Indonesia

In 2004, Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan professor, won the Nobel Peace Prize for her Greenbelt Campaign. The forestry project has planted more than 30 million trees in its 32 years, stemming deforestation across swaths of Africa and helping 900,000 African women to have decent livelihoods tending to tree nurseries and planting trees.

Trees are undeniably good things. They draw CO2 from the atmosphere and store it physically as carbon in their structure. They improve water and air quality, and protect soil from erosion and, in turn, desertification. Particularly in tropical zones, continuous vegetative cover is the only way to prevent the destruction of the soil, since, as environmental historian Colin Duncan explains,

"In many tropical places, the meager soils also have some unfortunate geological characteristics. High laterite content renders some tropical soils into concrete-like surfaces in the event that the vegetation cover is removed and they are exposed to drier conditions. Such eventualities are practically irreversible."

Still, we should be absolutely clear that greenery is not a panacea for excess atmospheric CO2.

Sometimes tree-planting can ultimately have negative effects on net CO2 emissions. One example occurs when natural or old-growth forests are destroyed and commercial monoculture tree plantations replace them.

By Daniel Kessler

On Nov. 16, two Greenpeace activists from Germany and Italy and two members of the press from India and Italy, all of whom were traveling on valid business and journalist visas, were picked up and detained by Indonesian police.

They were on their way to meet the villagers of Teluk Meranti, who have been supporting Greenpeace in its efforts to highlight rainforest and peatland destruction in the Kampar Peninsula — ground zero for climate change. The police also took into custody an activist from Belgium who had been working at our Climate Defenders Camp there.

Despite the validity of their travel documents and the absence of any wrongdoing, two of the activists and both journalists are now being deported by immigration authorities on questionable and seemingly contrived grounds, even though no formal deportation permits have been issued.

Just a few days before, immigration authorities deported 11 other international Greenpeace activists who participated in a non-violent direct action in an area where Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Ltd., or APRIL, one of Indonesia's largest pulp and paper companies, is clearing rainforest and draining peatland on the peninsula.

Deforestation is responsible for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Driven in part by consumer appetite for cheap beef, leather, timber, biofuels, tropical oils and products, as well as paper products, deforestation is proceeding at the rate of an estimated 13 million hectares a year. That translates into 50,000 square miles, an area more than half the size of the United Kingdom, being lost every year.

While there is growing international support for tackling global deforestation -- there's even generous support in the Waxman-Markey bill for the effort -- action has been stymied by the overall lack of progress on a global climate agreement. The circumstance is exemplified by the UN's program on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD). It has only one donor, Norway, and six projects off the ground.

While addressing deforestation has remained difficult, around the world there has been encouraging progress on the opposite process - reforestation and afforestation. Governments, companies, organizations and individuals are putting trees back on some of the lands devastated by deforestation. 

Earlier this month, Pakistan broke a Guinness World Record previously held by India for the most trees planted in a single day – 541,176. There are even reforestation vacations for enterprising travelers that want to get in on the act. But popular events are just the tip of the iceberg of a far more difficult process that is proceeding largely unseen in many pockets around the world.

In early December 2004, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered a police crackdown on illegal logging after flash floods and landslides, made by worse by deforestation, killed more than 300 people, according to news reports.

Fifteen years earlier, in 1989, the government of Thailand announced a nationwide ban on tree cutting following severe flooding and the heavy loss of life in landslides. And in August 1998, following several weeks of record flooding in the Yangtze River basin and a staggering $30 billion worth of damage, the Chinese government banned all tree cutting in the upper reaches of the basin.

Each of these governments belatedly learned a costly lesson, namely that services provided by forests, such as flood control, may be far more valuable to society than the lumber in those forests.

Corporate security guards and police kicked and brutally dragged away Greenpeace activists during a peaceful protest this past week at the headquarters of Indonesia’s largest logging and palm oil company, the Sinar Mas Group.

The protesters were demanding a halt to the company's destruction of Indonesia’s forests. Two dozen protesters had chained themselves to the entrance of the Sinar Mas building while climbers deployed an enormous, five-story banner calling Sinar Mas a "Forest and Climate Criminal".

In a press release, Bustar Maltar, forest campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, issued this statement:

The excessive violence today by Sinar Mas security is testament to the way this company does business. Sinar Mas may think they are above the law, but the right to peaceful protest is enshrined in Indonesian constitution. We took action today because Sinar Mas and the Indonesian government are failing to do so. We are facing the greatest threat to humanity -- climate chaos, yet still companies like Sinar Mas continue to destroy forests and peatlands, rather than protecting them for future generations and, as is becoming increasingly clear, for climate stability. 

In an e-mail, Greenpeace protest organizers provided this eyewitness account of what happened: