The rainforest has become an emblem of human despair. The three syllables are
filled with corporate greed, crook politics and individual helplessness. We
have been told many times, and rightly, that the rainforests are
irreplaceable. We have also been told, and wrongly, that once they are gone,
they are gone, and there is nothing we can do.
They exist, where they still exist, as a botanic measure of human misery and
guilt. All that is most stupid and destructive in the human condition is
summed up in the word rainforest. It is high time we changed all that.
And so I made a trip to Brazil: not to catch a glimpse of the last bit of
rainforest before it goes, but to seek out the forests of good cheer, to
walk through the forests of hope, to lift my eyes to the distant canopy of
life. I went with John Burton, chief executive of the World Land Trust
(WLT), and the aim was not to wail about what has been lost, but to do
something about what is left. And then some: and then some. You can do more
than just save the bloody stuff.
You know about rainforest: 6 per cent of the world’s land surface; 50 per cent
of the world’s species, and every day an area the size of Wales is
destroyed. Or is it Ireland? Or maybe London. The horror stats simply don’t
register any more. We have reached a point of compassion fatigue when it
comes to the rainforest. We defend ourselves from its horrors with weak
jokes: is it really worth destroying a rainforest area the size of Rutland
to make a single copy of The Sunday Times? But on this trip I learnt a
slightly better way of alleviating the horrors.
We went not to the Amazon and the north but to the Atlantic rainforest and the
south. There is about 5 per cent of it left: it can claim to be the most
endangered chunk of habitat in the world. It suffered from accessibility.
Almost at once, we were in the middle of it all, just a couple of hours from
Rio. Much easier to chop this stuff down than go fagging up to the Amazon.
The timber was used to build Rio 200 years ago, and after that it was
cleared to make pastures and arable fields.
But chunks remain. They lie disconnected in a long sprawl across southern
Brazil, into Paraguay and Argentina: little bits here and there, frequently
on slopes, harder to clear, less agreeable to farm.
From the air, you see a patchwork quilt of different greens: the livid green
of arable fields, the richer green of pasture: and, here and there, the
profound and almighty green of the forest that survives. So let’s save it,
eh? First, then, to a chunk already saved: the Reserva Ecologica di Guapi
Assu (Regua). There are 6,700 hectares (16,556 acres) of it. First morning,
dawn: a sudden melodramatic vision of it, looking out across the shaggy
hills at a vivid wet green that fills your eyes and your soul, the peaks
rising with extraordinary suddenness, each one bearing trees and trees and
trees – a horizon-filling vista of green. The sight forces you to set
despair aside, at least for a while. We haven’t destroyed it all, not yet.
Well, they aren’t going to destroy this bit – that’s the beauty of it. The
best way to protect something is first to own it. And WLT played a vital
role in the purchase of Regua. A series of donations, most of them of £25,
gave WLT the wherewithal to buy this lovely slice of planet Earth.
Nicholas Locke’s family has farmed here for four generations. He is Regua’s
project director, a man of large ambitions. He has, for example, planted
18,000 trees at Regua, giving each a gardener’s care: not just sticking them
in the ground and hoping for the best, but manuring them and mulching them,
giving them after-care and ensuring an extraordinary 90 per cent survival
rate. Beyond, a mountainside on which he will next year plant 20,000 trees.
Most of the trees came from Regua’s own nurseries, grown from seeds gathered
in the forests. There are 20,000 species of plant in the Atlantic
rainforest; Locke has planted 45 species here.
You will see, then, the difference between virgin forest and this making good,
this patching up. It’s not the same, it never could be. But that’s no reason
to give up. The irreplaceable nature of the rainforest has become a staple
of 21st-century life: well, here is the forest, being replaced.
It would be far, far better had it not been cut down in the first place. So
what’s the answer? Give up?
There are 250 species of mammals to be found in Atlantic rainforest: there are
puma, silent and elusive at Regua. There are also precious primates:
marmosets and the muri-qui, or woolly spider monkey.
I’d love to tell you of my close encounters with them, but they are
near-impossible to see. There aren’t very many of them; this kind of forest
is rich in species, poor in population.
And seeing anything in rainforest is appallingly difficult. Rather, the forest
is an experience of simmering life. If you are quiet, you can hear the trees
growing. Walk, and you see plants on plants on plants; trees wearing soft
cloaks of moss, looping garlands of vines, impossible branch loads of
bromeliads. And much of it here is second growth. The virgin forest was
mostly cleared in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it is growing back,
comparatively impoverished. The lower the slope, the younger the forest: so
I felt a need to climb.
