About our logo

Tree-forest
The Global Forest Coalition logo represents the tree-forest. This concept appears repeatedly in many different Indigenous Peoples’ cultures: it is a universal icon representing the primordial tree in the vision of original cultures.

The icon looks like a figurative and conceptual form of the Yvapuruvu tree, Scysolobyum sp of the Atlantic or Parana forest, which stretches from Southern Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina. This tree is famous for supporting hundreds of species of plant and animal life. Indeed, it tends to be the habitat of so many epiphytes that it is almost impossible to see the trunk, branches, leaves or flowers. A single tree constitutes an entire ecosystem.

Water-river
The water-river-brook at the foot of the tree is a representation of the flow of life through water courses. Rivers represent the perennial integration of communities through contacts, communications, exchanges, displacements and the dispersion of cultures.

The "knots", whirlpools and backwaters of the icon represent meetings and the coming together of coalitions, as well as breaks in the road towards the endless and stops in the eternal flow - tangles in the networks, study circles and wheels of dialogue and reflection.

Symbiosis of life
Finally the tree-forest and the water-river are one single idea as one produces the other. They represent the symbiosis of life, the indivisible link that underpins the creation of life as we know it today on Planet Earth. Many are coming to understand this; the Indigenous Peoples and all cultures of sustainability have always known this.