Forest Destruction is on the Rise

The impact of deforestation on wildlife and vegetation is immense. About 80 percent of the world’s land animals and plants call forests home. When their habitats are destroyed, many of them can’t survive. Instead, they are forced out of the woods as their food sources disappear, leading to more run-ins with humans.

Forests also play crucial roles in various ecological processes. For example, they remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, so forest destruction worsens climate change. They also play a part in the water cycle by helping to return water vapor into the atmosphere.  

With tree cover to shelter it from sunlight, the ordinarily rich soil in a former forest can dry out, making it much harder for those forests to recover.

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‘This Is My Land’: The Indigenous Women Chiefs Protecting the Amazon

For decades, Brazil’s Kayapo tribe has battled deforestation of their home. Now women are at the frontlines of the fight to save the rainforest. Concealed among dense Amazonian rainforest and grassy savannas are the simple palm-thatched dwellings of the Kayapo, one of Brazil’s best-known indigenous groups. Their scattered villages along the banks of the Xingu River are so remote that until the 1950s, the Kayapo people had virtually no contact with or knowledge of the outside world. Over the past three decades, Kayapo communities have been increasingly exposed to the outside world, bringing major shifts in the tribe’s social structure. One of the more recent and unexpected changes has been the emergence of three women chiefs, who are now in charge of villages spread across a vast swath of Amazonian rainforest.

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