| The destruction of tropical forests in the world today is so extensive, so devastating ,so irrevocable that humanity may soon lose its richest, most diverse, and most valuable biotic resource. As a consequence, life will lose forever much of its capability for continued evolution. Many groups of the larger vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles) will be especially affected, but count- less other organisms - less spec- tacular insect, mollusk, and plant species - will be lost as well.1 The economic, esthetic, and cultural losses to future generations will be in calculable. The damage may not be visible to us here in the United States, for the tropics are faraway, hot and humid places about which we know very lit- tle and have been taught even less. To most people the word "tropics" itself conjures up a picture of pristine _______________________________ HUGH H. ILTIS, a botany professor and her- barium director at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, specializes in the evolution of corn and its relatives; in the New World species of Capparidaceae; and in the plant geography and floristics of Wisconsin, North America, and the Neotropics. He has made eight expeditions to Latin America, which led to the discovery of Zea diploperennis, the most primitive relative of corn. 55 |
Photo : Tropical moist forest at Centinelas, Western Ecuador, with Carapa nicara- guensis, cleared for agriculture, 1984 nature, mysterious and marvelous; of great apes and elephants, of orchids and plants. Precisely because the tropics are mysterious and wonderful, it has been hard to escape the nineteenth- century colonial mentality of a wild and green El Dorado just waiting to |
be explored in a dugout canoe; a trop- ical last frontier with unlimited riches still begging to be "developed" by enterprising pioneers (now, of course, ostensibly for the benefit of native populations).2 The horrendous destruction of nature over the past half century - the critical reason for |
| the now-widespread concern among biologists - was almost always con- veniently ignored or belittled. The realistic ecological picture today, however, and its long-range implica- tions are very grim indeed. Those of us who take pride in being environmentally enlightened have been teaching pollution control and contour plowing, nature preservation and Aldo Leopold's land ethic, but mostly with reference to our own rather impoverished temperate biota.3 What little concern we may have had for the tropics was rarely based on reality. In our comfortable ig- norance, these lush lands and their wild animals seemed so safe from destruction that we rarely worried about their fate. The underdevelop- ment, the innocence of their illiterate populations, and the endemic tropical plagues like malaria and yellow fever that kept their populations well in check seemed sure to offer their am- ple protection. Since 1945, however, all this has changed. We now have DDT and 2,4,5-T; the all-powerful (and greedy) multinational corporations with their woodchippers and jungle smashers (one acre an hour, as advertised by Le Tourneau); the vast and hungry army of the poor and the landless; and the devastating, self-serving, post-World War II development syndrome. Inevitably, what has resulted from these activities has been the system- atic, barbaric obliteration of nature for the "benefit of man." As a conse- quence, we are faced today with the greatest biological calamity this world has ever known - the imminent deci- mation and extermination of the world's tropical biota. As E. O. Wil- son put it, such a great loss of genetic diversity would be worse than energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war or conquest by a total- itarian government. {In fact,] [a]s terrible as those catastrophes would be for us, they could be repaired within a few gener- ations . . . . The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likey to forgive us. 4 56 |
Tropical
Destruction It is in the tropics, in particular in their inconcevably diverse and beau- tiful but fragile wet forests, that biological genocide is in full swing. Of the estimated 8 (to possibly 30) million species of plants and animals on Earth, a vast preponderance live in tropical ecosystems. The destruction of such habitats, therefore, would bring in its wake the extermination of literally millions of species - species of which, for the most part, we do not yet have a description, a picture, a life history, or even a name. Indeed, the utter devastation that humanity is now bringing to tropical ecosystems - the vast and uncon- trolled forest destruction in many regions of Asia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America - has to be seen to be believed. During 1962, at the foothills of the Andes in a Peruvian valley near San Ramon, I stood on a narrow hanging bridge suspended over a clear mountain stream and watched a troop of spider monkeys, a hundred feet up, jumping from one tree to the next and eating fruits from