Thursday, June 02, 2005

From Thousand-Year-Old Sentinel to Traffickers' Booty

Published: June 2, 2005

ALERCE, Chile - The majestic tree that gives this town its name is one of Chile's principal national symbols. Streets, schools, suburban housing developments, hotels, gas stations, taxi fleets and even a record company and a brand of cellphone - all invoke and honor the towering and sturdy "sequoia of South America," as the alerce is sometimes called.

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Scott Dalton for The New York Times

In 1976, Chile declared the alerce tree a "national monument."

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Scott Dalton for The New York Times

Luis Cárcamo, right, followed by his son Javier haul off trunks of the prized alerce. Cutting of live trees is illegal.

The New York Times

In Alerce, the tree that provided its name has all but vanished.

But here in Alerce, as in many other parts of southern Chile, there are scarcely any alerce trees to be found these days. Predatory cutting and burning in defiance of laws meant to protect the species have reduced its range and numbers by half and created a lucrative black market in which alerce timber can fetch as much as $5,000 per cubic yard, if successfully spirited abroad.

"The corruption is tremendous, involving very important people," said Adriana Hoffman, a former Environmental Protection Agency director. "There is always plenty of talk about saving the alerce, but nothing gets done and as a result, we are losing part of our patrimony. What is going on is truly scandalous."

Despite its resemblance to the North American redwood, the alerce (pronounced ah-LER-say) is actually a relative of the cypress, with a tough, water-resistant reddish-brown wood that makes it much sought-after for use in building construction and furniture making.

Slow-growing, largely because it favors soils poor in nutrients that other trees shun, it nonetheless grows to a height of 165 feet or more and a width of 15 feet, and some trees in protected areas are more than 3,600 years old.

Since 1975, the export of alerce timber from Chile for commercial purposes has been banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. To further protect the species, Chile in 1976 also approved laws that declared the alerce a "national monument" and prohibited the cutting down of any live trees.

But those regulations contained a loophole that loggers were quick to exploit. Since it is legal to harvest dead trees killed off by fire, lightning or disease, traffickers have been clandestinely helping the process along, environmental advocates say, in hopes of reaping big windfalls.

Most often, loggers simply strip trees of their bark or set forest fires to scorch them and make them eligible for the death certificates that are required before they can be cut down and trucked to sawmills. But the traffickers have also been known to "strangle" alerces with metal rings placed tightly around the trunk.

On a recent cold and drizzly Saturday morning, José Darío Cárcamo, 68, and his son and grandson were scavenging for the remnants of trunks in what had once been a grove of alerce trees here. Their plan was to recover as many stumps as they could with their axe and power saw and then sell the wood, either to neighbors for fuel or to local artisans who prize the alerce as the raw material for carved souvenirs or musical instruments. "When I was a young man, it seemed that there were still alerce forests everywhere," said Mr. Cárcamo, a former woodsman. "Now my grandson has only this, and God only knows what will be left for his grandson."

Government officials maintain that environmental groups here and abroad are exaggerating the threat. They argue that alerce stocks remain plentiful and that the official policy is working better than the alternatives suggested by critics.

"The alerce is not going to be wiped out this year or next, or in the next thousand years," Carlos Weber, director of the National Forestry Corporation, the government agency that oversees all aspects of Chile's forest management, said in an interview in Santiago. "We're not talking about 50 or 100 trees left, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of acres, far above what the market demands each year."

In an effort to safeguard the alerce, Chile has set up a network of national parks and other protected areas. But the government has crippled the environmental crimes division of the national police, and environmental advocates say they are worried at other signs of a lack of resources and political will to guarantee that the law is obeyed.

"It's an absurd responsibility and raises the question of whether the government is serious about enforcing environmental laws in southern Chile," said Aaron Sanger, the representative in Chile of Forest Ethics, an American environmental group. "The government has one ranger for every 900,000 acres in that region, so it is kind of hard for that ranger to do a good job of detecting illegal logging in these remote places."

Environmental groups charge that the illegal traffic in alerce wood is controlled by a mafia that has connections to powerful politicians. Last year, a judge near here received death threats after she began an investigation into charges that a federal senator had improperly pressured Mr. Weber to issue logging certificates to favored constituents.

More recently, the mayor of Fresia, west of here, Nelson Schwerter, was arrested and accused of being a middleman in an alerce-smuggling scheme. He has accused judicial authorities of a political vendetta, but five woodcutters have identified the mayor as the person to whom they sold illegally logged alerce.

Much of the alerce shipped abroad has been tracked to places like Britain and Japan. "The alerce is mixed with other woods that are not on the protected list, and the customs people are none the wiser," said Dr. Hoffman, now the director of Defenders of the Chilean Forest, a leading environmental group. "There is little control and even less knowledge."

Yet in spite of the high price that alerce commands on the black market, commercial loggers have shown little interest in replanting the tree, for obvious economic reasons. Pine and eucalyptus grow fast enough that they are ready for cutting in as little as 20 years, while the alerce requires 1,000 years or more.


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Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Dinosaurs:
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Dinosaurs

“Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries,” the new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, offers a walk-through re-creation of a 130-million-year-old Chinese forest populated with previously unseen models of beaked and feathered dinosaurs, dino-eating mammals and even flying dinosaurs such as Microraptor — a four-winged, feathered glider. Museum visitors can experiment with T. rex biomechanics using interactive animations, created in Maya and Flash and turned into QuickTime movies, running on dual-processor Power Mac G5 stations. “We’re very happy with the way this stuff runs on the Mac, particularly with regard to what we can do with QuickTime, in terms of embedding video into an interactive shell,” says Mike Cosaboom, manager of Interactive exhibits. One of the biggest visual wows at the exhibit involves a synchronized three-video-source, three-screen animated projection of an Apatosaurus morphing out from just bones into layers of muscles, nerves and skin behind a gleaming 60-foot steel Apatosaurus skeleton that stretches across the center of the exhibition. Read more about the project and watch four video clips from the dinosaur exhibit.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

Orchid world

Located on Highway 3B, between Gun Hill and St.John's Church, in the heart of the Barbadian countryside this six acre farm is surrounded by sugarcane. On an elevation of 810 feet a number of vantage points allow the visitors to take in the view.


Visitors can take a self guided tour past a waterfall along the well landscaped meandering path and through five orchid houses. The trees are also to be watched carefully for orchids such as Schomburgkia will bloom once a year in a spectacular fashion. All the corners of the orchid world show us new and different floral delights.
Orchids like Vandas, Phalaenopsis, Calanthes, Cattlyeas, Ascocendas and Dendrobiums are found everywhere. ‘rain forest’ orchids are displayed in an environment meant to be a simulation, an eye catching display wherein the orchids seem to hang in mid-air with the orchids’ roots completely free of soil.

The entire area is quite calm and serene and the sound of burbling water and that of the wind rustling through the nearby sugar cane or the twitter of birds. The scent of the orchid fills the air along with the rich colors and shapes.
The orchid world is a feast for the eyes. The wedding gazebo located on the best vantage point offers visitors a calm, colorful option to get married.

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