Tag Archives: forest

An easy, cost-effective way to address climate change? Massive reforestation.

by Philome19D Posted on April 11, 2019

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As the implications of climate change become starker and the world faces up to a biodiversity crisis that threatens humanity’s existence, a group of campaigners from across the world are saying there is one clear way to get us out of this mess, but that governments are ignoring it.

In an open letter published in the British newspaper, The Guardian, the group tells governments that the best and cheapest way to avert a climate catastrophe is to heal nature by restoring and replanting degraded forests and by better conserving the natural world.

“Defending the living world and defending the climate are, in many cases, one and the same. This potential has so far been largely overlooked,” say the 23 signatories to the letter.

“We call on governments to support natural climate solutions with an urgent program of research, funding, and political commitment,” they added.

Vast amounts of carbon can be removed from the air and stored by restoring ecosystems razed by palm oil plantations, cattle ranching and timber, and fish production, the letter says. The 23 signatories include the  teenage school climate strike activist Greta Thunburg, authors Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein, and Philip Pullman, U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann, and environmental campaigner Bill McKibben.

“The world faces two existential crises, developing with terrifying speed: climate breakdown and ecological breakdown. Neither is being addressed with the urgency needed to prevent our life-support systems from spiralling into collapse,” say the signatories.

They call for the defense, restoration and reestablishment of forests, peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, natural seabeds, and other crucial ecosystems, to remove and store large amounts of carbon from the air. The protection and restoration of these ecosystems can help minimize a sixth great extinction, they say.

The group says that nearly a third of the greenhouse gas reductions needed to hold temperatures to a 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) rise can be provided by the restoration of natural habitats. But natural solutions are calculated to have attracted just a small fraction of the funding so far committed, according to journalist and author George Monbiot, one of the signatories.

Technology alone cannot solve climate change, Monbiot wrote in The Guardian. Much of the technology proposed to capture carbon is expensive and could pose problems at scale. The cheapest and surest approach, he wrote, is to restore natural forests and allow native trees to repopulate deforested land.

Regenerating and conserving nature to address climate change is expected to be a central recommendation of next month’s landmark study of the state of the natural world, compiled by hundreds of scientists. The United Nations-backed report is expected to confirm that nature is in rapid decline in many regions, with ecosystems on the point of collapse.

Protecting and restoring natural forests is seen as vital. Trees suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it. Nearly one-quarter of all the emissions reductions pledged by countries in the 2015 Paris agreement could come from tree planting and restoration. The U.N. has challenged countries to restore 865 million acres of farm and forest land by 2030 — an area bigger than India. And countries are responding.

Initiative 20×20, an international effort, hopes to restore 49 million acres by 2020 in Latin America and the Caribbean. And the multicountry African Forest Landscape Restoration initiative intends to restore 247 million acres of degraded forests in Africa by 2030.

Pakistan has just planted 1 billion trees. China plans to create forests totaling the size of Ireland. And in Africa, Ethiopia, Niger, Mali are among countries that strongly back the reforestation of degraded land.

But there’s a snag. A new paper in the scientific journal, Nature, suggests that 45 percent of the land area that nations have so far pledged to allocate for carbon drawdown is being used to for commercial plantations.

There’s a huge difference between restoring natural forests and planting trees for commercial use, for example the large-scale monoculture of oil palms to provide us with the palm oil so ubiquitous in snacks and cosmetics. The latter are less efficient at carbon storage, and in fact release carbon emissions by replacing peatland, as well as being detrimental to wildlife.

These natural solutions also go beyond trees. They include the restoration of peatlands, salt marsh and seagrass. They also mean the protection and recovery of animals like rhinos in Africa, which act as a natural protection against devastating wildfires, and wolves in North America, which some studies suggest could protect forests by controlling populations of animals that feed on plants and trees.

Still, Monbiot cautions: “We don’t want natural climate solutions to be used as a substitute for the rapid and comprehensive decarbonization of our economies. The science tells us both are needed.”

“But,” he continues, “what this thrilling field of study shows is that protecting and rewilding the world’s living systems is not just an aesthetically pleasing thing to do. It is an essential survival strategy.”

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An easy, cost-effective way to address climate change? Massive reforestation.

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North Carolina to Trump: End the shutdown so we can use our hurricane aid

by JanellLerner Posted on January 9, 2019

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North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper addressed the president in a letter today, explaining that the ongoing partial government shutdown (now on its 19th day) is holding up key disaster relief for the state. North Carolina needs to repair flood damage from Hurricane Florence last year and 2016’s Hurricane Matthew, and prepare itself for future storms.

