Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Article:
Sustainable Forests or Sustainable Profits?
The overly corporate-led form of globalization that we see today also affects how natural resources are used and what priorities they are used for.
"It is true that cutting down forests or converting natural forests into monocultures of pine and eucalyptus for industrial raw material generates revenues and growth. But this growth is based on robbing the forest of its biodiversity and its capacity to conserve soil and water. This growth is based on robbing forest communities of their sources of food, fodder, fuel, fiber, medicine, and security form floods and drought."
— Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest, (South End Press, 2000), p.1
We hear more about sustainable forestry practices by the large logging multinationals. However, what does that really mean? Who is it sustainable for? Society and the environment, or for the logging companies? By replanting trees that will grow quickly and allow them to be felled for "sustained" logging sounds like a good strategy. However, the trees that are favored for this (eucalyptus) require a lot of water to grow so quickly. As John Madeley points out.
"[T]he [eucalyptus] trees achieve this rapid growth by tapping large quantities of groundwater, impoverishing surrounding vegetation and threatening to dry up local water courses."
— John Madeley, Big Business Poor Peoples; The Impact of Transnational Corporations on the World’s Poor, (Zed Books, 1999) p.76.
Madeley continues by describing the impact that the use of chemicals to treat woodpulp from the eucalyptus has on local fisheries and on food production. This has had terrible effects on indigenous people within such regions.
source: http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssues/Biodiversity/Loss.asp#SustainableForestsorSustainableProfits
Reflections:
Though it is not a main cause, globalization is one of the causes of loss of biodiversity. In order to generate revenue and growth in the industry, natural environments like forests have been cleared, causing plants and animals to lose their habitats and the loss of biodiversity.
After this, the article talks about sustainable forests as the way to solve deforestation. The Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE) defines sustainable forest management as "the stewardship and use of forests and forest lands in a way, and at a rate, that maintains their biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality and their potential to fulfill, now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic and social funcions, at local, national, and global levels, and that does not cause damage to other ecoystems". In other words, trees that are cut down are replaced with trees that grow quickly so that they can be "felled down for sustainable logging". The trees that are chopped down are replaced and that does not cause a problem.
However in the specific case study, the trees replaced those that were chopped down were eucalyptus trees, and this kind of trees require a lot of water in order to grow fast. They tapped large quantities of groundwater, thus "impoverishing surrounding vegetation and threatening to dry up local water courses". The use of chemicals to treat wood pulp from the eucalyptus has also affected local fisheries and on food production, which in turn creates problems for the indigenous people within the regions.
Environmental expert
Jean Ng
2D'06
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