Monday, February 09, 2009
Saving the Last Forests
Deforestation is a political topic as well as an environmental one. The industrialized countries, having done all the deforesting they liked in their own countries, tell poor countries they cannot do the same.
You'd think, considering what's at stake, that the already-deforested countries would pony up some dough to save the last existing forests. To compensate people who would otherwise cut down trees. Not a chance.
This goes beyond carbon offsets, beyond environmental policy, beyond any law made by any country. It concerns the world's ability to breath.
The world's forest have been assaulted during all of modern history, but never so much as they have been during this turn of the century, and the greater part of the most recent devastation has been illegal.
Deforestation is one of those things we hear about, and they sound bad, and we're sorry about them, but we're not sure what it is, exactly, that we can do to stop it.
How about, for starters, not paying for it?
If you buy a product made out of wood, wouldn't you like to know if the wood was harvested legally? I don't know. I'm just guessing.
Well it turns out there are a lot of people who would just as soon you didn't know, and you can find out all about it in an article called The Stolen Forests by Raffi Khatchadourian in the October 8 edition of the New Yorker. I picked it up in the sauna.
It's about the Environmental Investigation Agency, a private agency which is, on a shoestring, doing what the United Nations and the governments of the world should be doing: identifying illegally forested wood and tracing the profit trail through the world's economy, ending, naturally, in a well-known ubiquitous discount store here in the United States. You know who I'm talking about.
So it turns out there damned well is something we can do about it, which is not to buy these products and make it illegal to sell them. This is something governments around the world can do if citizens use cattle prods on them.
It's the only thing that's ever worked. ¶ 9:58 PM
You'd think, considering what's at stake, that the already-deforested countries would pony up some dough to save the last existing forests. To compensate people who would otherwise cut down trees. Not a chance.
This goes beyond carbon offsets, beyond environmental policy, beyond any law made by any country. It concerns the world's ability to breath.
The world's forest have been assaulted during all of modern history, but never so much as they have been during this turn of the century, and the greater part of the most recent devastation has been illegal.
Deforestation is one of those things we hear about, and they sound bad, and we're sorry about them, but we're not sure what it is, exactly, that we can do to stop it.
How about, for starters, not paying for it?
If you buy a product made out of wood, wouldn't you like to know if the wood was harvested legally? I don't know. I'm just guessing.
Well it turns out there are a lot of people who would just as soon you didn't know, and you can find out all about it in an article called The Stolen Forests by Raffi Khatchadourian in the October 8 edition of the New Yorker. I picked it up in the sauna.
It's about the Environmental Investigation Agency, a private agency which is, on a shoestring, doing what the United Nations and the governments of the world should be doing: identifying illegally forested wood and tracing the profit trail through the world's economy, ending, naturally, in a well-known ubiquitous discount store here in the United States. You know who I'm talking about.
So it turns out there damned well is something we can do about it, which is not to buy these products and make it illegal to sell them. This is something governments around the world can do if citizens use cattle prods on them.
It's the only thing that's ever worked. ¶ 9:58 PM
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According to a story in the NY Times a few weeks ago, there is now more recovered former farmland than ever before, and forests are reclaiming places where people have abandoned their farms and houses. The trees aren't old growth but they are similar to the forests that we've lost..so there is actually a net gain in forested land over the past 50 years.
# posted by 
: 2/11/2009 7:51 AM
: 2/11/2009 7:51 AM
I remember, when hubby and I were traveling in Burma, seeing all these huge trucks loaded up with massive tree trunks going by us again and again and again.
They were coming from the north and while I wasn't sure, I thought they were probably teak trees.
Bummer. Such a hardy wood that's so sought after here, but the harvesting of it is destroying an
entire eco-system in Burma, not to mention the many many people who have been forced into labor in order to cut it all down.
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They were coming from the north and while I wasn't sure, I thought they were probably teak trees.
Bummer. Such a hardy wood that's so sought after here, but the harvesting of it is destroying an
entire eco-system in Burma, not to mention the many many people who have been forced into labor in order to cut it all down.
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