Forest // Current TV

United Kingdom Talk Video Thursday 16th October 2008

Thursday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show here on... more

ChrisReardon
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THE FOREST FLOOR

The forest floor of primary tropical rainforest is rarely the thick, tangled jungle of... more

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Can we save forests by listening to trees?

wo scientific discoveries could help reduce forest fires and prevent bug infestations.

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Forests help combat climate change

"Rare is the forest untouched by man. Whether logging or clearing land for agriculture, the bulk of the world's forests have fallen to crops, cattle or younger trees. According to some estimates, less than 10 percent of forests worldwide can be considered old growth, or undisturbed for more than a century. And that is not just a tragedy for the plants and animals that require mature forests—it is also a tragedy for the world's climate, according to a study published today in Nature.

Laborious research in the 1960s by the late pioneering U.S. ecologist Eugene Odum seemed to indicate that forests achieve a balance between the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) absorbed by growing trees and plants and the amount of CO2 released back into the atmosphere by the decomposition of dead plant matter.

In fact, not only do old trees continue to store carbon in their wood, forest soils also appear to be actively capturing carbon over time, although direct observations of this process are lacking. All told, by Luyssaert's calculations the relatively small remaining stands of old-growth forests in the U.S. Pacific Northwest as well as Canada and Russia consume "8 to 20 percent of the global terrestrial carbon sink," or roughly 440.9 million tons (0.4 gigatonnes) of carbon per year.

That is not even close to enough to balance the 1.8 billion tons (1.6 gigatonnes) released into the atmosphere by deforestation or crop-clearing. But it remains important—if unrecognized—in the present battle to combat climate change. Luyssaert suggests that credit—and money—should be given to protect such old-growth forests under carbon trading schemes and other economic mechanisms to combat climate change.

"Any kind of existing program that gives credit to reforestation could give credits to forest preservation," such as the carbon offsets based on tree planting, he says. "Instead of investing the money in a new forest, it could as well be used to protect an old forest."

But the case for old forests as carbon sinks is not airtight. The measurements used by Luyssaert rely on the flux of CO2 levels over the forest, but this kind of metric can be skewed by young stands of trees within an old-growth forest or an increase in growth as a result of higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, according to forest ecologist Mark Harmon of Oregon State University in Corvallis, who was not involved in the study.

"To really test this, one would need a far better data set that had different ages in the same system: that is very young, mature, old-growth and super old-growth in each system," he says. But "older forests should not be written off as places to store more carbon. Even if they aren't taking up more carbon, their harvest releases a great deal."

Protecting old-growth temperate and subpolar forests might prove a boon to the fight against global warming, also because of the soils they currently shade. "Many old boreal forests tend to be underlain by permafrost soils, which can contain many times more carbon than that stored in the vegetation," Euskirchen notes. Melting those soils is an ongoing climate calamity."
"Rare is the forest untouched by man. Whether logging or clearing land for... more

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Destruction of Kenya forest is national emergency

Maasai goatherd Joseph Nkolia points dismissively at two shallow pools, the only water in a parched stream west of the Kenyan town of Narok.

"It rained yesterday and look at it," he says.

"Two years ago it used to flow strongly through here. Now I often have to get a lorry to bring water from Narok for us and our animals, and it costs a lot." His flock wanders past without bothering to drink the scant brown water.

The stream is a tributary of the Ewaso Ngiro, one of 12 rivers fed from the Mau Complex, Kenya's biggest forest and a vital water catchment in the west of the country.

Destruction of the woodland by rampant illegal settlement, logging and charcoal burning threatens severe damage to Kenya's economy with an impact on energy, tourism, agriculture and water supply to cities and industry.

A familiar Kenyan saga of corruption, illegal landgrabs and the use of state resources to buy votes has destroyed a quarter of the 400,000 hectare forest in the last decade, with an impact that may be felt as far away as Egypt.

The Mau was broken into 22 blocks by human settlement over the last century but the real destruction began in 1997, when large plots were given away by the government of former President Daniel arap Moi to win votes in an election.

"My life will be completely ruined if I cannot get water for us and our livestock, our land will turn into a desert. We will all die," said another Maasai, Moses Mundati, standing on sunbaked ground where the Ewaso Ngiro no longer extends.

As he spoke, people brought yellow containers to gather water from the narrowed river beside him.

But if the saga is familiar, the recent reaction is not.

Kenya's new coalition government set up a task force in July to reverse the destruction of the forest, which the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) says could cost the tourism, tea and energy sectors alone at least $300 million.

"Such an extensive and ongoing destruction of a key natural asset for the country is nothing less than a national emergency," said Prime Minister Raila Odinga.

