Peter Lehner's Blog: Saving Wildlife and Wild Places

Saving Forests One Tree at a Time

2010-04-14T19:24:42Z

News about forest conservation is often filled with sobering facts about the damage caused by deforestation.

Just recently a United Nations study found that globally we are losing the equivalent of an area the size of Costa Rica each year to deforestation. This is scary news; as we lose our forests so go countless species, some still yet to be discovered, and even more greenhouse gas emissions are released into the atmosphere.

Encouragingly though, the UN study also found that targeted efforts have helped slow the global rate of deforestation. While much remains to be done to save our forests, we are seeing that we can make a difference.

Last year, with the support of our members, NRDC's Revive a Rainforest initiative planted 30,000 trees in Costa Rica's Central Valley. Our local partner CATIE, a regional leader in tropical resource management, will use this project as a model for farmers, rural communities and organizations interested in reforestation initiatives.

Photo Credit: CATIE

I helped plant one of the first trees and I'm heartened to see how big the trees in our Member Rainforest have already grown -- from just a few inches less than a year ago to nearly three feet tall.

Our reforestation initiative is also now seeking to restore the biodiversity of 50 acres of former cattle pasture and plantation land on Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula. Working with the Friends of the Osa (or FOO), NRDC’s Revive a Rainforest initiative will now plant up to 50 different species of trees and plants.

Photo Credit: Tina Lee & Kristine Bucchianeri

I've been travelling and working in Costa Rica for many years but had never had the chance to visit the Osa Peninsula until last year. I was amazed by the abundance of wildlife -- in one afternoon I saw toucans, four different species of monkeys, hundreds of dolphins in the Golfo Dulce and trees full of scarlet macaws -- including one that was very friendly! The Osa is one of the wildest places on Earth and we must do all we can to protect it from the persisting threat of unsustainable agricultural and expanding real estate development.

We can restore areas that have lost their biodiversity and recreate the type of habitat where animals such as the jaguar and spider monkey can thrive again. The goal of our project with FOO is to do precisely that.

The project site will be a living laboratory, especially for young people in the Osa to learn first-hand the importance of protecting forest biodiversity. We're excited about these projects and very grateful to the NRDC members who have supported our efforts to revive Costa Rica's rainforests.

And I'm happy to say that The Walt Disney Company is also excited about our project and has selected the Cerro Osa Restoration project as one of five habitat restoration efforts that will receive support through Disney's Friends for Change: Project Green.

Through the Friends for Change website kids can learn how to help the planet through simple every day actions - involving their friends and tracking their collective impact. Kids can also vote to help Disney decide how much support each habitat project will receive.

Disney’s initiative means that starting at an early age kids will have a real opportunity to see and learn just how important small steps like planting a new tree can be.

In fact, as we are discovering, these small steps can collectively revive a rainforest.

A Goal for Copenhagen: Keep the Focus on Enforcement

2009-09-23T20:50:20Z

Few seem willing to address the issue openly, but one of the toughest issues to address when delegates gather in Copenhagen in December for the global conference on climate change will be governance. Many developing nations attending have stressed and under-funded civil systems. Others are torn by armed conflict and human suffering that push enforcement of environmental laws to the fringes of the political priority list. As an experienced environmental prosecutor, I know how hard it is to achieve compliance particularly with environmental laws which are often perceived as not posing the type of immediate threat to public safety that ordinary crimes are -- even in a stable democracy such as the United States. I also know what happens without enforcement: Very little.

Beyond my experience as a prosecutor, I also have a personal connection with a story that proves this point. That experience is with the tale of two modest Central American nations, Costa Rica and Nicaragua -- neighbors who share a long common border, similar environmental laws -- and vastly different records of enforcement. I've watched this tale unfold first-hand for nearly 30 years during frequent visits to the region to help with family businesses in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. (The family coffee farm there is Rainforest Alliance-certified.)

When economic expansion, cheap credit for cattle and laws favoring deforestation all contributed to a dramatic loss of Costa Rica's lush tropical rain forest between 1950 and the mid-1980s, alarm bells went off in the corridors of power. Vast stretches of remaining public forest land were placed under protection, national parks were expanded and reforestation projects launched. With a well-established rule of law and functioning government institutions, the protection worked. A quarter of the nation's territory is national forest land. Forests on privately-owned land are protected with the help of FUNDECOR (Foundation for the Development of the Central Volcanic Mountain Range), a non-profit foundation established to protect Costa Rica's tropical forests. Under a FUNDECOR program, revenue from taxes on gasoline and tourism are used to pay farmers not to cut forested areas of their land. Those monitoring the program say the compliance rate of private landowners is high -- 99 percent, according to one estimate. Moreover, although the situation is far from perfect, in many areas of the country, people really do comply with laws restricting logging.