a gigantic fig tree. Iridescent blue, giant Morpho butterflies sailed erratically through a sun-flecked opening in the forest, while a pair of banana-billed toucans sat motionless on a branch silently watching- a scene seemingly straight out of Genesis. Today, none of this exists, for later that year, with a development grant provided by the U. S. sponsored "Ali- anza para el Progreso," an energetic man bought the land (and presuma- bly all the Indians living on it), cut down the forest, and planted coffee and bananas on its 45-degree slopes. Such land clearing is now widespread all over the Andes, and has resulted in massive soil erosion, siltation of rivers, and even climatic changes. The dramatic and unprecedented fluctua- tions in recent Amazonian water lev- els5 are among the serious and unex- pected consequences. Loss of species is another. With such extensive habitat de- struction, it is small wonder that all |
around the world primates, along with many of the larger vertebrates, are facing extinction. In three months of South American field work in 1977, we saw only one spider monkey - a pet on a silver chain in a hotel lobby. That was in Ecuador, where we visited the lowlands of the Pacific slope. The forests there, separated from those of the Amazon basin by the lofty peaks of the Andes, are the home of several thousand unique local species (termed endemics) that evolved here in isolation, providing fascinating examples of geographic speciation. Near Santo Domingo de los Col- orados lies a small remnant of moist tropical forest, studied intensively by Calloway Dodson and Alwyn Gentry. As described in their Flora of Rio Palenque,6 this tract of only 167 hec- tares (circa 420 acres) has over 1,100 species of plants in 123 families. Almost half of them are woody. Nearly 6 percent of them were new to science, and 4 percent are endemics, known to be from nowhere else on earth. A small "sierra" only three miles away has strikingly different and also highly endemic flora, a diversity quite unexpected by any temperate-zone botanist. But in the tropics, whether in Panama, Mexico, Colombia, Bor- neo, or here in Ecuador, local floras are saturated with unique taxa: local endemism is the rule, widespread species the exception. For example, in Ecuador - a coun- try no bigger than Minnesota - there may well be as many as 20,000 dif- ferent species of plants, over one- fifth of them endemic. On the other hand, there are only around 17,000 plant species in all of North America, and only 1,700 native species in all of Minnesota, which, at best, can boast of only one endemic - a semi-sterile Dogtooth Violet (Erythronium pro- pullans) perhaps of hybrid origin. Because of this overwhelming bi- otic diversity and the briefness of their acquaintance with it, biologists remain quite ignorant of most tropi- cal species (especially insects) and |
We are faced today with the greatest biological calamity this world has ever known - the imminent decima- tion and extermi- nation of the world's tropical biota their interrelations. How very much we have yet to learn is evidenced by the fact that one-fourth of the neo- tropical wet forest plant species and more than nine-tenths of its animal species are still unknown to science. Rio Palenque is a mere 400 acres of wild nature, yet it is the only preserved remnant of this particular type of tropical forest on the whole of the Pacific slope of Ecuador. It is now but a tiny island of virgin forest com- plexity set in a vast sea of sterile, cultivated uniformity - thousands of square miles of monocultured ba- nanas, sugar cane, African oil palms, and corn. What only 25 years ago was the most inaccessible and unknown of tropical forests - a dream for any botanical explorer, stretching unin- terrupted from Quevado to Esmer- aldas - and a region from which hardly any biological specimens were available for scientific study, has now been almost totally destroyed. Only an occasional plank-rooted forest 57 |
giant, uncut because of its
immense size, stands alone in a field of bananas. It is a pathetic, grim reminder that now we shall never know what botanical or zoological riches these forests once held. In many ways it is already too late for their study. Spreading Development This picture of tropical forest "conversion," of century-old giants being felled and mountains of bull- dozed primeval wilderness being burned to give way to cow pastures, corn fields, and tree plantations to provide food and firewood for the hungry, is being repeated again and again - in Brazil, in Panama, in In- donesia, and in Mexico.7 The U. N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 7.5 million hec- tares of closed forest and 3.8 million hectares of open forest are currently being destroyed each year.8 At this rate, it will be all over in 20 years. Even the seasonally dry forests now are getting the axe. I cannot tell you with what feelings of horror and hopelessness I witnessed the bulldoz- ing of a hundred-thousand-acre plot of virgin