Indigenous leaders from the Guardians of the Forest joined 500,000 people to march through Madrid for COP25. They encourage youth participation so that the youth can be aware of what is happening to indigenous lands and rights.
Indigenous leaders from several countries were represented including those from Brazil and Costa Rica. These leaders ask for:
governments to guarantee their real and effective participation in decision-making that affects them
recognition of their rights to land
protection of indigenous territories as protection of the territories protects all of humanity
unity without borders as the fight to protect Mother Earth is the “mother of all fights”.
“The fight for mother earth is the mother of all fights.”–Sonia Guajajara, Brazilian Indigenous Peoples Coalition APIB
You don’t hear much anymore about the cutting of our forests to make paper. Has this destructive practice just moved overseas where we don’t have to confront it, or have increases in recycling in recent years made paper production less destructive? – J. W., Greenville, SC
It’s
true that saving paper (and in turn saving trees) used to be a big discussion
topic at home, school and office, but these days you don’t hear much about it.
This is likely because paper recycling has become ubiquitous; most of us are
now well-versed in how to sort recyclable paper from other “waste.”
According
to the American Paper and Forest Association
(AF&PA), upwards of two-thirds of all paper consumed in the U.S. was
recovered for recycling in 2018. What this means is that a lot of the paper we
use now gets made with recycled materials that don’t cause more logging and
deforestation.
A big
player in this march forward has been the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an
international non-profit that sets standards on forest products and then
certifies and labels those that meet the standards as eco-friendly. Another
major factor has been the establishment of guidelines set forth and agreed to
by 200 governmental and other entities in 2014’s New York Declaration of Forests
(NYDP), an international agreement to “end natural forest loss” by 2030.
Despite
this progress, deforestation for paper still continues unabated in Indonesia
and other parts of the developing world where government oversight is
non-existent and profit incentives are too great for illegal loggers to ignore.
Some 10 percent of global deforestation (a major driver of climate change) is
due to logging for wood products including paper, according to the Union of
Concerned Scientists (UCS).
UCS
reports that clearing tropical forests and replacing them with mono-cultural
plantations of so-called “fastwood” trees like acacia, partly to make virgin
paper, accounts for more deforestation across Indonesia than more infamous
environmental bogeymen like palm oil production and coal mining. “This is particularly harmful because about a quarter
of fastwood plantations were cleared on carbon-rich peat soils,” reports UCS,
“adding significantly to global warming pollution.”
The forests of Indonesia are still falling to feed the world’s demand for paper products. Credit: Tom Fisk, Pexels
Beyond
recycled paper itself, there are some promising alternatives to wood pulp as a
feedstock for paper production. Some well-known alt-paper feedstocks include
fiber crops like bamboo, kenaf, hemp, flax and jute, agricultural scraps such
as sugarcane bagasse, corn husks or straw, and textiles left-over in the
production of fabrics and rope. A newer entrant in the green paper alternatives
playing field is calcium carbonate—literally rock dust—which is made by
pulverizing construction waste and fusing it together with plastic before
compressing it with massive rollers into its final paper-thin form.
What
about, you might ask, the rapidly-growing digital age we find ourselves in now?
Isn’t that saving trees? Yes, but consider the electricity load of all the
computers, tablets and phones, as well as the server farms and network
switching facilities that keep your e-mail inbox full and your Facebook feed
full of new content. They’re largely powered by coal and other fossil fuels.
Our addiction to digital information might just be taking a larger toll on the
planet than if we still got our information the old-fashioned way—from actual
books, magazines, newspapers and printed reports.
