Hmmm.  26.2 miles.  Hmmm.

This seemed like a good idea at the time.  But when I set out from Lewisham to take my son Freddie back to university the other day I set the mileometer on the car to zero, and we were on the A1 heading out of London before we’d done 26.2 miles!  Erm.

I’m raising money for the Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK), a small and feisty environmental charity that does great work in rainforests around the world.  You can get a feel for what they do by clicking on the "Belize" image below and watching a short YouTube film. 

Rainforests are home to 50 million indigenous people, and 80% of the world’s poorest people depend on forests.  Yet every year an area of rainforest the size of England and Wales is cut down, leaving local people homeless, driving 50,000 animal and plant species to extinction, and releasing more carbon dioxide than all the world’s planes, trains and cars combined.

Much of RFUK’s work is focused on the Congo Basin, and on helping the indigenous communities who live there to gain land rights and to manage their forests for their own wellbeing.  They help people like the Baka tribe of ‘pygmy’ hunter-gatherers in Cameroon, who you can see in the pictures below.  The Baka have lived sustainably off the land for centuries.

Now their way of life is threatened by industrial logging companies, as well as by commercial hunting, and by national parks that deny pygmy peoples access to their ancestral land.  Indigenous people are often duped into giving logging companies access to the forest in exchange for sacks of sugar and salt, or some simple hand-held tools.

By donating to the Rainforest Foundation you can help give indigenous people a voice so that they can exercise their rights and protect the forests on which we all depend.  You can support them as they map their ancestral lands, stand with them as they lobby their governments, and enable them to access education and health services for the next generation.

Thank you so much, Jon x