Thomas E. Lovejoy (New York, 1941- Washington D.C., 2021) earned a PhD in Biology from the Yale University in 1971. In the course of his career, he directed the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) Conservation Program (1973-1987), and served as Assistant Secretary for Environmental and External Affairs for the Smithsonian Institution (1987-1998), Chief Biodiversity Advisor to the President of the World Bank (1999-2002), President of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment (2002-2008), Chair of the Independent Advisory Group on Sustainability for the Inter-American Development Bank (2010-2011) and Senior Advisor to the President of the United Nations Foundation.
He was University Professor in the Environmental Science and Policy Department at George Mason University (United States) and Chairman of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.
Lovejoy was distinguished with the Tyler Prize (2002) and the Blue Planet Prize (2012). As well as serving on numerous scientific and conservation boards and advisory groups, he was a member of the National Geographic Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Linnaean Society of London, among others. In 2016, he was appointed as a U.S. Science Envoy by the United States State Department.
Speech
Ecology and Conservation Biology, 1 st edition
Seen from the sky it is an endless tract of luxuriant land, interspersed with water channels that run through it like brown capillaries coursing through the green. Then suddenly, a human settlement comes into view. Look closer. The land surrounding the town seems to have lost its lush green appearance. It is scored by highways and paths that branch out like a fishbone, and between each spine the land looks barer, poorer, less itself. So, it turns out that the forest is not infinite. It has an end. And here something is eating it away from within, driven by the needs of a distant world – Europe, the United States, emerging Asia – hungry for oil and timber, for biofuel and soy crops.
The first to conduct a large-scale scientific analysis of the creeping damage being done were two U.S. biologists: Thomas Lovejoy, then research associate at the prestigious Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and holder of the biodiversity chair at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, and William Laurance, likewise of the STRI. The immense Amazonian forest that fascinated Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana in the 16th century, and is, even now, home to scores of uncontacted ethnic groups, “is perilously close to the point of no return”, warns Lovejoy. “Ecosystem degradation is advancing much faster than we imagined, though we must take hope from the ambitious conservation initiatives that are now starting up.”
The Amazon rainforest occupies over five million square kilometers and is a paradise of biodiversity. One out of every ten known plant and animal species is found within its confines – at least 4,000 plant species, 3,000 fishes, some 1,300 birds, and around 1,500 mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Many more remain unknown. “It’s the only place in the world where you can see jaguars, eagles, tapirs… all these magnificent creatures in their natural environment,” enthuses Laurance.
In the 1970s, Thomas Lovejoy decided to study how the forest was coping with a problem that was already heading the list of threats to planetary ecosystems: habitat fragmentation. He launched the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP), a joint venture between the Smithsonian and Brazil’s Amazonian Research Institute which is the largest study, in space and duration, ever conducted on fragmented jungle habitat. Bill Laurance is the project’s most productive researcher with over 270 publications to his name in leading scientific journals, along with a steady output of educational articles.
The BDFFP covers an area of more than 1,000 km2. It takes in vast stretches of intact Amazonia, as well as numerous forest plots of between 1 and 100 hectares which have been progressively isolated from the surrounding forest by clearcutting and pastureland. BDFFP researchers censused all these area for trees, birds, primates, small mammals, amphibians and insects both before deforestation – from 1979 to 1983 – and after, at regular intervals. The result is an invaluable resource: a catalogue of the species present, and their abundance, prior to deforestation. This may seem at first sight a meager outcome, but given the huge complexity of topical ecosystems, allied with the rarity and patchy distribution of many of their inhabitants, such an information-gathering effort is a massive achievement and a vindication of this pioneering experiment.
Analysis of these data has also yielded up new findings. For example, Laurance and Lovejoy have discovered that the changes taking place on the edges of artificially fragmented plots are rippling out across an unexpectedly large area, with impacts being detected over a distance of some 10 km. Moreover, changes in the natural microclimates of forest remnants trigger a dramatic rise in tree mortality, especially among the tallest specimens. And when a big tree dies in Amazonia, it takes with it a marvelously complex vertical ecosystem, a honeycomb of ecological niches as densely constructed as the Manhattan skyscrapers – only, in this case, skyscrapers that house a different animal or plant species in each of their apartments. Tree death, therefore, means a serious loss of biomass.
The BDFFP project has also helped settle a long debate among conservation experts
Is it better to protect numerous small areas or a single large one? The BDFFP has shown that in forest patches of around a hundred hectares, bird species plummet in a bare 15 years, which supports the case for keeping large extents of forest intact.
Another recent finding involves mathematical models to simulate how the forest will cope depending on the kind of conservation – or non-conservation – policies applied. In the article The Future of Amazon Brazil , published in Science in 2001, Laurance wrote: “The Brazilian Amazon is currently experiencing the world’s highest absolute rate of forest destruction (…). We developed two computer models that integrate spatial data on deforestation, logging, mining, highways and roads, navigable rivers, vulnerability to wildfires, protected areas, and existing and planned infrastructure projects, in an effort to predict the condition of Brazilian Amazonian forests by the year 2020. Both models suggest that the region’s forests will be drastically altered by current development schemes and land-use trends over the next 20 years.”
What would happen to the rest of the world if Amazonia ceased to exist? “It will mark a big contribution to climate change, as well as a tragic loss of biological diversity,” responded Lovejoy. With deforestation, the carbon stored in living organisms is released into the atmosphere. Simulations suggest that in the Amazon alone, this process may be pumping 150 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere every single year, equivalent to the carbon output of the whole United Kingdom.
Is there some way to halt the damage? According to Lovejoy and Laurance, the causes of deforestation were no more locally confined than its effects. This is why they pitched their researcher training program and their campaigning efforts at regional and international level. The BDFFP has long been a training ground for dozens of environmental scientists and managers, some of whom now hold positions of power with a say in the future of Amazonia. Their message is clear: “Directly or directly, we all play a part in deforestation when we consume oil or wood …,” says Laurance. “It is not just the local countries but all of us who must make an effort. This is something that concerns us all. We need to stop deforestation now.”