What about "poorly planned and unsustainable development - particularly from logging and forest conversion to agriculture - is putting many of these unique creatures at risk" doesn't PC understand? This isn't a "Crisis du Jour", as the minimizers like to say, but something we've been documenting and worrying about for over a 100 years. The dodo was a loser and the bison almost so. Those are hardly recent developments!!!
Konny, you are such a sap. You'll believe anything the crisis-folks put in your 'news.'
1.
Launch a campaign to DESTROY THE AMAZON RAINFOREST.
Tell your liberal friend that it's growing so fast there's a danger that within a few decades it might reach the southern borders of the United States, menacing our great-grandchildren with its evil leafy tendrils and its deadly population of jaguars, bullet ants, snakes, killer bees, and such like. You think we exaggerate? According to a January 2009 report in the New York Times-and what liberal could ignore the voice of Pravda?-"For every acre of rainforest cut down each year, more than 50 acres are growing." Do the math. Then be afraid. Very afraid. And start stockpiling the Agent Orange.
From “365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy”
2. (Reuters) -
The world's tropical rainforests are making a comeback, but young vegetation may not be able to sustain as much diverse wildlife or lock up nearly as much climate-warming carbon dioxide as old trees did, scientists report.
The rainforest debate has raged publicly for decades, and more recently has been the subject of behind-the-scenes ferment among conservation scientists. It is the main topic of a Smithsonian symposium on Monday at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
These discussions are taking place as the international community is trying to figure out how to stem global warming. Because tropical forests sequester the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, they are considered an essential part of the solution.
About 135,000 square miles (350,000 square kilometers) of the original forested areas that were cut down by humans are growing back, according to Greg Asner of the Washington-based Carnegie Institution, a presenter at the symposium. That is only 1.7 percent of the original forest.
This regrowth is relatively quick, with the shady forest canopy closing in after just 15 years as trees grow taller and denser, offering habitat for creatures adapted to just this environment, such as birds with huge eyes able to see in the leafy gloom.
Using United Nations projections of population growth, Wright and Muller-Landau predicted in a 2006 journal article that "large areas of tropical forest cover will remain in 2030 and beyond, and thus that habitat loss will threaten extinction for a smaller proportion of tropical forest species than previously predicted."
Tropical rainforests are regrowing. Now what? | Reuters
3. I don’t know if you saw it, but the New York Times recently ran a piece in which two scientists, Dr Joe Wright and Dr Bill Laurance, from the Smithsonian debated regeneration of rainforests in Panama. The gist was that in some places
rainforest is re-growing and whether because of this saving untouched rainforest is as urgent a problem as it is portrayed. There may be a lot of deforestation going on, but there is also re-growth elsewhere. Cool Green Science just posted a piece which offers a thoughtful response to both positions:
It’s one of those things where both people are right and both are wrong, in degrees.
Rainforests Are Tougher Than We Tend to Think
After describing how in Brazil’s first national park, Tijuca, you’d be hard pressed to figure out what parts of the land had be a coffee plantation one hundred years ago, post author David Cleary points out that,
We think of tropical forests as porcelain-like, fragile and impossible to put back together if broken. Tijuca back’s up Dr Wright’s argument that it’s more accurate to view tropical rainforests as tough and resilient, able to absorb a huge amount of punishment and come back.
Rainforests In Some Regions Are Re-growing Rapidly: Should We Worry Anymore About Deforestation? : TreeHugger
4.
These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.
“There is far more forest here than there was 30 years ago,” said Ms. Ortega de Wing, 64, who remembers fields of mango trees and banana plants.
The idea has stirred outrage among environmentalists who believe that vigorous efforts to protect native rain forest should remain a top priority. But the notion has gained currency in mainstream organizations like the Smithsonian Institution and the United Nations, which in 2005 concluded that new forests were “increasing dramatically” and “undervalued” for their environmental benefits. The United Nations is undertaking the first global catalog of the new forests, which vary greatly in their stage of growth.
“Biologists were ignoring these huge population trends and acting as if only original forest has conservation value, and that’s just wrong,” said Joe Wright, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute here, who set off a firestorm two years ago by suggesting that the new forests could substantially compensate for rain forest destruction.
Dr. Wright and others say the overzealous protection of rain forests not only prevents poor local people from profiting from the rain forests on their land but also robs financing and attention from other approaches to fighting global warming, like eliminating coal plants.
About 38 million acres of original rain forest are being cut down every year, but in 2005, according to the most recent “State of the World’s Forests Report” by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, there were an estimated 2.1 billion acres of potential replacement forest growing in the tropics — an area almost as large as the United States….In Panama by the 1990s, the last decade for which data is available, the rain forest is being destroyed at a rate of 1.3 percent each year. The area of secondary forest is increasing by more than 4 percent yearly, Dr. Wright estimates.
New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests - NYTimes.com
Konny....this seems to be over your head, but I'll keep trying. 'Member what I told you about the French Revolution being the birth of Liberalism?
Well, again, they believed that 'science and reason' dominates all endeavors...and this means that humans control the earth and can make and break same.
Isn't true.
‘Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,’ from the D of I, the world, earth...has its own timetables, and rules and cycles....
You can do all the 'poorly planned and unsustainable development' and it won't destroy the earth.
Example? The gases put into the atmosphere by a volcano...as opposed to man.
Do a little studying on your own.
By leaps and bounds s0n!!