As a result, Costa Rica's rainforest, which had shrunk from about 60 percent to around a quarter of the country's land area between 1950 and the mid-1980s, began growing again and today once again covers over half the country. Shrewd political leadership coupled with some slick marketing has leveraged the richness of those forests into one of the country's biggest commercial assets. Eco-tourism today is a huge money-spinner and President Oscar Arias talks about a new goal to make Costa Rica the first nation in the world to become carbon neutral by 2021, in time for the country's 200th birthday.

The ingredients to this success: political stability, functioning institutions, a respect for the rule of law, a strong economy and a stable middle class that values quality of life issues, such as a clean environmental quality. Now, with huge economic benefit from eco-tourism, strong environmental practices play an additional role. They protect an important commercial asset. The consistency of Costa Rica's enforcement of environmental laws -- and other legislation -- also creates a level of predictability that encourages new investment across a broad cross-section of the economy.

In neighboring Nicaragua, the story is very different. With income levels about one-fifth of those in Costa Rica, Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the hemisphere (behind Haiti). Poverty, together with a history of political turmoil through much of the past century, have left Nicaragua's government institutions woefully under-funded, inefficient and open to corruption. There is no well-developed culture of compliance with environmental laws or consistent enforcement to assure such compliance. The judicial system is weak and there is no clearly defined political vision of what to do with the forested land.

Because of this, illegal logging operations all too often out-muscle municipal authorities who are responsible for forest management but have few of the resources needed to fulfill the task. Today, Nicaragua's forests occupy roughly half the territory they covered in 1950 and continue to shrink in size, albeit at a slower pace than a decade ago. A dramatic turn-around any time soon seems too much to hope for.

My point here is that it will be critical to focus in Copenhagen on steps that take the realities on the ground into consideration. Only such steps can make a difference. Environment specialist Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations is correct when he calls it "a waste of time" to focus too heavily on near-term, legally binding carbon emissions caps for developing countries. They may sound serious, but, as Levi points out, they are largely toothless. Verification is difficult and punitive measures highly unlikely.

There's no silver bullet that can resolve the carbon emissions problem in Copenhagen, but there are steps that can be taken to help developing nations strengthen their institutions and, with that, enforcement.

Under provisions of the Central America Free Trade Agreement's (CAFTA) environmental chapter, for example, the United States is working with governments in the region, including Nicaragua, on a program to strengthen environmental legislation. This work includes a public awareness campaign about a provision in the agreement that enables individuals to sue for compliance.

Shortly after coming to office, the Obama administration declared it planned tough enforcement of environmental provisions in America's trade agreements. Such steps are crucial because the sooner developing countries learn there is a visible upside to responsible environmental practices then pressing for enforcement will be seen more as an asset than a liability. Then we will be on the way to real change.

Protecting the Rainforests: Sending out an SOS on behalf of the world's tropical forests

2009-09-21T20:24:57Z

As all eyes turn toward the UN's Climate Week and G20 summit, now is a good time to focus on the international impacts of climate change and the actions we all can take to stop the further deterioration of our planet.

One such action is to lend your voice to an international effort to protect the rainforests.

NRDC has partnered with the Prince's Rainforests Project - an initiative created by Britain's Prince Charles to support the development of an emergency package to curb deforestation and help spread the word on the connection between tropical deforestation and climate change.

Prince Charles, a dedicated environmentalist, has recruited famous faces and influential leaders including the Dalai Lama, Michael Dell, Daniel Craig, Eric Schmidt of Google, Harrison Ford, Russ Mittermeier, Pele, and Princes William and Harry to educate the public on the connection between rainforests and Climate Change. And just recently, I participated in the effort alongside NRDC president Frances Beinecke.

You too can lend your voice to the cause by making your own frog video right on the site; post it to social networking sites, and send to friends and family. We urge you to take minute to sign up and here's why:

Curbing tropical deforestation is vital in order to mitigate climate change. Tropical forests act as carbon sinks, sequestering approximately 20% of greenhouse gas emissions internationally. In addition, tropical deforestation occurs on such a grand scale that it accounts for about 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide - that's more than the entire international transportation sector (all of the planes, trucks, cars, and ships combined).

