Watch Earth Matters on CNN and CNN International. Throughout this west African country, forests considered sacred are being slashed and burned for personal gain. Every year, in villages across Ivory Coast, mask festivals reaffirm ancient bonds between the people and their land, especially the lush rain forest that sustained human societies here for centuries.
Every mask is a symbol of the ancestral spirits.
The spirits were supposed to punish anyone who abused the sacred forests. But they have failed to protect the trees. In the village of Beoua, where forest land has been scorched to become farmland, ancestral blessings are invoked under a single remaining tree. Gome has campaigned for 15 years to save more than 200 of Ivory Coast's classified forests. A farmer who leveled one such sacred forest to plant rice told CNN he was unaware of the land's classified designation.