“Is this a Mulanje cedar?” I asked, still having never seen a live one of any age. “I thought this was too low of an elevation for them to grow.”
“We thought so, too,” said Mitole, “but they are doing well.” These trees were just a few years old, too young by decades for loggers to be interested in them yet.
The trust has pursued a host of concurrent strategies to save the cedar, from mass planting to translocations and community outreach. But just as MMCT, which was founded in 2002, is still learning new things about the tree, it is also learning which tactics are most effective in saving it. To understand any efforts to save the cedar, one must understand the roots of its current plight.
In the early 1900s, when Malawi was still a British colony known as Nyasaland, the cedar was prized for its sturdiness, aroma, plentifulness, and termite-resistant qualities; it was the timber of choice in the country. The British had established the Mulanje Forest Reserve on almost 140,000 acres in 1927, ostensibly for conservation purposes, but in reality, probably to “exploit the plateau’s resources,” according to a 2007 paper in Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation. Around 1950, it became clear that there were insufficient cedar supplies to meet demand. The government planted groves of pine and other exotic tree species within the massif to help provide the timber needed and to relieve pressure on the cedar. The government also made it illegal to harvest Mulanje cedar without obtaining one of a few official land concessions to do so. But this system did little to stop the problem.
In the aughts, the “wheels started coming off,” Carl Bruessow, MMCT’s executive director, told me over a Zoom call this fall. Those who were awarded concessions to harvest a certain number of dead trees — oftentimes politicians looking to make what they saw as “easy money” — harvested many more living ones as well, he said. Illicit lumberjack gangs roamed the massif, clear-cutting entire swathes of forest, cedar and otherwise, with no regard for the age or condition of the trees they took. “Whenever there was any law enforcement action to try to counter it, either from the police or the forestry department, there was political interference,” said Bruessow, 60, who was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but moved to Malawi, where his White settler family had lived for generations, when he was 6 years old. MMCT organized patrols to try to stop trucks carrying untold numbers of cedar planks, only to find that some of the vehicles actually belonged to the aforementioned politicians.
Then things got really bad. Between 2010 and 2015, there was what Bruessow called a “wholesale ransacking of the mountain’s cedar.” Driving the frenzy was the astronomical price the wood could fetch. According to Bruessow, on the rare wood market Mulanje cedar was going for $5,000 to $8,000 per cubic meter. Without any enforcement mandate, MMCT had little recourse to stop the plunder.
The ultimate destination for all of the timber was unknown. However, Bruessow heard that much of it went to the Middle East for smart-looking dhows — traditional sailing vessels in the region — as cedar is a “good boat-building wood.” A miniscule amount remained in Malawi. The cedar’s “decline was as dramatic as you can imagine,” Bruessow said of those five years, thanks to the combination of government corruption, non-enforcement of logging quotas by the Department of Forestry, and the economic incentive for local villagers to continue cutting down the trees. (The carved cedar doors I saw in MMCT had been commissioned from local craftsmen in 2006. “Those guys are brilliant carvers and carpenters,” Bruessow said. “The amount of cedar they use in comparison to what disappeared is almost negligent, and we always wanted to support them.”)
“Ecologically, the cedar is — was — the dominant species in the cloud forest, which is the forest above 2,000 meters,” Bruessow said. “Our main assumption is that, if the cedar were to disappear, you would start to lose other species. And if we start to lose even one or two species, it will create a domino effect that will probably cause total loss of the ecology here.”
MMCT spearheaded the first of several projects to combat this distinctly anthropogenic extinction. Beginning in 2004, the organization began planting batches of cedar seedlings up on the mountain, averaging 15,000 per year. They grew the seedlings in several nurseries secluded high up in Mulanje itself. But there were unforeseen issues. “The survival rate was too low,” Mitole told me. The dramatic loss of older and taller cedars was, at least in part, to blame: Without the protective canopy provided by the old-growth forest, harsh frosts led to massive die-offs among the younger plants. It was also a numbers problem. Planting 15,000 new trees per year wasn’t enough.
“If the cedar were to disappear, you would start to lose other species. It will create a domino effect.”
So Bruessow and MMCT launched other initiatives to combat the cedar’s disappearance from as many angles as possible. Several translocation trials, still ongoing, involved planting cedar saplings from different seed sources (from different spots on the mountain) in various places around the country, such as Zomba Mountain, 40 miles northeast of Mulanje.
“We are trying to understand the different conditions present at all these sites and looking at the cedar’s growth rate to see what is surviving across all sites and where they’re doing better,” Mitole said.
But all the potential fixes, including the nurseries on the mountain and the translocations, had one shared problem: They failed to remedy the conditions that led to the cedar’s demise in the first place.
“Scavengers of old cedar, they’re not only going to take the stumps and dead logs,” Mitole said. “Considering that the big cedars are no longer available for them to harvest, they will go after younger trees. We have even seen the trees that were replanted only 15 or 20 years ago being chopped by the harvesters.” Those six-foot high trees out front of MMCT, I realized, might not be safe for long.
With that in mind, MMCT sought a two-pronged approach that involved not only planting new trees, but also effecting a new cultural paradigm.
THREE DAYS AFTER VENTURING up into the center of the massif, I found myself walking along narrow ochre-colored dirt paths between brick huts. Each dwelling was made from the same red earth beneath my feet. I was following Ruth Kalonda, the proprietor of the Hikers Nest, my guest house in Likhubula, who had offered to bring me to the nearby Nakhonyo Nursery. Nestled behind a cluster of houses and streets off the main dirt drag, Nakhonyo is one of five community-run cedar nurseries in Mulanje District.
There I met Daiton Rabson, the chairman of the Nahkonyo Management Cedar Group. Wearing a purple T-shirt and off-white canvas pants, Rabson flitted about beneath a trellis shading row upon row of cedar seedlings. He alternately weeded and watered the near-neon green plants, potted in black plastic bags. Though a far cry from the 150-footers blanketing the Mulanje Massif only 25 years ago, these six-inch baby cedars, of which Nakhonyo Nursery currently has 15,600, are key to saving the tree.
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