THE TWILIGHT FOREST

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] for 3,000 miles and born in a broad belt across the west of Africa dwarfing the struggles of its people's stretches the tropical rain forest a twilight land where the Sun penetrates only and shafts of sudden silver against the dim recesses of a world of trees this is a story about those trees about pioneering about natural resources if the 214 accessible about a great enterprise and what that enterprise means to a people past emerging into the 20th century of an industrial west [Music] the African rain forest hundreds of thousands of square nose of it walnut and mahogany egg Burundi Rocco separately would quite a father Oh Becky and a dozen warm giant trees towering high above the surrounding bush [Music] for countless centuries the African have used the trees of the forest here and there on the rivers bank they were his canoe or the Timbers of a village hut the forest was his home and he used it for his simple needs a comb a bone a hunt a canoe other than that in the main nothing the trees grew and grew old rotted and fell tropical creepers covered the worms and the termites board their way into them and in the humid forest air slowly they crumbled away back into the soil from which they are sprung that was the rain forest primordial ever growing ever wasting oh yes people had often thought of cutting timber on a big scale but the undertaking was too immense the risks too great the trees worth cutting didn't grow conveniently in great messes like a pine forest they grew far apart often in inaccessible places no one even knew if they were enough good please to make it pay well of course you could always go and count them someone said count the trees it was just a dream [Music] safley 70 miles from the sea the highest point up river an ocean-going ships can reach seth early is a boom time a few years ago it was a little trading post now it's bursting it seems with people come to look for gold in the streets charms and fishes monkey skulls and dried snakes heads bicycles and wireless sets jostle and jumble for spirit has come to 7e a prosperity never known before for in Seppala miles from anywhere in the heart of the bush had been built the United Africa companies to great plants a modern plywood factory using every latest technique the West could offer and at its side one of the most up-to-date sawmills in the world [Music] here was the source of the new prosperity at last that dark secret rainforests were giving up their riches here at the mill there was we're not for one or two but for a thousand or more and a thousand new things to learn about insecticide that killed the voracious tropical wood worms and beetles about tools that were fight power instead of sweat about trucks with arms in their bellies that would pick up storm timber by the ton and the rivers Bank of Saturday was only one end of the story in the Gold Coast a thousand miles away from here was an operation on the same scale the twin hath of a vinter that needed millions of pounds to start and is unique in the whole history of forestry they said you couldn't harvest full rainforest on an industrial scale the difficulties were too great now train load by crane load but timber rattles down into the holes log after log so many tons so much a ton mahogany comes up at the water and the sapling wood goes down into the hold that it has needed more than a team of sweating laboring men to get them there more than a key side in the heart of the bush it had needed the building of a great and complex organization and it started with a man who said you could always go and count the trees that's just what they did count the trees it meant cutting away through the bush for weeks and months and years away from all touch with civilization it meant hacking away through thousands of miles of unknown forests up ill and down hill and finding out what was there mile after mile at trail was forced they called it enumeration 3,000 miles of tropical rainforest reports indicated areas available for operations in the Gold Coast and Nigeria in the most favorable of these areas options were taken out and sample enumeration started in a straight line across the jungle backwards and forwards a path was cut and all the way every tree above a certain minimum size was measured and recorded and that was only the sample there was another stage to come everywhere logging was to begin the whole area was divided up into squares of one square mile each square was then divided by walkable traces into eight sections and that done a team of men walked in line abreast 20 yards apart down the length of each and every section in line abreast 20 yards apart over every section of every mile of every concession everywhere where felling was to start each time a man saw big enough tree of the right type the enumerator was called up if it was fully mature for only mature trees were to be cut the species and its exact position were noted done [Music] the trees were measured and numbered and put on the map yard by yard the line went up leaving behind a forest of marked trees in the past in the ancient world and in the forests of America men that descended like locusts leaving not a tree standing then where once a canopy of leaves had sheltered