I ran across an article on Digg titled “Buy A Tree and Watch it Grow Thanks to Google Earth”. This tweaked my interest so I followed the link. Basically the idea is to donate $5.50 per tree to have one planted in your name in Borneo. This is to help the re-growth needed in that part of our world. The donation buys a tree, all the care and feeding needed, and the exact coordinates of the location of your tree can be seen on google earth. I tried it out and found it quite fascinating. I tend to be cautious when giving money to something I have no control over so I scrolled down to the comments at the bottom of the article and sure enough, some of the responses weren’t real positive. One commentor felt we should plant trees closer to home, another thought it lazy of a person not to plant a tree yourself and others were just skeptical. I decided the article would of been much more effective had it given the reasons for the needed trees. So in order to calm my own suspicions, I went on a search and here is what I found.

First a little history…

An undisturbed natural rain forest has little effect on the atmospheric CO2 levels, but once disturbed (deforestation) CO2 is released into the atmosphere causing world wide changes.

Trees are often called the “lungs of the earth” because of their major importance to maintaining the levels of O2 and CO2. In short, they help us breathe correctly. Two thirds of all the living animal and plant species on the planet make the rainforests their home with hundreds of millions of plants, insects and microorganisms left yet to be discovered. It is these species that provide us with natural medicines as well as ongoing research to discover other potential benefits. Many foods originally came from rain forests, timber and animal products. Now, let your imagination take you where it may as you think of life without rain forests. Trees are valuable and necessary to our very existence.³

Borneo, the third largest island in the world and located in the center of Maritime Southeast Asia , was once covered with dense rain forests. Then in the 1980s and 1990s Borneo began to change as logging, legal and illegal, started leveling the forests at a rate unparalleled in human history. Borneo’s rain forests went to industrialized countries like Japan and the United States in the form of garden furniture, paper pulp and chopsticks. Today, what remains of the forests are threatened by the emerging bio-fuels market, specifically, oil palm.

“Oil palm is the most productive oil seed in the world. A single * hectare of oil palm may yield 5,000 kilograms of crude oil, or nearly 6,000 liters of crude, making the crop extremely profitable when grown in large plantations.”¹ The growth of these plantations has only made the problem worse because large areas of the rain forest have to be clear-cut to allow for the crop to grow. Also,the plantations serve as barriers to migrating animal populations.

Borneo’s forests have been some of the most bio-diverse on the planet with its many rare and endangered animals including the Sumatran rhino and the orangutan, squirrels, flying-squirrels, porcupines, civet-cats, rats, bats, flying-foxes and lizards. Snakes of various kinds are abundant. The forests swarm with tree-leeches, and the marshes with horse-leeches and frogs. There are more than 420 different birds and 222 mammal species in Kalimantan, half of which depend on the rain forests for survival. Borneo shelters more varieties of birds than are found in Europe and as many species of mammals as live on the entire continent of Australia. More than 50 species of timber trees grow in the dense forests.²

We each use or benefit in some way from these many resources. Resources that are diminishing quickly due to the flattened terrains. You would be surprised, if not astonished, at how these changes affects each one of us. There is always a domino affect in any unnatural changes of our earths resources. Does that mean we shouldn’t use the trees? No, but as with anything, the over use, the greed we seem to thrive in, is the cause of so much that troubles us today.

Additional affects…

The lowland forests grow giant trees called Dipterocarps. They are the most valuable source of timber in Borneo. Consequently those are the areas that have been logged the most in the past 30 years causing unnatural occurences of weather patterns as well as seasonal growing patterns. The reproduction of these giant trees is tied to the arrival of El Niño, with 80-93% of species synchronizing their flowering to the onset of the dry weather conditions, which traditionally occur on a roughly 4 year basis. Lisa Curran, a biologist who has spent more than 20 years in Borneo, has said that “during a Dipterocarp year in Kalimantan, the canopy bursts into color as countless emergent Dipterocarp trees — each of which may have 4 million flowers — bloom during a six-week period, a strategy that intermittently starves and swamps seed predators so that at least some seeds survive to germination.”¹ The once tightly linked ecosystem with its mass blooming and subsequent fruiting, which has been known to synchronize over an area of 370 million acres and involve 1870 species, has been broken by intensive logging. Dr. Curran says that “logging has reduced the density and biomass of mature trees below a critical threshold.” As the forest is cleared, droughts become more frequent and severe. With droughts, come wild fires. Fires feed pollution. The fires release massive amounts of carbon dioxide contributing up to 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, making Indonesia the third largest greenhouse gas polluter, despite having only the world’s 22nd largest economy.¹

What to do…

Logging, fires, and conversion for oil palm plantations has made conservation an urgent priority in Borneo. Recently there has been some positive conservation news out of Borneo. A group of 1500 scientists in more than 70 countries have realized the urgent need for conservation efforts to begin in Borneo’s forests. In February 2007, the governments of Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia agreed to protect roughly 220,000 square kilometers (85,000 square miles) of tropical forest in the so-called “Heart of Borneo”.¹

Beyond setting aside areas for protection, Borneo’s forests are in critical need of restoration. (This is true for all our forests) The use of native tree species should be encouraged though financial incentives and education programs. Individuals can help by making a donation of $5.50 per tree. Google earth will locate where “your tree” is planted so you can watch it grow. You’ll even have your name on the website to specify “your tree”. If you’re interested Babytree.org will get you set up to purchase a tree, or even more if you so desire. I plan to purchase one myself.

Resources: ¹Butler; Mongabay.com. http://www.mongabay.com/borneo.html

² Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borneo

³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainforests

* hectare= A unit of area equal to 10,000 square meters. Equivalent to 2.471 acres.

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