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Editor’s note: Our friends at Eco-Libris are in the business of preserving forests by “offsetting” books. Today, they bring you a profile of another organization involved in forest conservation, and one of that organization’s success stories. This post was originally published on Friday, March 28, 2008.
We bring you from time to time stories and updates from our great planting partners, and today we have a mini-documentary about Honduran farmer Don Cheyo, who grows organic crops and lives sustainably thanks to help from our planting partner, Sustainable Harvest International (SHI).
SHI works in developing countries in Central America - Nicaragua, Honduras, Belize, Panama. Central America has lost more than half of its rainforests in the last 50 years, contributing to mass extinctions and global warming. Rainforest destruction also wreaks havoc on local populations who depend on the rainforest for their survival.
SHI helps many farmers like Don Cheyo in nearly 100 struggling communities across Central America to reverse rainforest destruction with sustainable land-use practices that allow them to take control of their environmental and economic destinies. SHI is involved in many activities - from trees planting and restoration and preservation of degraded land to educational programs and community loan funds.
Editor’s note: Getting to spend more time with the Eco-Libris blog has turned into a real pleasure, as they’ve got a keen sense of the “big picture” when it comes to book publishing. In today’s post, Raz discusses a “carbon financing” project by Merrill Lynch that involves investment in healthy forests… a critical element of sustainability for the publishing industry. This post was originally published on Thursday, March 20, 2008.
With all the gloomy news coming these days from Wall Street, it’s great to see that when it comes to the environment, Wall-Street is still bullish. I’m talking about the news on Merrill Lynch new investment of $9 million to finance a project to protect 750,000 hectares of forest in Indonesia.
Dana Mattioli reported last week on the Environmental Capital blog of the Wall Street Journal about the new green deal. Firstly, let’s make one thing clear - this is not a donation or anything like that. It is an investment that according to the article is supposed to generate Merrill annual proceeds of $432 million over the next 30 years.
The expected income will come from in carbon financing, which means that someone will pay Merrill to offset polluting activities elsewhere with the amount of carbon dioxide that won’t be emitted (3.4 million tons of carbon dioxide every year) because of the fact that the trees will be kept alive and won’t be cut down.
By Sam Aola Ooko •
March 7, 2008
A Tragic Case Study
We have seen how local ecology plays an important role in conflicts in Africa, which are mostly camouflaged as political, religious or ethnic. Let us spare a brief moment and look at the Democratic Republic of Congo as a case study outline for ecology as a source of wealth and as a precursor of death for innocent millions of people.
A synopsis of the history of the DRC, as Congo Kinshasa is commonly known, tells us that the plunder of its natural resources begun well in the 19th century when King Leopold II’s Belgium, its former colonial master, demarcated it for its own enrichment with the infamous “Scramble for Africa” - a period in late 19th Century world affairs when Africa’s interior was feverishly carved up by European imperialist expansion.
No Peace Amid Wanton Destruction
Since then, DRC, formerly Zaire under the notorious Mobutu Sese Seko, has not known peace. But the wanton plunder and destruction of its ecology, plentiful of minerals and forest cover, continues. And millions of people have and continue paying the heavy cost of it all - through rape and death under the watchful eye of the world hiding beneath the blue flag of the United Nations. Talk of ecological wealth turned into a curse.
By Jennifer Lance •
February 21, 2008
A Forest of Stories, by Rina Singh and Helen Cann, is a collection of “magical tree tales from around the world.” These folktales reign from China, Guatemala, Japan, India, Nigeria, Israel, and Morocco. As Rina explains in the introduction to A Forest of Stories,
Trees are here with us now. We have a direct relationship with them-an unfair alliance, in which we accept a multitude of gifts from them and offer nothing in return. We nourish ourselves with the fruit they provide, and we use their wood to make our homes. We plant them in our gardens and parks, and we heal ourselves with the medicines they give us. We have both creatively and selfishly put every part of the tree to use, and yet they make no demands on us. they stand still, holding the soil in place, controlling floods and providing homes to countless animals.
Here is a list of the wonderful tree tales from A Forest of Stories:
By Martín Cagliani •
February 16, 2008
If you follow me, I’ll take you on an eco-trip around the world, visiting the most beautiful green places of our living planet Earth. The idea is to know the forests and trees that we want to save when we fight for an eco-friendly world to live on.
The first eco-place, will be the National Park Los Alerces in Argentina. You can find it at Chubut province, in the Argentinian Patagonia. It has some of the most beautiful biodiversity in the world, with a wide and rare vegetable variety.
Six lakes are nestled in there. The Lake Futalaufquen, flows to Lake Verde and Menéndez by the Arrayanes river, and Lake Verde flows to Lake Rivadavia by the deep green Rivadavia river.
New research from the National Science Foundation suggests a warming Earth could mean a significant increase in voracious, plant-eating insects.
Scientists studying the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period about 55 million years ago when global carbon dioxide levels spiked rapidly, found that plant fossils from that time show noticeably more insect damage than plants from before or after the PETM. They […]
By Amy Stodghill •
October 3, 2007
Disposable chopsticks are reserved mainly for Chinese take-out in America, but are an everyday staple for several Asian countries. Unfortunately, all of those chopsticks add up to a lot of deforestation.
China is the biggest consumer and exporter of disposable wooden chopsticks, producing 45 billion pairs each year, which uses up about 25 million trees. Last year the Chinese government imposed a 5% tax on disposable wooden chopsticks in an attempt to
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By Ryan Thibodaux •
February 20, 2007
World War II Poster (Photo Credit: Hemphasis.net)The United States is the only industrialized nation that bans farmers from growing industrial, non-psychoactive hemp, but a group of lawmakers in Washington are trying to change that.
Last week, House Representative Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas who is also running for president in 2008, was joined by 9 Democratic co-sponsors in introducing House Resolution 1009, the Industrial […]