Cooper writes: “Our critical long-term work to rebuild stronger and smarter is delayed with every day that federal funds are held in Washington.…Please work with Congressional leaders to end this shutdown so our communities can rebuild quickly and effectively.”

Last April, North Carolina was allocated $168 million for disaster recovery from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). And in September, HUD allotted an additional $1.68 billion to be shared between North Carolina and other states affected by 2018 storms. But states can’t access those funds until they are given guidance from HUD and the Federal Register, both of which are closed during the shutdown.

The shutdown is making things worse for disaster-affected communities across the board, but there was already a backlog in undisbursed funds. Bloomberg reported last week that the Trump administration has been sitting on $16 billion earmarked for storm protection while HUD delays the release of instructions for how states can apply for those funds.

Trump is more explicitly blocking disaster relief to disaster survivors in drier (and blue-er) parts of the U.S. In 2018, wildfires took the lives of nearly 100 people and completely leveled the town of Paradise, California. This morning he tweeted (then deleted, then retweeted after correcting some spelling errors): “Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen. Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money.”

Whether or not Trump’s California-centered threats have teeth remains up in the air. Such a move would be without precedent, and The Washington Post reported this afternoon that it’s unclear whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency is taking steps to comply. To add to the confusion, much of California’s forests are federally managed — so Trump can ask feds can rake their own leaves once they’re back on the job.

Despite states’ pleas, signs do not look good for a resolution to the shutdown. President Trump stormed out of a meeting with Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, tweeting that it had been “a total waste of time.”

He ended the tweet by saying, “Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!”

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North Carolina to Trump: End the shutdown so we can use our hurricane aid

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California’s battle against climate change is going up in smoke

by SheltonUPJ Posted on December 10, 2018

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This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Just a few months ago, climate activists in California were celebrating an impressive victory: New data showed that the state had brought greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels, four years earlier than planned. The win, a cut of emissions to 429.4 million metric tons (the equivalent of taking 12 million cars off the road) was the result of steady decreases in emissions most years.

“California set the toughest emissions targets in the nation, tracked progress and delivered results,” Governor Jerry Brown tweeted. The next step was to cut emissions another 40 percent by 2030 — “a heroic and very ambitious goal.”

But by November, skies across the state were gray. Wildfires were raging, including a blaze which would prove to be the deadliest and most destructive in state history. The conflagrations have set California back: The recent Camp and Woolsey Fires, officials say, have produced emissions equivalent to roughly 5.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, more than three times the total decrease in emissions in 2015. Recently, the Department of the Interior announced that new data shows the 2018 California wildfire season is estimated to have released emissions equal to about one year of power use.

California’s wildfire problem

Of course, wildfires are not new to the West Coast. But the kind of vast, devastating conflagrations seen in California in recent years — this fall’s Camp Fire decimated 153,000 acres in the Butte County area and destroyed almost 14,000 homes — are becoming more common. According to the state’s most recent climate assessment, California could see a 77 percent increase in the average area burned in wildfires by 2100.

All this is bad news for a state committed to decreasing its carbon footprint. But California’s official emissions score will not be affected by the extraordinary amount of carbon released during wildfires this year, because the agency that calculates emissions — the California Air Resources Board — considers wildfires to be a part of the earth’s natural carbon cycle. (The ARB is a regulatory body and, as agency spokesperson Dave Clegern noted, “can only regulate what can be controlled.”)

But the agency is looking into ways to better track carbon emissions from conflagrations. Right now, Clegern says, the ARB uses data including the size of the fire and the kind of fuel burned to estimate its carbon footprint. But, he said, scientists don’t currently have a good way to accurately calculate emissions from disasters like the Camp Fire, which burn residential and commercial properties. While those findings won’t be included in the state’s emissions tally, Clegern said it’s still important to gather the data: “We need to know what goes up in the air when these things happen. Our first mission is to protect public health.”

The increasing size of wildfires in California is driven by several factors linked to climate change, scientists say, including a shift in the jet stream that causes the state to suffer more hot, dry spells. The state’s seven-year drought has weakened forests and left millions of acres highly susceptible to lethal attacks from insects like bark beetle. In recent years, more than 100 million trees are estimated to have died statewide. Dry, dead forests are a fire hazard, and they pose a threat so severe that, in 2015, Governor Brown declared a state of emergency and created a task force to identify areas of particular risk. This January, scientists at the University of California-Berkeley reported that the situation was “compounded by the long-established removal” of naturally occurring, frequent, and low-intensity fires in the state’s forested areas, “a key ecosystem process” in hazardous wildfire prevention.

