"Vast Green Expanses Have Turned To Fields Of Dust" As Loggers Flatten Gran Chaco; 370,000 Acres Destroyed In 2024 Alone

[hatrack]

In the Gran Chaco forest, vast green expanses – home to jaguars, giant armadillos and howler monkeys – have turned to fields of dust. The forest once brimmed with life, says Bashe Nuhem, a member of the Indigenous Qom community, but then came a road, and soon after that logging companies. “It was an invasion. Loggers came without any consultation and families moved away. Those that stayed were left with only a cemetery of trees,” she says.

The Gran Chaco is South America’s second-largest forest after the Amazon; its 100m hectares (247m acres) stretch across Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia. It is also one of the richest areas of biodiversity in the world – host to more than 3,400 species of plants, 500 birds, 150 mammals, 120 reptiles and 100 amphibians. But as agricultural and logging industries have encroached on the territory, it has also become one of the most deforested places on Earth. About 7m hectares of native forests were lost in Argentina between 1998 and 2023, according to official data, about 80% of which was in the Gran Chaco. New figures from Greenpeace show that nearly 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres) were destroyed in the forest in 2024 – a 10% increase from the previous year.

Strip after strip has been turned into farmland or burned, local people have been forced from their homes and wild animals are being caged in by fences. The only way to describe it, Greenpeace says, is a “forest emergency”. While the Amazon is afforded international scrutiny and publicity, environmentalists say the Gran Chaco is quietly disappearing.

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Natay Collet, a park ranger and technician, has witnessed the destruction first hand. “First they chop down the trees of value to sell, then they come for the rest with machines and chains. Afterwards, they set fire to the land, killing everything. All that is left is a desert,” she says. Collet says deforestation has happened since “the first colonists came” but that for the past 15 years “companies have come with everything they have”. “There is no hour of rest, it happens all hours, every day,” she says, adding that better technology and chainsaws have accelerated the process.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/07/a-cemetery-of-trees-vast-green-expanses-turned-to-dust-as-loggers-plunder-south-americas-gran-chaco

[Bayard]

1. Humans destroying their future keeps snowballing more every day

There is no long term vision, only short term greed.