2025-10-30
43 分钟The Economist A few weeks ago, Ainsley Johnston,
one of the Economist's science correspondents, went to Madagascar.
Just walking up and could hear lemurs, which was really exciting.
Now we're about to have breakfast and then head off into the forest seed collecting.
I was in Madagascar with a team of Bostonists,
and they were telling me about how their countryside has changed.
So before the east part of Madagascar was full of forest, Hennet Sau is one of the Bostonists.
She told me about a local expression.
In her grandparents' generation, they use the phrase,
when the eastern forest disappears, kind of like the equivalent of when pigs fly.
Before...
people thought that it will never disappear but with the threat that the forest are under now this expression is not true anymore
because the forest is disappeared.
Yeah, it doesn't really make sense anymore.
It's like a kind of expression to say that everything can change but before it was reality.
It's not the reality anymore.
The phrase doesn't reflect reality anymore
because the loss of the eastern forest no longer seems impossible or even distant.
The rainforest, like Madagascar's many other wooded areas,
are under threat from climate change, wildfires, slash and burn agriculture, and invasive species.