Blog: Forests

On Friday, a Greenpeace team broadcast a live webcast from the heart of the Amazon rainforest, in an area which was still-smouldering after a recent forest fire. Even rainforests have dry seasons and during the current one, fires both natural and man-made are devastating huge areas.

It was an amazing technical achievement but that wasn't the reason they did it - they were there to show how the forest is being cleared for a variety of reasons (in this case, to open up areas for cattle).

I haven't seen Wall-E yet (Joss tells me it's very good) but it sounds like a cross between Happy Feet and Silent Running - cute creatures and incredible animation bundled up with an environmental message. Now while the intentions of the film makers may have been to push the notion of a cleaner, greener world, the companies sitting between us and them seem to have other ideas and Wall-E is being used to sell all manner of less-than-green products.

In the US, one of these is Kleenex which currently has the little robot appearing on its boxes. As Kimberly-Clark, the company that makes Kleenex, is clearcutting forests to make it, Greenpeace USA thought this was a little odd. In fact, they thought it was the height of iron-e. So, with the help of political cartoonist Mark Fiore, they produced this spoof video.