Deforestation

This piece from Low-Tech Magazine examines the practice of coppicing trees for firewood and other uses. The author argues that this practice offers a sustainable, low-tech, small-scale alternative to industrial logging, and doesn’t threaten to accelerate global warming. While we don’t agree with every element of this piece, it is a very important article. How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again by Kris De Decker / Low-Tech Magazine From the Neolithic to the beginning of the twentieth century, coppiced woodlands, pollarded trees, and hedgerows provided people with a sustainable supply of energy, materials, and food. ...

A blockade has been launched at the Capitol State Forest, Washington to stop clearcut logging. Learn more about the blockade. Forest Defenders today have launched a blockade to prevent the clear-cut logging of a 100-year-old forest west of Olympia on the traditional territory of the Chehalis people. The forest, part of the critically endangered Puget Lowland Eco-Region, was auctioned off by the Department of Natural Resources as the “Chameleon Timber Sale” to the Elma based Murphy’s Logging Company. Protesters have set up a blockade preventing road building and logging in one of the largest and most biodiverse units of the timber sale. The site is home to a late-successional Douglas Fir forest (over 100 years since it was last logged), which is gaining old growth characteristics that support endangered wildlife. ...

An ongoing blockade to protect old-growth forests in western Canada has now lasted more than a month, but blockaders hopes that a government report would help protect the Fairy Creek Valley have been dashed. Forest Defenders Hold the Barricades as the BC Government Fails to Defer Road Building and Logging into the Fairy Creek Rainforest September 14, 2020 Featured image: Road building in the old growth forests of the Renfrew Creek Watershed, part of the greater Fairy Creek Rainforest. (Photo Credit: Ken Dawson) ...

Another Massive Clearcutting Proposal Threatens Southeast Alaska’s Economy, Wildlife, Carbon Stores JUNEAU, ALASKA (Tlingit: A’aakw Kwáan lands) — The Trump administration announced plans today for yet another massive timber sale that would destroy more than 5,100 acres of critical old-growth habitat in the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska. “Shame on the Trump administration’s Forest Service for having the gall to continue to burden and overwhelm Southeast Alaskans with yet another needless and money-losing timber sale when we are in the midst of a pandemic and a controversial Alaska Roadless Rulemaking process," said Dan Cannon, Tongass Forest Program Manager for Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. “As Alaskans await Secretary Perdue’s decision on the Roadless Rule, they will yet again have to advocate for the protection of critical old-growth habitat in their backyards. We don’t know how many times we need to say it: Timber only contributes 1% to Southeast Alaska’s economy, while the fishing and tourism industries contribute 26%. Stop making Southeast Alaskans’ lives more difficult by threatening our true economic drivers.” ...

Forest Defenders are Occupying an Old Growth Forest to Prevent Imminent Logging in the Last Intact Watershed of the San Juan River System Victoria, B.C. 8/10/2020 An informal, grassroots collective of people from across Vancouver Island alerted to Teal Jones’s road building incursion into the headwaters of the unlogged Fairy Creek watershed are prepared to block road crews from further work. Forest defenders are prepared to remain occupying the roadway until the Provincial Government releases the recommendations from its Old Growth Forest Review Panel which Minister Donaldson said they will not release for at least another six months. ...

This episode of The Green Flame features an interview with James Darling who is currently on the 8th day of a hunger strike against logging of old-growth forests in British Columbia, Canada (occupied First Nations territory). You can contact James at: (250) 816-4321, or at james0darling@gmail.com. In this interview, James talks about why he started the hunger strike, the old-growth logging in British Columbia, the path forward for the movement, and revolutions that have used hunger strikes. ...

This podcast features two interviews. First, we speak with Joshua Wright about current logging of old-growth forest in the Mattole River Watershed, as well as on Vancouver Island and in Alaska. Second, we speak with Will Falk. Will is currently journeying the length of the Ohio River (the most polluted river in the United States) exploring the history and ongoing colonization and desecration of the watershed. Will Falk’s work can be found at: ...

Deforestation rate climbs higher as Amazon moves into the burning season by Rhett Butler / Mongabay.com 10 July 2020 Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon climbed higher for the fifteenth straight month, reaching levels not seen since the mid-2000s, according to data released today by Brazil’s national space research institute INPE. INPE’s satellite-based deforestation alert system detected 1,034 square kilometers of forest clearing during June 2020 bringing the twelve-month total to 9,564 sq km, 89% higher than a year ago. The extent of deforestation over the past year is the highest on record since INPE started releasing monthly numbers in 2007. The 12-month deforestation rate has risen 96% since President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon climbed higher for the fifteenth straight month, reaching levels not seen since the mid-2000s, according to data released today by Brazil’s national space research institute INPE. The news comes as the region moves into the dry season, when deforestation and forest fires typically accelerate. ...

Grassroots activist Suzanna Jones challenges the idea that green energy is good and rebukes the corporations and ideologically-captured organizations who promote it. By Suzanna Jones The recently released documentary Planet of the Humans takes direct aim at the major threat to the Earth. It does this by asking fundamental questions: can Nature withstand continued industrial extraction; can humans – particularly those in the dominant West – persist in taxing the natural world to fulfill our own ’needs’ and desires; is ‘green’ energy the savior for our climatic and environmental problems or is it a false prophet distracting us from confronting the gargantuan elephant in the room, what writer Wendell Berry calls “history’s most destructive economy”? ...

Editor’s note: This article, first published at Marx21, dives into the origin and epidemiology of the CoViD-19 virus with a socialist biologist. While it does not represent an official Deep Green Resistance perspective, it does include valuable factual information—including the essential analysis that CoViD is a “disease of civilization.” For further reading on this topic, see " Civilization Makes Us Sick" and " The Ecology of Disease." Republished with permission. The coronavirus is keeping the world in a state of shock. But instead of fighting the structural causes of the pandemic, the government is focusing on emergency measures. A talk with Rob Wallace (Evolutionary Biologist) about the dangers of CoViD-19, the responsibility of agribusiness and sustainable solutions to combat infectious diseases. How dangerous is the new coronavirus? Rob Wallace: It depends on where you are in the timing of your local outbreak of Covid-19: early, peak level, late? How good is your region’s public health response? What are your demographics? How old are you? Are you immunologically compromised? What is your underlying health? To ask an undiagnosable possibility, do your immuogenetics, the genetics underlying your immune response, line up with the virus or not? ...