Sociology 302: Forest and Culture
Paper 3
December 16, 2003
I am a life-long environmentalist and lover of the outdoors. Living in Humboldt County it is difficult not to be acutely aware of forest issues. The actions of Pacific Lumber Company make the news almost daily, tree sitters are a common occurrence, and the situation of the rivers and bays as result of logging practices are well known. I have been an avid backpacker, hiker, and mountain climber most of my life. I have hiked into a lot of the wilderness areas of the west, and seen my share of old growth forests. I have traveled in various parts of the world and seen the results of major deforestation on Vancouver Island, Thailand, New Zealand, Greece, Turkey, Sicily, and of course right here in Humboldt County. I have seen tree farms in Jordan, New Zealand, England, and France. I have seen great expanses of native forest in Alaska and Norway. So I thought I knew something about the forests. Finally I was aware of the deforestation that was taking place, particularly in Canada, Thailand, and via news articles and television what was happening to the tropical rainforests of South America and Africa.
But I was not aware of the magnitude of the problem, nor of any possible solutions. This class has taught me a great deal, and I will summarize what I have learned. I have been stimulated to read beyond the assigned texts, and I will include a few words about these ancillary readings as well.
From World Ecological Degradation I found it interesting to learn about the cyclical nature of deforestation, and how much it is tied to human behavior. Beginning with the Third-Millennium Stone Age in Mesopotamia and Harappa I found it interesting how agricultural practices, exuberant living, and trading practices eventually brought down a great civilization and virtually ruined the land. Then began a series of similar cycles including the Second Millennium Bronze age of Create and Greece and its deforestation and decline, the Age of City-State (Classical Greece) where the pattern repeated itself, the powerful and far reaching Roman Empire and its ultimate decline into the dark ages, and finally the rise of Europe and the New World. I had heard of the dark ages following the Roman Empire, but was not aware of the earlier ones. It was enlightening to note how man has repeatedly engaged in actions that led to a decline of the forests, ultimately to the point the nature had been so overwhelmed by human activity that civilization at that time would virtually collapse, leading to a long period of time where urbanization would decline, and the forests and the land recover. This is in spite of the certain knowledge that this would be the result. Because every civilization took steps at some point to practice good forest management, it must say something about the innate nature of mankind as a species that they recognized their mistakes, but repeated them anyway.
I learned a brand new concept during this class. This is the concept of distantiation, or separation from nature. As we become a more urbanized society, more and more people are removed from the forests to the point that they no longer feel any connection. When the forests provide fuel, game, shelter, and in many cases livelihood such as in the case of rubber tappers, people are far more likely to care about the fate of the forest. But when they move into an urban setting the forest becomes an abstraction, and when it comes under siege they do not feel any real concern. This seems to me to be a very major concern, and solutions to the problems of deforestation may lie partly in overcoming this problem. I found the film The Burning Season quite gripping.
From Our Forests Our Future I learned about the state of our world’s forests, and well as some possible approaches to solving the crisis facing the world’s forests. The numbers given showing deforestation in that book are truly alarming, and it appears that at the rate we are progressing in forest destruction, in less than 25 years we will have reduced the forests to a small fraction of historic levels.
I read as an ancillary reading A Forest Journey, by John Perlin. In that book it discussed the increased use of wood by civilizations throughout history, and what impact this has had upon our forests, particularly the forests of the United States. The use of large trees to supply masts for ships, and the need for the finest wood for railroad ties was interesting. When I recently read the book Nothing Like it in the World, by Steven E. Ambrose about the building of the transcontinental railroad, I appreciated it even more when he made note about the prodigious cutting of trees for ties, bridges, and snowsheds, and how all the sawmills in California had trouble keeping up with the demand for wood for this monumental effort. Purlin also pointed out how historically wood was society’s principle fuel for heating and manufacturing, construction of buildings, mining, tools, and even transportation, mostly ships and railroads. While not all of that is still true, wood still plays an important role mostly in construction of shelters the word over.
