The Silent Crisis: The State of Rain Forest Nature Preserves

The principal response of the global community to the threats against biodiversity has been the establishment of strictly protected areas, exemplified by the National Park System of the United States. In such areas, consumptive uses are banned and wild nature is allowed to exist in untrammeled form. Nonconsumptive recreational uses—such as sightseeing, hiking, swimming, boating, and camping—are permitted but are regulated as to place and time and number of participants. In the tropical forest realm, however, protected nature preserves are in a state of crisis. A number of tropical parks have already been degraded almost beyond redemption; others face severe threats of many kinds with little capacity to resist. The final bulwark erected to shield tropical nature from extinction is collapsing. The predictable and unpredictable ecological processes likely to affect the future ability of protected rain forest areas to retain their full biodiversity are examined in chapter 3. While the potential impact of ecological processes could be severe, they are amenable to technical solutions and could be solved given sufficient resources and knowledge. A far more immediate and significant threat is posed by human activities. Indeed, the crisis of parks in the tropics results primarily from increasing human pressure on all unexploited natural resources, aggravated by ineffective protection. Pressure on parks is exerted on local, regional, and national scales, usually taking the form of illegal land appropriation or resource extraction. The attack on tropical parks is being pressed by four main classes of actors: local and displaced populations of agriculturalists and extractors, governments, resource-robbing elites, and (in a few cases) indigenous forest-dwelling populations. In this chapter, we discuss the root causes of the actions of each of these groups and of the institutional failure that results in ineffective enforcement of park legislation. many common themes, regardless of the geographic area to which they pertained, and one theme in particular stood out: despite legal status and the presence of conservation officers, protected areas are not safe from illegal appropriation and exploitation. Our perception is that the threat to tropical parks is not widely appreciated.