The 2007 UNFCCC Bali Action plan included language addressing policy approaches and positive incentives to protect forests; and this year's climate negotiations will consider plans for a scheme known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation). REDD aims to reduce deforestation and forest degradation through financial incentives. Unfortunately, developing and implementing REDD will not be simple and might take years to come into fruition as stakeholders iron out REDD's key questions and concerns.

In the interim, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN estimates that the world could lose over 100 million hectares of tropical forests over the next 10 years. Several observers including Norway's International Climate and Forests Initiative, Project Catalyst and the Prince's Rainforests Project, all developed proposals for emergency funding to curb deforestation as REDD comes into fruition.

In London in April of 2009, HRH The Prince of Wales (Prince Charles) hosted a meeting of world leaders in order to discuss the need for immediate interim action. The result of this meeting was the formation of the Informal Working Group on Interim Financing for REDD (IWG-IFR), with Norway acting as the secretariat. The IWG-IFR has met several times this year and will likely reach an agreement early 2010.

As negotiations continue, we at NRDC strongly encourage everyone to call upon world leaders to reach an agreement and sign up today to show support for emergency action to save the rainforests.

My Week With the Whales

2009-02-27T17:27:42Z

Gray whales love to spyhop. That’s one of the primary lessons of my week in Laguana San Ignacio, one of NRDC’s premier BioGems. On the west coast of Mexico’s Baja California, the lagoon is the last pristine breeding and gathering area for gray whales. I believe it is actually the last pristine spot in the world for any whale.

Laguana San Ignacio is pristine in a way no other place I've seen. As I sat on a small bluff on a chair, I could see only water, the untouched far side (now federally protected thanks to NRDC's advocacy) and whales.

Many many whales. At any one moment, I could see 10 to 15 whale spouts, the backs of one or two whales passing nearby and perhaps one whale "spyhopping."

The whales rise vertically out of the water, entirely silently. They pause with 3, 4, maybe 5 feet out of the water. Hanging completely still. "Doing what," we asked our guide incessantly. The answer: "We don't know … perhaps to get their eyes out of the water to look around."

After popping up, the whales may slide straight back into the water, also silently, or may flop around a bit, but still gently. Only then do they arch their back and spout. Once or twice the whale opened its mouth. (I'd say smiled, but that implies we know why they open their mouths and we don't.) It was when they opened their mouths that we could see the baleen, the gill-like sieves they use to catch the small animals they eat. Hard to imagine such huge beings survive entirely on mud-dwelling critters smaller than my thumb.

While spyhopping is silent, breaching is not. And the gray whales breach a lot. We saw one breach 8 times in a row. Our “panguero” (or boat driver) said the most he's seen was 23 breaches in a row. They raise most of their 40 tons out of the water and come crashing down. The splashes can be seen for miles. We don't know why they breach; perhaps it's like scratching their backs.

But what amazed me most about my week with the whales is that many are friendly. Really friendly. They are curious and come right up to the small boat. They take a look. They push the boat. They sometimes stay just inches out of reach of our hands. But at times they would come close and we could stroke them (not pat them, we were told).

They'd stick around as if they were having fun. One put its snout up right by me and I was able to kiss it (the pangueros say that's the thing to do). Kissing a whale? It's clear that doesn't happen unless they want that. (Their body control is exquisite -- they can put their huge body, flipper or tail exactly as close or as far from us as they want.)

I know the thrill and deep sense of wonder that I got from touching a whale. I wonder what they get from the interaction.

Describing the Devastation of Mountaintop Mining

2009-01-29T14:00:55Z

As a lawyer, I've written about environmental harms quite often. Yet as I recently flew over several of the larger mountaintop mines in eastern Kentucky, I struggled to find the words to describe the devastation. The scars where trees, topsoil and many feet of unwanted rock have been ripped off, leaving barren rubble behind. The dams at the head of the valleys (known locally as "hollows") that fill the steep valleys with the rubble and other fill. Unnaturally colored ponds sitting behind the dams.

I visited eastern Kentucky at the invitation of Marianne, a friend from school, and her husband Jim. While there, we met many people engaged in fighting mountaintop removal and took an air tour of the mining sites. Appropriately enough, after our tour, we landed at Wendell Ford airport, the site of a former mountaintop mine now turned into a flat table where a steep mountain had once been. Greeting us at the airport were posters claiming that "coal is the future," with photos that can only be described as Orwellian:

Before: a mountain, looking barren and useless.
During: big trucks and bulldozers, implying jobs.
After: animals and grasses and specific claims that reclamation of mined areas "improves" the land.

