Consumption and Environmental Destruction

From the always interesting environmental site Worldchanging, allow me to reprint the caption from this photograph.

Congo, Conkouati National Park, 2007
In the Cotovindou logging concession a Congolese worker for the Chinese timber company Sicofor saws down a 22-meter moabi tree that will be loaded the same day on a truck bound for Pointe Noire. From there it will be embarked for China. It will probably end up as luxury furniture in Europe or the States. Moabi (baillonella toxisperma) takes about hundred years to reach maturity. Its fruits are edible, its bark has medical applications and the oil its seeds produce is very sought after on the African markets. The droppings of elephants, that love the Moabi fruits, are the main mechanisms for spreading the seeds and therefore of its reproduction. Due to poaching, elephants are getting rare, due to logging Moabi is getting rare. In the Congo forest elephants and Moabi could disappear at the same time. Moabi has been included in the red list of IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) in 2004.

The most important point made here is not the decline of elephants or even the tree species. It's the fact that this tree is almost certainly going to make luxury furniture for the United States or Europe. For all the complaining the first world does about environmental destruction in the developing world, a large percentage of that is done for our consumption. I can't tell you how many environmentalists I've known who seem to miss this connection. They talk about how much they love the environment and how much they hate its destruction. Then they buy homes on the edge of the wilderness that they commute to. And they purchase expensive wood furniture from exotic trees. Sure it looks good. Adds a lot to the atmosphere of the house. It also destroys national parks, forces wildlife into extinction, threatens indigenous cultures and native knowledge, and contributes to climate change.

Purchasing products made from rainforest wood is simply unacceptable and must be stopped. The model is CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. CITES has gone a long way to stop the smuggling of sea turtles, rare birds, elephant ivory, and other endangered species. But it does nothing to protect their habitats. We need a new convention to protect those habitats and make it illegal to purchase products made from goods that destroy habitats. We also need to attack those who are hypocritical in their purchases of these products, making it socially unacceptable to buy them, much as we have done with exotic animals.