O Pantanal brasileiro é a maior área úmida tropical do mundo, cobrindo uma área quase do tamanho da Grã-Bretanha. Só que hoje, não está tão molhada. Após um verão de seca, estão ocorrendo incêndios catastróficos que já devastaram 2,4 milhões de hectares de terra este ano. (Isso é mais do que queimou na Califórnia, Oregon […]
environmental activism
World on Fire
Brazil’s Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, covering an area nearly the size of Britain. Only today, it isn’t so wet. After a summer of drought, catastrophic fires are raging that have devastated 2.4 million hectares of land already this year. (That’s more than has burned in California, Oregon, and Washington combined.) Its precious […]
The Amazon: How do we heal a burning heart?
Like a lot of people, I’ve been deeply affected by what’s been happening in the Amazon in 2019.
Deforestation has reached double the rate of last year, as the red line of logging and fires, many of them set deliberately to clear land for soybeans and cattle, encroaches deeper and deeper into the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
Armed land-grabbers are dislocating Indigenous people and killing those who resist. Even legally protected lands are getting logged and destroyed. It’s just horrifying. And I feel, sometimes, these waves of helplessness, like watching a car wreck in slow motion. The grief is so strong – what do I do with it?
Xylella: Supervillain or Symptom
Of Almonds and Olives Once again the dreaded plant pathogen Xylella fastidiosa has come onto my radar. I first wrote about it in the context of olive trees in southern Europe; now it is affecting almond trees as well. In the old us-versus-them, conquest-of-nature paradigm, the response to a deadly plant disease is to exert […]
Olive Trees and the Cry of the Land
The olive trees are dying in the Salento region of Italy, the picturesque heel of the Italian peninsula. A new disease called Olive Quick Decline Syndrome (OQDS) is ravaging olive groves that date back to Roman times and before, some with 2000-year-old trees. Leaves wither as is scorched by fire, twigs and branches die back, […]
Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy
When we transmit to each other our love of earth, mountain, water, and sea to others, and stir the grief over what has been lost; when we hold ourselves and others in the rawness of it without jumping right away to reflexive postures of solution and blame, we are penetrated deep to the place where commitment lives. We grow in our empathy. We come back to our senses.