I delegated the actual climbing to a horse, a greyhound-slim chestnut with
Spanish saddle, hogged mane and bottomless fitness. We climbed up mountain
trails far too steep for vehicles, deeper, ever deeper, picking our delicate
way between tree and tree, once or twice miscalculating and catching a
tremendous blow on the knee, as the trunks got thicker, the green grew
denser and the canopy closed over.
Up we went, the view so steep that I could see nothing but the path: then down
again, feet level with the horse’s ears. Forest: not a collection of living
things, but a living, breathing entity all in itself.
A cage in the middleof the forest: and a young woman of startling beauty.
Christine Steiner, from Rio, is monitoring the red-billed curassow: a forest
bird, somewhere between a crow and pheasant to look at, but bigger. An
Atlantic rainforest speciality, and until recently, no longer found around
Regua.
This is a captive reintroduction programme: for the original birds have been
shot out of the forest and there are only 250 left in the wild anywhere.
These days, the forest is patrolled by rangers, former hunters themselves,
whose duty it is to encounter hunters unarmed, and persuade them to stop. It
has worked: the red-billed curassow are out there and surviving. Now let’s
wait for them to breed.
For one of the problems of owning, say, a chunk of rainforest is that you
can’t just buy it and reckon you’ve done the job. If you don’t cherish it,
the hunters will come in and hunt the place out, illegal loggers will rip
off the best trees, others will simply take over the land and dispute your
claim to it. Everything about the rainforest has to be long-term: the plans
and, most especially, the commitment.
Up into the hills again, this time by Land Rover, to inspect a parcel of land.
It’s lovely stuff, green and jumping with life. A glorious thing: a parrot,
two parrots, orange-winged Amazons. And then, to represent the impossible
exoticism of the forest, its almost preposterous diversity, a channel-billed
toucan. Got to buy this: yes, buy this as soon as a deal can be done, which
in Brazil is at least two years. Push too hard and the price goes through
the roof.
How much land, then, does World Land Trust own? It has been instrumental in
the acquisition of 350,000 acres of endangered habitat in Brazil, Paraguay,
Argentina, Belize, the Philippines and India. But it owns nothing. Not a scruple,
not a scintilla of land does the World Land Trust actually own.
Well, that would be neo-colonialism, wouldn’t it, and the developing countries
are rightly somewhat sensitive on that point. Regua is owned by a Brazilian
NGO of the same name, working with the WLT. WLT advises when asked, supports
all the time and buys land when money has been raised. That is the way these
things work: you operate with existing organisations or assist with the
setting-up of a new one. What you absolutely don’t do is take over.
Down further south, then, to the countryside around Curitiba. A train, the
Serra Verde Express, which must be the most spectacular train ride in the
world, snaking with majestic leisureliness through vertiginous forest: an
inspiring revelation of the enormous amount of land this remnant 5 per cent
actually covers.
But the important business was with people who grow soya beans. Not the
multinational giants – more Atlantic rainforest has been cleared for soya
planting than anything else – but a group of people who farm organically and
want to work towards the conservation of the gorgeous bits of forest that
surround their fields.
Here, the dominant tree is the araucaria, from the same genus as the monkey
puzzle tree. These Brazilian giants look like megalomaniacal cow parsley:
trees rich in meaning and significance. Here again, Burton was looking for
areas to acquire and safeguard: seeking partners among the local farmers and
their customers. The farmers appreciate the romance and meaning of the
forest: they also know it brings rain. It’s been raining in the Misiones
province of Argentina, where there is a lot of Atlantic rainforest still
standing, but here, where much of the forest has gone, it hadn’t rained for
a month. Nor is that anything to do with coincidence.
In the forest that surrounds the fields owned and farmed by Rangel Panzarini,
there are araucarias of prodigious dimensions. As we walked, we found an
ocelot scat, armadillo burrows, the loud araucaria specialists, the purplish
jays, and at the open soggy patch, an outrageous display of butterflies, in
good numbers and prodigious diversity. This place is worth saving for that
blue swallowtail with the pink spots alone.
So yes, people we can work with, Burton was saying, good people, who love
their land. Find a good local NGO. Calculate the biodiversity.
Find areas to replant: where one sizeable chunk of forest can be joined up to
another. Wildlife corridors are the future for a patchwork land.
The thing is that it’s doable: eminently and obviously doable.
Buy. Buy and give away, but stay to advise, assist, look forward.
Rainforests are emblems not of despair but of hope: at least when seen with
the right eyes.
Save the rainforest
Organisations that allow people to buy rainforest to protect it:
World Land Trust www.worldlandtrust.org
Amazon International Rainforest Reserve www.amazonrainforest.org
Cool Earth www.coolearth.org
