Crucially, though still little understood, forests create the envi-
ronment for the propagation of water, the 'first-born' of the energies
of life, as Schauberger puts it, and they moderate the climate, mak-
ing it cooler in summer and warmer in winter. They are also respon-
sible for the mineralization and fertilization of the surface soils,
essential for the nutrition of higher life forms and, most important
of all, the forests create the rich humus and bacterial life, the foun-
dation of a rich biodiversity, which stores and recycles vast amounts
of rainfall, preventing floods on lower land.^3Tropical rainforests
Everyone who has the opportunity, before it is too late, should visit
a tropical rainforest, for they are the priceless jewels of our ecosys-
tem. Important not just for the incredible richness and variety of
their fauna and flora, they have had a substantially modifying influ-
ence on the world's climate, helping to make most of the Earth
pleasantly habitable and very productive. They were on four conti-
nents, but are now only about half their extent of 500 years ago: the
South American is the most complete, at about 75% of its original
size; the South-east Asian, from India, through Indo-China to
Indonesia and Australia is about a third of what it was, and the
African about 40% of its original size. The Central American has
virtually disappeared.
More than twice as much of the Sun's energy reaches the Earth's
surface at the tropics as in high latitudes where the Sun's angle
above the horizon is very low. The tropical rainforests of the world
act as heat pumps, transferring to higher latitudes some of the enor-
mous energy they generate, thus evening out the temperature dif-
ference. Without them, the equatorial regions would be much hotter,
and the higher latitudes much colder. The larger the mass of a trop-
ical rainforest, the more effective it is as a heat pump.
Now that we know, from a study of the Amazonian rainforest,
how the heat pump works, it is possible to conjecture that the
African continent would not have been nearly as dry as it is today.
In South-East Asia the destruction has reached cataclysmic propor-
tions, with a free-for-all between corrupt local interests and greedy
multinational companies who are also extracting minerals at a fast
pace, particularly in Borneo, where most of the virgin forests, theo-
retically protected, are likely to disappear within fifteen years.
- THE ROLE OF THE FOREST