Trees Cool the Climate…Isn’t That Cool?

Researchers from Carnegie’s Global Ecology department found that evaporation of water from trees not only cools things locally, but also globally, as well. The cycle produces clouds that reflect sunlight, meaning less energy (heat) makes landfall. The net result? Cooling.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/neil-wagner/trees-cool-the-climate-is_b_971032.html

Barbie Ends Troubled Relationship With Deforestation:

Barbie is moving her dream house out of the Indonesian rainforest. On Wednesday, toy maker Mattel announced that it will stop using paper products from companies “that are known to be involved in deforestation.” This comes after a major Greenpeace campaign to convince the toy giant to ditch problematic packaging, specifically paper from the company Asia Pulp & Paper. Below is a video Greenpeace had made to bring public awareness to this campaign .

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/10/barbie-ends-troubled-relationship-deforestation

Wangari Maathai was a person who showed how significant one person can be. She won the Nobel Peace Prize and was the founder of the Green Belt Movement responsible for planting more than 40 million trees in Kenya. What would you like to do to counter deforestation?

I feel guilty to travel more than 2 times from China to US every year. But I will try to walk and ride bikes more often.

I just loaded the free Kindle app on my iPad and then downloaded Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle on the Gutenberg site (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3704), also free and complete with illustrations. Very, very cool.

Anyway, in the first chapter of his book Darwin describes the deforestation that he encountered when they anchored at Porto Praya, in St. Jago, the main island of the Cape de Verd archipelago, on January 16, 1832. Unfortunately, deforestation is still a problem.

Here’s what Darwin wrote:

“When the island was discovered, the immediate neighbourhood of Porto Praya was clothed with trees, the reckless destruction of which has caused here, as at St. Helena, and at some of the Canary islands, almost entire sterility. The broad, flat-bottomed valleys, many of which serve during a few days only in the season as watercourses, are clothed with thickets of leafless bushes. Few living creatures inhabit these valleys. The commonest bird is a kingfisher (Dacelo Iagoensis), which tamely sits on the branches of the castor-oil plant, and thence darts on grasshoppers and lizards. It is brightly coloured, but not so beautiful as the European species: in its flight, manners, and place of habitation, which is generally in the driest valley, there is also a wide difference.”

Charles Darwin. The Voyage of the Beagle

An inspirational reforestation project in Guatemala is named after Chico Mendes, a Brazilian environmentalist and human rights activist who was assassinated by a rancher on December 22, 1988. The video tells the story behind this project. Worth watching!

[Breaking News]: The WWF, World Wildlife Fund, has just released their 2011 Living Forest Report. It examines the drivers of deforestation and identifies the opportunities to shift from business as usual to a new model of sustainability, which can benefit government, business and communities. The report proposes that policymakers and businesses unite around a goal of zero net deforestation and forest degradation (ZNDD) by 2020 as a groundbreaking global benchmark to avoid dangerous climate change and curb biodiversity loss.

Watch the main message of the report below.

Download the full report here: http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/how_we_work/conservation/forests/publications/living_forests_report/

Stop deforestation and save our rain forests!

National Geographic talks about the human impact on our planet

Here is a great link to an easy to read article on deforestion. It is a straightforward description of the effects of deforestation as well as a way to reverse the damage.