The world we have created today as the result of our thinking thus far has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.
--Albert Einstein
The truth is, we are all part of a culture that supports itself through the non-sustainable use of resources. Our economy is such that we prosper at the expense of the environment. Our way of life depends on deferring the costs of environmental damage to future generations and to people in other countries.
Such a culture cannot last. Eventually, we will destroy our environment and our civilization. However, a new environmentalism has emerged that would recognize environmental costs today, force us to pay as we go, and bring us back from the ecological Rubicon of mass extinction which we are about to cross.
This new environmentalism incorporates ideas of sustainability into our modern economy. It envisions a world where natural resources are consumed but also replenished, where rainforests are inhabited and yet flourish. This new environmentalism is called "sustainable development."
Defining Sustainable Development
For centuries, the philosophy behind sustainable development--to live in harmony with the environment--has been an integral part of most indigenous cultures.
The term "sustainable development," however, was first coined in 1987 in a United Nations' report entitled, Our Common Future. This report defined sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." In other words, as natural resources are used, they are replaced.
Sustainable Development and Rainforest Destruction
Sustainable development has implications for almost every environmental problem. With regard to tropical deforestation, however, there are five ways sustainable development can alter the fate of our rainforests.
These are: 1) create rainforest preserves that will pay for themselves, 2) support earth-friendly businesses, 3) use governmental incentives to require companies to replace the natural resources they use, 4) change the policies of intergovernmental lending institutions that currently finance environmentally destructive economies, and 5) reduce the debts of tropical countries to a manageable level.
The next few pages will examine each of these sustainable development solutions and identify some of the dedicated men, women, and organizations working to integrate them into our global economy.
Rainforest Preserves that Profit
Establishing rainforest parks and preserves can help save rainforests. However, setting aside natural areas costs money. In underdeveloped tropical countries, funds for such projects often are not available.
In such cases rainforest preserves are needed that can pay for themselves. This can be done through "ecotourism" or "extractive reserves."
What is Ecotourism?
Ecotourism is the practice of charging tourists a fee to visit a park or preserve and then using these fees to protect the natural fauna of the area. It is, in essence, a user fee charged to tourists and earmarked to protect nature.
Throughout the world there are about 5,400 protected natural areas generating an income from tourism. But so far only about 5 percent of the world's forests are in these areas. More preserves built around rainforests and more income from these preserves are needed to help save rainforests.
A good example of rainforest ecotourism is in Madagascar. There, tourists are paying to see the rare, raccoon-like Lemur in his native forest. Another example is in Brazil, where the largest monkey, the Muriqui, has become a tourist attraction. Before the civil unrest in Rwanda, however, one of the best examples of rainforest ecotourism was that country's Park National des Volcans.
Rwanda and the Mountain Gorilla
Created more than 60 years ago, the Park National des Volcans was a huge wildlife sanctuary that protected the endangered Mountain Gorilla and other wildlife of central Africa. But in the early 1970s, because of an expanding population and poverty problems, the Rwandan government converted half the park to farmland and was debating the fate of the remaining half. Many environmentalists feared the park would soon disappear.
In 1979 two environmentalists, Amy Vedder and her husband Bill Weber, convinced the Rwandan government that endangered species tourism could be a profitable use for the park. Vedder, a zoologist with the New York Zoological Society, and Webber, a tropical research specialist, envisioned tourists paying to see, in a natural habitat, the endangered gorillas made famous by Dian Fossey's book Gorillas in the Mist.
The two then set about acclimating the normally shy, but sometimes aggressive, gorillas to human visitors. Before the Rwandan civil war erupted in 1994, about 18 tourists a day were paying for a one-hour guided tour among the gorillas. Because of these tourists, park revenues increased by 2,000 percent, and the Rwandan government decided to maintain the park as a tourist attraction.
Extractive Reserves
Rainforests also can generate profits--and thus ensure their own protection--through the creation of extractive reserves. An extractive reserve is an area in the rainforest set aside for the harvesting of crops that occur naturally in the environment, such as herbs, fruits, nuts, and rubber.
