Food for Forest Fights

Why Forests? Why Now? The Science, Economics and Politics of Tropical Forests and Climate Change. Seymour, F., and J. Busch. 2016. Center for Global Development, Washington, D.C., U.S.A. 429 pp. US$17.95 (paperback). ISBN 978-1-933286-85-3. Defending Giants. The Redwood Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics. Speece, D.F. 2017. University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, U.S.A. 354 pp. US$29.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-295-99951-7. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World. Wohlleben, P. 2017. William Collins, London. 271 pp. £9.99 (paperback). ISBN 978-0-00-821843-0. Human development seems incompatible with the existence of forests. Modernity came over this planet, with societies wielding fire, axes, and chainsaws in the name of progress. Forests occupied land suitable for farming or were treated as sources of timber, firewood, and charcoal. Despite many cultures being deeply rooted in forests and regardless of many people's emotional attachment to trees and woods, we live in an age of globally accelerating forest loss. In the last years, the revolutionary data sets provided by Matt Hansen et al. (2013) allow tracking of the loss of tree biomass that is occurring across most biomes (Hansen et al. 2013), a frustrating experience. From time to time, even the most motivated forest conservationists feel the need for some reassurance and stories that may nourish their optimism about the possibility of change. Three recent, very different books about forests and their conservation make up a thought-provoking package and may provide forest conservationists with good food for fight. The former director general of the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Frances Seymour, now with the Center for Global Development (CGD), together with her colleague Jonah Busch, presents a remarkable primer on the science, economics, and politics of tropical forests and climate change. If we look back to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where a forest convention did not materialize, to the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Framework Conference on Climatic Change (UNFCCC) or to the many Conferences of the Parties of the environmental UN conventions, we see a history of failure and lost opportunities to put forest protection on the global conservation agenda. Still, the mechanisms for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (first RED, later REDD+ [reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation]) from deforestation and land-use change represent progress, and the shift from the failed climate summit of Copenhagen (in 2009) to the Paris agreement (in 2015) was remarkable. Nonetheless, more forests should have been saved in the last decades, when deforestation was relatively more important as a source for greenhouse gas emissions (in comparison with burning fossil fuels) and when forests were subjected to less extreme weather induced by climate change. The CGD's book asks, “Why forests? Why now?” Is there still time to work with the “forest option” for the mitigation of climate change? Of course, there is, and the book cleverly summarizes the relevant science and lessons learned. Based on a series of input papers and a huge body of primary literature, it is convincing, well-written, and astonishingly comprehensive. It is also well structured, facilitates reading and learning, and is supported by instructive and elegant illustrations. The main chapters deal with the importance of tropical forests, human development, forest monitoring, arguments for forest protection (“Making Forests Worth More Alive than Dead”), experiences with stopping deforestation, global consumer demand, and forest and climate politics (both in the global South and the global North), as well as finance. An interesting section is dedicated to the comparative analysis of ecosystem services. The authors believe that carbon storage is the only globally appreciated ecosystem service and that other forest-related services are too dispersed or occur too infrequently and thus are not valued appropriately. Indeed, it is time to acknowledge that the manifold approaches to protecting tropical forests through sustainable forest use, bioprospecting, ecotourism, or payment for ecosystem services have failed to hold the tide of deforestation. However, this courageous statement reflects a pragmatic preparedness to entirely carbonize forest conservation. This means giving up a more complex and holistic narrative—but this might produce unwanted shortcomings and risks. The current political situation continues messy, as more than 50 countries have initiated REDD+ programs, but just a few have access to results-based funding for the service of safeguarding carbon storage. Additionally, disbursement lags far behind pledges. A large part of the finance comes from bi- and multilateral aid. The book may have the power to reenergize frustrated players, but it also names challenges and shortcomings of the political and technical machinery that arose around forest and climate protection (“too low, too slow, too constrained as aid”). The authors address the errors related to the aidification of forest conservation. Forest-rich countries should not be regarded as poor so-called developing countries that are the beneficiaries of donor countries, but rather as trade partners, who offer a vital service to the rest of the world. The window of opportunity is closing. An important