Across Latin America, Mennonites seek out isolation at the expense of forests

Eine wohl relativ unbekannte Siedlung ehemaliger deutscher Kolonisten in Peru.

rebloged by Chirimoya Tours – Peru Reisen.

Bergregenwald Amazonas
Der Regenwald von Südamerika vor allem das Amazonastiefland trägt mit seinem Regenwald rund 20% zur globalen Sauerstoffproduktion bei.

Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News

Low German Old Colony Mennonites, who have been settling across Latin America for the past 100 years, have cleared 495 hectares (1,223 acres) of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon so far this year.

The illegal deforestation documented by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) is part of an ongoing expansion in the region by this conservative group associated with the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition.

In a statement released on Dec. 13, the Peruvian Ministry of Environment (MINAM) announced that legal complaints have been filed and measures taken to “investigate, sanction and paralyze the irregular activities.”

“We have now documented the deforestation of nearly 4,000 hectares [9,800 acres] across four new colonies established in the Peruvian Amazon since 2017,” Matt Finer, the MAAP director at the NGO Amazon Conservation, wrote in an email to Mongabay. “This makes the Mennonites the new leading cause of organized, large-scale deforestation in Peru, more than…

View original post 20 more words

Leave a Comment

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.