Review – ‘Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet’ By John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy

The world’s megaforests – in Siberia, Congo, North America and the Amazon – are vital to the planet’s health and future of humans, and Ever Green is their manifesto. This sweeping overview of the Earth’s forested ecosystems includes descriptions of the flora, fauna, and people of these forests, offering economic and political perspectives and explaining how forests contribute to planetary health. However, like the forest, it is more than the sum of its parts. After reading Ever Green, readers will recognize themselves as part of the whole.

—

The authors of this fascinating book are John W. Reid, a conservationist and economist, and Thomas E. Lovejoy, a pioneering biologist who passed away in 2021, prior to the publication of the book. 

The first two chapters introduce the topic and lay out several of the challenges of describing these forests, including politically-charged topics such as mapping and terminology. It is a somewhat slow, almost meditative beginning, and suits this type of grand work. 

Following the introduction, the first major part of the book takes the reader on a grand tour of the world’s five largest forests, from the Taiga of Russia and the boreal forests of North America to the tropical forests in the Amazon, Congo, and New Guinea. The authors provide a thoughtful explanation of what characterizes each of these forests, going into specific terms and definitions (for example, what defines a “forest”?) and plenty of fascinating details and anecdotes. Did you know that gorillas in the Congo enjoy digging for, and eating, truffles? Or that elephants engineer the forests for other species? These chapters also explain the threats unique to each type of forest, whether it is logging roads, plantations, hunting, or clearcutting.

Throughout the entire first section, the authors reiterate one of their central concepts: that isolated or separated concentrations of trees are fundamentally different from a large forest. Controlled scientific studies attest to it, but dozens of examples illustrate it, including the interactions of root systems, fungi, insects, predators and prey.

About a third of the way through the book, the focus shifts to the people who live in and near megaforests. A highlight of the entire volume is the fact that the voices of Indigenous people are prioritized throughout. For, as it turns out, these forests are also home to extraordinary, and extraordinarily varied, people. 

A quarter of the world’s languages are spoken in the world’s largest woodlands. In the Congo forests, we find Pygmies famous for their tracking ability, who can smell at 60 paces whether or not an elephant is asleep. 

The book explains the role of Indigenous people as occasional exploiters and more often guardians of the forest, tending to consider what they have as a relationship with the land rather than ownership of the land. This naturally leads to conflict with oil and gas companies, loggers, and national armies. It also becomes clear that there is no one-size-fits-all for “Territories of Traditional Nature Use.” Although Congo suffers relatively less deforestation, it has very little indigenous control, while in the New Guinea forests, 90% of the land is held by native people and spiritual beings are considered parties to agreements. Meanwhile, New Zealand considers Te Urewara (a forest) a being with the same standing as an individual to seek relief from the judicial system.

More on the topic: Nature Rights: What Countries Grant Legal Personhood Status to Nature And Why?

From its excellent introduction to the people of the earth’s megaforests, the book moves to the relationship of forests with global financial markets. Again, the conflict is clear: markets focus on the value of forests’ parts rather than the integrity of the larger natural systems. For centuries, forests have long been prized for specific resources such as dye from Pau Brasil trees or masts for English ships. This skewed vision has not changed; indeed, when speaking of a 1966 proposal for Redwood National Park, then-governor Ronald Reagan said, “A tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?” Unfortunately, humans are cognitively ill-equipped to understand huge numbers, and find it difficult to see the difference between “lots” and “infinite.”

The authors also provide many examples of how, from a fiscal point of view, humans have not learned from their past mistakes of undervaluing megaforests – from the cautionary tale of the preclassic Maya (“Forest abuse can topple civilizations”) to the fact that the exhaustion of Spanish forests for silver smelting led to the collapse of the Roman Empire’s monetary system. Readers are then reminded that normal forest covers less than 8% of Atlantic forests’ precolonial 321-million acre (130-million hectare) extent. 

The last several chapters of the book examine how this might change. This includes a realistic assessment of how to monetize the carbon storage of forests, especially following the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen attempt at a global cap-and-trade system. The authors provide concrete examples of how multinational agreements play out when met with reality, including the environmentally disastrous ascension of the Bolsonaro administration in Brazil and the progress of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which set and reached a goal to protect 17% of land by 2020, and now has a new goal of 30% by 2030. The different types of nature preserves are also explained. A deep-dive on the destructive capacity (95% of deforestation in the Amazon takes place within 3 miles of a road or navigable river) and surprising economic inefficiency of forest roads should be a wake-up call to the agencies that often fund them, such as the World Bank.

By the end of the book, it is also made clear how difficult it is to re-grow forests from both a practical and monetary point of view. “Avoiding forest loss is monumentally easier and cheaper than getting a forest back,” say the authors. However, re-grown natural forest stores 42 times as much carbon as short-term rotation plantation forestry.

Throughout the book, the authors challenge readers to reflect on their own assumptions. While it seems to be trivial to define a “forest” as separate to a place that is not a forest, most of the people who live in one do not think of them as separate. The resources of megaforests include not only fish, game, nuts, and building materials. One forest-dweller points out, “I don’t know what the word is, when we need to find peace, we go in there. We gain strength and we come back.”

You might also like: The World’s Top 10 Biggest Rainforests

A fine feature of the book is its useful, detailed maps and wonderful photographs, which are of much better than average quality even in the paperback edition. Each of the images is so thought-provoking that it is easy to imagine a different edition of this book that focuses only on the photographs.

While the authors never point it out specifically, the text offers persistent reminders of the monumental role played by non-profits, research institutions, and multilateral organizations. After every few pages, readers are introduced to a different one, and another group of volunteers or leaders who have dedicated their lives to this cause.

It is difficult to find a flaw in this extraordinary book, although it sometimes does become self-indulgent in describing the authors’ visits to megaforests, straying into the travelogue genre. There is also an occasional over-reliance on the acronyms to refer to the numerous organizations mentioned in the text. 

The book concludes with a challenge to the readers from numerous forest-dwellers: tell them to come – or, at least, to step outside and learn how to love the natural world. For the authors of this extended love-letter to a green earth, and the people who live daily with our world’s megaforests, the forests are not a resource to be exploited nor a separate entity, but a cathedral to the religion of nature.

Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet 

John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy

2022, W.W. Norton & Co., 208pp

—

Check out more Earth.Org book reviews here.