deforestation
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Serena’s cautionary tale
On Oct. 18, 1929, just days before the stock market crash, Thomas Wolfe published his monumental novel, Look Homeward, Angel, unveiling the machinations behind small town life in western North Carolina. It took Wolfe several years to return to his Asheville hometown, and when he finally took his first glimpse of the Blue Ridge in […]
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Forest policy is a hot topic at international climate negotiations
The U.S. Secret Service and the press are on higher alert with the arrival of U.S. congressional delegations at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan as the second week of the conference gets underway. While the official Bush delegation is remaining low-profile — even evading questions at today’s press conference — most Democratic congressional […]
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The financial crisis is distracting us from … everything!
Prince Charles busted out with a strong message on Tuesday: This economic stuff is scary, but climate change is the real crisis. Word. But it turns out Chuck ain’t the only one using this device. Depending whom you ask, the real crisis being overshadowed by financial turmoil is: green building (“can’t wait”), clean energy (“can’t […]
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Massive U.N. study attempts to do for biodiversity what IPCC did for climate
When Wall Street saw around $1-$1.5 trillion dollars go up in smoke from the financial sector, the world rightfully freaked the hell out. Meanwhile, the world is burning up between $2 trillion and $5 trillion of capital a year through global forest loss. That’s the cumulative value of the lost services forests provide, including carbon […]
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Cote d’Ivoire’s West African chimp population drops off dramatically
The population of West African chimpanzees in Cote d’Ivoire has declined 90 percent in the last 18 years, according to a new study published in Current Biology. In the 1960s, the West African country was home to about 100,000 of the apes; in 1989-1990, scientists counted 8,000 to 12,000, which they estimated to be half […]
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Bad news for climate change
In August alone, loggers and farm interests leveled 300 square miles of Amazon rainforest, the Brazilian government reports (via AP). That’s a land mass larger than greater Chicago — taken out in the span of a single month. It also represents a leap of 228 percent over August 2007’s destruction. Two observations: 1) Higher soy […]
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Al Gore, Wangari Maathai urge U.N. to tackle deforestation in next climate treaty
Nobel Peace Prize winners Al Gore and Wangari Maathai urged United Nations countries on Monday to pay special attention to tropical deforestation in their next international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol. Preserving forests, they said, will help local communities, fight poverty, and may substantially slow global warming since deforestation accounts for about one-fifth […]
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Google knows what you’re doing
Oh, Google, what would we ever do without you? Check out this Google Maps-generated image of the region near Cannon Beach, Oregon: The strange patchwork of brown? Those are clearcuts in the Coast Range. And many of them appear to be recent. What’s really great is that you can zoom in so close that […]
