transcript

Audio slideshow: Panama tropical forest

This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI's THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI's THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: If a tree grows back in a tropical forest, does it make a difference to biodiversity? That twist on an old riddle could help scientists understand the potential fate of millions of species of plants and animals. Old growth tropical forests are the world's richest ecosystems, and they're rapidly disappearing. Scientists agree that deforestation is causing a cascade of extinctions. But what happens when the forests start to grow back? Two American scientists in Panama have been arguing over that question, as Julia Kumari Drapkin reports.

JULIA KUMARI DRAPKIN: Walking with Joe Wright along the forested edges of the Panama Canal is like a lesson in taxonomy.

JOE WRIGHT: This is diptrix panamensis. This is scleruurus guatamalensis.

DRAPKIN: Wright switches from Latin to English and points to a shady spot between the trees.

WRIGHT: See that little brown bird? Watch what he's going to do. You see? It's a leaf tosser. He tossed a leaf, with his beak.

DRAPKIN: The endangered bird flips leaves over like pancakes.

WRIGHT: He's looking for insects underneath them. Up. Up.

DRAPKIN: Wright is a forest ecologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He's been cataloguing the inhabitants of this forest for 25 years. This isn't the virgin tropical rainforest that activists are fighting to save. Only 90 years ago, it was farmland. But Joe Wright says you'll still see lots of animal species living here.

WRIGHT: We've seen howler monkeys, crested curacaos, great tinamus, crested guans, that are doing just fine in this secondary forest.

DRAPKIN: But when Wright's colleague Bill Lawrence looks at the same kind of forest, he focuses on what you don't see.

LAWRENCE: You're not going to see jaguars, pumas. You're don't see harpy eagles. You don't see tapirs or peccaries.

DRAPKIN: Lawrence is a conservation biologist also with the Smithsonian. He believes that ancient trees and the dense canopy of primary forests hold the only hope for preventing mass extinction in the tropics. So when it comes to conservation, he says secondary forests just don't cut it.

LAWRENCE: To me, this is not biological prime real estate.

DRAPKIN: Most conservation scientists share that belief. But Lawrence's friend and colleague Joe Wright thinks it's just a matter of perspective.

WRIGHT: Bill's a pessimist. I'm an optimist.

DRAPKIN: Wright says his research suggests there's plenty of conservation value in secondary forests. And his challenge to long-held assumptions has the long-time friends in a professional standoff. Lawrence says if the two sides were nations –

LAWRENCE: We would have broken off diplomatic relationships and be lining up our two armies, and perhaps letting loose with the missiles.

DRAPKIN: Tensions arise because old growth tropical forests are home to most of the earth's terrestrial plants and animals. And conservation scientists estimate two-thirds of these forests will be gone within 40 years.

LAWRENCE: You know that's ecological Armageddon. That's a really scary kind of idea.

DRAPKIN: A scary idea, because according to conventional wisdom, when the original forests disappear so will all the species that live there. But Joe Wright doesn't buy that notion. He believed that conservation scientists are overlooking a key trend.

WRIGHT: The second most important land use change in the tropics today is actually reforestation.

DRAPKIN: The reforestation of lands as birthrates in much of the tropics fall, people abandon farms and fields and move to cities.

WRIGHT: This trend of slowing population growth, greater urbanization is going to lessen pressures on forests, and total forest cover will not decline as rapidly.

DRAPKIN: So Wright did his own research and drew up a new conservation equation. By including various types of secondary forests, he calculated that only 25 to 30 percent of tropical species will be threatened with extinction by mid-century. That's a big number, but –

WRIGHT: That's a different than the conservation literature which is more like 75 percent.

DRAPKIN: And that difference between the two projections set off a raging debate among scientists on the conservation value of secondary forests.

WRIGHT: Many other biologists don't believe that. There's a very heated controversy now, and nearly two dozen papers have been published in the last two years.

DRAPKIN: Those are all scientific papers, of course, but the argument has political overtones as well. The science the two sides are arguing over doesn't exist in a vacuum. And Bill Lawrence worries about shifting a public attention away from the primary importance of primary forests.

LAWRENCE: The stakes are high in this type of thing. I mean, if people get the wrong idea, that tropical forests are not in peril and seriously threaten a lot of biodiversity that would be a tragedy.

DRAPKIN: A tragedy because tropical forests are still being cut down. And the population pressures that Joe Wright studied aren't the only threat.

WRIGHT: Species in nature are not just being punched once. They are being punched about five times from different directions simultaneously. That's the threat. It's the death of a thousand cuts.

DRAPKIN: Cuts like increased global demand for food, fuel, and resources. And then there's climate change. Joe Wright concedes there are many threats in play, which makes him all the more happy that his work has stimulated new research on the value of secondary forests.

WRIGHT: There's only going to be more in the future, and to have a complete understanding of conservation, and the biodiversity threat in the tropics, we need to have a greater understanding of these secondary forests and their potential.

DRAPKIN: And for his part, Bill Lawrence acknowledges that Joe Wright has a point as well.
LAWRENCE: He's forced us to look much more critically at what information we have about what's really happening. And so I give him all the credit for that. In many ways, I think this is one of the most important debates that has come up in the last several decades.

DRAPKIN: But it will be decades more, the two scientists say, until they who is right. Until then, they can agree on one thing: that tropical forests of all kinds and the creatures who live there, are worth saving. For The World, I'm Julia Kumari Drapkin.

MULLINS: You can hear Julia's narrated slideshow of Panama's tropical forests at theworld.org

Copyright ©2008 PRI's THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI's THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World's Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.