All human beings of goodwill wherever you may be; allow me to be your oracle declaring the relentless match of a catastrophe. This catastrophe is being hurried nigh by none other than powerful and connected American and European businesses. This is none other than the destruction of the main equatorial forest in Africa; the Congo Forest.
Barack Obama, Nicholas Sarkozy, Dimitry Medvyedev, Queen Elizabeth, Manmohan Singh, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, Nelson Mandela, Jacob Zuma, Umaru Musa Y'ar Adua as well as Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, plus Omar El Bashir and Salva Kiir Mayardit all know it. So do Joseph Kabila, Paul Kagame, Pierre Nkurunziza, Jakaya Kikwete and Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.
There is massive, wanton and horrific logging going on in the Congo Forest! Who are the real beneficiaries? Why are the great Green Movements of the worl not interested at all in fighting for the Congo forest? Why is this massive water tower for the entire continent being raped with complete impunity? These questions beg urgent answers.
It would be just fine if this was a trivial regional matter. But, sadly, this is not the case. The massive equatorial forest is a carbon sink for the entire continent and beyond. It aborbs millions of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere every second. It is the only major regulator of climate in Africa, and the only true check on the advance of the deserts, the Sahara from the north and the Kalahari from the south.
There is a great amount of heat, no light at all, being generated in Kenya over the comparatively insignificant Mau Forest in the eastern Rift Valley that takes hardly five minutes to fly over. The government has already resolved to move the occupiers, both legal and illegal, out of this Kenyan water tower. The Green Belt Movement, politicians, religious leaders and the like, have been very vocal about this emotive issue. Many kilometers of lines in the newspapers have consumed much ink on the matter. I do not wish to dwell on this one therefore.
My attention is in the Congo forest. This is where we need massive international support. This, compared to Somalia, is where order can easily be restored. The perpetrators of this huge impending humanitarian crisis are known by their governments and can be stopped. Who will take the requisite action?
When Al Gore made the celebrated "An Inconvenient Truth" Video, he managed, in spite of a huge budget and research data, to ignore and skirt around the massive issues surrounding the Congo Forest, but mentioned one of the immediate sysmptoms: the melting of the ice caps on the Mount Kilimanjaro.
In my opinion, the congo forest suffers because as Upton Sinclair put it; "it is DIFFICULT to get a man to understand something when his SALARY depends upon hi NOT UNDERSTANDING IT". How many leading lights and powerful men and women look to the Congo Forest for their salary? Evidently, many more than we care to imagine.
Reference website: http://www.a24media.com/index.php/category-news/314
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