357 Latin America

–Costa Rica: 26) Bird Route is the brain child of the Rainforest Biodiversity Group
–Colombia: 27) New rainforest reserve dedicated to the protection of medicinal plants
–Paraguay: 28) Hiking a last chunk of rainforest near San Rafael: only 5% remains
–Brazil: 29) Stora Enso bribes it way into the destruction of another 2,500 hectares, 30) What is the jungle like? 31) Eliasch’s demise, 32) restoring the forest will take 4,000 years, 33) Save the golden lion tamarin, 34) Species diversity in regenerating forests,

osta Rica:

26) Staring up into the rainforest canopy, it’s almost like looking into a living Impressionist painting, your eyes dazzled by the flash of colors, your ears picking up the extroverted squawks and screeches of green and blue colored Macaws, orange and green Motmots, and multi-hued Toucans. You’re in Central America’s first bird route. Now the 400 plus bird species that inhabit the Sarapiquí region of Costa Rica will have a greater chance of survival, and birders from around the world a chance to see these grand winged masters of the sky. At roughly the size of West Virginia, Costa Rica has a greater variety of bird species than all of North America. It is home to five per cent of all the world’s known animal and plant species, including 850 bird species. The Costa Rican Bird Route is the brain child of the Rainforest Biodiversity Group, and partially funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The route consists of twelve birding sites, teaming up established and newly created biological reserves, to offer a variety of bird watching opportunities and programs in the San Juan – La Selva Biological Corridor of northeastern Costa Rica. The birdwatching industry is a global phenomenon, and has seen the largest increase in participants over the last ten years. Birding is the fastest-growing outdoor activity in the US, and according to a survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 51.3 million Americans report that they watch birds. And more are taking it up all the time. http://travelvideo.tv/news/more.php?id=14675_0_1_0_M

Colombia:

27) Colombia today announced the creation of a rainforest reserve dedicated to the protection of medicinal plants. The Orito Ingi-Ande Medicinal Flora Sanctuary encompasses 10,626 hectares of biologically-rich tropical rainforest ranging in altitude from 700 to 3300 meters above sea level. The sanctuary is based on an initiative launched by local indigenous communities with the support of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), an innovative NGO working with native peoples to conserve biodiversity, health, and culture in South American rainforests. Members of the communities — which include the Kofán, Inga, Siona, Kamtsá, and Coreguaje tribes — combined their rich knowledge of medicinal plants with cutting-edge technology to determine the placement and extent of the reserve. Their contributions to the effort are reflected in the name of the reserve, according to ACT. “The name ‘Ingi-Ande,’ which means ‘our territory’ in the language of the Kofán people, is being used to underscore the robust participation of local indigenous peoples in the design and declaration of the sanctuary, part of which lies on Kofán ancestral lands and is long celebrated in their rich oral traditions,” said ACT in a statement. “The process of creating, designing, and declaring the Orito Ingi-Ande sanctuary has been the result of a coordinated effort among the Ministry of the Environment, Housing, and Territorial Development; the Special Administrative Unit of the Colombian National Park System; the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT); Rosario University; and especially the Union of Traditional Yagé Healers of the Colombian Amazon (UMIYAC), whose traditional healers and apprentices provided the support and knowledge necessary to undertake the process.” Indigenous groups used GPS units to map the occurrence of yoco plants and other important medicinal plants identified by shamans, or indigenous healers. By combining technology with traditional plant knowledge, the effort helped strengthen cultural ties between indigenous youths and elders at a time when such cultures are disappearing even faster than rainforests. http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0612-colombia.html

Paraguay:

28) I always take an umbrella when I go to the rainforest. Some people believe in just getting wet, but this can be uncomfortable and surprisingly chilly. I put the damn thing up a little before six last Sunday morning and set off into the forest. I was at San Rafael, a chunk of Atlantic rainforest in Paraguay. The determined, soaking downpour explained how such forests get their name. Atlantic rainforest bears the distinction of being the most damaged habitat on Earth. There’s about 5 per cent of it left. I was traveling with a conservation organisation called Guyra Paraguay, and for me the glass was 5 per cent full. The forest was silent, no voices, just the sound of the rain pattering on umbrella and the wide leaves of the understorey. The place is both inhospitable and enchanting. It sucks you in, it involves you. You raise your eyes and see plants on plants on plants. Everything is soft, damp growth. If you are still enough, you can hear the trees growing. It is not a good place for human beings; it lacks the clear logic of the African savannahs from where we sprang. This is a sad place, a lonely place, a broken forest crying out for healing. A fragile and fractured environment, it has been patched and patchworked. That it survives at all is miracle enough. Some might think that the surviving 5 per cent is hardly worth bothering with, but you don’t think that when you are in the guts of the place. From the air, bouncing in by light aircraft, I could see chunks here, chunks there. This part has been bought up by Guyra Paraguay with the support of the World Land Trust in this country. There are holes at the edge of the forest and here, gloriously, the broken forest is being healed. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_barnes/article4133079.ece

