72 | Feature: Reforestation
◄ restore the world’s forests we need to do just two things: to ensure that ownership of the world’s forests is vested in the people who live in them, and to give nature room”. Pearce does not believe that the answer to the world’s forest problems lies in a big planet- wide project to plant more trees. In fact he reckons this “would be bad for people, bad for forests and in the end bad for the planet too”. He also thinks it is unnecessary: “We don’t have to do the planting. We shouldn’t do the planting. Nature will mostly do it for us. And she will do it better. If we stand back and give them room, forests will regrow”. Pearce refers to the eastern US in making his case. He observes, for example, that “little more than a century ago, there were virtually no trees in Pennsylvania. Half a century of clear-cutting to supply everything from ships’ masts to charcoal, and construction materials to tannin, had left one of the founding states of the US arboreally bankrupt. Today, there are seven million hectares of forest in the state – not all of them native, but most of them in rude health”. More widely, Pearce quotes Karen Holl of the University of California, Santa Cruz: “The entire eastern United States was deforested 200 years ago, much of that has come back without actively planting trees.” Pearce explains that reforestation in the US is partly because forest land increasingly has been seen as valuable real estate, and worthy of protection for environmental
reasons. However it has been driven “at least as much by declining demand for land to grow crops”. Pearce notes that in 30 years, arable land in the US has declined by almost a fifth. Marginal agricultural land has been taken out of production in the eastern states as more efficient agriculture has expanded, particularly on the US plains further west. This narrative will be familiar to many involved in the hardwood trade – not least because it is frequently told by AHEC – but perhaps less well known is that the eastern US is not an isolated example. In fact, it may be closer to the norm. Using a wide range of examples, drawn from his 30-year experience of travelling and speaking to forestry folk in all corners of the globe, and much recent academic research into “environmental history”, Pearce shows that forests all over the world have been declining, and recovering, for generations.
The US example may be only the most familiar for reasons of timing as the forests there are just now reaching maturity. Elsewhere, agricultural land is in the early phases of abandonment and natural forest re-establishment has only just begun. Pearce notes that in a large swathe of Europe, from Poland and Slovakia to Romania and Ukraine, and extending into western Russia “economic dislocation and the withdrawal of socialist support for farming led to an exodus from rural communities, especially from remote or mountainous areas”. At the same time rural
populations are ageing and young people are migrating to cities. According to Pearce, “even as loggers have ripped up old-growth forests in the mountains, new growth has been returning” and that “in most places, as the fields are abandoned, scrub and trees return”. While most prevalent in eastern Europe, the same process is under way in northern Portugal and across the border into western Spain where big agricultural areas have been deserted. Pearce quotes work by Francesco Cherubini of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology showing that in the past 30 years Europe has seen a net loss of fields equivalent to an area larger than Switzerland and four times more could go by 2040.
The story Pearce weaves around tropical forests is even more startling. He refers to an accumulating body of evidence from the Amazon, South-east Asia and Central Africa to show that large areas of what is today seemingly “pristine” rainforest were in precolonial times a landscape dominated by human activity and are, to a large extent, “rewilded”. And while forest conversion continues at an alarming rate in many parts of the tropics today, vast areas are naturally regenerating. Drawing on recent analysis of global satellite imagery by the University of Arkansas, Pearce notes that “only about a quarter of forest loss so far this century is obviously permanent, with the land taken for commercial agriculture, mining, infrastructure
Above left: Forest ownership in the US is highly fragmented PHOTO: AHEC
Centre: Communities are the best forest conservers PHOTO: NORMAN CHILDS, GHANA TIDD Above right: Secondary forest in Indonesia PHOTO: RUPERT OLIVER
TTJ | July/August 2022 |
www.ttjonline.com
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