Acrylics on Paper
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This was created for the exhibition "Artists as Activists" at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts.
I chose to work with the issue of deforestation. Back home we lived next to the forest and in our garden my brothers and I each had a tree of our own that we treated like our houses. It makes me sad to see large amounts of trees being cut down all over the world.
Whole forests that have existed for centuries have to make way for everyone's greed in the form of mining, plantations, gigantic cattle farms, highways, cities, etc... Deforestation is also shaping our climate. Forests are needed to provide most of our oxygen. Cutting them down results in quite the opposite: Tropical deforestation is responsible for approximately 20% of world greenhouse gas emissions. Forests also regulate the water cycle and rainforests produce about 30% of our planet's fresh water. They are also home to a great variety of animals, which lose their habitats through deforestation and die.
We need to protect our forests and replant and reforest and give back to nature what didn't even belong to us in the first place.
