Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
centers. The hunters who enter by logging roads are efficient, cleaning out areas, leaving only the
smallest creatures. The roads also open the forest to refugees, who build villages where none were
before, compounding the effect of hunting.
While wars ravaged the DRC, just to the northwest, in the Republic of the Congo, or Congo-
Brazzaville, European companies demonstrated the power of industrial logging techniques that
could soon be replicated to the south. The proponents of logging claim that it brings wealth to
impoverished countries, but as Dale Peterson writes, it is actually “giving the cash wealth to one
group, the urban rich, and taking the biodiversity wealth from a different group, the rural poor.”
Logging diminishes the forests' capacity to sustain the people living there. The types of trees most
often logged have always been crucial to the livelihood of rural people, not only for materials but
for medicine and food. And they don't grow quickly. Some of the sapele trees (
Entandrophragma
cylindricum
) that loggers cut are four hundred to nine hundred years old, making them “approxim-
ate contemporaries of Leonardo Da Vinci.”
Logging proponents have argued that the removal of such old trees would have little impact on
the rest of the forest, but the complexity of these ecosystems defies the imagination. Conservation
biologist Lee White illustrates the relationships between forest species with the story of an elephant
that defecates in AD 1000, its feces containing the seeds of
Baillonella toxisperma
, locally known
as the moabi tree. Though many sprout, only one isn't consumed by the forest's animals and in-
sects. The seedling takes root, but for twenty years it doesn't reach more than a yard in height, until
a storm fells a massive tree and opens a hole in the canopy. As White writes, “This event initiated
a race. . . . Forest species growing in the center of the opening were scorched by the sun and died.
Other plants were broken by elephants feeding on the lush vegetation in the gap, or were bent into
nests by families of gorillas.” The moabi survives, lifting with it the vines that have grown around
its trunk, carrying them to the sunlight. Only when the tree is one hundred years old does it bear
fruit for the first time. White describes the many plant species and creatures living in its limbs, and
how, when monkeys eat its immature seeds, none sprout and years pass before it flowers again.
Three centuries later, the moabi produces fruit every three years, its large crops attracting numerous
species, even Iron Age humans moving their village to be closer to it. Its branches become home to
birds, primates, and plants, orchids covering its trunk. The story ends when the tree is one thousand
years old, over two hundred feet tall, nearly ten feet in diameter, when loggers cut it down and a
bulldozer drags it away. White's point is that we must not lose sight of geologic, or deep, time when
working with the rainforest. Conservation is enriched when we understand not just how to preserve,
as Cowlishaw and Dunbar write, “the biological processes that underpin living systems,” but also
“the ecological-evolutionary processes that gave rise to the communities as we now find them and
that continue to drive them.” It is important to understand how long it took for the rainforest to de-
velop, that its biodiversity is a product not of decades or even centuries, but of millennia.
As for humans, it's impossible to conceive of the forest without them. The most isolated areas
are affected by people hunting and harvesting fruit and insects that are also fed upon by animals.
However, while humans have likely been in the Congo basin for the past one hundred thousand
years, systematic logging of the oldest trees is very recent and has an extreme impact; the exterm-
ination of these trees radically disrupts the ancient ecological balance.
Logging also threatens traditional subsistence economies, which are deeply entwined with the
ecosystem. Ancient trees provide material for multiple aspects of people's lives—for building,
medicine, and food—and they are the ones that host the most caterpillars when other food sources