Aside from preventing deadly conflagrations, protecting forests also means preserving the state’s best tool for regulating carbon emissions. By removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it as carbon in soil, branches, and tree trunks, forest have historically worked as a “carbon sink” for the state. But research shows that between 2001 and 2010, tree die-off meant California’s forests emitted more carbon than they sequestered.

Wildfires accelerate this process. Conflagrations release carbon into the atmosphere as they burn and, once the smoke has cleared, leave fewer trees to sequester carbon. In the years following a fire, dead trees begin to release their stored carbon back into the atmosphere. And a recent study also showed that forests which burned at high severity suffered worryingly low regeneration rates. In some places, no trees grew back at all.

But the damage doesn’t end there. When a forest is burned for the first time, “between 5 and 20 percent of the carbon goes up,” explained Nic Enstice, regional science coordinator at the state’s Sierra Nevada Conservancy agency. That’s because even a high-severity fire will not incinerate every tree in a forest. But if a second wildfire ravages through an already-burned area, the dead trees are more readily consumed, resulting in even greater carbon release.

The fire season’s growing effect on the state gives scientists all the more reason to study its emissions. “That’s the kind of issue we’re wrestling with now,” Clegern said.

California’s best hope for reaching its ambitious climate goals may lie in technology and rebuilding the state’s dilapidated forests. The state is relying on energy companies like utility giant PG&E to increase purchases of renewable power and invest heavily in burgeoning industries like electric transportation over the next decade. (PG&E, meanwhile, could be on the hook for billions of dollars in fines if an investigation finds the company’s equipment ignited some of California’s recent conflagrations.) Plans are also underway to push harder on forest restoration efforts: In May, the state announced its Forest Carbon Plan, which included a pledge to double the rate of forest rehabilitation to an average 35,000 acres a year by 2020.

“We know that we have to increase the health of our forests pretty significantly over the coming years,” Enstice said.“What we saw in the Camp Fire, the Rim Fire, the King Fire — these are all out of the normal patterns.”

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California’s battle against climate change is going up in smoke

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The Trees in My Forest – Bernd Heinrich

by Myrna Posted on December 4, 2018

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The Trees in My Forest

Bernd Heinrich

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 13, 2009

Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


Ina book destined to become a classic, biologist and acclaimed nature writer Bernd Heinrich takes readers on an eye-opening journey through the hidden life of a forest.

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The Trees in My Forest – Bernd Heinrich

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Here’s how California could avoid wildfires (hint: It’s not raking)

by FaustinoMolle44 Posted on November 20, 2018

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Nine months ago, when California wasn’t in flames, government investigators warned Governor Jerry Brown that an inferno loomed.

“California’s forests are reaching a breaking point,” the report said.

The report got about little media attention at the time, but it’s still worth taking seriously even now. It came from an independent oversight commission set up by the California government to sniff out ways the state was going bad, then make recommendations to Brown and the legislature. The commission spent a year interviewing experts and holding hearings.

If California doesn’t want a future wreathed in wildfire smoke, the report suggests, it will need to permit more tree thinning, more prescribed fires, and more burning of wood for electricity.

Wait a sec, you say. Does that mean President Donald Trump is right to blame the fires on California’s forest management? Hardly. Trump’s suggestion that California needed to spend more time “raking” the forest is comically wrong. The Paradise Camp Fire started on National Forest Land, which is managed by Trump’s own Department of Agriculture, not by California. The severity of the recent fires, burning areas surrounded by brushy chaparral rather than forest, can be blamed more accurately on climate change and also the sprawling development that puts houses in the wilderness.

That said, it’s also true that California — and the rest of the West — needs to change how it manages forests. Ever since the United States took control of the West, people have been putting out fires. Before 1800, California was a pretty smoky place — an estimated 7,000 square miles burned every year (1,000 have burned so far this year. This history of fire suppression has left us with a massive backlog of fuels that we will have to deal with … somehow.

California’s fire report, recommended big changes. For starters, the state should flip its traditional mode of suppressing fires and shift to using fire as a tool, it said. That would mean burning in a controlled manner, lighting prescribed fires and firing up biomass electricity generation plants. All that would let the government control the air pollution from blazes, allowing someone to plan and space out fires, instead of having raging wildfires bathe the state in smoke all at once.

The commission also suggested that California supply a greater percentage of the wood it uses for everything from paper to houses. The state has strict sustainability rules for logging but ends up importing 80 to 90 percent of its wood from other places that may have “weaker or nonexistent regulations,” the report said.

