Monday, November 17, 2008

Can’t See the Forest for the Trees Many experts believe it’s time to take a closer look, and not just in El Salvador. Despite assumptions that globalization is destroying forests, these researchers argue that in many parts of the world globalization and the policies that go along with it are in fact helping to create them. Migration from rural areas to cities or other countries, new markets for forest commodities, and even war are helping in some places to bring trees back. In other places the demand for diverse and far-flung products like rubber, tea, and açaí fruit, for example, is transforming existing forests and the lives that depend on them, often in unexpected ways. Perhaps most surprisingly, archaeologists and ecologists have discovered growing evidence that many forests once considered pristine, including much of the Amazon, have long been marked by human activity. Resurgent forests, changing forests, forests bearing the marks of ancient inhabitants: findings like these have made researchers reexamine how human activity has shaped forests in the past and is shaping them today. They have also forced researchers to revisit ideas that have long colored Western thinking, casting fresh doubt on what researchers call the “myth of the pristine” and suggesting that untouched forests may be more an invention of the Western mind than something found in the real world. Research also has challenged the assumption that human activity destroys biodiversity; in some circumstances, researchers say, it can increase biodiversity. Thus, rethinking forests carries powerful implications for conservation policy—it may require, for example, a greater appreciation for working forests. And rethinking forests leads to fundamental questions about the vexed relationship between nature and culture....

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