The idea behind an extractive reserve is to harvest only what the forest can easily regenerate. In this way, an extractive reserve becomes a perpetual source of income and thus a perpetual means of protecting rainforests.
In the long run, the income from an extractive reserve should exceed the income from a non-sustainable use of a rainforest, such as clear-cut logging.
Charles Peters, a botanist with the New York Botanical Garden, and two associates, Alwyn Gentry and Robert Mendelsohn, proved this to be true in the Peruvian Amazon.
These three men acquired a one-hectare plot of rainforest (2.5 acres) near the town of Mishana, Peru. There, they inventoried all the crops that could be harvested seasonally--fruits, vegetables, wild chocolate, latex, etc. They estimated the value of these crops to be about $420 at a local Peruvian market.
Peters, Gentry, and Mendelsohn then estimated the value of the timber on their land. They found that a local saw mill would pay them $1,000 if they clear-cut the entire plot. They concluded that if left forested and harvested repeatedly for sustainable crops, the rainforest in this area would, over time, produce considerably more income than clear-cutting for timber one time.
Supporting Sustainable Businesses
Everyone of us, as a consumer, can help preserve rainforests. We can do this by demanding goods made with concern for the environment, including products from extractive reserves. Businesses that produce these earth-friendly products have been dubbed "sustainable businesses."
Ben and Jerry's
A natural ice cream company, Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., is one example of these concerned businesses.
Long touted as a socially responsible business, Ben and Jerry's buys its ice cream ingredients from small U.S. farmers and family businesses. But Ben and Jerry's also buys ingredients from extractive rainforest reserves.
The idea to put ingredients from the rainforest into an ice cream sold in the U.S. originated in 1988 at a rainforest benefit party. There, Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben and Jerry's, happened to meet Jason Clay, the director of Cultural Survival, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving indigenous cultures in their natural environments.
Clay recently had returned from the Amazon. He had with him samples of exotic nuts harvested by Indians from Brazil's extractive reserves. Clay's intention was to convince American businessmen like Cohen that by marketing the nuts they could not only profit but also help protect rainforests and indigenous cultures.
Cohen was enthusiastic about the idea. He took it upon himself to devise a recipe using the nuts and subsequently ordered 15 tons of nuts for his company. Shortly, thereafter, his best-known product was an ice cream made with the nuts, called Rainforest Crunch.
Through a separate company, Community Products Inc., Cohen also markets two other products that contain the nuts, Rainforest Crunch candy bars and Rainforest Crunch popcorn. In all, Cohen's enterprises purchase 150 tons of nuts each year from the rainforest.
The Body Shop
Another business that buys products from extractive reserves is The Body Shop, a British cosmetic company. The Body Shop uses a number of ingredients from the rainforest in its skin softeners, bath beads, lip balms, conditioners, and body lotions. The rainforest ingredients in these products include andiroba oil, piquia oil, babassu oil, Brazilian nut oil, naja oil, murumuru palm tree kernels, urucum seeds, honey, and beeswax.
Anita Roddick, The Body Shop's founder and managing director, believes that by creating a market for these items her company is creating an economic incentive to save rainforests.
Like Cohen, Roddick also uses her business to support indigenous cultures. She does this by purchasing the natural ingredients that her company uses from Indians. These Indians include the Kayapo of Brazil, the Nanhu of Mexico, the Santa Ana Pueblo of New Mexico, and native communities in the Solomon Islands, Nepal, Tanzania, and Zambia.
In 1990 Roddick's support of sustainable development was recognized by the United Nations' "Global 500" environmental award.
Whole Foods Market
Sustainably producing products from the rainforest is only part of the solution. The ultimate goal of sustainable development is to produce all the products that our society needs in an earth-friendly manner.
Such a goal might seem impossible, but a company called Whole Foods Market is pioneering this effort. Whole Foods is the largest chain of natural foods grocery stores in the United States. On average, each of its stores markets 12,000 food and non-food products produced with concern for the environment. Among the products sold at Whole Foods is Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream.
