Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [293]
For humans, forests represent much value that becomes jeopardized by cutting them down. Most obviously, they are our principal source of timber products, among which are firewood, office paper, newspaper, paper for books, toilet paper, construction timber, plywood, and wood for furniture. For Third World people, who constitute a substantial fraction of the world’s population, they are also the principal source of non-timber products such as natural rope and roofing materials, birds and mammals hunted for food, fruits and nuts and other edible plant parts, and plant-derived medicines. For First World people, forests offer popular recreational sites. They function as the world’s major air filter removing carbon monoxide and other air pollutants, and forests and their soils are a major sink for carbon, with the result that deforestation is an important driving force behind global warming by decreasing that carbon sink. Water transpiration from trees returns water to the atmosphere, so that deforestation tends to cause diminished rainfall and increased desertification. Trees retain water in the soil and keep it moist. They protect the land surface against landslides, erosion, and sediment runoff into streams. Some forests, notably some tropical rainforests, hold the major portion of an ecosystem’s nutrients, so that logging and carting the logs away tends to leave the cleared land infertile. Finally, forests provide the habitat for most other living things on the land: for instance, tropical forests cover 6% of the world’s land surface but hold between 50% and 80% of the world’s terrestrial species of plants and animals.
Given all these values of forests, loggers have developed many ways of minimizing the potentially negative environmental impacts of logging. These ways include removing individuals of valuable tree species selectively and leaving the rest of the forest, rather than clear-cutting an entire forest; logging at a sustainable rate, so that the rate of tree regrowth equals the rate of tree removal; cutting small rather than large patches of forest, so that the cut area remains surrounded by trees producing seeds to start regrowth of the logged area; individually replanting trees; and removing individual big trees by helicopter if the trees are sufficiently valuable (as is true in many dipterocarp and araucaria forests), instead of removing trees by trucks and access roads that damage the rest of the forest. Depending on the circumstances, these environmental safeguards may end up either losing money or gaining money for the logging company. I shall now illustrate these opposite outcomes by two examples: the recent experiences of my friend Aloysius, and the operations of the Forest Stewardship Council.
Aloysius is not his real name but one that I have made up for him, for reasons that will become obvious. He is a citizen of one of the Asian/Pacific countries where I have done fieldwork. When I met him six years ago, he quickly struck me as the most extroverted, curious, happy, humorous, confident, independent, and smart person in his office. He courageously and single-handedly faced down and pacified a group of mutinying workers. He repeatedly ran (yes, literally ran) up and down a steep mountain trail at night, to coordinate work at two campsites. Having heard that I had written a book on human sexuality, within 15 minutes of meeting me he broke out into a laugh and said that it was now time for me to tell him what I knew about sex rather than about birds.
We saw each other while jointly involved in several subsequent projects, and then two years passed before I returned to his country. When I saw Aloysius next, it was obvious that something had changed. He was now speaking nervously, and his eyes darted around as if he were afraid of something. That surprised me, because the venue for our conversation was an auditorium in the national capital