Adopt a Forest

AS TROPICAL BIOLOGISTS, MANY OF US ESPOUSE ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION to our students, our peers, and sometimes to the media and general public. In doing so, we are helping to spread the word, to inform the populace about the importance of tropical nature and the many perils it faces. But the things we talk about are often general in nature, such as the looming dangers of deforestation, or the generic threat of global climate change. Are we really having a positive impact? As one who has spent much of his professional life attempting to influence conservation policy and action in the tropics, I have become convinced that there is one strategy, above all others, that is most likely to achieve real success. One should adopt a forest. The potential of this strategy is revealed by perhaps the most famous tropical forest-adopter of them all, Daniel Janzen. Working and often residing in Costa Rica since the 1970s, Janzen has adopted the critically threatened tropical dry forests of Guanacaste (Janzen 1986, 2000, 2002; Campbell 2002). He has studied these forests and their biota intensively, told the world of their importance, worked tirelessly to establish and expand Guanacaste National Park, and helped to acquire and rehabilitate a considerable expanse of tropical dry forest surrounding the park. Were it not for Janzen, Guanacaste would likely be an obscure and degraded relict of an endangered ecosystem, rather than one of the more famous places in the lexicon of tropical biology. Janzen is not alone, of course. Patricia Wright’s tireless efforts to study and protect Ranomanfana National Park in Madagascar (Wright & Andriamihaja 2002, Conniff 2006), and Scott Mori’s attempt to protect forests around Saül in French Guiana (Mori & de Granville 1997, Mori et al. 1998), also spring to mind as examples of determined forest-adopters, although the Saül forests have since been overrun by illegal gold miners. Also prominent in a list like this are those in-country conservation leaders, such as Paulo NogueiraNeto in Brazil (Nogueira-Neto 1966, 1991; Lovejoy 2005) and Emil Salim in Indonesia (Salim & Ullsten 2000, Anon 2006), who pioneered protected-area networks in their respective nations.