Public Support
Public support for these types of businesses is tremendous. From 1983 to 1992, Ben & Jerry's yearly sales rose from $1.8 million to $132 million. In the last ten years, The Body Shop's annual sales increased from £2.1 million to £168.3 million. Since opening its first store in 1980, Whole Foods has grown to include some 43 stores in ten U.S. states, selling over $400 million worth of natural and organic products annually.
Sustainable businesses, however, represent only a fraction of the global economy. But by buying more of the products that we use daily from these businesses, we, as consumers, can help these businesses save rainforests.
Ben Cohen explains, "Businesses have created most of our social and environmental problems. If businesses were instead trying to solve these problems, they would be solved in short order."
Government Regulations
Governments can help save rainforests through regulations on commerce that protect the environment. These "earth-friendly" regulations would both require and encourage businesses to pay for using natural resources.
Paying for Resources
One way governments can require businesses to pay for using natural resources is through user fees or permit fees. Regulations like these are based on an economic concept called "natural resource accounting."
The premise behind this concept is that natural resources, such as clean air, pure water, and virgin forests, have a monetary value. Consequently, the price of a permit to destroy these natural resources should equal the cost of replacing them.
For example, lumber companies (that do not grow their own trees) should be required to buy a user fee equal to the cost of planting and raising to maturity the trees they harvest.
Similarly, companies that create water pollution should pay for a pollution permit, whose cost would equal the cost of cleaning up their pollution.
Incentives for Conservation
In addition to penalties, governments can encourage businesses to operate without damaging the environment through financial rewards or incentives. These rewards could take many forms, including government-backed loans or direct subsidies. But the most comprehensive way for governments to encourage sustainable development is through tax policy.
Preferential tax treatment needs to be given to businesses that make products with few natural resources.
For example, recycled paper producers should be taxed less than virgin paper producers. Currently in the U.S., recycled paper is slightly more expensive than non-recycled paper. (Printing this book on recycled paper cost an additional 8 percent.) With the appropriate tax policy, recycled paper could be made to cost less than virgin paper.
Preferential tax treatment also could make lumber from tree farms less expensive than lumber from old growth forests. Such policies could even encourage firms to develop paper and wood substitutes. In fact, any product deemed to be environmentally friendly¯alternative fuels, electric cars--should be subject to a minimum of taxation.
Incentives for Green Investing
Another tax policy that can protect the environment is to give tax credits and tax deductions to people who invest in earth-friendly businesses. Profits from such investments could be made subject to low capital gains tax rates, as well.
Who Pays the Tax?
These tax incentives and disincentives are basically consumption taxes; individuals and businesses that consume products made with few natural resources would end up paying fewer taxes.
This does not mean that our society overall must pay more or less in taxes. The only change would be in who pays the tax.
For example, a tax policy based on sustainable development might decrease personal income taxes while increasing the tax on gasoline; theoretically, society as a whole would pay the same amount in tax but would tend to conserve energy.
Levying taxes on industries that pollute is another policy that encourages sustainable development. Revenues from these taxes would be earmarked to clean up pollution. This is known as the "polluter pays principle."
In favor of the "polluter pays principle" is the World Resources Institute, an organization of scientists and policy experts supported by the United Nations and private foundations. This institute recommends raising taxes on social ills, such as pollution, while lowering taxes by an equal amount on social virtues, such as work.
Why Not Ban Products from the Rainforest?
Government regulations that require businesses to pay for natural resources and pollution are controversial ideas. Even some environmentalists disagree with these ideas.
These people feel that products harmful to the environment should be banned outright instead of regulated and taxed.
In some cases, products should be banned, i.e., pesticides that are overly toxic (like DDT). But if products from the rainforest are banned, deforestation could increase.
This is because industries in tropical countries, such as timber, agriculture, and cattle production, make up a large portion of tropical economies. Banning the products of these industries would leave many people unemployed, thereby increasing poverty and the number of subsistence farmers who clear rainforests to survive.
This is why sustainable development needs to be integrated into the economic system of each nation.
