About All That Tree Planting
It seems that the world's forests are diminishing in size at an annual rate of 32 million acres per year. That is an area, according to the article, equivalent to the nations of Greece or Nicaragua. And who is leading this deforestation?
NGAMBE-TIKAR, Cameroon (Reuters) - From outside, Cameroon's Ngambe-Tikar forest looks like a compact, tangled mass of healthy emerald green foliage.
But tracks between the towering tropical hardwood trees open up into car park-sized clearings littered with logs as long as buses.
Forestry officers say the reserve is under attack from unscrupulous commercial loggers who work outside authorized zones and do not respect size limits in their quest for maximum financial returns.
"I lack words to describe what is going on here," says Richard Greine, head of the local forestry post, 350 km (220 miles) north of Cameroon's capital Yaounde.
"Both illegal and authorized exploiters have staged a hold-up on the forest."
From central Africa to the Amazon basin and Indonesia's islands, the world's great forests are being lost at an annual rate of at least 13 million hectares (32 million acres) — an area the size of Greece or Nicaragua.
The timber business is worth billions of dollars annually, and experts say few industries that size are as murky as the black market in wood.
Evidence of rampant deforestation around the globe points in one direction: booming demand in China, where economic growth is fuelling a timber feeding frenzy.
In just the past decade, China has grown from importing wood products for domestic use to become the world's leading exporter of furniture, plywood and flooring.
Chinese firms might not be chopping down the trees themselves, but their insatiable appetite is driving up prices, spurring loggers to open more tracks like those torn through Ngambe-Tikar and drawing huge global investment to the companies.
You know, the country that is poised to become the biggest greenhouse gas emitter this year. The country that is exempt from Kyoto. The country that is laughing itself sick at the West and its obsessions. And who, exactly, is suffering from all this? Why, the poor, of course.
In Mande village on the fringe of the Cameroon jungle, Pierre, a hunter dressed in tattered shorts and T-shirt, does not know that more than half his country's original forest cover has been cut down in his lifetime.
But he knows the local eco-system has been ravaged.
Once upon a time, wild animals would sometimes stroll right into his compound. "These days you don't see any. They don't fall into our traps anymore. You need to go very far, deep in the forest to see or catch one," he tells Reuters.
As usual, it is the poorest who pay.
So not only is China bringing coal-fired power plants online at an astonishing rate, they are also denuding the planet of the forests that true believers swear will be the salvation of mankind. True believers who think the West is the villain here. True believers who will gut Western economies and excuse China and by default allow the poorest to suffer the worst. Good thinking.
Environment, World news | Gaius Monday, 11 June , 2007
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Blue Crab Boulevard » Deforest First, Infest Second — Tuesday, 12 June , 2007 @ 8:45 pm
By John, Monday, 11 June , 2007 @ 12:19 pm
Tell that to Bono and Geldof. It’s all our fault. Where’s your guilt?
By Gaius, Monday, 11 June , 2007 @ 2:08 pm
Must have left it in my other suit.
By old_dawg, Monday, 11 June , 2007 @ 3:44 pm
Fortunately, you can now get “guilt offsets.” Much like buying carbon offsets, they don’t really solve any problems, but they do allow you to make as many problems as you can pay for.