deforestation
sastyk | June 2, 2010I don't plug a lot of movies, mostly because I don't see a lot of movies - I spend so much more time staring a computer screen than I want to, I don't go to the movies often. But I thought I'd have a little blog film festival over the summer, showing bits or trailers of some of the best movies that both show our problems and offer solutions This one, "Taking Root" from 2008, however, is very much worth seeing:
What Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement have accomplished is important the rest of us in a whole host of ways. One of the likely consequences of increasing economic stress…
sastyk | January 28, 2010My fellow Science blogger Eric Michael Johnson has a superb post up about possible strategies for reforestation in Haiti - and the enormous economic barriers to doing so:
In other words, by providing a 25% subsidy for seed and a 75% subsidy for fertilizers both large and small farms would improve their income while at the same time improving the conditions of their environment. These subsidies would also be less expensive than the current practice of punishing infractions.
"The modeling results indicate that agricultural subsidies tied to forest conservation can provide opportunities for…
cwilcox | October 9, 2008... then you don't want to know how much we lose economically by deforestation each year. Pavan Sukhdev, leader of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb), explained at the World Conservation Congress that the monetary cost of the nature we destroy makes the losses on the financial markets look like chump change. We lose about $2 to $5 trillion a year by destroying natural resources compared to the $1 - $1.5 trillion lost on Wall Street due to the current economic crisis.
The Teeb figure is derived from estimating the economic cost to replace the services that forests provide for…
grrlscientist | June 5, 2008tags: New Guinea, Papua, deforestation, satellite analysis, biodiversity, field research, endangered species
Before and After: Forest area near Milne Bay in 1990 (top) and 2005 (bottom).
Image University of Papua New Guinea.
I have been fascinated by New Guinea ever since I first read about this unique island in Wallace's marvelous book, The Malay Archipelago, when I was just a kid. My fascination with New Guinea led to my passion for the birdlife there, especially my love for the Birds of Paradise, and the lories and other parrot species. I had always secretly dreamt of visiting this…
illconsidered | October 6, 2007"South America chokes as Amazon Burns" is the headline on an online Independent news article. Apparently the annual practice of fall burning to clear forest land so we can eat hamburgers and get fat has spun out of control this year. The world's largest forest has become a bit of a "tinder box" due to drought conditions thought to be a result of climate change.
Vast areas of Brazil and Paraguay and much of Bolivia are choking under thick layers of smoke as fires rage out of control in the Amazon rainforest, forcing the cancellation of flights.
Satellite images yesterday showed huge clouds…
ddobbs | June 1, 2007
Don't count on the tropical forest gobbling up our excess carbon. Such is the warning from a recent study by Harvard's Kenneth Feeley and others in Ecology Letters, which suggests that we may not be able to count on surging tropical forest growth to slow global warming by consuming some of the excess carbon (via carbon dioxide intake). Why not? Because warming temperatures, contrary to previous thought and hope, were found to actually slow tropical forest growth in this 25-year study in Panama and Malaysia. As Feeley notes in the article's abstract, "these patterns strongly contradict the…