sentence in the book summarizes the struggle for the best solution, which so far has been dominated by “an excessive focus on avoiding the risks associated with initiatives to protect forests rather than avoiding the risks of continued deforestation as usual” (p. 390). Another inconvenient truth, not well understood by many players, is that “current forest losses are effectively irreversible from a climate perspective” (p. 407) because any regeneration of logged or burned forests needs at least decades to restore carbon stocks and sink capacities, whereas the time frame to avoid dangerous climate change may be measured in years. Meanwhile, the mix of toxic risks is ever growing. The authors point out that tropical forests are being negatively affected by climate change now and are losing functionality. Some systems, such as the Amazon, may have come dangerously close to a tipping point (Lovejoy & Nobre 2018). Another serious problem is that forest-rich countries get tired and frustrated by the slow and poor delivery of REDD+ and explore extractivist, less sustainable pathways to prosperity. The book, on the solid fundament of a broad and honest analysis, tries to propose solutions from within the system to heal a key symptom of a deeply rooted system-wide crisis. Implicitly, it is based on the assumption that we can reconcile or at least combine forest conservation and economic growth. The root cause of our planetary problem is not addressed. The book describes embodied deforestation and the necessity of working with demand-side measures that tackle commercial exploitation and land use promoted by the global markets, which has not been sufficiently addressed by international climate-change policy instruments (Henders et al. 2017). But it does not ask how much will be enough. More likely, it is not an either–or situation. Conservationists have to work within the existing socioeconomic system, but at the same time, they have to question its paradigms and problematic tenets to put up effective resistance. Here, the Defending Giants comes into the play, and it is completely different in scope and genre. Defending Giants tells the story of an astonishing conservation movement: “the redwood wars and the transformation of American environmental politics.” Its author, Darren Speece, is a history teacher. He portrays the movement of rural activists who challenged the timber industry and disrupted politics. In the 1980s, there was a change in logging operations under which big corporations began targeting the last ancient redwood groves on California's northern coast. The author presents a more holistic panorama of American environmental history, which is not only written by the federal government and national actors, but also by people on the ground. He highlights the grassroots diversity of the environmental movement and shows how the activists were preservationists and romantic tree huggers but also thought about the needs of a sustainable and equitable timber economy. Speece addresses the divide between white-collar workers and conservationists and rural people emerging at the end of the 1970s. The book starts with a description of the deep roots of the conflict, of the redwood forests themselves, and of the early history of logging these iconic American ecosystems. The story unfolds in 3 phases from 1850 onwards: industrialization, stabilization, and transformation. Speece sees a century-old historical stream of ongoing struggles between the timber industry, the state, and citizens over the valuation of redwood forests. A first attempt by Minister Carl Schurz, in 1879, to include North Coast redwoods in the list of national parks to be established was turned down by economic lobbyists. The results of the state-supported aggressive logging in the era of industrialization were economic growth, the rise of a powerful self-regulating timber industry, and increasing citizen concerns. In the early 20th century, the first redwood groves were protected thanks to philanthropic action. In the 1950s, the Sierra Club grew substantially and became an important player in redwood conservation. The club's book Last Redwoods and the Parkland of the Redwood Creek promoted the creation of a large park, which moved beyond setting aside isolated stands of grand trees. The redwood preservation movement had its origins in American romantics reacting to the rapid changes brought about by industrial society and capitalism. It is amazing to learn about the different groups involved in redwood protection, such as Sempervirens Club, Save the Redwoods League, Environmental Protection Information Center, and Earth First!, that were prepared to fight decades-long struggles against extractivism and ignorance. The words attributed to former California governor Ronald Reagan summarize the state attitude toward redwood conservation during economic boom times after World War II: “If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all” (p. 57). The author shows how the Redwood Wars and the modern environmental movement were products of social and economic transformations in postwar America that encompassed the housing boom and rapid growth of both the economy and environmental problems. On the one hand, first successes of the environmental movement, such as the Wilderness Act (1964) and the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), as well as disasters such as the Santa Barbara oil spill (1969), would have inspired conservationists to move forward calling for nature protection as necessary for human