Raising the profile of the ancient yews of Britain
The ancient yews of the British Isles are the oldest living beings in Europe. Conservation bodies and yew enthusiasts all agree that information and education about this species and the vintage of its specimens is vital to their survival since their main threats are to do with human ignorance rather than other natural disasters such as hurricanes.

A major step forward is the outstanding work of Tim Hills, who visited, photographed, examined and mapped over 900 sites of veteran yews. Sponsored by the Tree Register of the British Isles (TROBI), his database is now in the last steps of preparation and due for launch in March 2005: www.ancient-yews.org

And even more information about this fascinating and most important species can be found on www.yew-trees.com but not yet, since the site is still under construction by the dedicated yew researcher Paul Greenwood (Jan 2005).



Des Oliviers pour la paix de la West Bank
Le vieux festival juif, Tu B’Shevat, est la nouvelle année de l’arbre. C’était seulement un petit festival auparavant, mais sa force spirituelle grandit, d’après le Shalom Center «honorer l’union juive avec la terre et renforcer le message que c’est le devoir d’un juif d’être un gardien responsable de la terre qui appartient à Dieu. » Planter des arbres devient à nouveau un acte sacré.

Les rabbis pour les droits de l’homme (RHR) écrivent : « Nous sommes conscients que les arbres sont aussi sacrés pour les palestiniens, et d’entières communautés sont dépendantes des oliviers en particulier pour gagner leur argent. Dans l’intifada des milliers d’oliviers ont été détruit… Seulement si l’on parvient à empêcher la destruction des oliviers et si l’on protège le droit des agriculteurs de récolter les olives, nous pourront entièrement célébrer ce jour de fête. »

D’après le ministre de la défense Binyamin Ben-Eliezer l’Israel a en effet déraciner environ 1.375 acres des plantations palestiniennes et détruit environ 1.125 acres de champs céréaliers.

Chaque année à la période de récolte des olives (octobre/novembre) des adhérents de la RHR et d’autres organisations de paix aident les agriculteurs palestiniens, ce qui inclut la protection des agriculteurs et des arbres de violence physique.

Depuis les jours de Noah, l’olive est le symbole de paix et de prospérité. Le RHR condamne tout acte illégal contre les oliviers comme une infraction claire contre les commandements de la Torah de ne pas détruire d’arbres, ce qui compte également en temps de guerre.

Plus d’informations : www.rhr.israel.net

Source : « TreeNews » Automne/Hiver 2004

L’amérique détruit de vieux arbres en Irak
L’Irak a la plus grande concentration de palmiers de dattes sur cette terre. Dans les années 60 et 70, environ 30 millions d’arbres produisaient 578.000 tonnes de dattes par an, après le pétrole le deuxième volume d’exportation de l’Irak.

Mais la guerre Iran-Irak dans les années 80 (un seul incident a détruit les 5 millions d’arbres des plantations de Ras al-Bisha) et la politique agricole destructrice du régime de Saddam Hussein ont réduit le nombre de palmiers de dattes en Irak à environ 13 millions (43% de la quantité originale).

Les autorités d’Amérique prétendent travailler à ce problème. Un accord qui a été fait en février 2004, expose que le USAID Agricultural Development Program veut payer 40.000 palmiers de dattes (0,0013%) pour les plantations et les pépinières, alors que le ministère de l’agriculture de l’Irak veut des moyens pour payer les terres, le personel, la logistique et l’entretien des plantations.

De plus les attaques aériennes américaines et britanniques en mars 2003 sont tombées en même temps que la pollinisation des dattiers et a ainsi mis fin à tout espoir d’une riche récolte. En ce qui concerne l’année 2004, le journaliste Patrick Cockburn a rédigé un compte rendu dans le magazine “Independent”:

“En Irak central des soldats américains utilisent des bulldozers et la musique de jazz qui vrombit des haut-parleurs et déracinent d’anciens bosquets de dattiers, d’orangers et de citronniers. Cela fesait parti de la politique de punition collective des agriculteurs qui ne donnaient aucune information sur les guerillas qui attaquent les troupes américaines.

Mais si quelqu’un ne savait vraiment rien?

Source : "TreeNews" Automne/Hiver 2004




USA to start global initiative against illegal logging
The USA have started a global initiative against illegal logging and hence for the preservation of the tropical rainforests. Foreign Affairs Minister Colin Powell made public on Monday the fact that Third World countries will now be aided in their fight against the illegal timber trade. The US would support local police forces and supply modern technologies to monitor activities in the woodlands.

The initiative focuses on the Congo and the Amazon, as well as the tropical forests in Latin America and south-east Asia. As an example, Powell mentioned Liberia, whose president Charles Taylor used illegal timber trade profits to buy weapons. According to estimates by the World Bank, developing countries lose 10 to 15 billion dollars annually to illegal logging.
Source: dpa [German press agency], July 29, 2003

The German Minister for the Environment, Juergen Trittin, pointed out the importance of the role of Germany and the European Union in the conservation of the last tropical rain forests. The EU supports a comprehensive approach for efficient conservation of the rainforests. He describes the latest American initiative as half-hearted. ‘It is not enough to supply developing countries with surveillance technology. Only a more far-reaching approach, encompassing financial aids, sensitizing the buyers’ market for illegal products, and a system of benefits and sanctions, can limit the illegal logging of the rainforests effectively.’ (The German government finances forest projects in the developing world with over 125 million Euro, £83m, annually.)
Source: dpa [German press agency], July 30, 2003

Oilfield in Colombia disappears after Indio prayers
In 1995, the US oil company Occidental Petroleum, Oxy, bought the concessions to mine for oil – in one of Latin America's supposedly biggest oilfields – at the border of the territory of the U'wa tribe in north-eastern Colombia.

