destructive logging

Of China, Napoleon once said to let it sleep. When it wakes, he warned, the world will tremble. It will have escaped no one's attention that that time has almost certainly come, and as China grows in virtually every measurable way, so does its appetite for raw materials including timber.

On 12 February 2005, Sister Dorothy Strang was assassinated for defending the rights of rural workers in the Amazon. For more than 30 years, she had campaigned against the human rights abuses and environmental degradation that continue to plague Pará State as the interests of the forest-dwelling communities are disregarded in favour of land-grabbers, ranchers and loggers.

Kleenex, one of the most well known brands of tissue products in the world, is helping to destroy the world's remaining ancient forests.

Metsähallitus, the Finnish state-owned logging company, has unilaterally terminated all negotiations with the Sami reindeer herding co-operatives and has said that the logging moratorium on 90,000 hectares of important reindeer grazing forests is over. Logging could restart as early as August.

In May Greenpeace closed our Forest Rescue Station (FRS) located at Inari, Lapland, having achieved our objective of temporarily ending logging on valuable forest lands and in anticipation of talks on the future of the forests that were scheduled for June.

In July 2003, a Greenpeace team helped the indigenous Deni Indian communities in the Amazon to demarcate their homeland. The land was under threat from a Malaysian logging company.