What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another. ~ Mahatma Gandhi It was in course on a discussion on vital strategy during World War II with Stalin at Tehran that Winston Churchill had famously said: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ The statement basically refers to deception and subterfuge.
However, it can be tweaked to make it applicable to an another war, one that is far more horrific and destructive than the two World Wars. Specificaly, it is the war against the natural world. In the words of Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist, “It is a war unleashed by violence of the monoculture mind, which reduces nature to a raw material, life to a commodity, diversity to a threat, and views destruction as progress”. We perpetrate assaults on the forest as if it were an enemy to be wiped out.
Such an assault leads to deforestation ~ the permanent removal of a forest or trees to clear the land for agriculture, or grazing or using the timber for fuel, construction or manufacturing. To perpetuate this war, politicians, corporate houses, the media, and corporate enterprises that deal with paper and timber refer to issue that appear to be true. . But the truth is so awful that it needs to be blended with lies to pacify public outrage.
Robert Jay Lifton, an American Psychiatrist, has written in his crucial book, The Nazi Doctor that it is hardly possible to perpetrate mass atrocities without first convincing everybody that the action is not harmful but rather beneficial. Deforestation is always accompanied by catchy slogans ~ we are not killing trees, we’re creating more job opportunities; we’re saving trees from diseases; we’re preventing wildfires; we’re not killing forests, we are helping the local economy.
Even more effective and extensive lies have accompanied deforestation. In North America, about half the forests in the eastern part of the continent were hacked for timber and farming between the 1600s and late 1800s, according to National Geographic. The forests are also in bad shape today almost throughout the world. Deforestation is extensive in the tropics. A 2017 report by scientists at the University of Maryland showed that the tropics lost about 158,000 square kilometers of forest in 2017 ~ an area that is the size of Bangladesh.
The Guardian reported that two and a half acres of forest are cut every second. This is equivalent to two football fields. One hundred and fifty acres are cut per minute. This works out to 214,000 acres per day, an area larger than New York City. Seventyeight million acres (121875 square miles) are deforested each year, an area larger than Poland. Since humans started cutting down forests, 46 per cent of trees have been felled globally, as per a 2015 study report published in Nature.
According to the data furnished by the Government of India in Parliament, a total of 20,314.72 hectares of forest land were diverted in three years 2015-2018 for different development projects. Protagonists of deforestation often indulge in obfuscation to justify deforestation. They refer to clear-cutting as ‘even age management’ or ‘mechanical fire suppressions’. Leaving a few trees in the middle of a clearcut is described as ‘selective cutting’.
Old-growth forest is called ‘biological desert’ even though extensive scientific researches have established that natural forests provide habitat for most of the world’s threatened species. Particular animal species are chosen as ‘indicator species’ so that the entire forest ecosystem of interdependent species does not have to be considered as a synergistic whole. Ancient trees are called ‘decadent’, in the hope that there would be less outcry over the loss of something already decaying than over the loss of something that was born long before our civilization and its war against nature.
Deforestation is essential as we need roads and logging to put out forest fires. The forests need to be cut to provide jobs as well as to create healthy forests. However, to reveal the truth the ‘bodyguard of lies’ needs to be busted. Contrary to the popular propaganda, the adverse impact of deforestation renders the forest soil unusable for plantations. For example, when the rainforest is cleaned in tropical areas, nutrient availability goes down considerably. This means that farmers will have to use fertilizers and artificial stimulants to make the land fit for cultivation.
When the added costs of fertilizers and stimulants are taken into account, the benefits of deforestation appear to be negligible. In human terms, once a native forest is cut, it is gone forever. Moreover, heavy machines ~ such as bulldozers, trucks, skidders, fellerbunchers ~ prevent tree roots from spreading by eliminating the air space for the oxygen. Susceptibility of roots to pathogens gets increased. The compactness can last for decades, reducing the productivity of the entire site.
Natural fires in tropical forests are very rare but intense, and lighting causes most of them. They usually burn over a very small area and fires hardly leap to the top of big trees. In fact, human-lit fires are commonly used to clear the land for agricultural use. First the valuable timber is harvested, then the remaining vegetation is burned to make way for crops or cattle grazing. In August last year, more than 80,000 fires burned in the Amazon, an increase of almost 80 per cent from 2018, National Geographic reported thus, “The claim that forests need to be cut to generate jobs is merely an excuse.
The wood and paper industry and its markets are now global, with only a handful of companies left to compete. Over the past generation, employment has gone down as production has gone up. Forests are the backbone of life forms and the life on the earth is sustained through them. We depend on forests for our survival, from the air we breathe to the wood we use. Besides providing habitats for animals and livelihood for humans, forests also offer watershed protection, prevent soil erosion and mitigate climate change. Yet, despite our dependence on forests, we are still allowing then to disappear’. [WWF].
The economic value of the services provided by forests worldwide is estimated at $ 16.2 trillion. The forests pump out oxygen we need to live and absorb the CO2 we exhale. A single mature, leafy tree is estimated to produce as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year. Although the phytoplankton in the oceans accounts for at least half of the earth’s oxygen, forests play a key role. After oceans, forests are the world’s largest carbon sink.
We have been the obedient servants of Gilgamesh for 5000 years. We have cut a path of destruction, ignored the spreading deserts, disregarded the disappearing animals, the foul air and water, the warming planet. We have destroyed most of the earth’s natural forest cover, and we pretend we can live without it. The story goes that Gilgamesh defeated the forest protectors and the forces of civilization won the battle for the forest, but it is not true.
We can hardly afford to ignore the warning of Kayapo chief Tacuma: ‘The world is in great danger. When the trees die, the Earth dies. We will be orphans without a home, lost in the chaos of the storm.’
(The writer is a retired IAS officer)