At the root of the problem: the best books about deforestation

Iceland’s Christmas advert about palm oil’s links with deforestation was banned last week, because it was said that the short Greenpeace-made animation was “political”. But how else to convey the devastation caused by the conversion of rainforest to plantations to provide cheap vegetable oil?

 An orangutan seen through a haze caused
by forest clearing in Borneo, Indonesia.

Veteran US entomologist EO Wilson, a world authority on biodiversity, offers the planetary view. Destroying rainforest for economic gain, he says, is like “burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal”. In his 2002 book The Future of Life, he asserts that the loss of forest over the last 50 years has been one of the most profound environmental changes in the history of Earth: “The forests are the abattoirs of extinction, shattered into fragments that are then being severed, adulterated or erased one by one. The last frontiers of the world are effectively gone, an Armageddon is approaching.”

Read the story from The Guardian by John Vidal - “At the root of the problem: the best books about deforestation.”