PEACE from TREES

Nine of 28

Renew instead of steal, not in road’s building, in road’s removing. Return to true wealth living, breathing, revery, regrowing, everflowing-fountainous-green; meet your needs with blooms instead of massacre-slaughter-turn-around instead and roll in a dance with real life’s ecologic wheel of unending wealth.

Last villages of those who are most without? Villages where no road can reach. Their home’s wealth is to our wealth as extinguishable raw source of certain consumption. And as land’s assurance for a long-good life for all that lives, that’s what we dispose of, what we consume so fast, so much that it’s as though we’re a race to digest what’s most rare?

Root-sourced-seed-pierced yearning of our own truth before it’s barely even known. An opposite of metal serpent eating mountain returning carving roads, hauling on roads, serpent of enterprise, of more ‘modern’ desires. Roads of our stumped-crossed webs grow nearer and nearer to the last village, the most rare…

Which side is poorest? What does each side lose? Can you see the tops of every tree still? Can you see an earth brown instead of green? Are you clutching, clinging, scratching holding off a false sense of far off poverty? Return to true wealth living, breathing, revery, regrowing, everflowing-fountainous-green!

Poem and photos by DeaneTR © 2008
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This series of 28 photo-poems are inspired by recent writings related to forests around the world. The poem above is inspired by the condensed news article below. If you'd like to learn more 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 message to earthtreenews-subscribe@lists.riseup.net
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A study has revealed the extent to which poorer countries are trampled by the huge environmental footprints of the rich. Meanwhile, the effect of poor on rich nations, such as Britain, is less than a third of the impact that the rich have on the poor. Because the global environment does not respect political borders, the impact of ecological damage wrought by one country can be felt across the world. To illustrate that point, an American team has attempted to determine which nations are driving ecological damage and which are paying the price. The study, led by former University of California, Berkeley, research fellow Thara Srinivasan, assessed the impacts of agricultural intensification and expansion, deforestation, overfishing, loss of mangrove swamps and forests, ozone depletion and climate change from 1961 to 2000. When all these impacts are added up, the portion of the footprint of high-income nations that is falling on the low-income countries is comparable to or greater than the financial debt recognised for low income countries, which has a net present value of 1.8 trillion in 2005 international dollars (International dollars are US dollars adjusted to account for the different purchasing power of different currencies.) "The ecological debt could more than offset the financial debt of low-income nations," she says. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/01/21/earich121.xml

Before 1500 A.D., there were approximately 6 million indigenous people living in the Brazilian Amazon. But as the forests disappeared, so too did the people. In the early 1900s, there were less than 250,000 indigenous people living in the Amazon. Originally, 6 million square miles of tropical rainforest existed worldwide. But as a result of deforestation, only 2.6 million square miles remain. Nearly 90 percent of the 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty worldwide depend on forests for their livelihoods. Fifty-seven percent of the world’s forests, including most tropical forests, are located in developing countries.A typical four square mile patch of rainforest contains as many as 1,500 flowering plants, 750 species of trees, 400 species of birds and 150 species of butterflies. Rainforests provide many important products for people: timber, coffee, cocoa and many medicinal products, including those used in the treatment of cancer. Seventy percent of the plants identified by the U.S. National Cancer Institute as useful in the treatment of cancer are found only in rainforests. More than 2,000 tropical forest plants have been identified by scientists as having anti-cancer properties. Less than one percent of the tropical rainforest species have been analyzed for their medicinal value Rainforests are threatened by unsustainable agricultural, ranching, mining and logging practices. http://woip.blogspot.com/2008/02/rainforest-is-essential-in-fight-of.html

They say that one sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. I’m gonna lay out a pattern here and let’s see if we can recognize it in less than 6,000 years. When you think of the hills and plains of Iraq, do you normally think of cedar forests so thick the sunlight never touches the ground? That’s how it was before. The first written myth of this culture is that of Gilgamesh deforesting that area to make cities. Plato complained that deforestation was drying up springs and destroying the water quality in Greece. The forests of North Africa went down to make the Phoencian and Egyptian navies. We can go north and ask, Where are the lions who were in Greece? Where are the indigenous of Europe? They’ve been massacred, or assimilated—in any case, genocide was perpetrated against them by definition because they’re no longer there. ~Derrick Jensen http://hecatedemetersdatter.blogspot.com/2008/02/actions-speak-louder-than-words-by.html

The present paper documents the influential role played by selective moral disengagement for social practices that cause widespread human harm and degrade the environment. Disengagement of moral self-sanctions enables people to pursue detrimental practices freed from the restraint of self-censure. This is achieved by investing ecologically harmful practices with worthy purposes through social, national, and economic justifications; enlisting exonerative comparisons that render the practices righteous; use of sanitising and convoluting language that disguises what is being done; reducing accountability by displacement and diffusion of responsibility; ignoring, minimising, and disputing harmful effects; and dehumanising and blaming the victims and derogating the messengers of ecologically bad news. These psychosocial mechanisms operate at both the individual and social systems levels. Keywords: consumptive lifestyles; collective efficacy; environmental ethics; moral agency; moral disengagement; population growth; psychosocial change; self-efficacy; token gestures. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bandura, A. (2007) ‘Impeding ecological sustainability through selective moral disengagement’, Int. J. Innovation and Sustainable Development, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 8–35. http://growthmadness.org/2008/02/18/impeding-ecological-sustainability-through-selective-moral-
disengagement/

PEACE from TREES