the ground the rains poured onto the naked flooding the rivers and leaving devastation behind sometimes even the climate changed men fell the trees and their children inherited a desert but this was not to be a wholesale slaughter here trees were to be cut only on a hundred year cycle allowing for the continuous regeneration of the forest when the Axman were gone it would be their great great grandsons who cut the forest next [Applause] [Applause] the forests of the earth our man's inheritance not for one generation alone but for all generations on this basis of respectful nature a new industry was founded forestry operations started on a vast scale with all the knowledge and resources of the west behind them not only to settle a had a new prosperity come carried on the roar and platter of Steel tracks it reached deep into the forest drawing in men often from villages hundreds of miles distant [Music] three thousand miles and a year away the craftsman would painstakingly polish the decorative grain of a table or a chair the paneling of a room the showcase of a shop in London or beads but for the African in the forest it meant something very different it meant that almost overnight the 20th century had come into his life [Music] [Applause] [Music] only a brief time ago a man had heaved and sweated and strained at a rope now he was mastered of a machine [Music] 100 years of all it took to grow that tree a hundred years of spring and summer you don't sunshine the brain now a day will bring it crashing into the ground [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] through seed and sapling to maturity so lived and died a tree that a new seed might grow tall in its place [Music] now carefully sighted all through the filling areas appeared the collection yards for a tree in the forest is worth nothing first you have to get it out here at the collection yard the whole complexity of the forestry operation begins to emerge [Music] now the log leaves the forest for a different world a world of movement and organization a world of machinery [Music] the collection point is the beginning of the road the entire system of roads that had to be built to transport the lungs but transport is the key to the whole forestry operation there might be a hundred miles of jungle between you and the riverbank button the river is the only way out so the logs weigh maybe ten tons apiece a foisted onto lorries fleets of lorries with mechanics and repair shops and stalls and fuel and spare parts to keep them going everything you need you bring in yourself just as you build the road yourself and maintain them and rebuild them when the torrential tropical rains wash them away Arthur my love timber that once would have rotted in the forest now resting gently on the waters of Ethio privet but every in love but species down into the water the reward of risks accepted and difficulties overcome [Music] long by log and section by section but timber is made up into rafts huge rods to be told a hundred miles and more downriver to Saturday down to the mills [Music] log by log using the creepers of the forest it slash together 20 logs in a section that's maybe 200 tons of precious hardwoods to be pulled into place [Music] [Applause] [Music] it all looks so simple so careless but beneath the quiet surface the currents are Swift and treacherous and a man who stumbled could be crushed relentlessly between tons of rolling timber 200 tons to a section 5 sections to arrived a thousand tons of hardwoods on the end of a pole that used to be the center of a palm from a thousand tons to push and shove away from the bank and out into midstream [Music] [Applause] once you're away from the bank the watchman takes up residence there beneath his roof of bamboo fetch he'll live until the raft arrives it's not exactly a living in the lap of luxury but somehow Watchmen always seem to manage [Music] it used to take a month or more for the raft to drift on the current down to 70 now with diesel tugs it takes less than a week 4,000 miles away in London other men are studying the pulse of world markets calculating prices and freight charges while yet the timber is hardly wet with the water of the field but here the palm oil chunk bubbles on the watchman's fire and the tug pulls the raft steadily on down between the green river banks down to the mill millions of feet of hardwood but it's more than just timber floating down to Stephanie it's a visible sign of the true independence of Africa and the West reward for the West without whose knowledge and resources those logs would have rotted back into the grind reward for the African but it means wealth for the tribe on whose land it stood yesterday it was a risk no one would take today it's a great industry providing revenue for tribe and government and employment for thousands you built roads where there were no roads trained men straight from their villages and a hundred new skills brought machines where machines had never been you came into the forest and where you came you created wealth where before it had wasted back into the earth yesterday they were counting the trees a small band of men hacking their way up hill and down mile after mile through the dense bush today from that twilight forest timber for the world is on its way out [Music]