In short, California has a lot of hard, dirty work to do in its forests to avoid choking Californians with smoke every year. But here’s the rub: The federal government owns nearly 60 percent of the forest in California. And that, as the authors of the report delicately put it, “complicates a state response.” California has already instituted a suite of programs to restore forests, but Trump has yet to take a rake to the land under federal authority.

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Here’s how California could avoid wildfires (hint: It’s not raking)

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Axl Rose is Twitter feuding with Trump over California wildfires

by MargheritaLord Posted on November 13, 2018

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California is on fire again. In an alternate universe, the president of the United States would acknowledge the effects of climate change on wildfires as she directed a barrage of federal resources to the afflicted state. In this universe, however, the president blamed forest management and threatened to withhold funds. And then … Guns N’ Roses lead singer Axl Rose got involved? Here’s what happened.

On Saturday, as a trio of wildfires whipped through California and terrified people evacuated, President Trump took to Twitter to berate the state. Yes, at least 31 people died in the Camp Fire and the president thought now would be a good time to threaten to withhold federal relief:

“There is no reason” for the wildfires except for forest mismanagement? Sir! Poor management is certainly one element of a complex problem, but most forests in the state are managed by the federal government. And rising temperatures play a role too: They make wildfires like the Camp Fire bigger and more common by creating drier conditions.

The lead singer of an iconic ‘80s band isn’t exactly the first person you’d call on to debunk Trump’s tweet, but Twitter is a bizarro melting pot so of course Axl Rose hit back at the president with some wildfire knowledge.

We can’t speak to the “demented n’ truly pathetic” part of the tweet, but the lack of federal funding bit is spot on. The U.S. Forest Service can barely keep up with fire suppression, let alone prevention.

California does need more prescribed burns in order to alleviate some of the state’s fuel load (not the commercial logging that the Trump administration would like to promote but rather the small trees, shrubs, and brush that build up). Less fuel load equals more manageable forest fires. But doing so costs billions of dollars — money that policymakers aren’t sending to the state.

N’ what about climate change? Axl didn’t fit that detail in his Tweet. One person remembered though: the Los Angeles County fire chief. In response to Trump’s tweet, Chief Daryl Osby said, “We’re in extreme climate change right now.”

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Axl Rose is Twitter feuding with Trump over California wildfires

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Washington state residents resort to giant fans and throwing rocks at the smoke to get it to go away

by TraceeZerangue Posted on August 23, 2018

This week, breathing in Seattle air was the equivalent to smoking around a third of a pack of cigarettes a day, thanks to smoke from wildfires raging in Canada and the Cascades. On Monday, air quality in Spokane was the worst in the country, forcing people to don masks or stay inside. You know what they say: Desperate times call for desperate measures. Rather than wait for the interminable smoke to dissipate, some Washington residents elected to take matters into their own hands.

One Spokane Facebook event implored its nearly 2,000 attendees to: “Blow Spokane’s Smoke Back to Canada.” “To get rid of this smoke, we have to work together as a community,” the event’s description says. “After much deliberation and mathematical calculation, we have figured that it is absolutely possible for us to blow this smoke away with high powered fans.”

Thayne Jongeward

The haze may be thick and disorienting, but Spokanites know a couple thousand box fans can’t reverse the smoky effects of decades of forest mismanagement and rising temperatures. That didn’t stop them from taking credit, though, when the smoke finally started to lift on Thursday morning. “IT IS WORKING!!!” wrote one resident, adding: “KEEP PUFFING AND BLOWING, AND THANK YOU!!!”

Another Facebook event with over 43,000 attendees had a similar idea: Throw rocks at the smoke. “I strongly believe with enough rocks, we can make the smoke leave,” the event organizer wrote. Yet another page suggests positioning a giant fan over the state of Idaho. All of these satirical events promote ways to donate to B.C. food banks, animal shelters, and the Red Cross.

I asked my friend Alexandru Oarcea, who’s a hotshot firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, about the box fan plan. He thought it was cute but pointed out a major flaw: “If, by some miracle they were able to create enough wind to start to push it to Canada, it would just suck the smoke from Oregon and California in behind it.”

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Washington state residents resort to giant fans and throwing rocks at the smoke to get it to go away

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President Trump, these are the real reasons California is on fire

by JanelleWeldon2 Posted on August 6, 2018

President Trump has finally weighed in on the California wildfires that began last month. But it wasn’t to express condolences for the victims or to praise the incredible bravery of firefighters — it was to try to score political points.

