Tag Archives: Deforestation

Protected and intact forests lost at an alarming rate around the world

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“In Australia and Oceania, as well as North America, the loss in protected forests exceeded 5%. Worryingly, in parts of Africa, Central Asia, and Europe, the relative forest loss was higher inside protected areas than outside. However, in several countries of South America and Southeast Asia, protection was found to substantially prevent forest loss.”  phys.org

GR:  Despite occasional positive statements about the slowing rate of deforestation, forest loss continues.  Now that have destroyed more than half of Earth’s wild animals, shouldn’t we stop destroying habitat lest we end up with a silent planet?  Why can’t we stop?  What’s the problem?  Answer:  Those 7 billion hungry mouths of ours aren’t interested in anything beyond today.  Solution:  Yep, you guessed it; the unavoidable conclusion is that it’s time to get to work on a fleet of Ark B’s.

Grieving over Growth. Gary Gripp: To a Future Generation

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BY GARY GRIPP, to a future generation:

“Everything central to our way of life is in the growth mode: the banks, the corporations, all our extractive and service industries, and, not least of all, our population. More people means: more willing buyers of homes, cars, electronic gadgets, and all the trappings of modern life. More jobs, more prosperity, more everything.

“More, more, more. It is in the interest of banks and corporations, as well as businesses large and small, that the market for products continues to grow. More, more, more. Grow, grow, grow.

“On a finite planet with degraded natural systems and diminishing natural resources, this growth imperative, built-in to our systems and into our lives, is an irresistible force coming up against an immovable object. It is us hitting a wall, and doing so at speed. More and more people in my time now see this crash coming.” blog.edsuom.com

GR:  Hey grandkids, we just couldn’t help ourselves.  (We really couldn’t.  To see what it would take for humans to survive on Earth, read Corr Syl the Warrior.)

Nature News Digests

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GarryRogersNature News Digests:

Global warming: Are trees going on strike?

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“Trees, crucial absorbers of climate-harming carbon dioxide gas, may finally be balking at an ever-earlier spring season brought on by global warming, researchers said Wednesday.

“Over the past several decades, trees across central Europe have been steadily sprouting their spring leaves earlier in response to warmer temperatures, they said.

“As a result, forests absorbed more carbon dioxide in a longer growing season—a boon that has been worked into global warming projections.

“But a study published in the science journal Nature said trees have slowed their pace of seasonal advance—raising fears it may stop altogether.

“The slowdown “suggests a current and possible future weakening of forests’ carbon uptake due to the declining temperature sensitivity of (trees),” lead author Yongshuo Fu of Peking University in Beijing told AFP.”  Read more at: phys.org

GR:  This is one of those “point of no return” stories.  If forests indeed begin absorbing less CO2, preservation and reforestation will have less benefit than hoped.  This will accelerate global warming.  Nevertheless, forests are the essential homes of many of Earth’s plant and animal species.  We must continue lobbying for the end of deforestation.

See on Scoop.it – GarryRogers NatCon News

Native tribe fights to save Boreal forest in Quebec

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Mandy Gull holds back tears as she steps off the helicopter in northern Quebec. “I’ve never seen anything so sad,” says the young woman whose aboriginal tribe is seeing its ancestral lands eroded by logging.

“If my grandfather knew,” says the deputy leader of the Cree tribe, one of 11 indigenous ethnic groups present in Quebec.

The flyover of the Boreal forest, pockmarked by clear-cuts, both saddens her and toughens her resolve to end deforestation in the region.

“We don’t own this land… as Cree, we know that we’re stewards of the land, (and) we’re here to protect the land,” she said.  Sourced through Scoop.it from: phys.org

GR:  Faced by rapacious loggers and their government representatives, defenders of the forests have many roadblocks to success, not the smallest being personal danger of injury and incarceration.

Record-Breaking Wildfires, Greenland Melting and Earth’s Hottest Month Ever

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Humans have some advantages over other animal species, but like the animals, we can’t control our urge to reproduce and our desire for the security of material wealth. Sentient but not sapient, sensitive but not wise, our advantages have let us to eliminate competition, disease, and danger. Thus, nothing can stop our booming population and our world-destroying “environmental footprint.”  (ACD = anthropogenic climate disruption)

Exposing the Big Game's avatarExposing the Big Game

The following article from Truthout.org covers all that I was going to go over in Part 2 of Global Warming: the Future is Now, so here’s this instead:

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Dahr Jamail | The World on Fire:

The US is now officially in the worst wildfire season in its history, as almost 7.5 million acres across the country have burned up since spring.

Articles about ACD’s impacts are now being published in more mainstream outlets, carrying titles that include verbiage like “the point of no return,” and it is high time for that, given what we are witnessing.

A recently published study by the UK-US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Reliance revealed that “major shocks” to worldwide food production will become at least three times more likely within the next 25 years due to increasingly extreme weather events generated by ACD. One of the coauthors of the report…

View original post 1,998 more words

Humans Are Set To Wipe An India-Sized Chunk Of Forest Off The Earth By 2050

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“In this Sept. 15, 2009 file photo, a deforested area is seen near Novo Progresso in Brazil’s northern state of Para.

“By 2050, an area of forests the size of India is set to be wiped off the planet if humans continue on their current path of deforestation, according to a new report. That’s bad news for the creatures that depend on these forest ecosystems for survival, but it’s also bad news for the climate, as the loss of these forests will release more than 100 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“The report, published Monday by the Center for Global Development (CGD), found that, without new policies aimed at cutting back on deforestation, 289 million hectares (about 1,115,840 square miles) of tropical forests will be cleared away. That’s a chunk, the report states, that’s equal to one-seventh of what the Earth’s total tropical forest area was in 2000. And, according to the report, the 169 gigatons of carbon dioxide that this deforestation will unleash is equal to one-sixth of the carbon budget that humans can emit if they want to keep warming below 2°C — the level that’s generally viewed as the maximum warming Earth can endure while still avoiding the most dangerous climate impacts (and even 2°C is seen by many experts as too high).”  Sourced from: thinkprogress.org

GR:  With so many signs pointing toward mass extinction, continuing to pollute and procreate is irrational.  It would be prudent to change our behavior.    But saying this feels like watching a bus flying off the road and over a 500-foot cliff and saying “they should use the brakes.”  I guess it’s too late.

Scientists warn only ‘simplified’, degraded tropical forest may remain by end of century

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A new and more dangerous phase of impacts on the world’s remaining tropical forests is emerging, threatening to simplify the world’s most diverse ecosystem including mass species loss, according to new UCL-led research published today in Science.  Sourced through Scoop.it from: phys.org

Evidence of species loss in Amazon

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Researchers studying plants, ants, birds, dung beetles and orchid bees in the Brazilian Amazon have found clear evidence that deforestation causes drastic loss of tropical forest biodiversity.  Sourced through Scoop.it from: phys.org