White Beech: The Rainforest Years (2 page)

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:

Blue, glossy green and velvet black,

They coiled and swam; and every track

Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

That self-same moment I could pray;

And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea.

We all carry our own version of the dead Albatross hung around the Mariner’s neck. Our Albatross is the guilt that should weigh on us for making war on other Earthlings, invading and disrupting their habitat, slaughtering them in their millions and condemning millions of others to death and extinction. The Ancient Mariner didn’t know why he shot the Albatross, any more than the early settlers in Queensland could explain why they shot and killed vast numbers of koalas. The Mariner’s sudden surge of love for the snakes (snakes!) was like the sudden awareness of kinship that overtakes some of us as we enter the contemplative phase of life, when we find ourselves watching flies and midges instead of swatting them. The Ancient Mariner didn’t know, as Coleridge didn’t, that the opalescent sea snakes that were thronging about him were eels that had travelled halfway round the world to breed in the Sargasso Sea. The truth is even more wonderful than Coleridge’s fiction.

The Mariner learnt that ‘he prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast’; true it is that entering fully into the multifarious life that is the Earthling’s environment, while giving up delusions of controlling it, is a transcendental experience. To give up fighting against nature, struggling to tame it and make it bring forth profit, is to enter a new kind of existence which has nothing to do with serenity or relaxation. It is rather a state of heightened awareness and deep excitement. As I limp back down the mountain with my pockets full of fruit, on my way to prepare the seed for planting, I know that as many will grow as should grow. I am like Ganymede in the talons of the eagle, caught up and carried along by the prodigious energy of the forest. If the forest has its way, paucity will be replaced by plenty; once the vanished trees return, an invasion will follow. Mosses, lichens, ferns, orchids, mites, weevils, beetles, moths, butterflies, phasmids, frogs, snakes, lizards, gliders, possums, wallabies, echidnas, all will reappear in their own sweet time.

The forest is the bottom line. Without it the thousands of species that have evolved with it will fade from the earth. Technology has no solutions to the problem of biodepletion. There is little point in accumulating gene banks and none whatever in breeding threatened species in captivity. The only way of keeping the extraordinary richness and exuberance of this small planet is to rebuild habitat. If you put nets into the Wenlock River to trap Green Sawfish, and then truck them hundreds of kilometres to Cairns, where they will be loaded into an aircraft and flown to an aquarium in Missouri, you will be doing nothing to aid their survival, though you may be earning yourself as much as fifty thousand US dollars. The sawfish may survive in the aquarium, but they will survive as White Beeches do when they’re planted as street trees. They will have been forced to exchange a life of astounding plenitude for mere existence. If their habitat has disappeared, they can never return to it; if their habitat was restored, they would never need to go to the other side of the world, there to dwell in a tank.

The good news is that as soon as a depleted ecosystem begins to rebuild, the creatures that have evolved with it will flock to it. As soon as the Sloaneas we reared at CCRRS were shoulder-high, we found in the domatia on the undersides of their leaves mites that were practically identical with those found in the domatia of their fossil ancestors (O’Dowd
et al.
). It really doesn’t matter what ecosystem any might be, the creatures that belong within it are unique. They may be the same species as elsewhere, but their interaction with diverse habitats and different co-residents creates diverse behaviours. Monitor lizards lay their eggs in termite nests. There are few termite species in subtropical rainforest; the few there are make their nests high in the trees. The gravid lizard must climb the tree, break into the termite nest, get inside and lay her eggs, which might explain why in our local version of the Lace Monitor (
Varanus varius
) the female is less than a third the size of the male. The eggs laid, she leaves the nest, and the termites reseal it, so the eggs will be incubated in constant warmth and humidity. Legend has it that when the eggs are ready to hatch, the mother lizard will visit the nest once again and tear it open to free her hatchlings. Nobody seems to have actually witnessed this event but we keep watching.

