Tag Archives: Desertification
Record-Breaking Wildfires, Greenland Melting and Earth’s Hottest Month Ever
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)
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:
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…
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Extinction Resources: Information, Opinion, Ideas, & Questions
Extinction Information Resources
Passenger Pigeon
Stopping human-caused extinction of Earth’s plant and animal species is the greatest challenge of our time. This post provides access to the latest articles on extinction. The first item (Ceballos et al. 2015) is the latest detailed report on what we know and how we acquired the information.
More than a thousand recent articles are linked to my blog (https://garryrogers.com/blog):
Causes of Extinction
My blog covers the things that people do to cause extinctions and reduce biodiversity. These deeds of ours are woven into individual and our collective habits and beliefs. Stopping them will alter our society and our culture. It will be difficult. Our population must be reduced, our food choices must change, and our resource harvest must decline. Nothing less will succeed. Search the blog using the following terms for recent reports: Burning, Coal, Construction, Deforestation, Desertification, Energy, Farming, Fishing, Fracking, Grazing, Hunting, Invasive Species, Logging, Mining, Oil, Pesticides, Pet Trade, Pollution, Population, Roads, and Soil.
Climate change will become the major cause of extinction. Here’s its search link on my blog: Climate Change.
For more reading, my Internet newsletters include a wider variety of articles than my blog.
Watch “The Sagebrush Sea” Tomorrow
The sagebrush vegetation of the Great Basin is the most abused and devastated ecosystem in America. Livestock grazing, introduced invasive plants, and wildfire have replaced it with invasive alien plants.
This Wednesday, May 20 the PBS show Nature is showing “The Sagebrush Sea”, a documentary shot, edited, and produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s multimedia team. The film focuses on wildlife and conservation in the threatened sagebrush region that covers 250,000 square miles of North America. Watch the trailer at Sagebrush Sea Trailer. Check your local PBS station for broadcast time. Learn more at The Sagebrush Sea.
Desertification and China’s Great Green Wall
“Unlike the Great Wall of China, a 5,000-mile fortification dating back to the 7th century BC that separates northern China from the Mongolian steppe, the Great Green Wall of China-otherwise known as the Three-North Shelter Forest Program-is the biggest tree planting project on the planet. Its goal is to create a 2,800-mile long green belt to hold back the quickly expanding Gobi Desert and sequester millions of tons of carbon dioxide in the process. If all goes according to plan, the completion of the Green Wall by 2050 will increase forest cover across China from five to 15 percent overall.
“The Chinese government first conceived of the Green Wall project in the late 1970s to combat desertification along the country’s vast northwest rim. Soon thereafter, China’s top legislative body passed a resolution requiring every citizen over the age of 11 to plant at least three Poplar, Eucalyptus, Larch and other saplings every year to reinforce official reforestation efforts.
“But despite progress-according to the United Nations’ most recent Global Forest Resources Assessment, China increased its overall forest cover by 11,500 square miles (an area the size of Massachusetts) between 2000 and 2010, with ordinary citizens alone planting upwards of 60 billion trees-the situation is only getting worse. Analysts think China loses just as many square miles of grasslands and farms to desertification every year, so reforestation has proven to be an uphill battle. The encroaching Gobi has swallowed up entire villages and small cities and continues to cause air pollution problems in Beijing and elsewhere while racking up some $50 billion a year in economic losses. And tens of millions of environmental refugees are looking for new homes in other parts of China and beyond in what makes America’s Dust Bowl of the 1930s look trivial in comparison.” Source: www.healthnewsdigest.com
GR: A little reading in this article and its references quickly reveals that despite China’s massive commitment to reforestation, desertification is increasing. Part of the problem is that the land-use practices that led to vegetation loss and soil instability are continuing. Another part of the problem is that Chinese planners are making the same mistakes made in the U. S. and in other arid regions where managers used nonnative plants to replace depleted natives.
Many of you will be nodding and thinking that whenever land-use managers focus on Human benefits, they lose sight of the need for complete ecosystem health. They focus on potential benefits from foreign species that appear to be suited to growth on degraded lands. Their goal is to continue profitable logging, livestock grazing, and water diversion. Therefore, the desert grows.
Thanks to Professor Willem Van Cotthem for his efforts to provide a single Internet source for work on desertification (https://desertification.wordpress.com).
Desertification and Biodiversity
The link between land degradation and desertification has been made abundantly clear in studies conducted in Africa and Australia. A loss of natural vegetation, a loss in soil organic matter and a loss of soil stability contribute greatly to the process. These processes are often interlinked. Vegetation encourages soil stability by providing cover, the binding action of roots, providing root exudates and by the contribution of its biomass to the soil. A loss of vegetation results in a corresponding loss of soil organic matter and stability.
Soil organic matter and soil stability are often linked. A soil that becomes depauperate in its content of organic matter looses the glue that holds soil particles together and becomes easily erodible. The more a soil erodes the more difficult it becomes for the soil microorganisms to glue the particles together. The process is analogous to a spider’s web in the wind. A whole web can withstand the pressure. If one of the threads that anchor it is broken the spider can repair it, but if the rate of damage is slowly increased, there will come a time when the spider cannot repair the damage and the web will be destroyed by the wind.
Every environment has a threshold beyond which damage cannot be repaired by the natural system. In arid and semi arid environments this threshold is very low.” –Source: groundviews.org
GR: Naturalists have been concerned about desertification for more than a century. Though the term has not been in the news very much in recent years, the process has continued wherever people have conducted marginal farming, excessive livestock grazing, watershed deforestation, and other improper land-use practices. Recently, the term has been showing up more often, and I think we will soon begin to see it regularly seated beside biodiversity as one of the great concerns of this century.
GarryRogers Nature Conservation 