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The rainforest houses invaluable genetic resources. But greed is rapidly shrinking its borders, pushing into extinction myriad species. G.K. Rao pays tribute to the forest in conjunction with World Forestry Day tomorrow.
THE rainforest is a place of magic, but it has many traps for the ignorant and the unwary. For one thing, it is easy to lose one's way. The woods are full of trails, made by water, by animals big or small and even by humans. One trail looks much like another to the uninitiated, and it is easy to go round in circles.
Since the trees are so high, and they shut out most of the light, it is not easy to get a fix from the sun. If the sun is visible, that is. Often it is shrouded by clouds, and finding one's direction then becomes a matter of guesswork. That, and the fact that so little is generally known about it can make for a frightening experience. "You need patience, humour and courage most of all," says our guide and mentor Razali. "The question of supplies is not so important." Ex- commando, honorary ranger, cyberspace wanderer and Team Leader of the Utan Bara Adventure Team(UBAT), he has criss-crossed the Malaysian rainforest innumerable times. " First of all you must remember that in the tropical forest you'll never lack for food and water. You can even find rope, roofing and fuel. But you need to be calm, control your very natural fear while you survey the possibilities. Patience is one of the most important qualities. Haste can be deadly because it can exhaust you both mentally and physically." After all, there is no real need to hurry. The city's time scale has no meaning here.
It is the seasons that define time in the jungle. That, and mundane things like hunger, the breeding season, and the alternations of light and darkness. The imperatives of city-bred humans have no place at all. The forest is not a kindly place. There are no bandaids and bromides for the sick and the slow. Weakness can be as good as death. On the other hand, survival is not such a difficult task. It can accommodate an astonishing variety of life, from the elephant to the sloth, from the giant trees which can tower eighty metres or more, to that most exotic, elusive and exclusive of epiphytes, the orchid. Virtually anyone and anything can make a place for itself provided it is capable of adaptation. "You have to be ruthless in the jungle," Razali says. "But it doesn't mean that you cut down every tree you see, or kill every animal you encounter. But survival is the keynote, and for that you must be prepared. for anything.
"Once you live in it for any time, you realise that every creature does whatever it can to survive. It exploits the environment to secure its comfort. My comfort or my soul isn't important for the tiger if it can't find other prey. But it won't bother me if it isn't hungry. "The rule is, take what you need. For the rest, don't disturb the forest. Let the fruit hang from the trees until you're hungry. And always remember that your body too will one day make food for the land. That's how you balance life and death in the jungle. Both are equally abundant, equally extravagant." The rainforest is a living system whose complexities have not yet been defined. Indeed even its wealth has not been fully catalogued. E. O. Wilson, biologist, co-founder of sociobiology and philosopher of science, in The Diversity of Life says, "The unsolved mysteries of the rain forest are formless and seductive. They are like unnamed islands hidden in the blank spaces of old maps, like dark shapes glimpsed descending the far wall of a reef into the abyss.... The rain forest in its richness is one of the last repositories on earth of that timeless dream."
In 1982, Terry Erwin of America's National Museum of Natural History estimated that there may be 30 million species of arthropods (a class that includes all the insects, spiders, crustaceans, centipedes, and related organisms with jointed, chitinous exoskeletons) in the tropical forest alone. At that time the number of known species of organisms, including plants, animals and micro-organisms was tentatively placed at 1.4 million! Today that number stands at 1.75 million. Other estimates are generally more conservative, but even these place the number of rainforest species at between five and 10 million, far more than all known species at present. Thus, an exhaustive inventory remains one of the great challenges open to all biologists. The hunt for new species is still wide open.
Sadly, the opportunity to respond seems to be shrinking by the moment, if the figures are anything to go by. The rate at which rain forest is being logged all over the world, and the consequent loss of habitat, means that a large number of species are great extinction spasm, rushing to eternity a large fraction of our fellow species in a single generation." We pride ourselves as the crown of creation, as stewards of the land that was given to us by God. But we tend to forget that we are not alone in that role. The forest giants are stewards in their own right. They watch over the land and water, help to regulate the seasons and keep the air breathable by fixing the carbon and releasing immense quantities of oxygen. In addition, their fruit provides life to a host of creatures and their bodies are home to an immensely complex web of living organisms. Even in their death they secure life. When they crash down, they clear vast areas of the forest floor, letting in enough sunlight for entire ecosystems to glory and flourish. Their rotting trunks support a myriad species, from mushrooms to plants small animals. Thus, the logger's reckoning is skewed. It produces only a count for the number of trees harvested, their weight in dry wood and their value in terms of dollars to the seller.
No reckoning is made of what they do in helping to maintain the balance of nature, of the amount of oxygen they release during their long lives, the amount of carbon they fix, the leaf litter they create (which degrades into fertiliser), or indeed the number of animals they shelter while they stand. Perhaps such an audit should be attempted, to see whether a tree is more valuable standing in the forest, or as furniture and firewood in a hundred thousand homes. In a temperate forest an area of one acre may contain no more than half a dozen tree species at most. An acre of rainforest could, on the other hand, contain a hundred or more. That implies a diversity of life unimaginable anywhere else.
When it is logged there is no way yet to measure the loss of biodiversity in an area, but there is a possibility that the forest will return to its original state if it is left entirely alone afterwards. In a hundred years or two perhaps the balance will be restored. But that does not happen too often. More likely, in a hundred years the entire forest will have been hewn down. Wilson offers a tentative figure based on a theoretical model. "With... cautious parameters, selected in a biased manner to draw a maximally optimistic conclusion, the number of species doomed each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour three." This, he cautions, is a conservative estimate. Much of this extinction involves species which are either unknown or little studied. We are destroying something of whose existence we may be entirely unaware. It is thus impossible to estimate the loss of keystone species that could lead to the entire collapse of local ecosystems, triggering an even more catastrophic series of events.
Human intervention is the major cause of this wholesale destruction. As polluters and producers of waste we have no equals. As landscape artists we operate on a global scale, replacing vast tracts of forest with the mono-culture of plantation, factory and city. Perhaps we are too powerful for our own good. We carry the seeds of our own destruction, and it is these seeds that we seem to be sowing now. Like Samson, we could end up pulling our own house down around our ears. Perhaps that process has already begun.
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Utan Bara Adventure Team organises adventure expeditions in the jungles of Malaysia, and run Jungle Survival Courses. For further information contact UBAT at:
Tel/Fax:
03-4022-5124
E-mail:
info@ubat.com.my
Website:
www.ubat.com.my
(c)
Gerald Lopez 1996.
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REPRODUCTION RIGHTS.
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