As any threatened ecosystem begins to recover it may wobble. When the weevils that evolved many millennia ago with our Bolwarras found the ones we had planted at Cave Creek, they overwhelmed them (Williams and Adam). The creamy-white porcelain flowers were nothing but writhing brown knots of insect bodies, until the weevils’ predator caught up and lunched largely and long. Balance in the rainforest is largely a matter of stalemate, for no single species can opt out of the eternal struggle and no single species can be allowed to win it. Any species that dominates is doomed. Survival depends on finding your niche and keeping it.

I had no idea in December 2001 that what was about to fall into my hands was a hotspot of biodiversity. Gondwana was nothing but a name, no realer to me than Middle Earth. The first botanist to take a look at what I had was excited; those who followed were more excited. I knew that my patch was surrounded on two sides by national park, which was a plus, and I knew the national park was at the northern extremity of a World Heritage Site that was then called the Central Eastern Rainforest Reserve Area. That area, consisting of a broken string of small rainforest remnants, is now called Gondwana Rainforests of Australia. The forest fragments are of major conservation importance because of their high rate of endemism; what that means is that surviving in them are many species that can survive nowhere else. The rate of endemism grows higher in the northernmost fragments; it is highest in the Springbrook National Park, and that system includes Cave Creek. This is the astonishing stroke of luck.

I didn’t go shopping for exceptional biodiversity. I would have taken whatever came my way. When our first planting stopped holding its breath and shot up to make a forest, I was amazed. As I walked under its low canopy I felt a special kind of comfort in the knowledge that here at least the devastation of Australia’s astonishing biodiversity could be reversed. When I saw that caterpillars were already feeding on the leaves of the new little trees, I rejoiced that the system could still rebuild itself, that insects and plants that had evolved together many millennia ago could find each other again. For years I had wandered Australia with an aching heart. Here was balm indeed, worth every cent of the millions of dollars I have since turned into trees. The stock market may stagger, but the trees grow on.

This book could have been named for any of the myriad species that have their being in that small chunk of rainforest. I could have called it ‘Platypus’ or ‘Gastric-brooding Frog’, or ‘Pencil Orchid’ or ‘Blue Crayfish’ or even ‘Green Mountains’ but ‘White Beech’ is the name by which the book announced itself to me. I didn’t know that I wanted to write a book about the rainforest, until I woke up in the middle of the night with those two words written in white neon under my eyelids. I began to write the story before I knew the half of it. I still don’t know the half of it; I didn’t know till a few weeks ago that the fruit of the Cave Creek quandongs is blue not because of a pigment but because of nanoscale photonic crystals like the ones that give us the blue feathers of the peacock and the blue scales on butterflies (Lee). Every day brings a new encounter with the wonderful. There are as well encounters of a different kind.

I had all but finished this book, when a last terrible twist was given to the tale of the forest. I thought I knew all the outrages and insults that had been inflicted on it. The land had been stripped naked, the forest knocked down, burnt, the ground flattened and dug up time and again. It never occurred to me that the area might have been poisoned, and that with the deadliest compound that man has ever made.

I was innocently stowing my recyclables in the big yellow wheelie bin at the Resource Recovery Centre, when one of the locals came over for a natter.

‘I notice those people over the road from the national park are trying to grow organic vegetables,’ he said. ‘Bloody ridiculous.’

(I didn’t tell him that they had lost so much money trying to distribute their organic vegetables that they had already given up.)

‘All those signs along the fence saying no spraying. Bloody ridiculous. That whole place used to be sprayed from one end to the other with 2,4,5-T. Regularly. For years.’

