The Ragged Edge of the World (40 page)

It will be years before anyone knows whether the Congo Basin Initiative, still in its formative stages, provides a model for harnessing and efficiently deploying resources. The most ambitious prior effort to address tropical deforestation—the Tropical Forest Action Plan (TFAP), sponsored by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Bank in the late 1980s—became mired in bureaucratic haggling and actually intensified deforestation in Cameroon and some other tropical nations. The idea of tying forest preservation to efforts to avert climate change by giving credit to polluters for preserving “carbon sinks” first arose in the late 1980s in the preliminary talks leading to the Kyoto Treaty (though significant effects could come from national schemes and trading outside the treaty). Even if such sinks are eventually included in the treaty, the concept might not have any material effect on forests for at least another ten years—twenty-five years from first efforts in that direction. The lessons of the TFAP and Kyoto are that the more players there are, and the more there is to negotiate, the more the players will negotiate. Noble intentions very quickly devolve into a game in which players seek to gain access to resources while preserving their own competitive position.

There are alternatives. One possibility would be to use a simple marketlike system that minimizes opportunities for negotiation, and that funnels champions and resources into every part of a forest system. Here's how such an approach might work:

Imagine two continents. Let's call them Pangea and Gondwanaland. Each has vast wet tropical forests that extend over seven nations. On Pangea, the largest country is called Hectaria; on Gondwanaland, the largest nation is Forestia.

Pangea and Gondwanaland have similar problems. Forests are being cut for timber exports, cleared for agricultural land, and pushed back by urbanization. Both continents have problems with illegal tree cutting, land invasions, out-of-control burning seasons, and all the other factors that remorselessly reduce the size and resilience of the rainforest.

Hectaria established a system of parks and reserves, but, as deforestation continued outside the parks and outside the nation's borders, Hectaria lost one of its two rainy seasons. Fires and pests destroyed areas that had escaped the chain saw. Downstream areas became vulnerable to floods.

Over on Gondwanaland, Forestians watched these events unfold. They decided to learn from Hectaria's tragedy. One lesson was that nations could not go it alone; all seven forested nations had to be involved in a continental-scale effort to save the system.

But how? These were poor countries. They needed outside funding. First off, the Forestians realized that to attract foreign donors the plan would have to be grand. They also realized that to allay the suspicions of neighboring countries and minimize the potential for negotiation, endless studies and bureaucratic haggling, the plan would also have to be both simple and transparent.

With these design features in mind, the president asked a former chief justice of Forestia's Supreme Court to design a plan. He chose the man because he had never been heard to use a word of more than three syllables. Here's what he came up with:

For purposes of conservation, cartographers created a map that divided the entire Gondwanaland rainforest of 600,000 square miles into 100 contiguous blocks, each 77 miles on a side. These blocks might cross national borders or ethnic territories; no matter. Forestia's conservation biologists started to object, saying that the grid ignored biogeographic realities. The justice held up his hand, pointing out that biogeography was a six-syllable word, and noting that the grid's uniformity was its virtue because it eliminated any opportunity for negotiation.

The next part of the plan impaneled a committee to seek credible bidders to take responsibility for preserving forest cover in each and every tile in that grid. The seven nations selected a few trusted members of the international environmental community to solicit bids from NGOs, corporations, international organizations and other credible parties, to take responsibility for forest cover and forest viability in each of those blocks. In essence they created a market for shares in the Gondwanan Forest, only in this market the successful bidder was obligated to put in resources, not take them out. The committee served as overseers of the market, certifying the bona fides of those bidding for blocks, acting as a clearinghouse where approaches could be compared and special problems addressed, and monitoring performance. Bidders had no supervisory authority over their blocks; they had to win over local people, governments and NGOs through offers of assistance and resources.

Those who ended up with a block could pursue any path they liked in order to preserve the forest in their area. The only criterion for success would be a periodic review of forest cover and forest viability a few years down the road (something that could be accomplished through remote sensing). Successful bidders could pour additional funds into existing projects, beef up enforcement, spur ecotourism, develop markets for environmental services or carbon credits, pursue urban development projects, whatever. The key to the plan was to have a group take responsibility for each and every block of the Gondwanaland rainforest—wall-to-wall coverage. Since many groups would want to bid for the most prized parts of the forest, a successful bid for one of the gems came with the obligation to take responsibility for one of the orphans.

The approach began showing results immediately. First the Gondwanaland Refugium Project (as it was called) seeded the area with champions, and that alone improved reporting on what was going on in the forest. Different groups found they could compete to show that their approach was better. Groups also found that they could cooperate and borrow expertise, and even subcontract to others when necessary. With many different groups competing and adapting, the project was like an ecosystem itself.

Environmental groups already working in Gondwanaland welcomed the initiative because it brought new sources of funding and publicity. Surprising new donors, attracted by the scale and high profile of the initiative, began showing an interest in the refugium because the project offered opportunities for green branding, market differentiation, and in some specific cases, the possibility of environmental credits and offsets that might later be applied to satisfy legal obligations. The Scallop Oil Company, which had suffered a black eye for some of its previous environmental practices, adopted several blocks and then promptly subcontracted its commitment to various NGOs already working in the area.

There were other surprises. Preserving the “orphan” forest areas of low biological diversity turned out to be surprisingly easy, as donors helped certify carbon credits and water credits that provided host governments with more income than they had been getting from forest concessions. For instance, Everglades Light and Power pledged to spend $5 million a year over twenty years on an “avoided deforestation” credit in an orphan block to meet a voluntary commitment to reduce its CO
₂
emissions by 2 million tons a year. Government officials realized that the $150-per-hectare fee they would receive for the pro rata portion of carbon sequestered exceeded the logging concession bids for the remote area. They also got credit for conservation spending in the communities, giving them a stake in the success of the enterprise.