And he did so by badly twisting the science of how wildfires work. In a now-deleted tweet from Sunday, Trump blamed “bad environmental laws” for “diverting” water into the Pacific Ocean. On Monday evening, Trump reposted essentially the same tweet:

And he doubled down on this flawed argument.

According to the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik, Trump’s tweets on wildfires and water “deserve some sort of award for most glaring misstatements about those two issues in the smallest number of words.” I’d have to agree.

In Trump’s muddled mind, there’d be “plenty of water” if California rivers were exploited to the point they were completely dry at the end of the line — like the Colorado River now is.

The conservative agriculture community in the state’s Central Valley yields a substantial clue to where this weird idea came from. In the minds of some farmers there, allowing even a drop for endangered fish habitat means the government is stealing their water.

Beyond cutting down forests as a fire management strategy (you can’t have fires if you don’t have trees!), Trump seems to argue for airdropping huge quantities of water from reservoirs onto fires.

Given that Trump drinks bottled water with both hands, he should know this fundamental fact better than most: Water is heavy. And it takes a lot of effort to lift it into the sky and drop it on wildfires.

California’s reservoirs are actually near long-term average levels right now. The state’s firefighting resources are vastly overmatched, and help is pouring in from across the country and around the world. There’s even a newly converted Boeing 747 that’s been airdropping flame suppressant.

And still, a tiny bit of rain would do incredibly more good than any amount of water that could be diverted from the state’s lakes and reservoirs by firefighters. A barely measurable sprinkle over the amount of territory that’s currently on fire in California is about 6,000,000 gallons of water — about what the 747 fire bomber could carry in 300 loads, a month’s worth of round-the-clock operations. It’s not water availability in reservoirs that limits the ability to fight these fires — it’s logistics.

The massive Mendocino Complex, which could soon be the largest wildfire incident in California history, is burning right next to Clear Lake, the largest natural lake in the state. Firefighters are using water from the lake as fast as they can to help fight the fire. The fire is just 33 percent contained. So no, Mr. President, the fact that water exists in the state does not mean that it’s very useful to combat a fire like this.

Letting rivers run their natural course is not what causes massive wildfires. It’s year after year of hot and dry weather that causes wildfires. And, it just so happens, there’s something we’re doing that’s making weather hotter and drier.

Decades of misguided fire suppression policy and booming urban development in forested areas have contributed to this boom, but the main reason for the surge is climate change. (Even California’s chief firefighter agrees.) For the president to deny the central role of climate change in what’s happening is not only foolish, it’s dangerous.

July was the hottest month in history for many parts of California, and burnable vegetation is off the charts. Longer, hotter dry seasons, combined with timber die-offs due to drought and temperature-related insect infestation, have turned the state into a tinderbox ready to explode.

After the state’s worst drought in millennia, the very wet winter of 2016-17 created loads of grasses and shrub growth — perfect kindling for wildfire now that the drought has returned. Temperatures this week have surged, particularly at nighttime, fanning the flames further and giving firefighters little time to recover. Smoke from the wildfires is detectable across half the United States, creating a public health nightmare that’s trapping people indoors.

This is already one of the worst years for wildfires in U.S. history, in a decades-long streak of increasingly really bad wildfire seasons. Four of the 10 most destructive fires in California history have occurred in the past 10 months. Together, these four megafires have burned nearly 10,000 structures. That’s a mid-sized American city’s worth of homes, gone.

So far this year, about three times more land area has burned than normal. The deserted Yosemite National Park is indefinitely closed due to the Ferguson Fire, the largest wildfire ever recorded in the Sierra National Forest.

And wildfires are going to get much, much worse in the years to come if we don’t radically reduce fossil fuel emissions. Instead, Trump’s anti-environmental policy moves, like stopping California from having stricter standards on automobiles, will worsen climate change. Trump’s proposed 2019 budget eliminates federal funding for wildfire research.

When Trump was elected, I said that the effects of his climate denial would linger for hundreds of years. That fear now seems to be coming true.

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President Trump, these are the real reasons California is on fire

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Fire scientists know one thing for sure: This will get worse

by LakeishU32 Posted on August 1, 2018

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Subtract out the conspiracists and the willfully ignorant and the argument marshaled by skeptics against global warming, roughly restated, assumes that scientists vastly overstate the consequences of pumping greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. Uncertainties in their calculations, the skeptics say, make it impossible to determine with confidence how bad the future was going to be. The sour irony of that muttonheaded resistance to data is that, after four decades of being wrong, those people are almost right.