The lie represented by those photos was seen clearly from the air where all we could see for miles was barren rock, not fertile productive farms. Rick, who has lived in the area his entire life, told us that there are no animals in mined areas. Animals, he explained, need nuts to last through the winter. Nuts obviously come from trees and the biggest piece missing from these lands are trees.

Truman, another life long resident of the area, put it simply: "Trees don't grow in rock rubble."

Another area resident showed us where coal companies, rushing to mine before the end of the Bush Administration, pushed over all the trees, further devastating the landscape without any regard for logging income and jobs that would be lost.

I asked our companions why so few people complain about the mines destroying their water supplies, covering their houses with toxic dust and cracking their foundations with blasting?

Carl, a third-generation miner now retired, says he's speaking out and many people tell him privately that they agree, but can't speak publicly because a family member has a job with a mine and would lose it if they did. "It's the only way to support their families now; that's why we need some wind farms and other energy sources around here," he said.

Yes, indeed. Renewable energy is part of the answer. So is energy efficiency - I did not see one compact fluorescent bulb in or on any of the houses or buildings in the hollows. We also need to cap carbon and make coal pay its true price so that clean energy can compete with it. NRDC will be working on all of that.

Oh, and we found out that the coal ash that caused the big spill in Tennessee at the TVA Kingston plant came from the very hollow - Montgomery Creek - that we visited. The coal destroyed one community when it was dug up and another when it was dumped.

Seems so last 18th century. I know that a 21st century technology and policy can do better. Working with the new Administration in Washington and the local communities that are literally being blown away, we will.

The photographs that accompany this post were taken by NRDC member J. Henry Fair. They were both taken at Kayford Mountain in Southern West Virginia in late 2005. Additional photographs by Henry can be found at http://www.jhenryfair.com and http://www.industrialscars.com

Taking a Break to Plant a Tree

2009-01-28T15:50:54Z

TURRIALBA, Costa Rica -- There is a reason they call them rainforests. It was pouring as I put the first tree into the ground here in a new forest that NRDC is planting with the support of our members. The one good thing about all that rain: it made it easier to dig the hole.

We’re planting the rainforest in Costa Rica in an area that long ago was a rainforest, but for the last 50 or 100 years has been a cattle farm. Nearby are other existing forests as well as some other acreage that we hope will also get replanted as forest. The seedling I planted, a native species called Vochysia, was about 10 inches high. I had just stood by a Vochysia tree that was about 30 feet high and only 5-6 years old. Trees and other plants grow so quickly here that it is very exciting to think that birds will be perching in the tree I planted within a couple of years.

Jose Joaquin Campos, the director of CATIE – the Center for Tropical Agriculture, Investigation, and Education – showed me the area and also planted a tree. Campos works with students from more than 20 countries in Latin America, teaching them all sustainable farming and other practices.

In the area of the new rainforest, they have carefully studied the watershed. The area feeds one of Costa Rica’s largest rivers but it has a lot of small towns with few sewage facilities and farms that cause a great deal of erosion. So they are working hard to restore the area and to teach farmers how to conserve their soil.Many of the trees in NRDC’s forest will be planted by local school children or by local farmers learning about tree planting so they can plant native trees on some of their land.

It’s quite something to drive around this part of Costa Rica. It rains a lot so it’s very lush. But much of the lush greenness is pasture for dairy cows. Some call it the Switzerland of Latin America. But those lush fields are almost all former rainforests so to understand lushness is only possible when you go into the rainforest itself.

In the forest, the vegetation is so think it’s impossible to go anywhere not on a path. I counted about 15 types of ferns in a few minutes (and I’m no expert). Trees of all sizes and shapes. I could hear lots of birds, but see few of them in the foliage. Even the air smells and feels vibrant. Of course, with all this tree cover, the land retains its soil moisture better and there is far less erosion and runoff so the nearby streams are richer as well.

Indeed, not so long ago, I walked up a stream to see a big waterfall nearby the new forest. There was no path and the only way was to go up the stream itself, walking in the water. The rainforest – also a second growth forest that is now legally protected – came right down to water’s edge. Blue morpho butterflies and many others I don’t know the name of flitted by. Small waterfalls brought little rivulets into the stream. It was clear that stream and rainforest were one joint ecosystem.

The NRDC forest-to-be will connect several of Costa Rica’s parks, allowing animals to freely roam amidst the rivers and streams crossing the area like arteries. It’s nice to be able to take a break from law books and memos to see our work literally take root.

We’re Drowning In Our Own Trash

2008-07-11T19:05:37Z

Thomas Malthus has suddenly become popular again. While Americans are concerned about fuel prices, much of the rest of the world is concerned about food prices. In countries like Egypt and Bangladesh, and in regions of Africa, riots have erupted over a shortage of food. In other countries, like China and India, when rice is shipped, it’s shipped under the protection of armed guards.

