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.

Here are some of SHI’s achievements within 11 years of operations:

• Planted more than 2,000,000 trees.
• Converted 6,000 acres to sustainable uses, thereby saving 30,000 acres from slash-and-burn destruction.
• Improved nutrition through the establishment of more than 200 organic vegetable gardens.
• Increased farm income up to 800%.
• Built 165 wood-conserving stoves (saving 1,650 trees per year)

SHI is proud in the fact that it works only in communities where we have been invited by local people. One of their main strengths is that their projects are locally initiated and supported by in-country organizations, which helps to ensure that the work will continue long after they left an area.

So, now that you know them a little better, you can lay back and enjoy this video clip. The story of Don Cheyo demonstrates the important work SHI does in few areas - promotion of sustainable agriculture, planting trees, provision of wood-conserving stoves, etc. It was filmed and edited by a media company that is currently producing a documentary on SHI’s work (we’ll update you as soon as this documentary will be released):

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/rsosWesVYOk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

If you like to know more about SHI, please check their website - http://www.sustainableharvest.org/

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.

Carbon financing based on forest protection wasn’t permitted under the Kyoto Protocol, but as we reported in the past, it was discussed in the U.N.’s Bali meeting in December last year. Though it is not approved yet, there’s a good chance it will be part of the post-Kyoto program that will replace in 2012.

Although carbon financing is far from being proven as an efficient and beneficial solution, I am very supportive of adding the forest protection into the program. Unfortunately, economic forces are the ones leading most of the deforestation and therefore it might be that economic forces may be the best realistic remedy.

I believe that Merrill will be followed by many other institutional financiers that will see an opportunity in protecting forests. For many forests this involvement will make the difference between deforestation and conservation.

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.

In science, precursor is defined as a substance from which another substance is formed, so to use the term here aptly fits the true state of affairs in this tragic African story that would otherwise contribute great wealth to the rest of the world.

Untapped Mineral Wealth
The instability in Congo has largely been instigated by Congo’s yet untapped mineral wealth that even the Mafia now want to control. The fighting has been in the rich mineral regions of Eastern Congo. Despite the nearly abject poverty of its people, Congo is so rich in mineral wealth that it has virtually all known rich minerals found in the world.

Large deposits of gold, copper, cobalt, diamonds and petroleum oil still remain untapped. The country’s rivers provide a source of hydroelectric power giving Congo the capacity to light up all of Africa. Thousands of kilometers of forests have ample supply of wood that rivals that of the fast-depleting forests of the Amazon.

At the University of Kinshasa, Congo has Africa’s only nuclear reactor and research center since the country also has uranium deposits. The American atomic bombs that were dropped on the Japanese islands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the Second World War used uranium mined in the Congo.

DRC is a virtual mineral economy. Between 1921 and 1992, more than 90 new hitherto unknown minerals were discovered in the DRC. The country has metallic cobalt reserves estimated at 600,000 tons, with derivative names that include cattierite, comblainite, kolwezite, sphaerocobaltite, dolomite, cobaltoan calcite, carrollite, siegenite, heterogenite and oursinite.

But the mineral that dominates the headlines around the world is coltan. Cell phones, laptops and video-game machines contain a little-known, tarry black mineral called colombite-tantalite, or coltan, that’s found mostly in Congo and Australia. If it is from Congo, chances are that a warlord or rebel army sold it illegally and used the proceeds to buy weapons.

Fighting is Centered Around Mineral Reserves
The brutal fighting among militias in the Democratic Republic of Congo is occurring around some of the country’s richest mineral reserves and various rebel groups control areas rich in gold, diamonds and coltan whose mining process has disastrous social and environmental consequences.

Poor humans are being used as slave labor in the thousands of mineral mines scattered around DRC and up to a million people were uprooted from their homes in 2007 alone to escape the incessant fighting between rebel groups that compete for control of mineral deposits. Children are being forcefully enlisted as foot soldiers, to kill anyone who attempts to get in their way. Gorillas and other wildlife too have borne the brunt, with tens being killed in their natural habitat to pave way for even more mine territory and uncontrolled logging.

In the depletion of its forest cover, illegal logging of thousands of hectares for exotic woods such as Afromosia also known as African Teak and Sapele goes on unabated. This is despite the fact that African Teak is partially protected by a global agreement that unfortunately places no restrictions on its export from the DRC.

The CIA Factbook says continued poaching threatens wildlife populations; there are major issues to do with water pollution; deforestation; internally displaced people and refugees are responsible for significant deforestation, soil erosion, and wildlife poaching and mining of minerals continues to cause rampant environmental damage.

