Sir Ghillean (Iain) T. Prance,
the eminent botanist who served as director of Britain’s Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, from 1988 to 1999, was in New York this week to receive
the Gold Medal of The New York Botanical Garden for his contributions to plant science. The award is given infrequently; the last recipient was Edward O. Wilson, in 2002. Sir Ghillean has done research across the world, including the
Amazon, where he has witnessed dramatic changes over 40 years. “I went
to Suriname in 1963 and Brazil in 1964, and there was very little damage
to the rainforest,” he told me. “But by the 70s they had built a
highway across the Amazon, then colonization followed, with cattle
ranching in the 1980s and now soybean farming. We’ve lost 23% of the
Brazilian Amazon rainforest, but there is still a lot to fight for.” I asked him what we’ve learned about what works to preserve
rainforest and what doesn’t. “Sustainable forestry on the whole hasn’t
lived up to its promise,” he said. “Sustainable use is possible, but
less than 1% of development in the Amazon is truly sustainable.” The
only real hope he sees is for wealthy nations to step up and pay nations
with significant remaining rainforest to keep it intact, something
Guyana has asked the world to do for its rainforest, as I blogged about
last May. |