Nature - Page 3

Intrepid Ecologist, Suzanne Simard, Discovering Big Old Trees

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SAN FRANCISCO – Professor Suzanne Simard is a remarkable woman – a passionate, courageous forest ecologist who has upended Canada’s, male dominated, planet-killing forestry sector.

Simard’s new book, Finding the Mother Tree, is an epic read loaded with curiosity, grit, discovery, grief and triumph.

Fearless, intelligent, caring women are healing our planet. Simard is indeed amongst them.

Professor Suzanne Simard
Suzanne Simard with an ancient western redcedar Mother Tree.
Credit: Diana Markosian

Old-growth rainforests are superlative carbon storehouses and incomparable intercontinental climate-makers, secondly only to the oceans. We cannot inhabit this planet without old-growth inhaling carbon and exhaling oxygen.

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432 New Coal Mines, The Bitter End

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SAN FRANCISCO – This week, climate fires, climate floods, climate heatwaves and climate mega-droughts are laying waste to people and Mother Earth.

Climate and Coal Mines
Credit: Peter Carter, Climate Emergency Institute

A mega-drought across America’s West is deepening. In California, a million acres are fallow. Billions of dollars forgone. No mid winter Sierra Nevada snowpack, no spring groundwater recharge, so millions of taps across the Golden State have begun to trickle.

In June amid record U.S. heat, the world’s coal producers announced 432 new coal mines, mostly in China, Australia and Russia. Avarice bankers, oligarchs and the world’s leaders are unconcerned about adding more combustion heat into the biosphere that has become a gigantic land and sea graveyard.

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Droves of Dead Blue Carbon Shepherds – Manatees SOS

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SAN FRANCISCO — Woefully out of touch Floridian lawmakers have thrown nature’s indispensable carbon-keepers, manatees, under the bus. So far in 2021, almost a thousand peaceful sea cows have died. Unprecedented.

Dead Manatees
Where are the animals supposed to live on this Florida island? Credit: Wikimedia

Unbridled development, fossil fuel and wood pellet heat, poisons, vessel strikes, red tides, sewage and agricultural runoff, fertilizer factories disgorging, plastics, and the former Trump administration lessening protection by downgrading from endangered to threatened status, have fast-tracked Florida’s manatees to extinction.

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Netflix Backs Planet-Killing Show – Unacceptable

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SAN FRANCISCO — An upcoming Netflix series, Big Timber, glorifies the annihilation of Vancouver Island’s rare and indispensable old-growth rainforests. Revolting.

British Columbia (BC), Canada, has about one percent of its old-growth forests intact. Vancouver Island, BC, the world’s forty-third largest island, has been cutover within an inch of its life.

Netflix Climate Show
A sacred old-growth western redcedar in unceded Pacheedaht Territory of southern Vancouver Island.
Credit: TJ Watt

The few unharmed stands of old-growth on Vancouver Island create coveted clouds, which reflect incoming radiation and help keep the planet within a habitable range of temperatures. Those hallowed rainforests are crucial habitat for endangered marbled murrelets, little brown bats, northern bats, black swifts and scarce sockeye salmon.

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Chinese Fisheries Emptying Oceans

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Chinese Fisheries

SAN FRANCISCO – China’s fishing armada operates more hours than the next 10 biggest nations combined. Mother Earth and all the marine creatures stand no chance whatsoever against this formidable voracious onslaught.

China has fished out the South China and East China Seas, the Sea of Japan and the Philippine Sea. So now, they’ve set sail with an expanded flotilla to conquer the oceans and all life therein.

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Ode to Idaho’s 1500 Wondrous Wolves

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Keepers of rivers, waterways and
cathedrals of splendor –
O, how we of earth honor Ye and
Gitche Manitou!

Shepherd of sacred balance:
elk, beavers, trout, sturgeons,
grizzlies, wolverines, rattlesnakes,
eagles, ravens, hummingbirds,
worms, butterflies, bees.

Earthmen pay homage to thee.

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Old-Growth Rainforests, Key To Human Survival

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Old-growth rainforests are mesmerizing. No other planet in this or any other galaxy, which we know of, supports these hallowed cathedrals of splendor.

