Money has been propelling ecological destruction.
Women of my region – peasant women – came out to say we will hug the trees. You will have to kill us before you kill the tree, because these trees are our life. They are our mothers. They give us water. They give us soil. They give us fuel.
Deforestation is leading to the disappearance of water, disappearance of energy, and ecological catastrophes like landslides.
Why were the trees being cut? Very simply, because cutting a tree makes money. Leaving a tree in place gives you stable ecosystems, gives you basic needs, gives you material welfare, avoids poverty. But cutting a tree leads to huge profits for the logging companies and the countries count it as the growth of the gross domestic product. A live tree doesn’t contribute to the GDP. A killed tree does.
And that is the basis of why the more our economies grow, the more people suffer and the more the planet suffers.
