American Canopy

by Eric Rutkow

By the early 1980s, this new submovement within environmentalism was beginning to work toward formulating a practicable plan to address rain forest destruction. One possibility was an international treaty, but the political momentum was absent among the developing countries that controlled the trees. A more feasible option was for the movement simply to put its money where its mouth was and offer to pay for the outcomes it desired. While the nonprofits were well capitalized, they could not command billions of dollars, the amount necessary given the scale of destruction. The international environmentalists thus looked to build bridges with other funding sources. These included the U.S. government and the United Nations (both of which oversaw international aid organizations with vast budgets) as well as the deep-pocketed MDBs (which were already embroiled in rain forest politics).

  Gradually, a loose coalition formed, and in July 1985, a group of international organizations—including the World Bank, the WRI, the U.N. Development Program, and the U.S. Agency for International Development—declared that they had devised a Tropical Forestry Action Plan (TFAP) to combat deforestation. The plan called for a staggering $8 billion to be donated over five years for preservation, reforestation, and rehabilitation projects in fifty-six nations. As a representative for the U.N. Development Program explained, “Hitherto we’ve just piddled around with this problem. . . . Now we are telling the world this is a global problem and this is what it will cost to fix, and we’re asking for billions.”

  Despite early optimism, the plan sputtered. Interagency squabbling hampered effective administration. Potential donors hesitated to commit such large amounts, and the money that was raised produced less impact than hoped for. Some developing nations simply refused to participate, wary that the financial support would cost them political sovereignty. Still, TFAP set out a preliminary path for the potential use of funds from the developed world to address environmental challenges abroad.

  Directed aid, however, was not the only way to make money talk. Some in the American rain forest movement targeted the U.S. corporations whose behavior encouraged tropical deforestation. In mid-1987, the Rain Forest Action Network (RAN)—a two-year-old San Francisco–based nonprofit—called for a boycott of the fast food chain Burger King, which annually was importing seven hundred thousand steers raised on land cleared from Central American rain forests. The boycott quickly gained widespread coverage from national media that were beginning to embrace the rain forest issue. An article in Newsweek quipped, “Lunch isn’t what it used to be. . . . Partly because it takes 55 square feet to produce enough grazing area for a single all-beef patty (let’s not even discuss Double Whoppers), at least 260 rain-forest acres disappear each day.” Within a few weeks of the boycott’s being announced, Burger King caved to the public pressure and promised that it would no longer purchase south-of-the-border beef. It was a major victory, and set a precedent for other companies that profited from rain forest destruction.

  At this point, it was beginning to seem like the multipronged approaches of the environmental movement had a real chance to change the fate of the rain forests. The New York Times published an article in October 1987 titled “Concern for Rain Forest Has Begun to Blossom.” It described the save-the-rain-forest campaign as making “slow but certain progress.” The head of the RAN told the Times reporter, “What’s happening now is very exciting. . . . [T]here’s more to be done in the United States to save the rain forest than in countries like Brazil because a lot of American tax dollars and American companies are financing destructive rain forest projects.”

  As media reports increased, the issue began to grab the attention of the great tastemakers in American culture: entertainers. Among the first to embrace the issue was the long-touring band the Grateful Dead. In mid-1988, it announced that it would perform a benefit concert for the rain forests at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Frontman Jerry Garcia told the New York Times, “We’ve never called on our fans to align themselves with one cause or another, and we’ve always avoided making any political statements. . . . But this is an issue that is life-threatening and we hope that we can empower our own audience to act.” Dozens of major musical acts followed the Grateful Dead’s lead, including the Rolling Stones, who donated five hundred thousand dollars from their 1989 Steel Wheels tour to rain forest protection.

  By early 1989, the rain forests were being described as “the hottest political cause since world hunger.” That spring, a sort of celebrity debutante ball for the save-the-rain-forest campaign took place in New York City. It was called “Don’t Bungle the Jungle,” and its twenty-one hundred attendees included a roster of America’s glitterati: designer Calvin Klein, musician Billy Joel, actress Tatum O’Neal, model Iman, and artist Kenny Scharf, who served as cohost. The guests were treated to an evening of live music, with performances by the B-52s, the Del Fuegos, the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, and even Madonna, who was not only the biggest musical act in America at the time but also the benefit’s other cohost. Clad in a blond wig and see-through blouse, she told the star-studded crowd, “When the trees go down, the whole system collapses. . . . The tropical forests produce oxygen for the world. You know, air, we need it to breathe. . . . Every second an area of rain forest the size of a football field disappears. . . . At this rate in 50 years the entire rain forest may be gone—forever.” The gravity of this statement was somewhat undermined later in the evening when Madonna began dancing provocatively with comedian Sandra Bernhard. In the flurry of tabloid speculation that followed, Bernhard griped to People magazine, “The rain forest is dying. What do you care more about, the rain forest or our sexuality?” People’s response: “The rain forest. Really.”

