[Terrapreta] Amazon cattle ranging

[MFH]

Lou, as you say, there is much sense in the wise extraction of forest
products. Trees don't live forever - they get old and die, are killed by
lightning strikes, by insect damage and disease. The forest constantly
recycles and renews.

 

If, for example, 1/40th of the tree volume per hectare of a tropical forest
is extracted annually, there will not be any noticeable degradation.
Economics have something to do with the promotion of this as a system.
Generally, the owners of the forests and the trees receive a pittance for
the "stump" prices. One of our aims in PNG was to demonstrate to the
landowners that the trees in their forests were akin to a bank account.
Protect the capital, make a modest withdrawal from time to time, and this
would be balanced by the new growth (interest). At that stage they were
receiving $3/c.m. stumpage when the logger was getting $150/c.m. fob for
round logs. One of the aims of providing small portable sawmills was to
demonstrate the value difference. For a 5 c.m. log they could get as much as
$250 for the sawn timber versus $15 as a round log. This reinforced the
value of the trees and the value of the forest, and led to many landowner
groups refusing to deal with loggers.

 

I'm aware of the results of some of these projects some 15 years after
commencement, and in the best of these the diversity and the vigour of the
forest has been maintained. In some areas a comparison can be made to an
adjacent block that has been industrially logged. From the air after 15
years both areas look similarly vigorous, but on the ground the logged area
is a mess of vines, creepers and (often exotic, i.e. foreign) pioneer
species which have no commercial value. A reasonable estimate is that it
will take 100 years for the area to return to the sort of species mix that
existed prior to logging. 

 

So another approach is to work towards a wider realisation that trees are
more valuable than the miserable royalties paid, and that forests have many
additional economic values. Maybe this means that timber is too cheap -
absolutely. Woodchip sells for a miserly few dollars/tonne at source.  

 

This can be looked at from many angles, e.g., how many people can live off a
hectare of "managed" tropical forest, as compared to (a) how many can live
off a hectare of 'slash and burn' agriculture after the 3rd year, or (b) how
many from a cash crop such as cocoa or coffee. The assumption in the first
instance would be limited timber extraction plus a range of non-timber
forest products (fruits, nuts, shelter materials). Any of the calculations I
did showed that the forest had more annual income value when left in place
and managed.

 

Max H

 

 

 

 

 

 

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From: terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org
[mailto:terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of lou gold
Sent: Wednesday, 21 May 2008 1:08 PM
To: Nikolaus Foidl
Cc: terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Amazon cattle ranging

 

Oh boy Folke, since David Yarrow and I seem to be the tree-huggers who
regularly contribute to this forum I can't help but think that your lecture
is being delivered at least in part to me. So let me take the time to
correct some of your statements that simply seem off-the-mark to me.

I know, everybody loves trees and it is a gut feeling for everybody that
cutting trees is bad. 


I don't know who the "everyone" is that you are refering to but it
definitely does not include me. I am not against cutting trees and I am not
against the logging industry. The problem is that somehow you really don't
seem to see the forest for the trees.

In fact, one can take a long term view of the earth's vegetative cover and
see a ceaseless war between forestland and grassland. . The territory
controlled by these two great vegetative kingdoms has shifted back and for
across the earth many times due mostly to changing climatic conditions.

In general, human beings have been soldiers in the army of the grasslands
using all the weapons of "civilization" and "domestication" to achieve
victory over the forest. In general, BUT NOT ALWAYS. Apparently, one of the
great exceptions is to be found among -- you guessed it -- the Indios de
Terra Preta -- who are thought to have had millions of people living in the
central Amazon basin without ceaseless deforestation.

Deforestation sounds like a catastrophic event.

Well, some times it is and some times it is not. It is when it triggers
climate change. Human deforestation created the climate shifts that resulted
in the Sahara desert, making it uninhabitable by most plants and critters. A
shift like that is catastrophic. When deforestation starts to trigger
regional climate change we might prefer to keep a lot of the forest
standing.

A grown established forest has neutral balance of fixation and loss, if the
forest gets too old the danger of loosing all the stored biomass with a big
scale fire is imminent and very often.

This is not true for the central Amazon basin where fire has historically
been extremely rare due to heavy rainfall. And where does the rainfall come
from? It comes from the transpiration of the trees in the forest. Without
the forest, the climate shifts to drought as has already been ocurring in
the Eastern Amazon. And drought triggers more fire, etc, etc in a positive
feedback loop that can alter both regional and global climate in
catastrophic ways. 

With all due respects for the important work that you are doing in Bolivia
-- and the creative stewardship for both conservation and food production
that it represents -- I've got to say that the lowland basin of the Eastern
Amazon presents a radically different situation. Here is what Dan Nepstad
from Woods Hole says about it:

Mongabay: In Bali you also put out some rather dire projections for the
Amazon in 2030. Could you elaborate on this? 

Nepstad: There are all these models (namely the Hadley model) pointing to
the end of the century when there will be a big forest die-back in the
Amazon. But before global warming is going to kick in there is going to be
all sorts of damage from the droughts we are already seeing as well as
deforestation, logging, and the fires that are part of that regime. To
factor in these effects, we took our deforestation model, our logging model,
and what we know about the effect of drought on tree mortality, and
projected out the year 2030 using current climate patterns - the last 10
years repeated into the future. We found that by the year 2030, 55 percent
of the forest will be either cleared or damaged - I think 31 percent cleared
and 24 percent damaged by either logging or drought, with a large portion of
that damaged forest catching fire. This produces a huge amount of emissions.
We're looking at 16-25 billion tons of carbon going into the atmosphere in a
very short time frame -- the next 22 years. The scary thing is some of these
assumptions are quite conservative. 
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0124-nepstad.html

We have to see that this planet is the only one and until we do not have an
alternative to agricultural food production we cannot save all the trees in
this world.

In what possible scenario do you imagine that anyone seriously involved in
these issues is trying to "save all the trees in the world"? 
OK, I'm glad to think about how we can be most creativily involved in earth
changes INCLUDING DEFORESTATION but let's not clutter the discussion with
assertions that simply are not true.

Touch the earth and blessed be.

lou

 

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