Tropical Forest Voices

The Joseph Rock Arboretum—A Garden in the Making

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Jill Wagner

With great pleasure, I would like to announce the initiation of a new Arboretum in Kona, Hawaii. The Joseph Rock Arboretum has been planned over the last ten years. The garden is 48 acres located in the heart of Kailua Kona, an exceptional land.

https://josephrockarboretum.org/

The site of the Joseph Rock Arboretum was previously a cattle-grazing land. But, several hundred native Hawaiian dry forest plants and trees have persisted and provided the remnant stands upon which the habitat is built. Over the past two years, more than 3,000 plants have been planted, most of which are native dry forest species. The site does not have irrigation in the field, so we time the planting with the rainy season, and the plants are establishing and adapting to the local weather patterns.  

There are a few ways to determine if the site has good survival. One is to observe if the out-plants are flowering and seeding. The other is to check if natural regeneration happens in the habitat. At this site, we have observed good flowering and seeding. Besides, we are collecting the seeds to bank them for future restoration. It will enable the community to grow native plant species on their land.

Arboretum Map
Dots represent areas where restoration is completed
Map of Joseph Rock Arboretum

The mission of the Joseph Rock Arboretum is to collect and study trees, shrubs, and plants from Hawaii and around the world. Its goal is to teach people how to care for the natural environment through hands-on seed collection, seed banking, propagation, and fieldwork. The vision is to support new forest creators as future caretakers of the planet. The Arboretum is primarily a training site for future foresters.  It is the home of Future Forests Nursery (www.forestnursery.com), which has been serving restoration in Hawaii since the 1990s. It is also home to the Hawaii Island Seed Bank (drylandforest.org), which stores native seed collections from over 32 large landowners and agricultural crop seeds for the Hawaii Seed Growers Network (www.hawaiiseedgrowersnetwork.org).  

The arboretum is curated and contains plant collections from Hawaii, South America, and Australia—including succulents and a tropical hardwood zone. The nursery facilities and seed bank provide excellent facilities to train visiting foresters, students, and global forestry partners.  We are currently building lodging for visitors so they can stay in Hawaii for four weeks and work through the entire restoration cycle. 

We also provide educational experiences for school groups on Hawaii Island. In addition to the Hawaii training experience, we also offer an online 12-month course in Restoration Principles and Practices. It is a comprehensive course with modules in all aspects of restoration to help land managers deepen their understanding of the work and increase capacity. 

For all interested, more information can be found here.

The Cusp of Conservation

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Nick Brokaw

Post as written in 1993

One day last month, I was truly on the cusp of tropical forest conservation. On April 18th, 1993, I attended a meeting of Junta Directiva de Bethel, in Guatemala to discuss plans for Bethel’s cooperatively-owned forests. In five hours of discussion, I heard arguments for sustainable forest management, dissolving the cooperative, clearing the forest for cattle, and some other plans. Each meant a different fate for the forest!

Bethel (Bay-TELL) is located in the Petén lowlands of northern Guatemala, on the Río Usumacinta, with a view of Mexico across the river. Bethel has 47 households and about 10,000 acres of communally-owned forested area. Betheleros are tenacious. They were one of the only two villages in the region that refused to vacate during the recent civil war when guerrillas roamed the environs. The war slowed development in the area but is mostly over now (we passed through just one military checkpoint on the road to Bethel versus four last year). People are now thinking about new ways to use their forest land.

Location of Bethel, on the Usumacinta River, Department of Petén, Guatemala

We are there to advise them if they want it. Bethel is one of several projects within “ProPetén”, or Proyecto Petenero para un Bosque Sostenible, run by Conservation International. ProPetén has a full-time staff of three North Americans and ten Guatemalans, which consists of community development people, social anthropologists, foresters, small business specialists, forestry extensionists, and others. I am a short-term consultant to ProPetén.