  Americans were now being bombarded from all sides with calls to save the rain forests. The New York Times alone ran more than fifty stories on the rain forests during 1989. Documentaries and special reports filled the airwaves. Stores began stocking clothing adorned with images of endangered species. Supermarkets carried cereal boxes and snack packs that displayed cartoon scenes of tropical forest life. Colleges held rain forest vigils. There was even a rain forest exhibit on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day.

  In the midst of this activity, USA Today produced a short, tongue-in-cheek article titled “Evolution of the ’80s Man.” The final evolutionary phase, from 1988 onward, was described as the “Gentler Man.” According to the article, his “mission was to nurture, prolong life and save the planet. . . . [H]e contributed time and money to save the rain forests.” This may have been a caricature, but it captured a remarkable development in the way average Americans thought about trees. They no longer needed to be physically located in the United States to justify concern. The growth of ecology, the rise of the international environmental movement, the martyrdom of Mendes, and a sudden celebrity and commercial push had worked together to help stamp rain forest protection onto Americans’ ethical map (though most might have struggled to locate a tropical forest region on an actual map).

  And Americans were not the only ones whose attitudes were changing. Brazil, which controlled more rain forest than any other nation, was also undergoing a transformation. Its government had long chafed at the work of the international environmental movement, viewing it as a threat to political sovereignty. As late as 1989, the Brazilian president was still questioning the movement’s entire premise: “We cannot accept the developed world’s manipulation of the ecology issue to restrict Latin America’s autonomy and progress. . . . It is the developed countries which should be giving explanations for the destruction of the environment.” Barely a year later, however, a newly elected president announced that his administration was going to reverse course, support the goals of international environmentalism, and accept aid to save the rain forests. This turnabout partly reflected economic necessity—Brazil, like many developing nations, was trapped in a worsening cycle of debt and could not easily turn down aid. But there was more going on, a deeper shift in priorities that owed much
to the work of local environmental groups. Brazil even agreed to host an upcoming Earth Summit that would mark the twentieth anniversary of Stockholm.

  Following Brazil’s about-face, the international environmental movement continued to expand its actions, both in the Amazon and throughout the tropical world. Much of the progress relied on links with local and indigenous communities whose leaders were carrying on the legacy of Mendes and other, lesser-known, rain forest defenders. The combined impact of these activities helped to break the pattern of accelerating forest loss that had marked the “Decade of Destruction.” But the pace still remained alarmingly high, and pressures to develop the rain forests would only increase, especially as populations swelled and global markets demanded ever more resources.

  America’s save-the-rain-forest campaign never officially ended, but it only managed to sustain its peak level of popular interest for several years in the early 1990s. The special news reports gradually slowed down. The celebrities—most of them anyway—moved on to new feel-good trends. The save-the-rain-forest T-shirts disappeared from the racks. The much-anticipated Chico Mendes movie was scrapped.

  In some respects, America’s concern for the rain forests did not so much disappear as become subsumed. A new international environmental threat—one that affected not only the rain forests but every tree on earth—was beginning to seem even more worrisome. To put it simply, the world was starting to heat up.

  Carbon Copies

  THE EARLY MONTHS of 1988 were record setting, at least as far as temperature was concerned. Mercury was everywhere on the rise. Meteorologists began pronouncing it the hottest year since official record-keeping began in the mid-nineteenth century. Then the summer arrived, and the situation only worsened. Heat waves rumbled across the nation. Droughts reached a scale unknown in some places since the Dust Bowl. On July 4, Time magazine ran a cover story simply called “The Big Dry.” The punishing conditions were front-page news and top-of-the-hour television.

  In the midst of this, an unusual number of fires began to appear in the Yellowstone region. This was one of the sacred cathedrals of America’s arboretum. Part of it—the portion containing the grand geyser named Old Faithful—served as the nation’s first national park. It had been authorized by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Nineteen years later, President Benjamin Harrison had designated over one million adjacent acres as the nation’s first federal timber reserve (later to become America’s first national forest). All of these tree-filled acres were at risk if the fires spread.

  Federal officials tried to contain the outbreaks from the very start, but the summer’s unrelenting heat stoked the blazes like a cosmic bellows. Individual fires swelled and then linked together, forming massive walls of flame that rolled across the tree canopy. At the height of the crisis, more than nine thousand firefighters were dispatched in an effort to contain nature’s fury. But all was in vain. The wildfire would not relent until the midautumn arrival of cooler, wet weather. By that point, more than one-third of the park—nearly one million acres—had been consumed. How many moose perished was anyone’s guess.

  It was the worst forest fire in the history of the National Park Service, and Americans wanted answers for what had happened to their cherished trees and the ecosystem they supported. Some questioned the agency’s tactical decisions. Others suggested that the fire was an unavoidable—indeed, necessary—response to an overabundance of mature timber. But the clearest culprit—at least to a nation suffering beneath triple-digit temperatures—was the heat wave itself. The all-important question, then, became: Just why was it so brutally hot?