tropical-dry forest in the coastal plain of southwestern Mexico. These arid lands supported 40-foot tall "candelabra" cacti and an army of small trees, yet they are essentially useless for agriculture because of very low rainfall. Does a miserable crop of sorghum for cattle feed every three or four years justify so mindless a de- struction ?9 Nearby, in the moist oak-fir-pine forests of the 10,000-foot Sierra de Manantlan, we discovered three years ago a wild perennial grass (Zea diploperennis) that is ancestral to corn and of immense economic po- tential.10 Today, lumber trucks still continue to roar down these moun- tains every half-hour, hauling gigan- tic logs to be made into boards and into broom handles that are exported to the United States in order to gain badly needed foreign exchange. The trucks are witnesses to the steady, if slow, devastation of a biological |
treasure-house.11 If
the encroaching agricultural development had reached the minuscule habitats of Zea diploperennis, a dozen cows in a week's time could have obliterated this species, and with it the possibility of ever developing highly virus- resistant or even perennial corn.12 For many of us in North America, the destruction of these Latin American habitats has another, more special significance. The migratory birds we love to see in summer de- pend on wild places in Latin America to survive the winter. Warblers in the Ohio Valley already are becoming rarer. Farmers and orchard owners depend upon these birds to a con- siderable degree for insect control. Many of our larger birds are moving closer to extinction year by year. From both the standpoint of the birds' survival and our own, this is in- deed "one world." 13 Bioclimatic Paradox Many well-meaning American ad- visors and humanitarians have been misled by the luxuriance of the tropical forests. How many times have they announced that the answer to world hunger lies in their sustained agricultural utilization? Yet, igno- rance of ecology in this case is fatal. As Professor J. Chang14 of the University of Hawaii has explained, in the tropical regions, despite their lushness, annual grasses such as wheat, rye, barley, and rice have relatively low agricultural productiv- ity compared to those species found in the cool temperate climates from whence they originally came. This is due to a simple bioclimatic fact: dur- ing the long and warm tropical nights, a plant's respiration burns up most of the surplus carbohydrates that it produces during the relatively short photosynthetic day. The 16-hour days followed by cool, 8-hour nights, as found in the Dakotas or the Ukraine, permit much greater accumulations of photosyn- thate in such plants, creating a bumper crop come harvest time. In addition, high rainfall tends to |
| leach the already nutrient-poor lateritic soils to sterile gravels in many parts of the lowland tropics, and there are no climatic controls (i. e. , the freezing temperatures of winter) to knock back insect pests. Dreams of making bread baskets out of these regions evaporate into the fantasies that they are - editorials and lead ar- ticles in prominent journals not withstanding.15 Thus, the tropics - the wet tropics in particular - present a climatically determined paradox. Biologically, they are rich beyond belief, but in many significant ways they are agri- culturally quite poor. That Iowa or South Dakota can never become a Mexico, Panama, or Amazonian Bra- zil in terms of biological diversity seems obvious. At the same time, tropical countries can never become an Iowa or a South Dakota in terms of agricultural productivity. This ecological fact will have serious political consequences and will be unpleasant to face. There is another side to this great productivity-diversity-preservation paradox: the countries most desper- ately in need of money to create and maintain the gigantic national parks necessary to preserve their unique bi- ological riches - both for themselves and for the whole world - are the very ones that are usually too poor to af- ford them. Statistics on park person- nel bear this out. Compared to the tropical nations, the industrialized countries spend ten times the money and support ten times the staff per unit area of park. Thus, the countries with so much to preserve can, in their poverty, preserve only a little. Just think of the incredible collection of large game animals that now crowd the remain- ing central African savannas and for- ests: rhino, lions, gazelles, and gi- raffes - all residents of poor countries that have disastrous economies and exploding populations. Yet, the Serengeti is still a park. Worldwide, even despite great handicaps, coun- tries small and large make valiant ef- forts (often with assistance from the World Wildlife Fund) to preserve 58 |
their patrimony of wildlife and
