We need to protect our forest

Sep 02, 2014 Letters

Dear Editor,
We, at ECHO, speak for the environment; no one else. Today, we raise our voices, loud and strong, for the protection of our forest because we need to protect what is left of it. Without healthy forests the earth cannot sustain life. Already, as much as eighty per cent of the world’s forests have been degraded or destroyed. We need to protect our forest.
The importance of forests goes way beyond their own boundaries. Forests assist in regulating the Earth’s climate. They store nearly 300 billion tonnes of carbon in their living parts. Therefore, when they are destroyed through logging, or burning, this carbon is released into the atmosphere as the climate-changing greenhouse gas – carbon dioxide.
Also, our forests regulate water flow and rainfall. We depend on them to grow our crops. Therefore, the loss of forests in one part of the world can have impacts in another. With so many of the world’s forests already destroyed, we urgently need to protect what is left. Yet, the industry is still relentlessly felling trees, shipping raw logs, converting forests into disposable products that end up in our shopping baskets – while pushing species to the brink of extinction, destroying the lives and livelihoods of forest communities and exacerbating global climate change.
While you were reading this article, logging companies felled more than fifty trees in our hinterland. We honestly need to protect our extraordinary and irreplaceable forest. Let us stop them now!
We are asking citizens to demand that their foods, paper and wood products are not linked to the destruction of the forests. We are also asking citizens to plant or care for a plant or tree in your neighbourhood because we need them, we really do. We are calling upon our politicians to take appropriate action that is needed to protect our forest as well as the rights of the people who depend on it, biodiversity and the climate.
We, at ECHO, have committed ourselves to investigate, document, expose and take appropriate action against the destruction of our forest.
Royston King
Executive Director
Environmental Community Health Organization

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