The general nature of the problem was suggested to me when I was in the forest consultancy game in the form an empirical question. Why was it that forest areas under rebel (NPA or MNLF) control remained just as bad as those under Philippine government control?

I would sometimes come to an area which was alternately logged by the rebels and the Philippine military. The rebels were up in the woods some days and the military on others. In fact the only woods that were decently managed were those which actually belonged to someone.

The country rep of the WWF and I had a long debate one day at a Davao hotel. I said, “if you want to preserve the forests, title them to the tribes or sell them to private parties”. He was aghast. “Do you mean to say,” he said, “that you’ll allow private parties to own forest?”

“Sure,” I said. “And they can cut and sell the wood as they please.” This produced an even greater horror. He asked, “how can forests be managed for profit?” He refused to credit the possibility.

I explained that the intellectual lineage of discount rate owed much to forestry. Back in the day, when charcoal became big in Germany, the woodsmen cut down the surrounding forest until they ran out of woods. Then one day a German monk had an idea.

What if you could sell trees that were harvestable in the future? So the monk identified block parcels which were planted to even aged stands. After ten years you had stands of 10, 9, 8 … 1 years of age. Assuming they were harvestable in 20 years, then stand 10 would be ready to harvest in another ten years, stand 9 in eleven, etc.

As a block was harvested it was replanted. Things rotated around so that you never ran out of trees. There was always a stand in the pipeline. To support the enterprise you had to value things which were only realizable in the future. You needed a discount rate by which you could sell a future stand of trees. You needed other things besides. Contracts, property rights. Law. Only then could forests survive.

The WWF man listened to me with increasing disdain. His comeback was always, “profit is bad.” My comeback is that only profit ensures that the future has a value. Without profit, the future has no value except as a bureaucrat assigns it. As proof, I invited him to compare the conditions of forests under private management and those under the government forestry department.

He grimaced. “Well that is because of corruption. What we need is to cleanse government culture of greed and then there will be no corruption.” I brought up the rebels and said, “well if dyed in the wool communists act just looters of the commons what hope for extirpating corruption?” In fact, I argued, it was greed that created rational practice. Unless people were motivated by greed, they would never protect the forest. “People will protect the forest only if they expect to benefit from it.”

He recoiled, I remember, like Faust from Mephistopheles. “Profit!” he said. “It can never work.”

Well the last time I checked the forests managed according to his principles of idealism were all gone. And those managed under greed were still there. The right discount rate — the real value of the future — can only exist where there is a market for its value. If you let the politicians set the value of the future, they will debauch our tomorrows to bribe voters today.

One of the ways you tell whether a forest is dying is to look at its age structure. A healthy forest has lots of little trees, fewer middle sized trees and relatively few big trees. Susutainable foresty is the process of identifying trees which at the older end of the age distribution and taking them before rot does. A dying forest has no little trees because they rebels have dragged the harvestable trees across the forest floor with a winch in the harvesting process and smashed them. If you look at European demography you can see something that is structured just like that.

It’s a dying human forest. Europe cannot rationally continue down that path. It’s just as simple as that.