Once was the forest: Ruminations on Earth's silent inhabitants

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Aerial view of smoke rising at the site of a forest fire in Yajiang County, Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China, on March 17, 2024. China has initiated a Level-IV emergency response, deploying satellite and mobile teams to combat the fires. A few weeks ago, government authorities warned of natural disasters this month, including floods, cold waves, sand storms, and forest fires.

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Ukrainian soldiers are firing artillery in the direction of Bakhmut as the Russia-Ukraine war continues in Donetsk, Oblast, Ukraine, on March 5, 2024. In addition to the inestimable human costs, the conflict has caused significant environmental damage by clearly impacting forests. Research published in Communications Earth & Environment reveals that 25 percent of the forests were lost in the invaded territories, costing billions of dollars worth of environmental damage.

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A picture shows a partially burnt pine tree with green sprouts in an area of forest that was burned in a wildfire last summer in Roque de Ayesa in El Teide National Park on the Canary Island of Tenerife on March 13, 2024.

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A pair of Asian barred owlets keep watch on a tree in Nagaon district, Assam, India, on March 16, 2024. Found during the day on exposed perches, these species are commonly found in woodland habitats such as forests of pine and oak, subtropical and tropical evergreen jungles at lower elevations

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An activist from the "Stop Tesla" initiative occupies a tree house among many rigged by the activists in a pine forest near Fangschleuse, close to the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg plant, on March 12, 2024. The activists are protesting against a planned factory expansion into the forest by occupying the wooded area near the company's car factory.

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A brown bear perches on a tree branch in Bursa, Turkiye on March 8, 2024. Global warming and the reduction of its habitat has disrupted the species' hibernation.

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A member of the Group for Animal Rescue in Disasters (GRAD) holds a Brazilian porcupine (Coendou prehensile) killed by forest fires in the Pantanal wetland in Porto Jofre, Mato Grosso State, Brazil on November 11, 2023. According to the specialists, these fires in the largest wetland on the planet are primarily caused by human action, particularly the use of slash-and-burn techniques for agricultural expansion, exacerbated by an exceptional drought.

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An Indigenous man carries a lapa into his hut, a rodent whose meat is essential to the community's diet, near a settlement along the Pira Parana river, Vaupes province, Colombia, on November 10, 2023. Far from the COP28 in Dubai, where carbon credits are discussed as a solution to the climate crisis, the local experts warn against the sales of "green" bonds to polluting companies that aspire to offset the use of fossil fuels, which, for indigenous traditions, are even worse than mining and oil exploitation.

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Kostas Pistolas, a livestock breeder, sits on the debris of his burnt sheepfold in a burnt forest in the Evros region, near the village of Dadia, Greece, on October 26, 2023. Summer wildfires are common in these regions, but the arid, windy and hot conditions that scientists link to climate change have made them worse this year, forcing thousands of evacuations.

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"Is it smart use of fallen trees or environmental vandalism?" ask Wombat Forestcare's convenor Gayle Osborne and Victorian National Parks Association nature conservation campaigner Ben Gill on March 12, 2024, referring to large fallen trees strewn across the landscape of the Wombat State Forest, caused by a savage windstorm. They argue that extracting large fallen trees inflicts further environmental harm due to the machinery that carves up the forest floor and denies habitat to small animals, insects and fungi that eventually inhabit the logs.

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Officials from the forest department, along with the Delhi Police, carried out a demolition drive alongside the forest land at Sangam Vihar on February 28, 2024, in New Delhi, India. The forest department has been carrying out anti-encroachment drives in the southern ridge, an extension of the Aravalli hills, since 2019.

Image: Monicah Mwangi / Reuters

This is a bed abandoned by the Ogiek indigenous community, who were evicted from their dwellings in Sasimwani village within the Mau Forest complex in Narok county, Kenya, on December 14, 2023. The Mau forest is the ancestral home of Ogiek, a hunter-gatherer community that has for centuries depended on the forest as a source of livelihood and home.

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This photograph shows part of the network of pipes that allows sap to be collected from the birch trunks in a plot of the Chambord Forest in central France on March 15, 2024. A network of more than 3 km of pipes allows tree sap to be collected by gravity into a tank, where it is filtered and intended for consumption and the manufacture of cosmetic ointments.

Image: Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP

Competing teams take part in a mountain bike race, set in lush jungles and mountainous region as part of the "Raid des Alizes", an all-women's adventure multi-event competition for charity, on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, on December 7, 2023.

Image: LUIS TATO / AFP

A young woman picks tree seedlings to re-plant them in an urban forest during the nationwide tree planting public holiday in Nairobi on November 13, 2023. The Kenyan Government has declared a special holiday on November 13, during which the public across Kenya is expected to plant trees to contribute to the national efforts to save the country from the effects of climate change.

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This photograph, taken in Muttersholtz, France, on October 18, 2023, shows a paving stone with a commemorative plaque in a forest sanctuary where people can choose where to rest after their death. An alternative to cemeteries, placing an urn containing the ashes of a deceased person at the foot of a chosen tree, with a paving stone and a simple commemorative plaque covering it, is already widespread in Germany.

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Endemic to the central highlands of Sri Lanka, a Horton Plains shrub frog (Pseudophilautus alto) perches on a curving bark in a forest in Nuwara Eliya on March 2, 2024. An endangered species, the frog is threatened by habitat loss.