Navigation

Deforestation Declines

• Now for some good news about the environment. An article in The Week (April 9, 2010), noted that “For the first time on record, the worldwide rate of deforestation has declined.” Over the past decade, the planet lost 32 million acres of forest, compared with a loss of 39.5 million acres during the 1990-2000 decade. Deforestation has declined because of greater awareness of the value of forests and by planting new forests. Asia leads the way in planting trees; the area has added 5 million acres over the past decade. The total amount of forests worldwide is 9.8 billion acres. Since photosynthesis consumes carbon dioxide and releases oxygen, forests play a substantial role in providing an atmosphere that sustains life on the planet.

• True or false: The driver of modern society is a relentless quest for economic growth. Regardless of your answer, you might consider reading Bill McKibben’s new book, Eaarth (sic): Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. McKibben is an environmental scholar in residence at Middlebury College, an author, and a former staff writer for the New Yorker.

In a special report on sustainability in Scientific American (April, 2010), McKibben said the following: “We need to mature. We’ve spent 200 years hooked on growth, and it’s done us some good and it’s done us some bad, but mostly it’s gotten deep inside us, keeping us perpetually adolescent. Every politician who ever lived has said: ‘Our best days are ahead of us.’ But they aren’t, not in the way we’re used to reckoning ‘best.’ On a finite planet, that was going to happen someday. It’s just our luck that the music stopped while we were on the floor.”

• Polar bears are the largest terrestrial carnivores on earth (note: elephants and rhinos aren’t carnivores). These amazing creatures are tightly linked to their Arctic Ocean habitat, much of which has been covered with ice and floating “islands” of ice. Polar bears have been observed to swim, nonstop, over 60 miles in open water, cruising at six miles an hour, and they routinely swim from one ice sheet to another. A bear of less than 300 pounds reportedly dragged a 2,000 pound beluga whale for 20 feet across the ice. “They can smell seals through two feet of ice and a decaying whale 20 miles away,” writes Richard Ellis in his new book On Thin Ice, the Changing World of the Polar Bear (Knopf). It’s a fact that the Arctic ice is thawing at an alarming rate, and that some bears have drowned from exhaustion while swimming for miles trying to find an ice floe. As they try to adapt to a changing habitat, we wish them well.

• Major pollutants in smog are nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, collectively known as NO2. Although some NO2 comes from automobile exhausts, most is generated by coal-fired power plants. Overall, these plants are responsible for 25 percent of smog-forming pollution. Overall, progress is being made to reduce NO2 emissions, especially in the Midwest. In 2005, satellite data from the largest plants in the Ohio River valley showed a 38 percent decline in NO2 compared to 1999 levels. In the Northeast, however, auto tailpipe emissions of NO2 may be offsetting declines in the Midwest. (David Biello in Scientific American, November 28, 2006)