There is a way to save the rainforests

[Briar]

There is a way to save the rainforests

Johann Hari

While we have fixated on our little local worries over the past week, the biggest news story of the year passed unnoticed in the night. The Brazilian government was forced to admit that the destruction of the Amazon rainforest has returned to ecocidal levels. An area the size of Belgium, taking thousands of years to evolve, was destroyed in the past year alone. Some 20 per cent of the forest has now been trashed, with a further 40 per cent set to be slashed in my lifetime. This is steadily happening to all the rainforests on earth.

Long after we have forgotten who won the Florida primary or precisely why Peter Hain resigned from the Cabinet, people will be living with the consequences of this news...

...But you and I do not only wreck the rainforests through our purchasing power; our government is also helpfully doing it for us. The British Government is now one of the biggest funders of the World Bank – and its record is plain. In Congo, I saw the second-largest rainforest on earth beginning to be consumed. The logged stumps lay like stubble on a recently-shaved face, and the indigenous pygmies wandered homeless and hopeless.

The World Bank's own leaked internal investigation admitted it had encouraged vast multinational logging companies to move in and cause "irreversible damage". Robert Goodland, who worked in a senior position at the Bank for 23 years, says this is no anomaly. He argues that the destruction of the Amazon has been "aided and encouraged by the Bank", because its focus is "on helping multi-nationals extract oil, gas and other resources from developing countries"...

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-there-is-a-way-to-save-the-rainforests-776113.html

[johan helge]

1. From the article:

"In our own self-defence, the developed countries need to set up a fund – as ambitious as the Marshall Plan – to preserve the remaining rainforests, and thereby prevent drastic destabilisation of our climate." - and thereby preserve many species, too.

Hear, hear! (But I'm not holding my breath - things will be done too little too late.)

[IndyOp]

2. Kick! (n/t)