On April 18th, ProPetén presented a preliminary plan to the Junta Directiva for sustainable forestry integrated with agriculture. We had maps, timber inventory, economic projections, and market strategy. We discussed a tourist lodge (Usumacinta is the biggest river in Middle America and a route to marvelous Maya ruins that are rarely visited). We talked about the future but did not push hard. Weren’t these the best ways to use Bethel’s natural resources for the benefit of all Betheleros now and to come?  

The Junta responded—with a long speech by one member on the advantages of dissolving the cooperative and each member to manage their piece of land. Another 20 minutes speech on the advantages of clearing the forest for cattle. Another, deriding ecotourism! It lasted five hours—lengthy spontaneous speeches, with metaphor, hyperbole, humor, and elaborated repetition; all in the best tradition of oral communication. Finally, there was some support for the ProPetén plan and it was partly adopted.

The cattle faction and those wanting to dissolve the cooperative had spoken the longest and the loudest. But, in the end, a wise head secured some agreement by proposing to give forestry a two-year trial. Nonetheless, we were stunned by a near failure. We thought the ProPetén plan, with all its maps, figures, and compatriot spokespersons would carry the day. We had done a lot of homework, talking to people in Bethel for the past year, learning about local conditions, and anticipating reactions.

The landscape of northern Petén, Guatemala (photo in 2012)

What went wrong? Despite lading our approach with socio-economic perspectives and our team with Guatemalans, we underestimated the human factor in conservation. The long-range, cooperative plan provoked a strong reaction. A few individualists (people like many of us) wanted to do their own thing. Why stake one’s future on cooperation in the precarious polity of Guatemala? Moreover, these entrepreneurs believe they can do better on their own with their share of Bethel. Doing better, they could then can buy somebody else’s share. They will certainly need more than one share of cattle.

What was the silent majority at the meeting thinking? Maybe of their thousands of landless compatriots, poorer than themselves. Dissolve the cooperative and within a decade or two, a few former members will own its (deforested) 10,000 acres and the rest will be landless. That night in private conversation, a spokesman for the cooperative faction reassured us that cooperation would hold as the majority wishes for long-term sustainable use of resources. We are not so confident, but we are working hard to assemble more facts for sustainable forestry, understand the political economy of Bethel, and foresee the obstacles in tropical forest conservation. But it is difficult! Only a few among us have a true feel for life in Bethel— a life little exceeding subsistence and overseen by a willful military.

Update: I do not know what happened in the end, but the 10,000 acres were not all deforested. Inspection of the Google Maps image available on September 1, 2020, shows substantial clearing but also a substantial forest in the vicinity of Bethel, Guatemala. Perhaps the community adopted a mixed land-use plan, with good results, considering their situation.

Author: Nick Brokaw, Forest Ecologist, San Juan, Puerto Rico

The Belize Tropical Forestry Action Plan: An Education

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Nick Brokaw

In 1988, I was fortunate to become a member of the Tropical Forestry Action Plan (TFAP) team for Belize, Central America. I worked with a group of forestry experts and saw much of Belize during this time. The experience taught me that tropical forestry can be sustainable, in principle, and showed me how complex forestry truly is.

Organized by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), TFAP was a pan-tropical program created to assist countries in studying and advancing the state of their forestry. Forestry in Belize was in decline at the time (Fig. 1), so the Government of Belize asked the UK to organize a Belize TFAP that could assess the conditions and provide targeted recommendations.

Figure 1. Graph showing log production in Belize from 1951 to 1986. Displays pine, hardwoods, and mahogany in units of thousand cubic feet. Yields of both pine and mahogany drop sharply throughout '51-'71.
Figure 1 – Log production in Belize (Belize Tropical Forestry Action Plan, 1989).

Members of the TFAP team came from Belize, USA, UK, Canada, and Turkey, and were mainly sponsored by development agencies of those countries. Each team member focused on their individual specialties, such as forest management, forest economics, forest industries, land use, institutions, and environmental conservation. As a forest ecologist, I had been sponsored by the US Agency for International Development and my specialty was conservation.

