NOVEL ECOSYSTEMS - The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Natures Salvation - page 100

Yet the blinkered thinking persists. Degraded forests and forests in recovery are almost everywhere
under-researched and undervalued. The most exceptional thing about the new forests of Puerto Rico is
that they have been researched.
To take one instance of this myopia, many conservation scientists see the logged forests of the giant
tropical island of Borneo as virtually a lost cause. Typical was this headline on a press release from the
Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, in July 2013: “80 Percent of Malaysian Borneo
Degraded by Logging,” it shouted. 13 A new analysis of data from Landsat satellites showed that “seem-
ingly dense tropical forest cover” was often a mess, “impacted by previously undocumented high-im-
pact logging or clearing operations.” Collaborator Jane Bryan of the University of Tasmania called it “a
crisis.” The study found that “very few forest ecosystems remain intact.” 14
Nobody would suggest that was good news. I have been to Borneo several times and seen for myself
the scale of destruction, both from the ground and while flying overhead. The rain forest “looks like a
dog with mange,” I wrote once. “Areas of dense forest are interspersed with large naked patches, ripped
out by bulldozers and chainsaws.” 15 But consider this. Most logging is selective, with the valuable trees
removed and the rest (or those that don't succumb to collateral damage) left behind. And studies show
that forests logged in this way in Borneo retain almost as much biodiversity as many nearby unlogged
areas protected in national parks. In among the mess, most species survive, albeit in reduced numbers.
David Edwards of James Cook University in Australia found that 75 percent of bird and dung beetle
species remained across a large logging concession covering 2.5 million acres in Sabah, Borneo, even
after the entire concession had been logged over twice. Other species would show similar results, he
said. 16
Of course there had been damage and species lost, among which specialist local species may be
prominent. Old-growth forest will probably contain more species than recent regrowth, or “secondary”
forest. And secondary forests, as in Puerto Rico, are likely to be places where alien species get a grip.
But Edwards's point was that “degraded forests provide important habitat” for the majority of forest
species even after logging. Jeffrey Sayer—veteran conservation scientist at the IUCN, WWF, and else-
where—goes even further. He told me that in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo,
“biodiversity in logged-over concessions is in better condition than many of the protected areas.” And in
the Congo basin of Africa, “only an expert can really tell the difference between forests in concessions
and those in protected areas.” There is, he said, “abundant evidence” of the conservation value of logged
forests.
Daisy Dent, a tropical forest researcher now at the University of Stirling in Scotland, says that
globally “there is now a larger area of secondary and degraded tropical forest than there is old-growth
forest.” 17 This, surely, is too much biodiversity to be ignored. “Secondary forests of all ages should be
protected. They are a hugely valuable safety net for biodiversity,” says Robin Chazdon of the University
of Connecticut. “And like a good Bordeaux, the value of secondary forests is expected to increase over
time.” 18 Edwards's colleague William Laurance agrees. He told me: “Logged forests in the tropics are
too vast, vulnerable, and important to ignore, given their large conservation potential. It is vital that we
recognize their key role for conserving tropical nature.”
Yet these places are rarely recognized as being of conservation value. No green group stands up to
protect secondary forests, even though they are the most abundant habitat for wildlife in the modern
tropics. They receive little more attention than the forests that have been clear-cut and converted into
plantation monocultures of acacia or eucalyptus. They are routinely left off maps of the world's sur-
viving forests, dismissed as “degraded” and valueless, says Douglas Sheil of the Norwegian University