Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 1
ON GREEN MOUNTAIN
Standing on the summit of an extinct volcano on Ascension Island in the tropical South Atlantic, I was
at one of the most remote spots on the planet. I watched the British military plane that had delivered me
there, midway between Brazil and Africa, take off and head south to the Falkland Islands. I felt rather
alone. Down below was a harsh, black, and treeless moonscape of volcanic clinker, baking in the sun.
Beyond was ocean for seven hundred miles in every direction. But in the cool mountain air, I was sur-
rounded by lush greenery. As noon approached, a lone cloud formed over the summit and then suddenly
descended, shrouding the mountain and me in mist.
The Ascension locals—a mix of British contract workers, American service personnel, and families
from St. Helena, another remote South Atlantic island—call this oasis Green Mountain. The island's
British administrator has a bungalow up here, complete with a pair of old cannons pointing out across
the ocean. But away from his lawns, where I later had afternoon tea, the mountain and its cloud forest
felt primeval, a leftover perhaps from the days before sailors began visiting here five centuries ago.
My instincts couldn't have been more wrong, however. The greenery was relatively new. When
Charles Darwin visited Ascension Island in July 1836, homeward bound after his long journey aboard
HMS
Beagle
, he had complained about its “naked hideousness.” The mountain where I now stood was
“entirely destitute of trees.” Another visitor of the day, William Henry Webster, had called the island
“an awful wilderness amid the solitude of the ocean.” Peering through the mist, my guide, the moun-
tain's genial warden Stedson Stroud, explained: “Nothing you see here is native. Except for a few ferns,
everything has been introduced in the past two hundred years.” The cloud forest of Green Mountain is
an entirely synthetic ecosystem, a potpourri of foreign species shipped in by the British navy during the
early- to mid-nineteenth century at the whim of Victorian botanists. Every passing ship had delivered
more trees for the local garrison to plant.
On our way up the mountain, Stroud and I walked through stands of Bermuda cedar, South African
yews, Persian lilacs, guava fruit trees from Brazil, thickets of Chinese ginger, New Zealand flax, taro
from Madeira, European blackberries, Japanese cherry trees, and screw pines that grow taller here than
at home on the islands of the Pacific. The summit was improbably covered in a dense stand of Asian
bamboo that rattled like a huge wind chime in the brisk trade winds that suddenly blew the mist away.
I was on Ascension because the very existence of this forest is controversial. It is more than a patch
of trees, more than a botanical garden. It is possibly the most cosmopolitan tropical forest in the world,
and it is said to be the only one that is entirely created by humans. Moreover, researchers who have
visited the forest herald it as a fully functioning ecosystem, created from scratch in little more than a
century from fragments assembled at random from around the world. The vegetation, insects, and other
species interact in countless ways, providing vital services for each other. Forest ecosystems are not sup-
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