« Humanity is waging war on Nature. This is senseless and suicidal, » António Guterres admonished at the time. « The consequences of our recklessness are already apparent in human suffering, towering economic losses, and the accelerating erosion of life on Earth. »
« Making peace with Nature will be the defining task of the coming decades », he added, « and the key to a prosperous and sustainable future for all people. »
The UN report stated that the growth of the global economy in the past half century was mainly driven by an enormous increase in the extraction of fossil fuels and other natural resources which has taken an unacceptable toll on the environment.
The World Health Organization said that the root cause of pandemics like Covid-19, a disease transmitted from animals to humans, is the destruction of the natural world. They warned that there will inevitably be worse outbreaks in the future unless action is taken now.
Global societies and economies must be transformed by systemic changes in policies at national levels that replace GDP as an economic measure with one that takes into account the true value of Nature.
We can take positive action individually, too. We can limit our consumption of energy and choose to vacation closer to home this summer.
Let’s be part of the solution by boycotting all products from deforestation; gold, palm oil, exotic wood, soy, beef, leather, etc. and choosing locally sourced alternatives instead.
Every effort, however small, counts!
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About Barbara Crane Navarro - Rainforest Art Project
I'm a French artist living near Paris.
From 1968 to 1973 I studied at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, then at the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California, for my BFA.
My work for many decades has been informed and inspired by time spent with indigenous communities. Various study trips devoted to the exploration of techniques and natural pigments took me originally to the Dogon of Mali, West Africa, and subsequently to Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil.
Over many years, during the winters, I studied the techniques of traditional Bogolan painting. Hand woven fabric is dyed with boiled bark from the Wolo tree or crushed leaves from other trees, then painted with mud from the Niger river which oxidizes in contact with the dye.
Through the Dogon and the Yanomami, my interest in the multiplicity of techniques and supports for aesthetic expression influenced my artistic practice. The voyages to the Amazon Rainforest have informed several series of paintings created while living among the Yanomami. The support used is roughly woven canvas prepared with acrylic medium then textured with a mixture of sand from the river bank and lava. This supple canvas is then rolled and transported on expeditions into the forest. They are then painted using a mixture of acrylic colors and Achiote and Genipap, the vegetal pigments used by the Yanomami for their ritual body paintings and on practical and shamanic implements.
My concern for the ongoing devastation of the Amazon Rainforest has inspired my films and installation projects. Since 2005, I've created a perfomance and film project - Fire Sculpture - to bring urgent attention to Rainforest issues. To protest against the continuing destruction, I've publicly set fire to my totemic sculptures. These burning sculptures symbolize the degradation of nature and the annihilation of indigenous cultures that depend on the forest for their survival.
Barbara Crane Navarro 
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They have these top climate and environment meetings going on for 2 decades now, don’t they, and what is the outcome?
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The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 was supposed to produce a new blueprint for international action on environmental issues that would help guide international cooperation and development policy in the twenty-first century. Successive global governments have caved to fossil fuel lobbies instead… Pathetic!
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And now they want to green stamp nuclear energy and in some places even coal … extremely pathetic!
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Yes, it’s terrible!
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