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    forest defenders

    Trees in winter.

    What We Can Learn From Trees

    They are our ancestral model for cooperative, non-violent, and sustainable communities.

    H. Patricia Hynes
    Feb 03, 2024

    As I began this piece on trees in forests, woods, and parks, a friend asked, why in January in New England? Why didn’t I wait until the deciduous trees were a palette of new spring green crowning the stark brown trunks and branches of winter? The next day, January 7, nature provided the answer: a 10-inch snowstorm. Trees after a winter snowstorm—their upstretched dark deciduous branches shouldered with snow and their downreaching evergreen branches pillowed with snow—are a feast for the eyes.

    “A forest is a sacred place... The medicines available in the forest are the second most valuable gift that nature offers us; the oxygen available there is the first.” These are the words Diana Beresford Kroeger, Irish-born and educated in the ancient Celtic culture of spiritual and physical respect for trees. This brilliant botanist went on to receive advanced degrees, culminating in a doctorate in medical biochemistry. She affirmed that simply walking in a pine forest is a balm for the body and soul, elevating our mood, thanks to their chemical gift of pinenes, aerosols released by pine trees and absorbed by our bodies.

    Keep ReadingShow Less
    Opinion
    trees
    Indigenous protesters block a highway in Brazil.

    Stop Marginalizing Indigenous Knowledge in Climate Negotiations

    Indigenous Peoples are living the change that all recent scientific reports call for; this provides a baseline for policymakers and governments at COP28.

    Valérie Courtois
    Chris Filardi
    Dec 09, 2023

    The unimaginable is becoming reality. The Aral Sea, with its historically thriving shipping and fisheries, has dried and is now the Aralkum Desert. In the Amazon, an unprecedented drought left the basin’s largest rivers almost completely dry, impacting hundreds of communities without means of navigation, food, or drinkable water. In 2023, wildfires in Canada burned an area larger than Greece and more than double the 1989 record year in Canada. These forests have never before burned like this in thousands of years of existence, since mile-high ice sheets receded at the close of the Pleistocene.

    In this year of catastrophic drought and fire, more than 160 countries are attending the United Nations’ annual climate summit in Dubai. And this gathering comes at another historic inflection point. Just weeks ago, global average temperature passed a critical threshold exceeding 2°C hotter than preindustrial levels—an ominous signal of a changing climate.

    Keep ReadingShow Less
    Opinion
    indigenous
    Environmental damage from mining in Colombia.

    How to Convince a Village to Destroy Their Future in 8 Steps

    if you are an unethical multinational mining corporation, read here's a handy guide to dividing communities, sparking conflict, and creating the exact amount of chaos necessary for your project to proceed.

    Catapa
    Jul 09, 2023

    Multinational mining companies all over the world use similar strategies to convince communities to agree to their destructive extractive projects. Want to know their secrets?

    We're diving into the mining conflict currently occurring in the village of Falan, Colombia, where multinationals including AngloGold Ashanti are preparing the village for the mines they want to open there. The mining projects will have a devastating impact on the environment, access to potable water, agriculture in the region, and the current and future potential of tourism.

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    Opinion
    mining

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