March 21, International Day of Forests
Image: Unsplash/Maxim Hopman
Forests evoke a sense of mystery and awe for me. I recall the wonder I felt walking alone in a pine forest in our Northwest Territories: I am mesmerized by photos of giant trees in BC that beckon me and awake a longing to spend silent retreats in their midst. Yet such forests also evoke sadness. Stories of new oil pipelines and clear-cut logging in what remains of the never-to-be replaced old-growth forests in BC seem catastrophic. Why is it that we have not protected this national heritage? And then there is the Amazon rain forest. In the March 17, 2022 edition of The Washington Post, an article by Terrence McCoy “The Amazon Undone; Death in the Forest” describes the ongoing destruction of a place of beauty, a place that preserves our climate. Along the 500 mile Highway 319 which runs through a largely preserved area of the Brazilian Amazon. New sideroads, extreme violence, land grabbers, fires, and deforestations are present. People disappear and their bodies are never found. Large new farms on illegally deforested land are hidden among the trees. And there is conflict between environmentalists and citizens. For example, Manaus, a city of 2.2. million is cut off from Brazil’s highway system and wants the highway to make travel easier and enable development. Yet environmentalists claim: “What has historically been a carbon sink could suddenly become a ‘carbon bomb’ upending the world’s efforts to avert catastrophic warming.”
I believe action to preserve forests is required of all of us. Some wonderful work has been done by researchers in Canada and the Amazon. We need to keep ourselves informed of such research, stories about the destruction of forests, and add our voices to those who protest these events.
-Sister Pat McKeon, csj