The dangers

Mineral resources

It looks like after the war! Where two years ago there was one of the most species-rich rainforests on earth, today there is only mercury-contaminated sand. Thousands of criminal gold prospectors are raiding the rainforest. They plow through every square meter of soil and wash every last crumb of gold out of the sand. What remains is a desert. Forest never grows here again and the children of the locals get sick because their food and water is contaminated. Besides these gold mines, there are huge silver and copper mines that threaten the jungle. The rainforest of Mein Regenwald is threatened above all by the search for oil and natural gas. Because even if the forest has been transferred to us, this only applies to everything that grows above ground. According to the law, the Peruvian state is allowed to do whatever it wants with the mineral resources under the earth - no matter who or what lives above ground.

Fire

By nature there is no fire in the rainforest, it is simply too humid. Therefore, no plant species has developed defense mechanisms against forest fires. When humans set fires, the forest is defenseless, and after a major forest fire, nothing grows so quickly. Fire rages particularly badly in mountain forests, however, because they often stand on meter-thick layers of peat. When the forest burns down, this soil dries out and the fire continues to burn underground, often for years. In the past, indigenous people used slash-and-burn agriculture on a small scale. After a few years, they moved on and the forest was able to recover. But today, thousands of fires blaze every summer, set intentionally. CO2 is released en masse and huge areas of forest are lost year after year to slash and burn. This situation is exacerbated by climate change, which alters precipitation patterns so that locally set fires can develop into huge forest fires, destroying thousands of hectares at a time and leaving entire mountains bare and unprotected.

Loggers

Logging companies are often the first to hit a forest area. They build roads and tear huge gashes in the sensitive forest floor with their machines. Loggers build illegal camps deep in the jungle. They feed on the meat of wild animals, which they kill en masse. In the process, they usually harvest only the oldest and most valuable trees, not even stopping at mother trees, whose seeds the forest needs to grow back. Illegal settlers then come along the paths that the often illegally operating loggers build deep into the rainforest. They set fires in the remaining forest and convert it step by step into agricultural land. This is how large areas of forest are lost all over Peru - every year.

Land theft

Big investors, land-hungry small farmers, speculators and corrupt officials - they all want to grab land in the rainforests for free. They burn down the rainforest and turn it into fields, pastures and plantations. With disastrous consequences for biodiversity, rainfall and the world's climate.

Illegally appropriating a piece of rainforest is very simple: You find a piece of rainforest and occupy it. Then you have this area registered in your own name by corrupt officials in the agricultural authority and already a piece of former wilderness belongs to an illegal land squatter who can do what he wants with it. In this way, a real land speculation mafia has formed, which does not even stop at indigenous territories and state nature reserves.

This is exactly why we at Mein Regenwald need control posts and forest guards, because the 20,000 hectares of rainforest that we protect are just an object of speculation for others. That's why we need to guard the forest well.

Plantations

Whether oil palms, pineapples, citrus fruits, coffee or vegetables - everything grows in the rainforest, at least in theory. What the jungle can handle on a small scale becomes a problem in monocultures. In many places, monocultures stretch for several kilometers. Where the rainforest once stood and provided a home for thousands of species, today only coffee bushes or oil palms grow as far as the eye can see. But the rainforest makes its own rain: Large forests evaporate a lot of water and generate a lot of precipitation, which then allows new forests to grow again and cools the global climate. In the meantime, however, so much forest has already been destroyed for plantations that precipitation levels are changing. The monocultures are leaching the soils and erosion is becoming a major problem. The rainforest of Mein Regenwald is threatened especially by pineapple, coffee, orange and vegetable plantations, because the plantation owners want to clear even the last forests for more and more new cultivation areas.

Cattle

Cattle are a real plague in the tropical rainforest. They originally come from the steppe regions of western Asia and have no place in the sensitive ecosystem of the Amazon. But for the cattle herds, huge areas are burned down to create artificial steppes, so to speak, on which they can graze. The introduced grass displaces native plants. The heavy cattle compact the soil so much with their hard hooves that the sensitive roots of the trees can no longer grow. Without trees, the soil is defenseless against the rays of the tropical sun. It dries out, hardens and no longer allows water to penetrate when it rains. The rain then runs off above ground and washes billions of tons of fertile soil into the rivers every year, making them so turbid that they become uninhabitable for fish. At the same time, the massive cattle overfertilize the otherwise barren jungle soil, leading to massive species extinction. Most orchids, for example, cannot withstand so much nitrogen in the soil and die. Where once there were endless rainforests that sequestered billions of tons of CO2, today many millions of cattle graze all over the Amazon, ruminants that produce huge amounts of methane gas every day, which fuels climate change even more than CO2.

Road construction

Throughout Peru's rainforests, roads large and small, legal and illegal, have been built in recent years. The roads allow plantation owners, loggers and gold prospectors to reach previously inaccessible areas. Often the forest then has only a few years left before it is lost forever.