Brazil:

29) Stora Enso has acquired 2,500 hectares of land in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in the south of Brazil, reportedly to cultivate fast-growing eucalyptus trees for paper production. This will force out peasant farmers from their land, thereby jeopardising food production, campaigners say. The company is also at the receiving end of public anger in Finland after it closed down a pulp factory this year. The company laid off 200 workers in the small northern Finnish city Kemijärvi. Brazilian land rights activists say Stora Enso will exacerbate food insecurity because it plans to divert agricultural land to cultivating eucalyptus. “With the global rise in food prices, the use of land for cultivating monocultures and soya for cattle is counterproductive,” Ulysses Campos, coordinator of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil told IPS on a visit to Finland. “The Brazilian government is to a large extent an accomplice in spreading the cultivation of monoculture plantations, but they are selling it as if eucalyptus would be something very good for the Brazilian economy,” he said. MST says that Stora Enso is currently in violation of a 29-year-old law that forbids foreign companies from owning land within 150 kilometres of Brazil’s border. The area in Rio Grande do Sul where the company is said to have acquired the land is close to Uruguay. In order to circumvent the law, Campos said Stora Enso has set up proxy companies in Brazil which then acquire the land for Stora Enso. One of the companies, he said, is Azenglever Agropecuária. Ulla Paajanen-Sainio, vice-president for investor relations and financial communications at Stora Enso denied that Stora Enso is doing anything illegal. “It is not our view that we have done anything illegal, and we are relying on Brazilian legal advice to proceed further with this,” she told IPS. Azenglever Agropecuária, she said, is owned by two Brazilians who are local employees of Stora Enso. She said the Finnish-Swedish company is providing the equity. http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42794

30) The jungle, in the words of Candace Slater, a specialist in Brazilian literature, is “an emphatically nonparadisal space.” For five hundred years, the Amazon has been one of those “dark unruly spaces of the earth” — the phrase is that of postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha — that serve as a Rorschach test of the European imagination. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver describes the jungle like this: “The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. The forest eats itself and lives forever.” Rainforest environmentalism sees the rainforest native as sharing the purity of the rainforest — closer to nature, less affected by the evils of the world, demonstrating the integrity of the unspoiled. The native of the rainforest is a monolithic figure, the keeper and companion of the plants and animals, an instrument to criticize our own civilization. That purity becomes associated with a wisdom we once had but have lost, and which we need to recover in order to rebuild what our technology has destroyed. Thus, the native is our guide — “our guide to nature, or our guide to the prehistoric past,” as anthropologist Bernard McGrane puts it. http://singingtotheplants.blogspot.com/2008/06/jungle-and-rainforest.html

