We’re joining forest guardians to protect Europe’s last ancient forests from deforestation caused by illegal logging.
🌱 Join us to rewild the planet: https://planetwild.com...
Europe was once a continent of trees. Today, less than 1% of its virgin forest remains, much of it hidden away in Romania. These ancient forests hold incredible biodiversity, but they’re under attack. Corruption, illegal logging, and timber mafias are cutting down and logging trees that have stood for millennia.
In Mission 31, we joined forest guardian Gabriel Paun and his team at Agent Green. They’ve already saved thousands of hectares, risking everything to defend Europe’s last wilderness.
Now, we’re equipping them with a cutting-edge forest protection tool to fight deforestation and protect what little remains of these ancient forests.
#deforestation #illegallogging #biodiversity
Special thanks to Simon Straetker and 'Wildlife Documentary' for additional footage.
Chapters
0:00 Protecting ancient forests in Europe
1:23 Meet the guardian who’s fighting back
2:17 Agent Green: Investigating who’s exploiting the forests
This is how trees can call the police if they're in danger of being chopped down!
Tree are cut down illegally all the time.
In fact, up to 90% of rainforest logging is illegal.
So the Rainforest Connection created a system to help protect forests, by putting phones in the tops of trees with solars panels and a powerful microphone, that can listen constantly for any sound of illegal logging or other things that could threaten the forest.
The very moment a chainsaw is used in the forest, the sound is picked up by the phones, and an alert is sent to local partners who can intervene immediately and halt the logging.
The entire process happens in a matter of minutes!
The devices cost very little too and have no negative ecological impact on the forest, and can detect chainsaw noises up to 1km in the distance.
The devices have been used to help protect a variety of precious wildlife, such as Gibbons in Indonesia, and have helped local people fight deforestation.
Would you like to see this solution being used around the world?
Illegal businesses form an interlocking web in the Brazilian remote region where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed, threatening Ind
The outpost is intermittently frequented by members of Univaja, the Indigenous rights collective for whom [Bruno] Pereira had worked. But it is currently manned by a lone resident: a 76-year-old Peruvian named Juan da Silva and his black labrador mutt. Equipped with a torch, a fishing rod, a few cans of food and occasionally a radio, he fears for his life every night.
"I want to get out of here,” says Da Silva. “I don’t want to die. I want to live.”
The outpost is where [Dom] Phillips and Pereira slept the night before they were killed. Da Silva points to the hooks that held their hammocks, bolted to wooden posts under a small porch.
Pereira had slept on the right side of the building, which overlooks a small estuary used by illegal fisherman to enter a lake with thousands of valuable pirarucu fish – and a pathway into Indigenous land that evades a government checkpoint a few miles upstream.
"The fishermen get very angry if we don’t let them through,” Da Silva says, pointing to the stream, where a shaggy crested Amazon kingfisher sits on a branch scouring the water. “Sometimes I can’t stop them, because if I did they would kill me.”
Such are the contrasts in this underreported part of the Amazon rainforest where magnificent natural beauty has become a backdrop to increasing violence and impunity. It is the setting for a battle over access to resources that has intensified following the election of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in 2018.
Law enforcement officials say the Javari Valley, an area the size of Portugal and home to the world’s largest concentration of uncontacted Indigenous tribes, is now Brazil’s second largest drug trafficking route, where the interwoven illicit industries of fishing, logging and mining have proliferated over the past decade.
Pereira had worked with villagers here, trying to steer them away from illegal fishing – many of the river’s species are subject to strict regulation to manage stocks, and it is prohibited to fish in Indigenous territory further upstream. But a single pirarucu, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish, which grows to over 100 kilograms, can be sold for $1,000 at market price, while a single Amazon river turtle can be sold for $200.