Long-lived, self-perpetuating, unique genetics, structurally diverse with dead standing and fallen trees, gaps in the canopy and habitat for a rich array of life forms – old-growth has it all. It is the best that Mother Earth can muster at inhaling and storing carbon, exhaling oxygen, circulating freshwater, making climate and providing lodging for our brethren and sistren, the animals. Hallelujah.

Old-Growth Rainforests
Moisture created in old-growth rainforests circulates and irrigates the globe.
Image credit: Richard Whitcombe

Where there are rainforests it is wet: locally, regionally, continentally and intercontinentally. These stupendous biologically complex treed communities create vast atmospheric rivers of moisture, sustaining life on land. And they are giant air conditioners seeding clouds that reflect an extra five percent of incoming solar radiation into space.

From spirit bears to Tasmanian devils, rainforest life is absolutely dazzling. Predator/prey interactions are in a constant arms race. For instance, tropical rainforest fishing bats use sonar to locate fish and utilize a gaff-like toe to catch them, while plants have developed mind-boggling chemical defenses against fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects and animal grazers and browsers.

The scent within an old-growth rainforest is like walking into a heady aromatic medicine chest. Every breath is a medicinal tour de force that helps the human body ward off cancers.

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Community Food Forests To The Rescue

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Community Food Forests

About 40 million Americans, including many children, experience food insecurity. An estimated 26.5 million people in the United States live in food deserts with little fresh produce on public spaces. Urban food forests to the rescue!

Community Food Forests
Atlanta’s Brown Mills Food Forest has a fruit and nut orchard, raised beds, herb gardens along with terrific walking paths across seven acres. Many hundreds of school children have visited and learned how to grow, tend and harvest the bounty.
Image credit: Sharon Lee

These marvelous oases on community lands often have three layers of food. Fruit and nuts trees make up the overstory, shrubs like raspberries and huckleberries occupy the mid layer, and an abundance of ground food like trailing strawberries or carrots, beets, potatoes and broccoli beautify the floor.

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Water, Wind And Worms, A Wonderful World

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Natural systems and animals have been inspiring people for ages. Water, wind and worms are teaching us many new lessons to help caretake our ailing planet.

For example, Portland-based InPipe Energy has devised an ingenious micro-hydro system using a pressure recovery value (PRV) to regulate the flow of municipal water. It harnesses the energy within flowing water by spinning a microturbine, which makes electricity.

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Sensors within PRVs help municipal agencies to better manage water infrastructures by quickly pinpointing any leakage. In addition, InPipe Energy can erase the carbon footprint of pumping water throughout the system, an energy-rich process that currently relies mostly on the fossil fuel-powered grid.

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Imagine It! An Ideal Handbook To Heal Us And Our Planet

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Laurie David and Heather Reisman have penned a terrific how-to take care guide for individuals, families and ultimately our Mother Earth.

They remind us that, “Our planet, like our bodies, is a system. Everything is interconnected.” Many of us have become disconnected. This book teaches us how to reconnect and nourish our bodies and minds.

how to heal the planet

To kick-start this process, they ask thought-provoking questions: “Is the amount of news about heatwaves, floods, droughts and wildfires really beginning to worry you? Do you sometimes feel as though our climate crisis is so big that your individual actions can make much of a difference?”

This concise handbook brings awareness to plastics, food, clothing, chemicals, paper, water and transportation. Each chapter begins with important facts that are followed by an inspiring story. And each one closes with a doable action plan to reduce your individual and family footprints.

Every small step is significant. David and Reisman’s winning formula helps us understand why we must break old habits that are detrimental to both Mother Earth and us.

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The Joy of Curiosity And Kindness

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The human brain is a stupendous three-pound electrically-charged organ that has hundreds of miles of wires composed of brain cells. Those cells are so miniscule that thousands of them could comfortably fit into the period at the end of this sentence.

The brain is exceptional at both solving problems and making tools. It also constantly seeks to explore. In fact, we are all natural explorers, born to look around.

An old-growth rainforest is a heavenly community of nature’s finest fauna and flora in concert. 
Image credit: Reese Halter
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Man-Made Global Heating Is F*%#ing Hideous

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Why is only one day, each year, set aside to pay homage to our Mother Earth? Is it, so that for 364 other days we can turn a blind eye, or worse, rape her with impunity?