Resources and further reading:
National Public Radio, TIG Blogs, Reuters, The EUROMIN Project

Photo credits:
CIA Factbook/ DRCongo Map, Nando Quintana via Wikimedia Commons

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:

• The Cypress Tree (Chinese)
• The Kapok Tree (Guatemalan)
• The Chestnut Tree (Japanese)
• The Cherry Blossom Tree (Indian)
• The Palm Tree (Nigerian)
• The Fig Tree (Jewish)
• The Pomegranate Tree (Moroccan)

My daughter’s favorite story is “The Chestnut Tree”, the tale of a Japanese girl named Aiko who is comforted by a tall chestnut tree on her way home from work everyday. One day, the tree tells her he is to be cut down and made into a great ship. Ironically, Aiko’s father drowned when his boat was hit by a large fishing vessel during a great storm.

Aiko is heartbroken when she discovers the chestnut tree’s stump, but she remembers its words that only she would be able to launch the great ship it by hugging it and saying, “I am Aiko, your friend.”

The prince comes to launch the great chestnut tree’s boat into the ocean, but it will not budge. All the strong fisherman tried to move the ship, but only Aiko had the power. In the end, the prince is enchanted by her story and asks her to marry him. “Her good fortune was indeed a gift of friendship from the chestnut tree.”

Why do so many stories end with strong women marrying princes?

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.

At these lakes’ margins we can find forests full of life, with a wide variety of trees. The most beautiful of them are, by far, the Coihues. Then the Cipreses, and at last but not least the Alerces that give name to the Park. The Alerces are thousands of years old. But don’t rush, let’s go step by step.

The park was created in 1937, just to protect those Alerces with thousands of years, because they were being cut down indiscriminately to build wood tiles. The Alerces have a very straight trunk, so they were perfect for construction. And they are hard, strong and don’t putrefy.

Now let’s introduce the trees themselves. The Coihues, as you can see in the photograph, have a really beautiful trunk shape, and they tend to grow wide. They live close to water: lakes, rivers or streams.

The local people used to say that they live a part of their life standing up and the other lying down, because the Coihues have shallow roots, so a strong wind can knock them down. But while they are down, they keep growing, and give life to all around them.

The Alerces are the special guests. They aren’t all around the Park, like the Coihues, you will only find them in El Alerzal, deep down into the forest, and in the well protected area of the Lake Menendez. You can only reach there with national park guides.

If you see one Alerce there, you might say, “this tree it’s only 10 years old,” but in reality you can be standing in front of a 1000 year-old Alerce. That is because they grow so little year by year, only 1 millimeter, so Alerces tend to be really thin.

Today you can find specimens 3622 years old, one of them in Chile. In the Park there are trees around two and three thousand years old, like el abuelo, which is more than two thousand.

But, before they suffered being indiscriminately cut down in the Park, there were living trees 12.6 m in diameter, like the one reported by Charles Darwin. If you calculate, an Alerce with 1 meter in diameter as being at least one thousand years old… good lord, can you imagine? A creature with almost 12,000 years.

If you want to visit these great living creatures, you can travel to the city of Esquel, and from there to one of the best green places of the world.

Photo 2: Flickr

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 found no evidence that the plants themselves had become more appetizing to insects, or that insect species themselves changed. Rather, it appears that the PETM simply was a time when insects became more voracious and destructive.

Part of the reason might be that plants grown in high-carbon dioxide conditions are less nutritious than they otherwise would be. Some scientists have speculated that might have been the reason dinosaurs grew so large: to be able to take in large enough volumes of plant material to sustain them.

The high-temperature PETM lasted about 100,000 years.

“Our study convincingly shows that there is a link between temperature and insect feeding on leaves,” said Ellen Currano, the study’s lead author and a researcher with Pennsylvania State University and the Smithsonian Institution. “When temperature increases, the diversity of insect feeding damage on plant species also increases.”

Today’s tropics already illustrate that phenomenon, as insects there eat more plants than do their temperate-zone counterparts. Insects are also among the warm-weather species now expanding their ranges as average temperatures around the globe rise.

The researchers’ findings suggest that insects could wreak greater damage to crops and forests around the planet as the climate continues to change.

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 preserve forests, and Japan's Ministry of Agriculture introduced a recycling program to turn one-use chopsticks into biofuel.

Instead of reaching for the paper wrapped disposable wooden chopsticks the next time you get take out, bring your own set of bamboo chopsticks or use a fork (just make sure it's not plastic.)