Near the bore hole, the natives started to prey to their god Sira, asking to hide the oil from the white man, deep in the underworld. And indeed, no more oil could be found. The company has spent about 100 million dollars since, drilling to a depth of 3600 metres (!) but the oil is gone. And Oxy is leaving for good.

Is it possible for an entire oil field to disappear? No question for the U'wa tribespeople. ‘The king of money is merely an illusion,’ they say. Capitalism which destroys everything ‘reckons us crazy. And that's what we’d like to remain, if it allows us to keep on living on our beloved Mother Earth.’ In their cosmology, the oil is the ‘blood of the Earth’. It rests in the depth where the earthquakes come from and holds all life in equilibrium.

Over just a few decades, the U'wa have been heavily decimated to about 5,000 people by diseases imported by the white man. The neighbouring tribes call them the ‘thinking people’ and their noble task is to ‘sing the world into being every morning’. In 1996 their fight was supported by a young Californian eco-activist, Terry Freitas, who was murdered three years later. But by then the U'wa had already matured to global eco-heroes by making efficient use of the internet, road blockades, and court hearings. Two years ago they exposed US vice president Al Gore who had inherited Oxy shares from his father.

Now, the Colombian state company Ecopetrol has announced its intention to go looking for the oil themselves.
Source: 'Der Spiegel' [German news magazine], no. 21, 2002

More about the U'Wa Defence Project
‘Each time that a species is extinguished, humankind approaches its own extinction; each time an Indigenous people becomes extinct, one more member of the great human family leaves forever on a journey with no return… Perhaps before greed takes root in us we will be able to see the wonder of the world and the greatness of the universe that extends beyond the diameter of a coin.’
Berito KuwarU'wa, U'wa Traditional Authority
Source: http://www.leonardodicaprio.org/udp.html

links:
http://www.starhawk.com/uwa/
http://www.amazonwatch.org/megaprojects/samore.html
http://www.ran.org/ran_campaigns/beyond_oil/oxy/
http://www.moles.org/uwa/



Return of the wolf
The wolf, ‘the friend of the forest’ (because it regulates the deer populations which everywhere destroy tree seedlings), is making its slow return into Central Europe. From territories in northern Russia as well as the Carpathian Mountains in Romenia and south-western Ukraine it moves via Poland into Germany, while some Italian wolves from the Abbruzes migrate into south-eastern France.

‘For the first time [in 150 years] wild wolves have reared their young in Germany,’ says Frank Moerschel, biologist of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), referring to the wolf family (wolf pairs mate for life) that made its home on the area of a military training area near the Polish and Czech borders. ‘The site is situated exactly on one of the ancient wolf tracks,’ explains an enthusiastic Michael Gruschwitz of the Environmental Ministry of Saxony, ‘a huge area – absolutely quiet and very rich in wildlife.’
Source: 'Der Spiegel' [German news magazine], no. 45, 2001

ElectriciTrees
Professor Bernhard Wiltholt, chairman of the Institute of Biotechnology at Zurich's ETH, says that future power shortages could be solved by tress and ‘plants that produce electricity from sugars … or directly via photosynthesis, so that energy could be brought [to] everywhere on earth via small dispersed systems that everyone can build by planting a few seeds.’ Depending on the number of such trees planted, electricity could be grown to run a fridge or even a household.
Source: 'The Ecologist', Dec 2001

Ancient forest discovered near London
A mile and a half of prehistoric forest has been discovered on the south bank of the Thames at Erith on the outskirts of south-east London. The crumbling remains of oak, ash, alder, Scots pine and yew are thought to date from the Neolithic, and to represent a wooded island between two channels … Bronze Age pottery has been found overlaying the forest remains. It is now being recorded by the Thames Archaeological Survey directed by Mike Webber.
Near Chelsea, an early Neolithic wooden club that resembles a cricket bat has been found. It is made of oak, about 2ft 6in long, and has been radiocarbon dated to 3540-3360BC.
Source: ‘British Archaeology’, Oct 1998

Epidemics from the rainforest
The destruction of the tropical rainforest is often accompanied by the outbreak of new unknown diseases. An unknown virus, for example, was discovered in the blood of the workmen who cut the road from Belém to Brasília through the jungle in 1950. Subsequently, 11,000 people fell ill with high fever and muscle pains. And the construction of the railtrack from Lima to La Oroya in Peru resulted in an outbreak of the so-called 'Oroya fever'. The origin of the Aids virus, too, is thought to lie in the tropical rainforest.

The high biodiversity of the rainforest also promotes a high potential for unknown viruses – which can be set free by the ecological destabilisation of these areas. In Latin America, the extinction of big cats and the expansion of agriculture led to a massive increase of rodents, and hence of the Machupo virus. Other epidemics, like the Rift Valley fever, can be traced to the spreading of huge cattle herds and the explosion of mosquito populations that often accompanies clearfelling. ‘A change of host, for example from rodent to human,’ says virologist Kurt Roth of the Georg-Speyer-Haus, an Aids research institute in Frankfurt, ‘is favoured by a preceding mass increase of the virus population because the chances of successful mutations are growing too.’
Source: 'GEO' (the German equivalent to 'National Geographic'