Redwood Reader

The New York Times reported yesterday on conditions in the Panama Canal Zone, and we find more water-forest problems in a new setting. The Panama Canal uses 26 million gallons of water for each time a ship enters or leaves the Gatun locks connecting the Atlantic to the Miraflores locks on the Pacific Oceans, for a total of 52 million gallons. This water is drawn from Lake Gunta, a huge manmade lake formed when the Canal was built. There may be as many as 40 of these ship lockages a day.
That means a lot of water, especially in an area of dry winters where operating water needs to be stored. But in the last several decades half of the watershed has been logged or slash- and –burned for subsidence agriculture. Loss of water caused curtailment of shipping in 1990-1991 to about thirty a day causing huge revenue and scheduling problems. The Canal is estimated to be a factor in forty percent of the nations economy. This year the people vote on upgrading or expanding the system, for which even more water will be necessary.
This area is similar to ours in that respect, with an inch an hour, six inches in twenty-four hours and a hundred inches a year common, all relatively close to local conditions. What they are seeing is tremendous impacts to water resources from poor land management techniques. They see silt filling the canal and relate it directly to loss of forest cover.

“Rain falls so heavily in Panama that early canal builders described storms as turning the air to water.
On forested slopes, much of this water soaks into the ground and feeds slowly into watershed streams and then into Gatún Lake. But deforested slopes cannot absorb heavy rains. Floods of water run off into the lake, overflow Gatún Dam and run out to sea - useless for lockage. Meanwhile, eroded sediment ends up on the lake bottom, reducing its storage capacity.”

The effect of this is maintenance on a huge scale that directly impacts human needs.

“Between the town of Gamboa and Barro Colorado Island, a dredge anchored offshore drills into the lake bottom, sucking up excess sediment and pumping it through long pipes to shore. The resulting turbulence fills the lake with so much silt that people nearby who rely on it for drinking water have to filter it or use bottled water instead. But the dredging helps maintain the lake's capacity to store water.”

Once again it is clear ignorance has cost native people basic human needs like clean drinking water. Exploring further we find Columbus was the first man to see the area, another Spaniard wrote about the fabulous forest and its 1500 tree species in 1524, and that the jungle remained relatively intact the whole time, including building a railroad and the Canal and its use for about the first fifty years. Problems really started in the fifties with- road building. Probably initiated in WWII, the United States built a highway across the isthmus. Loggers followed the access and soon over three thousand kilometers of roads existed, built by loggers and followed by slash and burn agronomists and cattlemen. When the treaty to turn the land back to Panama was announced people felt they had a right to take advantage of their own land long inaccessible to them and rapidly turned forest into pasture.
In the 1980’s Panama hired Dr. Stanley Heckadon Moreno, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, to form a study group to contain watershed destruction which was peaking in that decade. By the time the study was complete in 2000 53 percent of the forest had been cleared. The study group realized Panamas future depended on forest and watershed health, and President Eric Arturo Delvalle created Chagres National Park, 250,000 acres of forest, as a national insurance policy. This was approximately one third of the watershed.
The project stumbled in the Noriega years in the eighties and even after his arrest in 1990 smaller watershed parks weree subject to poaching and trespass. Nevertheless, Dr. Heckadon became the first environmental minister. HE points out the importance of banks deciding not to fund cattlemen’s operations in the forest. The return of national ownership from the U.S. allowed the government to protect more resources, and the really big problems have eased. But there is a continuous pressure on a smaller scale that seems inevitable when protecting resources. This is eventually being addressed by educating the people on the critical importance of watershed health so they will see it as healthy system.
To that end a restoration team of scientists are studying and restoring impacted segments of the landscape learning as they go. They are trying to find that balance of functioning landscape system and sustainable usage. We note once again how paying to preserve big trees reduces economic incentive to harvest them, and that carbon sequestration money could go a long way towards that effort, and that glomalin management neatly fills all the gaps and streamlines management objectives. A lot of carbon dioxide will grow back into the landscape, the precipitation interface will reestablish itself and condition the atmosphere with various gaseous emissions for cycling water and causing droplet formation, among other functions. We would like to see the glomalin regime included in the planning and monitoring on this scale. At this point it is just another variable to measure carbon usage and fungal production, as well as growing water storage capacity in the soil and reducing sedimentation in the locks. Habitat and sustainable economics are a by products of good management.
They are plagued by an invasive species of sugar cane that is deeply rooted, fast spreading and growing so densely native species have a hard time getting established. It has served its original purpose of erosion control but now impedes native revegetation efforts.
One suggestion might be to use open top chambers in orchards as in the FACE experiments that would give native vegetation an advantage in the establishment years. Once the trees got started and the canopy started closing it would be more difficult for these types of plants to get the sunlight they need for optimal growth. Done in conjunction with studies this might be an invaluable combination of research and methodology.
The world is awakening to a new vision of how to maintain things we once took for granted but learned were not without end. Land, forest, water, trees, game, fish, clean air all have had a tough go of it in the last two centuries, and increasingly so. We finally recognize we are totally capable of destroying natural systems and are not so good at putting them back, and there is need for better understanding of natural systems so we have less impacts and more benefits for both the system and people. One of the best ways is to seal areas off and do nothing but that is a luxury in most of the real world. By understanding glomalin we can participate in the process to speed it along.
We hope these guys get together with the Papua-New Guineans and UNEP reps studying Kyoto and USDA SAR and bring the new science and need for big trees together with the control of greenhouse gases in a single global program that protects functional forest while providing sustainable benefits such as water, timber and wildlife in a profitable and stable landscape. Glomalin allows us to think this is a very doable change of attitude simply based on better knowledge.