31) Eliasch, a Swedish-born businessman, is a former deputy treasurer of the Conservative party, and now serves as Gordon Brown’s special representative for deforestation. In the course of a speech in 2006 he said that hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico had cost insurance companies “$75bn” (£38bn) and it might be cheaper to buy the entire Brazilian rainforest for “$50bn” (£26bn) thereby preventing deforestation and making hurricanes less frequent. Eliasch has himself bought up around 400,000 acres of Amazon rainforest, an area about the size of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city. He made the purchase in 2005 and is believed to have paid around £8m for it. According to its website, the idea behind Cool Earth is that “rainforests are worth much more left standing – both for the planet and for local communities.” His organisation, Cool Earth, invites people to donate money to “secure one area of land that would otherwise be sold to loggers and ranchers and to price deforestation out of the market”. The charity says that it puts its money into a local trust and that it “employs local people to do the work, helping them to get income from the forest without cutting it down, and make sure the rainforest is worth more standing than cut down”. “For as little as £70 you can protect a whole acre” it tells potential donors, while £35 protects half an acre. So far, so worthy, but the combination of Eliasch’s remarks and activities have now caused a growing backlash amongst Brazilians outraged by the notion that they cannot be trusted to take care of the Amazon themselves. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/12/brazil.climatechange?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnew
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32) A new study has suggested that for a rainforest to regenerate completely, it might take up to 4000 years. According to a report in New Scientist, the study, which focused on the Brazilian Atlantic forest, determined that though certain aspects of a rainforest may return in just 65 years, for the landscape to truly regain its native identity takes a lot longer up to 4000 years. The Atlantic forest originally stretched along the southern half of Brazils Atlantic coast, covering some 1.2 million square kilometers. Once lush, the forest has been continually exploited for food, wood and space. Today, land it used to occupy is home to most of the country’s population, including Brazils two largest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and only 100,000 square kilometers of forest remain. To determine how long it would take for the forest to regenerate, Marcia Marques and colleagues at the Federal University of Parana collected data on different parcels of forest that had been virtually cleared and left to recover for varying amounts of time. They then plugged the data into a computer model to calculate how long it would take for the forest to recover entirely. The researchers looked at four different measures of forest regrowth: the proportion of tree species whose seeds are dispersed by animals, the proportion of species that can grow in shade, tree height, and the number of native species. http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/world-news/rainforest-regeneration-might-take-up-to-4000-yea
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33) The endangered golden lion tamarin — a flagship species for conservation efforts in Brazil’s highly threatened Atlantic Forest or Mata Atlantica — plays an important role in seed dispersal, thereby helping forest regeneration, according to research published in the June issue of the open access e-journal Tropical Conservation Science. Collecting droppings of golden lion tamarin introduced to União Biological Reserve in Rio de Janeiro state, Marina Janzantti Lapenta and Paula Procópio-de-Oliveira of the Golden Lion Tamarin Association found that the small primates are efficient seed dispersers, due to the number and variety of seeds consumed and because they help faciliate germination. “The tamarins deposit the seeds in places more favorable to germination,” said Lapenta, lead author of the study and an ecologist at the University of São Paulo. Lapenta says that tamarins deposit seeds in favorable habitats far from the trees where they feed, giving the seeds a better chance of germinating away from seed predators and with better access to sunlight. “While other animals disperse seeds in the same forests of golden lion tamarins, these species disperse seeds of different sizes and in other quantities,” Lapenta explained. Lapenta and Procópio-de-Oliveira suggest the golden lion tamarin goes beyond simply serving as flagship species for conservation: the charismatic primate actually plays an important role in the recovery of the Mata Atlantica, an ecosystem than has been diminished by more than 90 percent due to logging and agricultural expansion. http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0609-lapenta_tcs.html

34) In 1967, an American billionaire named Daniel Ludwig purchased 16,000 square kilometers of rainforest in Brazil–an area half the size of Belgium. Ludwig, who had made his fortune building supertankers, was betting on a paper shortage and hoped to boost his wealth by growing Eucalyptus trees for pulp.Thinking big, Ludwig shipped a preassembled paper mill from Japan and floated it up the Jari River. He built a new town, and his workers chopped down about 1300 square kilometers of rainforest to make way for the plantations. The rest remained untouched. After a little more than a decade, however, the scheme failed. Stymied by rising energy costs and business setbacks, Ludwig pulled out. Logging continues in the area, but many of the clear-cuts have been returning to the wild. Ludwig’s losses have been science’s gain. Given the rate at which rainforests are being cleared, some ecologists say there is a growing need to turn more attention to the woods that sprout up in their place. Whether the land is left to its own devices or managed by humans as tree farms, these second-generation ecosystems are coming to dominate the wooded landscape. Attracted by the Jari property’s combination of intact rainforest, vast tree plantations, and regenerating forest, Carlos Peres recognized it was a perfect place to figure out which species persist where. “If you’re trying to predict the future, this is what you need to do,” says Peres. A wildlife biologist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K., he and his team have now published their follow-up of Ludwig’s folly in a series of recent papers. “It’s comprehensive enough that the results are convincing,” says ecologist Robert Dunn of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Whether those results are good news or bad news, however, is a matter of debate.”The big take-home message is that there are a lot of species missing” from secondary forests and plantations, Dunn says. And for Peres’s team, the findings reinforce the need to conserve the remaining old-growth tropical forests. “Primary forest is even harder to replace than many researchers expect,” says Toby Gardner of the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil. “For many species, once these virgin forests have gone there is nowhere else to go.” http://www.mydeadspace.cn/blog/?p=237