For the last week I’ve been carrying Al Gore’s book “Our Choice – A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis” in my purse, devouring the forest section as if it were food. It is food for my brain, as I awaken parts of it, that used to be numb, completely asleep under the drug of survival. I remember when that happened…
In 1990 I lived on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. My daughter was not quite three years old then, and we were experiencing our first months of being a family of two. They were clear cutting the Olympic National Rain Forest as fast as possible before legislation would kick in, to save the habitat of the Northern Spotted Owl. Now I can remember, driving behind logging trucks with old growth Douglas Fir, and crying so hard I could barely see the road, apologizing to the trees whose enormous severed ends were being buried in my memory. I remember driving by the cut forests that looked like a warzone, and felt like a bomb had hit. I remember doing an illustration of a spotted owl, printing it with a statement from Chief Seattle (chief of the Suquamish Indians of the Olympic Penninsula) “All things are connected…” and promising myself when my child didn’t need me at home as much, I’d do something to help the degraded earth to recover. Now I remember. The numbness of survival has finally evolved beyond adaptation, to transformation…
At the beginning of this blog in 2008, I took her to Brazil, and we discovered the rainforest where I was born had been cut down too. 93% of the most diverse rainforest on earth is gone. That’s when the action kicked in — 18 years later. So now, 4,183 trees later, I’m trying to understand how, why we did this to our earth. I can’t comprehend the ignor-ance of Nature.
Here are some of the information fragments I’m finding as I research “successful” reforestation projects. Al says,
China leads the world in tree planting … they have planted more trees in each of the last years than has the rest of the world combined.
So, I had to see what they’re doing. These facts come from a report by the World Bank:
China has the biggest tree plantation program in the world and the World Bank is its biggest financier.
Despite its ambitious program, China still has one of the smallest amounts of forest per capita (0.12 ha/person) and a fast-growing need for more timber. In the last decade, timber imports have more than tripled.
About 30% of imported wood is exported in processed form to places like Japan, the United States and Europe. Wood is also consumed to produce crates, labels and wrapping for other fast-growing Chinese exports.
Then I looked the World Bank up too:
World Bank – Although the World Bank represents 184 countries, it is run by a small group of the most powerful nations who in turn promote their own interests. The President of the World Bank, for example, is nominated by the President of the United States and has always been a citizen of the U.S. Like the IMF, the World Bank also issues Structural Adjustment Loans which place restrictions on how the money can be spent. For example, a World Bank loan may require privatization of the water supply which benefits transnational corporations and undermines the rights of the people. In this way the World Bank can manipulate and control growth in the developing world to benefit itself.
“All things are connected…”
Al continued…
In fact, China has been planting so many trees that it is now planting more by a third each year than the largest deforesting nation, Brazil, is cutting down.
Brazil is the largest deforesting nation — responsible for 48 percent of all deforestation in the world.
Recently, Brazil proposed a program to pay small farmers to plant new trees in areas of the Amazon that have been deforested, but thus far, the program has had little apparent impact.
“All things are connected…”
Enough sifting through the shadows of facts. It has been a time of Blessed Unrest and it is a New Year. We can do better.
Creator – All things are connected by You…such magnificent beauty, order and perfection. Help us to forgive ourselves and each other for making such a mess of Paradise. Use our minds, hearts and hands to make amends, now. May we surrender our human ignorance and greed to our Higher Mind and ways of being incarnate, with respect, compassion, gratitude and praise for all of Creation. Amen.