I found the Legend of Gilgamesh particularly interesting. It shows that even back in that era, people were quite well aware of the importance of the forests, and the need to live in harmony with nature. Yet in spite of a clear warning of the consequences of exploiting the forests, humankind paid no attention, and nothing has changed after all these centuries.
Our Forest Our Future was interesting reading, and I got a lot out the statistics, though the rate of deforestation was a bit depressing. The suggestions for a sustainable environment through voluntary actions was an interesting one, even if much of it seemed too idealist for practicality. Of particular note in Our Forests Our Future was the portion called “Forests in a Full World”. This projected a global population of around 9.5 billion in 2050. Also, while I was taking this class I read the book The Future of Life by Edward. O. Wilson. Wilson makes almost the same projections for population growth, and I will discuss this again later.
However, it was in Earthsummit.biz that I felt that I was beginning to truly come to grips with what was at the core of what the problem was, and some possible solutions. While I don’t want to repeat everything I said in the Final Examination, it seems apparent to me that there are three fundamental problems facing us. They are the stress that is being placed on our planet from overpopulation and human behavior, urbanization and distantiation from nature as mentioned earlier, and globalization and the emergence of both national and transnational corporations as an impersonal and exploitive force upon our forests. I will expand on each of there in turn.
The population of the earth is expanding at a very large rate. When I was young the population was a little over 3 billion and that seemed like a very large number. And amazingly enough almost a third of these people were in China. In just the last 50 years I have seen an stunning change in the visible landscape. Sacramento, where I was raised was a pleasant town of 125,000 surrounded by farms, and hills covered with huge oak trees. Today, it is teeming metropolis of over 2 million, almost all the oak trees are gone, and the farmland is covered with houses as far as the eye can see.
As mentioned earlier, I read The Future of Life by E.O Wilson while I was taking this class. This book contains some very alarming data about the “ecological footprint” of humankind on the earth, along with the aforementioned population growth. According to Wilson the amount of land and shallow sea needed for minimal living conditions such as found in developing nations is 2.1 hectares per person. In the U.S. we currently require 9.6 hectares. For everyone to live like we do in the U.S. would require three additional planets. Populations projections are a bit risky, but even using conservative estimates, the available evidence points to a population of approximately 8.5 billion by 2050 and somewhere between 9 and 10 billion by the end of the century, and that assumes a major effort to keep it under control. The reason this number is important, is because when related to the aforementioned number of hectares of land required to support this population we will basically need to cultivate all the available land on the planet to feed everyone. This has ominous implications for the forests. This in Wilson’s words creates a “bottleneck”. To relate this to Chew’s work in World Ecological Degradation, he would appear to call this same bottleneck a dark age. Wilson claims we entered and passed the point where the earth sustainable capacity could support the population in 1878. This is about the same date that Chew argues we began to enter the latest dark age.
We are engaging is some other very risky behavior. The use of fossil fuels is alarmingly high. While it is possible that we may find technological solutions to replace them, this is by no means a sure thing. If we truly begin to run out of this fuel source in the next 40 years, the implications are ominous. Almost every aspect of modern civilization is dependent on energy, including manufacturing, transportation, communication, and heating. It is hard to imagine what the world would be like if we tried to do manufacturing without electrical power, traveled without cars, planes, trains, and steamships, communicated without radio and television, and heated solely with wood. But all of this depends on electrical energy, and much of it is generated by fossil fuel.
Furthermore the use of fossil fuels is almost certainly causing global warming. This provides a wide variety of threats to life, as we know it. Rising oceans could inundate much of our agricultural land mass or require hugely expensive dikes to keep the ocean away. Climate changes could cause massive changes in agriculture, some good as we can grow more wheat in the northern regions, some bad as we lose productivity in the southern regions as desertification occurs. Disease could increase, especially mosquito born ones such as West Nile Disease and Malaria. There is a great deal of propaganda that claims that global warming is not really happening, but almost all of it is funded by large transnational corporations like Shell, Chevron/Texaco, Exxon, and British Petroleum. The Bush administration has bought into this misdirection, and this has increased the problem.
