Tropical Rain Forests:
Exposing the Myths
The false idea that 'forest' is the normal clothing of the Earth has many roots. Above all, it reflects the twin birth of the 'science' of ecology and the 'religion' of environmentalism out of the womb of late-19th Century romanticism in Germany, England, and Massachusetts. "Nature endeavours to keep the earth clothed with wood of some kind", wrote Henry David Thoreau. This is, of course, nonsense. Even if we ignore the vast oceans, dry grasslands and deserts, hot and cold, dominate the continents, and have long done so. Tropical savannas alone occupy around one-third of the land surface of the Earth. Yet the tenets of ecologism were idiosyncratically derived from those very few parts of the world characterised by wooded domains, the Teutonic wald of Germany's Black Forest and Thoreau's famous 'Walden' in Massachusetts.
This idea of the 'ancient climax forest' thus came to be deeply imbued in European colonial officials, so much so that they instinctively assumed that any non-forested land must have been originally 'forested' and later cleared by fire and the axe, the plough and the hoe. We now know that most such areas have never carried a 'forest' for millions of years. But the juggernaut of the 'Green' myth of deforestation through human carelessness and greed was set rolling. "Man alone can destroy the stability of the climax during the long period of control by its climate" asserted the famous American ecologist, Frederick E. Clements, in 1936.
Since the 1960s, the fundamental myth has been assiduously enhanced by the addition of a gamut of 'scientific' and 'morality' myths, all aiming to persuade us that the rain forest is vital for maintaining the stability and balance of the Earth - for our very own survival on this planet. Are the forests not 'the lungs of the Earth'? 'The living sinks' that will help to buffer our human excesses of carbon dioxide emissions as we recklessly warm the atmosphere? The richest remaining 'library' of genetic resources for us to store, read, and use? 'The last refuge' of forest peoples living in harmony in an untainted Golden Age and Garden of Eden? The oldest of the old, the 'cathedrals of the wild', a heritage which we must cherish at all costs?
Again, it is all nonsense. At the end of the Last Ice Age, only some 12,000 to 18,000 years ago, the tropics which are today occupied by these so-called 'ancient cathedrals' were seasonal savanna grasslands, both cooler and much drier than now. Fire was rampant. There were no rain forests in the Malay Peninsula and much of Amazonia, and, despite the increasing human development of forested space, there are still more rain forests persisting than existed then. As in Europe and North America, the forests came and went as climate changed; there is no Clementsian "long period of control" under one climate. Beneath many rain forests, there are sheets of ash, a testimony in the soil to past fires and non-forested landscapes.
The whole farrago of scientific gobbledegook becomes painfully obvious in the control myths of the rain forest as 'the lungs of the world' and as 'the carbon sinks of the Earth'. What do lungs do? Take a deep breath - they gulp in oxygen and give out carbon dioxide! If the rain forests are indeed 'the lungs of the world', they should surely be cut down as quickly as possible! In reality, some do precisely this because of their heavy decomposition systems while, if you truly want trees to take up carbon, you require newly-planted, young vigorous plantations.
The myth is exposed. Rain forests are quite unessential for maintaining the so-called ecological balance of the Earth. Compared with the oceans, the trees are 'noise' in the system. We no more need them than we did the forests of Europe, largely cleared by the 17th Century, or Thoreau's woods in New England.
Some people, especially in the rich countries of the North, may like rain forests, while others may psychologically need them as part of their own romantic New Age existence and agenda. But these are quite different matters. Such neo-colonial overtones have all too often given rise to the misreading and misuse of other people's landscapes. Yet most folk, following the current fashion of the BBC's 'Walking with Dinosaurs', might happily settle for a Monday evening television meal and a fantasy virtual rain forest on the box.
The innate danger of the 'Rain Forest Myth' is that it has grown into a hegemonic myth, one that excludes all other myths from discourse and debate. Moreover, it is founded on a series of 'Little Green Lies', or 'Great Green Whoppers' as one of my academic colleagues prefers to call them. These not only deny the fundamental search for 'truth' in science, but, far more seriously, they warp policy-making with regard to the developing world.
None of this, however, provides a mandate for illegal logging, poor silvicultural practice, bad development theory, the misuse of fire, or Mafia-like pioneer politics. In fact, our moral responsibilities are precisely the opposite and probably all the greater. We must strive even harder to ensure that any system replacing the trees is a truly productive and flexible system, fully adapted to an ever-changing, unstable, non-equilibrium world.
© Philip Stott 2003.
Further Reading
Philip Stott 2001. 'Jungles of the mind. The invention of the tropical rain forest.' History Today, Vol. 51(5), May 2001, pp. 38-44.
For Philip's monograph Tropical Rain Forest: a political ecology of hegemonic mythmaking (London: Coronet Books, 1999: Price £8.00/Special Offer Price £3.00 excl. p&p UK only), select the book image below (also available free in .PDF format [Acrobat Reader required]).