health. On the other hand, “industry warned of economic catastrophes, massive job losses, and the destruction of small rural towns if resources were locked up” (p. 70), which is a well-known argument put forth in current debates. The earliest national parks, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Sequoia, protect beautiful and hardly accessible landscapes where economic extraction was difficult anyway. A new move in the 1960s was to propose large parks comprising “productive” ecosystems. Speece describes how fights to create and defend the large Redwood National Park (established in 1968) led to more generally challenging industrial logging and its impact. Environmentalists developed new models for action and challenged industry and state with legal arguments, countering logging permits and harvest plans. Radicalization happened in the second half of the 1980s, especially after the Pacific Lumber Company became a conglomerate and multinational stock-holding company owned by Charles Hurvitz’ Maxxam Inc. The conflict led to violence including environmentalists vandalizing private properties and a bomb attack on an activist in 1990 that brought the situation national attention. Still, in 1992, the Rio year and in the so-called Redwood Summer, Pacific lumber started illegally logging Creek Grove while activists tried to stop cutting in the woods. Finally, the case went to Congress and the federal courts. In 1996, “President Clinton wanted to solidify his eroding support among environmentalists” after endorsing the expansion of logging the national forests (p. 229). Policy innovations in which multispecies habitat conservation plans were applied toward implementation of the Endangered Species Act and provision of financial resources for buying out valuable forests broke the stalemate. These deals in redwood country are considered a milestone in American environmental protection that helped transform the way land conflicts are handled. Still, it did not stop struggles and fights on the ground promoted by activists unsatisfied with the habitat conservation and harvest plans. Speece's book is full of details likely to be of less interest to a wider international readership, but it is an important case study, soberly presented, that reflects the growing tensions. The book's photographs allow one to get into the spirit of the activists’ times and empathize with the actors, and they support the documentary function of the work. The maps could have been a little more instructive and comprehensive. The book illustrates how local action, national politics, and globalization are connected. Although it references a unique ecosystem on the U.S. West Coast, it delivers an important message to conservationists worldwide. Engagement matters and makes a difference, but it may take decades rather than years to produce results. Environmental and conservation movements are well advised to learn from this history of successes and failures. The epilogue describes the balance between these end results: “Though the North Coast activists transformed environmental politics, nobody won. Pacific Lumber went bankrupt,” other companies “left the area, vast parts of Headwater Forest were harvested, mudslides buried towns and choked salmon runs, new corporations took ownership of the forest, and North Coast counties were left holding their breath. But through it all, North Coast activists persisted, and their example suggests that modern environmentalism has often been a powerful bottom-up movement that successfully transformed state and national environmental politics” (p. 267). This statement is of utmost importance in light of the international conventions and processes described in Seymour and Busch's book on tropical forests. The role of civil society in inventing and developing conservation must not be overlooked. If we lose the people and their motivation—as the engine of societal development—there will be no effective political action on environmental matters. If one wonders how to inspire people to embrace the cause of the forest, it would be useful to consider another book and how it affects a vast readership. The bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees by the German forester Peter Wohlleben marks a notable global phenomenon. Since 2015, this book has been translated into 40 languages including Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian, and it was chosen nonfiction book of the year in Germany (2015, 2016), Canada (2016), and the United States (2017). The Society of Environmental Journalists awarded it an honorable mention because it ensured its readers would never walk through forests again in quite the same way. The media coverage, especially in Germany, is broad and continuing, perpetuating the attention given to the book. The Hidden Life of Trees has inspired TV documentaries and animated nonspecialists to discuss forest ecosystems. The author, who lives and works in the German Eifel mountains, uses a story-telling approach to highlight the relevance of forests and selected aspects of forest ecosystem functionality. Thirty-six chapters take the reader on a journey from root networking and tree communication to forest hydrology, climate change, and many other related topics. Wohlleben emphasizes the relevance of cooperation of individual trees in creating a bigger whole, an ecosystem with emergent properties: “Every tree, (…) is valuable to the community and worth keeping around as long as (p. 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