Trees

Burning Cathedrals Alive

Extinction bankers
Raping America’s hardwoods
British Columbia’s softwoods
Australia’s rare gums,
Subsidised
Wood pellets,
Europe’s hulking ovens
Stoking climate catastrophe,
Hustling Great Ending.

The Big Forestry Lie,
Enormous profits
Devastating biological deaths,
Trees are water
Water is life
Life is water!
Grownup forests
Cooperative complex
Communities,
No trees
No life!

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Racketeers Ransacking Rainforests

Seven years a trillion dollars,
Cutthroat business levelling Mother,
Twenty-five thousand banks,
Rinsed pressed laundered,
Planetary extinction fast-tracked!

One hundred fifty-two billion illegal log dollars,
Transcontinental oragnised FAT crime,
Lotta bank paper annually,
Gleeful pensions shareholders directors,
Homeless wildlife deadly silence,
Mother’s imperative climate stabilising native forest obliterated!

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Tarkine Callin’ Australians

‘takayna/Tarkine inimitable oxygen gem,
Largest Southern temperate water-making
temple,
Purest planetary air,
Opulent Aboriginal heritage,
Indispensable climate stabaliser!

Chinese MMG heavy metal miners,
Ransacking church toxic tailings,
MP Sussan Ley’s blessings,
Pumpin’ poisons atop Pieman River,
Desecrating cherished rainforest,
Hideous biological annihilation!

Destroying rare Tasmanian masked owls,
Forest guardians harken nightly,
“Hoot . . . hoot, Save our Ship!”,
Now or never Australians,
Defend Mother’s sacredness,
Noblest direct-action campaign!

Reese Halter Unearthly Wails
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The Great Forest, A Wonderful Book

The Great Forest is a stunning book that is loaded with intriguing information and many beautiful images.

Ecologist David Lindenmayer along with photographers Chris Taylor, Sarah Rees and Steven Kuiter have presented the finest tabletop forest book that I have ever read.

These skilled Aussie forest defenders help us understand the mesmerising wet forests of Victoria’s ancient Central Highlands, and that the Indigenous Peoples are the rightful caretakers of these lands. This exquisite book showcases the majestic oxygen-making mountain ash, the world’s tallest flowering trees and many of its unique animals.

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Giant Sequoias Homage

O cinnamon mighty fire-resistant trunked-ones,
Your tree kingdom royal highnesses,
Gargantuan beings beyond perception of immense!
Rare Cali’ Sierran glorious mountaineers,
Deep rich soils, disease and pest free.
Heavenly.

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Intrepid Ecologist, Suzanne Simard, Discovering Big Old Trees

SAN FRANCISCO – Professor Suzanne Simard is a remarkable woman – a passionate, courageous forest ecologist who has upended Canada’s, male dominated, planet-killing forestry sector.

Simard’s new book, Finding the Mother Tree, is an epic read loaded with curiositygrit, discovery, grief and triumph.

Fearless, intelligent, caring women are healing our planet. Simard is indeed amongst them.

Professor Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard with an ancient western redcedar Mother Tree.
Credit: Diana Markosian

Old-growth rainforests are superlative carbon storehouses and incomparable intercontinental climate-makers, secondly only to the oceans. We cannot inhabit this planet without old-growth inhaling carbon and exhaling oxygen.

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Old-Growth Rainforests, Key To Human Survival

Old-growth rainforests are mesmerizing. No other planet in this or any other galaxy, which we know of, supports these hallowed cathedrals of splendor.

Long-lived, self-perpetuating, unique genetics, structurally diverse with dead standing and fallen trees, gaps in the canopy and habitat for a rich array of life forms – old-growth has it all. It is the best that Mother Earth can muster at inhaling and storing carbon, exhaling oxygen, circulating freshwater, making climate and providing lodging for our brethren and sistren, the animals. Hallelujah.

Old-Growth Rainforests
Moisture created in old-growth rainforests circulates and irrigates the globe.
Image credit: Richard Whitcombe

Where there are rainforests it is wet: locally, regionally, continentally and intercontinentally. These stupendous biologically complex treed communities create vast atmospheric rivers of moisture, sustaining life on land. And they are giant air conditioners seeding clouds that reflect an extra five percent of incoming solar radiation into space.

From spirit bears to Tasmanian devils, rainforest life is absolutely dazzling. Predator/prey interactions are in a constant arms race. For instance, tropical rainforest fishing bats use sonar to locate fish and utilize a gaff-like toe to catch them, while plants have developed mind-boggling chemical defenses against fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects and animal grazers and browsers.

The scent within an old-growth rainforest is like walking into a heady aromatic medicine chest. Every breath is a medicinal tour de force that helps the human body ward off cancers.

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Ecocide: Killing British Columbia’s Last Great Big Trees

How much is enough? More. Since 1981, I have witnessed the greatest and most diversified temperate old-growth rainforests in the world, those of British Columbia (BC), being raped and pillaged under the auspice of crown (provincial) forestry management propping up a couple hundred timber-harvesting towns and the opportunistic (and fleeting) multinational corporations that milk the system and taunt the people with jobs.

Giant British Columbia Trees
Reese Halter planting trees in the Northern Rockies, circa 1986.
Image credit: Jane Williams

Today, about a couple dozen old-growth wood-addicted communities with automated state-of-the-art mills remain. It’s a house of cards that over the previous decade has siphoned $3.65 billion from the provincial coffers to stay afloat. Lousy subsidies.

In reality, every day there are less wild rainforests and far less animals. Habitat destruction is horrible in an accelerating man-driven Age of Extinction. Additionally, those cutover forestlands are incapable of decontaminating putrid fossil fuel-tainted rainwater, which runs off into the sea or through your tap.

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