Locals say illegal activities have become commonplace in recent years. One villager recently spotted a boat with three men carrying shotguns, laden with illegally caught fish. Illegal fishermen use small boats, laden with ice, to navigate into Indigenous land under cover of darkness, according to a report by Univaja, and then return to deliver their catches to larger boats waiting on the main river.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Friday will propose restoring roadless protections on more than 9 million acres of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, a move that would overturn one of Donald Trump’s most significant changes to public lands.
Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:
For two decades, Republicans and Democrats have fought over whether to ban roads on more than 9 million acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. Now, the Biden administration aims to settle the question once and for all.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will propose reinstating a Clinton administration-era rule to ban logging and road building in more than half of North America’s largest temperate rainforest, the department confirmed. The restrictions had managed to stay in place for years because of a series of court battles, but the Trump administration wiped them out last fall.
“Restoring the Tongass’ roadless protections supports the advancement of economic, ecologic and cultural sustainability in Southeast Alaska in a manner that is guided by local voices,” Vilsack said in a statement, adding that the rule reflects the input of Alaska’s tribal and community leaders “and builds on the region’s economic drivers of tourism and fishing.”
The proposed rule would protect critical habitat and prevent the carbon dioxide trapped in the forest’s ancient trees from escaping into the atmosphere, but Alaska’s governor and congressional delegation say it would hurt the timber industry. Alaska Native leaders, environmentalists and tour operators argue that protecting the region’s remaining wild landscapes will sustain the state’s economy in the long term.
“Having protections for close to 10 million acres of old growth means that we have the resources needed to continue teaching our traditional practices, continue harvesting our traditional foods and medicines and to not only prosper as Indigenous people, but to come to the world’s aid right now so people can learn our ways of living and our ways of being,” Anderson said. “In the future, we would hope that tribal governments are listened to, and properly consulted with, in the beginning.”
The rule, which will be published Tuesday, will be subject to 60 days of public comment before being finalized.
The administration announced in July that it would end large-scale old-growth logging on the 16.7 million-acre forest, which still boasts roughly 5 million acres of prime old-growth habitat, while continuing to auction off tracts of younger trees.
The Clinton administration enacted the roadless rule to protect undeveloped stretches of national forest not just in Alaska but throughout the West, covering a total of 58.5 million acres. While some modifications have been made in a handful of states, such as Idaho and Colorado, it has remained largely intact since 2001.
Roads fragment habitat and make it easier to remove some of a forest’s most prized trees, which also provide habitat for wildlife, keep streams cool and prevent soil erosion.
While Clinton officials identified the Tongass as deserving protection because of its vibrant and lucrative wild salmon runs, many scientists and conservationists have argued in recent years that policymakers need to protect its old growth to prevent the carbon they store from being released once they’re felled. The trees there absorb at least 8 percent of the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48 states’ forests combined.
Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest rose sharply last month as the country prepared to send troops to try to curb illegal logging and mining. Brazil's space research agency said the area destroyed in April was 64% bigger than in the same period last year. In the first four months of 2020, destruction of the forest by illegal loggers and ranchers rose 55%, it said. President Jair Bolsonaro's policies and rhetoric encourage illegal logging activity.
‘Brazil's Amazon: Surge in deforestation as military prepares to deploy’, BBC
Indonesian villagers are trying out a treetop surveillance system that uses recycled phones and artificial intelligence software to detect chain saws.
PAKAN RABAA, Indonesia — This village in West Sumatra, a lush province of volcanoes and hilly rain forests, had a problem with illegal loggers.
They were stealing valuable hardwood with impunity. At first, a group of local people put a fence across the main road leading into the forest, but it was flimsy and proved no match for the interlopers.
So, residents asked a local environmental group for camera traps or some other equipment that might help. In July, they got more than they expected: A treetop surveillance system that uses recycled cellphones and artificial intelligence software to listen for rogue loggers and catch them in the act.
“A lot of people are now afraid to take things from the forest,” Elvita Surianti, who lives in Pakan Rabaa, said days after a conservation technologist from San Francisco installed a dozen listening units by hoisting himself nearly 200 feet into the treetops. “It’s like the police are watching from above.”
