By Ruth Kamnitzer:

In March 2023, Tropical Cyclone Freddy hit Malawi, unleashing six months of rain in six days. Freddy was the largest and longest-lasting tropical cyclone ever recorded, and the impacts were catastrophic.

In Malawi, more than 600 people died and more than 650,000 were displaced.

Communities around Mount Mulanje, in the country’s south, were some of the hardest hit. Once heavily forested, parts of the mountain have been left denuded or bare from illegal logging, fires and demand for firewood.

Without trees to slow the rain’s descent, slopes turned to rivers of rocks and mud, destroying villages and smothering fields.

For many, Cyclone Freddy was a turning point, says Kondwani Chamwala, an environmental educator whose family home sits in the mountain’s shadow.

“The communities, most of them are now seeing the importance of protecting what is there,” he says.

Often called the ‘Island in the Sky’, Mt. Mulanje rises steeply out of the plains like a rocky fortress. It is massive, about 64,000 hectares (158,000 acres) around, with a broad, high-altitude plateau from which rise 13 peaks, the tallest reaching an elevation of 3,002 metres (9,849 feet).

Miombo woodlands, a type of forest common across parts of Southern Africa, dominate the lower slopes.

But as you ascend, you enter an otherworldly place: fog-laden forests and grasslands, home to nearly 70 endemic plant species.

Nine major rivers originate on the mountain’s slopes and there are hundreds of streams. In local lore, it is a place of spirits.

Designated in 1927, Mount Mulanje is one of Malawi’s oldest forest reserves. It is also a Unesco Biosphere Reserve and has been nominated as a World Heritage Site. But those designations have not been enough to fully protect the mountain’s biodiversity.

More than a million people live in the surrounding districts of Mulanje and Phalombe. Much of the most fertile land, on the southeastern side of the mountain, is covered by tea plantations.

On the rest, Malawians plant maize, beans, vegetables and other mostly subsistence crops.

At one time the miombo woodlands, rich in edible fruits and mushrooms, covered much of the land around these farms and the mountain’s lower slopes.

As a child, Chamwala recalls “playing around with monkeys” while gathering fruit in the miombo and catching fish in the cool, clean rivers. Dry wood was plentiful and collecting firewood was an easy task.

But things have changed drastically, Chamwala says. Women now have to travel long distances to gather firewood. Some of the rivers are drying up, making irrigation more difficult. Wild fruits and medicinal herbs are harder to find, and the animals have all run away. “Even a snake you cannot capture,” Chamwala says.

Malawi is one of the poorest countries