hannes schick

Hannes Schick

The world's forests are under throng since half a century but the earlier years have been disastrous and the next ones will be worse.
In Malaysia, Indonesia, Canada, South Africa and Central America, fires and other human interventions have destroyed 16 millions hectares of forest. Daily they talk about the increase of extreme events like is hurricanes and devastating floods in line with the foresights of changes in climate. But they hesitate in applying foresight and safeguard measures world level.
By a rented van I go along the road sided by burned trunks with their crippled branches extended to the dark sky as ghosts. The ash penetrates into lungs and rests on hairs and face.

Everywhere centres of fire crackle. During the drive, lasted two hours and a half, I counted more than a hundred camions loaded with huge trunks of precious wood. I overcame a long line of camions waiting for being loaded with other trunks. New surging crowds of farmers burn even greater areas to create fields, plantations and pastures.
I'm at Sumatra, but I could be as well in Malaysia, Guatemala or Brazil.
I see a woman among the remnants of smoking trunks. When I take her a picture she runs away muttering. The campesinos lay the blame on the climate changes, to the Nino, a meteorological system having gone on tilt since some years. Along with its sister Nina, it is responsible for the huge damages world scale. Usually El Nino purifies the air with the rain, getting back to the earth ash and smoke particles.
But the arrival of the infant prodigy has turned into an ever less reliable event. In the round dance of the charges everybody accuses each other.

The West accuses the wood export countries and vice versa; the responsible governments lay the blame over the woodcutter companies to whom they grant the deforestation permissions. And while everybody accuses everybody, everybody goes on exporting or importing precious wood.
Cutting down the woods, mines and monoculture agriculture will go on devastating the last forests of our planet.
This way they contribute to upset the delicate ecological and climate equilibrium of the earth. That's why climate events as Mitch and George will increase every year. Instead of raising one's eyes to the next cargo of mahogany or cedar, the responsible politicians do not put in act a kind of alternative exploitation, biologically diversified and supportable.
This lack of far-sightedness implies that the nice statements declared in the last summits of Buenos Aires, Kyoto e Rio have not had an ecological impact. The farmers of the forest shrug their shoulders if you ask them what they think about the atmospheric contamination, about the unbreathable air, about the sky covered for months. Ploughing by fire is the unique method they know to make place to plantations.
The farmers of the Amazonas, Sumatra or Kalimantan are in sizeable part ex-inhabitants of the overcrowded towns, and often they migrate on government's charge.

In Brazil there's a program to move farmers without land from the northeast of the Amazonas. To make this move more tempting the government warrants them the property right on a piece of land. To have the right for this title, to the government's contributions and seeds, farmers must plough and farm the land for at least five years.
According to surveys carried out by a searchers' team in 1997 and 1998 in the world they have been burnt down from three to five million square kilometres of virgin forest. What the farmers do not burn out it is eliminated by the multinational companies to create plantations of oil palms, pastures, agricultural products, ananas, bananas.
In the metropolis on top of the atmospheric contamination it adds a pall of toxic gases and during the peak of the summer mortality reaches levels ever higher. The World Resources Institute estimates that to the atmospheric contamination it is due the million of dead per year in Southeast Asia and in China, where they have aimed to carbon (one of the most contaminating combustibles) to launch the economic development.

"If you live this way day by day you accustom to", a campesino of the Peruvian Amazonas explains me.
The owner of a woodcutter Bolivian company says: "We are just doing what any other industrialized western country has done before us". But the comparison is weak: in Europe the process of transformation of land from woods to agricultural land has been slow and by degrees, and the sizeable of these forests, specially in the countries limiting the Alps, goes on existing and growing, safeguarded by environment laws and undergoing severe controls of bearableness. All over the west the wood areas are slowly and constantly increasing since two ten-year periods, while in Asia it disappears every year till the 5% of the pluvial forest.
"Welcome to the future" Abuelo said, an old Huoarani while we were crossing the Amazon forest to get to his village, under throng by oil companies, woodcutters and farmers. He referred to the black brown endless expanse that rounded us. After days and days spent between remnants of carbonised forests, under an ever covered sky, sure that neither next day we will see the sun, I remember another sentence of Abuelo: "We've lost the forest, but the white man has lost his centre, has lost himself".