DEFORESTATION PROJECT
A Visual Representation of
Global Deforestation
The goal of this project is to make the unfathomable level of destruction that is taking place around the world as comprehensible to the general public as possible.
For many years, I have been conscious of global warming, the damage to the ecosystem, the benefits of recycling etc, but until now, I have struggled to understand how I can make a significant difference. I have also not been able to comprehend the statistics and I know that I am not the only one.
Speaking from the perspective of someone that has a basic understanding, but by no means an in-depth understanding of the climate crisis, the current approach to drawing attention to the level of damage being inflicted has simply not been effective on me, simply because I cannot fathom the figures. From the conversations that I have had with people more informed than me, they also aren’t able to comprehend the destruction taking place on our planet.
My wife and I recently moved to Exmoor from London, next to our house used to be a coniferous forest, with a stunning ecosystem in our first months at the property we explored in awe of its mystical beauty. A couple of months ago the entire forest was felled within a few weeks. We are well aware that forests such as this are essentially crops, however, as I walked through the stumps I started to ponder on how many trees were felled around the world each year, a figure that you may well be aware of.
Approximately 15 billion, it’s a number that doesn’t mean much to me to be perfectly honest! I know it’s a lot, as most people do, but it didn’t knock me off my chair! As a visual person, I wanted to break the numbers down to help me better comprehend the figure.
1 year – 15 000 000 000
1 month - 1 250 000 000
1 day - 41 095 890
1 hour - 1,712,328
1 minute - 28,538
1 second – 475.63
These figures are widely available, although not broken down to such an extent, however, they remain just numbers on a piece of paper. Their impact is, unfortunately, fleeting. To better gauge the level I started to cut slices off branches that had been discarded in the woodland around our house to make little coin-like pieces and to lay them out on our garage floor, after several days of work I reached the number of pieces that represented the number of trees felled in one second. When I asked friends and relatives how long they thought this example represented the average response was a day.
My goal is to create a piece of work that represents the number of trees that are cut down in one minute around the world. I have estimated that the required area would be roughly 53m2, with the end piece being approximately 8 metres wide. The pieces will be left rough and unfinished, split and torn edges welcomed as they would resemble the carnage of the stumps that remain in the processed woodlands.
To demonstrate the relationship between the number of trees being lost and time, the gallery lights should momentarily switch off every 60 seconds, marking a fresh wave of trees awaiting their fate.
The image below is a sample of the proposed project. The image depicts the number of trees felled in 3 seconds.
Additional Ideas
Alongside this work, I would like to display photographs from the major forests under threat around the world. Large prints of the woodlands and forests could be displayed around the outside of the room containing the sculpture. To coincide with the lights in the gallery turning off every minute and the images of the beautiful forests will be replaced with photographs of the exact same area of forest, but after it has been processed.
To my mind, the combination of the quantity which will be visually staggering and the dramatic photos showing the level of destruction would be hugely compelling and fundamental in raising awareness of the destruction that is taking place around the globe.
I didn’t get the opportunity to accurately mark the locations of where the photos were taken in the forest and the images of the aftermath (below) are taken on an iPhone two years after the woodland has been felled, but the contrast is still startling.
