Forest destruction just a symptom

A small wildfire on the edge of the road. Photo/File

There's an orange glow on the night horizon in central Paraguay - no, not a romantic tropical sunset, but a wildfire. Satellites recently registered 1800 of them on a single day.

I was there with ornithologist and bird artist Derek Onley to help with a fledgling conservation project, Para La Tierra, that is trying to protect some of what's left of Paraguay's forests. It's a race against time. Many of the 700 bird and animal species are losing their habitat even while being recorded for the first time.

We stayed near the central town of Santa Rosa del Aguaray, where David Attenborough travelled 50 years before in search of giant armadillos for the London Zoo. He went by boat because the forest was thick and impenetrable, teeming with butterflies, birds and animals in one of the richest biospheres on the planet. Now much of the land is smoke and stubble. American kestrels perch on fence posts, Black and Turkey vultures circle above.

In Paraguay's south and east, around the three main cities of Asuncion, Encarnacion and Ciudad del Este, Atlantic forest was cleared many years ago, mainly for cattle farming. It has since been transformed into treeless grain fields dotted with silos. Paraguay is the world's fourth-largest exporter of soybeans. In 2013, soy exports gave it one of the highest rates of economic growth in the world.

Yet 40 per cent of Paraguayans live in poverty.

Some 87,000 farming families, known as la gente sin tierra, the landless people, are moving north, burning and clearing the forests. You see them in large groups on the side of the road camped in makeshift black plastic tents.

The 2 per cent who own over three-quarters of Paraguay's land, recipients of the soy profits, no longer need peasant labour when heavy machinery and Roundup do the job. Instead of people, the land now feeds cattle and cars in China and Europe. It's horrifying to watch the Atlantic forest burning. Imagine the uproar if our native bush was burned off like this. It was, of course - when our pioneering ancestors "cleared the bush" 150 years ago. Have I the right to condemn la gente sin tierra for doing the same? While they are the direct threat to these fast-disappearing forests, they are at the end of a long chain of inequality that runs as deep and wide as the Paraguay and Parana Rivers that border this country.

Visiting Paraguay reminded me that conservation is about far more than trying to save trees and birds. It is a political choice. We have to go beyond the trees - in Paraguay's case to the obscene inequality in land ownership and the economic colonialism that puts profit before people.

In New Zealand's case, is it enough to join local volunteer tree planting days, while our Government continues to strip our environmental bodies and laws of the ability to protect what's left of our own gorgeous country? It's election year. Let's not forget the wood for the trees.

* Rosemary Penwarden is a freelance writer and member of several environmental and climate justice groups. In between projects, she loves to divide her time between her two-year-old grandson and elderly mother.