The Amazon Rainforest encompasses an area of 2.1 million square miles, home to 319 billion trees. Yet 17% of the forest has been cut down - as a result, the forest is no longer a carbon sink, it emits more carbon into our atmosphere than it stores contributing significantly to climate change.
In 2021 alone, some 8,000 square kilometres were taken from us. Everywhere that we travelled along dusty red roads, the sky was full of a sickly brown smoke, the horizon peppered with fires, the landscape strewn with the carcasses of burned trees.
Day after day, lorries carrying their lucrative haul of timber thundered past us, a leviathan cargo lost to the world. This unrelenting devastation on a scale we can never imagine from the comfort of our sofas, is the public execution of our planet.
