Tasty living fossils

What I read

According to "Pakistan's Ziarat: An ancient juniper forest and its living fossils" (2018), the ancient juniper forests in the Ziarat region of Pakistan are threatened by local people who need the wood to burn since the government does not provide them with that preferable alternative to wood fires, even though their region is a source of  natural gas to the country. In addition to the trees, some of which are thousands of years old and whose berries are used to flavour food, there are animals such bears, wolves and wild species of sheep and goats in the forest, which was made a biosphere reserve in 2013 in order to protect the trees, whose great age makes them valuable for climate research. 

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My response 

Google Doc's very useful "Word count" tool (on the "Tools" menu) tells me that I managed to write my summary above in 121 words, which is still safely below the 130-word maximum allowed: shorter is usually better for a summary. I always read an article a couple of times, and sometimes more, before I try to summarize it, but this one was more difficult because it's badly written. If you look at my source, it's really just a collection of unconnected sentences, so turning it into a couple of connected main ideas for my summary was challenging. But the photographs are great, and the pieces of  poorly connected information are interesting. 

I decided to read the article a couple of days ago because the title, which was on the front page of the BBC News website, includes the word juniper. I like flavour that juniper berries add to soups and stews, but I really didn't know much about them, not even that they were a type of pine,  so the article was educational. It was also interesting to learn a bit more about Pakistan, especially something more cheerful than the usual religious intolerance and other bad news  that is what most often seems to put Pakistan in the news. 

And as I read the story, I was also reminded of the recent controversy in the Thai news about the luxury houses that judges have been having built for themselves on Chiangmai's Doi Suthep. The poor traditional inhabitants of that northern Thai province are not allowed to gather wood or other resources from the area, but it was legally OK for the judges to have a large area cleared for their own comfortable housing paid for by our taxes! Sometimes the law seems made up to be unjust, usually to the advantage of rich and influential groups who do not need such generous help from the state, just as the poor people in the ancient juniper forest do not get the advantages of the natural gas taken from their region, but are instead forced to illegally cut down the ancient trees so that they can warm and cook for their families in what looks like a very cold climate in the photographs that accompany the story.  

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My question

What do you feel should be done with the houses built for court officials on Doi Suthep? 

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Reference

• Pakistan's Ziarat: An ancient juniper forest and its living fossils. (2018, April 22). BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43660466