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Restoring Forests forSake of Climate, Habitats

Associated Press

   Editor's note: Heroic efforts to revive ecosystems and save species are
   being waged worldwide, aimed at reversing some of humankind's most
   destructive effects on the planet. "What Can Be Saved?," an Associated
   Press series, chronicles the ordinary people and scientists fighting
   for change against enormous odds -- and forging paths that others may
   follow

   MADRE DE DIOS, Peru -- Destruction of the forests can be swift.
   Regrowth is much, much slower.

   But around the world, people are putting shovels to ground to help it
   happen.

   In a corner of the Peruvian Amazon, where illegal gold mining has
   scarred forests and poisoned ground, scientists work to change
   wasteland back to wilderness. More than 3,000 miles to the north, on
   former coal mining land across Appalachia, workers rip out old trees
   that never put down deep roots and make the soil more suitable to
   regrow native tree species.

   In Brazil, a nursery owner grows different kinds of seedlings to help
   reconnect forests along the country's Atlantic coast, benefiting
   endangered species like the golden lion tamarin.

   They labor amid spectacular recent losses -- the Amazon jungle and the
   Congo basin ablaze, smoke from Indonesian rainforests wafting over
   Malaysia and Singapore, fires set mostly to make way for cattle
   pastures and farm fields. Between 2014 and 2018, a new report says, an
   area the size of the United Kingdom was stripped of forest each year.

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