PEACE from TREES

Five of 28

All stored carbon that’s ever been… all us clowns just want to throw it up in the air? Green sun rich-blue-sky of too much sun blackened to forgetting of where our lungs are from… So much confetti us clowns throw in the air… Where is there a map of where we’ve been, where we’re going, how we get home?

A Mythic and practic saves a joyous and cynic. A tree-clown-comedy-drum-love between filtering… cleaning… breathing pure air… a knowing of far away from us until a desire-center-rotating-wheel returns to us…

Clowns know: who must wait for attention, who needs clowning now, who needs us as love as caged wild set free from our over-consuming, over-seeing, over-reaching too much being, too much leaving our center, too much in our darkness throwing to sky… At long last we're certain we want its opposite.


Poem by DeaneTR (c)2007 - Photos from the internet
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This series of 28 photo-poems are inspired by recent scientific discoveries related to forests around the world. The poem above is inspired by the condensed news articles below. If you'd like to learn about forest issues from around the world on a regular basis subscribe to my newsletter / weblog which is called: "Earth's Tree News" and can be viewed on the web at http://www.livejournal.com/users/olyecology
or via email by sending a blank messge to earthtreenews-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
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In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025. Stopping the loggers is the fastest and cheapest solution to climate change. So why are global leaders turning a blind eye to this crisis? The rampant slashing and burning of tropical forests is second only to the energy sector as a source of greenhouses gases according to report published today by the Oxford-based Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of leading rainforest scientists Figures from the GCP, summarising the latest findings from the United Nations, and building on estimates contained in the Stern Report, show deforestation accounts for up to 25 per cent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 per cent each; and aviation makes up only 3 per cent of the total. "Tropical forests are the elephant in the living room of climate change," said Andrew Mitchell, the head of the GCP. http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2539349.ece

Vast tracts of the world's second-largest rainforest have been obtained by a small group of European and American industrial logging companies in return for minimal taxes and gifts of salt, sugar and tools, a two-year investigation will disclose today. More than 150 contracts covering an area of rainforest nearly the size of the United Kingdom have been signed with 20 companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past three years. Many are believed to have been illegally allocated in 2002 by a transition government emerging from a decade of civil wars and are in defiance of a World Bank moratorium. According to the report, the companies, mainly from Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Singapore and the US, are already stripping from the 21m hectares (52m acres) of forest, primarily to extract African teak, which sells for more than £500 a cubic metre and is widely used for flooring, furniture and doors in Britain. According to the 100-page study, compiled by Greenpeace International working with Congolese ecological and human rights groups, if all the forests identified for logging are felled, it could "release" up to 34bn tonnes of carbon - nearly as much as Britain has emitted in 60 years. To gain access to the forests for the next 25 years, the European companies have made agreements with village chiefs, offering bags of salt, machetes and bicycles, and in some cases promised to build rudimentary schools, the report states. http://environment.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,,2054146,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1

PEACE from TREES