Forest nations on other continents looked at this initiative with enormous interest. The dozens of different approaches offered a test bed for conservation and development ideas. If something wasn't working in one block, there was nothing to stop the group from switching gears and trying something that was working in another block. Three years down the road, the committee pored over satellite maps to check on the progress of various groups. Forest cover continued to deteriorate in some blocks, but it improved in others. Overall, deforestation slowed.

Could such an approach work in the real world? The risks are low, and it is hard to argue that anything else is working at the scale of the problem. The structure is loose enough to allow bidding, or the lots might be allocated through blind lottery. There are various incentives for different classes of donors, ranging from financial incentives for credible corporations looking for credit for carbon offsets to the purely philanthropic. For host nations, the plan offers the possibility of new resources, new relationships with powerful institutions and corporations, development funds, and international credibility on a high-profile environmental issue. The plan requires no studies or surveys, only effective marketing to host governments and sponsors. It promises the delivery of resources and real action without the endless haggling that has seen perhaps a third of the world's moist tropical forests disappear since alarms first sounded in the 1970s. The only way to find out if such an approach will work is to try.

That's my idea. What's yours?

The raw material for this book comes from my travels going back forty years. Over those decades I had the help of many people who facilitated my trips, helped me understand these far-flung places, and, in some cases, saved me from getting killed or imprisoned. Many of these people are mentioned in the book, but many more are not. I don't remember the name of the driver who got Nick Nichols and me out of a market in Kinshasa just as an angry mob was forming, for instance, but I'm grateful for his timing and urban driving skills.

While I mention a number of scientists and conservationists from different organizations in the pages of this book, I benefited enormously from the practical advice and hospitality of the staff of scores of scientific institutions, conservation groups, and other organizations, ranging from the big groups such as the Wildlife Conservation Society, the World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation International to smaller groups such as RARE, Ecotrust, WAHLI in Indonesia, Global Witness in Asia, and the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, among many others.

Quite a few of the groups that helped me along the way had nothing to do with conservation, but reacted with openness and generosity out of simple hospitality. I mention the Mill Hill missions in the book, but in other parts of the world I benefited from the insights and advice of people from Doctors Without Borders. In Central Africa, I received wonderful cooperation from the U.S. embassies in the Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and what was then called Zaire.

Then there are the people with a passion for nature whose observations and local knowledge gave me an enormous head start in understanding different peoples and landscapes. Steve Galster, a courageous and resourceful conservationist, proved very helpful in my research into the plight of the tiger in India, and then again in my reporting on conservation issues in Siberia. At different times I traveled with Spencer Beebe from the Queen Charlotte Islands to Costa Rica in North and Central America. Tundi Agardy is wonderfully eloquent on the condition of the oceans, and she also taught me to scuba dive. Dan Nepstad helped immeasurably in my understanding of the workings and vulnerabilities of the Amazon rainforest. In many cases, I turned to accompanying photographers—an intrepid group that includes Frans Lanting, Nick Nichols, Tony Suau, and Bill Campbell—for perspective, and they never disappointed.

One group of people not mentioned elsewhere deserves special mention here because it was their assignments that got me to the ragged edges of the planet. The late Norman Cousins of the now defunct
Saturday Review
started me off on my travels by giving me an assignment to investigate fragging in Vietnam. Mary Griswold Smith—whose title at
National Geographic,
senior assistant editor for research grant projects, did not begin to do justice to her role in many of the magazine's groundbreaking articles and expeditions—championed my dream assignment on apes and humans. John Stacks brought me to
Time
magazine, and more than once responded to my pitching a story in some ridiculously remote place by saying, “Why are you still standing here?” (an answer I took to mean “Get going on the story,” although it is entirely possible that he was saying “Get out of my office”). I tried for years to get an assignment to write an article on Cuban conservation, and I'm grateful to Carey Winfrey and Terry Monmaney of
Smithsonian
for sending me to Cuba. Allison Humes of
Condé Nast Traveler
enabled me to return to Polynesia after a hiatus of many years. There are many others, and I thank them all.

The impetus for several trips came from entirely outside journalism. Tim Wirth, the head of the United Nations Foundation, encouraged me to visit Antarctica and pointed me toward the National Science Foundation program that enabled me to travel freely on the continent. Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, invited me to be a guest lecturer on a school-sponsored trip to Midway Atoll.

In the early days, I financed some of my trips from book advances (something upon which I look back in wonder, as those advances were not large). In such cases, which included my first journey to Africa in 1974, I faced huge logistical obstacles as well as a skeptical reception from those I wanted to interview, as a contract from a publishing house presented by a disheveled guy who looked about fourteen years old was not the kind of press credential local officials (or expatriates) were used to seeing. In many places, I got past the door only because I had a letter of introduction from someone who had the credentials that I then lacked. I'm enormously grateful to the many academics, officials and journalists who provided these letters (some of whom are mentioned in the book).

Once I began writing, I was able to go off and focus on the book thanks to the generosity of friends who offered places where I could disappear and work. Jerry and Ani Moss provided the solitude to start writing the book, and Stephen and Valerie Evans-Freke provided a refuge when I did my final revisions. In between, another refuge—the Mesa Refuge—offered a place where I could write several chapters. The Mesa Refuge offers peace and quiet, but it is set amid one of the most stunning landscapes on the Pacific coast, and that poses a true test of an author's willpower. I hope to return and be tested again in the future. And many thanks to my wife, Mary, for understanding my need to go off to these places to write.