Blog: Forests

Jayapura (image by sandranahdar, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

As I write this, I'm sat in a hotel lobby looking out on to a market place where women are sat on the hard tarmac, blankets with tomatoes, lemongrass, onions and chillies spread out before them. Towering behind them is the incongruous bulk of the local KFC and, although there was torrential rain an hour ago, the streets are bone dry. That's because it's very very hot which is not surprising when you're a few degrees south of the equator.

I've mentioned before about how I love wandering through the Greenpeace photo library (it's on a big server, so any wandering is purely figurative) - there's always just one more enticing folder to explore. And it's hardly surprising, when our campaign work takes photographers to some stunning locations and places them at the heart of the action. Some have even won major international awards for their work, both with Greenpeace and independently.

If you submitted your own Forest Love video in response to ours, you might catch a glimpse of yourself in the new video we've put together below which we're going to deliver to European Commission president José Manuel Barroso in Brussels. The commission are due to vote on legislation to ban illegal timber in Europe and hopefully that will take place in mid-October, but the date has changed several times over the past few weeks so who knows?