Resurrection

Brazil's Atlantic Forest Rises from the Ashes

by Andrew Downie

In order to make forestry history, André Ferretti drove two hours from his home in southern Brazil to Tagaçaba, a tiny village on the country's Atlantic coast. There, under the punishing sun of the Southern Hemisphere's summer, he boarded an aluminum launch that wound its way down the Tagaçaba River before veering off into an inlet running through a mangrove swamp.

After clambering aboard a makeshift wooden jetty, he and seven others made their way toward a small hill about a half hour's hike from the river. Carrying hundreds of inch-high saplings, they trod across an open buffalo pasture, teetered over makeshift bridges, waded knee-deep through rivers, sloshed through brown mud, black mud, gray mud and red mud, and up onto a bluff that looks down across a spectacular vista of pastures, mountains and the glistening waters of the Atlantic.

On the top of the hill, they cut away the rough grass and dug some holes and started planting. The reconstruction of the Atlantic Forest was under way.

The trees have grown since being planted in January, but they are still an unremarkable presence on the bluff, their fragile stalks almost unrecognizable from the bushes and weeds that coat the hillsides and the pasture below. If they had not been planted in neatly dug holes, they would be indistinguishable from the vegetation surrounding them.

Looking at the weedy little stalks, it is hard to imagine, let alone see, the scale and the drama of what Ferretti and his colleagues are doing here. What remains of the original Atlantic Forest is one of the most biodiverse woodlands in the world, with as many as 450 species of trees per hectare found in some parts of the forest hugging Brazil's southern coast. (A hectare equals 2.47 acres.) But as Joe Keenan, the man who manages The Nature Conservancy's Atlantic Forest program, points out, less than 7 percent of the original Atlantic Forest is left. By comparison, almost 90 percent remains of the celebrated Amazonian rain forest, and its plight is known around the world. Fashioning the buffalo pastures and deforested hills of the Atlantic Forest back into the thick woodland they once were is no mean task.

"How do you bring back as diverse a landscape as the Atlantic Forest?" asks Keenan. "You can still conserve the Amazon. But the Atlantic Forest has been so chopped up that what we have to focus on is restoring and linking patches of forest. It's a real challenge to take a cattle pasture and put a forest on it. This restoration project is a recognition that we have gone too far. We have pushed things out of balance, and it is time to bring some of that biodiversity back."

Keenan knows it is a difficult and arduous task. "It's a slow process," he says. "In fact, it's like watching grass grow."

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