Deforestation

By Salonika Neupane / Photos: Jalpesh Mehta (Empower Foundation) via Let India Breathe Deforestation has been a major contributing factor towards environmental problems. Trees, in addition to providing oxygen, also sequester carbon. By cutting down trees, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases sharply, contributing to the problem of greenhouse effect. Despite these often irrevocable damages, a 2015 study estimates that a total of 46% of trees have been felled since humans began cutting down trees. Deforestation often occurs due to commercial logging, or to turn the forest land for agricultural purposes (as is the case with the current deforestation in Amazon rainforest). In developing countries, a major cause of deforestation is the supposed development projects. These projects are often masked as an essential part of development, and any group opposing these projects are labeled “anti-development”, which makes it even more difficult for people to begin to question the necessity of the projects. Those who do resist have to spend valuable time and energy fighting off these labels. ...

by Liam Campbell In 1997, forest fires in Indonesia grew so large that they accounted for 40% of global emissions during that period. The Borneo rainforest is the most ancient in the world, having taken 120 million years to evolve into its current state of rich diversity. Indonesia is also home to some of the world’s largest tropic peat bogs, deep and vast stockpiles of carbon which have formed over millennia. When these peat bogs ignite they are almost impossible to extinguish because they burn deeply into the Earth and smoulder for weeks or even months, and they can also release millions of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere very suddenly. Although seasonal fires are common in the Borneo, climate collapse has made the rainforest more susceptible, and the magnitude of this year’s fires are already unfathomable. ...

Featured Image: thousands of acres of Pinyon-Juniper forest bulldozed by the BLM in Nevada / by Max Wilbert / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Christopher Ketcham is a freelance writer for Harper’s, The New Republic, Vice, and many others. This video is an interview between him and Deep Green Resistance co-founder and author Derrick Jensen. They discuss Ketcham’s new book " This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West." It’s the product of ten years of research and travel across the public lands of the West. ...

By Max Wilbert The Amazon Rainforest is on fire. But the fire is merely a symptom of deeper problems, not root cause. Therefore, simply putting out the fires does not solve the problem. To protect the Amazon rainforest, we need a deeper understanding of threats to it. For this, we turn to the indigenous people, the guardians of the Amazon, to learn from them. The Kayapo Nation The Kayapo (or Xingu) are an indigenous nation in the northwestern Amazon rainforest, who live on roughly 27 million acres of rainforest and savannah territory claimed by Brazil and currently subject to the rule of American ally and genocidal fascist Jair Bolsonaro. The Kayapo, who are split into many different groups, live a largely traditional lifestyle, hunting and gathering and practicing small-scale agriculture. They use at least 900 species of plants as food an medicine. They live in small villages which are periodically abandoned to return to forest. Beauty is highly valued in the Kayapo culture, as is oratory. Each tribe has different colors, and leaders often wear a headdress made from the birds of native feathers. ...

By Max Wilbert / Images: public domain Here is a familiar fact to many people across the United States and the world: the Redwoods of Northern California are the tallest trees in the world at nearly 400 feet. This is both true and false. It’s true because right now the redwoods are the tallest trees. But it’s false because not long ago, that wasn’t the case. The tallest known redwood is 379 feet tall. But historical accounts are full of references to Douglas Fir trees 400 feet tall and more. One tree in the lower North Fork of the Nooksack River Valley is thought to have been 465 feet tall, probably the largest known tree ever recorded anywhere on the planet. And it wasn’t alone. ...

Featured image: The Guardians of the Amazon recently destroyed a logging truck they discovered in their territory. © Guardians of the Amazon by Survival International Warning: some people may find the details and image below disturbing A leader of an Amazon tribe acclaimed for its environmental defenders has been killed, the latest in a series of deaths among the tribe. The body of Jorginho Guajajara was found near a river in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. He was a leader of the Guajajara people, acclaimed internationally for their work as the ‘Guardians of the Amazon’ in the most threatened region in the entire Amazon. ...

by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance “Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them.” - François-René de Chateaubriand New research in the prestigious journal Nature estimates that “the global number of trees has fallen by approximately 46% since the start of human civilization.” The study also suggests that about 15 billion trees are being cut down each year, and that the average age of forests has declined significantly over the last few thousand years. ...

Featured image by Souparno Chatterjee by Chandan Sarma / Youth Ki Awaaz Hakim Sinan village, Ranibandh Block, Bankura District, West Bengal: It was getting dark in the forest. At a distance, light was gleaming from oil lamps in the village. “Did you breastfeed these Saal trees? Why are you stopping us from cutting them down?” growled the poachers. “How can you breastfeed your own mother?” retorted the resolute Adivasi women. Culturally, forests have played a vital role in the lives of the Santhal tribes. This is much more evident in villages that live on the fringes of the forests. It is a relationship built on reverence and compassion. ...

Featured image: Guardians of the Amazon from the Guajajara tribe: “We patrol, we find the loggers, we destroy their equipment and we send them away. We’ve stopped many loggers. It’s working.” © Guardians of the Amazon by Survival International Members of an Amazon tribe patrolling their rainforest reserve to protect uncontacted relatives from illegal loggers have seized a notorious logging gang, burned their truck, and expelled them from the jungle. The Guardians of the Amazon are from the Guajajara tribe: “We patrol, we find the loggers, we destroy their equipment and we send them away. We’ve stopped many loggers. It’s working.” ...

Featured image: With support from Survival, the Guajajara are able to expose illegal logging and threats to their uncontacted neighbors in real time. © Survival by Sarah Shenker / Survival International “We are here,” says Olimpio, looking directly into the camera, “… Monitoring the land and protecting the uncontacted Indians and the Guajajara who live here. Why? Because there are some people – anthropologists from some countries – who want, once again, to violate the rights of the uncontacted Indians in the country.” ...