diver- sity. A bright light amid all this destruc- tion is the massive effort by a variety of people in Latin America to pre- serve the tropical biota within their countries.16 Costa Rica has a national system of 22 well-administerd parks and reserves, which, considering the small size of the country, is unrivaled by any other in Latin America.17 In fact, 8 percent of its area is under ef- fective protection, and Costa Rica's per capita financial commitment to its parks is higher than that of the United States. Significant advances have been made in the Amazonian regions of Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, where, during the past 16 years, nearly 12 million hectares of forest have been placed under protec- tion.18 Admittedly, most of these are as yet unstaffed and exist "on paper only." Nevertheless, even this is a first step, and recognition must be given to the many forces in Latin America working for preservation. They should be encouraged to con- tinue these efforts. An Ironic Lesson In addition, it may be wise to con- sider the proposal by Ira Rubinoff, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, for a global system of protected tropical forest preserves that would be supported by the international community through taxation of all countries whose people enjoy a per capita income greater than $1,500 a year. It should be remembered that developed nations have an economic stake in the sur- vival of tropical forests at least as great as, or greater than, the nations in which the forests grow.19 One per- cent of our bloated defense budget would go a long way toward setting aside 1,000 preserves of 600,000 acres (240,000 hectares) each, which would insure the preservation of approx- imately 10 percent of the rain forests (only 2 percent are now so protected). For Americans, there is an ironic lesson in the loss of the tropical biota, |
for what Latin American
countries in particular are unable or unwilling to preserve will haunt us in the centuries to come. It is not only the songbirds that we shall miss. The rich, over- developed nations have long used their economic clout to exploit mercilessly the poor, underdeveloped tropical nations, and directly - or in- directly - have added the insult to in- jury of abusing their biological treasures. Politicians or businessmen are hardly ever interested in the preservation of rare Brazilian reptiles or Mexican birds, or in the percentage of endem- ics in the Colombian biota. The deci- sions they make concerning the fate of this bountiful life are almost always in terms of short-range profit, not long-range wisdom. Just ask the American lumber companies, or the gigantic Japanese conerns that are (literally) ripping off the forest re- sources of Southeast Asia and the "living museum" of New Guinea. But this is one world, and the cata- strophic loss of wildlife will affect us all. Our children and theirs may well wish to study the tropics, will want to see them for themselves, and, at the very least, will want access to the vast storehouse of economic plants and animals that these forests contain20 and the opportunity to study the im- portant ecological phenomena that they exhibit. If we are to keep faith with our children, the overdeveloped nations must learn, now and quickly, as an integral part of their foreign policy and foreign aid, to approach the problem of extinction seriously and in a new and much more far- sighted, financially responsible way. Establishment of an enlightened foreign policy depends on efforts to subsidize the staffing and upkeep of preservation efforts in the tropics, to help train biologists, to build local museums of natural history, and to translate or otherwise make available the scientific literature so that people of these areas can become experts of their own biota.21 The trend, of course, has been the other way. We have persisted in our political and economic domination of |
| the tropics. Furthermore, the
biolog- ically ignorant leaders of the overde- veloped nations have continually beaten the drum for rapid "sustain- able development" of the tropics, un- mindful that the tropical forests can- not be exploited on a permanent basis without destroying them.22 Try as these countries may, saddled as they are with their burgeoning populations, they will simply never be able to reach a high level of wealth unless they happen to own oil wells. But in the process of a biologically in- sensitive "development," they will surely destroy their own biotic wealth. There is both hypocrisy and tragedy here: hypocrisy because these geographic-economic factors are well known but too inconvenient to be ac- cepted, and tragedy because what all the underdeveloped countries need now more than anything else are freely available and medically safe popula- tion control measures on the one hand, and peace and freedom from economic manipulation and exploita- tion by the overdeveloped countries on the other. On both of these counts, the United States, the only country we ourselves can hope to in- fluence directly, is unfortunately am- biguous, vacillating, and self-serving. Educating the Public In the meantime, preservation falls by the wayside, exploitation of the tropical forests and their conversion to hamburger-producing cow pas- tures continues unabated,23 and exter- mination and extinction of species are occuring at a wholesale rate, now claiming perhaps many thousands of species each year.24 To a considerable extent, the tone has been set by rapacious multinational and national corporations based in the United States, Japan, and Europe - some- thing that we need to be aware of, something that we must, with dedica- tion and courage, try to correct within this decade. No small part of this will be the education of the American, European, and Japanese public. 59 |
