"Exotic" Wood from an "Ordinary" Place
Essay Posted May 27, 2008 by James E. Nelson
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| Teak logs (approx 10 yrs old) cut as part of a thinning, ready to be loaded on a truck. |
As part of our interest in realistic green investment, Brenda and I are considering a variation on rain forest reforestation that we first heard about in 2007. Because rain forest soil is so fragile, the success of restoring pristine rain forest that has been cut down for more than a few years has been negligible at best. Along with the difficulty there is a danger that when the next great financial opportunity comes along, the process of slashing and burning the renewed rain forest will happen all over again. Tree plantations are a sort of via media, a “middle way” between the two extremes of environmental absolutism and unfettered economic development. They provide many of positive benefits of the rain forest, but since the owners and managers have a long term financial interest, there is little incentive to “slash and burn” when the next great idea comes along.
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| Teak trees were planted in 2002. |
Wednesday I visited a teak plantation in eastern Panama’s Darién Province. Darién is the home of Panama’s most extensive rain forest. At the other end of the country, the more temperate climate in western Panama makes it the bread basket of the country with well developed farms and agricultural infrastructure. Central Panama—the canal zone—is very commercialized. Eastern Panama (where I went on Wednesday) along with the rain forest, has historically been the region of cattle ranching and logging. The pattern is very much like it was in places like Ohio and Illinois in a previous century and still is in certain parts of Montana and Alaska: Timber land is clear cut by the loggers and then cleared and planted in grass for the cattle herds. But the soil quality of eastern Panama is such that over the long haul the land wears out from such intense use and profits begin to fall. Eventually pasture land (and rice fields) are abandoned.
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| A field prepared for planting seedlings. |
This is the land the tree farmers convert to tree plantations. The three primary trees grown commercially are spiny cedar (also called “pochote” a hard wood not related to the cedar varieties we are acquainted with in the U.S.), mahogany, and teak. The land is “cleared” but not in the sense that a Montana wheat farmer or Alaska cattle rancher might use the term. A great deal of living ground cover and dead organic material (fallen trees, bushes, and weeds) remain. And then every few feet the detritus is pushed aside and a tree is planted. Over time these woods are thinned and after two or three decades, the trees are harvested and the process starts all over.
So this is where I went. A teak plantation 250 kilometers southeast of Panama City in the midst of rain forest, cattle ranches, and a variety tree plantations. It should have dawned on me that this sounded suspiciously similar to the Yaak Valley in extreme northwest Montana, where I did my seminary internship. But there were no banana plants in the middle of the hay meadows in the Yaak, nor did the cattle graze in the shade of mango trees and coconut palms, so I completely missed the connection initially.
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| Husqie: The saw of choice for loggers everywhere. |
But the connection was clearly there. On the drive down we passed small towns with grocery stores and gas stations with Husqvarna signs in the window. (Husqvarna was the chain saw of choice in Troy, Montana—I use one to this day.) Logging trucks with loads that looked suspiciously overweight flew down the road at breakneck speed. Around 8:00 a.m. we stopped for breakfast at a restaurant. There were animal hides and antlers hanging from the walls and a tree stump that was probably ten or twelve foot in circumference was placed in the corner as a table. If it weren’t for the thatched roof it was a scene that could have been found in any small town along the eastern face of the Rocky Mountains.
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| A loggers breakfast in paradise. |
The journey was both exotic and completely ordinary. It was filled with new sights and sounds while at the same time everything happening around me was what one would expect in a ranching and logging community. Robert, the owner of the plantation, told us over breakfast that all these little towns we were passing through sprung up to support the logging industry. It was as if Yaak, Montana had been crossed with a tiki bar.
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| Yep … that's a telephone booth, and yep people really live in that house behind it. |
For me the rain forest conjures images of wildness beyond the reach of civilization. But in this modern world civilization has pretty much reached everywhere—even the Indian village we visited miles from the nearest road and across the river. In fact, anyone who is familiar with Yaak, Montana might understand what I mean when I say that the Panamanian rain forest may be more civilized than the Yaak valley. Everywhere I went in eastern Panama (including the Indian village) had electricity, phone service, and law and order. The communities around Yaak, Montana fail on all three counts!
In my March 25 essay about Jane Goodall, I reported that she found the bison, wolves, and moose of Yellowstone Park to be exotic. She also said that the migration of the Sandhill cranes was every bit as much a wonder of the natural world as the migration of the wildebeest in Africa. While I find Sandhill crane migration to be fabulous and the sighting of a wild wolf to be enthralling, I would hardly call them exotic because they are part of my ordinary world. But ordinary, for Jane Goodall, is Africa, not Yellowstone Park or the Platte River.
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| Ocelot cub. Approx. 2 weeks old. |
This essay is a corollary to that one. Jane Goodall taught me that the exotic can be found in ordinary places. Eastern Panama taught me that exotic places are surprisingly ordinary. Granted, I’ll never have to chop through last month’s banana tree growth with a machete just to get to the shed, but by the same token, the employees at the teak plantation will never have to shovel snow to get the pickup out of the drive way. (How “exotic” would that be!?!?) I will never find an orphaned ocelot cub in my back yard, but the Panamanians will never have the opportunity to see a herd of bison pounding across the prairie because both bison and prairie are foreign and exotic in Panama.
(Clearing brush from around young teak trees, workers found the ocelot cub pictured above and determined it was abandoned. Most of the locals shoot ocelots on sight because their food of choice is chicken. Chances are this little guy’s mother was killed in such an incident.)
Who knows, next year maybe some Panamanian will come to Sioux City to see about investing in an apple orchard. After all, strange and exotic investments are all the rage.
Copyright © 2008 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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