Saving Trees Through Art is an environmental art project dedicated to the Amazon rain forest. In August 2017 I went to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil to sketch the remains of logged trees. For me a stump left after the extermination of a tree resembles a fingerprint. Indeed every tree has a unique identity, formed by a distinctive pattern of age rings and other unmistakable marks drawn from the tree’s life experience. First, I found logging sites and took the “fingerprints” of the trees (by placing a paper on the cut and rubbing over it with graphite). After capturing this ongoing devastation, I interviewed several environmental NGOs and independent activists committed to the restoration of the rainforest, and took their fingerprints. The final artwork is diptychs pairing my drawings of cut down trees with a fingerprint of a volunteer planting a new tree. I view this as the yin and yang of the world, recreation striving to balance out destruction. Each person I interviewed works tirelessly 

(and often without any compensation) on saving the rainforest. From volunteers planting trees, families buying land from the government and creating natural preserves to save the primary forest, professors teaching forest engineering and management, sustainable farmers, to scientists who study the genetics of the local seeds to ensure the healthy and rapid grow of the secondary (replanted) forest and big organizations like Idesam whose mission is to promote sustainable use of natural resources and to find alternative solutions to environmental conservation, social development and climate change mitigation. Along with the volunteers’ fingerprints I asked them to write couple of sentences about WHY they care for nature and what motivates them to act. Just think about it, in the time it takes to read this text, an area of the rain forest larger than 48 football fields will have been destroyed.