Global production simply can’t keep up with global consumption. And so people are asking: Was Malthus right?

Malthus, an economist and demographer from the 19th century, is known for predicting that population growth moves more quickly than the expansion of food production. As he former moves geometrically, and the latter arithmetically, its inevitable that population overcomes production. As a result, Malthus predicted, people will starve.

Many experts now believe that the 19th century proved Malthus incorrect. The Green Revolution increased global food production, helping it keep pace with global population growth. It allowed us to keep consuming.

But with anything you produce, you also have waste. And, given the growing consumption, unless one is very careful about production technologies, you have waste on a massive scale. As photographs by Chris Jordan and our daily experience of taking out the trash and seeing litter everywhere can testify, our consumption of goods leads to an overwhelming volume of trash. So much so that the scale of the numbers can be difficult to comprehend. Consider some numbers Jordan uses:

Two million plastic beverage bottles are used in the US every five minutes.
1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags are used in the US every hour.
426,000 cell phones are retired in the US every day.
While 106,000 aluminum cans are used in the US every thirty seconds.

And that’s just the waste we can see. Waste gases from power plants are filling the air that we breathe, leading to the early deaths of tens of thousands of American and hundreds of thousands or millions around the world. Invisible carbon dioxide is turning the oceans so acidic that shell fish are having a harder time growing their shells while it changes our entire planet’s climate.

The point here is pretty clear. We’re drowning in a sea of our own waste.

This point changes the way we have to understand Malthus. For him, it was a two-way balance between consumption and production. Now, it’s a three-way balance between production, consumption, and waste.

And it’s no longer simply a question of whether we can have another Green Revolution to increase production, because even if we did that we would only increase our waste problem.

We have to begin addressing this question of waste. If we are to feed more people – and we will have to, given predictions of global population growths – than we should also free more people of the sea of garbage and poison and waste our production has created.

Part of this will be to examine of our own, personal consumption habits. Each of us should find ways to reduce our waste, whether it’s by bringing lunch to work, or by using cloth bags at the grocery store, or by driving smaller cars. Whatever it is that works for you, I’d urge you to try it.

Will that be enough? Certainly not. But it is a start. A start to be expanded on every day.

(Photo credit: Chris Jordan, www.chrisjordan.com)

The Heart of the World

2008-05-19T16:01:53Z

I recently had the pleasure to meet Los Mamos de la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta at an environmental philanthropy forum in Miami sponsored by Poder, a Latin American business magazine.

The Mamos are known as the “Elder Brothers” of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Colombia – an area they call “the Heart of the World.” The health of their mountains, they believe, reflects the health of our planet. I agree.

The Sierra Nevada are the world’s tallest coastal mountain range. They rise from the temperate Caribbean coast into snow-capped mountains almost 20,000 feet high that feed 35 watersheds. These watersheds support the area’s 1.5 million residents, the nearby farming plains, and the region’s 50,000 indigenous people.

Once you get above around 10,000 feet, 100 percent of the reptiles and amphibians can be found nowhere else in the world but in the Sierra. The mountains boast well over 3,000 different species of plants, and play host to the migratory birds traveling between South America and the US and Canada. They are home to people speaking a language found nowhere else in the world.

But as the Mamos will tell you, the “Heart of the World” is changing. And rapidly.

Snowcaps are shrinking. Rivers and streams are drying up. Biodiversity is declining. The soil is eroding. And the birds are flying elsewhere. This is happening in the heart of the world and, I’m sad to say, spreading throughout the earth’s biosystems.

The story of the Mamos, and of global warming changing their way of life, is not the last chapter in an anthropology book, but the first chapter in the book of all of us. Climate change will get us all if we don’t act fast, and act strongly.

The United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for 25 percent of the world’s global warming pollution. So for those of us in the U.S. and in big cities throughout Latin America, our job is to adopt the policies and practices that will solve the global climate crisis. Energy efficiency. Renewable energy. Market transformation. And to do all of this in a big way.

Some say wait. But as the Elder Brothers will tell you, the planet is not waiting.

Some say it’s too expensive. The truth is, it’s too expensive to keep wasting energy and using dirty energy.

The longer we wait, the dirtier the air and water, the more costly the switch to clean energy. The longer we wait, the more we’ll lose of human history. The more we’ll lose of our culture and the natural world around us. And, as the Elders will tell you, the more we’ll lose of our heart.