Julian Hill

Progress Killed Britain’s Wolves, But It Could Save Our Tigers

It is said that Britain’s last wolf was shot in the Heathrow Marshes, the site of Heathrow Airport, in 1746. Probably somewhere around the ruin of the Roman temple of Diana which now lies below Runway One. The shooting was called progress, as was the interment of the Roman ruins.

That early progress was followed by the Industrial Revolution and the building of an empire that all led to the creation of a great welfare state, one of many in the developed world. Welfare states, where poverty is virtually unknown, where the homeless can be accommodated in million-dollar mansions , the sick don’t need to worry about hospital bills and education is free for all.

Modern equivalents of Britain’s wolf are the Sumatran tiger, the orangutan, the babi rusa in Sulawesi and other critically endangered species all threatened by habitat loss as forests are destroyed. Unfortunately for them, they do not live in a developed welfare state.

What’s the prognosis for the Sumatran tiger and the others in the wild? Grim, I guess, but let’s have a look at why.

This week and next the world’s attention will be focused on climate change summit in Copenhagen. One of the issues on the agenda will be the loss of tropical forests globally. This is seen as important in the climate change debate because not only does forest destruction feed massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but it also destroys the permanent carbon sink which would go on fixing the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere — carbon dioxide put there by emissions from, predominantly, developed nations.

Arresting climate change is indeed a worthy cause but so also is the protection of environments which sustain rich biodiversity. This duality of worthy causes has seen a close focus on the destruction of tropical forests by the world’s green movement and now by governments, media and the people of the welfare states.

These groups lay the blame on developing nations for failing to protect their forests.

But this is hypocrisy, I’m afraid. It’s getting too late to beat around the bush or sooner or later there will be no bush to beat and no Sumatran tiger in it either.

Destruction of forests has been a fact of economic life for a very long time. From the cedar forests of Lebanon, used for the pharaohs’ shipbuilding programs to Sherwood Forest that went for charcoal for Sheffield steel. And again, all in the name of progress.

“It’s a pretty poor show that these developing nations don’t seem to be able to control the destruction of their forests,” is a fairly standard dinner party attitude in the developed world. But you chopped down your Sherwood Forest and shot your last wolf in the name of progress, so why shouldn’t we do the same? That’s not a bad argument really, apart from the very dire global consequences of agreeing with it.

So it seems the issue is all about economics. On the one hand we have a pampered developed world whose environmental crimes of yesteryear in part paved the way for their present, relative opulence and on the other a developing world of poverty, high infant mortality, premature death, hunger and low education standards. And the pampered world is dictating to the developing world that it shouldn’t pursue progress the way the pampered world did.

A subsistence farmer living in or on the fringes of a high-value forest cares most about his family’s next meal. He doesn’t have the chance to worry about education and if he gets sick, he will mostly likely die, at any age. So if he can feed himself and his family by trapping that tiger and selling its penis to China, felling that majestic tree or working for a team of illegal loggers, he will. And so he should, because for him, it is a matter of food or hunger, life and death. Don’t expect him to be high-minded and altruistic about it all, he’s hungry.

Money rather than unrealistic expectations is the most likely way of curbing the destruction of the forests, provided it gets into the right hands. Money for forest-friendly projects, money for rectification and education, money for preserving the status quo, for law enforcement, for mapping and monitoring. The early betting on the Copenhagen outcome is that there will be some move toward providing international funds to curb forest destruction and the amount being talked about is $11 billion. That’s not a bad start but when the Iraq and Afghan wars have cost trillions, $11 billion would seem paltry for one of the major crises facing the world today, scarcely enough for the admin fees of those who will distribute it.

This really should be pay up time for the hypocrites. Money will go a long way to fixing this problem so the funding needs to be agreed, quickly implemented and substantial. Will Copenhagen be up to the challenge? Britain’s wolves have gone, but there is still a chance for the Sumatran tiger.

Julian Hill is a technical adviser with Deloitte in Jakarta. He can be contacted at jchill@deloitte.com.

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