If A Tree Falls in a Global Catastrophe, Will Anyone Hear It?
We like to feel that if we just explain facts to people, they’ll understand, because, after all, we still love the same things, we all want a livable world for our children, and everybody likes clean air, clean water, and trees. Right?
No, some people are sick monsters, and just have to be stopped, whether they are polite, well educated men in suits and plush offices, or a drunk 16 year old with a chain saw.
A 16-year-old boy was arrested Thursday on suspicion of criminal damage after one of Britain’s most famous trees, a sycamore that stood in a dip in Hadrian’s Wall, was cut down overnight in what the authorities described as “an act of vandalism.”
“We have reason to believe it has been deliberately felled,” Northumberland National Park said of the beloved tree, known as the Sycamore Gap tree, in a statement that was issued before the arrest.
The teenager was in custody and was assisting with the investigation, the Northumbria Police said on Thursday.
Voted Tree of the Year in 2016 in the Woodland Trust awards, the Sycamore Gap tree, located about 100 miles southeast of Edinburgh, was several hundred years old and was featured in the 1991 film “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” starring Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman.
Milton da Costa Junior nosed his pickup through a remote stretch of the western Brazilian Amazon to check on his babies. The nonprofit organization he works for, Rioterra, has planted millions of young trees in the rainforest as part of an effort to reforest woodland decimated by illegal logging and ranching in the area.
As the Toyota lumbered towards a ramshackle wooden bridge on the way back to the town of Machadinho d’Oeste in Rondônia state, Da Costa said two masked men on motorcycles sped past him, then blocked his way.
One of the men drew a revolver, Da Costa said, and delivered a message: Stop planting trees.
Local authorities said the September 2021 incident, which Da Costa outlined in a police report that was reviewed by Reuters, is being investigated. No suspects have been identified.
Threats are just one of the challenges facing Rioterra and other environmental groups around the world pursuing a seemingly simple fix for the climate crisis: replanting denuded forests. These projects, science suggests, could help slow global warming by trapping carbon dioxide in living trees. Such efforts also could restore wildlife habitats and help protect threatened species. In the Amazon, it would also safeguard the atmospheric moisture that rolls off the rainforest and carries showers to faraway fields and reservoirs.
But in Brazil, many farmers who have carved livelihoods out of the rainforest fear that environmental groups want to push them out. Tree-planting groups, meanwhile, have struggled to cultivate some native trees on a mass scale. Seasonal flooding, fires – even arson – are perpetual worries.
Then there is money. Ecologists hope to protect the Amazon from a so-called tipping point – when so much land is cleared that the ecosystem can no longer sustain itself as rainforest and dries out into a degraded savanna. To do that, forest restoration needs to occur over a jungle area twice the size of Germany, according to Carlos Nobre, one of Brazil’s most prominent climate scientists. The price tag: more than $20 billion, he estimates.
Replanting efforts in Brazil so far are modest operations, albeit rapidly growing ones, led mainly by nonprofits. Out of dozens of reforestation initiatives in the country, Rioterra and The Black Jaguar Foundation, a Brazilian-European group, are among the largest. Rioterra has reforested Amazon land approaching the size of Manhattan over the past decade and plans to more than double that by 2030, said Alexis Bastos, who manages the nonprofit’s reforestation efforts and was one of its founders. Rioterra spends about 12 million reais ($2.4 million) annually on reforestation, he said.
Black Jaguar is even more ambitious: It hopes to spend at least $3.7 billion in the next 20 years restoring a forest area the size of Lebanon. Through corporate and private donors, it has raised just 0.2% of that sum so far and planted just 0.03% of its goal.
Meanwhile, Amazon destruction continues at a furious pace. Government data show that about three soccer fields’ worth of virgin forest was cleared every minute in 2022. Illegal invaders destroy in hours what it takes Rioterra or Black Jaguar a year to plant.
It was supposed to be a good-news story out of the damaged Amazon rainforest: a project that replanted hundreds of thousands of trees in an illegally deforested nature reserve in Brazil.
Then it went up in flames, allegedly torched by land-grabbers trying to reclaim the territory for cattle pasture.
Launched in 2019 by environmental research group Rioterra, the reforestation project took 270 hectares (665 acres) of forest that had been razed by cattle ranching on a protected nature reserve in the northern state of Rondonia and replanted it with 360,000 trees.
The idea was ambitious, says Rioterra’s project coordinator, Alexis Bastos: save a corner of the world’s biggest rainforest, fighting climate change and creating green jobs along the way.
Then, just as the scarred brown land started returning to emerald-green forest—its growing young trees absorbing an estimated 8,000 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere in three years—the whole thing burned to the ground.
Bastos remembers the sinking feeling he got when he saw the area turned to ashes.
This is the moment where you look back on all of the changes you made, some burdensome and/or expensive, and wonder what was the point.
The kid with the chainsaw got the attention he wanted, at least.
As gruesome as this sounds start shooting illegally grazing cattle.