The UNESCO Courier - Current Issue

In 2015, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) published a time-lapse of the Earth “breathing”. From April to September, boreal forests in Siberia, Scandinavia and North America burst into life, turning much of the northern hemisphere green, only to fall back with the arrival of winter. In the southern hemisphere, the process happens in reverse, the graphic showed, the green waxing and waning on the map with the movements of the sun. The world’s three largest rainforests in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and Indonesia are deep-green and ever-present around the equator.

The old colonial buildings of the University of Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were not always dedicated to the study of environmental sciences. Until the 1970s, the decrepit red brick buildings housed tobacco warehouses. It was then that the first shrubs were planted in the courtyard of this former factory, by a Polish biologist.

At the Danish forest kindergarten Krudthus, about 30 kilometers north of Copenhagen, children spend most of their time in the forest.

In 2016, in Baise Leye County of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China, my team and I rappelled down with a rope to the bottom of the Dashiwei Tiankeng, 600 metres under the ground. The term tiankeng, “heavenly pit”, refers to large sink-like negative terrains with steep walls, formed over millions of years and developed in carbonate rock strata.

Tari, Papua New Guinea, 1965. A boy is born on a carpet of ancient ficus leaves in the high deepland forest. Mundiya is his name, pronounced “Mudeejay”.

The worth of a felled tree is easy to quantify; currently, lumber is worth about US$350. But what is the value of a standing tree? It is obviously valuable for biodiversity, for the climate, for humans and agriculture: a forest provides habitat for birds, stores carbon, casts shadow and regulates rainfall. But these are not financial values, therefore leaving forests vulnerable for clearance. So a new idea emerged.

“If the forest is still standing, it is thanks to the presence of indigenous peoples. And today, this is the most important mission of our planet. Because it is a mission that not only guarantees our lives but guarantees the lives of all people,” Txai Suruí, activist of the Paiter Suruí people and coordinator of the Indigenous youth movement of Rondônia, Brazil, said in a recent statement.

Vincent Beaubien needs to go to the forest regularly. He goes there to picnic by a fire, sleep or simply walk. The 33-year-old construction foreman, who lives in Delson, a suburb of Montreal, feels the benefits of this contact with the trees after taking just a few steps in the woods. “It gives me the peace and serenity I need. These are the feelings I take away with me.”

Since she was a small child, Erika Barnett, from the Seri community in northeastern Mexico, watched mangrove seedlings be carried away by the waves. She would then gather young shoots to take back to her home on the coast.

They are both foreign and yet familiar. Photos from before the digital age and selfies, before Instagram. Their vintage colours and gelatin-silver grain give off a curious air of innocence – and melancholy. The protagonists have no names. We know nothing about them, or the person who, one day, captured these scenes of ordinary life on film. All we know is the country and the year (the pictures presented here were taken between 1950 and 1980 in the United States and the United Kingdom).

The word “Viking” has long been associated with tall and muscular man wielding a razor-sharp weapon, wearing a helmet and standing boldly on the prow of a ship, ready to pillage and burn. Today, however, in the age of interdisciplinary research, and when medieval history is omnipresent in museums and universities but also on social media and the silver screen, our visions of the Vikings are changing.

Biodiversity loss is a critical issue that threatens the survival of countless species and the stability of our planet’s ecosystems. The issue is of particular concern for UNESCO World Heritage sites, which are representative of more than a fifth of global biodiversity.