Developed nations have an economic stake in the survival of tropical forests at least as great or greater than the nations in which the forests grow. That the forces opposing a rational solution to these ecological problems are all-powerful and influential need hardly be pointed out. In 1970, we had Earth Days from coast to coast, dedicating ourselves to a biologically sane world. Now, 13 years later, this profound intellectual revolution is all but dead, sabotaged by administra- tive officials and by heavily subsi- dized and carefully orchestrated cam- paigns of the media and their corpo- rate allies, which have obscured the very real dangers in neglecting the world's ecology. I need only to point out that the special anniversary issue of Time magazine, "The Most Amazing 60 Years in History," published October 5, 1983, does not mention or illustrate in its 168 pages of text and lavish pic- tures one single environmental event, fact, or problem: nothing whatever on Earth Day or Rachel Carson's Si- lent Spring or on DDT or 2,4,5-T, or on extinction of species or pollution, or soil erosion; in fact, absolutely not one word on any environmental issue. |
This
indifference in reality reaches even to Time's total silence on the population explosion. This is, on re- flection, surely the most terrifying fact of the past 60 years: the near tripling of the world's population,25 an increase of fully 2.95 billion addi- tional people since 1923, the year when Time magazine came into ex- istence. This brings me to a final point. While corporations exploit and their political bedfellows run interference for dubious economic aims, let us not forget (well-meaning liberals included) that equally responsible for these biological extinctions are poverty, hunger, and ignorance - the chop- chop of a million axes, the cravings of a billion mouths. Although the people of the tropics do need more protein and more fire- wood, they need birth control even more. For by now, any knowledge- able observer of the world's scene must come to the conclusion that the food vs. population race can never be won - or rather, can only be won by decreasing the birth rate by whatever means of birth control are available. It certainly will not be won by fur- thering the immaculate misconcep- tions of raising more food by cutting down more forests, by plowing up more prairies, and by draining more wetlands.26 We are running out of all of these, and the population bomb keeps on ticking. The world's net population in- crease in 1982 was 82 million people,27 the highest yearly increase ever - and mostly in the tropics. (An estimated 40 to 50 million abortions allowed that many additional chil- dren not to be born.) Only in an ecologically educated world public, in nations self-restrained in both re- source use and reproduction, is there any hope for the conjunction of a healthy and well-fed population, a biotically rich earth, and peaceful co- existance. We must impress on our students these facts: that the world's carrying capacity is finite, that there are too many people now, that the actual, very real collision between resources |
| (including food supply, clean
living space, and tropical forests) and popu- lations is the biggest, most funda- mental, and most nearly insoluble problem that has ever confronted the human race. Whether wild ecosys- tems of any sort will long survive (even in the United States) will de- pend upon its resolution. The outlook is not hopeful. Men and women of good will have no alternative but to work for the preservation of a nature- rich good earth. ___________________________________ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ________________________________________ The experiences on which this article is based were partly supported by various National Science Foundation grants and the University of Wisconsin Herbarium's E. K. and O. N. Allen Herbarium Funds. I thank D. A. Kolter- man, S. L. Solheim, and D. M. Waller for help- ful criticisms of the manuscript. Thanks are due also to Cathie Beckwith for faithful typing under deadline pressure. I dedicate this paper to Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Norman Myers, Peter Raven, Ray Fosberg, Otto and Isa Degener, and Jack Sharp - all tireless ad- vocates of a nature rich world. ________________________________________ NOTES ________________________________________ 1. Anonymous, The World's Tropical Forests: A Policy, Strategy and Program for the United States (Washington, D. C. : U. S. Government Printing Of- fice, 1980); G. O. Barney (study director). The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the Twenty- first Century (Washington, D. C. : U. S. GPO, 1980); D. W. Ehrenfeld, Conserving Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); P. Ehrlich and A. Ehrlich, Extinction: The Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species (New York: Random House, 1981) ; A. Gomez-Pompa, C. Vasquez-Yanes, and S. Guevara, "The Tropical Rain Forest: A Nonrenewable Resource," Science 177 (1972): 762-765; H. H. Iltis, "Shepherds Leading Sheep to Slaughter - The Biology Teacher and Man's Mad and Final War on Nature," The American Biology Teacher 34 (1972): 127-130, 137, 201-205, 221; H. H. Iltis, "To the Taxonomist and Ecologist: Whose Fight is the Preservation of Nature?" BioScience 17 (1967): 886-890; N. Myers, The Sinking Ark (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979); N. Myers, Conversion of Tropical Moist Forests (Washington, D. C.: National Academy of Sciences Press, 1980); National Research Council, Committee on Research Priorities in Tropical Biology, Research Priorities in Tropical Biology (Washington, D. C. : National Academy of Science Press, 1980); G. T. Prance and T. S. Elias eds. , Extinction is Forever (Bronx, N. Y. : The New York Botanical Garden, 1977); P. H. Raven, "Tropical Rain Forests: A Global Responsibility," Natural History 90 (1981): 28-32. 2. For pro-development appraisals of Amazonian colonization, see Tad Szulc, "Pioneers Carve a New Frontier - Will the Next Century Belong to Brazil?" Parade Magazine, September 4, 1983, pp. 4-6. This article contains an economic justification and human- istic glorification of biological destruction, and reached perhaps 30 million or more American households; see also P. H. Abelson's editorial, "Rain Forests of Amazonia," Science 221 (1983): 507. Equally un- critical is this tragic view of Amazonia by a prominent American businessman-diplomat: "The cause of this discouraging rate of development [of the Amazonian 60 |
rain forest] is that the
ground itself must first be cleared of jungle . . . and civilization itself introduced, before new farms can be laid out and made productive. . . . Whole new traditions and ways of life must be established . . . . Just to look at the geography is to see the formidable nature of the challenge. One huge belt of land . . . lies on the equator in the heart of the heat and fevers of the tropics. The Amazon River, unlike the Mississippi, flows through vast tracks of what are sill sodden, malaria-ridden, impenatrable jungle wastelands, its waters patrolled by alligators and man- eating snakes. In contrast, the gentle, traffic-moving rivers of Europe have been channels of trade for a thousand years." S. L. Linowitz, "The Future of the Americas," Science 181 (1973) : 916-920. 3. The former pre-occupation with the preservation of local plant communities is shown by M. L. Fernald of Harvard University in his famous pioneering essay, "Must all Rare Plants Suffer the Fate of Franklinia? " Journal of the Franklin Institute 226 (1938) : 383-397. 4. E. O. Wilson, as quoted in P. Schabecoff, "A Million Species are Endangered," New York Times Novermber 22, 1981; cf. Proceedings of the U. S. Strategy Conference on Biological Diversity (Washington, D. C. : Department of State, 1982). 5. A. H. Gentry and J. Lopez-Parodi, "Deforesta- tion and Increased Flooding of the Upper Amazon," Science 210 (1980): 1354-1356; I. Friedman, "The Amazon Basin, Another Sahel?" Science 197 (1977):7. 6. C. H. Dodson and A. H. Gentry, "Flora of the Rio Palenque Science Center," Selbyana 4 (1978): 1-628. 7. J. D. Nations and D. I. Komer, "Rainforests and the Hamburger Society," Environment 25 (1983) : 12-20; see also note 1 above. 8. P. M. Fearnside, "Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: How Fast Is It Occuring? " Interciencia 7 (1982): 82-88; the utilitarian, anti-preservation op- position creates the impression that there are no hard data on tropical deforestation, that environmentalists (such as N. Myers) exaggerate the extent of damage [e. g., the Lugo-Brown critique Myers' book in In- terciencia 7 (1982): 89-93] , and that, since there is nothing really to worry about, scientists and preserva- tionists are misleading the public. But "it is irrelevant in the long range, whether the proportion of forests destroyed is 0.6% or 2% of the biome per year" [N. Myers, Interciencia (1982) 7: 358] , whether 60,000 km2 or 200,000 km2 of primary virgin forest are converted to permanent cultivation each year, because even the lower figure is an incredibly large area - 1/3 as large as the state of Wisconsin. In either case, it represents ecological insanity. Sad to note, in the eyes of the world's power brokers, nature destruction is always justified, if by doing so people get fed and hunger is alleviated. The crucial, ultimate question, "what are we going to do then?" after three or four decades, once everything is gone and the world will be even fuller with people than now, is conveniently neglected. 