His words hit me like a fist in the solar plexus. I knew 2,4,5-T only too well; 2,4,5-T was one of the two compounds that made up the defoliant known as Agent Orange. For years I carried a can of Agent Orange in my luggage, ready at the first opportunity to spray it on the White House rhododendrons. Agent Orange was the herbicide used by the Americans in their vain struggle to crush the Vietnamese National Liberation Front by ‘intentional destruction of both the natural and human ecologies of the region’, the most colossal onslaught ever inflicted on any natural system anywhere. By drenching the Vietnamese rainforest with herbicide the Americans hoped to strip the vegetation that provided cover for the Viet Cong and, by destroying the people’s crops, to starve them out of the countryside. In Operation Ranch Hand something like 20 million gallons of herbicide was sprayed on Vietnamese forest and cropland. By the time the operation came to an end in January 1971 a fifth of the forest cover in Vietnam, as well as some on the borders of Laos and Cambodia, had been destroyed. The American military stopped using 2,4,5-T, not out of remorse at the devastation they had wrought, but because of the growing body of evidence that it was contaminated with 2,3,7,8-TCDD, a dioxin. Dioxins are so toxic that they are measured in parts per trillion; at a tenth of a part per trillion they are still mutagenic, carcinogenic and teratogenic. They are also indestructible; even distillation will not remove them from water. They resist biological breakdown, are concentrated in fatty tissue, and are not easily excreted. By far the most dangerous of them is 2,3,7,8-TCDD which persists, accumulates and aggregates in the environment, becoming even more toxic when exposed to heat or light.

From the beginning of Operation Ranch Hand, scientists all over the world had been protesting at its savagery and recklessness. As one of the London-based Australians against the Vietnam War I had seen images of Vietnamese infants born appallingly deformed, apparently because of dioxins in the water table. In December 1971 I took a plane from Saigon to Vientiane. For a half-hour, as we flew north from Saigon, I saw nothing below but bare pitted mud latticed with tree skeletons, the accumulated result of nine years of ecocidal warfare. In 2006 the Vietnamese government informed the international community that dioxin poisoning had claimed 4 million victims and begged for help. Vietnam is a poor country, with few resources to put into a proper assessment of the damage done to its people or to deal with the burden of illness that will blight their future, as the teratogenic effects of dioxin exposure manifest themselves in a third and fourth generation of Vietnamese babies. In forty years the forest has not regenerated; in place of the rainforest dipterocarps there is a coarse scrub of bamboos and Pogon Grass, which is identical with the Blady Grass of southern Queensland. The lowland tropical forest of the Mekong delta is cousin to the forest at Cave Creek, with Gondwanan elements like podocarps and casuarinas; that meant less than nothing to me in 1971 but it matters a lot to me now.

The Americans drenched Vietnam with Agent Orange as an act of war. Could Australians have willingly poisoned their own country in peacetime? Surely my neighbour was mistaken.

‘Right up to the foot of the scarps. Year on year,’ he went on, ‘for years, 2,4,5-T. And now those people are growing purple carrots and blue potatoes on it and trying to pretend that they’re organic. All bullshit. You couldn’t farm organically anywhere round here.’

Surely he meant 2,4-D, Agent Orange’s other ingredient, I thought, as I turned the car around. I was wrong. I know now to my great sorrow that 2,4,5-T was widely used in south-east Queensland for thirty years or more.

Australia was one place where, as the Vietnam War wound down, the American military could profitably offload their unused chemicals. Much of the Agent Orange that entered Australia between 1969 and 1971 came via Singapore; some went to Western Australia, where vigorous campaigning has brought to light the extent of its malevolent action on the Aboriginal workers who were made to use it in the Kimberley. Ten times as much Agent Orange came into Queensland, via Farm Chemicals Pty Ltd at Eagle Farm near Brisbane, but of the kind of indignation that convulsed Western Australia there is no trace. By all accounts this old stock was unstable and heavily contaminated with dioxin (Hall and Selinger). Some of it was reportedly fire-damaged. It was dangerous, but it was cheap. It was to be used in forestry, to thin native hardwoods to the required eight-metre centres and to eliminate competing vegetation, and in agriculture, to control weed infestation in pasture, particularly Groundsel. It was also used by local authorities for brush control along roadsides and railway lines.