  A potential answer had appeared on the front page of the New York Times on June 24, just as the Yellowstone fires were beginning. The headline read: “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” According to the article:

  [T]he higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution. . . . Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the “greenhouse effect.” But today [a top government scientist] told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere. . . . The current drought [is] a foretaste of what the country [will] be facing in the years ahead.

  Other media outlets soon picked up on the story. Within weeks, “The Greenhouse Effect” was featured on the cover of Newsweek.

  As the summer wore on, and the droughts deepened, and the Yellowstone fires raged, the cries of global warming grew louder. Americans were inundated with terrifying accounts of the impending day of reckoning that their own behavior had supposedly brought about. According to Spencer Weart, author of The Discovery of Global Warming, “Up to this point . . . global warming had been generally below the threshold of public attention,” but the issue suddenly broke through. A poll conducted in the aftermath of the brutal 1988 summer found that 79 percent of Americans had become aware of the greenhouse effect.

  THE ORIGINS OF the climate change discourse reached back to the early nineteenth century and a French scientist named Joseph Fourier. He had wanted to understand what factors produced the earth’s stable, temperate climate. Based on his calculations of incoming solar heat energy and of outgoing infrared radiation, the earth should have been extremely cold. In the late 1820s, he postulated, correctly, that the warmer observed temperatures were somehow due to insulation that the earth’s atmosphere provided. Fourier compared the situation to a box covered with a pane of glass, where sunlight entered and much of the heat could not escape. (This powerful but inapt image would later give rise to the term “greenhouse effect.”)

  In the late 1850s, John Tyndall, an English scientist, picked up where Fourier had left off. The atmosphere, he speculated, might be able to trap heat if gas molecules absorbed infrared radiation. Most scientists at the time believed that all gases were transparent in this regard, but Tyndall discovered that coal gas—mostly methane—broke this supposed rule. According to Weart, Tyndall “found that for heat rays, this gas was as opaque as a plank of wood.” Tyndall’s subsequent experiments proved that other atmospheric gases, including carbon dioxide, were similarly absorptive. (In a continuation on Fourier’s glass box analogy, these gases would later be dubbed “greenhouse gases.”) Tyndall explained, “As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial [infrared] rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface.”

  Tyndall had identified the mechanism behind Fourier’s insulation speculation, but his research stopped there. It was another forty years before a Swedish scientist named Sven Arrhenius offered a precise relationship between greenhouse gases and global temperature. Arrhenius determined—in a rough but remarkably accurate calculation (at least based on present estimates)—that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would raise the Earth’s average temperature by five to six degrees Celsius.

  The role of mankind in all of this meant little to the early climate theorists. Their worldview treated nature, in its broadest dimensions, as a force well beyond man’s reach. And, from an atmospheric sense, this had largely been true during the nineteenth century. Theories of climate change were thus viewed as somewhat abstruse philosophizing, perhaps useful for understanding geological shifts like Ice Ages, but hardly relevant to anything in the near term.

  This consensus view, however, began to fracture in 1938. That year, a British engineer named Guy Stewart Callendar stood before the Royal Meteorological Society in London and declared that the world was indeed warming and that man was to blame. His claim threatened the very foundation of man’s relationship to nature. It was practically heresy. But Callendar remained adamant. His calculations showed a discernible warming trend, and the simplest explanation for him wa
s the millions of tons of greenhouse gases that poured forth from the world’s refineries, power plants, automobiles, and factories. The entire industrial system had been built around extracting energy from carbon-rich coal and petroleum (the so-called fossil fuels). But their combustion released huge volumes of carbon dioxide.

  Many initially dismissed Callendar’s contentions as either incorrect or wildly speculative. The skeptics questioned whether it was even possible to measure global average temperature or carbon concentrations. These were—and still are—valid concerns. But researchers across diverse fields found innovative ways to track temperature and carbon over time. Glaciologists would study air bubbles trapped in ancient ice cores. Paleobotanists would analyze sediment from peat bogs. Meteorologists would set up carbon sensors in the most remote corners of the globe. Dendrochronologists would measure the width of tree rings from millennia-old specimens. The early evidence was far from conclusive, but suggested that Callendar might have been correct.

  By the early 1960s, climate researchers were recommending that fossil fuels be treated as a type of pollutant. Their case was not yet sufficient to sustain a Rachel Carson–style polemic, but the federal government did acknowledge the concern in a 1965 report on environmental pollution. One of the report’s sections bore the title “Carbon Dioxide From Fossil Fuels—The Invisible Pollutant.” It noted, “Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years.” In the period between the federal report and the scorching summer of 1988, the climatic threats from fossil fuels appeared occasionally in the nation’s public discourse, particularly during the energy crises of 1973 and 1979.

  Fossil fuel combustion, however, was not the sole source of greenhouse gases. Carbon was the basic building block of all organic material, including trees. When forests grew, they sucked carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and converted much of it into wood. Conversely, when trees decayed or caught fire, they released much of this stored carbon as CO2. Nature maintained a general degree of balance between these two processes. But this homeostasis was threatened by man-made deforestation, which transformed forests from giant reservoirs of solid-state carbon into greenhouse gas factories.