Continued...Maasai goatherd Joseph Nkolia points dismissively at two shallow pools, the only water... more

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Zaagkii Project called U.S. Forest Service "Success Story"

The Zaagkii Wings and Seeds Project is helping to save butterflies in northern... more

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Beetles eat forest the size of Connecticut

An insect smaller than Ed Berg’s thumbnail uprooted he and his wife Sara.

Swarms of spruce bark beetles killed most of the centuries-old spruce trees surrounding the Bergs’ former home on East End Road in Homer in the late 1990s. After the beetles denuded their land, the Bergs moved into downtown Homer.

“Ninety-five percent of the trees on our two properties died,” Ed Berg said. “After we clearcut the dead trees so they wouldn’t fall on the house, we lost the privacy of the place because suddenly the house was visible from the road and we had all the road noise.”

Berg is an ecologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Soldotna who recently attended a conference on the spruce bark beetle in Homer, where the bark beetle hit hardest during what many scientists call the worst outbreak in North America’s history. A few dozen scientists met on the Homer Spit to share their findings on the tiny creature that has changed the landscape of the Kenai Peninsula and much of southcentral Alaska, including the Anchorage area and the Copper River basin.

Berg presented a study in which he compared beetle outbreaks on the Kenai Peninsula to those in the Yukon Territory near Kluane National Park. He found that spruce bark beetles attacked white and Lutz spruce (a hybrid between white and Sitka spruce), and to a lesser degree Sitka spruce, an average of every 50 years on the Kenai Peninsula.

Beetles are nothing new; Berg pointed out that in 1899 members of the Harriman Expedition had described large patches of dead trees on the southern end of the Kenai Peninsula, and trees preserved in the soil of a Fairbanks hillside show that the beetles were in the Interior thousands of years ago. Though beetles have long attacked the spruce of Alaska, the latest outbreak was Biblical in scale. Why?

A long run of warmer temperatures, Berg said. Though the Kenai Peninsula has experienced warm summers many times during the past century, the warmth “really shifted into overdrive” from 1987 to 1997. Without cool, wet summers to knock down bark beetle populations, millions of beetles flew from tree to tree each spring, boring into the bark of spruce trees and laying eggs. When the eggs hatched, larvae grubs girdled the trees from within by feeding on the sugary inner bark, known as phloem. The result was an area the size of Connecticut in which spruce trees died en masse, giving the forest ecosystem a makeover from which it won’t soon recover. Now, most of the beetles are gone, but not because things have cooled down.

“Conditions are still warm here, but they’ve eaten themselves out of house and home,” Berg said.

Bark beetles have eaten Alaska spruce for centuries, but the recent outbreak was of a magnitude so large that forest managers at the conference agreed they could do little but watch and salvage dead trees for wood chips or firewood. An insect smaller than Ed Berg’s thumbnail uprooted he and his wife Sara.... more

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Lost in the Wild

Search and rescue workers had expected the worst when they went looking for two... more

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Green News Update

To help offset rising food costs, around 1, 000 families in the Kiang Valley, Malaysia... more

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Urban farming flourishes in Detriot, USA

The goal of the Detroit/Michgan based charity Urban Farming, is to turn unused city... more

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The devastation of the rain forest

About 22% of the earth's original forest coverage remains. Western Europe has lost 98% or so of its primary forests; Asia 94%; Africa 92%; Oceania 78%; North America 66%, and South America 54%. Approximately 45% of the world's tropical forests, originally covering 1.4 billion hectares, have disappeared in the last few decades.

One and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second with tragic consequences for both developing and industrial countries. Rainforests are being destroyed because the value of rainforest land is perceived as only the value of its timber by short-sighted governments, multi-national logging companies, and land owners

Nearly half of the world's species of plants, animals and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest deforestation.

Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases. Currently, 121 prescription drugs sold worldwide come from plant-derived sources. While 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less that 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists.

There were an estimated ten million Indians living in the Amazonian Rainforest five centuries ago. Today there are less than 200,000.

The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the "Lungs of our Planet" because it provides the essential environmental world service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 percent of the world oxygen is produced in the Amazon Rainforest.

More than half of the world's estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live in the tropical rainforests. One-fifth of the world's fresh water is in the Amazon Basin.

At least 80% of the developed world's diet originated in the tropical rainforest. Its bountiful gifts to the world include fruits like avocados, coconuts, figs, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, bananas, guavas, pineapples, mangos and tomatoes; vegetables including corn, potatoes, rice, winter squash and yams; spices like black pepper, cayenne, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, sugar cane, tumeric, coffee and vanilla and nuts including Brazil nuts and cashews.

