WWF and TBWAParis: Before It’s Too Late 2008 Graphic of Forest as Lungs

Summary: In April 2008 World Wide Fund for Nature WWF and TBWAParis released a timely graphic, "Lungs: Before it's too late," to spotlight the deforestation crisis.

“Lungs: Before it’s too late” by WWF and TBWAParis: Brett Jordan, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr

World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) raises awareness of challenges to biodiversity conservation and to ecological footprint reduction throughout the world via innovative as well as traditional methods and strategies.

In 2008 WWF’s satellite office in Paris, France, teamed with international advertising agency TBWA Worldwide’s Paris branch, TBWA\Paris, to create a graphic advertisement spotlighting the importance of forests in global ecosystems and the catastrophic threats of deforestation to the planet’s well-being.

Erik Vervroegen, president and executive creative director of TBWAParis from 2003 to 2009, led the project, with Caroline Khelif, Leopold Billard and Julien Conter as art directors. Entitled “Lungs” with a caption “Before It’s Too Late” and the WWF panda logo in the lower right, the graphic was released in April 2008.

Under an overcast sky, a landscape of forests and open land primarily is colored in shades of light and dark green. Two large, leaf-shaped, densely forested tracts, extensively dissected by sinuous rivers, dominate the print advertisement’s foreground and center.

In the right foreground one of the tracts exhibits deep, ground-level gouging. Amber brown barrenness deforms over 50 percent of the right tract.

The leaf-shaped tracts, ribboned with rivers and deformed by deforestation of a portion of one tract, are reminiscent of cone-shaped lungs, branched with pulmonary capillaries and deformed by removal of a section of one lobe. Lungs process air during breathing, favoring oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide.

Trees filter the air flowing around Earth to finesse the carbon dioxide-oxygen exchange, absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. Oxygen released by one large tree provides a sufficient supply for two people.

The caption “Before it’s too late” spotlights the catastrophic challenges ensuing from deforestation that threaten well-being for all life on Earth. Although a study published online Sept. 2, 2012, in Nature presented a dazzling global tally of 3.04 trillion trees, deforestation removes 15 billion annually from the Earth’s surface. Led by Thomas W. Crowther of Yale Climate and Energy Institute, the study finds that the worldwide total tree count has been reduced by approximately 46 percent since the beginnings of human civilization.

Although commissioned almost 7.5 years ago, the WWF and TBWAParis print advertisement graphically and timely calls for responsible commitment to reversing the chain of catastrophic events unleashed by the chemical imbalances created by excessive deforestation. It is not too late for effective actions, inspired by “Lungs: Before it’s too late,” to affirm the awesome power of visual imagery.

tree density at the square-kilometer pixel scale; global map produced from satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies: Thomas Crowther et al./Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, no usage resrictions, via EurekAlert!

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

“Lungs: Before it’s too late” by WWF and TBWAParis: Brett Jordan, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/x1brett/3408368805/

tree density at the square-kilometer pixel scale; global map produced from satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies: Thomas Crowther et al./Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, no usage restrictions, via EurekAlert! @ https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/98493.php?from=305194

For further information:

Crowther, T.W., et. al. "Mapping Tree Density at a Global Scale." Nature, vol. 525 (Sept. 10, 2015): 201-205.
Available @ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7568/full/nature14967.html

WWF International. "Think About the Rainforest." YouTube. May 22, 2008.
Available @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPHMXiw-XaA