When Air Becomes Breath: Protecting the Forests that Shaped Me
The forest felt like the first place I could breathe.
When I was 13, overwhelmed by the world, I would escape into the arboretum behind my mom’s house in Oregon. Through miles of trails, I’d listen to wind stirring the trees and birds chirping like a kid’s choir, each singing its own tune. Protected in the Douglas firs, I could feel my breath steady itself, my anxious thoughts fade away.
I’ve been chasing that breath ever since, through the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, the cloud forests of Costa Rica, and the temperate forests back home in the Pacific Northwest. I followed it through a PhD on the impacts of forest fragmentation in the Amazon, and into a research position at the Bezos Earth Fund. And every time I’m in the field, I’m struck by how much I love these giant ecosystems, and how critical they are to the health of our planet.
Forests hold — and sustain — an astonishing variety of life. They’re home to tens of thousands of tree species, 80% of the world’s amphibians, 75% of birds, and 68% of mammals. They provide essential resources for billions of people in the way of products like oils, fruits, nuts, and seeds. And almost two-thirds of the world’s freshwater supply comes from forested areas.
The Alarming Cost of Forest Loss in 2023
We need forests to survive. But in 2023, we lost 59 million acres (23.9 million hectares) of them, an area about the size of Minnesota. The forests that remain have been severely fragmented, cut into so many small pieces that now more than 70% have exposed edges. This leaves them vulnerable to drought, hot temperatures, and strong winds, and leaves wildlife trapped, cut off from the rest of their habitat.
This destruction extends beyond visible loss. Every time a tree falls, or a patch of forest is cleared, a burst of carbon dioxide is released back into the atmosphere. In 2023, forest loss released an equivalent 14.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide — that’s the amount produced by more than 3.4 billion gas-powered cars per year. Additional stress from wildfires, unsustainable resource use, and extreme weather from climate change compound these challenges.
How We Can Save the World’s Forests
Yet a spark of hope remains — and the Bezos Earth Fund is working to ignite that hope across the globe.
Protecting nature is at the heart of the Earth Fund's work to advance the global 30x30 goal to safeguard 30% of the planet by 2030. We've committed $1 billion to protect what remains, with $471 million already flowing through 55 organizations working in biodiversity hotspots like the Amazon, Canada, the Congo Basin, and the Tropical Andes.
These incredible regions are home to hundreds of Indigenous Peoples and local communities whose knowledge, stewardship, and leadership are essential for long-term protection. Through our partnerships, we've helped establish almost 250 million acres (101 million hectares) of Indigenous-managed lands.
Protecting Forests, Empowering Communities
Our work in the Amazon is supporting the creation and management of protected areas, cattle tracking systems to fight deforestation, carbon markets that reward sustainable practices, and enhanced protections for Indigenous territories. We’ve established roughly 16 million acres (6.5 million hectares) of new protected areas and Indigenous territories, while also strengthening the sustainable management of some 358 million acres (145 million hectares).
In the Congo Basin, home to the second largest rainforest in the world, we’re enabling lasting forest protection through the establishment of 82 conservation areas covering almost two million acres (800,000 hectares). And we’re securing land rights for Indigenous Peoples across another 1.73 million acres (700,000 hectares).
Our grants also support four major Indigenous-led conservation projects in Canada, spanning approximately 371 million acres (150 million hectares) of land and sea, ensuring the country’s vast boreal forests filled with spruce, fir, pine, and birch trees remain protected for generations to come.
Beyond conserving what we still have, the Earth Fund is also bringing back what's been lost. From Texas to Virginia, we’re working with partners to restore over one million hectares of longleaf pine forests. This restoration work will take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and create safe habitat for vulnerable species.
This work, driven by people who inspire me endlessly, makes me think about a paper I wrote in eleventh grade. It was for my biology class, and it was on the importance of nature. In it I wrote, protecting nature, protecting forests, is something “that should always be important to the world.” Without forest, “hiking under a canopy of tropical trees in the summer or kayaking down the Amazon River engulfed in beauty...won’t be possible.”
While I probably deserved that B minus, I stand by what I wrote. Forests breathe so much life into the world. They breathe life into us too — so we must continue the fight to protect them.