The name of the world is forest*
The destruction of the primary forests is causing a worsening change of the climate. With them die rare species and subtle cultures, human or non-human, of which we will never know anything about.
The destruction of the primary forests is causing a worsening change of the climate. With them die rare species and subtle cultures, human or non-human, of which we will never know anything about.
The
saw cuts the bark of a gigantic dipterocarp. Up above, an orang-utan
mother and her baby cling to the last branches of the canopy, as if
to flee to the sky. But the tree is cut in all its width. Slowly,
majestically, inexorably, its trunk, all eighty meters of it,
wobbles, bends and collapses in a thunder of broken wood, torn vines,
hoarse cries, and frightful flights of hornbills. In falling, the
giant carries in death a thousand nests, a thousand lives, a thousand
small dens hidden in the folds of its bark. He crushes a thousand
others under his enormous mass. He himself is a living being,
conscious of what surrounds him in the manner of plants. And while we
pick up the little red monkey from the broken body of his mother, the
reclining tree loses its sap like blood. It is soon dragged along the
mud tracks, raked by trucks in the bosom of its world: the rainforest
of Sumatra.
Everywhere,
this scene is repeated. In the Congo Basin or the Amazon, in
Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Canada, everywhere, forests are
disappearing under the steamroller of human madness. Monstrous dams
are engulfing them, sprawling cities are devouring them little by
little, and cattle farms are finishing them off. Giant trees are cut
down for the precious wood industry. Fires are lit to make room for
palm oil plantations. Coltan mines excavate the earth to the last
roots in the heart of Congolese national parks. Their workers eat
bushmeat and kill the gorillas.
No
account is ever held of the inhabitants of this ocean of trees that
are ravaged.
Tropical
forests are yet home to the world’s most marvellous biodiversity,
tree frogs, unheard-of insects, unknown medicinal plants and subtle
non-human cultures. The forest is also home to human peoples who have
been exploiting its resources with respect for a millennium. In
symbiosis with her, they venerate and protect her. But the magic of
their shamans can do nothing against gold diggers armed to the teeth,
bulldozers and soldiers who expel them from their ancestral lands and
destroy their traditions.
Each
year, more than 13 million hectares of forest are lost, the
equivalent of the surface of England or forty football fields every
minute. This biotope is essential for climate stability and soil
conservation. Its destruction further increases the amount of CO2 in
the atmosphere, and with it, climate change and flooding, droughts
and landslides.
In
the past, we lived with the forest. She surrounded our hamlets until
the end of the Middle Ages. Huge expanses of oaks then covered the
whole of France. The bears, the wolves, the lynx prospered in peace,
regulating in harmony the nature around them. Today, everything has
been totally ravaged or almost. Fields, highways, cities, car parks
stretching to infinity have long covered the high forests and woods,
which occupy only a small area of the European continent. We
have forgotten the majesty of trees; we have lost the secret of
dialogue with them. And today already we are starting to pay dearly.
Forests are a treasure of evolution: help us to protect them!