I enjoyed Vandermeer and Perfecto’s incredibly detailed and informative work. Two years ago, with one of OWU’s spring break service trips, I had the chance to visit Nicaragua and to work with a group called Sustainable Harvest International. It was really interesting to read about some of the things we saw first hand, particularly with regards to Nicaragua’s R.A.A.S. region and the area surrounding Bluefields. The pictures posted here were taken during this trip. While it was really informative to read about the challenges facing nations in Central America, particularly Costa Rica, I would have liked to learn more about rain forests in other regions of the world, such as West Africa and Southeast Asia. While there are many universal themes that can be drawn from this book and applied elsewhere, it would have been interesting to read about the specific challenges other areas face. I particularly found valuable the ways in which this book looked at the issue of rain forest destruction within the context of social justice. Indeed, the preservation of rain forests does not exist in a vacuum and should not be treated as an issue separate from the challenges humans face. Below are some of the author’s main points, things I found interesting, and pictures from Nicaragua with commentary and observations.
- rain forests cover only 7% of earth’s surface, yet account for 50% of Earth’s biodiversity (3); serve as lungs of the world
- the knife that slices the banana over your morning breakfast cereal is the same as the saw that cuts down trees in the rain forest (3); bananas grow in huge monoculture, alter hydrological cycle, require massive inputs of fungicides; despite the massive human exploitation and environmental harm caused by banana growing, governments like Costa Rica’s encourage banana growth because it brings in needed economic investment (4-10); perpetuates peasant labor system
- food insecurity and poverty are the root causes of deforestation, not simply overpopulation! (12-13)
- Costa Rica has been seen as a success in terms of rain forest preservation; however, it fails in many ways (15)
- herbivores in rain forests, and all forms of life have to be extraordinarily specialized–form niches (19); mutualisms
- E.O. Wilson: “The natural world offers myriad forms of value in education, exploration, aesthetic experience, and irreplaceable products and services.”
- finding a truly “untouched forest” is impossible; humans have historically had huge impact on rain forest systems; weather also regularly alters the nature of the rain forest significantly
- tropical soils are an extremely important factor; perhaps contradictory to what might be expected, tropical soils are very nutrient poor and highly acidic; nutrients leach very rapidly; vegetation has evolved to deal with this by absorbing nutrients very rapidly after they are released (29-32); huge number of pests also exist in tropical forests; all of these factors make farming very difficult on a large scale (36-39)
- peasants are forced to farm on slopes; leads to massive erosion (39); soil layers are removed, leaving very compacted surfaces on which any activity becomes difficult→the below image is of bare soil being exposed on a slope, as trees have been removed (picture taken in central Nicaragua)
slash and burn agriculture (41): solves the main problems of agriculture in that it clears vegetation and pests and also releases needed nutrients back into the soil–this allows for rapid growth of crops. Slash and burn farming can be done on a small scale, as long as constant crop rotation takes place and perennial crops are used; in this way, this form of agriculture is sustainable on a small scale. Farmers move to the rain forest more because of politics, but not because of nature. Technology is not likely to solve the problems of farming in rain forest systems (47). The below photo is taken from a plane just to the west of Bluefields, Nicaragua. It was immediately evident from the plane window the pattern that the authors describe of small areas of forest surrounded by larger swaths of agriculture. While it is blurry, the smoke in the photo is from slash and burn techniques. Throughout the trip, we observed this occurring in parts of the country, particularly, in the more eastern areas.
enclave production: integration of all aspects of production to allow for total control of the entire process; e.g. British tea companies in the Indies (53-54)- United Fruit Company (UFCO) became the largest land holder in Guatemala, while 75 percent of peasants were landless!; Jacobo Arbenz won the presidency on the platform of agrarian reform; CIA then staged a coup to overthrow a democratically elected government (54-56)→this is an instance in which American economic considerations outweighed our supposed principles of democracy and freedom; this started a decades-long incredibly bloody civil war in Guatemala that ravaged the country
- modern banana production still has huge environmental impacts; alters the physical nature of the soil; heavy use of fungicides and pesticides; monoculture results, decreasing biodiversity, and using up all of the shade so that few plants can grow in the understory (60); I found an interesting article about bananas: it turns, out that with bananas, there’s really only a couple of genetic varieties that are being produced for the mass global markets–this makes bananas extremely susceptible to disease. We tend to think of bananas as having only a couple of major varieties. However, people historically used to eat a huge range of banana varieties. This illustrates how we can, with little success, attempt to control for pests and diseases with chemicals, or how we can increase the diversity of bananas we grow in order to prevent a massive wipe-out of this crop.
- colonialism by the great European powers was often driven by demand for raw materials or specialty items: e.g. tea, spices, wood; thus, the Global South evolved to provide inputs to the Global North; dependency theory- undeveloped world has not developed s expected because of persistent exploitation by the first world; Global South must remain if the Global North is to stay prosperous, some argue (73-80)
- companies from the Global North are able to exploit workers and the environment in the Global South, because few constraints exist; huge inequalities between the North and the South (104)
- the exact effects of logging are unknown; roads present a problem, because once they are in place, peasants are granted easy access into the forest, and “fish bone” patterns appear in aerial pictures of the forest (82); even selective logging is harmful because other trees can be damaged in the removal process; little attention is paid to the understory, which can become compacted and trampled by machinery (87)
- In Nicaragua, much of the land that was once rain forest is now barren, almost desert-like. Even though we visited at the start of the rainy season, many of these areas looked scorched. Pictures of deforestation from Nicaragua:
- logging should imitate nature: e.g. hurricanes and other natural disturbances (87)
- one would assume that Costa Rica would have the best third world national forest system; however, the emphasis is on tiny islands of preservation; the surrounding populations are not taken into account; socioeconomic factors and land ownership patterns are also ignored: elitist conservation views prevail (106-108); If we are to actually effectively address the challenges facing rain forests, we must not separate human existence and other realities from the picture!; In the 1980s, despite Costa Rica’s conservation system, the country actually lost more forest cover than Nicaragua, mostly because of the contra war there (131).
- R.A.A.S. of Nicaragua: the largest remaining lowland tract of rain forest in Central America; also the poorest area in Central America (112-116); Nicaragua and other countries view the rain forest as an escape valve for social problems; neoliberal policies push peasants to the agrarian frontier
- ecotourism: “international tourists who could spot the rarest of birds through their binoculars yet could not see the desperate and hungry people just across the road” (112)
- landless worker’s movement in Brazil (128)
- while the future does not look good in Central America, there is reason for optimism if there is more attention paid to the vast swaths of land and the issues between the “pockets of protection” (134)
- *we need to better manage the land that humans use: e.g. zoning laws that restrict the use of resources (154); there is no way we could ever feasibly put all land under national forest protection. We must reframe how we think about conservation: if we look at agricultural land uses as actual ecosystems, then we can begin to see how harmful our current practices are. If we diversified how we grow crops, then we could actually provide a pretty good replacement for the natural ecosystem. In Nicaragua, Sustainable Harvest International promotes the growth of crops in ways that mimic the natural forest setting. Indeed, the agricultural practices they advocate do not resemble the traditional conception of an open-field agricultural system, but look and function very much like a forest. The picture below shows a diversified farm, with crops like yucca, sugar cane, bananas, and peppers.
the vast majority of first world conservationists wish to preserve land in the third world for simply aesthetic reasons (167)- “Those whose dream is the wilderness equivalent of the gated community need to understand that wilderness destruction is a sociopolitical problem requiring a sociopolitical solution.” (168)