To return to World Ecological Degradation, from there I also developed a new appreciation of the impact of urbanization on resource consumption. It had never occurred to me that an urbanized society used more resources than a rural or distributed one. So the tendency for humans to cluster together increasingly into large urban settings seems quite counterproductive, and a change in values to make it more desirable for people to live in small enclaves closer to the land and resources would seem to be a good move. Moreover, urban poverty seems much more devastating than rural poverty, as people are crowed together into slums with no opportunity for clean water, raising of crops or animals for food, or even fresh air in some cases.
The relative percentage of the earth’s resources consumed by the United States was a bit of an eye opener, in particular the point that it was simply impossible for the world’s population to live as lavishly as we do. The earth simply lacks the capacity to supply this kind of demand. So the message to me was clear. Either we were going to live less exuberantly or the world was going to continue to be tiered into haves and have-nots. The comparison between the lives we live today in the United States and the way the Romans lived around the time of the birth of Christ is simply striking. The mosaics we saw of Rome show that nothing has really changed. This has caused me to look around at our current society, and I am appalled at the waste in our exuberant life styles, as we drive SUV’s to the supermarket, package so many goods in plastic bubblewrap, and spend so much of our resources on objects of art with no practicality. It seems clear to me that we are going to have to change our behavior drastically, and of course much of the rest of the world will never be able to reach this level of consumption simply because it is physically impossible.
I was already beginning to develop some strong opinions about the relationship between globalization and deforestation and our non-sustainable life style before I read Earthsummit.biz. A lot of this was coming from the fact that I was taking Sociology 305 – Sociology in the Modern World at the same time. There was such a strong crossover; it was sometimes difficult to remember from which class an idea came from. As I learned more about transnational corporations it was becoming increasingly clear that this trend bode ill will for the forests in general, and for humankind overall. So when we finally got to Earthsummit.biz I was already fairly well convinced that we needed to change something, I just was not sure what.
As I read more about the basic nature of corporate charters I was appalled to learn what has happened in the last 150 years to grant corporations power that is almost obscene in nature. Protected by the 14th amendment here in the U.S. that grants corporations equal protection under the law as real people, corporations were at the same time allowed to run unchecked by legal restraints on their behavior. So they give copious amounts of money to political parties while violating environmental laws with impunity, they engage in human rights violations around the world without fear of reprisals, and now with the aid of the WTO and the United Nations they run roughshod over basic principles of decency at every turn. They have seized the economic, social, and political agenda worldwide, and represent the single largest threat to our planet after our own selfish, self-indulgent individual behavior.
So suggestions for reeling in corporate power fall on a sympathetic ear in my case. Even here in Humboldt County I am simply appalled at the power of major corporations. I have watched Maxxam Corporation take a well behaving lumber company, Pacific Lumber, and turn it into a pariah. From sustainable logging to silted up rivers and destroyed fisheries, and finally to a corporate funded recall attempt of a district attorney who had the audacity to sue them for lying and fraud - this is corporate arrogance at its worst. And now we have the prospect of a Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) Terminal being discussed, and some people are in favor of this for a handful of jobs and a power plant producing electricity we don’t need, but can only sell. Recently I learned that behind all of this frenzied activity might be indeed a transnational consortium, Pacific Natural Gas. This is only just now surfacing, but I would not be a bit surprised to find out it is true.
So in summary I have learned a great deal. I have much better sense of history overall, because the history of deforestation is also much about cultures, trading practices, and social practices. I know much more than I used to about social, political, and economic threats to our forests, our environment, and in fact our entire planet. I know now about the World Trade Organization (WTO) and why so many people thought so poorly about it to walk into tear gas in Seattle. I now have a far greater appreciation of the importance of the world’s forests to other ecosystems. I can identify threats to the forests, and I can suggest strategies to arrest their decline. And finally I have learned about the major threat that unbridled corporate power is to everything we have. I honestly feel corporate power, and in particular transnational corporate power with the WTO doing it bidding, and the U.N. firmly in its clutches, is something that needs to be fought. That is a lot to learn in one semester.