From living to dead
Aradhika

Strangely Like War
by George Draffan and Derrick Jensen. Natraj Publishers, Dehradun. Rs. 250.
Pages 185.

Forests worldwide are under siege! They are being plundered, exploited and murdered by the human axe—helplessly, without a fight, they fall down, dead. The irony is that while humans wage the deadly war on trees in the guise of development, they do not realise that it is their own generations that they imperil!

Yes, the state of the environment is scary—what we are doing to it, and consequently to ourselves is very, very frightening. In a conflict "unleashed by the violence of the monoculture mind", the reduction of nature to raw material in the name of progress, say the authors, seems ‘strangely like war’.

The book is an urgent call to each one of us to stop falling prey to the misinformation propagated by people who profit from industrial forestry. It exposes the grave ecological crisis faced by each one of us. Supported by much evidence and statistical data, the authors beseech the people to return to a more sustainable world by suggesting ways to retain our forests without further delay.

The assertions are backed by a body of significant work that gives the book an authentic feel, not merely a hysterical crying of Wolf! Wolf! While Draffan is a forest activist, public interest investigator and a corporate muckraker and a noted writer, Jensen is the prize winning author of several books. He works to protect and rehabilitate forest and stream habitat.

Thus when they say that worldwide, two and a half acres of forests are cut every second, we tend to believe them. And these seconds add up to the mind-boggling figure of 78 million acres of forest (an area larger than Poland) being deforested every year.

When forests are cut, not only are the trees killed but the forest-dwellers as well. "The list of plants and animals damaged or extirpated by the deaths of once-great forests is long and getting longer every day," say the authors. Scientists estimate that an average of 130 species are driven extinct every day — which adds up to 50,000 each year! Not just that but "species extinction is likely to continue for a century after deforestation. Those species that we think have survived habitat loss have short leases of life and in fact, may be considered the "living dead".

A great deal of the blame rests on logging companies which keep slaughtering forests with impunity. As if the extinction of animals was not enough, even indigenous human tribes that are sustained by these forests are under threat e.g. The Mapuche of Chile, The Karen in Burma, the Togeans of Indonesia, The Penan of Malaysia, etc.

The authors have examined the phenomena of the war against forests in its entirety, including facets like accountability, claiming that, "the military and police, more broadly, the government—any government—often promote deforestation and spend far more time and energy working towards the theft of indigenous land than its protection." The cutting continues in spite of environmentalists, communities and individuals raising their voices. They also talk about the different ways in which forests are killed. Road building, for example, can result in soil becoming poisoned with heavy metals by contributing to the invasion of noxious species and increasing the number of forest fires by allowing human access. Other causes include logging and timber industry, use of chemicals etc.

The authors name corporations, corporate journalists, politicians and government machinery for perpetuating myths about forests being a "renewable resource" when there is little evidence that forest soils—and therefore trees—are renewable beyond three rotations of cutting and removing. These individuals and organisations work closely together since they are a part of the same machinery, in cahoots to "convert forests into chopsticks, two-by-fours and newspapers."

Draffan and Jensen take a look at the solutions that the civilised world has offered and conclude that these have been colossal failures or, at best, inadequate to combat the looming disaster.

Yet, they do have "some solutions—restoration ecology, relinquishing control of land to those who belong to the land, confining industrial forestry to existing plantation."

And what is it that you and I can do?

"You can fight to keep this particular tree standing, this particular forest functioning. You can help open your friends’ and co-workers eyes to the wonder and intrinsic value and legitimate standing of forests and forests dwellers`85and we can consume less!"

It’s a way that the authors show to join the army of the earth warriors to save the environment!

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