As of July 31, more than 25,000 firefighters are committed to 140 wildfires across the United States — over a million acres aflame. Eight people are dead in California, tens of thousands evacuated, smoke and pyroclastic clouds are visible from space. And all any fire scientist knows for sure is, it only gets worse from here. How much worse? Where? For whom? Experience can’t tell them. The scientists actually are uncertain.

Scientists who help policymakers plan for the future used to make an assumption. They called it stationarity, and the idea was that the extremes of environmental systems — rainfall, river levels, hurricane strength, wildfire damage — obeyed prior constraints. The past was prologue. Climate change has turned that assumption to ash. The fires burning across the western United States (and in Europe) prove that “stationarity is dead,” as a team of researchers (controversially) wrote in the journal Science a decade ago. They were talking about water; now it’s true for fire.

“We can no longer use the observed past as a guide. There’s no stable system that generates a measurable probability of events to use the past record to plan for the future,” says LeRoy Westerling, a management professor who studies wildfires at UC Merced. “Now we have to use physics and complex interactions to project how things could change.”

Wildfires were always part of a complex system. Climate change — carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases raising the overall temperature of the planet — added to the complexity. The implications of that will play out for millennia. “On top of that is interaction between the climate system, the ecosystem, and how we manage our land use,” Westerling says. “That intersection is very complex, and even more difficult to predict. When I say there’s no new normal, I mean it. The climate will be changing with probably an accelerating pace for the rest of the lives of everyone who is alive today.”

That’s not to say there’s nothing more to learn or do. To the contrary, more data on fire behavior will help researchers build models of what might happen. They’ll look at how best to handle “fuel management,” or the removal of flammable plant matter desiccated by climate change-powered heat waves and drought. More research will help with how to build less flammable buildings, and to identify places where buildings maybe shouldn’t be in the first place. Of course, that all presumes policymakers will listen and act. They haven’t yet. “People talk about ‘resilience,’ they talk about ‘hardening,’” Westerling says. “But we’ve been talking about climate change and risks like wildfire for decades now and haven’t made a whole lot of headway outside of the scientific and management communities.”

It’s true. At least two decades ago — perhaps as long as a century — fire researchers were warning that increasing atmospheric CO2 would mean bigger wildfires. History confirmed at least the latter hypothesis; using data like fire scars and tree ring sizes, researchers have shown that before Europeans came to North America, fires were relatively frequent but relatively small, and indigenous people like the Pueblo used lots of wood for fuel and small-diameter trees for construction. When the Spaniards arrived, spreading disease and forcing people out of their villages, the population crashed by perhaps as much as 90 percent and the forests went back to their natural fire pattern — less frequent, low intensity, and widespread. By the late 19th century, the land changed to livestock grazing and its users had no tolerance for fire at all.

“So in the late 20th and early 21st century, with these hot droughts, fires are ripping now with a severity and ferocity that’s unprecedented,” says Tom Swetnam, a dendrochronologist who did a lot of that tree-ring work. A fire in the Jemez Mountains Swetnam studies burned 40,000 acres in 12 hours, a “horizontal roll vortex fire” that had two wind-driven counter-rotating vortices of flame. “That thing left a canopy hole with no trees over 30,000 acres. A giant hole with no trees,” he says. “There’s no archaeological evidence of that happening in at least 500 years.”

Swetnam actually lives in a fire-prone landscape in New Mexico — right in the proverbial wildland-urban interface, as he says. He knows it’s more dangerous than ever. “It’s sad. It’s worrying. Many of us have been predicting that we were going to see these kinds of events if the temperature continued to rise,” Swetnam says. “We’re seeing our scariest predictions coming true.”

Fire researchers have been hollering about the potential consequences for fires of climate change combined with land use for at least as long as hurricane and flood researchers have been doing the same. It hasn’t kept people from building houses on the Houston floodplain and constructing poorly-planned levees along the Mississippi, and it hasn’t kept people from building houses up next to forests and letting undergrowth and small trees clump together — all while temperatures rise.

“Some of the fires are unusual, but the reason it seems more unusual is that there are people around to see it — fire whorls, large vortices, there are plenty of examples of those,” says Mark Finney, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service. “But some things are changing.” Drought and temperature are worse. Sprawl is worse. “The worst fires haven’t happened yet,” Finney says. “The Sierra Nevada is primed for this kind of thing, and those kinds of fires would be truly unprecedented for those kinds of ecosystems in the past thousands of years.”

