Forest Feels: The Amazon Basin
2-3 minute read
Our love of forests is primal and deep. Trees give us the very air we need to survive, as well as supplying shade, beauty, and a natural home for mushrooms.
Here we honour our mother forest, the earth’s lungs, the Amazon Rainforest.
Home to eight South American countries, it represents over half the world’s tropical forests [1]. Give or take, it holds 390 billion trees [2]. The Amazon rainforest can credibly be called awesome.
Credit: Fabio Fistarol
Cookeina tricholoma, Hairy Orange Cup Fungus. Credit: Katja Schulz
A teaspoon of Amazon soil can contain up to 400 types of fungi [3], so it’s anyone’s guess how many exist worldwide.
Some varieties have yet to be identified, so hopefully we’re forgiven for posting those with names we don’t know.
To highlight beauty, we need to reveal the shadow. Every 6 seconds, an area of rainforest the size of a football field is cleared [4]. You can watch surveillance here to see the devastating effect of logging and agriculture.
Credit: Roya Ann Miller
Reforestation is critical for planetary health, so we support sustainable projects that secure rights for indigenous people and regulate forest encroachment by government and industry.
Lawyers Philippe Sands and Dior Fall Sow are working towards ensuring that ‘Ecocide’ will be recognised as an international crime for the destruction of ecosystems and environment, a violation alongside genocide and war crimes [5].
Ivaneide Bandeira Cardozo. Credit: Gabriel Uchida
This cannot come soon enough. An investigation by Joao Fellet and Charlotte Pamment for the BBC revealed that plots of the Amazon rainforest are being illegally sold via Facebook Marketplace [6].
The article ends with an unnerving note from Ivaneide Bandeira, longstanding Amazon rainforest activist [7]:
"Never, in any other moment in history, has it been so hard to keep the forest standing".
In October 2018, National Geographic featured some of the last isolated peoples on earth. An indigenous tribe in the Amazon, the Awa, reportedly around 600 in number, “still rely almost entirely on bounty of the primal forest and its sources of water” [8].
Photographed river bathing with yellow-footed tortoises, the tribe reminds us to protect the nature we have, not to mention imperiled communities like the Awa whose existence are threatened by illegal loggers.
While the Amazon’s billions of trees sound vast, it’s only a fraction of what existed before the agricultural age. Just last year the World Economic Forum announced a goal of a trillion trees to help combat the climate crisis - that’s the right trees in the right places: restored, conserved and planted [9].
This vision depends on financial support, so Moksha will donate a portion of profit to the cause through the US chapter, American Forests. You can too.
In upcoming weeks we’ll profile other projects in the Trillion Trees movement, but in the meantime you can read further at American Forests, Trillion Trees and the UN’s drive to restore other world ecosystems.
As for the Brazilian government and Facebook Marketplace, hopefully a barrage of pressure for corrective action ensues. Our voices will be one of them.
This is it
Moksha
Sources
WWF, Amazon Facts
Wikipedia, Amazon Rainforest
‘How one teaspoon of Amazon soil teems with fungal life’. Helen Briggs. June 2020. BBC.com
’Is it time for “ecocide” to become an international crime?’ February 2021. The Economist.
‘Amazon rainforest plots sold via Facebook Marketplace ads’ February 2021. BBC News.
Ivaneide Bandeira, known as ‘Guardian of the Forest’ and founder of Kandidé non-profit environmental organization.
‘Isolated Nomads Under Siege in the Amazon Jungle’. October 2018. National Geographic magazine.
Trillion Tree Organisation, initiative of the World Economic Forum.