9. D. Poore, "Deforestation and the Population Factor," IUCN Bulletin, January-February-March 1983; reprinted in Parks 8 (1983): 11-12. 10. H. H. Iltis et al., "Zea diploperennis (Gramineae): A New Teosinte from Mexico," Science 203 (1979): 186-187; N. D. Vietmeyer, "A Wild Relative May Give Corn Perennial Genes," Smithso- nian 10 (1979): 68-75; L. R. Nault et al., "Response of Annual and Perennial Teosintes (Zea) to Six Maize Viruses," Plant Disease 66 (1982): 61-62; and L. R. Nault and W. R. Findley, "Zea diploperennis: A Primitive Relative Offers New Traits to Improve Corn," Desert Plants 3(1982): 203-205. 11. There are currently attempts being made by the Universidad de Guadalajara and the Instituto Na- cional de Investigaciones Sobre Recursos Bioticos (INIREB), Xalapa, to set aside part of this manifi- cent mountain range as a scientific preserve. 12. See note 10 above. 13. B. Webster, "Songbirds Decline in America," New York Times, August 12, 1980; J. W. Fitzpatrick, "Northern Birds at Home in the Neotrop- ics," Natural History 91 (1982): 40-47. |
14. J. Chang,
"Potential Photosynthesis and Crop Productivity," Annals of the Assn. of Amer. Geographers 60 (1970): 92-101; D. M. Gates, "The Flow of Energy in the Biosphere," Scientific American 224(1971): 88-100. At the same time, the quite effective agricultural methodologies evolved by primitive or indigenous peoples in the Amazon and elsewhere are also in need of deliberate protection. They can teach us a great deal about how forests can be utilized to some extent and with minimum impact on ecosystem function. But, just like the tropical forests themselves, the life, knowledge, and culture of these forest farmers are being destroyed. 15. See note 2 above. 16. W. M. Denevan, "Latin America," in G. A. Kless, ed., World Systems of Traditional Resource Management (N. Y. : Halstead Press, 1980), pp. 217-244; P. M. Fearnside, "Development Alter- natives in the Brazilian Amazon: An Ecological Evaluation," Interciencia 8 (1983):65-78. 17. D. H. Janzen, ed., Costa Rican Natural History (chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); M. A. Boza and R. Mendoza, The National Parks of Costa Rica, published under the auspices of the Costa Rican Institute of Tourism, the National University, he Na- tional Park Service, and the National Open University (Madrid: INCAFO, 1981); and personal communica- tion with Alvaro Ugalde, director of the Costa Rica National Parks Service and executive director of the Costa Rica National Parks Foundation, November 1983. 18. G. B. Wetterberg, G. T. Prance, and T. E. Love- joy, "Conservation Progress in Amazonia: A Struc- tural Review," Parks 6(1981):5-10; A. Gentry, "Ex- tinction and Conservation of Plant Species in Tropical America, A Phytogeographical Perspective," in I. Hedberg ed., Systematic Botany, Plant Utilization and Biosphere Conservation (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1979). 19. J. S. Denslow and T. C. Moermond, "Why We Must Save the Rain Forests," Capitol Times (Madison, Wisconsin), August 28, 1982; I. Rubinoff, "A Strategy for Preserving Tropical Rainforests," AMBIO 12, no. 5(1983): 255-258; and J. D. Nations and D. I. Komer, "Central America's Tropical Rain- forests: Positive Steps for Survival," AMBIO 12, no. 5(1983): 232-238. 20. N. Myers, A Wealth of Wild Species (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1983); G. Wilkes, "The World's Crop Plant Germplasm: An Endangered Re- source," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 33 (1977) 8-16; J. V. Neel, "Lessons from a Primitive People," Science 170(1970): 815-822; and H. H. Iltis, "Dis- covery of No. 832: An Essay in Defense of the National Science Foundation," Desert Plants 3, no. 4 (June 1982): 175-192. 21. H. H. Iltis and D. A. Kolterman, "Botanical Translations: Needs and Responsibilities," BioScience 33(1983): 613 22. M. Jacobs, "The Spirits of Bali," IUCN Bulletin 14(1983): 64-65. 23. Nations and Komer, note 7 above. 24. See note 1 above. 25. Anonymous, "World Growth-Rate Breaks Rec- ord," Wisconsin State Journal, August 31, 1983. 26. L. R. Brown, "World Population Growth, Soil Erosion, and Food Security," Science 214(1981): 995-1002. "We have now squarely to face this paradox . . . . We have increased human hunger by feeding the hungry. We have increased human suffer- ing by healing the sick. We have increased human want by giving to the needy. It is almost impossible for us to face the fact that this is so. The truth comes as a shocking discovery, for we have all been brought up in the Christian tradition in which caring for the least of our brethren has been counted the highest virtue." Rev. Duncan Howlett, All Souls Church, Washing- ton, D. C., December 6, 1969. [Quoted in The Other Side, The Environmental Fund Newsletter, Washing- ton, D. C., September 1979]. 27. "World Growth-Rate," note 25 above. |