So what happens next? The Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine forests of the west burn, and then don’t come back? They convert to grassland? That hasn’t happened in thousands of years where the Giant Sequoia grow. So … install sprinklers in Sequoia National Forest? “I’m only the latest generation to be frustrated,” Finney says. “At least two, maybe three generations before me experienced exactly the same frustration.” Nobody listened to them, either. And now the latest generation isn’t really sure what’s going to happen next.

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Fire scientists know one thing for sure: This will get worse

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8.3 Billion Reasons to Break Free From Plastic

by KimFrenchg Posted on November 18, 2017

Ever since seeing the now famous YouTube clip of a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose, I?ve made an effort to avoid plastic straws. When I go grocery shopping I take my own bags and I also make a point of eschewing the single-use bags in the fresh produce section (much to the consternation of the person weighing my fruit and vegetables).

I try to buy things packaged in glass, I drink filtered tap water and wear flip-flops made from recycled rubber. There are plenty of zero-waste activists out there who make my efforts seem positively puny, but at least I?m doing something, right?

It?s better than doing nothing, sure, but when you consider that humans have created 8.3 billion metric tons of plastics since large-scale production of the synthetic materials began in the early 1950s, and most of it now resides in landfills or the natural environment, you realize its time to up your game.

I mean, it?s a little embarrassing to learn that Rwanda has banned plastic bags in their entirety and the campaign to eliminate plastic straws was started by a nine-year-old, when you?re still buying the occasional single-use plastic item just because it?s easier.

As if that wasn?t enough of a wakeup call, I then found out about Break Free From Plastic, a global movement on a mission to stop plastic pollution for good. With The Story of Stuff Project as one of their anchor organizations, members on almost every continent and the likes of Greenpeace joining forces with them, Break Free is fast becoming a force to be reckoned with.

All the Plastic Ever Made: Breaking Study Tallies 8.3 Billion Metric Tons

There?s literally a ton of plastic garbage for every person on earth. Think about that for a moment and then ruminate on this: of the 8.3 billion tons of plastic produced since the 1950s, over half of it was made between 2004 and now.

We all know that plastic is a problem, but whether it?s the desire for convenience, the fact that we?re lazy or that the problem just seems overwhelmingly large, we?re all acting as if nothing?s wrong. That has to change.

I caught up with Shilpi Chhotray, Senior Communications Officer at Break Free From Plastic to find out how. Her suggestions for effecting change at both a domestic and civic level are more than doable. Literally, we have no excuse not to implement them.

Shilpi isn?t just paying lip service to the movement either. She?s implemented these practices at her own company?Sumudra Skin + Sea?as well. She?started the?skincare line with an ?ocean-first? business model (Sumudra means ‘ocean’ in Sanskrit)?that uses?reusable glass containers?instead of plastic and edible-grade kelp as an ingredient source.

Photo Credit: Sumadra Skin + Sea

How did you come to be involved in the Break Free From Plastic movement?

I’ve been involved in ocean advocacy for a decade and became immersed in plastic waste issues a few years ago through my work in stakeholder engagement with an ocean plastic lens. I took a deep dive, if you will, on the major players (the companies creating it and the organizations fighting against it) and the key research around the issue during this time. In July 2017, I was recruited to take the role as a Senior Communications Officer to amplify the work of the organizations behind the movement.

We?re each drawn to the causes we support for different reasons. What prompted you to focus your efforts on ocean conservation?

It was a study abroad trip to Cairns, Australia, home to the Great Barrier Reef, when I was a college undergrad at Virginia Tech University. Being exposed to the human impacts on the environment, specifically the ocean, sparked a lifelong desire to protect our blue planet. I took my interest a step further and focused my efforts in graduate school on marine protected areas, or creating underwater national parks to safeguard earth’s most precious resources. After being introduced to the rocky intertidal ecosystem (and the magical world of seaweeds), I was inspired to study marine organisms through underwater exploration via scuba (and a human-powered submersible in a later position!).

The stats released in the latest study (8.3 billion tons of plastic produced since 1950) are overwhelming to say the very least. Is it really possible to turn the tide on plastic pollution?

And to add to that, only 9 percent has been recycled since, which sparks two major considerations not being discussed enough: first, the global north (US + Europe) export copious amounts of waste overseas and second, recycling is clearly not a viable solution to the plastic waste crisis.

It’s absolutely possible to turn the tide on plastic pollution and that’s what Break Free From Plastic is all about. By emphasizing source reduction and investing in zero waste solutions at the city-level, we can greatly combat plastic waste ending up in our ocean, roads and waterways.

