Forests

The holiday season is coming and if your family is anything like mine that means there will be a lot of chocolate given, eaten and enjoyed. Huzzah! The time of year you can eat chocolate with complete freedom, knowing that you are part of an international movement of chocolate lovers. Not that I’m obsessed with […]

Imagine the Grão-Pará Ecological Reserve in the Amazon. Part of the world’s largest strictly protected area, the rainforest stretches seemingly forever, echoing with the sound of birds, insects and primates. Rivers tumble down waterfalls on their long, winding journeys to the sea. Then the forest gives way to open land. The trees are gone, the […]

It was a cold and rainy Saturday night in Sydney recently and I decided that we would have a family movie night at home. Movie? Check. Snacks? No. As a child we always had chocolate coated honeycomb as a movie treat, so for the first time in years I went searching for some. I couldn’t […]

You’re wheeling your trolley down the supermarket aisle – in a hurry, as usual. You grab the multi-pack of toilet paper. Your family’s preferred brand, with the familiar “tick tree” logo in the top corner. In your mind, you’ve already moved on to the next item on your list. But go back a minute. To […]

Of the top 10 risks identified by the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks Perception Survey, four are environmental: water crises, failure of climate change adaptation and mitigation, more extreme weather events and food crises. As a conservationist, I might be depressed by this list. Instead, I am delighted. If WEF members – which WEF says […]

In many circles, plantations have a bad rap. Their detractors point to examples where vibrant rainforests or rare natural grasslands have been replaced with single-species tree farms – so called “green deserts”. In many cases, large plantation developments have displaced people and disrupted livelihoods. Bad plantations certainly exist. Yet these critiques do not tell the full […]