As places that conjure up images of vast, empty spaces, frontiers are associated with many popular myths that contribute to their destruction. In each case, the reality is far more complex. Three of the more common myths about frontier forests are:
Myth: Frontiers are comprised of empty wilderness.
Reality: People have lived in many forests for hundreds of generations, mostly in small groups. Forests today house several hundred million people in Asia alone, [25] while at least 20 million people live in the Amazon Basin. [26] Low-level human activity over thousands of years within these areas has helped shape the forest structure and species mix in frontier ecosystems.
Myth: Forest peoples live in utopian harmony with nature.
Reality: Long before European colonization, forest peoples managed their natural resources according to customary practices. Evidence suggests that some human cultures destroyed their own forest ecosystems through abuse, and others in tribal warfare. [27][28] Today, rising populations, land shortages, and access to sophisticated technologies pose further management challenges for forest peoples.
Myth: Frontiers consist of fertile land, ripe for development.
Reality: In many places, frontier forests remain undeveloped because their soils are poor and they don’t have much commercially valuable timber per hectare. In many tropical forests, for instance, intensive agricultural activity can rapidly deplete soils that need natural debris from the tree canopy. Then too, forests are finite, and some are inaccessible. Forests in Amazonia and in Central Africa, for example, are rich in biodiversity but they often lack high densities of valuable timber species or good soils. [29]
References and notes
25. Owen Lynch and Kirk Talbott, Balancing Acts: Community-Based Forest Management and National Law in Asia and the Pacific, (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, 1995), p. 21.
26. Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia, Amazonia Without Myths, Amazon Cooperation Treaty, 1992, p. xii.
27. R. B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, (New York: Free Press, 1992).
28. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Global Biodiversity Assessment, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 765.
29. Duncan Poore, Peter Burgess, John Palmer, Simon Rietburgen and Timothy Synnott, No Timber Without Trees: Sustainability in the Tropical Forest, (London: Earthscan Publications, 1989), p. 18.