For instance, one of our member organizations in the Philippines, Mother Earth Foundation, helps cities develop programs to manage their waste. In the city of San Fernando 75 percent of waste gets composted or recycled and they aim to hit 93 percent. Mother Earth’s President, Froilan Grate says, “If you truly want to stop ocean pollution, it starts on land, which means rethinking how we manage our waste.”

What do you say to the person on the street who thinks the problem is too big to fix?

We created the problem in the first place so we can also fix it. We HAVE to fix it because we’ve already reached the tipping point of acceptable levels of plastic pollution. Microplastics (broken down from larger pieces of plastic) are literally everywhere, from fish to seabirds to our sources of drinking water, and even sea salt and beer.

Using a reusable bag and skipping the straw is good place to start, but it’s a terrible place to stop. My colleagues at SOSP for instance, encourage a culture of ?leveling up? by taking these practices to your communities ?your office, your child’s school, after school clubs and even your favorite caf?, to effect widespread change.

Where you go next is to engage at the civic level. Talk to the companies! If you don’t like the business practices, tag them on Facebook, write to them about your concerns. You can also write to city government officials to pass regulations…these are all important steps to effect systems change.

I love this quote from our Campaigns Director, Stiv Wilson: “Our consumer muscles have gotten really strong and our citizen muscles have gotten really weak. Not everyone is an activist, figure out where you can contribute and plug in.”

How can we as individuals make a difference? Can you offer some suggestions (small and big) of changes we can make in our daily lives?

It’s important to make smart purchasing decisions and avoid brands emphasizing a throw away lifestyle (single-use plastics). Break Free From Plastic member organizations in the Philippines recently conducted an 8-day coastal cleanup and brand audit in Freedom Island, a critical area for migratory birds, to identify the most polluting brands. Turns out, six international brands are responsible for roughly 54 percent of plastic packaging pollution found there.

Among them are corporate behemoths like Nestl?, Unilever?and Proctor & Gamble ?parent companies of the brands sitting in your kitchen and bathroom right now. Break Free From Plastic is encouraging anyone doing coastal cleanup activities to combine it with a brand audit, because coastal cleanup is simply not enough. For more information visit Plastic Polluters.org.

There are greener alternatives that are better for us and the planet. Personally, I’ve transitioned to shopping for groceries in bulk, buying less, and a lot of DIY. Even slowing down and dining in can help reduce single-use plastic waste, and it’s more fun too!

What is the one thing you?d really like people to understand about the negative impact of plastic that we might not already know?

Plastic pollution is not just an ocean issue, it’s a social justice issue impacting low income people of color who are often on the front-lines of the crisis fighting incineration (or burning of plastic waste) for the safety of their communities. Many of these communities are also in Asia and being blamed for the waste they didn’t create, the waste coming from the developed world.

At Break Free From Plastic we are shining a spotlight on innovative and scalable solutions created by our Asian colleagues, focusing on zero-waste cities and making sure the responsibility falls on the corporations accountable.

Was being a socially conscious brand on the cards from day one for Samudra Skin + Sea or did the brand?s ethos evolve over time?

Absolutely ?it’s a social venture. We have an ?ocean-first? business model, which means protection for the ocean is the foundation for all aspects of our methods and mission. For instance, we hand harvest the wild seaweed used in our products to ensure the regenerative properties of the plant continue to thrive for generations to come.

We have a zero-waste packaging model which means all of our products are encased in reusable glass jars with bamboo lids and/or compostable boxes certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Our soap bar in particular, created for hair and body, eliminates the need for bottled shampoos and conditioners. We strongly advocate a ?less is more? mentality and repurposing and reusing when possible.

Our mission includes partnering on marine conservation campaigns that benefit people and marine life. The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito and 5 Gyres (who is also a Break Free From Plastic movement member) are two fantastic organizations we work with to communicate efforts around ocean stewardship. Personal wellness and ecological integrity need to go hand-in-hand, and Samudra is bridging that gap.

With so many people doing what they can to effect positive change in the world, it?s hard to just sit back and pretend that plastic is someone else?s problem. It?s everyone?s problem. In my own life, I?m definitely going to try harder to reduce the amount of waste I generate. What about you? How will you #breakfreefromplastic?

Related Stories:

5 Human Habits Harmful to Ocean Health

How to Tell if Your Sunscreen is Damaging Coral Reefs
22 Freaky Facts About Plastic Pollution

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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8.3 Billion Reasons to Break Free From Plastic

Posted in alo, Anchor, bamboo, Casio, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 8.3 Billion Reasons to Break Free From Plastic