deforestation
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Umbra on forest fires
Dear Umbra, My husband says that Rush is blaming the Sierra Club for the huge forest fires raging in Colorado and Arizona. He says that because environmentalists oppose logging, the forest is too full of fuel. I told him that as far as I know, the Sierra Club is really trying to prevent logging in […]
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Go Get ’em, Tigers
The world’s largest mangrove forest, Sundarban, spans the border between Bangladesh and India, but the countries don’t have a joint plan to manage the 3,700-square-mile area. The United Nations is hoping to change that. Two U.N. entities, the International Partnership Fund and the Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, are providing funding to help Bangladesh and […]
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On Bjorn Lomborg and deforestation
In The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg writes that "basically, the world's forests are not under threat." A charitable reader could attribute this flawed conclusion to errors of omission and ignorance; perhaps the author simply doesn't know the sources well enough to interpret them properly. Less charitably, one might reasonably conclude that Lomborg intentionally selects his data and citations to distort or even reverse the truth. His interpretations of data on global forest cover and Indonesian forest fires aptly illustrate both failings.
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China's dust bowl is growing at an alarming rate
Last month, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laboratory in Boulder, Colo., reported that a huge dust storm from northern China had reached the U.S. “blanketing areas from Canada to Arizona with a layer of dust.” They reported that along the foothills of the Rockies, the mountains were obscured by the dust from […]
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Can't See the Forest
20 percent of Earth’s original forests remain undisturbed 13 percent of original forests in the Pacific Northwest remain undisturbed 1 to 2 percent of original forests in the U.S. remain undisturbed 2.47 acres of rainforest are destroyed each second, an area approximately the size of two U.S. football fields 214,000 acres of rainforest are destroyed […]
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How Many Scientists Does It Take to Screw in a Message?
Dr. Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist from Oregon State University, has been elected to many scientific honors, one of which was the presidency of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. For her presidential address at the AAAS annual meeting, she looked straight out at the huge assembly of scientists and delivered an unapologetic, […]
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A review of 'From the Redwood Forest' and 'Forest Blood'
The recent high-profile deal to keep chainsaws out of the Headwaters grove of ancient redwood trees near Eureka, Calif., is unlikely to bring about a truce in the raging war over old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest and northern California. Environmentalists continue to dig in their heels and repudiate all compromise (more than 90 percent of U.S. old-growth has already been lost, they say; no more can be sacrificed). Meanwhile, the timber industry flexes its mighty political muscle and logs on.
