Reply to Niesten and Rice's Comment

The prescriptions advanced by ecologists and foresters about how best to preserve and/or sustainably manage tropical forest ecosystems influence public policy to varying degrees, depending on the relative power wielded by either group in international or governmental bodies at any particular moment in time. Public policy in turn is influenced by direct lobbying and through reaction to public opinion which is shaped by the debates that are presented in specialist publications like this one, the media, and in boardrooms, classrooms and conferences. Both disciplines are dominated by Northern scientists who arguably bring their own experiential biases to bear on the debates. The Commentary on Sustainable Forest Management and Conservation Incentive Agreements by Niesten and Rice is a restatement of their positions, as set out in the articles cited in their References. The Commentary first sets out the case against SFM, then moves to a promotion of conservation incentive agreements (CIA), and finally examines the case for combining the two, i.e. logging a stand of all its commercially valuable timber species and then closing it off under a conservation incentive agreement. The stated premise in the piece is the urgent need to cordon off ever larger amounts of ‘undisturbed natural habitat’ for biodiversity conservation against the continuing trend of deforestation due to logging and land clearing. The rallying cry of all these pieces is indeed to protect against disturbance of what are portrayed as the remaining ‘old growth’ tropical frontier forests. I shall comment briefly on four issues considered in this piece by Niesten and Rice: the unstated espousal of an equilibrium state for tropical forests; the critique of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM); the ‘log-andprotect’ prescription; and conservation incentive agreements. Finally I shall summarise an alternative approach to managing tropical forests sustainably, the goal desired by a planetary majority, including ecologists and foresters. My own bias is shaped by Guyanese citizenship and anthropological training. My approach, then, is that of a non-specialist, being neither ecologist nor forester. The Western science of ecology is a comparatively new field, but one whose pronouncements on the big questions of our time, from assigning responsibility among nations for global warming and climate change to species extinction rates are generally accorded great weight by public and policy makers alike. However, a number of the pronouncements of its adherents have been questioned from both inside (Botkin 1990, Wu and Loucks 1995) and outside (Blaikie 1985, Cronon 1996, Forsyth 2003) of the discipline. The underlying premise of this piece by Niesten and Rice is the undesirability of ‘disturbance’ of tropical forest ecosystems, echoing ‘the cult of wilderness’ approach of Northern ‘deep’ or Green ecologists. The goal of ‘undisturbed natural habitat,’ is introduced in paragraph 3, and recurs throughout the Commentary. The authors maintain that ‘relative to an unlogged forest, even the most careful timber harvest implies a significant disturbance that can result in a variety of negative impacts on biodiversity’. However, many ecologists and other scientists now question the equilibrium thesis, as new scientific evidence emerges of planetary disturbances and more studies published of anthropogenic forests and landscapes. Some years ago, the geographers Karl Zimmerer and