The Brazilian government is currently trying to protect its section of the rainforest, but it can not stop huge multinational companies from coming in a doing illegal logging.
About 22% of the earth's original forest coverage remains. Western Europe has... more

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Alberta Oil Sands // Comment Picked for TV

Thanks to lrudser from the University of California at Berkeley for uploading her... more

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Tree-top walkway to open at UBC

Situated in the David C. Lam Asian Garden section as part of Walk in the Woods Trail,... more

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Mountain pine beetle invasion in Canada poses global warming threat

A festering problem Lloyd reported on last year -- the invasion of British... more

TheRealEdwin
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Earth Healing Initiative: Menominee Indian Tribe of WI in Great Lakes 2008 Earth Day Challenge

Youth and adults at the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin plan three events as part... more

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Alberta Oil Sands

This is a story about the environmental impact of the Alberta oil sands, located in... more

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The Manoomin Project: Michigan teens, American Indians restore wild rice

(Marquette, Michigan) - The Manoomin Project is restoring wild rice to northern Michigan after the grain disappeared a century ago due to logging, pesticides and other manmade impact.

Over 100 at-risk teens are learning to respect themselves, nature and American Indian culture by planting more than one ton of wild rice during the past four summers. The teens also learn about social issues like racism against Native Americans.

The 2007 planting was delayed six weeks until November due to low water levels.

The teens first participate as part of juvenile court probation for minor crimes but many enjoy the project so much they return the next year.

Guides from several tribes volunteer to teach the teens how to take water samples, and about the historical and cultural importance of the grain that is used in many American Indian ceremonies.

The project was founded by the non-profit Cedar Tree Institute and the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC).

Guides belong to KBIC, the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa (Ottawa) Indians based in downstate Harbor Springs, Michigan, and the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa located close to International Falls, Minnesota near the Canadian border.

Rev. Jon Magnuson, project founder, praised the tribes for working with the teens, most of whom are white. The project includes classroom time, stress reduction exercises, and learning about social issues like prejudice against Native Americans.

In July 2007, the teens heard from Ojibwa elder and Vietnam War veteran Glen Bressette who explained he was the target of racism while their age and overcame problems familiar to the youth like substance abuse and scrapes with the law that included being shot at by police while stealing gas.

The teens witnessed Bressette have a dramatic flashback when a helicopter flew low and close to their meeting site along Lake Superior. He had been a gunner aboard a chopper in Vietnam.

American Indian guide Don Chosa said the teens carry hundreds of pounds of wild rice seeds for miles through thick forests and over mountains to get to seven secret remote planting sites along rivers and lakes. During the hikes, the teens have come upon bears, eagles and other wildlife.

An annual "Blessing of the Wild Rice" ceremony is held that includes American Indian food, songs, language, and prayers. If they want, the teens have the opportunity to learn about God and the environment but they are not forced to be be involved in any religious activities.

Manoomin Project volunteer media advisor Greg Peterson looks at the 2007 planting and four years of success.(Marquette, Michigan) - The Manoomin Project is restoring wild rice to northern... more

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Earth Keepers protect environment with passion in 2007

The Michigan Earth Keepers are protecting the environment with hands-on projects that... more

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Robin Hood's Forest Is In Trouble

From 100,000 acres to 450 acres? That is a tragedy. ///By KATE SCHUMAN, Associated Press Writer Sun Nov 4, 2:34 PM ET

EDWINSTOWE, England - Robin Hood might have a hard time hiding out in the Sherwood Forest of today.

The forest once covered about 100,000 acres, a big chunk of present-day Nottinghamshire County. Today its core is about 450 acres, with patches spread out through the rest of the county.

Experts say urgent action is needed to regenerate the forest and save the rare and endangered ancient oaks at its heart.

Some 15 organizations have joined forces to draw up a rescue plan, hoping to win a $100 million grant through a TV competition in December.

"If you ask someone to think of something typically English or British, they think of the Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood," said Austin Brady, the regional director of the East Midlands Conservancy Forestry Commission. "They are part of our national identity ... but the Sherwood forest is a real place and the real forest needs help too."

The forest is beloved for its connection to Robin Hood, the legendary 13th century bandit who supposedly hid there from his nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham, in between stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

One of Sherwood's oldest and most celebrated trees is Major Oak near Edwinstowe, the town where legend has Robin marrying Maid Marion. Historians believe it and other Sherwood oaks could have been saplings back in Robin's time.

Park rangers say the collection of ancient oaks is one of the greatest in Europe. But they see an increase in the trees' rate of decline.

Over the centuries, the forest was carved up for farms, mines, towns and logging. Sherwood timber built medieval ships and even part of London's St. Paul's Cathedral.

Now, the ravages of age and, some fear, climate change are taking their toll. On average one veteran oak per year would fall; this year seven have come down and the rate seems to be accelerating, said Izi Banton, the forest's chief ranger.
From 100,000 acres to 450 acres? That is a tragedy. ///By KATE SCHUMAN, Associated... more

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