Life doesn’t operate in black and white.
If we’re honest, we admit that the things we like have
negative impacts, and the things we hate may include positives. Shades of gray.
Take forest management. We can all agree that
clearcutting a forest has devastating, even catastrophic impacts. The forest,
after all, is entirely removed, even if it or some semblance of it may be
regrown later.
You might assume that human collection of non-timber
resources in the forest is, by contrast, pretty benign. Like collection of fruits
or flowers or roots for medicine, tapping of trees for their latex to make
rubber, wandering the Hawaiian forest for maile.
(Image: Prized Hawaiian forest vine, maile. Credit: Forest & Kim Starr.)
But as benign as they might seem when compared to logging,
these activities also have impacts, ranging from minor to very significant.
University of Hawai`i botany professor Tamara Ticktin, a conservation
biologist and ethnoecologist, has studied these issues, and her insights have
some weight. The British Ecological Society recently named one of her papers one
of the 100 most influential among the 17,000 papers it has published.
That 2004 paper was titled, “The ecological implications of
harvesting non-timber forest products.” It is available here.
Ticktin herself said the strength of the paper may be that
it had pulled together a great deal of information that previously had not been
collected in one place.
“Prior to the Ticktin article, our knowledge of the
ecological consequences of non-timber forest product extraction was disparate,
and spread out across many different case studies. Ticktin made an important advance
by systematically reviewing the conclusions of 70 different studies from across
the world,” wrote Jos Barlow in a review for the British Ecological Society.
In an interview, Ticktin said there have been widely
different views of non-timber harvest—anywhere from the view that any activity
by humans is harmful, to the view that traditional collecting in forests is
largely benign.
In the paper, she makes the point that “extraction of
non-timber plant parts may alter biological processes at many levels.” And
dramatically increasing the harvest can turn a relatively non-impactful
activity into one with significant negative consequences for the forest.
“One of the take-homes is that it depends on local knowledge.
It’s how you do it,” she said.
Reviewer Barlow, an ecologist himself, wrote: “the good news
is that some management techniques can be effective at reducing the negative impacts
of harvesting. These include enrichment planting, shade management, and focussing
on non-lethal harvesting activities that do not affect the population of adult
stems (such as the harvesting of bark, fruits, latex and resins).”
As a local example, Ticktin said she has a student looking
into methods of harvesting the scented lei vine, maile, in Hawaiian forests. "Improper
harvest techniques could damage the plants, while careful, informed harvesting
could have no effect or could even stimulate growth" she said.
It can also depend on what plant is being harvested, and
what part of the plant is being harvested. Examples of collection goals: There
are different impacts from stripping new growth from maile, collecting fruits
from mokihana or pulling entire hapu`u plants out of the forest.
None is as destructive as clearcutting, but neither is any entirely without impact.
Shades of gray.
© Jan TenBruggencate 2014
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