1.31.2008
Timber
I started thinking last Saturday, when the power was out all over town, and a crew of men came and chopped all the branches off the tree across from our office. In town, the lady at the supermarket told me that the power company had switched off all the power to avoid being electrocuted as they trimmed branches that were encroaching on power lines around town.
Sunday afternoon I was driving in my neighborhood and saw a row of full grown trees that had been chopped down to jagged stumps. Over the felled branches, my neighbors crawled like a horde of termites, hacking off the leaves and trimming the boughs to firewood length and bundling them onto the heads of children. Free firewood, what a lucky day.
I thought of the logging trucks that come rumbling down through one of the areas we work, in the foothills of Mt. Meru. The big trucks stop halfway down the mountain and unload all the poles, whole trees really, in an incredible display of grunting and muscle, onto borrowed lots. Another truck winds its way up the mountain and the men reload the poles, using ramps and sticks and rhythmic chanting to get all the trees back on. As the reloaded truck rumbles down the hill, chickens and children and women with firewood on their head scatter.
An old Swedish man lives in the same mountain foothills and gives every villager a free sapling who asks for it, but farther up the mountain, the former forest is now fields of potatoes and beans marked by red jagged stumps. A nearby ravine is too steep to farm and shows the tangled jungle that these tidy rows replaced. I gasped when I saw a colobus monkey jumping among the vines and the children accompanying me laughed.
Driving outside of Lusaka in Zambia in 2002, we saw miles and miles of scorched earth, the trees harvested for charcoal for the hungry capital. In the slums there, it is sold in gunny sacks and the people selling it are blackened by the soot.
Sunday afternoon I was driving in my neighborhood and saw a row of full grown trees that had been chopped down to jagged stumps. Over the felled branches, my neighbors crawled like a horde of termites, hacking off the leaves and trimming the boughs to firewood length and bundling them onto the heads of children. Free firewood, what a lucky day.
I thought of the logging trucks that come rumbling down through one of the areas we work, in the foothills of Mt. Meru. The big trucks stop halfway down the mountain and unload all the poles, whole trees really, in an incredible display of grunting and muscle, onto borrowed lots. Another truck winds its way up the mountain and the men reload the poles, using ramps and sticks and rhythmic chanting to get all the trees back on. As the reloaded truck rumbles down the hill, chickens and children and women with firewood on their head scatter.
An old Swedish man lives in the same mountain foothills and gives every villager a free sapling who asks for it, but farther up the mountain, the former forest is now fields of potatoes and beans marked by red jagged stumps. A nearby ravine is too steep to farm and shows the tangled jungle that these tidy rows replaced. I gasped when I saw a colobus monkey jumping among the vines and the children accompanying me laughed.
Driving outside of Lusaka in Zambia in 2002, we saw miles and miles of scorched earth, the trees harvested for charcoal for the hungry capital. In the slums there, it is sold in gunny sacks and the people selling it are blackened by the soot.
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Deforestation really is a global problem - with consequences far-reaching, not just local. In America we (and this we really hurts, because I do not want to be part of it) are devastating whole mountain ranges - cutting off the tops to mine the coal underneath - and losing entire pristine Appalachian ecosystems in destruction that can never be undone. You can see it on Google Earth.
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