Escalating deforestation, soaring mercury. Radio National Australia, The Science Show, Earth Day 2021

Our kith and kin, the animals, are terrified because ghastly man-made heatwaves, climate fires, climate droughts, climate floods and the GDP-driven Age of Extinction are accelerating at breakneck speed. Ladies and gentlemen, we need all the animals, old-growth rainforests, coral reefs, wetlands, salt marshes, mangroves, peatlands, kelp forests and marine grass meadows in-tact to survive and cohabitate on this hallowed blue planet.

The elephant in the room is human consumption and the insatiable fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion energy required to make more. Do you really need more?

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Fisheries Demolishing Our Only Home

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The mysterious oceans occupy 99 percent of the blue planet’s living space (biosphere). The oceans are the cradle of life, climatemakers, oxygenmakers and home to unknown numbers of species.

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Today, the oceans are dreadfully ill with vast areas of boneyards. “The oceans are really a mirror of human health, if they are sick and dying then that’s the future of humanity as well,” admonished oceanographer David Baker, University of Hong Kong’s Swire Institute of Marine Science.

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Ecocide: Killing British Columbia’s Last Great Big Trees

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How much is enough? More. Since 1981, I have witnessed the greatest and most diversified temperate old-growth rainforests in the world, those of British Columbia (BC), being raped and pillaged under the auspice of crown (provincial) forestry management propping up a couple hundred timber-harvesting towns and the opportunistic (and fleeting) multinational corporations that milk the system and taunt the people with jobs.

Giant British Columbia Trees
Reese Halter planting trees in the Northern Rockies, circa 1986.
Image credit: Jane Williams

Today, about a couple dozen old-growth wood-addicted communities with automated state-of-the-art mills remain. It’s a house of cards that over the previous decade has siphoned $3.65 billion from the provincial coffers to stay afloat. Lousy subsidies.

In reality, every day there are less wild rainforests and far less animals. Habitat destruction is horrible in an accelerating man-driven Age of Extinction. Additionally, those cutover forestlands are incapable of decontaminating putrid fossil fuel-tainted rainwater, which runs off into the sea or through your tap.

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Fossil Fuels Ruined Iconic Aussie Snow Forests

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Fossil fuel stoked global heating has laid waste to the Aussie’s second favorite tree, the wonderful snow gums of the Alps.

Sprawling forest graveyards are strewn across Oz. From the lonely giants of the temperate southwest to the skeletons mangroves of the tropical northeast and along the bare high plains of New South Wales to the boiled ones of northeast Tasmania – it’s bloody grim.

snow forests
Cooma Monaro, New South Wales, is a vast high plateau where many ancient ones died of a strangling thirst egged on by recurring brutal heatwaves.
Image credit: Greening Australia

I’ve walked in these eerie, lonesome tree cemeteries and lamented their loss to the nation. How many more millions of acres must we lose of these complex, climate-making, biodiverse hotspots replete with water-rich bastions before governments stop the annual $5.3 trillion in subsidies to the wealthiest and biggest polluters, the fossil fuel industry?

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Ecocide: Norway Murders 1278 Climate-Stabilizing Whales

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Thirty-nine years ago, the world agreed to end commercial whaling. Only two rogue nations, Japan and Norway, still refuse to abide by the rule of law.

In 2020, Norway’s bloodthirsty whaling armada slaughtered 503 minke whales, 74 more whales than they destroyed in 2019. This year, Norway has issued death warrants for 1,278 minkes. These crazed planet-killers have single-handedly annihilated more than 14,000 wonderful whales over the previous 39 years. What the frack!

End whaling in Norway NOW!
Image credit: Bill Waldeen

Are the Norwegians starving? Is there really a consumer demand to eat our mammalian kith and kin, the whales? No. Instead, these glorious masterpieces are brutally killed and minced into dog food. Wot.

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Climate Generation Going Vegan To Save Life On Earth

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The climate generation (Gen Zs, or under 26s) comprises almost a third of the world’s population. These intrepid kind humans are fighting the climate crisis by ‘taking the rose by the thorn’ and eating plant-based diets to save Mother Earth. Happy dance!

Going Vegan

The purchasing power of the Gen Zs is formidable. It exceeds $3 trillion. Recently, the UK’s BOL Foods became an entirely plant-based company with planet-friendly food for the burgeoning Gen Zs vegans. Additionally, that company is now saving 200 metric tons of CO2 and 1.8 million gallons of water annually.

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