The team worked in Belize during May and June of 1988. Our headquarters for the duration of our assignment was the Bull Frog Inn in Belmopan, the capital of Belize. We all traveled to do archival and field work to get the background for our assessments and recommendations, but whenever we weren’t on the road, the team would meet each day at the Bull Frog to share meals and discuss our progress.

My archival work was to study conservation policy and progress in Belize using documents supplied by the Belize Forest Department, other government offices tasked with resource management, and conservation NGOs. My field work was to visit protected areas and speak to Belizean conservationists. For practical reasons, I was paired with Ozzie Bender, a veteran forest industries consultant from Tacoma, Washington. Ozzie had worked in 35 countries and was a deep source of wisdom and stories. He and I drove around Belize visiting protected areas, offices, logging sites, sawmills, furniture makers, and even a match company (Figs. 2-8).

Figure 2 – Logging camp (Belize, 1988).
Figure 3 – Logger’s bed (Belize, 1988).
Figure 4 – Felling a mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) (Belize, 1988).
Figure 5 – Skidding logs to a barquedier (log assembly point) (Belize, 1988).
Figure 6 – Feeding scrap (left) into a milling machine that shapes broom handles (emerging right) (Roberson’s sawmill, Iguana Bank, Belize, 1988).
Figure 7 – Toucan Safety Matches, showing the Emerald Toucanet (Aulacorhynchus
prasinus), (Toucan Match Co., LTD, Belmopan, Belize).
Figure 8 – Sawyer (standing at left, control lever in hand) riding the conveyance moving a log to the right into a circular saw (Roberson’s sawmill, Iguana Bank, Belize, 1988).

After leaving Belize, the TFAP team met again in September 1988 at the Oxford Forestry Institute in the UK to integrate our reports. We submitted the 272-page (A4 paper) final report to the Government of Belize the following year, in September 1989.

My report described laws, regulations, and conventions governing environmental conservation; enumerated the public and private protected areas; provided suggestions for studies, a data center, new reserves, and improved management; and gave results of a “gap analysis,” which showed what habitats were not protected.

I did the gap analysis by layering a big map of Belize’s protected areas on top of a same-scale map that showed Belize’s 34 major vegetation types, assumed to represent distinctive habitats and constituent organisms. Taped onto a picture window, both layers would be brightly backlit on a sunny day, and I could see which vegetation types were not included in protected areas. The main conclusion of the analysis was that 16 of the 34 types were not protected.

Other reports from the Belize TFAP suggested changes such as using band saws instead of circular saws for milling (to reduce waste), abandoning polycyclic for monocyclic silviculture to favor mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) regeneration (which does better in large disturbed areas), establishing a series of long-term forest dynamics plots (to assess growth and natural regeneration of multiple species), changes in royalties (stumpage fees; and to increase Forest Department revenue), adding personnel to the Forest Department (to extend expertise and oversight), improved data collection (to optimize wood products output and income), and many others, all in great detail.

There is a lot more to forestry than trees alone. That is what makes it hard to achieve sustainability. But there are clear steps to take toward success so long as we can keep all the parts in mind and remain in pursuit of our goals.

The team also provided an action plan to effect these changes. I helped enact some recommendations, such as the establishment of long-term plots and research on promoting mahogany regeneration. Many of the other changes were also implemented following the TFAP report.

In the end, I got my consulting fee and much more from working on the Belize Tropical Forestry Action Plan. Every step of the way – at the Bull Frog, on the road with Ozzie, and at Oxford – I gained a deeper understanding of industrial, economic, silvicultural, and institutional forestry. It was a course in forestry that greatly expanded my outlook.

There is a lot more to forestry than trees alone. That is what makes it hard to achieve sustainability. But there are clear steps to take toward success so long as we can keep all the parts in mind and remain in pursuit of our goals. ISTF makes these parts of forestry accessible and foments the collective will to continue forward.

For all interested, the conservation section of the Belize TFAP report can be found here.

Author: Nick Brokaw, Forest Ecologist, San Juan, Puerto Rico