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Interview with Dr. Bill Laurance
QUESTION: WHAT DOES STRI STUDY?
ANSWER: Essentially our main interest is "how do humans affect tropical rain forests?" So that is a very broad view of things, but we're interested in things like forest destruction and the fragmentation of the forest. What happens when agriculture or logging goes in and chops up the forest into pieces? Which is what happens... typically you get soy farming in the Amazon or cattle ranching. You also get these little islands of survival or islands of extinction, of forest. We look at the impact on plants and animals of logging operations, of fire. We are interested in hunting. We are working quite a lot on the impacts of hunting and road expansion in Africa, in Tropical Africa. We are also quite interested in the effects of global change, of global warming and changing conditions of the atmosphere on tropical forest and tropical eco-systems. So we are really pretty broadly interested in how do people, how do humans, affect rain forests and what are the implications for the survival of nature.
QUESTION: HAVE YOU SEEN A CHANGE IN YOUR 30 YEARS IN CONSERVATION?
ANSWER: Definitely. Unfortunately tropical rainforests are changing fast. About 40 million acres of tropical rain forests are being destroyed every year. That works out to about 100 football fields a minute. So there is an incredible rate of simple forest destruction. Another thing is that we are really seeing a shift in terms of what is causing the forest destruction. Thirty years ago everybody talked about slash and burn farmers. These were small farmers that went out into the rain forest with their machetes and they cut down forest and they burned some of the forest and they planted crops. Instead of small-scale farmers, now we are seeing bulldozers and we're also seeing these kinds of activities because of increasing economic globalization. Everything is connected now. We're seeing these activities tend to be important in terms of providing an economic impetus for road building. So oil companies will go in and build roads in the rain forest. Timber companies will go in. Other people will go in and build roads and that opens the frontier. We refer to it as sort of the Pandora's box effect. You suddenly open up this box and you often times get a spontaneous invasion of the forest by land speculators, by hunters, by miners, by colonists. And very often this leads to rampant forest destruction.
QUESTION: IS THERE HOPE?
ANSWER: There's definitely hope. There are definitely some causes for optimism. For example this program right here. This is a great example. People's awareness is increasing. People's awareness is improving. Things like this help a lot. This tends to develop, tends to sort of connect in other ways. Politicians get influenced. Programs develop. So there are different kinds of programs that are happening now. There's much more interest in a lot of developing countries in forest conservation. There's a lot of interest, for example, in using carbon trading and using the mechanisms that are being set up as part of the Kyoto Protocol to try to help save forests. I think that one of the things that people need to realize is that about a quarter of all the billions of tons of greenhouse gases that are going into the atmosphere every year, so this is maybe two or three billion tons of carbon emissions, are spewing forth when people are knocking down and razing and burning tropical rain forests. And so a very important cause of global warming is the destruction of the tropical forest. So if we can slow down forest destruction, in addition to driving more efficient cars and improving the efficiency of our industries, we can then have an impact on slowing down global warming.
QUESTION? HOW DOES CARBON TRADING WORK?
ANSWER: The basic way it works, it's a little bit complicated, but the basic way is for example take a country like the United States. Now lets say the US agrees to reduce their carbon emissions to a certain level. Or let's say certain industries agree to do that. Let's say Coal-fired and energy utilities say they're going to reduce their carbon emissions. So they need to reduce their emissions. Now one way they can do that is to retrofit their coal-fired generating plants or rebuild their plants or build new plants, which can be very expensive and cost billions of dollars. They could do that or they could also take some of that money and they could, for example, give it to Costa Rica or Brazil or Thailand or Malaysia and say use some of that for protecting their forest or for regenerating some of their forest. And we know pretty well how much carbon is in the rain forest. I know right there, that rain forest behind us (which is about a hectare, or two football fields) has about two hundred tons of carbon in its vegetation. And if that's knocked down and burned that's going to go up in the atmosphere as smoke. On the other hand, if a country plants trees or allows a forest to regenerate that carbon will go back into the vegetation and will come out of the atmosphere. And so it will help the global warming situation. So there are these mechanisms that are being set up now to use to essentially use carbon trading to try to help protect forests.
QUESTION: WHAT CAN ONE PERSON DO?
ANSWER: Being willing to provide some donations for some of these projects would be fantastic. You can get involved with some of the conservation organizations. Many of these are doing a really good job. You can support politicians that are being smart about the environment. And I think another thing that you can do is look at your own backyard. Because it is surprising how people in developing countries very often look at the United States. For me, for example, as someone who works in the developing world and tries to advise countries about their use of natural resources, you know frankly they will look at me sometimes and say 'You're an American and we're not very impressed with what the United States is doing'. We need to drive more efficient cars, we need to be smarter about what we are doing, smarter about our energy use, smarter about protecting our own resources. I think that will actually send a pretty powerful message around the world.
QUESTION: WHAT IS THE POINT OF NO RETURN?
ANSWER: A tipping point. We see this happening over and over again. A system will get stressed and suddenly for almost no explainable reason it will suddenly change. And I will give you an example of this. There was a bay in Florida, its called Florida Bay. It was a big bay, about 2200 kilometers in area. It was getting some septic pollution coming in every year. It just happened like that every year. One day, that bay, which was a clear water bay with Manatees and sea grasses, it became a murky dead zone almost over night. It just hit a tipping point. No one really understood why, it just happened. And there is a lot of concern something like the Amazon could do the same thing. And one of the key reasons is that the Amazon generates a lot of its own rainfall. It's a huge area of forest. The vegetation gives off a lot of water vapor as it is photosynthesizing. And that water vapor is very important in terms of going up and forming clouds and maintaining the rain. So the more forest you cut down the less moisture you get going up into the atmosphere. And then less rain that is going to come back down again. So there is less of this recycling of water. No one knows how much of the Amazon can be cut down before it reaches that tipping point where the systems suddenly collapses in a rage of droughts and fires. There is a great deal of concern about this. We've had the world's top scientists here, a few years ago, talking about this exact issue trying to identify this. We have not been able to put our finger on the answer. People have suggested that maybe 30% of the forest destroyed, more than that would potentially be reaching a tipping point. But the bottom line is we're shaking the dice with the Amazon, in fact we're shaking the dice with the whole planet right now.
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Bill Laurance, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, is leading the new initiative to conserve our planet' s tropical forests through carbon trading and emissions reductions. David Calvin of the Paradise Earth rainforest project recently sat down with him for this interview in Panama.
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