Hope for the Rain Forests

The devastation of tropical rain forests, most conspicuous in Brazil, may finally be slowing. There are encouraging indications, welcome even if too late to reverse the effect on world temperatures and “the greatest loss of species that the world has ever experienced.”

This is the judgment of Ghillean T. Prance, the new director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, on the fringes of London. He was speaking at the Missouri Botanical Garden, on the fringes of St. Louis. You may be surprised to learn that Prance, Kew, the Missouri Garden and Peter H. Raven, its director, are at the center of the struggle to rescue the tropical forests of the world.

The Kew and Missouri botanical gardens are more than pretty parks with extraordinary collections of plants. They are global research centers engaged in the struggle for survival of plant species and, ultimately, humankind. They are two of the most important places for rescuing tropical species from extinction. The total of specimens in the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium reached 3.5 million last summer--”among the most important in the world,” Prance noted.

He was in St. Louis to receive the Henry Shaw Medal in recognition of his own work as the collector of 30,000 species from the Brazilian Amazon, among them 300 new species. So his words about conservation had a special meaning, an authentic urgency.

Brazil has cut and burned more than 30,000 square miles of primary rain forest in the last two years, he reported. In the summer of 1987 a satellite passing over the southern Amazon of Brazil picked up 6,803 points of fire, with smoke rising to the upper atmosphere. The total burn, including primary forests and reburning of already cleared land, rose from more than 78,000 square miles in 1987 to more than 95,000 square miles--about the area of Oregon--this year. And Brazil is not alone in destroying rain forests.

Pictures of the terrible burns seem to have played a decisive role in winning a change of policy from President Jose Sarney of Brazil, Prance reported. Last month, in an address to the Brazilian nation, Sarney announced new measures to slow Amazon forest destruction, including an end to tax incentives for deforestation projects and limits on cattle-raising projects, Prance said.

Rain-forest destruction is one of two major contributors to the greenhouse effect that now almost certainly will raise world temperatures by at least 3 degrees Celsius (about 5 degrees Fahrenheit), he said. The other principal culprit is the burning of fossil fuels, oil and gas, most of it consumed by the developed nations. This means that all industrialized nations, not just the developing nations that are destroying the great rain forests, are contributing to the climatic changes that bode widespread dislocation like the drought in the American Midwest last summer, he said.

“If there is to be any future for tropical rain forests and for the half of the world’s species which they harbor, it will be through a balance between conservation of natural ecosystems and rational, sustainable utilization of the other areas,” Prance concluded. Profound advice. That is why, in his view, botanists must do more than collect and catalogue. They must also become engaged in “economic botany, the study of useful plants.”