing surveys for 63 countries containing 95 per cent of the world’s tropical moist forest. In the end, he writes, “A conservative interpretation is that tropical moist forest area has changed little since 1980, within the limits of error.”

Grainger finds flaws in evidence for deforestation. Global surveys from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, he writes, have been skewed. When the FAO has found that forest cover has gained ground since a previous survey, it has presumed the older figure was too low and “corrected” it. Presto, instant decline.

His solution? Create a World Forest Observatory. The satellite technology for this has been available since 1972, he noted in an email to The National.

In another chapter, Chris Reij of VU University in Amsterdam says that over the past 20 years, “re-greening” in the Sahel country of Niger has occurred on 5 million hectares of land (that’s roughly three-fifths the size of the UAE).

This has happened, he writes, because the Niger government in the mid-1990s transferred ownership of the trees out of the state’s hands and into those of farmers. When the state owned the trees and imposed fines on anyone who cut them down, farmers averted the prospect of fines by uprooting seedlings before they could grow into trees – especially seedlings of introduced species like the water-sucking eucalyptus. But once the trees were theirs, the farmers nurtured saplings of local species and used the grown trees to protect crops from wind, as a source of firewood and to develop a crop of groundnuts for market.

Q&A

Why, according to The Social Lives of Forests, is the conventional wisdom on deforestation wrong?

Statistical sleights of hand such as that performed by the FAO are one reason. Another is that researchers, by looking at too-short time frames, have mistaken long-term cycles of decline and regrowth for short-term patterns of decline. A third reason is hypocrisy arising from self-interest: the European Union asserts that humans are integral to forest preservation in Europe but a threat to it in Africa.

What does the book say about the role of big business?

The essays tend not to take a position on the role of big business. However, two big-business practices that various of the essayists oppose are strip mining and monoculture, in particular large-scale rubber plantations.

Does the book say much about this part of the world?

No. It’s not The Social Lives of Deserts. The closest it gets to the Middle East are the Western Ghat highlands of southern India. “Far from being mere agents of deforestation, then, Ghat residents actually constructed many of their forests over generations, helping create the very biodiversity hot spots they are now seen as threatening,” write Kathleen Morrison, who is one of the book’s editors, and Mark Lycett of the University of Chicago.

Who are the book’s editors?

They are Morrison; Susanna Hecht of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Christine Padoch of the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia.

Any subtext?

What I as a reader took from the book was that the idea of humans living in peaceful harmony with nature is illusory; that, rather, humans live in a state of creative tension with nature. We build, we preserve, we destroy.

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