L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, devoted the most prominent coverage in its July 20 edition to deforestation in the Amazon region.

“This is not a romantic photo,” Isabello Piro wrote of the front-page photo. “ It is a dramatic photo. The heart that stands out in the center of the frame is the result of the savage deforestation to which the Amazon rainforest of Brazil is subjected, where public forests are systematically prey to illegal loggers.”

After summarizing recent studies by MapBiomas, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, and researchers at the University of Exeter, Flores concluded, “Humanity does not seem to have understood that if the ‘green’ heart of the Earth stops beating, then humanity itself risks its life.”